“What is to be done?”, By Dr. Dawg

Since there has been some discussion of theory going on here, or, more accurately, praxis, I thought I might post a paper I wrote a while back that sums up my hopes and fears about our project of social change. It's long, and academic, but I hope it might offer some ideas worth discussing.

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The bourgeoisie has…drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations.
–Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party

We are passing from the sphere of history to the sphere of the present and, partly, of the future. But we firmly believe that the [next] period will lead to the consolidation of militant Marxism, that Russian Social-Democracy will emerge from the crisis in the full flower of manhood, that the opportunist rearguard will be “replaced” by the genuine vanguard of the most revolutionary class.
–V.I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done?

[O]nly from the vantage point of the West is it possible to define the Third World as underdeveloped and economically dependent. Without the overdetermined discourse that creates the Third World, there would be no (singular and privileged) First World. Without the “Third World woman,” the particular self-presentation of Western women…would be problematical.
–Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders

I mean, we have to rid ourselves of the basic paradigms of modernity. What are they? Among others, the notion of lineal, progressive, and ascending history. We’ll have to learn to work without that, to spin finely, to learn uncertainly. And not to ask ourselves: is this an advance or a regression? But rather to understand that that question has no place.
–Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar



ABSTRACT – Lenin’s question has not yet been answered. Against an endlessly ramifying transnational capitalism sweeping all before it in its incessant growth and development, opposition has taken increasingly complex and fragmented shapes, reflecting not only the complexity of the situation but a growing awareness of the multiple and sometimes contradictory forms of oppression. Class, “race” and gender intricately intersect within a context of social and economic practices that characterize corporate globalization. This paper explores the limits and possibilities for the future of transnational and transcultural oppositional solidarity.

Global capitalism and the roots of global resistance

The quotations above illustrate through their differences a number of points that I want to make in this examination of corporate globalization and the future of organized resistance to it. Two are from the classical Marxist-Leninist canon, (and I use the words “classical” and “canon” advisedly) and two are more contemporary voices whose points of origin are literally foreign to the former, in both space and time.

The prescience one can observe in the quotation from The Manifesto of the Communist Party, published more than a century and a half ago, which outlines with uncanny accuracy some of the major features of globalization, is offset by anachronism: the reference to “civilized nations,” followed by another to the “universal inter-dependence of nations,” erases the very existence of colonized peoples and their histories. Indeed, when Marx referred to such peoples explicitly, he often betrayed a Eurocentric prejudice and triumphalism quite in keeping with his time, and aligned, it must be said, with much colonial discourse.1

Marx did not, however, ignore the seamier aspects of the colonizing mission:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.” (Marx, 1912: 823)


Moreover, after 1860, he expressed considerable pessimism about the colonial enterprise, recognizing that the destruction of local infrastructure, not self-sufficiency, was a likely outcome for many of the “backward nations” (Larrain, 1991: 233) Yet he retained an essentially European model of development (Larrain, 1991: 238), as did his supreme practitioner, V.I. Lenin, although even at the time different views were expressed. (See Luxemburg, 1996 [1913]: 338, in which the effects of transnational capitalism, she hints, create national dependency: she refers, for example, to “out-work under capitalism” replacing “the ruin of independent craftsmanship” within the context of colonization.)

In any case, to begin to come to grips with Lenin’s question it may be instructive to look at his own partial answer to it. Through the lens of twentieth-century history, his declaration that the future would bring a transformed Russia led by a vanguard into “the full flower of manhood” renders an outmoded vocabulary tragic, given the fundamental failures, excesses and final collapse of the Soviet project. Perhaps the seeds of its eventual destruction can be found in these words, in which the course of the project is set:

We are not utopians, we do not “dream” of dispensing at once with all administration, with all subordination. These anarchist dreams, based upon incomprehension of the tasks of the proletarian dictatorship, are totally alien to Marxism, and, as a matter of fact, serve only to postpone the socialist revolution until people are different. No, we want the socialist revolution with people as they are now, with people who cannot dispense with subordination, control, and "foremen and accountants".

The subordination, however, must be to the armed vanguard of all the exploited and working people, i.e., to the proletariat.
–V.I. Lenin, The State and Revolution [1918]


There is no notion here of changing the dynamics of the work process to allow people to become “different.” Indeed, with control, subordination and an “armed vanguard” in charge, it is difficult to avoid recalling Marx’s well-known words in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon:
And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.

In this case “the spirits of the past” included Taylorism (Lenin, 1818b), the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and vanguardist command-and-control. Ordering people about was not going to change overnight; there would be no democracy on the shop floor. Nor would the “dictatorship” really be imposed by that amorphous mass called “the proletariat;” the latter, in fact, would be subordinated to the vanguard, governing in their name as a new, and yet very old, “body politic” (Kantorowicz, 1997). The sovereign (Foucault, 1990: 135-6) might have worn a red star, but did not abandon the spectral throne: the victims of the haphazard and chaotic violence of Stalinism remind one more of the wretched Robert-François Damiens* than of the disciplined subjects of governmentality (Foucault, 1977; 1994: 229ff). Marxists at the time relegated women to a “Question” (Aveling and Aveling, 1886) and largely dismissed or erased the life-history of colonized peoples in their accounts, failing to problematize institutionalized structures and discourses of racism that constituted them as Other and as inferior to Europeans, and were instrumental in their oppression and exploitation.

My purpose in briefly re-living here this relatively ancient history is partly to indicate that the transnational expansion of capitalism faced organized and transnational resistance almost from the beginning. But it is also to reiterate the profound failures of that initial resistance, and to contrast that limited approach, in its evolutionary, teleological, Eurocentric (Larrain, 1992: 237), androcentric and, it must be said, racist (Larrain, 1992: 235, 236) theoretical chains, to the far more complex resistance debates of more recent times.

Transnationalism today and sites of resistance

Few neo-Marxists today would support, much less attempt to build, a transnational solidarity based solely upon a working class cast in the mould of a European white factory worker, with a vanguardist model of revolution and state power, assigning second priority to the “Woman Question” and issues of “racial chauvinism.” The left opponents of corporate globalization would correctly see this as woefully insufficient in confronting and overcoming the complex “relations of ruling” that obtain today, in the home, within the nation-state and transnationally—or rather, that have by now been recognized and named (Dorothy Smith, cited in Clement and Myles, 1994: viii).

The current “map” of transnationalism—corporate globalization and resistances to it—is not an easy one to read. From the popular perspective, international trade and capitalist regulatory organizations like the World Trade Organization, The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, appear to have supplanted the sovereignty of nations and presented insurmountable barriers to alternative futures. The environment is rapidly being destroyed and human rights and dignity are rendered irrelevant by the exigencies of trade and profit-taking. And there is no alternative, we are told: resistance, fragmented and offering only temporary relief at best, is futile (Armbruster-Sandoval, 2005: 135ff; and see Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar on the recent election of Bolivia’s Evo Morales, cited in Acuña, 2006: “I refuse to accept that we don’t admit that we’re crossing through a happy moment”).

But matters are not so simple, nor, I would maintain, so hopeless. The “end of history,” to use Francis Fukuyama’s fatuous phrase, is nowhere in sight. Let us examine two of the popular notions just mentioned, beginning with the alleged withering away of the state under advanced capitalism, and the era of so-called “post-nationalism,” followed by the alleged impossibility of successful resistance.

In the 1960’s, a favourite street-chant of the Left was “Smash the State.” Is this now to become “Save the State” (see Munck, 2002, 144)? The state is, after all, in Western liberal democracies, at least in some limited fashion accountable to its citizens; in fact, as recent events in Latin America have indicated, pressures from below can yield governments (for example, Argentina, Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia) that to one degree or another appear to challenge the global hegemony of the US, although matters are more complex than that (see, for example, Petras, 2006, on the election of Evo Morales in Bolivia, although Dangle and Engler, 2006, take a more positive view). States can also be strong mediators between global capital and the needs of its own citizens, striking hard bargains with transnational firms as in the case of the “Asian Tigers” (McMurtry, 1998: 331ff; Martin and Schumann, 1997: 144). States will never simply be “representative” of its citizens, but will always exist in an uneasy tension with them, in a relation that is continually being negotiated and re-negotiated.

In any case, the state is in no danger of extinction. It should not be forgotten that transnational authorities such as those mentioned are indeed the creations of states, which are “co-generator[s] of global mobility and competition” (Schirm, 2002: 56). Certainly the role of the state has shifted in the current context (James, P. 2002: 6), but it remains, as Sarah Radcliffe puts it (writing of Latin America), “an important actor and a significant political interlocutor for subjects” (Radcliffe 2001: 20). The state is not “hollowed out” but “provides a ground of meaning-creation, institutions and political cultures through which transnational relations are constituted” providing “the context and platform through which a transnational public sphere is elaborated”(Radcliffe, Laurie and Andolina, 2002: 3, 15). Indeed, as recent developments in Latin America indicate, there is the distinct possibility of the state playing the transnational role of adversary to the hegemony of international capital.

Nor are we shifting into a period of the transnational or even post-national citizenship, despite the hopes of such commentators as Arjun Appadurai (cited in James, P., 2002: 5) reacting to the violence generated by the national imaginary. As Paul James puts it, “[I]t depends how the territory is lived and governed: questions of territory will always be with us as long as we live in embodied communities” (James, P. 2002: 6). If the transnational mobility of labour is held up as an example to the contrary, of a “de-territorialization” (Deleuze and Guattari, cited in James, P., 2002: 6) of citizenship, the migrants’ loss of social and political rights in the transnational sphere demonstrate the continued value of formal, territory-based citizenship (Sales, 2002: 99,100). And the notion of a post-modern rebellion like the Zapatista movement, at once bounded by community and place but transnational in its “digital simultaneity” (Reinke, 2002: 82, 83), loses its force when one considers that little changed materially in Chiapas (Reinke, 2002: 87).

We need to recognize that the interactions among states, their peoples and transnational institutions are complex, dynamic and mutually constitutive. Even colonies, with their colonized peoples portrayed sometimes as purely victims, are “hybrid and unstable”(Gunn, 2001: 172); the distinctions between colonized and colonizer, Gunn notes, citing Frederick Buell, are not “totalized formations in opposition to one another” but “constructions of a common, complexly interacting system” (Gunn, 2001: 173). Radcliffe notes that transnational actors including the World Bank, “transnational advocacy networks” and indigenous people, interact in complex ways that can benefit local populations through adroit leverage (Radcliffe, 2001: 27).

What, then, of the alleged futility of resistance? Let it be noted first that there is not one “resistance,” but many; and that the issue is less to create resistances than to join them together, as international capital is already joined: “Let the resistance be as transnational as capital” (slogan cited in Goodman, 2002: viii). Let us also be aware of the increasing urgency of the task: the process of corporate globalization has accelerated to the point that even such a committed socialist feminist as Chandra Mohanty has moved from an earlier emphasis upon transnational feminist struggle per se (Mohanty, 2003 [1986]: Chapter 1) to a call for feminist involvement in anti-globalism (Mohanty, 2002, 509).

The problem, then—what is to be done in the short and medium term—is to theorize and to build transnational solidarity.

The theory and practice of solidarity

I would like to introduce two notions of solidarity at this point: what I term centrifugal and centripetal. These are not necessarily in binary opposition. They are, however, imbricated wherever the conscious move to collective action provides a Foucauldian “surface of emergence” for solidarity discourses.

By “centripetal” solidarity, I refer to a solidarity among people based upon a perceived distinct identity and created in opposition to “others.” National liberation struggles have this character, for example, and the “identity politics” that have arisen more recently among racialized groups and radical feminists. Such solidarity is exclusive—only some people can join—and it has a centralizing, inward-turning tendency, in that it foregrounds and tends to reify the group identity that the subject shares, and can, in fact, fetishize difference (see Gunn, 2001: 10).

By “centrifugal” solidarity, I refer to an outward-turned project of solidarity, a flight from the specificity of time, place and history of the subject, a project sometimes called “making the links,” whose proponents attempt to build channels of communication and organizing bridges between groups resisting oppression, nationally and transnationally. Such an approach is also oppositional, but more to structures and systems themselves than to people.

I do not mean to oversimplify. As noted, one can find these two tendencies of solidarity emerging wherever resistance emerges, as in the American labour movement (Armbruster-Sandoval, 2005: 9-10); moreover, they can co-exist in a single subject. It is the extremes of both that are dangerous: in the case of centripetal solidarity, the essentializing of identity (Leistyna, 2005:10; Fraser, 2005:246-247) can create artifical demarcations between, for example, race and gender, when they are, in fact, inextricably entangled (Pihama, 2005: 366). An ahistorical and universalizing unity such as “woman,” shaped and defined, in fact, by subordination itself, is “ineffectual in designing strategies to combat oppressions” (Mohanty 2002: 31), and, with its hidden assumptions, prove to be exclusionary of Third World women (Trinh Minh-ha, cited in Goetz, 1991: 141). Moreover, such essentializing notions obscure or erase differences within the group: Mohanty explores at length the problems that Third World women find with universalizing feminist ideas from the First World, in which complex intersections of race and class are ignored, or inserted as an add-on into Women’s Studies programs, in a “discursive colonization” (Mohanty, 2003: 17; Mohanty 2002: 509; Alexander and Mohanty, 1997). Such difficulties are not overcome, but exacerbated, in “multiculturalist” approaches, which simply replace many homogenizations for one (Gunn, 2001: 120). Identity politics leads to “political refuges” in which “islands of validation and self-affirmation…[are] islands all the same” (Goetz, 1991: 145). Worse, it can lead to an almost wilful blindness, as in the case of feminist support for the arch-reactionary Anita Hill (James, J., 2005: 350).

The project of centrifugal solidarity is confronted by its own dangers. Where the cultural feminist adherents of identity politics “valorize experience” to the point that they entrench women “in their particularities,” postmodernists who want to tackle western normative universalism by engaging in the deconstruction of the category “woman,” subvert the feminist project by creating an endless “deferral of epistemic responsibility…[rendering] the need and even the possibility of a feminist politics problematic.” Both threaten the “imperative to act” (Goetz, 1991: 145, 134). There is in the latter case a flight from the centre, but no solidarity is found. There can be no bridges and channels when the ground under one’s own feet vanishes.

Solidarity must be founded in material conditions, however complex these might be. It is more than an “act of good will” (Gunn, 2001: xii). It is not based upon similitude, but upon “relations between self and ‘other’…[that] could be accepted as dialogically, even enhancing” (Gunn, 2001:194). If “woman,” for example, is a social construct, a marker of subordination across many cultures, then that marker, rather than signifying an obfuscatory “common oppression” (bell hooks, cited in Pihama, 2005: 367), could be a means of generating dialogue, mutual support and a wider understanding, Mohanty’s “noncolonizing feminist solidarity across borders” (Mohanty 2002: 503), or what Paul James calls an “embodied reciprocity” (James, P., 2002: 17).

If “global thinking is impossible” because we can’t think “from within every culture on earth” (Esteva and Prakash, 2004:412-413), global encounters are more possible than ever before, because of improved communications technology. As we move out centrifugally to engage in dialogue, however, we must be aware of the dangers inherent in that very technology. Cyberspace, as noted in the example of the Zapatista uprising, is not actual space, time or location (Reinke 2002: 87). In effect, the technology re-located the Zapatistas into enemy space (Reinke, 2002: 81). On the other hand, international labour solidarity is enhanced by such information-flows (Munck, 2002: 150), and, indeed, missing information can obviously inhibit solidarity, as lack of knowledge of the WTO did in the Seattle anti-globalization protests (Martinez, 2005: 295).

Solidarity is born of local engagement in a wider context: the Zapatistas, for example, did not seek solidarity with their own struggles so much as the formation of a “network of struggles” around the world, perhaps sparked by their own resistance (Reinke, 2002: 84). This goes well beyond similitude, to an expanded notion of “common interests, “ a “common context of struggle” (Mohanty, 2005: 324). Solidarity with the women of the Third World, says Mohanty, requires that “we…pay attention,” “to the specificities of their/our common and different histories” (Mohanty 2005: 340). We can see the intersection of the specific and the global in studies such as Martha Mies’ examination of lace-making in Narsapur (Mies, 1982), and in numerous studies that foreground women’s invisible or devalued work and their situation under capitalist development as “shock absorbers” (Elson, 1991: 186).

But initiating the necessary solidarity-building conversations across borders, cultures and histories is nonetheless challenging. The hidden assumptions even in discourses of resistance, such as in liberal feminism (Bandarage, 1984; Mohanty, 2003), need to be put on the table; reflection and self-criticism are essential if we are not, in Mohanty’s phrase, to “re-colonize” those who could be allies.

So far, the above amounts to a series of cautionary notes. When we attempt to put a solidarity project into practice, we find ourselves in a mine-field. We in the West bear the burden of our own history: and we carry that into the world. Like ethnographers, activists engaged in this project (Western or otherwise) are to some degree trapped in an “epistemological box” from which “[T]he more clearly they see their subject, the less clearly they see, or can correctively discount for, the apparatus of seeing itself” (Gunn, 2001: 15). Again, one must return to the actual cross-border oppressions and the resistances that arise, or could arise, transnationally.

The “transnational advocacy networks” of which Sarah Radcliffe writes (Radcliffe, 2001: 25ff) are a vital set of actors, mobilizing public opinion, although problems of inequality and accountability within the networks need to be resolved (Radcliffe, 2001: 27). The potential of these networks, constrained and at the same time enabled by the state (Radcliffe, 2001: 25), is enormous. While, as noted earlier, many labour victories in the sweatshops of the South prove to be short-lived, the Kukdong campaign in Puebla, Mexico (involving Nike and Reebok), was an unqualified success: it is the only factory in the Mexican maquiladora region where workers have a collective agreement and an independent union. Their resolve, supported by an transnational campaign, indicates the concrete results that are possible with the building of cross-border solidarity. The defeat of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), where the Internet proved its worth, was another such victory (Tabb, 2001: 196).

“Culture,” too, is a weapon in this struggle, indicating the complex “entanglements” of indigenous, state and transnational actors. Indigenous peoples have determined that a reified form of their culture, a “politics of representation,” is a winning strategy in “a successful politics of anti-colonialism” (Radcliffe, Laurie and Andolina, 2002:11), resonating transnationally. But this strategy has its dangers, too, turning a lived culture into a series of self-conscious images, a series of simulacra (Turner, 1991: 309).

But nothing mobilizes better than a crisis, and crises we have aplenty in this era of global capitalism: AIDS, global warming and incessant American invasions, to name but three. A lesser-known one that is building currently is the dumping of toxic waste (Shiva, 2004: 426; Mohanty, 2003: 511; McMurtry, 1998: 322-3, 395-6). Like wealth and health. Toxic waste is unequally distributed. Not only is it exported by the North to the South; it is also concentrated by race at home, as Mohanty notes:

Three out of five Afro-Americans and Latinos live near toxic waste sites, and three of the five largest hazardous waste landfills are in communities with a population that is 80 percent people of colour. (Mary Pardo, cited in Mohanty, 2003: 511)

McMurtry brings home what can only be called the death-logic of capitalism by quoting a memorandum from a former chief economist of the World Bank, Lawrence Summers, encouraging what he called the “migration” of the “dirty industries to the least developed countries. Here is a part of it:

The measurement of the costs of health-impairing pollution depends on the forgone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that. (in McMurtry, 1998: 395)

When leaked to the media, the actual author of the memorandum, Lant Pritchett, claimed that it was meant to be an “ironic aside” (“Toxic memo” in the on-line Harvard Review). The difficulty with the times that we live in is that we simply cannot be certain.

Transnational crises force all of us, whatever our standpoints, to interpret them as threats and to take action. Certainly, the reaction of capitalist institutions and First World governments to the crises specified here has been to pretend they don’t exist, or to minimize their impact, and to go on ignoring them or feeding them. But much as signifiers such as “woman” permit at least the possibility of solidarity across borders and cultures, crises demand action from a number of differently-situated players that can form the basis of transnational solidarity. The Kyoto Agreement, for example, was created by transnational “green” pressure, although it is in serious danger at this point.

Action, however, demands new vocabularies, the “translation” of the local experience of people, situated as they are in webs of meaning that include gender, race, class, nation, ethnicity and language (to name only a few elements that constitute the self), into communication that resonates beyond the local. Mohanty, once again, while “articulating
differences located in specific histories of inequality,” is also able to discern “a particular history that Third- and First-World women seem to have in common: the logic and operation of capital in the contemporary global arena” (Mohanty, 2005: 340). History, in other words, need not and indeed must not be confined to the local; there are, in fact, overlapping shared histories in which we are situated and which extend to the global level and offer the promise of action and change.

Conclusion: Carnivals of resistance, and the vertigo of transformation

Capital appears united; resistance to its effects, highly fragmented and dispersed. But, as Radcliffe, Laurie and Andolina indicate, matters are not so simple. Capital is regulated by institutions—the state, transnational bodies—that themselves are shaped by the needs and desires of populations pursuing their counter-hegemonic aims. The authors propose the notion, alluded to earlier, of “social entanglements around class, race, gender, profession, political affiliation, cultural authenticity (sic) and so on, which position actors not on a fixed ‘side’ of a hypothetic ‘above and below’ divide but which recognizes their complex, and unfixed, position….” They go on to “argue that relations are always national and transnational, as well as bodily and local” (Radcliffe, Laurie and Andolina, 2002: 15).

Thus, resistances can include a kind of judo-like skill in which Radcliffe’s transnational advocacy networks, with indigenous populations, or sectors of those populations (e.g., women) can use institutions as leverage to advance their specific causes. There is nothing immutable about any institution, and hegemony, as Antonio Gramsci reminds us, is something that needs to be won. Counter-hegemonic successes, such as the defeat of the MAI, can encourage other kinds of transnational solidarities.

But let us return to the title-question of this paper: what is to be done? I have tried to sketch out the problematic of solidarity and action, outlining the difficulties of transnational conversations that take account of the specifics of race, gender and class of each of the interlocutors. It is here that a newly-revivified socialism and historical materialism, despite their limited historical repertoire, may prove to realize their potential, not as a series of totalizing discourses, but as an open-ended praxis that not only accommodates but genuinely includes the voices and interests of women from both the Third World and the First, the colonized and the racialized and others, whose agency is undenied, whose oppressions are linked, and who are all “people with a history,” joined together in the process of making it.

What form will their future resistances take? In the absence of master-narratives and the impersonal and teleological unfolding of history, this will depend upon what is possible. Resistance, as the anti-globalist young people have shown us, can be joyful and non-violent, inclusive and organized along “the principles of non-hierarchy, democratic participation, and the notion of the personal being the political”—something Mohanty, in the midst of her calling for a feminist critique of the anti-globalist movement, concedes is an institutionalization of feminism within its decision-making processes (Mohanty, 2002: 529, 530).

In a slightly different context, Gunn makes this point: “Demonizing or merely even stereotyping the colonizing ‘other’ tends to reinscribe the totalizing structure of domination and subjugation even in the process of reversing its applications” (Gunn, 2001: 171-172). He argues for transcending “the discursive oppositions that currently define their relationship” (Gunn, 2001: 171). One cannot, in other words, move beyond the current situation if one is trapped in the discursive frame that creates and situates both oppressed and oppressor. Perhaps a hint of such transcendence may be found in so-called “carnivals of resistance,” in which participants mix “pleasure and rebellion,” a series of actions that be just as, or more effective, than using violence to counter the symbolic and actual violence of the New World Order—although the organizers can still find themselves on a terrorist list (Jordan and Whitney, 2001). If some would criticize the predominantly young protesters for struggling to articulate a positive vision of what an alternative world would look like (Harding, 2004: 420-421), I believe it is a hopeful sign that their values and dreams have not ossified into a Maximum Programme, but remain open, unfixed, without boundaries, continually engaged in dialogue.

As Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, a perceptive Mexican activist with a long history of struggle has said: “We’ll have to learn to work without [the notion of lineal, progressive and ascending history], to spin finely, to learn uncertainly. And not to ask ourselves: is this an advance or a regression? But rather to understand that that question has no place” (cited in Acuña, 2006). Transcendence is, by its very nature, vertiginous. Local resistances, joined together in the Zapastista “networks of struggle,” can transform the world or fail spectacularly at it: there are no blueprints or plans, at least none that have any credibility.

Is there an alternative? Another world may be possible (Armbruster-Sandoval, 2005: 154), although this phrasing suggests that even that may be an illusion. But there is no inevitability in history, and we always have choices before us, between socialism or barbarism, as Marx put it: or, in these dangerous times, between life—or death.