Interface

Interface номер один: содержание

2009-07-18T20:25:00.000+03:00

От редакции

Лоренс Кокс / Кристина Флешер Фоминая,
Movement knowledge.What do we know, how do we create knowledge and what do we do with it? (Знание о движениях. Что мы знаем, как мы производим знание и как им распоряжаемся?)
HTML PDF

Статьи

Майо Фастер Морел,
Action research: mapping the nexus of research and political action. (Активистское исследование: картография связей исследования и политического действия.)
HTML PDF

Бад Л Холл,
A river of life: learning and environmental social movements. (Река жизни: обучение и экологические социальные движения.)
HTML PDF

Сандра Мария Гаделья де Карвало / Хосе Эрнанди Мендес,
Extensão universitária: compromisso social, resistência e produção de conhecimentos (Образование для взрослых: общественный активизм, сопротивление и производство знания).
HTML PDF

Илзе Шерер-Уорен,
Redes para a (re)territorialização de espaços de conflito: os casos do MST e MTST no Brasil (Сети борьбы за ретерриториализацию конфликтных пространств: случай бразильских MST и MTST).
HTML PDF

Антонио Педро Дорес,
Movimentos sociais existem? (Существуют ли социальные движения?)
HTML PDF

Активистские / педагогические / исследовательские заметки

Майкл Дакет,
“Wor diary”: a case of DIY alternative history (action note). “Военный дневник”: случай альтернативной DIY истории (активистская заметка).
HTML PDF

Сурия Эврен,
Alternative publishing experiences in Istanbul (action note). Опыты альтернативного издательства в Стамбуле (активистская заметка).
HTML PDF

Каспар Дэвис,
Creative democracy: wisdom councils at work (action note). Творческая демократия: советы мудрейших в действии (активистская заметка).
HTML PDF

Алехандрина Рейес,
La sistematización de experiencias y la vision emergente en el hecho educativo (педагогическая/исследовательская заметка)
HTML PDF

Обзоры и рецензии

Дэвид Лэнди,
The mirror stage of movement intellectuals? Jewish criticism of Israel and its relationship to a developing social movement (review essay). Зеркальная стадия развития ангажированных интеллектуалов? Еврейская критика Израиля и ее отношения с развивающимся социальным движением (обзорное эссе).
HTML PDF

Фергал Финнеган,
Janet Conway, Praxis and politics(book review).
Джэнет Конуэй, Практика и политика [Praxis and politics](рецензия на книгу).
HTML PDF

Interface issue one: contents

2009-01-21T02:05:00.000+02:00

Editorial
Laurence Cox / Cristina Flesher Fominaya,
Movement knowledge.What do we know, how do we create knowledge and what do we do with it?
HTML
PDF

Articles
Mayo Fuster Morell,
Action research: mapping the nexus of research and political action.
HTML
PDF

Budd L Hall,
A river of life: learning and environmental social movements.
HTML
PDF

Sandra Maria Gadelha de Carvalho / José Ernandi Mendes,
Extensão universitária: compromisso social, resistência e produção de conhecimentos (Continuing education: social commitment, resistance and the production of knowledge).
HTML
PDF

Ilse Scherer-Warren,
Redes para a (re)territorialização de espaços de conflito: os casos do MST e MTST no Brasil (Networks for the reterritorialisation of spaces of conflict: the cases of the Brazilian MST and MTST).
HTML
PDF

Antonio Pedro Dores,
Movimentos sociais existem? (Do social movements exist?)
HTML
PDF

Action / teaching / research notes
Michael Duckett,
“Wor diary”: a case of DIY alternative history (action note).
HTML
PDF

Süreyyya Evren,
Alternative publishing experiences in Istanbul (action note).
HTML
PDF

Caspar Davis,
Creative democracy: wisdom councils at work (action note).
HTML
PDF

Alejandrina Reyes,
La sistematización de experiencias y la vision emergente en el hecho educativo (teaching / research note)
HTML
PDF

Reviews
David Landy,
The mirror stage of movement intellectuals? Jewish criticism of Israel and its relationship to a developing social movement (review essay).
HTML
PDF

Fergal Finnegan,
Janet Conway, Praxis and politics(book review).
HTML
PDF

General material
Call for papers, issue two.
HTML
PDF

List of editorial contacts

List of journal participants

Call for new participants

Call for IT /activist allies

Вебмастера, вебдизайнеры, присоединяйтесь к проекту!

2009-01-21T01:54:00.001+02:00

Цель журнала Interface - помочь разным движениям узнать друг о друге и наладить общение, не взирая на языковые и культурные барьеры, на разницу интеллектуальных традиций и политических контекстов, в которых они действуют. Чтобы достичь этой цели, мы намерены использовать информационные технологии, позволяющие избежать платности знания – будь то типографские расходы или стоимость подписки на периодические издания, - и создать на их базе настоящее пространство для интеллектуального обмена.

Как вы, возможно, уже заметили, в этом направлении нам еще предстоит проделать большой путь. У нас есть хорошие статьи авторов из самых разных стран и на разных языках. Но наш сайт пока очень простой, поскольку наши знания в области информационных технологий рудиментарны. Поэтому нам крайне необходима поддержка со стороны тех, кто в этом разбирается, кто помог бы нам производить действительно полезное знание, плодотворно общаться и находить эффективные технические решения.

У нас уже есть некоторые идеи, но мы полностью открыты для любых практических предложений по улучшению работы сайта! Если у вас есть идеи и вы можете помочь, пожалуйста, обращайтесь по электронной почте к Стефену Бому и Лоренсу Коксу.

Присоединяйтесь к нам!

2009-01-21T01:43:00.001+02:00

Interface – это, по существу, широкий диалог между теми, кто производит знание о социальных движениях, для социальных движений, и изнутри социальных движений, будь то активисты, исследователи, или же и те и другие в одном лице. Наш журнал многоязычный, и мы стремимся наращивать количество наших рабочих языков. В частности, мы ищем людей, которые могут рецензировать статьи на арабском, китайском, индонезийском и русском языках.

Interface – глобальный проект. Целый ряд наших групп находится в стадии становления: африканская, испаноговорящая латиноамериканская, восточно- и центрально-европейская, южно-азиатская, средиземноморская, юго-восточно-азиатская/океанская и североамериканская. Мы также ищем людей, которые могли бы помочь нам организовать группы по арабскому миру, Центральной и Восточной Азии.

Сотрудничество происходит в основном на двух уровнях. Большинство участников журнала состоят в одной из региональных редакций. Это означает, что они периодически заказывают статьи (просят кого-либо написать текст), время от времени рецензируют уже готовые статьи и принимают участие в обсуждениях общей стратегии журнала.

Некоторые участники стали региональными редакторами. Они стараются привлечь новых людей в свою редакцию, наблюдают за ходом издательского процесса и входят в редакционный совет журнала. Мы ищем людей на роль региональных редакторов для арабского мира, Центральной Азии и Восточной Азии, а также на роль вторых редакторов для испаноговорящей Латинской Америки, Восточной и Центральной Европы, Южной Азии, Средиземноморья и Юго-Восточной Азии/Океании.

Если вас заинтересовало то или иное направление сотрудничества, пожалуйста, свяжитесь по электронной почте с соответствующим региональным редактором. Детали см. здесь.

Action research: mapping the nexus of research and political action

2009-01-18T20:24:00.000+02:00

Mayo Fuster Morell

Abstract

This paper aims to capture the richness and diversity of action research on the global justice movement. It starts by proposing a typology of five tendencies (participative-collective method; producing alternative content; strategic thinking for political processes; building relationships and networking connections; and opening knowledge). It goes on to present clusters of different experiences, illustrated by examples. Having provided an orientation map of action research on the global justice movement, the author concludes by presenting what in her view should characterize action research. The paper is based on participant observation, a review of the literature and personal experience.

I. Introduction

The mobilization cycle of the global justice movement has been accompanied by a proliferation of new initiatives and practices with multiple trajectories that can be located in the intersection between investigation and political action.

Within the framework of this paper I refer to it as action research. However, the term action research is not the only term referring to this nexus between research and political action. Furthermore, there is not an established concept for defining it. There is a “network” of concepts that links terms like activist research, participatory action research, con-ricerca, memory, reporting, systematizing and investigaction, among others.

It could be argued that research is always action research and that there is no such thing as apolitical and / or neutral research. Furthermore, action research guided by a neoliberal agenda is not a minority tendency today. But in this paper I use “action research” to refer to research guided by a progressive and emancipatory approach and linked to a transformative action in the framework of the global justice movement.

The intersection, and interaction, between political action and investigation is a very broad field without clear boundaries or points of reference, and one that easily expands. There is an inspiration effect that stimulates reflection on existing investigative practices and gives rise to new research initiatives. Looking back to previous inspirations, the main pillars are the method of the “inquiry” and co-research in the Italian “operaist” tradition, women's consciousness-raising groups and feminist epistemology, institutional analysis, and finally the Latin American tradition of participatory action research (Malo, 2004).

Within action research we find different traditions and trajectories that make up a constellation with common points, but also points of contact and oppositions.

The goal of this paper is to provide those interested in action research with a map to make sense of the variety of different approaches. I start by distinguishing five tendencies to facilitate mapping of the action research field. The five types of action research tendencies are: i) being based on a participative-collective method; ii) producing alternative content; iii) developing strategic thinking for political processes; iv) a desire to change the way in which knowledge is managed and owned; v) and, lastly, building relationships and networking connections. I also present a typology of approaches and clusters of experiences providing examples for each type. Finally, I conclude by presenting what for me are the characteristic elements of action research.

The methodology behind this work is based on participant observation of various experiences of action research, conversations with practitioners and a review of the literature and documents produced by movement groups. This paper is also the result of my personal experience. It is based on my personal experience in action research initiatives developed in the frame of social movement organising. Since 2001 I have participated in several efforts at applying research to social movement goals and in conferences and meetings adressing these area at a Catalan and a European level. It is also based on my personal experience in developing research in European and North American academic institutions. Since 2006, I am trying to give an action research orientation to a PhD project [footnote 1].

II. A map of action research: five tendencies

Within the rich field of action research, I propose to distinguish five distinctive tendencies. Some types of experiences put particular attention on being based on a participative-collective method; others are focussed on producing alternative content; others develop strategic thinking for broad political processes; other are distinctive because of their attempts to build relationships and networking connections; and, lastly, others have a strong intention to change the politics of knowledge, that is the way in which knowledge is managed.

i) Participative-collective method: These experiences are characterized by being based on participative and collective oriented process. They are generally associated with specific subjects or goals.

ii) Producing alternative content: This orientation is focused on providing arguments and data related to the implementation of an alternative or to developing a critique of the status quo. It focusses on the production of content more than on transforming the way the knowledge is produced. It is thus action research in relation to the contents produced rather than with regards to how the information is generated and the methods used in doing so.

iii) Developing strategic thinking for broad political processes: This orientation is based on the goal of providing reflections and analysis concerning political strategy in broad political processes. It is not associated with a particular target or group but with movements as a whole.

Such research generally addresses questions on “deciding what to do in common” and “who we are”.

iv) Building relationships and networking connections: This orientation here is focused on creating dialogue and connections between diverse subjects and knowledge trajectories. It is based on finding commonalities to support each other and on developing transthematic frames and solidarity.

v) Opening knowledge: These are experiences that start from a critique of pro-property knowledge management logics such as restrictive intellectual property and copyright. They are engaged in developing alternatives that favour creativity, accessibility and re-use.

Apart from these five different tendencies, where the research is developed from is also a distinctive aspect. There is a consciousness of a border between research done inside academia and that done outside academia [footnote 2].

These five tendencies must not be considered as being necessarily in opposition to each other. Most experiences of action research discussed here are based on a combination of these five elements: Action research experiences tend to follow a participative method; to develop strategic thinking and produce alternative contents; to use open licences; andto contribute to building relationships as a result. These five tendencies refer to particular ways of combining all these aspects, putting a special emphasis on one or other of them.

III. Clusters of experiences

Having outlined these five tendencies in action research, in this section I will list some different experiences of action research within the global justice movement. This listing is far from being comprehensive, but I hope it is useful in order to convey the richness of the field.

List of action research experiences:

i) Co-research tradition and “consulta” method

ii) Participatory action research for local community building and space design

iii) Research critiquing and monitoring existing institutions and research on alternatives

iv) Action-oriented training and empowerment

v) Action research and art: performative research

vi) Hubs of reflection and publications on movement strategy and organizational logics

vii) Social Fora and the epistemology of the encounter of knowledges

viii) Mapping for action

ix) Memory: movement archiving and documentation

x) Online creation communities: peer-to-peer production model

xi) Techno-political tools: systematizing information for the creation of (networking) tools

xii) Organic intellectuals' contributions to social movements

xiii) Academivism: activists researching social movements from an academic institution

xiv) Another academia is possible: actions for change in academia

In the following map, each cluster is situated according to their closeness to the five tendencies presented in the previous section. The goal of this map is to provide a simple orienting picture of action research around the global justice movement.

Map I: Action research. Distribution of types of experiences by orientations [footnote 3]

i) Co-research tradition and “consulta” method

This approach is based on collectives that start a process of self-reflection on their identity in order to consider what they have in common, which is their situation, their own practices and alliances. At its base is the building of new subjectivities of transformation.

In some occasions there is an “external” affinity group that facilitates that self-reflection. This is the case for example of the Argentinian Colectivo Situaciones interventions in piquetero groups (www.situaciones.org).

This self-reflection discussion is a common practice in social centre assemblies, such as the Roman ETC (www.escatelier.net), although it is not necessarily being developed systematically.

The experience of the Zapatista Consulta and the Zapatista slogan “preguntar caminando” (“walking, asking questions”) is a methodological reference to this approach. Following this inspiration, some initiatives use surveys, interviews and discussion groups as an opportunity to talk to others and with themselves, to break down distances in the fragmented social space, and to search for common notions that describe personal reality and seeking forms of resistance and cooperation (Malo, 2004). Some examples of collectives with this approach are the Italian magazine Deriva Approdi (www.deriveapprodi.org) and Posse (www.posseweb.net), and the Madrid-based Precarias a la Deriva's co-investigación on women’s precarity (www.sindominio.net/karakola/precarias.htm)

ii) Participatory action research for local community building and space design

In this case the methodology of action research is used in order to direct community interventions around the provision or coverage of social needs or taking concrete collective decisions. In the USA, there is a tradition of community building that incorporates a systematic process of reflection in order to define community needs, problems and resources; see for example the University of the Poor (www.universityofthepoor.org). Municipalities in Europe and Latin America that promote participative democracy also adopt similar methodologies, as is also the case of cooperative intervention in third countries within solidarity movements.

It is also applied outside of local community environments and within international processes. This is the case of the World Social Forum's consultation process. The Social Forum Consulta is applied to allow decisions on the main themes of the programme to be made in a participatory way.

iii) Research critiquing and monitoring institutions and research on alternatives

These approaches are not necessarily characterised by the methodology used or who developed it and why, but by the contents of the research.

Research critiquing and monitoring institutions refers to research efforts aimed at documenting and strengthening the movement's criticisms and critiques. Examples include the research developed by the Corporate European Observatory (CEO) (www.corporateeurope.org) on the lobby system in European Union policies; the anti-GMO campaigns documented by ASEED (www.aseed.net); Statewatch's monitoring of political institutions (www.statewatch.org); the Center for Research on Globalization (www.globalresearch.ca) or research on the media by Source Watch in the USA (www.sourcewatch.org).

By contrast, research on alternatives is focused on developing alternative solutions, such as research on Basic Income (www.redrentabasica.org); the Centre Tricontinental’s research on alternatives from the South (www.cetri.be); INURA, a network of people involved in action and research in localities and cities (www.inura.org), or the Permaculture Network (www.permaculture.org).

In some cases, critical research and the research on alternatives work in parallel. This is the case of the Indian center Navdanya (http://www.navdanya.org) which does research on GMO consequences at the same time as developing organic farming.

iv) Action-oriented training and empowerment

There are several cases of educational “institutions” created specifically to provide skills and training on social movements issues. This experiences build on the critical pedagogy put forward by Paulo Freire as a response to the traditional formal models of education where the “teacher” stands at the front and “imparts” information to “students” that are passive recipients (Freire, 1996). This is the case, for example, of the Universidad Madres de la Plaza de Mayo (www.madres.org/Universidad.htm) or the Escuela Florestan Fernández linked to the Movement of People Without Land (Movimento Sem Terra).

v) Action Research and art: Performance research

This type of approach is characterised by developing research through artistic channels of expression. This is the case of Beehive Collective, whose mission is “To cross-pollinate the grassroots, by creating collaborative, anti-copyright images that can be used as effective educational and organizing tools for the public area” (www.beehivecollective.org).

vi) Hubs of reflection and publications on movement strategy and organizational logics

Some collectives adopt a role of creating opportunities and developing critical analysis to shed light on the contradictions of processes and movement organization. This is the case for example of the Turbulence Collective , who make calls for reflection on key questions and publish the results in a magazine (www.turbulence.org); of Networked Politics, the node for collaborating on researching new forms of political organization (www.networked-politics.info); or of the Team Colors collective in USA engaged in militant research to provide "strategic analysis for intervention in everyday life" (http://teamcolors.blogspot.com) .

Other actors important in spreading movement knowledge are the movements' publishers, such as El Viejo Topo (www.elviejotopo.com) or AK Press (www.akpress.org).

vii) Social Fora and the epistemology of the encounter of knowledges

Social Fora, or the spaces for cross-movement dialogue, are the meeting points of different trajectories of knowledges, such as feminist theory, and environmental or cultural studies. This spaces are key in generating knowledge for dialogue.

In Boaventura do Sousa Santos words, “The World Social Forum (WSF) symbolizes the struggle against the monoculture of knowledge in the name of ecology of knowledges within which both scientific and lay knowledge can coexist”. The epistemology underlying the WSF is opposite to the idea of a general theory, in Santos’ point of view. “The WSF undermines the idea that the world is an exhaustible totality, as it holds many totalities, all of them partial”.

The basic premise of the ecology of knowledges is that there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice (Santos, 2004). In the meeting place of different knowledges, key elements are a lack of hierarchy among the different knowledges and the building of translations. In this regard, Santos defines translation as “the procedure that allows for mutual intelligibility among the experiences of the world, both available and possible, without jeopardizing their identity and autonomy, without, in other words, reducing them to homogeneous entities” (Santos, 2005). In the practice of the movements, the work of translation concerns both knowledges and actions.

The translation of knowledges consists of interpretative work between two or more cultures to identify similar concerns or aspirations among them and the different responses they provide for them. The second type of translation work is the translation of actions. It is undertaken among social practices and their agents. “All social practices imply knowledge, and as such they are also knowledge practices. When dealing with practices, however, the work of translation focuses specifically on mutual intelligibility among forms of organization and objectives and styles of action or types of struggle” (Santos, 2005).

viii) Mapping for action

An innovative line of research is the construction of cartographic visual maps. It is based on creating collective understanding of the complexity of new territories and hightliting relationships. Some examples are the maps of Bureau d’Études and the Université Tangente (utangente.free.fr) showing multinational networks; the map against / about the Forum of the cultures of Barcelona (www.sindominio.net/mapas); or the map of conflicts in metropolitan territory of Rome done by Transform! Italia (www.transform.it).

ix) Memory: Movement archiving and documentation

Three key questions fall under this approach. First, the memory of the processes built by the actors themselves and not by external force. That is, the movements engage in building their own memory. Second, reporting on events to spread information on what happened and to make them accessible to people who were not involved at the time. Third, preserving what happens for the future and for the accumulation of debates and conclusions, allowing continuity in the process. Memory is based on applying archiving and documenting techniques. In support of this memory building, and specially in developing it in a collective way, new information technologies have played an important role.

Some examples of this approach are the archives of reports and minutes of the Social Forums such as the Memory of the second European Social Forum at Paris 2003 (www2.fse-esf.org); the Chronos archive of mobilizations (www.euromovements.info/chronosweb); the E-library on social transformation (www.openelibrary.info) which includes an archive of 700 articles on global justice movement related issues; the project to write the movements' story of Seatlle mobilization against the World Trade Organization in 1999 (http://www.realbattleinseattle.org) or the People’s Global Action's Global Archive (www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/en).

x) Online creation communities: Peer-to-peer production models

An online creation community could be defined as a “loosely” collective action performed by individuals that, cooperate, communicate and interact, mainly via a platform on the Internet, with the common goal of knowledge-making (Fuster Morell, 2007).

Online creation communities are interesting examples not necessarily for their contents but for their organizational form and methodology, highlighting principles of cooperation and participation of large groups and the accessibility of knowledge.

Online creation communities are based on what Benkler defines as commons-frame peer production (Benkler, 2006). This term describe a new model of economic production in which the creative energy of large numbers of people is coordinated (usually with the aid of the Internet) into large, meaningful projects, mostly without traditional hierarchical organization or financial compensation.

The first examples of online creation communities are development communities, that is communities developed around free software programming, such as the communities around Apache, Linus, Debian or Drupal. The emergence of development communities constituted an empowering and inspiring experience in terms of a collaborative frame of production and in terms of a “copyleft” knowledge management system that favours creativity and re-use. They are based on a decentralised community of passionate “hackers” collaborating to write the code, and leaving it open to allow it to be re-used and further developed.

The new technologies of information allow very rich processes for building collaborative working tools. A particularly good case is Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org). Wikipedia is a Web-based, multi-lingual, "copyleft" encyclopedia designed to be read and changed by anyone. It is collaboratively edited and maintained by thousands of users via wiki software. The open editing process has led to Wikipedia becoming the world's largest encyclopedia. Vandalism is a recognized problem, though much of it is caught and amended by users who monitor the recent changes. Critics claim that Wikipedia contains much inaccurate information and can never be as authoritative as a traditional encyclopedia. Nevertheless, Wikipedia is one of the most used reference sites on the World Wide Web and has been widely endorsed.

xi) Techno-political tools: Systematising information for the creation of (networking) tools

Some techno-political tools aim to generate an online creation community. Nevertheless, while online creation communities refer to a specific goal resulting from interactions online, techno-political tools are generally associated with broader processes and with processes whose offline dimension is more important than the online interaction that takes place through the tool.

Techno-political tools are defined by two key ideas. Firstly, they put an emphasis on a collaborative and open environment. Secondly, they are based on systematizing the information and knowledge generated in mobilization processes in order to build useful tools that reinforce networking and to democratize access to contact data. This approach is based on making the knowledge already driving the social networks accessible, to empower them and to articulate them. It is based on an “indirect” research approach.

In the Internet sphere, any action is translated into digital information and digital information always leaves a trace on databases. A growing part of people’s daily lives in the North and developed countries passes through digital supports (PCs and other machines). All this growing information generated in daily life can be connected and interpreted by programmes, each time more complex, in order to extract applicable knowledge. Within the social movements, for example, this strategy has already been introduced for example in the Social Forums process, through the adoption of new digital and online protocols for and for the organization of the events: all this data normally produced by the actions necessary to organize the forum is now stored, saved, made easily accessible and utilized to offer further opportunities to produce knowledge and information and to intensify the networking process within and around this space of confluence of social movements.

This is probably a new frontier for action research: the possibility of storing and the elaboration of information produced independently from direct research aims. Apart from many other complex (legal, social, cultural, political) aspects, the interest in the potential of this information will produce a close correlation between the development of databases and protocols that organize the flow of any action in the Internet and the aim of getting more and more information potentially transformable into useful knowledge. This could open up new connections between social movements and researchers. Furthermore, this tendency suggests that in the future one of the tasks of a researcher could be the conceptual design of the protocols for storing relevant data and of the programmes to elaborate them.

The “political” in techno-political tools means that the tools are used and/or built for political ends. The “techno” means that the content and/or the mediation of such practices is carried out through technology. The “tool” it refers to the fact that objects are open to being re-appropriated; to being used for unexpected purpose. The tool aims to combine autonomy and a sense of acting jointly following the logic of Do It Yourself (DIY).

The usefulness of techno-political tools could be defined as the capacity to expand / increase the identification of actors and resources for the action and reflection.

Some examples of techno-political tools are the tools developed by Euromovements.info, like the European Directory of collectives and organisations (www.euromovements.info/directory). The directory was not built from scratch, but adapts data that the regular activity of the movements creates. For example, the main information source for the European directory is the registration databases for the European Social Forums.

Another example is the activism networking platform openesf.net (http://www.openesf.net/) which is a networking platform to organise the European Social Forum.

xii) Organic Intellectuals' contributions to social movements

Although some movements resist ascribing knowledge to individuals, important contributions are nevertheless made by individuals to the movements as organic intellectuals, willing or not. In Barker and Cox's words:

“Movement intellectuals make two kinds of theoretical contribution. The first is the justification of the movement. Here form is as important as content, for much of the ideological work of movements is dialogical, in exchanges with opponents and potential allies. The forms and settings of movement ideas vary (…): pamphlets, newspapers, posters, sermons, songs on demonstrations, informal conversations, and so on. (...)

Secondly, movement intellectuals produce strategic and tactical proposals, typically of the form “Given the overall situation, and our purposes and resources within it, this is how we should act”. “We” may be a formally defined movement or party, or may be framed as “ordinary people”, “workers”, “the Catholic community”, “Blacks”, etc.” (Barker and Cox, 2001).

There are also individuals that have been studying an issue for many years (e.g. GMO, EU lobbying) and contribute as “experts” on the area.

Some Think Tanks, such as the Transnational Institute (http://www.tni.org/) based in Amsterdam or the International Forum on Globalization based in San Francisco (www.ifg.org), support the figure of “activist-scholars,“ understood as people committed to critical analyses of problems and providing intellectual support to movements. They include journalists, independent researchers and writers, academics and policy consultants.

According to Boaventura do Santos Sousa, all the experiences presented hitherto are forms of knowledge that “break the public space of the University (as institution that hold the monopoly on knowledge) in the name of a wider public space” (Santos, 2004). I now turn to experiences of action research related to academia.

Academia

Many participants in the global justice movement are part of universities. According to Agrikoliansky and Sommier's research on the European Social Forum (Paris 2003), 70% of the participants were related to a University (as graduate or post-graduate students) (2005). However, the relationship to academia is a live, open and multi-dimensional question in the global justice movement.

Some of the questions arising around the relationship with academia are: Is it possible and how, to make use of the academic institutions to benefit social movements? What are the perverse effects of the Academy studying social movements? Which role is played by academics in the mechanisms of power (such as the re-absorption and division of movements into physical activists and theoretical activists, or between non-violent and violent activists)? What practices of resistance to the academy are initiated by social movements? Etc.

Within the framework of academia there are several, complementary, approaches to action research around the movement.

xiii) Academivism: Activists researching social movements from an academic institution

“Academivism” can be understood as attempts to contribute to social movements through research developed in an academic framework, performed by people who have a double identity as academics and as activists. In other words, people who, while being active and part of the social movements and taking a critical approach to the academic institution, are engaged in research on social movements in an academic framework.

Some of the questions related to this position include: How can we make our work relevant to those with whom we study? What is the role of the researcher? Is it possible to carry out action research from an academic institution? How does affect the researcher to have a “double identity” of activist and research? How is the knowledge by the social movements and the activist theorised (and in what respects is it different from knowledge generated in the academy or other contexts)?

Anthropology and ethnography, due to their fieldwork immersion methods of “being there”, are more open to these questions. Juris presents militant ethnography as “a politically engaged and collaborative form of participant observation carried out from within rather than outside of grassroots movements”. But he also considers its limitations: “If ethnographic methods driven by political commitment and guided by a theory of practice largely break down the distinction between researcher and activist during the moment of fieldwork, the same cannot be said for the moment of writing and distribution. Indeed, one has to confront vastly different systems of standards, awards, selection, and stylistic criteria”. That could explain the anger of this activist at the first International meeting on activist research and social movements who responded with: “You go back to the university and use collectively produced knowledge to earn your degrees and gain academic prestige. What’s in it for the rest of us?” (2004).

From academia there is also places based on providing education on alternative contents with an academivist orientation. This is the case of Hegoa, a Basque institute for development and international cooperation (www.hegoa.ehu.es), of the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (Nottingham) (www.nottingham.ac.uk/cssgj) or of the Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales, promoter of the Observatorio Social de America Latina (www.clacso.org).

xiv) Another academia is possible: Actions of change in academia

Opening up the knowledge created in the universities

In the academic world, there are emerging exponents of public access to the knowledge it generates. Starting from the hard sciences, initiatives such as the Public Library of Science (www.plos.org), a nonprofit open access scientific publishing project aimed at creating a library of open access journals and other scientific literature under an open content licence, are part of a wave to make science results accessible and to enlarge cooperation in research.

Another example is Interface itself, as an open access journal on social movement research (www.interfacejournal.net).

These actions are connected to a broader free culture movement in favor of open knowledge and the defense of knowledge as a public good. At US Universities there is also an emerging movement of “Students for Free Culture” whose goal is to transform the politics of knowledge at University (www.freeculture.org).

Initiatives to bring academia and society closer

This approach refers to efforts to build relationships between civil society and academic institutions and to increase public awareness both of research results and of the demand-driven approach to research.

Examples include the Fondation Sciences Citoyennes (www.sciencescitoyennes.org), the Science Shop (http://www.scienceshops.org/) first established in the Netherlands in the 1970s or INOSA (www.cs.indiana.edu/~gasser/inosa) which "promotes more egalitarian relationships of mutual learning between individuals and organizations working within universities and those in other parts of civil society”.

Lastly, other types of “actions” taking place in order to change academia through ethically based practices have to do with the struggles in defence of the public university and against the proletarianisation of research.

IV. Authorship and ownership

In discussions on action research, a distintion and contrast between “academic research versus activist research” is commonly made, and this distinction is usually the main axes of the discussion. Useful considerations can arise from this perspective (see for example Barker and Cox, 2001). Nevertheless, I consider that this perspective limits analysis, and can be used to narrow the focus of the questions asked of action research. In this context, it can be useful to address action research from the point of view of authorship and ownership.

As presented previously, the five tendencies I proposed are not necessarily in opposition to one another. Most experiences of action research in the movement are based on a combination of these five elements: they contribute to building relationships; follow a participative method; tend to use open licences; develop strategic thinking and produce alternative contents. However, authorship and ownership is a more categorical issue. Some experiences are based on collective authorship while others have an individual authorship and these cannot go together.

It might be worth mentioning that individual authorship does not refer to monologues or to isolation. If we look to the contexts of individual contribution generally we will find it part of a conversation. Nevertheless, in individual authorship a moment can be clearly established in which the ideas are explicitly attributed to a specific person. Collective authorship can also vary. It can include the case of a “universal” non-authorship, not attributing a explicit authorship, or collective authorship can refer to the explicit authorship of a clearly bounded group. Furthermore, the same person could in some occasions adopt an individual authorship and in some occasions a collective one.

Map II presents a simple distribution for orientation purposes of different types of experiences around authorship and ownership. The distribution of the clusters suggests that there is generally a relationship between the type of authorship and the type of ownership. Collective authorship tends to adopt “copyleft” (or formulas that favor access and re-use) approaches to ownership more easily. Further analysis and empirical research may be needed to see if this analysis holds up.

Map II: Authorship and ownership: distribution of type of experiences by authorship and ownership [footnote 4]

V. Conclusion

The nexus between research and political action is rich in its diversity.

Five main tendencies can be distinguished. Some types of experiences put particular attention on being based on a participative-collective method; others are focussed on producing alternative content; others develop strategic thinking for political processes; others are distinguished by their effort at building relationships and networking connections; and, lastly, others have a strong intention to change the way in which knowledge is managed. There tendencies are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but can complement one another.

The type of authorship (individual versus collective) is a sharper border and may also be related to the type of ownership. Collective ownership seems to be adopted more in collective authorship.

The defining features of action research

In conclusion, I would like to raise for consideration and exploration a number of elements that ‘swarm’ around action research in the global justice movement and, in my view, should define it:

■ Research arising from the action of transformative social movements: that implied by the needs directly or indirectly expressed by the social movements and excluded sectors of the population.

■ Criticism of any theory that claims to speak from a neutral place, from where it can see everything. Instead, research should be carried out from people's own situations, that is, from personal experience, within a strategy of research from below.

■ Research towards action for the critical transformation of the present reality, with an explicit political commitment to the present cycle of protests: research that pursues the creation of a knowledge that is valued for its practical effectiveness in generating changes, in contrast to objective and contemplative theoretical knowledge in the traditional academic fashion; knowledge that gives visibility to conflicts; knowledge that generates and maximizes action; knowledge that transforms reality while generating a new reality.

■ Research with a glocalist [global+local] framing.

■ Non-disciplinary research which attempts to overcome the fictitious compartmentalization of reality. By contrast, reality should be understood as a totality that combines manifold interconnected aspects.

■ The development of research as an effective procedure, whose development is in itself already a result. The validation of research depends on its capacity to contribute to change. Research with a real use-value.

■ Research nurtured by a spirit of experimentation; nomadic and travelling research, adapting to changes.

■ The principles under which research is organized should be decentralization, horizontality, autonomy and the desire for coordination and cooperation. It is either developed by subjectivities constituted through the formal and explicit objective of social activism research, or transversally and integrated into other fields of social movement action.

■ Everyone participating in the research should be considered part of it, with an effort to overcome hierarchies. This includes research springing from the relationship between the subject-researcher (the researcher as subject) and the subject-researched in a process of composition; non-instrumentalist research; investigation without an ”object”; rather than treating the social movements as objects of investigation, they – as well as the researcher - are subjects in a process in which everybody is left reconstituted. It is not ‘about’ social movements; rather it is from and for social movements but immanently so. In other words, rather than locating itself in a position already codified, it produces the terms of the situation.

■ The subject-researcher participates in the situations investigated, is open about his/her motives and opinions, and is not necessarily a person with a specialized university education. By contrast, the traditional role of the academic researcher which is questioned here is that of the prudently distant, supposedly objective and individualist specialist.

■ The subject-researcher become more a facilitator of the research than its owner and director.

■ Research from the perspective of resistance rather than one that is merely communicative. It tends to be based not on an acquisitive position, “giving” voice to excluded populations, but on establishing cooperation, with the acknowledgement of its own exclusion from the outset. It is not constituted through a separated consciousness, but makes the research one more tool in the process of confronting the system that we resist.

■ A consciousness of the re-appropriation of knowledge and a critique of the apparatus of academic capture in relation to mechanisms that reproduce power relations and favour the expropriation of knowledge.

■ Knowledge management based on free, public, inclusive, common and nondiscriminatory forms for universal use, without property or copyright or under pro-profit aims. This tends to be supported by accessible formats and easily distributed as well as, when applicable, copyleft licensing. This implies a critique of the commodification and privatization of knowledge as one of the causes of social exclusion.

References

Agrikoliansky, Eric, and Sommier, Isabelle, dir., 2005. Radiographie du mouvement altermondialiste. Le deuxième forum social européen, Paris, La dispute.

Barker, Colin and Laurence Cox. 2001. “What have the Romans ever done for us? Activist and academic theorising”. Available at: http://www.iol.ie/~mazzoldi/toolsforchange/afpp/afpp8.html (Last Accessed Date: 30 August 2008)

Benkler, Yochai. 2006. The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. Yale University Press.

Boutang, M., Corsani, A. and M, Lazzarato. 2004. Capitalismo cognitivo: propiedad intelectial y creacion colectiva. Madrid: Tranficantes de sueÑos.

Bucchi, Massimiano and Federico Neresini. 2006. Science and public participation. Chapter for the New Handbook of Science and Technology Studies Section III: STS and the Public Sphere.

Casas-Cortes, Maribel. Can the activist Speak in the Academy? (On Paper).

Croteau, David, Hoynes, William and Charlotte Ryan, eds. 2005. Rhyming Hope and History: Activists, Academics, and Social Movement Scholarship. University of Minnesota Press.

Douglas Bevington and Chris Dixon. 2007. “Movement-relevant Theory: Rethinking Social Movement Scholarship and Activism”. Social Movement Studies, 4:3, 185 – 208

Euromovements. 2005. Newsletter: Activist research: practice(s) to challenge the investigaction. Availeble at: http://www.euromovements.info/html/ (Last Accessed Date: 30 August 2008)

Eyerman, Ron. 1994. Between Culture and politics. Intellectuals and modern society. Polity press.

Eyerman, Ron and Jamison, Andrew. 1991. Social Movements: A Cognitive approach. Polity press.

Freire, Paulo. 1996. Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970). New York: Continuum.

Fuster Morell, Mayo. 2008. “Web communities - Emerging organizational forms in collective action - Web 2.0 for profit versus Web 2.0 profit for all”. 2nd ECPR Graduate Conference. Barcelona.

Fuster Morell, Mayo. 2007. “Strumenti tecno-politici”. At Transform! Italia Parole di una nuova politica. Published by Edizioni XL Roma.2007 (Pages 113 – 121).

Fuster Morell, Mayo. 2006. “Investigaction and social forums”, en European Social Forum: Debating its challenges for its future. Ed: Action Research Network in Europe, online.

Geerts, Clifford. 1989. El antropologo como autor, Paidos Studio.

Investigaccio. 2005. Recerca activista i movements socials. Ed: El Viejo Topo, Barcelona,

Juris, Jeff. 2004. “Practicing Militant Ethnography within Movements against Corporate Globalization”. SSSP Annual Meeting.

Malo, Marta. 2001 Nociones comunes: Experiencias y ensayos entre investigación y militancia. Posse, Deriva approdi, Precarias a la deriva, Grupo 116, Colectivo Sin Ticket, Colectivo Situaciones. Ed: Traficantes de sueños, Madrid.

Prabir Purkayastha. 2004. “All India Peoples Science Network and WSF India. WSF Memory Seminar: WSF 2004 Mumbai Experience”. http://www.wsfindia.org/ (Last Accessed Date: 30 August 2008)

Rheingold, Howard. 1993. Virtual Communities. Gedisa Cibercultura. Barcelona. English edition availeble at: http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/ (Last Accessed Date: 1 Enero 2009)

Rioufol, Veronique., with the collaboration of Nicolas Haeringer and Françoise Feugas. “Practical Proceedings for Documenting the ESF 2003”. (On Paper)

Santos, Boaventura do Sousa. 2003. “The World Social Forum: Toward a Counter-Hegemonic Globalization”. Availeble at: http://www.duke.edu/~wmignolo/publications/pubboa.html (Last Accessed Date: 1 Enero 2009)

Wainwright, Hilary, Sheila Rowbotham and Lynne Segal. 1980. Beyond the Fragments. Feminism and the Making of Socialism. Merlin Press.

About the author

Mayo Fuster became active politically in the Catalan Global Resistance Movement. In 2002 she focused her activism on action research. She is co-author of “Recerca activista i moviments socials” (El Viejo Topo) and “Activist research: practice(s) to challenge the investigaction” (http://www.euromovements.info/html/index.htm). She is studying the governance of online communities in the European University Institute’s PhD programme, and is a visiting researcher at Ischool – UC Berkeley. She is part of the webteams of the European and World Social Forum and Networked-Politics.info. Email: mayo.fuster@eui.eu
website: http://www.onlinecreation.info/

Footnotes

1. I built the Econsensus tool in 2001 and founded Militant Investigation Network in 2002. In 2003 I founded the Glocal activist research working group and published the “Guide for social transformation in Catalonia 2003” and edited the Catalan directory of collectives (http://www.movements.info/). I co-organised, with Collective Investigacció, the first international meeting of activist research and social movements in Barcelona (January 2004; http://www.investigaccio.org/) and coordinated the publication of Recerca activista i moviments socials (2005 Ed. El Viejo Topo).

I founded the Euromovements techno-political network (http://www.euromovements.info/), the Social Forums Memory Project and systematized working group (2005-2007) and the Networked Politics collaborative research project (http://www.networked-politics.info/); and organised seminars and workshops on action research at various European and World Social Fora.

I began social movements research at the Institue of Governance and Public Policies (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona). I am currently doing a PhD on the governance of online communities at the European University Institute and am a visiting researcher at the School of Information at UC Berkeley.

2. A comparison of academic and activist theorizing can be found in Barker and Cox (2001).

3. Memory is also connected to opening knowledge orientation.

4. Not included in this map are performance research and action research for training and empowerment.

Activist research methodologies

2009-01-18T20:21:00.001+02:00

This article will be posted shortly.

Call for new participants

2009-01-18T20:21:00.000+02:00

This article will be posted shortly.

Activist research methodologies

2009-01-18T20:14:00.002+02:00

This article will be posted shortly.

Interface issue one: contents

2009-01-18T20:14:00.001+02:00

Editorial [in process]

Mayo Fuster Morell, Activist research methodologies [in process]

Sandra Maria Gadelha de Carvalho / José Ernandi Mendes, Extensão universitária: compromisso social, resistência e produção de conhecimentos

Budd Hall, A river of life: learning and environmental social movements

Antonio Pedro Dores, Movimentos sociais existem?

Ilse Scherer-Warren, Redes para a (re)territorialização de espaços de conflito: os casos do MST e MTST no Brasil

David Landy, The mirror stage of movement intellectuals? Jewish criticism of Israel and its relationship to a developing social movement (review essay)

Fergal Finnegan, Janet Conway, Praxis and politics (book review)

Venezuelan article [in process – promised by Sunday!] (teaching / research note)

Caspar Davis, Creative democracy: wisdom councils at work (action note)

Michael Duckett, “Wor diary”: a case of DIY alternative history (action note)

Sureyyya Evren, Alternative publishing experiences in Istanbul (action note)

Call for papers, issue two

List of editorial contacts

List of journal participants

Call for new participants [to be written]

La sistematización de experiencias y la vision emergente en el hecho educativo

2009-01-18T20:14:00.000+02:00

Alejandrina Reyes

English summary:
This contribution comes from a group of educators who attempt to turn 'education on its head'. Knowledge is created by ordinary Venezuelans in the process of reflection upon their participation in social movements and community struggle. Knowledge as part of this practice is knowledge for social emancipation, dignity and political transformation. This contribution is both a practical introduction to their work and a contribution to widening our educational praxis.

Frecuentemente cuando se tiene una visión tradicional o mejor dicho convencional de los procesos educativos, visión apegada al enfoque cartesiano / newtoniano, existe la tendencia que al hablar de términos como aprendizaje permanente, currículo abierto, formación personalizada, reconstrucción y reconocimiento de aprendizajes por experiencia, entre otros, se cree que se esta frente a una propuesta que expresa desorden, no apegada a los cánones de la rigidez y caracterizada por la falta de “seriedad académica” vinculada a la rigurosidad científica tradicional, de la comprobación y la certeza.

Existe en Venezuela una experiencia de aprendizaje a nivel Universitario como lo es el Centro de Experimentación para el Aprendizaje Permanente, (CEPAP) fundado en el año de 1976 como programa educativo universitario adscrito al Vicerrectorado Académico de la Universidad Nacional Experimental Simón Rodríguez, (UNESR). donde se aborda el hecho educativo a través del Método de Proyectos [nota a pie de página: 1] cuyo camino para implementar los aprendizajes a través de un currículo personalizado lo es la SISTEMATIZACION DE EXPERIENCIAS.

Esta experiencia venezolana innovadora a nivel educativo, ha permitido a lo largo de su historia, que los participantes incorporen los aprendizajes reconocidos a través de las sistematizaciones de experiencia, de manera paulatina, de manera sistémica, en su currículo de estudio auto construido.

De manera que dichos aprendizajes (a nivel teórico, metodológico, actitudinal) expresan una complejidad, un todo en influencia reciproca con las partes, al respecto nos señala Morin (1997)

“El desafío de la formación constituye entonces, un intrincado mundo, donde la supremacía de un conocimiento fragmentado según las disciplinas impide, a menudo operar el vínculo entre las partes y las totalidades y, debe dar paso a un modo de conocimiento capaz de aprehender los objetos en sus contextos, sus complejidades y sus conjuntos.

Es necesario desarrollar la aptitud natural de la inteligencia humana para ubicar todas sus informaciones en un contexto y en un conjunto. Es necesario enseñar los métodos que permiten aprehender las relaciones mutuas y las influencias recíprocas entre las partes y el todo en un mundo complejo, se intenta develar las experiencias, las cuales se convierten en narrativas de las prácticas educativas, que dan cuenta de procesos de interrelación social” (Morin. Pág.7)

Un camino que permite aprehender las relaciones mutuas y las influencias reciprocas entre las partes y el todo en los procesos de aprendizaje es el camino de la SISTEMATIZACION DE EXPERIENCIA, pero,

¿A qué nos referimos cuando hablamos de la sistematización de experiencias?
Entendemos la sistematización de experiencias como un proceso holístico de interpretación critica de la realidad, que refleja redes de relaciones complejas de las personas involucradas y donde el ser, el hacer, el conocer y el convivir de las personas se combinan armónicamente para conformar un todo en movimiento permanente en los procesos de aprendizaje.

De acuerdo a la experiencia que hemos tenido como facilitadores y facilitadoras en el Centro de Experimentación para el aprendizaje Permanente (Cepap) utilizando como eje orientador EL METODO DE PROYECTOS podemos señalar que la sistematización de experiencias se produce en diversas dimensiones, en esta oportunidad nos referiremos a cuatro de ellas a saber:

Dimensión Ontológica
A través de esta dimensión podemos observar cómo la sistematización de los procesos de vida, procesos experienciales, procesos vitales, nutren y fortalecen el principio de identidad, lo cual permite abordar los ejes transversales educativos SER y CONVIVIR dentro de una visión no fragmentaria y micro local, sino verlos de manera integradora en vinculación con el sentido colectivo de ciudadanía, que pone de manifiesto los valores y actitudes que debe prevalecer en un educador y educadora para los nuevos tiempos. De manera que para una mejor comprensión de la sistematización como elemento potenciador de la identidad será necesario tomar en cuenta en esta dimensión los hechos culturales, los valores, las subjetividades, creencias y emociones.

Al sistematizar experiencias actuamos convivencialmente. Cabe destacar que acá la sistematización incorpora elementos que para la ciencia mecanicista, fundamentada en el pensamiento de Newton y Descartes carecen de “veracidad”, estamos hablando de las subjetividades, las emocionalidades, los sentires de quienes participan en la experiencia. De manera que el SENTIR juega un papel importante en la sistematización.
Dentro de los productos académicos iniciales y aún en los del proceso intermedio y final que elaboran los y las participantes del Cepap tales como LA AUTOBIOGRAFIA, LOS PERFILES DE INGRESO Y PROSPECTIVOS, ROL PROFESIONAL CENTRAL es importante que se tenga incorporada esta dimensión de la sistematización lo cual refleja cómo los aspectos actitudinales de los y las educadoras está imbricado con la memoria histórica.

Dimensión Metodológica
En esta dimensión se puede observar cómo la sistematización se convierte en una vía a través de la cual se realiza la reconstrucción critica de los aprendizajes por experiencia, quienes sistematizan, adquieren o fortalecen conocimientos a nivel metodológico - procedimentales vinculados al eje transversal educativo DEL HACER. Los y las participantes en el Cepap, a partir de desarrollar sus productos académicos (Informes de aprendizaje) van incorporando herramientas metodológicas, técnicas, instrumentos vinculados a la metodología cualitativa que nutre profundamente sus procesos de sistematización, además reconoce maneras y caminos particulares que ha utilizado a través de su proceso de vida para el logro de proyectos que se ha planteado.

Dimensión Epistemológica
En la dimensión epistemológica esta ubicada la producción de conocimientos la cual emerge de la experiencia de vida misma, de manera que se aborda el eje transversal educativo CONOCER vinculado a la construcción crítica de nuevas categorías de análisis, partiendo de los contextos y cotidianidades alrededor de la experiencia sistematizada. Frecuentemente en muchos de nuestros Países latinoamericanos es a nivel de Postgrado donde se invita al estudiante/participante a construir conocimiento no a nivel de pregrado, donde se supone que el estudiante debe asumir el pensamiento de pensadores, teóricos, científicos reconocidos por la academia universitaria; en el Cepap el participante en sus Informes de Aprendizaje debe ir aproximándose al ir construyendo teoría sobre su practica, al ir desarrollando áreas de conocimiento relacionadas con la temática abordada en especial relacionadas con los ejes de sistematización, se va nutriendo teóricamente su proceso, así como también, cuando desarrolla sus Unidades de Aprendizaje (constituye un espacio integrador de conocimientos en el proceso de aprendizaje de los y las participantes)

Dimensión política
Esta dimensión es sumamente importante y trascendental, porque le incorpora a la sistematización de experiencias un nuevo elemento, el hecho estratégico y de opción ante un desafío histórico: ¿sistematizar para qué y para quién?. Esta dimensión política ayuda a problematizarnos, a preguntarnos si queremos sistematizar para ejercer una forma de dominación a través del control de la información y producción de conocimientos de las experiencias donde hemos participado o si queremos transformar y transformarnos a través de la comprensión crítica de nuestras experiencias, que no es sólo nuestra, sino de muchos en relaciones reciprocas.

A continuación queremos señalar puntualmente algunas características de las referidas dimensiones:

Como puede apreciarse en el cuadro anterior, la sistematización de experiencias esta inserta en una nueva visión paradigmática del conocimiento, en una visión emergente, que brota de las profundidades de nuestra historia como especie humana. donde esa historia a retazos se hilvana por puntadas de hilo invisible y va entretejiendo la red, que se nutre del planteamiento sistémico, que se nutre de la cuántica, de los aprendizajes ancestrales de nuestros pueblos.

A continuación queremos mencionar algunos elementos que consideramos importantes al abordar procesos de aprendizajes donde se incorpore la sistematización de experiencias:

Nos atrevemos a señalar que la SISTEMATIZACION DE EXPERIENCIAS es un elemento estratégico para una nueva visión del hecho educativo, para nutrir y contribuir con los procesos de aprendizaje de los y las nuevas ciudadan@s del mundo, del futuro, quienes vean sus vidas en relación con l@s otr@s y asuman corresponsablemente su accionar de manera critica.

En nuestro querida Patria la República Bolivariana de Venezuela, hoy más que nunca se requiere el fortalecimiento de nuevas visiones del hecho educativo, que inciten a que el proceso bolivariano, contribuya con la transformación planetaria. Muchas de las misiones educativas (Misión Robinsón, Misión Ribas, Misión Cultura) tomaron elementos de esta propuesta Educativa que le hemos presentado para incorporar procesos de aprendizaje que permitan que los compatriotas que hasta ahora habían estado excluidos del sistema escolar puedan acceder dignamente a él y desarrollar sus potencialidades.

Realmente es un honor, el que seamos parte de este todo, que seamos herman@s latinoamerican@s, y que en esta tierra fértil, LATINOAMERICA haya surgido nuevas maneras de producir conocimiento que no responden a la dominación y exclusión de una élite que sabe y una multitud que domésticamente responde a lo que se le diga. En nuestros Países de Latinoamérica han surgido propuestas investigativas y metodológicas como la investigación acción participativa de la mano de recordado sociólogo Colombiano Orlando Fals Borda; de otro País (Costa Rica) surgió la sistematización de experiencias, como modalidad investigativa participativa la cual como fruto germinado, emergió de la tierra, de manera frondosa, diversa, compleja y en permanente holomovimiento, para fortalecer a los movimientos populares.

Nuestro país, en estos momentos estamos apoyando misiones educativas “Yo si puedo estudiar la escuela básica”-Misión Robinsón en países latinoamericanos como BOLIVIA, ECUADOR, NICARAGUA entre otros, y tenemos la plena seguridad que nuestra modesta ayuda contribuirá a la igualdad y democratización del conocimiento de nuestros herman@s.

En este siglo XXI, dejemos pues que la influencia sutil de la sistematización de experiencias, se incorpore en las tradicionales catacumbas del conocimiento de nuestras universidades que esta muriendo y de la mano de los movimientos sociales y populares se unan a la danza de los procesos de transformación social.

Ponencia presentada en el Encuentro Internacional sobre Sistematización celebrado en la Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela (UVB), Caracas, 2008

Alejandrina Reyes, Centro de Experimentación para el Aprendizaje Permanente (CEPAP) de la Universidad Nacional Experimental Simón Rodríguez (UNESR), Venezuela (alejandrinare@gmail.com)

Notas a pie de página
1 Al respecto nos aportan Villarroel G., y Herrera S (76:2004):
"El método de proyectos fue creado por W.H. Kilpatrick en 1918. Lo fundó en el análisis del pensamiento hecho por John Dewey, y su cometido fue el ensayo de una forma efectiva de enseñar. De los mismos principios que dieron origen al método de proyectos surgió el método de problemas, por obra del propio Dewey. En tanto que el método de Kilpatrick se propone actuar concretamente en el campo de la realización efectiva, el de Dewey procura desenvolverse en el campo intelectual.”

Alternative publishing experiences in Istanbul

2009-01-18T20:13:00.000+02:00

Süreyyya Evren

I would like to base this ‘action note’ on our experiences of publishing anarchist materials in Istanbul in the last decade as an affinity group that mainly works on postanarchism. I will try to focus on two aspects of our experience.

First I would like to explain our position and our approach. Briefly, we have been actively working on a research and publication project in Istanbul from a poststructuralist anarchist perspective or we can say a postanarchist perspective. Of course, what we understand by these terms needs to be discussed in detail, but at the risk of simplifying we can say it has been a kind of updated pananarchism; an anarchism that is understood beyond the limits of politics and one which includes post-eurocentric non-modernistic elements, contemporary theoretical developments and culture in a broad sense which leads to a conception of an anarchism which grabs different fields and everyday life. When we are asked to summarize what we try to do, we simply describe it as a pursuit for heterodoxies in every possible field and an effort to enhance these fields of heterodoxies and challenge orthodoxies everywhere. And we make use of the works of contemporary philosophers like Foucault or Deleuze, so-called poststructuralists, and relating this body of theory to other sorts of political writings of people like Bakhtin or Franz Fanon. We try to develop an open methodology which doesn’t hesitate to employ third world studies, art practices and art theory and political forms of activities. So although we had good relations with postanarchists of the English speaking world (like Todd May, Saul Newman and Lewis Call) we have developed a different path since we first made our postanarchist publications in mid-90s.

Secondly, I would like to give some details and show how we tried to apply different forms of media in different periods of our project. I will try to draw the advantages and disadvantages we found in various forms of publishing. I hope this will be a useful survey of diverse modes of publishing, which gives clues for various possibilities. The methods we have been using for spreading and testing our political position will be evaluated together with their results.

Especially in the last 12 years, working as an affinity group of people who are interested in similar subjects, theoretical and political stances, we have passed through different alternative publication experiences. Here I would like to summarize and categorize these and then maybe compare and discuss possibilities.

We have had three main phases of alternative publishing.

1. The first period: Karasin Anarchist Collective.
Karasin Anarchist Collective was active between 1996 and 1998. It was a totally independent publishing period relying heavily on photocopy (xerox) magazines, newspapers, texts and pamphlets. No legal procedure was involved. As for the distribution of our publications we have used already existing networks of subcultural fanzine distribution; we also built a web site publishing everything we made so far in Karasin Anarchist Collective.

2. The second period: A period of ‘détournement’ -Working inside other publications and media
The second period of our alternative publishing dates to the period between 2000 and 2003. We have worked inside already existing structures such as an established humanist literature magazine, a comics and culture magazine, a radio station and a publication house and continued to develop our postanarchist studies, combining them with different grounds and media.

3- The third period: Independent publishing and launching a separate legal magazine of our own – Siyahi.
That period was initiated in 2003 as an autonomous web site. After that we started to publish our magazine Siyahi devoted to focus on postanarchist thought in November 2004. In total, we have published 7 issues of Siyahi.

Experiences
The first period: Karasin Anarchist Collective
Between 1996-1998, we called ourselves the Karasin Anarchist Collective. And in the context of the Karasin project we published a photocopied (xerox) magazine, a photocopied newspaper and pamphlets. We also used photocopy for copying certain texts. In total we did 2 issues of the magazine, 3 issues of the newspaper and 11 pamphlets. Karasin Anarchist Collective (in some places we called ourselves the Karasin Working Group) was composed of a small core of a few people [footnote 1].

Karasin was formed of people who were translating, writing, reading and discussing. I was active with a web site, photocopy magazine, photocopy newspaper, and pamphlets. But these were not its only activities. Long discussions had preceded our publications. As I remember it, a discussion period of nearly two years with different people came before publishing anything. We were having endless reflective talks about what we want to do. Before starting Karasin Anarchist Publications we did some works with the Karasin ‘logo’ in some events in literature and politics.
The first ‘photocopy action’ we did was against one of the most established famous Turkish novelists. We wanted to challenge an elitist advertising campaign which abused the cultural field to create a status distance, an event followed later by a total commercialization of the publishing field. The first action can be understood as an action against market determined literature/culture.

We published the first Karasin magazine on the 14th of April 1996. This was the day the Russian poet Mayakovski died. And although he was not an anarchist we had respect for him and his political stance and the gesture in this reference underlined our ties with literature as well [footnote 2].

Before Karasin, I personally had an experience with photocopy publishing already. With some friends, we had made photocopied books and magazines. Photocopying, in the early 1990s, was an important element of alternative publishing and alternative distribution for us. We had photocopied books and we even tried to distribute photocopied poems on the streets.

We had a completely fictive ‘photocopy publication house’ called the ‘Zenci Kitaplar’ (meaning ‘Negro Books’). Of course there was nothing like that officially. We were photocopying literature books, stories and poems.

As the second action of Karasin Group, we duplicated an article of a very well known Turkish art critic as a form of protest. In that article the writer was talking about the necessity of the institution of police as such. As a result of our protest, which was only duplicating his article by stamping our logo on it, we triggered protests of fellow leftists directed to this critic.

After these two actions we started the pamphlets and Karasin magazine and turned our faces more to anarchism than literature.

The second issue of the KARASIN zine, 8 May 1997, was dedicated to the memory of the execution of Alexander Ulyanov who was Lenin’s brother and who attempted to assassinate the Russian czar Alexander III. For us this dedication was also an indirect sign of our anti-Leninism.

The Karasin pamphlets we published included Sergey Neçayev’s Revolutionary Catechism, Peter Kropotkin’s Anarchism in Socialist Evolution, Anarchism and On Order, Mikhail Bakunin’s Revolutionary Catechism, and Emma Goldman’s The Psychology of Political Violence. We also published Franz Fanon’s A Sociology of a Revolution – the chapter of “Transformation of a Family”, Fyodor Dostoyevski’s The Dream of a Strange Person, an anarchist interview with Zapatistas by Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation in May 1994, a book on the 1992 Los Angeles uprising prepared by combining texts from different fanzines and essays about events.

How we worked:
We once bought a second hand photocopy machine and used that at home, but this was not efficient at all. It was not good for an amateur group like us – it did not cut the expenses as we imagined. So we bought an all-in-one printer. That machine became the mother of Karasin publications till the end. Karasin was prioritising becoming independent media, to be ‘outside’ the institutions. We were writing, translating, preparing and publishing at home and distributing the results ourselves.

We also made two special pamphlets on specific events. One of them was on peasant resistance in the Turkish town Bergama (Peasant Resistance of Bergama and Anarchism, June 1998, including three essays on the subject written by Rahmi G. Ogdül, Fusun Kayra and Sureyyya Evren. It was also published on the net and re-published by some other websites. And the other special work was on a specific event in another small Turkish town Fatsa in 1979. Between 26th and 28th of August 1998, we (me and Rahmi), in the name of Karasin, attended the Lisbon “International Conference on the Politics of Social Ecology. We presented our talk “Direct Democracy in Fatsa” and also photocopied a pamphlet of our talk. (That pamphlet was also translated into Portuguese and published on the net.)

And lastly, we xeroxed the Gazete Karasin (Newspaper Karasin). We produced the first issue as a monthly photocopy newspaper, dated 30th November 1998.

Parallel to photocopy publishing, we prepared a website for our Karasin collective in a free space from Geocities. Geocities was not a part of Yahoo at that point. The last updates to the web site were made in 1998. We put a free tracker program on the main page and as we have checked statistics we thought maybe the real broadening effect can be achieved via a web site. But after a while in which we didn’t update the site, Geocities/Yahoo canceled it (some parts of it can now be seen through web archive sites under http://come.to/karasin). Actually, these simply structured web pages achieved a lot. These pages made texts to reach so many places and stayed so long alive.

And internet publication was much much easier.

With photocopy publishing we had serious distribution problems. We were finding shelves in rock-punk oriented music shops, and yet everyday more and more bookshops started to demand invoices or directly stopped selling unregistered photocopy magazines. We were having real difficulty in distributing our material in other cities. Besides Istanbul, we were only distributing small amounts in Ankara and Bursa. We were having much more feedback through our website. Readers were able to download and print out all the material. We know that some people even made pamphlets themselves after downloading the stuff. Photocopying was limiting our dialogue with people outside the anarchist and subculture circles. We wanted to spread our ideas to a larger amount of readers, to different people with different interests. As our aim was to affect all aspects of life and to strengthen heterodoxies, we wanted to diffuse into various fields. So we shifted towards the second period, where our ideas met not only anarchist and punk communities but many people with diverse concerns in different parts of Turkey.

The second period: A period of ‘détournement’ - working inside other publications and media
In this period we mainly worked inside the oldest Turkish literature magazine. Slowly, we found ourselves more close to that magazine. In September 1998 they published my essay on the third-wave of anarchism that focused on the history of anarchism and anarchism in the late 90s. The editor-in-chief had sympathy for our ideas and we found a place inside the magazine for preparing special dossiers that related to postanarchistic topics such as poststructuralist anarchism. Beginning with a special dossier on hypertext, we started to prepare a series of dossiers focusing on various theoretical topics that we link to our postanarchist agenda.

So between 2000-2002 we worked inside different media platforms: sometimes we tried to transform them, sometimes we tried to change their direction a bit and sometimes we just wanted to live and function inside in our own way without changing it. In this period, with Rahmi, we developed a radical poststructuralist anarchist approach through the articles we wrote for Turkey’s oldest literature magazine over two years. During that period I worked as a co-editor in the magazine preparing special dossiers on theoretically charged concepts as hypertext, postfeminism, potlatch, metageography, everyday life, rhizomatic thinking, cyberfeminism etc. We also wrote for another monthly popular Turkish magazine, which was widely circulated because it was a comic magazine as well. It had nearly 20,000 readers across the country and there we tried to find writing forms to embrace everyday life and actual political agenda for non-professional readers. We used dialogues, photographs, jokes etc.

Subsequently we collected our accumulated articles in a volume with the title Bagbozumlari (Vintages), On Culture, Politics and Everyday Life in Studyo Imge Books, 2002. This was a publication house which mostly had a reputation on rock culture. (We also initiated the Turkish edition of Hakim Bey’s TAZ there.) Soon, again in Studyo Imge Books, we edited another volume as a collection of texts taken from various sources titled Another World Is Possible (ed. Sureyyya Evren & Rahmi G. Ogdul, Studyo Imge Books, 2002, Istanbul) basing it on ‘anti-globalisation movements’ and related bodies of theories.

This period ends with a radio program. Again with Rahmi, we initiated a radio program with the same title Bagbozumlari (Vintages) on the prestigious and independent broadcasting organization “Acik Radyo” (”Open Radio”) from Istanbul. We had various guests for our radio show for talks on art, culture, everyday life and political struggles. (Spanish anarchist Abel Paz was one of the international guests beside Turkish anarchists or writers.) Many shows focused on anarchism and postanarchism.

So in this period we worked in a literature magazine, a comics and culture/literature magazine, a radio station and a publication house. The advantages included the possibility of reaching a much greater audience in different forms, developing our ideas thanks to many intersections, meeting new people interested in the subject or having new contributions from different angles.

But this period also had its disadvantages. This style of ‘working everywhere’ was making it more difficult to understand our position for many people because everybody is not following every medium. The other contributors to the media we shared and the political and cultural differences in their stances had influenced the way our project was conceived by the general audience. Our neighbors, the other material used in these media, in these different bodies, were affecting our remarks somehow. As we were affecting them, they were affecting us as well and although this opened many positive new areas it was also limiting our expression. We were again in the need of media where we can initiate our own context and at the same time continue to retain our relations with a broader audience. Besides, readers develop prejudices about magazines, and whatever you publish may be either ignored (because of a prejudice about the magazine in question) or just labeled as something it is not even close to.

The third period: Making separate publishing and a separate legal magazine of our own –the Siyahi magazine.
Since 2003, we have been thinking about doing something alternative with our approach which will be a separate publication at the same time. But we did not want to do a photocopy magazine this time, we wanted printed material. But of course we didn’t have the means so we started with a website on www.postanarki.net (which is not active anymore). We published many articles in Turkish there and also collected related English articles in one website.

So then we started to make an independent magazine. We had the chance to work independently in a new independent publishing house (which mainly focused on poetry) and started to publish our magazine Siyahi on November 2004. We published six issues with this publishing house but lately they have had financial problems and decided to focus more to on poetry and short story magazines where they can receive more advertisement income to keep the company alive. So we moved to an other publication house (art-ist) for enabling the publication of our 7th, 8th and 9th issues. In fact, we were already in close organic relations with art-ist contemporary art magazine. Erden Kosova and I were writing and working for art-ist magazine since its beginning and Erden has been also in the editorial board.

Siyahi is a platform for contemporary theory, culture, arts and politics related. We have published many articles on postanarchism, and generally politics and culture.

As you can see we are working on postanarchism but Siyahi includes other subjects too. Siyahi is distributed nationwide in Turkey without being able to pay any fees to its writers and translators, thanks to their volunteering contribution. We also tried to initiate an international version of Siyahi (that would be called Siyahi Interlocal) working with Jason Adams, but that project only resulted in a web blog (http://community.livejournal.com/siyahi).

The postanarki web page and Siyahi shapes the third period. We started to make the postanarki web page in November 2003 by taking free space from Geocities again. (www.geocities.com/postanarki) And in February 2004 we moved to www.postanarki.net with our separate domain name and hosting. Kursad Kiziltug, who joined us in the second period, was actively working for the web site. When we started to have the printed publication - Siyahi magazine - he didn’t have time to work on it, and we also felt the printed material was more essential. This web site is not active anymore. But it leaded us to create some international contacts and to circulate many texts in Turkish and English. For example we met online with Jason Adams, the founder of Postanarchism Yahoo Group (October 2002) and the initiator of the Postanarchism Cleaning House web pages, who later visited us in Istanbul. And we met online with Juergen Muemken who later started to make a web page in German on the subject www.postanarchismus.net and edited two volumes in German on the subject.

Siyahi marks the last period but apparently things will change again, because the distribution company that was distributing Siyahi just went bankrupt and this puts us in a severe financial crisis.

Conclusion: After three phases
As an affinity group, we kept working on the same line of anarchist thought, developed new ideas accordingly, and kept spreading our ideas in various forms. With the same ideological aim, we stayed ‘outside the system’ by photocopy publishing, worked in other established institutions or we made an independent magazine ourselves.

The best part of making photocopy publications is the feeling of being ‘away’, being ‘outside’ the system. Of course, there are always debates asking if there is anything that can be labeled as ‘outside’. But still, you don’t give your names to official bodies to get printing permissions, you don’t have invoices, you don’t have advertisements, you don’t have barcodes. But you don’t have readers as well! I mean, of course you have readers, but it is very difficult to reach them, you don’t produce a lot and you can’t distribute a lot. In today’s conditions, it is the other way around; sometimes even a zine is like a simulation of a an e-zine... I sometimes feel that the e-zine is the real thing, and the zine is the simulation! The worst part of making photocopied publications is that you are very close to being proud of your distance with the system. The danger of sticking to an ‘anarchist identity’ is definitely there.

On the other hand, as I travel to different places, I get the impression that the problem is about the lack of alternative distribution channels. When I visited the London Anarchist Book Fair and saw all those bulks of anarchist pamphlets, I felt like that the ‘photocopy still works’. There is some kind of a romanticsm in it which I also still share in some way. Nevertheless, as far as I know, photocopied publication is widely understood as a tool for propaganda in radical circles. It is rare to publish contemporary articles aiming to discuss contemporary theoretical issues in photocopied pamphlet or zine form. In Karasin, we had the intention of publishing articles that would be a contribution to theoretical debates in the Xerox form.

Reflecting on our second phase, the best part of working within various established magazines, radio stations or publication houses is meeting new people, meeting new questions, reaching a wider audience, and testing and developing your ideas in different platforms. I can even say that it is like an education. How would postanarchism be ‘applied’ in a discourse you use on a radio show or a popular magazine? How do you relate your anarchist or poststructuralist jargon with daily language? (this was also a question during few talks I gave on ‘Postmodernism and Left’ in Istanbul and Ankara during mid 90s). It was also an important step in "enhancing fields of heterodoxies and challenging orthodoxies" in different fields. We later used our experiences in those different platforms when we prepared our separate magazine Siyahi.

The worst part of our second phase is; your message is easily distorted with your ‘neighborhors’ (other political, social and theoretical positions in the platforms you use). Nobody else follows all the platforms you are active in, so nobody is really able to comprehend the scope of your project. In some senses, it may be that the second phase never ended, but turned into a secondary approach: we still write in different magazines, sometimes on other issues as ‘anarchist/postanarchist writers’, sometimes directly on anarchism/postanarchism.

In relation to the third phase, the best part of making a separate independent magazine is deciding and building the platform you will talk on while being able to reach new people, new ideas, and a wider audience. An independent magazine seems like a must for making your message clear generally. The worst part is that it requires more volunteer work than any other. And it is a pity that we were unsuccessful in developing the project of ‘Siyahi Interlocal’, an independent postanarchist international/interlocal magazine that would be edited by postanarchists from different parts of the world.

All of these different approaches had positive and negative consequences. Maybe the fourth phase is this reflective attitude, thinking about the specific features of all these modes and trying to find the best composition that can carry us in the future…

Süreyyya Evren is a writer working on literature, contemporary art, and radical politics. His literary works include several novels, short story books, poems and critical essays. His writings have also been published in various languages including English, German, French, Czech, Serbian, Icelandic and Albanian. Evren is the editor-in-chief of a poststructuralist anarchist magazine called Siyahî in Turkey, and a PhD candidate in Loughborough University, United Kingdom. He is currently working on the historiography of anarchism. S.E.Turkeli@lboro.ac.uk

Footnotes
1 These people were Rahmi G. Ogdul, Bulent Usta, Fusun Kayra, Erden Kosova and Sureyyya Evren.

2 At the same period I was working as an editor in Kabalci publishing house. This foreshadowed our
understanding of ‘détournement’ which characterized our second period. While I was active with Karasin’s
anarchist photocopy magazines, newspapers and pamphlets with friends I was also working in this
publication house and there I initiated the publication of Murray Bookchin’s The Philosophy of Social
Ecology, Essays on Dialectical Naturalism, translated into Turkish by our comrade Rahmi G. Öğdül. Rahmi
also later translated other books related to anarchism and/or postanarchism: Peter Marshall’s William
Blake: Visionary Anarchist, 6:45 Books, 1997; Todd May’s The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist
Anarchism, Ayrinti Books, 2000 and Hakim Bey’s TAZ, Studyo Imge Books, 2002.
And as an editor in Kabalci Books, I also initiated a series of poetry books and we published Percy Shelley
and William Blake.

Wor diary: a case of DIY alternative history

2009-01-18T20:08:00.000+02:00

Michael Duckett

Introduction
"A group of people from Newcastle have created a 2008 diary that revels in our region's rebellious history.

This is a not for profit project to share forgotten stories of love and protest. We hope you get a copy and get inspired. Make history in 2008 and feature in future diaries!"

In this way the Wor Diary website announced the project which I present in this piece as a form of D.I.Y. alternative history.

Description
As the publicity for Wor Diary explained, "We have researched local archives and personal collections to get 3 historical dates for every day of the year, based on Tyneside's inspiring history of protest, rebellion, mutual aid and dignity. (Actually we've got lots more but will have to be brutal editors!)” The project was therefore born of an intention to research and remember this local history, and to bring it alive into the present day:

“From Suffragettes burning down railway stations before World War 1, to the Winlaton iron manufacturers arming the crowd in order to prevent another 'Peterloo' taking place on Tyneside, this is the underground history that is rarely acknowledged. Read of the dreams of long-forgotten pioneers, the determination of individuals fighting tyranny in all its forms, and the desperate struggles of the starving, without which we would not have the freedoms we have today."

Newcastle-upon-Tyne is the largest city in the North East of England, and has a strong industrial history and a reasonably well-known 'official' storyline of coalmining, shipbuilding & football. It also has, like most places on the planet, an alternative history - a forgotten and edited-out history of rebels, visionaries, dreamers and fighters. We ourselves, a group of friends who had first met through local protests, direct actions and green/peace/anarchist/solidarity networks, had only a limited knowledge of past struggles. Wor Diary was an attempt to capture some fragments of this underground history – to snatch back some of the histories that were not properly recorded, the futures that could have been but weren't (not yet).

The manner in which we conducted this research, shared it around our social circles, and published it for a wider readership, was characterised by non-professionalism, enthusiasm, voluntary effort and a form of open-ended participation. In this 'action note' I wish to relate the character of this effort at alternative local history, as a form of radical D.I.Y. praxis! In this form, character may be more important than efficiency; the quality of participation is prioritised over quantitative impact: the diary was not a means to an end, but a means that itself sought to be as rewarding, free, sociable & educational as possible. I shall detail four facets of this ethos further: (1) locality, (2) participation, (3) empowering history and (4) D.I.Y. aesthetics.

1. Locality
First of all, a note on regional identity and idiosyncrasy. 'Wor' is a local pronunciation of 'our'. It is just one of the terms that would not be easily understood by an outsider. Similarly, the first page declared that the diary was “produced by marras for marras”, ‘marra’ being an old pit term for ‘mate’, with strong (though fading) local associations of real, life-or-death support that would keep men alive down the region’s coal mines.

These terms, and almost all of the historical events recorded – personalities, locations, struggles – become opaque and meaningless to anyone lacking some regional knowledge. But the whole purpose of the diary was to record specifically local events - individuals who are not relevant to everybody already; locations which make up our intimate knowledge of the world. Forgotten things, and things that are obscure from a distance - but which happened here. And here matters. The place where you stand is important. It is where people have lived and died and dreamed and fought (we can name some of them). It is where me and you continue to live, die, dream, fight (we can give you some tips).

2. Participation
"Each month is drawn by a different person/household/family, with September produced during a participatory event at the Star & Shadow cinema"

The two of us who initiated the project tried from the outset to get as many people involved as possible. A couple sat with us as we trawled through historical documents; a handful contributed dates from their own knowledge or archive; and up to fifty people took an active hand in producing the diary itself.

How many people were involved? This is an interesting calculation, if you include all members of a family (the youngest artist was two, another contributor was heavily pregnant with the child born in between printing and distributing). One guy, the housemate of more fully involved participants, contributed in just one way: delivering a sample diary to the local newspaper offices in town, where an interested journalist then gave us a full page three advert (Newcastle Evening Chronicle 17.12.2007). I do not consider the journalist to be ‘part’ of it, but the guy who delivered the sample diary would be on my list.

Different people designed & drew the pages for different months, & within the constraints of a set diary-view format, they were free to add pictures, their own words & ideas in their own idiom and handwriting. This means that every week brings a surprise, a refreshing change of style. Some of it is illegible; much of the references are obscure; there are spelling mistakes and typos on almost every page and the format can be bewildering - and actually quite hard to use as a diary! But many people loved that quirky, individual, diverse character. For example, the scriber of the July weeks was Italian, but if not all readers could interpret her anti-pope slogans or recall who Carlo Giuliani was, it didn't matter because her words were a decoration on that page, to be dipped into if you wished, or skipped over as a back ground aesthetic when not.

Figure 1. Sample page – 21 by 15 cm (A5)

When I have asked people which weeks were their favourites, they have named completely different weeks, for reasons that I would not have anticipated. Several people do not use the diary as a diary, but have said they keep it on their desk just to read the week’s entries in the morning. I heard of a country doctor who was reading out the historical entries to his patients. In a way, it is gratifying to not know how many people have appreciated or engaged with Wor Diary. We never set out with a fixed plan, and we were always open to new contributions, and new interpretations of how things should be done. I would like to think that more people were involved than I myself know, just as more people bought and used the diary than I ever expected.

3. Local History, & Making History
"We hope the diary will inspire a greater sense of possibility and of the real history of struggles and freedoms that we have inherited. Not history to put on the shelf, but to inform everyday life. Never more will we pass that corner and forget it was where the 'witches' were hanged, or drink in that pub and forget the songs that once were sung against the British Empire and for the victory of the Mahdi army."

Interface journal is due to be launched on 15th January. On this day in history, in the small spot on the earth known as Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the following took place:
1814 The Tyne freezes. The first onto the ice is a Dutchman with beef bones tied to his shoes for skates, followed by crowds of locals. It stays frozen for 3 weeks, with stalls constructed and fires lit on top.
1871 Death of John Fife, who gained popularity as a radical opponent of Lord Londonderry’s use of cavalry against peaceful meetings, but in 1838 as Mayor of the new town council he himself called out the troops on Chartist gatherings. Archetypal bastard politician.
1939 Newcastle City Hall, memorial for the north-easterners who fought Fascism in Spain

As amateur historians, we found it was harder to find dates for more recent events (1960s onwards), because there are easily accessed secondary sources for older dates, and the older 'canon' of local radical history is fairly firmly established (the radical MP Joseph Cowen; the leaders of the Chopwell miners; suffragettes such as Emily Wilding Davies). This meant that there was a relative paucity of dates for late-twentieth century issues such as animal rights and gender politics. It was also true that ‘dramatic’ (violent) events prove easy to date and allowed us to quickly decide ‘let’s put that in’, whereas meetings, gatherings, and longer-term campaigns do not suggest themselves in such an obvious way. Although our history would be uneven, incomplete, and even somewhat inaccurate, it was a very illuminating and gratifying process to look through the local history books, newspapers and journal articles to discover our own radical heritage.

In your neighbourhood, in everyone's location, amazing, lovely, tragic or traumatic things have taken place, aspects of struggle and power and of life. Not every country has such a detailed historical record as Newcastle, but everywhere the sentiment is true that, as a page at the start of November puts it:

"Today: Jean did her neighbours shopping
Bob cleaned snow off the pavement
Billy did his ill friend's paper round
Joe got up early to hear the dawn chorus
Baby Isaac giggled at his book
Loads of people ate birthday cake
The papers are full of what 'celebrities' & politicians do or think is important. Our lives are full of joy and enthusiasm not fit for their headlines, but these are what makes our lives GREAT."

This sentiment was taken from a spoof paper produced in Newcastle in 2004 & distributed for free at Metro stations. This kind of ephemeral source would rarely make the historical record. The author of the sentiment participated in Wor Diary but did not know his words were being included.

We made the ‘empowering’ intention of the diary explicit in pages which we added to the front and back, devoted to non-diary information. Again, these were opened up to anybody in our political and social circles who felt there was something useful to be shared. In the end, they contained a unique mix of the diary-esque and the idiosyncratically local:

1. a welcome: "Hopefully it'll help inspire more dates to be remembered by future generations".
2. 2008 & 2009 dates at a glance.
3. a 'femstrual' calendar on which to plot period cycles.
4. two pages about 'their' statues (of war and imperialism) and 'wor' statues;
5. two pages urging a break from the everyday and breaking out of the role of passive consumer" such as forming co-ops, growing your own food & 'skipping' food;
6. a poem commemorating the horrors of the coal industry, 'Close the Coalhouse Door' by Alex Glasgow;
7. and for January 1st a fuller list of all the dates we found for that one day of the year, before editing, to demonstrate how many inspirational or strange things happen each day.
8. a list of places locally where more historical information could be found (libraries rather than books);
9. a personal manifesto by one participant declaring her intention in 2008 to express herself on the advertising-dominated walls of the city;
10. two pages of tips on organising a successful event or campaigning;
11. five pages of local contacts for everything from sexual health to credit unions to anarchist music collectives;
12. a page remembering one local visionary, Thomas Spence;
13. a timetable for the number 12 bus;
14. a list of colliery disasters and a map of the metro;
15. advice on "looking after ourselves & each other",
16. and blank pages for notes.

The back cover of the diary is designed as a face mask to be cut out once the diary is used: "Your face is recorded on CCTV cameras hundreds of times a day ... Why not reclaim your privacy with this lovely, easy-to-use mask?" On the first batch of diaries, elastic bookmarks were provided which would also serve to hold the mask on, and crayons were provided to encourage people to decorate their own diary in their own unique style.

4. D.I.Y. Style
Wor Diary was done in a deliberately amateur and diverse style, and was rushed to printing without any corrections or ‘smoothing out’ of the design. In copying our format from the Californian ‘Slingshot’ diaries, we also consciously chose to eschew mainstream aesthetics, computerisation or neat usability. Instead, Wor Diary partook of a form of ‘zine’ aesthetics, which is not to everyone's taste and is, politically, looked-down upon by more 'serious' revolutionaries or campaigners who want to change the world all together, on a large scale.

Figure 2: Fragment of a family-drawn page.
Zines are personally-produced by enthusiasts who wish to share their hobbies, their opinions, their diaries or their politics with like-minded souls. They are cheap and small-scale, wilfully obscure and non-mainstream. They inspire me for keeping hold of the personal, the authentic and the hand-drawn, and for taking on the imprint of social life – they collect fingerprints and coffee stains in a way that a ‘blog’ never does. Above all, they are about specific experience and not about universalising slogans or glossy mass-manufacture. Wor Diary declared its affiliation to this cultural form, on a hand-scrawled poster at the launch event, written on an unfolded cardboard box:

"Why DIY?
On the very 1st page of Wor Diary there is a mistake, clumsily corrected.
We could've airbrushed it, done the whole thing on computer, even 'paid a professional'.
We didn't, we did it worselves, amateur, hurried, loving, as part of our real lived lives.

Why?

Coz

(1) The World is not made of Plastic.
It IS made of trees, kittens*, coffee spills, texture & smudges.
So this is what wor diary LOOKS like it's made of.
* At least 6 cats have rubbed + walked on the pages, printer & laps of wor diary.

(2) It's NOT OUR JOB!
Jobs = paid, punctual, dull, organised, efficient.
Life = yours, fun, enthusiastic, messy, hungover, unfinished.
Wor diary is a product of our real, lived, joyfull untidy existence."

Process
The diary was launched with a 'pub quiz' in a volunteer-run cinema which currently serves as the most important free, radical space in Newcastle (http://www.starandshadow.org.uk/). This pub quiz further served to spread our stories of alternative history: “Instead of being quizzed on hits from the 1960's you will be asked about riots from the 1860's." Like every part of the diary’s process, it also partook of our politics to some extent: "Entry will probably be free to those who have been put in cells more times than Thomas Spence, or whose very existence has been made 'illegal' by the current violence of law (eg. 'failed asylum seekers', anyone breaking bail conditions, etc... )"

The diary was distributed and sold through friends and relatives, and made publicly available at outlets "chosen for their independent character and/or shared ethos with Wor Diary. Get your Christmas presents there instead of HMV & Waterstones." We also sold the diary at stalls which we set up at 16 local gigs & D.I.Y. events - often only selling one or no diaries, but having a presence and 'being at' the events, in the scene, feeling part of Newcastle.

I disagreed with some people who wanted to use the diary as a fundraiser, and argued that it should be kept at cost-price to reflect the D.I.Y. ethos, and also to ensure that it was bought & used - a form of propaganda as much as it is a product. In the end, the 500 we printed (at an anarchist workers co-op in a different city) were quickly bought up, even before the local paper advertised them. We didn’t realise we had created a successful formula until it was too late to print any more!

Epilogue: 2009
We never designed ‘Wor Diary’ as our political banner or group identity, and we made no efforts to make the project consistent or long-term. Instead, we lazily imagined that the idea could take off and be taken on by other people, so that perhaps every year would see a different diary made in a different UK city, filled with obscure information about that locality, researched and created by residents there. But enough people enjoyed and appreciated the 2008 Wor Diary that, in August, one participant circulated an email saying ‘I want to do Wor Diary again’. A meeting was then organised, and as I write we are in the middle of putting it together for a second time. The other original creator of the idea insisted that neither he nor I should be in charge this year, and so another participant has the responsibility of chasing up contributions, arranging meetings and so on. I have found it challenging to relinquish control, when I know now how to do it better, but it is true to keeping the participation genuinely open.

In many ways 2009 will keep the same format and ethos, and we have tried to improve participation by, this year, getting every single week of the year drawn by a different person. There is also the problem, however, of such an informal and loose project being pulled in different directions by those who find some part of it interesting. The feedback and criticism we got disagreed in the things we should build upon and the things we should drop. A majority wanted a more readable, less cluttered format but, with no editorship, this is not proving such an easily realised improvement! If a contributor provides a page that is just as cluttered as last year, but fits the rough brief they were given, then who are we to white-out parts of their contribution?

The biggest upset for some people was having a meat recipe contributed to the 2008 diary by one participant – who designed the recipe herself, did not mean to cause offence, & provided a vegan alternative. Yet this inclusion ruined the diary for a group of other participants, and they asked us to guarantee that it would not happen again. I refused at first, as I did not feel I had the right to take on an editorial role. Instead, I encouraged them to talk to the offending participants. But in the end we have arranged to have one group meeting before we print the diary, so that anyone with concerns can come along and, if it has to happen, any censorship will at least be done in a group process.

All quotes come from the Wor Diary website in September 2008. www.wordiary.org

Michael Duckett is a zine-maker, eco-anarchist and an enthusiast of our rebellious history. His Phd with the University of Newcastle explored the contemporary forms of anarchist ideology that are expressed within activist dialogue - not the ideology that is found in a book, static and set out in dry perfection - but a part of everyday life, shared and dynamic and gaining its meaning directly from context. He works with children, and volunteers for community projects in Newcastle. oldglen@gmail.com

Creative democracy: wisdom councils at work

2009-01-18T20:05:00.000+02:00

Caspar Davis

In a letter to Rececca Solnit, John Jordan wrote, "Our movements are trying to create a politics that challenges all the certainties of traditional leftist politics, not by replacing them with new ones, but by dissolving any notion that we have answers, plans or strategies that are watertight or universal. In fact our strategies must be more like water itself, undermining everything that is fixed, hard and rigid with fluidity, constant movement and evolution. We are trying to build a politics of process, where the only certainty is doing what feels right at the right time and in the right place... When we are asked how are we going to build a new world, our answer is, 'We don't know, but let's build it together.' In effect we are saying the end is not as important as the means, we are turning hundreds of years of political form and content on its head by putting the means before the ends, by putting context in front of ideology, by rejecting purity and perfection, in fact, we are turning our backs on the future... Taking power has been the goal at the end of the very straight and narrow road of most political movements of the past. Taking control of the future lies at the root of nearly every historical social change strategy, and yet we are building movements which believe that to ‘let go’ is the most powerful thing we can do—to let go, walk away from power and find freedom. Giving people back their creative agency, reactivating their potential for a direct intervention into the world is at the heart of the process. With agency and meaning reclaimed, perhaps it is possible to imagine tomorrow today and to be wary of desires that can only be fulfilled by the future. In that moment of creation, the need for certainty is subsumed by the joy of doing, and the doing is filled with meaning."

Wisdom Councils are that kind of leap into the unknown, an attempt to create a "politics of process" that puts context in front of ideology.

Three Wisdom Councils have been held in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. They resulted from the convergence of at least two already commingled streams of people: those who had come together as a result of a visit to Victoria by Robert Theobald in 1996(?), and the local branch of the World Federalist Movement – Canada, which has a deep interest in improving democratic processes.

Origins of Victoria Wisdom Councils
Robert Theobald was a great evangelist for the power and wisdom of ordinary people, believing that they were far ahead of their so-called leaders. He came to Victoria at the invitation of the World Federalists, and his visit led to the formation of a the Group with No Name, which started with about 50 people who met every other Saturday to share their thoughts and ideas. Spin off groups produced a forum on work as well as No Name University, a group of curious people including a couple of retired professors who explored topics ranging from physics to the power of myth. The Group itself dwindled over the next 5 years until it came down to about 10 people and finally it petered out.

One of Theobald's associates was Tom Atlee, founder of the Co-Intelligence Institute and author of the Tao of Democracy. Tom put some of the Group in touch with Jim Rough, the developer of Wisdom Councils and Dynamic Facilitation. Jim, who lives in Port Townsend, Washington, came up with the idea for Wisdom Councils through his work as a facilitator. He developed a technique called Dynamic Facilitation which helps groups quickly solve "impossible" problems by generating fresh ideas rather than just choosing between conventional options. Jim wrote a book, Society's Breakthrough, describing how a constitutionally mandated Wisdom Councils could transform American democracy for the better. Several people from Victoria – including Caspar Davis, a World Federalist and George Sranko, another veteran of the Group with No Name – established a connection with Jim by taking his Dynamic Facilitation seminar.

What Are Wisdom Councils?
A Wisdom Council is a group of about 12 randomly selected people who meet for several hours with the assistance of a Dynamic Facilitator with the intention of deciding on what issues are most important to the group and concocting a unanimous statement about them. The statement is issued to the broader community at a public meeting, and the Wisdom Council disbands. Jim Rough's original dream was that the Wisdom Council would be added to the U.S. Constitution as a new institution that would have no power other than meeting periodically, each time with a new randomly chosen group, and issuing statements that came from ordinary people who met as individuals with no pretence of speaking for anyone but themselves, who would create statements that came from ordinary people rather than from any power base or interest group. Jim Rough believed, and experience has confirmed, that ordinary people are far ahead of politicians, the media and other leaders in understanding the real problems of our communities and in conceiving solutions for them.

Nuts and Bolts of the Victoria Experience
Early in 2006, Sranko and Davis talked about the possibility of holding a Wisdom Council in Victoria. By a happy coincidence, the local branch of the World Federalists had received a bequest, and had decided to use some of it to explore democratic innovation. They decided to bring Jim Rough and Tom Atlee to Victoria to talk about Wisdom Councils, which they did. The event was held on a Friday evening in November 2006, and the next day about 40 people met with them to pursue their ideas, and Wise Democracy Victoria was born, with the intention of holding a series of three Wisdom Councils in the City.

About 30 people agreed to work on the project. They called themselves Wisdom Council Conveners, and they and the World Federalists agreed that a series of at least three Wisdom Councils was needed to fairly test the idea. The World Federalists agreed to fund the first two Councils, to cover the cost of mailings to potential Councilors, renting facilities for the Councils, etc. The Conveners kept in touch with themselves and with others who had attended the talk by email.

The Conveners met every Saturday for several months in a series of somewhat anarchic self-organized meetings that spent a lot of time deciding how to make decisions and sometimes overturning earlier decisions about subjects like what geographic area to draw the Wisdom Council from, how to do random selection when no really comprehensive list of residents was available , or perhaps even existent. They could not get the voters list, and in any case neither it nor the phone book was truly comprehensive, but in the end they settled on the phone book and devised a method of selecting random pages, random columns on the page, and a random number of lines from the top. The meetings were sometimes chaotic, but each week someone volunteered to facilitate and certain principles were faithfully observed, including the right of everyone who came to have a voice and to be heard. The conversations were always constructive, and decisions were by consensus. It was often messy, and usually slow – especially when previous decisions were rejected a week later when some different people showed up, but it was understood that real democracy takes time and understanding.

The Conveners considered that their own process was just as important as the process of the Wisdom Councils themselves, and a strong bond developed among the conveners. They carefully evaluated each Wisdom Council with an eye to improving the process and its impact on the community.

The Victoria Wisdom Councils
The first Wisdom Council, held in March 2007, was a great success for both the conveners and for the participants, who were astonished at how quickly the process of Dynamic Facilitation got them talking openly about important matters on which they had strong feelings with a group of strangers. Most were exhilarated by the experience, and some felt that it was an important event in their lives.

The first Council also got good media coverage. Two local papers (but not the major daily) and two radio stations ran stories on its planning, and the public meeting following it was attended by about a hundred people, including Victoria's Member of Parliament and a city councilor. After the event, the Wisdom Council presented its unanimous statement at a meeting of City Council. The only disappointment was that it failed to generate much buzz in the larger community. Members of the Council were invited to join the conveners, and one or two did.

The conveners did everything they could to make things easy, comfortable, and safe for the Councilors, who were each giving a Friday evening and all day Saturday to the project. For each Council, the conveners provided rides if needed, food, and daycare – although daycare was needed only for the third Council.

The second Wisdom Council, three months later, was also a success for conveners and participants, but it got less media coverage and again failed to generate a buzz. It was held in June, and the conveners did not reassemble until September. That fall Jim Rough gave his Dynamic Facilitation seminar in Victoria and some of the conveners attended. Jim had facilitated the first Wisdom Council and his associate Deanna Martin facilitated the second.

While Jim and Deanna were in Victoria for the seminar, Deanna facilitated a meeting of the conveners, and they decided that one reason the first two councils had failed to generate the hoped-for broader conversation was that they got lost in the noise of the city. From the start, the conveners had spent a lot of time and energy on determining the geographical scope of the Wisdom Councils, and the main question being whether to draw on the whole city or on a smaller area, It was decided to try the third Council in a smaller area, and the conveners chose Fernwood, a compact residential area that already had a stronger than average sense of community, and where several conveners and former councilors lived.

Following that decision, the conveners met with several community leaders and got articles in both community papers. They also held a meeting in the local pub, where attendees learned about the Wisdom Council process and discussed local issues and possible actions and solutions.

The third Wisdom Council, sponsored by the local Unitarian Church, was held in a Quaker Meeting House on the edge of Fernwood in March 2008, almost exactly a year after the first Council. It was also a tremendous success for the conveners and the participants, but it also failed to generate as much buzz as had been hoped.

Repercussions of the Victoria Wisdom Councils
One of the conveners taught a communication class at a local University, and he devised an exercise that grew out of his experience as a convener. He divided the class, who came from many parts of the world, including the People's Republic of China, into three groups, and assigned each group to conduct a meeting. One group was given rudimentary training – about half an hour – in Bohmian dialogue. A second was given a similar amount of training in Dynamic Facilitation, and the third was given no instruction. The three groups each performed in front of their classmates on one day, and on a later day they spent a later day on a post-mortem on the exercise. They were all exhilarated by the experience, and they recognized that even rudimentary training in Dynamic Facilitation had yielded the best results. This was a spin-off of the Wisdom Council project that may yield important – if unmeasurable – results as these young people pursue their careers, mainly in the media.

Another convener is involved in a Civic League, whose purpose is to determine a set of basic community values by going door-to-door and discussing them with as many municipal residents as possible, and then to measure the votes and actions of each municipal councilor against those values. This is a very different process, but there is a substantial degree of congruence between the values emerging out it and the statements of the three Wisdom Councils, which also had a lot of similarity with each other. (see the appendix below)

There was some discouragement after the third Council, and the conveners and the World Federalists held post-mortems, both separately and together. They recognized that the Councils had had an important impact on the lives of both the conveners and the Councilors, but they also saw that it had taken a great amount of time and energy to randomly select potential councilors, to invite them, and to persuade enough invitees to participate. No one felt that the time or energy had been wasted, but most felt that their next efforts might take a different direction.

There has been considerable talk about having a Wisdom Council in a local school, and that nay yet happen. There ahs also been considerable interest in convening similar Councils to address specific topics, rather than having an open agenda. Jim Rough calls this kind of council a Creative Insight Council.

After the post-mortems, the conveners took a break, but 10 of them – and two ex-Councilors – met for a potluck dinner in June before scattering for the summer and discovered that they still had a great deal of cohesion and a strong desire to persevere in some fashion. It is hard to say what will happen next. But the project will not cease. Both the conveners and many councilors have been infused with "the joy of doing, and [the realization that] the doing is filled with meaning."

Appendix I – Wisdom Council Statements

The Statements of the three Victoria Wisdom Councils are available online:

Statement of the First Wisdom Council
http://wisedemocracyvictoria.org/statement-of-the-victoria-wisdom-council/

Statement of the Second Wisdom Council
http://wisedemocracyvictoria.org/statement-of-the-second-victoria-wisdom-council/

Statement of the Third Wisdom Council (Fernwood)
http://tinyurl.com/4xo5c4

Here is the text of the Statement of the First Wisdom Council:

“The Victoria Wisdom Council recognizes that the fabric of our society is fraying in a variety of ways:
• We are increasingly isolated from each other
• We are losing connection with our environment and making choices that have grave impacts upon it
• Our society is increasingly socially and environmentally unsustainable
• There is a growing disconnection between our government and the people

We believe these issues are solvable by fostering a shift from “I” to “We” in our attitudes and actions, by taking a greater role in our democracy, and by recognizing our personal responsibility for these issues.

The Victoria Wisdom Council encourages citizens to become more civically engaged and politically active, by:
• Empowering disenchanted people to reconnect with public life
• Providing more people to people connections, and
• Offering new ways of finding and using our voice

The Wisdom Council itself is one way of achieving this.”

Appendix II: Civic Leagues
The Civic League movement is possibly the oldest citizen democracy initiative in North America. The National Civic League was founded in 1894, when more than 100 educators, journalists, business leaders, and policy makers met in Philadelphia to discuss the future of American cities. Those who attended the conference included Theodore Roosevelt, Louis Brandeis, Marshall Field, and Frederick Law Olmsted. The gathering was organized in response to widespread municipal government corruption and served as a national call to "raise the popular standards of political morality." - http://ncl.org/about/

The National Civic League seems to be flourishing in the US. In Canada there is a growing number local Civic Leagues do not seem to be connected to the US organization but which have a similar purpose. They are independent entities, but they seem to have a loose network, sharing their stories generally similar principles, although the details vary. These principles are quite congruent with the aspirations of the randomly selected Wisdom Councils, suggesting that there is an underlying thirst for genuinely responsible democracy and good government.

These are the principle of the Saanich Civic League (Saanich is a suburb of Victoria):

1 Accessible government that works for citizens
2 A community in social, environmental and economic balance
3 A diversified and strong local economy
4 Leadership to combat climate change
5 Community: walkable, affordable, safe; village- centred neighbourhoods
6 A strong commitment to heritage, culture and the arts
7 Beauty; preservation of natural areas; quality development
8 Support for local agriculture, local markets, increased local food supply
9 Accessible, clean - energy transportation networks
10 Actively engaged citizens and greater voter turnout

Caspar Davis is a retired lawyer and amateur editor, photographer and activist. He has been interested in Wisdom Councils since taking Jim Rough's Dynamic Facilitation course 10 years ago, and was instrumental in bringing Jim Rough and Tom Atlee to Victoria in 2006 to talk about Wisdom Councils, and he has been a member of the group that convened all three Victoria Wisdom Councils. rapsac4AT yahoo.ca

Book review: Janet Conway, Praxis and politics

2009-01-18T20:04:00.000+02:00

Fergal Finnegan

Conway, Janet (2006). Praxis and politics: Knowledge production and social movements. New York. Routledge

Even a cursory glance over some of the most prominent books produced over the past decade from within the ‘global justice’ movement would be sufficient to recognize a distinct style and sensibility (Mertes, 2004; Notes from Nowhere, 2003: Yuen, Katsiaficas & Rose, 2002). On a superficial level these collections, like the ‘movement of movements’ they sought to analyse, appeared to be a strange and unruly carnival of opinion and dissent which might, to pick a random selection, find Bolivian anarchists, Marxist academics and French peasants all rubbing shoulders. For many commentators this joyful cacophony clearly demonstrated the weakness, incoherence and irrelevancy of the global justice movement. However, on the contrary the form and the themes of the movement of movements indicated just how historically significant this period was. At the Zapatista encuentros, the world social fora, the various summit protests and direct action camps alongside thousands of other less well publicised events a new contemporary radical imagination was being shaped by coming to terms with the challenge of neo-liberalism. Inevitably any attempt to describe social reality on a global scale in a period of rapid change will be plural and unfinished.

Just as importantly it is hardly a historical accident that activists chose at this moment to work within broad progressive networks using participatory forms of democracy in which a plurality of opinions and strategies were encouraged. In this sense the shape and organization of the global justice movement can be understood as a conscious attempt to reevaluate the complex legacy of a century of radical thought and experience. It is thus unsurprising that a movement born under the shadow of the enormous failure of Soviet authoritarianism and inspired by the victories of the ‘new social movements’ should be concerned with how radical ideas can serve to deepen democracy and encourage diversity rather than stifle dissent and how utopias can be imagined without forgetting the grotesque brutality of the gulags and the lies of authoritarian Marxism

Of course when direct action know-how is placed besides grand Hegelian theory and NGO lobbyists work with committed anti-capitalists debates inevitably emerge over political strategy and ethical values. Debates which, a decade after the Seattle protests, we can now fruitfully reflect upon. One way of framing these debates is to ask how we can usefully understand the relationship between epistemology and politics. What do we mean by ‘knowledge from below’, how is it produced, what is its ultimate value, and what is, and should be, its relationship with formal, ‘expert’ and institutional knowledges? These are knotty and significant issues and it is precisely these important questions that Praxis and politics sets out to address by analysing the activities of one part of this ‘movements of movements’ at a local level.

The author, Janet Conway, is a Canadian scholar who spent most of the 1990s working as a full-time social justice activist in Toronto. In her book she examines a broad based coalition of Toronto activists that she helped establish called the Metro Network of Social Justice (the MSNJ) as it evolved and responded to the neo-liberal restructuring of the city between 1992 and 1997. It documents the organizational prehistory, founding and development of the MNSJ within the social and political context of a changing Toronto.

In this account the network, one of several such social justice coalitions that emerged in Canadian civil society in the 1990s, became an important space of resistance and collaboration as the neo-liberal assault on the welfare state intensified. The MNSJ grew steadily from 30 to almost 200 member organizations bringing together activists from a wide range of NGOs, radical political organizations, advocacy groups and trade unions. Inevitably, within such a politically diverse coalition very different objectives and strategies were espoused by various constituent groups within the network but according to Conway for a good deal of the MNSJ’s existence this was a source of creative tension and political experimentation.

However, as the 1990s progressed and as the effects the neo-liberal reform on a state and city level became clear a split slowly emerged between those within the MNSJ who advocated a popular education strategy and activists who were pushing a narrower and perhaps more ‘traditional’ campaign and protest agenda. Conway’s sympathies lie with the former rather than the latter strategy and she was evidently frustrated by what she saw as tendency towards ‘hyper-activism’ within sections of the MNSJ who relentlessly pursued campaign after campaign at such an unforgiving tempo that it left little time for reflection. Similarly, she enumerates some of the difficulties of political work that is overwhelmingly concerned with pressuring elites to make decisions rather than focusing on developing alternative practices at a grassroots level. This is contrasted to the slower rhythm of popular education initiatives undertaken by Conway and others within the MNSJ which were orientated to what the author calls long-term ‘capacity building’.

Most of their educational work was done under the self explanatory rubric of ‘Economic and Political Literacy’ (EPL) and involved both grassroots community workshops and activist education. The aim of this work was to create a dialogue within communities about how they understood their own social needs by learning and discussing political economy. The book gives considerable attention to this subject and the writer is still clearly excited by the potential of such work to develop social awareness of political issues, to help create social solidarity and ultimately to encourage meaningful forms of political agency. However, when the activists associated with this popular education approach sought to formalise and further their work within the network by securing funding for a properly resourced EPL centre in 1997 the initiative was blocked. As a consequence a number of activists split from the MNSJ and in Conway’s estimation this irreparably damaged the MNSJ as a space for creating knowledge from below and seriously hampered the reach and strength of the network.

Thankfully though Praxis and politics is not just another jaundiced account of possibility betrayed but a reflection on social movements and an argument about how to produce social theory. Conway uses her experience in MNSJ as an occasion to think through creating social movement theory from the ‘bottom up’. Furthermore, embedded within this history of the MNSJ and this approach is a thesis about the role of knowledge and learning in contemporary social movements. The author argues that the lived, formal and informal, knowledge of activists deserves careful attention and such work provides the key to understanding both the dynamics and potential of social movements. In this account the everyday and ‘largely tacit, practical and unsystematised knowledge’ (p.1) of social movements are described as powerful tools for remaking culture and identity. This, Conway argues, is particularly true in coalitions and networks such as the MNSJ which potentially offers a dialogical space for the development of more sophisticated and systematic political analyses through open debate.

This theory of social movements as fertile spaces of knowledge production, identity formation and political experiment certainly deserves careful consideration by both activists and academics. It is developed by drawing on the work of the radical Brazilian educator Paulo Freire and feminist theory in order to outline a social movement epistemology. Within this paradigm the process of democratic decision making and the experience of participatory knowledge production is an integral part of any genuinely democratic political project. In other words the process of making politics and social meaning is much more important than simply achieving campaign objectives. It follows from this approach to epistemology that all knowledge is shaped by power and history and is therefore necessarily, partial and provisional. In methodological terms this means that privileged formal, expert and institutional knowledges require an open and dialogical relationship with experiential knowledge to be really meaningful for progressive social movements.,

While this is hardly a novel proposition it is interesting to have this idea explored in the context of the most recent ‘movement of movements’. As such Conway’s book can be read critically and usefully alongside the recent work of the radical educationalists Michael Apple (2006), Henry Giroux (2004) and some of Stanley Aronowitz’s (2003) writings on social movements that consider some of these issues as well as various analyses on popular education by Crowther, Martin and Shaw (1999), Liam Kane (2001) and Marjorie Mayo (2005). Of course there are also clear parallels between Praxis and politics and the more magisterial work on epistemology and social movements by the Portuguese sociologist de Sousa Santos (2007)

Undoubtedly, Conway tackles a subject that is intriguing and perhaps even of enormous importance to social movement theory and for the most part carefully and painstakingly put together and clearly argued. Besides which the range, capacity and energy of the work undertaken the MNSJ activists is noteworthy in itself and as such the book is worthwhile. The fact that Conway goes to the trouble to elaborate how the MNSJ developed as Toronto became an important node in global capitalism adds to the value of the work. Nonetheless, however interesting and potentially useful some of the ideas might be the brevity of the arguments undermines the overall impact of the book by skating over whole fields of social movement theory, educational analyses and radical political economy so rapidly that the arguments are often more suggestive than compelling.

There are also some very noticeable gaps in the book. The central theme of how academic work such as this has, should or might relate to social movement activism is obviously touched upon in every chapter but strangely there is little reflection on how the research for this book, this act of translation from the grassroots to the academy, has impacted on the author’s life as an activist. Even more oddly given Conway’s personal involvement and that she undertook interviews with other activists the texture of the book is a little flat and the voices and passions behind the events remain a little muffled. Also, frustratingly the work lacks an appendix of materials of the MNSJ or the EPL and does not give any detailed accounts of the workshops organized by the EPL. Oddly given that the work is by an activist-academic there is no postscript on the work of the MNSJ since 1997.

This lack of grit is not solely due to the constraints of academic writing or the fact that Praxis and politics is too short to realistically achieve Conway’s ambitious goals. Throughout the book there is a theoretical and political unevenness. Conway has a strong distrust of modes of reasoning that risk theoretical and political foreclosure and is strongly influenced by Laclau and Mouffe’s (1985) blend of feminism, Gramsci, poststructuralism and liberalism. Accordingly Conway outlines a conception of radical democracy in which is seen as preferable not to legislate or prescribe for one particular vision of the future. However, in this case this approach leads to a theory that is a more an agglomeration rather than a consistent whole. The difficult work of acknowledging the contextual and provisional nature of knowledge within a framework that allows us to meaningfully discuss and evaluate truth claims is stymied and repeats the tendency in some postmodern work to confuse political and theoretical clarity with authoritarianism.

One of the effects of this is that Praxis and politics is often unclear about how power functions and is maintained in modern capitalism. As a consequence there is little attempt to broadly frame the losses and gains of the work described, Moreover, there is little clear and conclusive evaluation on the debates that have dominated networks such as the MNSJ on the value of participatory versus electoral democracy and the limits of the network form itself. A linked problem is that Conway’s preferred terms such as democracy or capacity building remain somewhat vaguely defined. Even more importantly the complex way popular education can be employed by varied political agendas is largely ignored. Instead, the popular education agenda is described as a political approach in and of itself against a series of positions with which she disagrees. Certainly democratic, and dialogical process are of paramount importance but it is moot whether the sort of ‘capacity building’ described alone amounts to an effective political strategy. This way of structuring the analysis of the MNSJ ultimately forecloses much of the substantive discussion to be had about how you think beyond the present moment, the obstacles in our way and how you get there.

Early in the book Conway approvingly cites David Harvey’s call for a ‘politics of global ambition’ (p.4) based on local resistance. In Praxis and Politics the author goes some way to thinking through important questions about social movements and knowledge which is undoubtedly a fundamental part of creating a politics of global ambition. However, the brevity of the books, the numerous gaps and the political vision that underpins mean that Conway falls well short of this. The book remains locked in a historical moment which was important both as a critique of the radical tradition and an attempt to understand the nature of neo-liberalism but the movement of movements needs to move beyond this moment and give a reckoning of its own strengths and weaknesses over the past decade. Those interested in remaking the world through a passion for freedom, equality, dignity and justice will find much to reflect upon in Conway’s book but perhaps in terms of political vision not quite enough.

References
Apple, Michael W. 2006. Educating the "right" way: Markets, standards, God, and inequality. New York: Routledge.

Aronowitz, Stanley. 2003. How class works: Power and social movements. New Haven, CT.: Yale University Press.

Crowther, Jim, Martin, Ian, and Shaw, Mae (eds). 1999. Popular education and social movements in Scotland today. Leicester: NIACE.

De Sousa Santos, Boaventura. 2007. Another knowledge is possible. Beyond northern epistemologies. London: Verso.

Giroux, Henry A. 2004. The terror of neo-liberalism. Boulder, CO.:Paradigm Publishers.

Kane, Liam. 2001. Popular education and social change in Latin America. London: Latin American Bureau.

Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe, Chantal. 1985. Hegemony and socialist strategy. London: Verso.

Mertes, Tom (ed). 2004. A movement of movements: Is another world really possible? London: Verso.

Mayo, Marjorie. 2005. Global Citizens: Social movements and the challenge of globalisation. London: Zed Books.

Notes from Nowhere 2003. We are everywhere: The irresistible rise of global anticapitalism. London: Verso.

Yuen, Eddie., Katsiaficas, George. & Rose, Daniel. 2002. The Battle for Seattle. New York: Soft Skull Press.

Fergal Finnegan is an activist from Dublin who is an adult educator and a researcher. Any queries or comments on the review are welcome especially from people interested or involved in popular education. His email is fergaltf@yahoo.co.uk or he can be contacted via post at the Department of Adult and Community Education, NUIM, Maynooth, Co Kildare, Ireland.

The mirror stage of movement intellectuals? Jewish criticism of Israel and its relationship to a developing social movement

2009-01-18T20:02:00.000+02:00

David Landy

Abstract
This article explores the strengths and limitations of movement intellectuals’ theorisation of their movement and its terrain of activism. It looks at four published collections of Jewish writers critical of Israel and Zionism and asks how these books represent and defend a developing diaspora Jewish Israel-critical movement, and whether they manage to effectively theorise its terrain of activism. I argue that although these books offer some important purchase on the issues surrounding Israel/Palestine, through promoting the subjectivity of Jewish activists, and by being constrained by what is acceptable among mainstream Jewish thought, they efface the voice and presence of Palestinians, producing a partial understanding of the issue and the movement. I suggest that this may be due to the particular phase of this movement getting to know itself and its terrain of activism, which I characterise as its ‘mirror stage’.

Books reviewed in this article:
Anne Karpf, Brian Klug, Jacqueline Rose, and Barbara Rosenbaum. 2008. A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism and Jewish identity. London: Verso. 224 pp ISBN-13: 978-1844672295 (pb) Paperback £7.49

Seth Farber. Radical, Rabbis and Peacemakers. Conversations with Jewish
Critics of Israel. Maine: Common Courage Press. 2005. 400 pp ISBN-13: 978-1567513264 (pb) Paperback $19.95

Mike Marquesee. 2008. If I Am Not For Myself: Journey of an anti-Zionist Jew. London: Verso.: 256 pp ISBN-13: 978-1844672141(hb) Hardback £15.49

Murray Polner and Stefan Merken. Peace, Justice, and Jews: Reclaiming our Tradition. New York: Bunim and Bannigan. 2007. 338 pp. ISBN-13: 978-1933480152 (hb)
Hardback $18.25

In the last few years there has been an explosion of diaspora Jewish writing critical of Israel and Zionism. This has coincided, though it is hardly coincidental, with the formation of a specifically diaspora Jewish movement that criticises Israel. There have always been Jews critical of Israel and supportive of Palestinians. Recently though, this has been transformed from a ‘Not in my name’ individual opposition to and withdrawal of support from Israel to ‘Not in our name’ - a collective attempt to withdraw legitimacy from Israel’s claim to represent Jews, and to forge a specifically Jewish collectivity whose aim is to oppose Israel’s policies. We can speak for the first time, not of disaggregated people criticising Israel, but a social movement whose aim is to oppose its treatment of Palestinians.

In this article I seek to explain the relationship between diaspora Jewish writings critical of Israel and this movement. Many of the authors I examine are active in Israel-critical groups (both Jewish and wider) and can be seen, using Gramsci’s term, as ‘organic intellectuals’ for this movement. This is not simply because of any activist involvement, but also because their books are explicitly designed to build this developing movement – to serve as guides that provide reasons, recruits and routes for its journey.

As such these productions offer an insight into the relationship that movement intellectuals have with a recently established social movement, and how well they can describe and analyse their movement and its concerns. The question of how movement intellectuals understand and present the movement they are associated with has wider application than the specific issue of Israel/Palestine; it links in with the debate comparing academic and activist forms of theorising.

There is no need to reiterate criticism of academic research on social movements, the main points being that these academic descriptions are neither useful for the movements themselves, nor relatedly, are they very good analyses of these movements (Bevington and Dixon 2005; Johnston and Goodman 2006). Such critiques in some cases explicitly contrast academic shortcomings with the output of movement intellectuals (Barker and Cox 2002).

In viewing the type of knowledge produced by movements, Barker and Cox (2002) maintain that it derives from their character as movements in action, rather than static debating fora. The knowledge produced is above all practical. It may be practical in providing ideological and moral justifications of the movement or in providing strategic and practical proposals – it is always, however, directed towards what Barker and Cox see as the essential feature of movements – their dialogical and developmental nature – a fact which ensures that movement knowledge is ‘attempts to find answers to the question “what is to be done?” in situations which they do not fully control.’ (2002, 45)

Yet this activist theorising needs to be critically analysed in terms of what forms of knowledge it produces, how it produces this knowledge, and what are the effects of knowledge being produced in conditions of contention. I ask these questions about this movement and with respect to a certain type of activist theorising – books on the movement that have been produced by activists and academics with some degree of movement involvement.

In choosing to analyse published books, I do not claim that this form encompasses all forms of activist theorising. Far from it, such material is overly representative of movement elites, is produced under market conditions and in response to other force than movement dynamics, including some of the forces that produce academic works. Nevertheless they represent an important public face of the movement and seriously wrestle with issues affecting it. They serve as exercises in movement justification and strategic thinking, and undertake crucial work in identity building that all movements - but particularly this one - needs to undertake.

In the article, I firstly introduce this movement – its aims, origins and its terrain of activism – does it try to change diaspora Jewish discourse on Israel/Palestine, does it try change wider opinions, does it try to do both? Then, I ask what relationship sympathetic academic/activist theorising has with this heterogeneous movement. I examine four books from the last couple of years – from America there is Seth Farber’s interviews with anti-Zionists, which forms a useful contrast with a collection of articles from ‘moderate’ critics of Israel (Farber 2005; Polner and Merken 2007). There’s Mike Marquesee’s transcontinental memoirs and finally another anthology from Jewish academics and activists, this time from Britain (Karpf, Klug, Rose, and Rosenbaum 2008; Marquesee 2008a).

These books offer in their different forms - memoir, interviews and multiple voices – various ways to understand both movement and terrain of activism. In doing so I also ask whether the ‘manifesto’ aspect of this writing detracts from understanding of the issue or whether their engagement contributes to it. I argue that it does offer powerful theoretical engagement with the issues around Israel/Palestine, but that it comes with a downside.

Put simply, through focusing on Jews, these books fail to consider Palestinians adequately. By contesting the terrain of Jewish identity some of these books find themselves in an identity trap whereby the subjects of activism are simply Jews, not Palestinians, something which serves to offer a very partial vantage point on the Israel/Palestine issue. I further argue that this is not a fault of the books being insufficiently objective and academic. On the contrary, it is partly the failure to fully concern themselves with the many way that Jews engage in activism on Israel/Palestine, and to adequately represent the movement that has led to this effacement of Palestinians.

This article is based on research into this movement – specifically on research into English Jewish Israel-critical activism, as well as readings of these books. As a Jewish activist in the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign, I research this activism in the spirit of critical solidarity – seeing it as a ‘partial, imperfect, yet significant praxis’ (Johnston and Goodman 2006: 17). It is in the same spirit I approach these books.

Description of movement
Firstly are we talking about a movement? There’s certainly something happening in the Jewish world. Since 2002, Jewish groups that oppose Israel have sprung up throughout the diaspora - in Canada, Australia, France, Scotland, even in Germany – and of course many organisations in the US. Taking England, there’s an alphabet soup of groups - Jews for Justice for Palestinians (JfJfP), Independent Jewish Voices (IJV), Jews Against Zionism (JAZ), Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods (J-BIG, Slogan “It’s kosher to boycott Israel”), not to mention the older Jewish Socialist Group (JSG).

This initially confusing profusion should not obscure the networked and decentred nature of this activism. Groups undertake joint activities with Jewish and non-Jewish groups; activists are sometimes linked to no groups, sometimes to many, Jewish and non-Jewish; there are links with radical Jewish cultural groups; and many activists are involved in mainstream political parties. Thus, contrary to the claims of detractors (Atzmon 2005), the English experience shows that what is being created is no new Jewish ghetto, but a situated response to the Israel/Palestine conflict and Zionist support of it, networked both to other Jews and non-Jews.

There are some linkages with Israeli and (to a smaller extent) Palestinian organisations and there are efforts to form coalitions – European Jews for Just Peace (EJJP) in Europe, and the more radical International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN, a network still at the formative stage). Despite these links, most of the efforts of Jewish Israel-critical groups are still directed at the national level.

While different groups have different priorities the underlying aim of most of them is similar – to challenge Zionist hegemony among their fellow Jews and to challenge Israel, speaking as Jews. The latter is mainly directed at mainstream and Jewish media, and provides support to Palestinians and Palestine Solidarity Movements (PSMs). It is also partly directed towards these PSMs – informing them and (to a lesser extent) Palestinian people that there are Jews who oppose Israel and asking them not to conflate the two.

These groups have been somewhat successful in informing the world of Jewish opposition to Israel as well as affecting fellow Jews. Jews, as the saying goes, are news; Jews who oppose Israel especially so, with their criticism of Israel garnering respectable media coverage. The opposition they have provoked from local Zionist hegemonies can be seen as a response to their success as well as a success in itself; the fact that Zionists need to spend increasing amounts of time condemning fellow Jews for being antisemitic (Julius 2008; Rosenfeld 2006) undermines this key Zionist argument and diverts their resources.

One should not overstate their effect. They are still a small, marginalised group of people whose claim to speak out as Jews on Israel/Palestine is subjected to constant attack. However, the mere fact of their existence signals success; in removing diaspora Jewish support for Israel out of the universe of the undisputed into the universe of opinion they have performed a valuable task. Some Jews support Israel, some don’t – either way the automatic equation between the two is shattered both for Jews and the wider world. They have more definite effects too among other Jews, with some mainstream Jewish opinion beginning to grudgingly respond to the existence of dissent.

Thus we have, certainly in the English instance, a networked group of people engaged in political contention with a common and very clearly delineated enemy – Zionists more so than Israel. This network is seeking to re-cognize the Israel/Palestine conflict for Jews and others (Eyerman and Jamison 1991), and there is a certain commonality of purpose, which takes in major disagreements over tactics, such as the boycott campaign. It certainly appears to tick many of the boxes as to what a movement is (Crossley 2002; Diani 1992).

However there is some divergence in the movement over the terrain of activism, or to use the term proposed by the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu - the field of contention (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992). As I indicated, this movement operates in two separate fields – the Jewish field [footnote 1] and the field of solidarity activism, with both of these fields operating and contending within a wider political field. For Bourdieu, different fields impose different forms of struggle on actors, partly because one needs to manipulate the language and the silences imposed by the field in order to have any chances of being listened to – or in the language of social movement theory, in order to ensure that the framing of the movement resonates for the target audience.

However the co-option of the field goes beyond this, since we don’t inhabit these fields as disembodied rational actors but as embedded, embodied creatures affected by the discourses of the field. Thinking of this in terms of identity formation, - people don’t just deploy identities, they inhabit them and are themselves changed by the dynamics of identity formation. For instance, one aspect of this movement is that some activists, through their criticism of Israel, were embedding themselves within Jewish life and Jewish identity debates, somewhat to their surprise (Segal 2005).

This is not to say that actors' opinions are determined solely by their field - here Bourdieu’s metaphor of the games player is useful. As he points out, the one who plays the game best is the one who lets the game inhabit them, and thereby can manipulate it to their advantage (Bourdieu 1990) . So it is with social movement actors - the question is to what extent the field, the terrain of activism the social movement activist chooses to contest, affects both their identification and ideology.

Deploying the memoir: ‘If I am not for myself’
Earlier I referred to these books as guides, comparable in part to travel guides where the authors lay out the barely chartered terrain they have travelled so that others may travel in their footsteps. One will not find any cut-and-dried defence of a movement here, partly because these books are a way of trying to create and guide this movement, something in the process of becoming, and importantly, to guide people into these movements.

The first thing to note is that these books are often highly personal. Returning to the language of social movement theory, they try to achieve their aims not merely through the use of collective framing devices (Benford and Snow 2000), but also through the use of personal narratives. If frames are the moral at the end of the story - strategic, directed and simple to understand, then narratives are the stories themselves – open-ended, incomplete and dynamic (Polletta 1998). The power of narratives derives precisely from their lack of completion, providing a sense of dynamic tension and the possibility for listeners to enter into the story.

All four books try to insert the personal into the political, a strategy immediately relevant to this struggle. It shows others a path to activism and provides a means of offering an important justification for this movement – the authentically Jewish nature of Israel-critical activism. The memoir form is an effective means of creating authenticity and establishing personal authority in advancing controversial arguments. It is undertaken by many anti-Zionist writers –Mike Marquesee, but also Eva Figes and Lynn Segal from Britain, and to a lesser extent Antony Loewenstein from Australia (Figes 2008; Loewenstein 2007; Segal 2007). Such memoirs can be seen as part of a longer tradition that contests the terrain of Jewish identity and memory from colonisation by Zionist narratives (for instance Klepfisz 1990).

There is a certain voyeurism in seeing someone’s personal life displayed in a political argument, and at times the memoir form is reminiscent of how pre-revolutionary Enlightenment writers like Rousseau used doses of pornography to spice up their political and philosophical arguments – a way of holding the readers’ attention. Not that the provision of vignettes, strong narratives, characters to interest the reader is to be condemned! Such attempts to be attractive to a wide group of readers underline the extent to which memoirs can be political interventions.

In Marquesee’s book, the counter-narrative advanced is both deconstructive and reconstructive. It deconstructs through presenting the author’s own experience of just how Jews decided to become Zionist, disrupting the automatic equation of Jewish and Zionist. Besides drawing on his own experience of being called a self-hater for questioning Israel, he delves in considerable detail into his grandfather’s personal and political life.

His book switches between political anti-Zionist arguments and accounts of this cantankerous, obstreperous, independently minded grandfather in the eddies of radical New York politics of the 1930s and 40s. The central question Marquesee raises about his grandfather is in the chapter ‘Nakba’ where he talks of his approval of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. He asks ‘How did the champion of the refugee and the immigrant come to gloat over a forced mass exodus?’ (Marquesee 2008a: 209). For Marquesee this question is essential, not simply as a matter of personal understanding, but also because it is directly relevant to why otherwise progressive Jews support Zionism today. His presentation of his grandfather’s political life is in part an attempt to unpick the reasons for this jarring support for Zionism.

Yet this book is not just a process of deconstruction; alternative paths are displayed, ideas his grandfather could have had, so that by the end of the book he is able to claim his own anti-Zionism as the true heir to his grandfather’s radical political beliefs. This presentation of anti-Zionism as a logical conclusion or even a homecoming for a certain type of Jewishness is achieved by splicing an alternative history of Jewry into the personal stories. Rather than Jewish history being persecution piled upon persecution till the messianic creation of Israel, the portrait is of Jewish people dealing with the challenges and chances offered by diaspora life. Diaspora Jews are shown as confident autonomous actors when they engage with their social surroundings, rather than when they take the Zionist or ultra-Orthodox route of running away into a self-created ghetto (for a similar treatment of early Zionism, though from wildly different vantage points: Rose 2005; Rose 2004).

The aim is to contest the dominant Zionist narrative of Jewish suffering and alienation from other Europeans, and to create an alternative narrative by revealing those threads of history that Zionism effaces. Instead of Chassidim, the Haskalah [footnote 2]; rather than Zionism, Bundism [footnote 3]. The biblical origin of Judaism is bought into play to argue that dissident prophesising has always been an authentic way of being Jewish - a central argument in the other books too.

Such alternative history both undermines Zionist claims and fashions a political actor – the diasporist Jew – and the political space in the diaspora where this actor can be active. Just as Zionism was once presented as auto-emancipation from the diaspora (Pinsker 1947), this is a means of auto-emancipation of diaspora Jews from Zionism’s vampiric proclivities.

The mirror stage and identity traps: ’Peace Justice and Jews’
Marquesee’s book shows the need for a social movement to establish a historical lineage and unity for itself; movement intellectuals need to assume that there is an ‘itself’ to speak for itself and they need to fashion that self. This assumption of a unity can be seen as akin to the psychologist, Jacques Lacan’s ideas about a mirror stage in development. This is where the infant ‘discovers’ itself as a unitary being by seeing itself reflected in the mirror or the eyes of another. This creation of such an identity is one of the main tasks of these books. It explains why, like earlier attempts (Kushner and Solomon 2003) most are collections of voices - not merely to substantiate the claim, made by Judith Butler (2004) among others that Jewish dissent is polyvocal and heterogeneous, but also to create within the pages of these books the form of such a movement.

While these books can be seen as acting as mirrors, the crucial difference between these and Lacan’s mirror is that they are not created by the Other but by those in the movement itself. They are designed to create a necessary corrective to the distorted reflection offered to Israel-critical Jews by Zionist eyes that see them as self-hating, antisemitic, un-Jewish etc. Marquesee’s aphorism: ‘If I am not for myself… Zionists and Jewish leaders will claim to be for me’ (Marquesee 2008a: 289) is firstly a demand for Israel-critical Jews to give the lie to Zionist claims about representing them. This is a recurring raison d’être these authors give for having a specifically Jewish movement. Equally importantly, he is also talking about the importance of rescuing anti-Zionist Jews from pariah status.

However, there is a problem with such identity contestation - the difficulty of lifting one’s eyes away from this internal struggle. In fashioning a mirror for itself the movement, like Narcissus, may drown in its own endless refractions. Put less poetically, through this necessary self-affirmation these authors may be unable to escape the identity traps that belie any movement, but particularly this one: where identity is the currency the movement trades on, but at the same time wishes to move beyond – at least to some extent.

This identity trap was recognised a few years back by Neve Gordon (2005), when reviewing two earlier all-Jewish collections of essays. (Kushner and Solomon 2003; Shatz 2004) He acknowledged the political effectiveness of taking a ‘Jews only’ strategy in compiling these anthologies, but pointed out that this strategy encourages tribalism and ‘ends up reproducing some of the most basic biases regarding who can criticize Israel and legitimately discuss anti-Semitism or the connection between Israel and Judaism.’(Gordon 2005: 105)

Marquesee largely avoids such a trap because of his unequivocal leftist and universalistic political stand. Far less successful or interested in avoiding such navel gazing is Peace, Justice, and Jews, whose subtitle could be ‘look at us, aren’t we great’.

While there are some fine individual pieces in this collection of 47 disparate vignettes, the overall tone is one of self-congratulation and self-absorption. The faintly sanctimonious air adopted against those Jews who ‘ignore others’ legitimate grievances’ (Polner and Merken 2007: xv) does not alter the fact that these ‘others’ are but rarely spoken of. This can even (or especially) be seen in those travelogues where the author ‘meets the Arabs’. In this voyage of the enlightened soul, Palestinians, often called Arabs, are usually treated as useful native guides to have - for part of the way. For instance Kenny Freeman talks about how he daringly moves to the Jewish town of Nazareth Illit which he described as being ‘attached to’ the Palestinian Israeli town of Nazareth, a nice euphemism which allows him to elide over the ethnic cleansing that caused it to be so, or the present day power relations between Nazareth and Nazareth Illit (Ezzat 2006).

After describing how he undertook to befriend a Christian Arab family, Freeman expresses how it was still important to find a Muslim to make friends with, to show that Jews could live with all sorts of Arabs. Having found someone and taken part in their colourful Muslim customs, he could then leave the Nazareth area for comfortably Jewish Tel Aviv. In a way the shallowness of such travelogues is the fault of the memoir strategy – necessarily promoting the personal, indeed self-obsessed point of view. However, the fault cannot be entirely placed on the format; this account can be usefully contrasted with Susan Nathan’s (2005) moving, insightful and self-critical exploration of life in an Israeli Palestinian town.

The absence of Palestinians exists at a deeper level in this collection. Tellingly the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948, is mentioned only once. This occurs in one of the most impassioned pieces –where David Howard, a committed pacifist, angrily rejects all the founding myths of Zionism. More representative however is Rabbi Arthur Waskow’s disingenuous take on Israeli history. In Violence and non-violence in Jewish thought and practice, the Nakba is simply not acknowledged. It doesn’t ‘fit’ with his narrative of ‘purity of arms’ whereby civilians were never targeted and Palestinian towns were never attacked by the mainstream Zionists who conquered Palestine in 1948. Invoking this fantasy past, he talks of how their moral and justifiable ‘decision to use military force sparingly’ has recently changed into a new and unprecedented aggressive use of violence (Waskow 2007: 122).

This self-deluding narrative is a denial of the actual past of deliberately planned ethnic cleansing (Masalha 1992; Pappé 2006). It is this historical lie that lies behind the professed non-violence of many of the contributors to this book, for it allows them to maintain support of Israel and equate Palestinian and Israeli violence in the present. Unconsciously recalling Anatole France’s cynicism about both rich and poor facing arrest if they sleep under bridges, here both the dispossessed and the racial elite will be criticised if they use violence to alter the status quo of Israel.

This is not to say that Freeman, Waskow and other authors are not interested in transformation, but the transformation they are interested in is that Jews become better, more moral people, so as ‘to be a free nation in our land’, as the title of one contribution has it [footnote 4]. Underlying this desire is a merging of diaspora Jews and Israelis which reproduces hegemonic conservative beliefs among the diaspora Jewish field.

Jews in Exile: ‘Rabbis, Rebels, and Peacemakers’
Reading this collection, one is reminded of theologian Marc Ellis’s sharp criticism of mainstream American Jewish critics of Israel, namely that their main interest is in redefining Jewish identity and their chief goal is the struggle to be the next Jewish Establishment. His work is informed by a horror that this nice debate over Jewish identity ‘is hashed out over and over again as the displacement, torture and murder of Palestinians continues, even escalates’ (Ellis 2003: 146-7 italics in original).

Ellis recommends walking away from this meaningless internal civil war. His point – that those who contest the Jewish field of activity primarily serve to reproduce it – echoes Bourdieu’s point about ‘the objective complicity’ that rebels have with that which they rebel against (Bourdieu 1993: 74). It is not simply the discourses of the field that are reproduced by actors contesting it, it is also the silences – that which the field finds unnameable and unsayable – in this case Palestinian rights – which are transmitted, however unwillingly or unknowingly, by activists.

Ellis advances the idea of a new actor – the Jew in exile, a character akin to Deutscher’s non-Jewish Jew (Deutscher 1968). This isn’t simply a theoretical construct – while some Jewish activists prioritise efforts to change the Jewish ‘community’, others saw this as secondary, either because it was a hopeless task, or because so many Jews are alienated from an official community dominated by unresponsive Zionist institutions, and so this is not an entity worth appealing to. Without totally dismissing the Jewish field, they prioritise the wider world.

Ellis’s critique and spirit presides over Seth Farber’s annotated series of interviews with prominent Jewish anti-Zionists and non-Zionists. Farber’s aim was not to present a representative survey of important American Jewish critics of Zionism. Although there are some notable names such as Noam Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein, the book mainly seeks ‘to make the anti-Zionist argument (against current Israeli policies) known to a larger public because it is the strongest, most cogent, and the most moral argument for opposing the Israeli occupation– and thus for becoming active in the pro-Palestinian movement.’ (Farber 2006)

This book then is a conscious effort to forward one wing of the movement. Accused by a potential interviewee of trying to divide peace-loving Jews, Farber counters by saying that recognition of such a division is long overdue (2006). In this division, Farber’s side seems to have the more interesting things to say, possibly because their talk is mercifully free of the half-truths and stock declarations of love for Israel which characterises ‘moderate’ Jewish critiques.

The book is constructed as a guide for the perplexed to get involved in activism, with slices of anti-Zionist history and theory scattered through the text. Nor is the personal touch foregone; Farber presents an account of his own trip to Palestine, recalling the memoir form as well as a trusted action repertoire the pro-Palestinian movement uses in encouraging others to get involved (Landy 2008).

Farber’s interviewees are equally aware of the book’s role in mobilisation and their voices are directed accordingly. Steve Quester of JATO (Jews Against The Occupation): ‘Please exhort your readers in your book to read the words of Palestinians…there’s a very bad habit, even on the real Jewish left, of Jews talking to other Jews about the occupation and thinking that they’ve just finished the conversation’ (Farber 2005: 50). This indicates Quester’s understanding that readers will most probably be those on the ‘real’ Jewish left, as well as a discomfort with this fact, wariness of being stuck in a Jewish ghetto. Of all the books considered, this is the one where awareness of the limitations of a Jews-only format is most clearly perceived, a function perhaps of the interviewees’ and author’s involvement in wider non-Jewish activism.

Though Farber’s anti-Zionist framing may work, his insistence, following Ellis that this solidarity with Palestinians constitutes a return to the Jewish prophetic, i.e. a reclamation of the Jewish covenant and the biblical prophetic tradition, is deeply problematic. Firstly this idea – following Ellis’s image of Jews in exile carrying the Jewish Covenant with them as they leave - returns him to the terrain he seeks to avoid, that of the self-regarding Jewish civil war. Secondly, many of his highly articulate interviewees disagree with his interpretation of their politics.

At times, such as with Noam Chomsky (favourite prophet: Amos), Farber’s concerns resonate. More often – even with Orthodox religious Jews such as Daniel Boyarin - they don’t. As Norman Finkelstein bluntly responds to yet another question about The Jewish Covenant. ‘I have no interest in covenants. I don’t know who the Jewish people are. These are all metaphysical, extraneous terms to me.’ (Farber 2005: 118)

Nor is he the only one to evince such lack of interest. It seems for most, their involvement in this activism has at least as much to do with their sense of being American, or of being universal citizens as with any sense of Jewishness. When Joel Kovel declaims that Israel in all its horrors is us (Farber 2005: 75), the collectivity he refers to is the US, not the Jews.

It is to Farber’s credit that he offers his interviewees the space to disagree with him and elaborate their own views. The extreme example of this might be Daniel Boyarin’s interview, which descends at times into almost comedic hostility. This interview illustrates the vast gulf that exists between religious Orthodox and more secular Jews despite Farber’s efforts to include both within the frame of his mirror. This is not a mere theoretical gulf – in England the one Jewish group excluded (or excluding themselves) from the thick network of opposition to Israel is Neturei Karta – the ultra-Orthodox opponents of Israel.

The limits to the form: ‘A Time to Speak Out’
Finally, there is A Time to Speak Out, an anthology produced by the British group Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) (Karpf, Klug, Rose, and Rosenbaum 2008). In many ways, this is the most intellectually robust of these Jews-only collections and by being so, most clearly reveals the limits to approaching the issue as Jews and also to a large extent as intellectuals rather than activists.

First, the positive aspects. IJV draws on a wide range of voices from mainstream British-Jewish opposition to Zionism, as well as American, Israeli and Australian writers. The aim of the book is to serve as ‘a book of voices…a lively and unpredictable town hall meeting’ (Karpf, Klug, Rose, and Rosenbaum 2008: vii). The clearest difference between this and earlier anthologies is its outer-direction, indicating perhaps a greater sense of purpose to this network. The voyages of self-discovery, accounts of ‘I went to Israel and guess what I found!’ are not completely absent but are secondary. It is as if this stage of the movement is already past; most accounts in this collection can be better characterised as ‘I stood up against Israel, and guess what happened to me!’

The first section of this book is a collection of critiques of Israel. Showing the valuable contribution such collections can make to understanding Israel/Palestine, this contains some impressive pieces such as Stan Cohen’s excoriating dismissal of Israeli academia and Eyal Weizmann’s analysis of the limits to the humanitarian discourse that surrounds Palestinians, adding to previous Palestinian-centred critiques of this frame (Zreik 2004).

The second section continues in the vein of critique, aimed this time at diaspora Zionists and the silencing of dissent by official Jewish institutions. The authors perform the task of exposing diaspora Zionism admirably; the stories and arguments have a cumulative effect, building up a composite picture of official Zionists as repressive, small minded, provincial and above all unfair. It is hard to read Abe Hayeem’s admirably clear account of how architects are silenced by Zionist browbeating, or Emma Clyne’s story of the absurdist antics of Jewish student societies, without feeling a sense of indignation at this Zionist hegemony. Here, the injustice frame is placed more over diaspora Zionism than over Israel’s actions – with diaspora Jews rather than Palestinians being the main victims in this framing process.

The cool dissection of the arguments of the Zionist lobby by the likes of Richard Kuper, co-founder of Jews for Justice for Palestinians (JfJfP), could be explicitly designed to fulfil one of the book’s stated objectives - to ‘lead others – likeminded perhaps but independent-minded certainly – to find their voices too.’ (Karpf et al 2008: xi). In other words this book, as with others is deliberately designed as a space-clearing exercise to allow and encourage a necessary dissent to be articulated.

Nevertheless the downside of speaking out collectively as Jews is never acknowledged. To repeat: this tactic, however unintentionally, reinforces the idea that Jews have a special role to speak out about Israel, a fallacy which serves to silence the largely absent Palestinians, and to implicitly tell others not to get involved. The incongruity of denouncing particularism and parochialism in a Jews-only collection is not addressed by participants, or perhaps where it should be addressed, by the editors.

Perhaps it is because IJV’s actions are focused on other Jews that there is a quite remarkable absence of Palestinians from this collection. They are rarely referred to except as the subjects – or rather the unfortunate helpless objects - of human rights discourse. There is an outright refusal to engage with the democratically elected Hamas government except to lament and occasionally condemn it. Indeed there is no engagement with any Palestinian political leadership. While it is understandable that liberal diaspora Jews would find it difficult and perhaps also inappropriate to be co-respondents of Palestinian leadership in the Occupied Territories, the non-engagement with Palestinians extends to those living in exile. The painful conclusion is that Palestinians are occasionally to be spoken of but are not welcome to speak in the virtual town hall the editors wish to create.

The troubling absence of Palestinians in this and other collections can also lead to a reproduction of the central Zionist idea – that Israel/Palestine is all about the Jews. Their absence also means that their concerns and proposals are not addressed. This is seen in the refusal by many writers to entertain the idea that the problem with Israel goes beyond the occupation regime. While there is no distasteful Nakba denial such as occurs in American collections, there is an equal refusal to address the demands of Palestinians to reverse its effects and return home.

One could view this as another example of activists being controlled by the discourses allowable in the Jewish field. If one’s goal is to change the mindsets of mainstream Jews, one can plausibly argue that this softly-softly approach works better than a more thorough-going strategy. One activist I interviewed defended this approach on practical grounds: ‘when you’re trying to nudge the door open, you can’t, you don’t nudge it open with some dynamite.’ Questions of strategy as well as ideology must be bought into consideration. Or rather questions of strategy, the choice of the terrain of activism, affect ideology. If ‘moderate’ Zionists are the target of activism, this helps direct the framing of the conflict – at its extreme there is an unthinking equation of Jews and Israel, more often the problem is framed as not being the racist/settler nature of Israel, it’s simply the occupation. And finally, this is a terrain of activism where it is difficult to highlight Palestinian subjectivity.

The silencing of Palestinian voices has been a theme of other collections, and indeed is a problem faced by the entire movement. This isn’t simply a result of Jewish advocates promoting their own identities at the expense of Palestinian subjectivity, or of meekly accepting the limits set by the Jewish field of contention. The problem confronts the Palestine Solidarity Movement as well.

Such a muting of Palestinian voices has many causes – Israel’s growing isolation of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, fractured Palestinian leadership as a result of their fractured experiences – being subjected to sectarian Jewish rule in Israel, military occupation in the Occupied Territories and exile elsewhere (Said 1986). It is also the result of power imbalance between western solidarity activists and the objects of their solidarity (Goudge 2003; Johnston 2003). Jewish activists aren’t the only ones whose field of activism is less universal than first appears, more involved in combating and possibly unconsciously reproducing local and racial hegemonies than in coalition-building across borders.

Nevertheless members of activist groups – Jewish as well as non-Jewish - do face this issue to a greater or lesser extent, and see the need to engage with Palestinians. That this is not done in this volume and only to a limited extent in other books can be seen as a flaw, a failed representation of this movement. (On the other hand, none of these books set out to explicitly describe a fixed, concrete movement.)

I would argue this lacuna occurs, not simply because the authors are writing as Jews, but also because they are writing as intellectuals. Were this a collection of activists, or rather – since many of the writers are activists – a collection of people writing as activists - they would feel less entitled to efface Palestinian resistance and subjectivity. It is telling that while activist groups such as JfJfP are occasionally name-checked, they are not discussed, and more radical and very active groups such as J-BIG (Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods) are not even mentioned. The erroneous impression is conveyed that IJV is at the cutting edge of British Jewish opposition to Israel and that the movement is confined to discursively challenging Zionist hegemony, rather than a wider range of activities.

Equally seriously for a collection explicitly designed to speak to a movement, there is little attempt to discuss concrete courses of action, beyond boosting opposition to Zionist hegemony over other Jews. This, I repeat, is despite the activist credentials of many of the authors. Instead many choose to adopt the intellectual vantage point, of observing from a god’s eye position (there is activist engagement – but only with Zionists and fellow Jews) and contenting themselves with judging.

Considering the calibre of many of the people in this collection, it seems that this format – a Jews-only intellectual critique - presents a missed opportunity. For as much as it renders the writers articulate about the problems, it renders them silent about the salient question to every problem: what is to be done?

Conclusion
One can’t formulate hard and fast rules about the strengths and limitations of movement theorising on the basis of four idiosyncratic books within a particular movement, but some general themes emerge. Firstly is the multifaceted nature of these writings. They alternately serve as mobilisation tools, analysable documents and analyses in themselves. They offer well-thought out counterposing views and important theoretical purchase on the movement. In this article I have done little more than scratch the surface of these arguments in order to reveal them; but these ideas demand to be engaged with.

Secondly is their critical distance from the movement they try to mobilise. This can partly be ascribed to how the books stress different factions in this movement and critique other factions, and partly to efforts to conform to dominant academic forms. But this is only part of the story. To return to my metaphor – Lacan claimed the mirror stage was necessary in forming the ego. And indeed movements are often imagined as pure egos, desperately trying to expand, to develop, to conquer target groups. Yet this collection of collections shows another aspect of social movements, their constant effort to try to understand themselves.

The attempt to see the self as whole is (usually) more than a heroic effort in self-delusion. Lacan’s insight was that in order to see the self in such a way, one needs an alienation from the self. The best of these books offer such a critical distance, their aim is both to criticise Israel and Zionism, and to apprehend their own terrain of activism. In this they echo Norbert Elias’s challenge to sociologists to try and achieve both detachment and involvement. While achieving such harmony should matter much to scholars, these books indicate just how much it does matters to activists.

Thirdly, they reveal something of how the terrain of activism determines the ideological and identitarian frames of contention. Returning to Bourdieu’s metaphor of the games player, the extent to which the player can choose how to play the game is evident from the wide divergence of views expressed. Even though all writers speak as Jews and to a greater or lesser extent to an imaginary Jewish collectivity, what they choose to say differs so radically that one cannot ascribe it purely to their terrain of activism. Put another way, one does not make allowances for Israel simply because one is trying to appeal to a group where praise for this state is deep-rooted and discursively hegemonic. This is a choice which some players make and some refuse to make – a choice both strategic and ideological.

Yet perhaps Bourdieu’s insight holds true at a deeper level – despite stated opinions the field still constricts the range of activities. If activists are fighting Zionist hegemony among Jews, Palestinians will only ever be incidental objects to this work. It will be confined to the relatively safe slogans of ‘end the occupation’ or even ‘end the most unsavoury features of the occupation’. This should not be automatically condemned, for this might be only one facet of people’s activities. To properly assess their effectivity we would also have to look at the other overlapping fields of activism which movement participants are involved in. One unfortunate result of Jews-only collection of essays is that it fails to convey that movement participants are involved in coalitions, other groups and so on, or to fully engage with this multi-field activism.

So does this speak of a flaw in movement theorising, particularly distant issue movements – that their analyses are fatally weighted down by their need to highlight the active subjectivity of movement participants? Not necessarily. Earlier I talked of how these works’ focus on Jewish subjectivity represented ‘missed opportunities’ for this movement. This is putting it too strongly, for they serve an important purpose and can be seen as representing ‘work in progress’, the long and often wearying progress of a movement constituting itself.

It could be argued that I am falling into another trap here – that I am assuming that there is an imperative for this movement to address Palestinians and their concerns, when this may not be the case. Perhaps this movement will remain as an increasingly comfortable contestation and assertion of a certain type of Jewish identity. And yet addressing Palestinian concerns, being truly universalistic, is one of the implicit and often explicit aims of this movement. It seems a logical corollary that to do so the movement and its intellectuals move beyond the mirror-stage - the immediate problem of combating those Jewish critics who would silence them. As a self-aware and self-consciously learning movement it has the resources and perhaps also the motivation to produce further activist theorising to do just that.

Bibliography
Atzmon, Gilad. 2005. "The 3rd Category and the Palestinian Solidarity Movement." http://www.gilad.co.uk/html%20files/3rd.html (accessed November 17 2006).

Benford, Robert and David Snow. 2000. "Framing processes and social movements: An overview and assessment." Annual Review of Sociology 26: 611-639.

Bernstein, Mary. 1997. "Celebration and Suppression: The strategic uses of identity by the lesbian and gay movement." American Journal of Sociology 103: 531-565.

Bevington, Douglas and Chris Dixon. 2005. "Movement-relevant Theory: Rethinking Social Movement Scholarship and Activism." Social Movement Studies 4: 185-208.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre and Loic Wacquant. 1992. An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1993. Sociology in Question. London: Sage.

Butler, Judith. 2004. Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence. London; New York: Verso.

Barker, Colin and Laurence Cox. 2002. "What have the Romans ever done for us? Academic and activist forms of movement theorizing." in Eighth international conference on alternative futures and popular protest: a selection of papers from the conference, edited by Colin Barker and Mike Tyldesley. Manchester: Manchester Metropolitan University.

Crossley, Nick. 2002. Making Sense of Social Movements. Buckingham: Open University Press.
Della Porta, Donatella and Mario Diani. 2006. Social Movements: An introduction. Malden, Mass.; Oxford: Blackwell.

Deutscher, Isaac. 1968. The Non-Jewish Jew, and Other Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Diani, Mario. 1992. "The Concept of Social Movement." Sociological Review 40: 1-25.

Ellis, Marc. 2003. "Jew vs Jew: On the Jewish Civil War and the New Prophetic." in Wrestling With Zion: Progresive Jewish-American responses to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, edited by Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon. New York: Grove Press.

Eyerman, Ron and Andrew Jamison. 1991. Social Movements: A Cognitive Approach. Cambridge: Polity Press in association with Basil Blackwell.

Ezzat, Dina. 2006. "Reunions Delayed." in Al-Ahram Weekly. Cairo.

Farber, Seth. 2005. Radical, Rabbis and Peacemakers. Conversations with Jewish Critics of Israel. Maine: Common Courage Press.

—. 2006. "The New Pro-Palestinian Jews: Beyond Tikkun and Atzmon." in Media Monitors Network http://usa.mediamonitors.net/content/view/full/26272 (accessed February 7 2007).

Figes, Eva. 2008. Journey to Nowhere: One Woman Looks for the Promised Land. London: Granta.

Freeman, Kenny. 2007. "A Dreamer’s Sojourn in the Holy Land." in Peace, Justice, and Jews: Reclaiming our Tradition, edited by Murray Polner and Stefan Merken. New York: Bunim and Bannigan.

Gordon, Neve. 2005. "Shatz: Prophets Outcast: A Century of Dissident Jewish Writing about Zionism and Israel and Kushner and Solomon: Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict." Journal of Palestine Studies 35: 103-105.

Goudge, Paulette. 2003. The Power of Whiteness: Racism in Third World Development and Aid. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Johnston, Josee. 2003. "We are all Marcos? Zapatismo, Solidarity and the Politics of Scale " in Global Civil Society and its Limits, edited by Gordon Laxer and Sandra Halperin. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Johnston, Josee and James Goodman. 2006. "Hope and Activism in the Ivory Tower: Freirean Lessons for Critical Globalization Research." Globalizations 3: 9-30.

Julius, Anthony. 2008. "Jewish Anti-Zionism Unravelled.": Z Word/ American Jewish Committee. http://z-word.com/z-word-essays/jewish-anti-zionism-unravelled%253A--the-morality-of-vanity-%2528part-1%2529.html (accessed: August 14th 2008)

Karpf, Anne, Brian Klug, Jacqueline Rose, and Barbara Rosenbaum. 2008. A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices on Israel, Zionism and Jewish identity. London: Verso.

Kushner, Tony and Alisa Solomon. 2003. Wrestling With Zion: Progressive Jewish-American resposnes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. New York: Grove Press.

Landy, David. 2008. "Authenticity and political agency on study trips to Palestine." in Thinking Palestine, edited by Ronit Lentin. London: Zed Books.

Loewenstein, Antony. 2007. My Israel Question: Reframing the Israel/Palestine Conflict. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press.

Marquesee, Mike. 2008. If I Am Not For Myself: Journey of an anti-Zionist Jew. London: Verso.

Masalha, Nur. 1992. Expulsion of the Palestinians : The concept of "transfer" in Zionist political thought, 1882-1948. Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies.

Nathan, Susan. 2005. The Other Side of Israel: My journey across the Jewish-Arab divide London: HarperCollins.

Pappé, Ilan. 2006. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Oxford: Oneworld Publications.

Pinsker, Leo. 1947. Auto-emancipation. London: [s.n.].

Polletta, Francesca. 1998. ""It Was like a Fever ..." Narrative and Identity in Social Protest." Social Problems 45: 137-159.

Polner, Murray and Stefan Merken. 2007. Peace, Justice, and Jews: Reclaiming our Tradition. New York: Bunim and Bannigan.

Resh, Nura. 2007. "Machsomwatch (CheckpointWatch): Women, Protest, and the Fight for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories." in Peace, Justice, and Jews: Reclaiming our Tradition, edited by Murray Polner and Stefan Merken. New York: Bunim and Bannigan.

Rose, Jacqueline. 2005. The Question of Zion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Rose, John. 2004. The Myths of Zionism. London: Pluto.

Rosenfeld, Alvin. 2006. "Progressive Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism." American Jewish Committee. http://www.ajc.org/atf/cf/%7B42D75369-D582-4380-8395-D25925B85EAF%7D/PROGRESSIVE_JEWISH_THOUGHT.PDF

Said, Edward W. 1986. After The Last Sky: Palestinian lives. London: Faber & Faber.

Segal, Lynne. 2005. "The Hidden Powers of Injury." New Formations 55: 172-187.
—. 2007. "Ways of Belonging." Jewish Quarterly Winter 2006/2007.

Shatz, Adam. 2004. "Prophets Outcast: A Century of Dissident Jewish Writing about Zionism and Israel." New York: Nation Books.

Waskow, Arthur. 2007. "Violence and Non-violence in Jewish Thought and Practice." in Peace, Justice, and Jews: Reclaiming our Tradition, edited by Murray Polner and Stefan Merken. New York: Bunim and Bannigan.

Zreik, Raef. 2004. "Palestine, apartheid, and the rights discourse." Journal of Palestine Studies 34: 68-80.

Acknowledgements:
I would like to thank the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences for funding for this research.

David Landy is studying diaspora Jewish opposition to Israel, focusing on Britain. He is based in the Dept of Sociology in Trinity College Dublin. His research interests include solidarity movements, theories of race and ethnicity, migration and diaspora, Zionism and anti-Zionism. He has been involved in international solidarity work and migrant movements as a migrant himself in Finland. He is currently involved in Palestinian solidarity activism. His main activist affiliation is Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign (IPSC) and academic affiliation is Trinity College Dublin (TCD). Email address: dlandy@tcd.ie

Footnotes
1 I deliberately don’t use the words ‘the Jewish community’ here, since I feel this to be a
deceptive term, which allows those dominant in the field to present their hegemony as a natural
consensual affair. The concept of field better conveys the processes of contention that actually
obtain.

2 Chassidism is a revivalist form of ultra-Orthodox worship, originating in the 18th Century,
around the same time as the Haskalah – emancipation of the Jews – began.

3 Bundism was contemporaneous with early Zionism, both being revolutionary turn-of-the
century movements. However Bundism promoted revolutionary change in a pan-European
Socialist context, rather than in escape to Palestine.

4 It is ironic that the only critical look at the Israeli peace movement is from within – a judicious
appraisal of Machsomwatch by an activist, which more than any praise, gives some hope as to
the future of this movement (Resh 2007).

Redes para a (re)territorialização de espaços de conflito: os casos do MST e MTST no Brasil*

2009-01-18T19:48:00.000+02:00

(Networks for the reterritorialisation of spaces of conflict:
the cases of the Brazilian MST and MTST)

Ilse Scherer-Warren

Resumo:
O espaço, enquanto território, é local e referência aos conflitos mais acirrados da sociedade. Já era nas sociedades tradicionais e continua sendo nas sociedades contemporâneas. Vamos aqui nos deter a esta última, especialmente ao caso brasileiro, no que diz respeito a espaços urbanos e rurais. Para atingir este objetivo, desenvolveremos alguns pressupostos teóricos para a análise das lutas sociais na produção do espaço, exemplificados à luz de dois casos emblemáticos de movimentos que contribuem para a (re)territorialização de espaços em conflito, a saber o Movimento dos Sem-Terra [nota 1] (MST) e o Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem-Teto [nota 2] (MTST) , no Brasil.

Abstract:
Space, understood as “territory”, is a site of, and a pointer to, the harshest social conflicts. This was so in traditional societies and continues to be the case in contemporary society. This article analyses these conflicts in this latter type of society, with particular reference to urban and rural spaces in Brazil. To this end, the author develops some theoretical presuppositions for the analysis of social struggles in the production of the space. The analysis is illustrated by two cases of high-profile movement that had contributed to the (re)territorialization of the spaces in conflict: the Landless Movement (MST) and the Homeless Movement (MTST) in Brazil.

Os conflitos sociais inter-organizações da sociedade civil e geradores de importantes movimentos sociais no Brasil contemporâneo, referem-se a lutas entre grupos que defendem o domínio, controle e manutenção de amplos espaços privatizados (como a dos ruralistas/UDR, dos latifúndios, do agro-negócio, do setor imobiliário, das grande corporações, etc.) versus grupos que buscam a conquista, legalização e preservação de espaços com função social de atendimento à populações historicamente em situação de exclusão social (como a dos sem-terra, dos quilombolas, dos indígenas, das populações tradicionais, das mulheres camponesas, dos atingidos por barragens, dos favelados, das novas periferias urbanas e outros).

As lutas das populações socialmente e relativamente excluídas do modelo da reprodução concentrada da riqueza no país, são lutas pela democratização da propriedade, pela preservação da natureza, pela distribuição da riqueza nacional, pela inclusão social, política e cultural dos mais pobres e discriminados da nação. Queremos aqui examinar como estes movimentos vêm se fortalecendo na sociedade brasileira através de suas organizações em rede e enquanto redes de movimentos sociais [nota 3]. Para tanto é necessário distinguir nas redes a noção de redes interorganizacionais ou “coletivos em rede” da noção de “redes de movimentos sociais”, a saber:

“Coletivos em rede referem-se a conexões entre organizações empiricamente localizáveis. (p. ex., entre ONGs ambientalistas). Estes coletivos podem vir a ser segmentos (nós) de uma rede mais ampla de movimentos sociais, que por sua vez é uma rede de redes. O Fórum Brasileiro do ONGs e Movimentos Sociais para o Meio Ambiente e o Desenvolvimento é uma sub-rede do movimento ambientalista brasileiro. Entretanto, o movimento social deve ser definido como algo que vai além de uma mera conexão de coletivos”. (Cf. Scherer-Warren, 2007c, in: Ferraro Júnior (org.), p. 328).

Para que ocorra a passagem de um coletivo em rede para um movimento social em rede, deve-se observar a realização de três dinâmicas sócio-político-culturais coletivas: 1. a formação de uma identidade coletiva ou identificação em torno de uma causa comum; 2. a definição de uma situação de conflito e de seus adversários; 3. a construção de um projeto ou utopia de mudança [nota 4]. Ou, em outras palavras:

“Las redes de movimientos sociales ... van constituyéndose en un proceso dialógico: a) de identificaciones sociales, éticas, culturales y/o político-ideológicas, es decir, ellas forman la identidad del movimiento; b) de intercambios, negociaciones, definiciones de campos de conflicto y de resistencia a los adversarios y a los mecanismos de discriminación, dominación o exclusión sistémica, o sea, definen a sus adversarios; c) con vistas a la transposición de los límites de esta situación sistémica en dirección de la realización de propuestas o proyectos alternativos, es decir, establecen sus objetivos, o construyen un proyecto para el movimiento” (Scherer-Warren, 2006c.)

Todavia este processo dialógico não ocorre num vazio da historicidade, mas sim em contextos com significados temporais, espaciais e societários, que transitam entre a solidariedade e o conflito, da reivindicação material à sua significação simbólica, da participação em contextos institucionais às estratégias que visam a transformação do instituído. São estes significados que buscamos entender para o caso das intervenções políticas do MST e do MTST e, desta forma, buscamos explicar como se opera a produção de territórios sócio-espaciais mais democráticos, a partir das seguintes dimensões analíticas das redes:

- espaço-temporal
- conflitiva-solidarística
 - material-simbólica
 - participativa-estratégica

1. Dimensão espaço-temporal
Harvey (1989) nos fala da compressão do espaço e do tempo na sociedade contemporânea. Segundo o autor esta compressão, resultante de novas tecnologias de comunicação e informação, teria promovido mais os localismos que os internacionalismos, teria beneficiado mais o capital que os trabalhadores. Concordamos com sua análise, mas gostaríamos de apontar também alguns processos na direção oposta, especialmente a partir da atuação de movimentos sociais em redes, geradores de novas territorialidades.

Estes movimentos de reação à lógica dominante, apontada acima, são agentes reativos ao status quo e podem ser entendidos a partir da noção de multerritorialidade, desenvolvida por Haesbaert (2006), onde diferentes lógicas de controle territorial, de relações de poder em relação ao espaço de referência podem coexistir, mesmo que de forma conflitiva. Em outras palavras, a organização espaço-territorial compreenderia três tipos ideais de representação (ibid, p. 307):

1. territórios-zona, centrados em dinâmicas sociais ligadas ao controle das superfícies ou áreas e com “fronteiras” bem demarcadas;
2. territórios-rede, controle espacial pelo controle de fluxos e das conexões (ou redes) e com a possibilidade de sobreposição e partilha de múltiplos territórios;
3. aglomerados de exclusão, resultante da exclusão socioespacial de grupos segregados e com inclusão precária, sem condições de exercer controle efetivo sobre seus territórios, seja no sentido de dominação político-econômica ou de apropriação simbólico-cultural (p. 312).

Pergunta-se, em que medida o MST e o MTST são agentes de resistência a territórios-zona historicamente consolidados e em que medida podem ser considerados produtores de novas territorialidades? Eis a questão inicial a ser aqui tratada.

As populações mobilizadas e que se associam a redes do MST e do MTST são, geralmente, oriundas de aglomerados de exclusão, seja de trabalhadores rurais sem terra (parceiros, meeiros, pequenos arrendatários, trabalhadores informais no campo, e semelhantes), seja de trabalhadores de periferias urbanas, advindos de um êxodo rural semi-forçado (trabalhadores informais sem qualificação). Freqüentemente estes trabalhadores se caracterizam por um nomadismo no campo e/ou na cidade, transferindo-se a diversos aglomerados de exclusão.

Com a adesão ao movimento, estes trabalhadores transformam-se gradativamente em sujeitos políticos, participantes do agenciamento de uma nova territorialidade, ou de um território-rede fluído que conecta os membros do movimento em sua área, acampamento ou assentamento, com os de sua região e estes com a organização a nível nacional e, em certos momentos, a nível latino-americano e globalizado.

A ocupação de terras devolutas e a organização de um acampamento provisório é um momento de desterritorialização e (re)territorialização de profundo significado político e simbólico. A ocupação das terras é um ato de resistência e de luta pela transformação de territórios-zona (latifúndios e terras devolutas), considerados como apropriações históricas inadequadas e socialmente injustas. O acampamento é o espaço onde as redes de solidariedade e de identidade simbólica e política se desenvolvem, conforme veremos mais adiante.

Já na passagem aos assentamentos da reforma agrária nova relação espacial ocorre. O assentamento se caracteriza como um misto de território-zona e território- rede. Território-zona não no sentido mais tradicional, já que não há o domínio econômico e político absoluto em relação à propriedade, seus membros orientando-se politicamente pelo movimento rumo a efetivação de um projeto ou utopia historicamente diferenciada. Esta nova forma de propriedade coletiva ou individual se condiciona ao uso e produção da terra. Porém tem suas áreas e fronteiras bem demarcadas. Portanto, trata-se de um microterritório-zona, sujeito a um controle específico e acordado entre os membro de cada assentamento, mas vinculado a um território-rede muito mais amplo, conectados por “nós” ou elos que se espalham regional, nacional e até internacionalmente, através de significados simbólicos e pautas de lutas políticas visando transformações sociais mais amplas e duradouras.

No caso de MTST a trajetória de resistência às condições de vivência de semi-nomadismo em aglomerados de exclusão e a luta para a produção de novos espaços de vivência tem pontos em comum ao MST no desenvolvimento da organização grupal, mas há uma certa especificidade que merece ser destacada. A questão fundamental aqui é a moradia e não o trabalho como no MST. Apesar de que a moradia fixa se vincula no imaginário desta população à possibilidade de luta por outros direitos da cidadania (emprego, saúde, educação, alimentação, lazer e cultura). Assim ao entrarem em conflito com o território-zona de referência, ou em suas palavras o “latifúndio urbano ocioso” ou os prédios desocupados e sujeitos à exploração imobiliária, estão também defendendo a criação de um novo território-zona residencial para a população urbana marginalizada.

Por outro lado, a participação do MTST num território-rede iniciou-se com sua vinculação ao MST. Aos poucos as experiências de ocupações localizadas de terras ou prédios vão criando elos entre si, mas a existência de um movimento nacional ainda não está consolidada e as relações transnacionais são emergentes [nota 5]. Assim podemos concluir que o novo território-zona para a cidadania dos sem-teto predomina em relação ao território-rede de articulação política, numa situação freqüentemente inversa a experiências do MST, ou conforme Martin (1997), apoiando-se em Fernandes, neste último movimento há elementos para se pensar a força da organização em rede na construção de novas territorialidades:

É precisamente “esta estruturação (que) permite o rompimento do isolamento geográfico, social e cultural, bem como a troca de experiências das fases das lutas, organização dos trabalhadores, ocupação de terras, negociação com as forças politicas envolvidas etc”. Ela permite ao MST não somente “o domínio sobre o seu próprio espaço”, mas também “a ampliação de sua organização e a espacialização/territorialização de suas lutas” (Fernandes, 1992, p. 35)

Desta forma, podemos concluir que a lógica reticular, que produz o território-rede, quando justaposta a uma lógica movimentalista, não articula apenas espacialidades e temporalidades, mas através destas conecta o presente e o passado, representados pelo cotidiano, com o futuro, representado pela utopia e os projetos de mudança. Este é o tipo de lógica que permite a aproximação da rede do MST a rede do MTST. Ferreira (2008), em análise sobre as redes movimentalistas da atualidade conclui na mesma direção, quando afirma que:

"As ações ocorrem sempre no presente e é a partir da vinculação entre o passado – com toda nossa historicidade – e o futuro – com o projeto utópico que almejamos – que poderemos construir as mudanças. Estamos, então, certos de que as espacialidades e temporalidades do cotidiano não se separam da dimensão do concreto e nesse sentido, como afirmamos anteriormente, devemos fugir do risco das reificações; senão estaremos caminhando na direção da naturalização das fraturas sociais, passando a ver como normais a segregação socioespacial e as enormes desigualdades na apropriação da cidade."

É através da consciência crítica sobre os processos hegemônicos de apropriação do espaço e sobre a conseqüente reprodução das desigualdades sociais que os movimentos citados vêm desenvolvendo suas redes de resistência e buscando construir novos espaços de solidariedade e de cooperação Devemos, entretanto, sempre lembrar que a produção de espaços e os processos de desterriterritorização são frutos de relações sociais que podem ser de cooperação ou de conflito, as quais devem, portanto, ser objetos eleitos para a análise desses processo, o que nos remete para a segunda dimensão analítica.

2. Dimensão conflitiva-solidarística
Segundo Ferreira (2008) “é justamente na busca das tensões entre os diversos agentes e atores que produzem o espaço urbano [podemos acrescentar: que reproduzem e produzem o espaço rural] que encontraremos o melhor caminho não só para a análise dos conflitos sociais, mas também para a transformação do estado de coisas atual”. Nesta direção, a relação entre proprietários e despossuídos é freqüentemente geradora de conflitos e promotora de movimentos de resistência. Porém, do lado dos despossuídos, o conflito também pode gerar identidades coletivas e solidariedade grupal, condições essenciais para a criação de um movimento social.

O conflito se constrói em torno de concepções diferenciadas de proprietários e despossuídos em relação ao valor de uso e valor de troca dos espaços de posse ou ocupação, por um lado, e/ou em relação às referências simbólicas, afetivas, elos comunitários ou societários de vivências nestes espaços, por outro. Neste último caso, os processos de migração forçada, como com os atingidos por barragens, é especialmente contundente [nota 6].

O MST, sendo o movimento social mais fortemente organizado no Brasil contemporâneo e apontado como referência mundial de resistência de populações marginalizadas, tem se consolidado como a representação política mais expressiva dos conflitos sociais no campo e instigado a criação de organizações contra reforma agrária, como a UDR, a bancada dos ruralista no Congresso e a constante tentativa de sua criminalização através da mídia de massa. O ápice deste conflito ocorreu recentemente no Rio Grande do Sul, através da repressão violenta da polícia a uma manifestação pacífica do MST juntamente com outros movimentos sociais em Porto Alegre e a subseqüente tentativa de criminalização legal e proibição da organização por parte do poder judiciário do estado apoiado por forças conservadoras do campo (latifundiários, agronegócio). O campo do conflito se ampliou, não só porque provocou no imaginário de muitos cidadãos a memória da repressão aos movimentos sociais na época da ditadura militar, como por ferir direitos de cidadania defendidos pelo conjunto de movimentos sociais, como os de ir e vir, participação em manifestações públicas e direito de expressão política. A reação também se estendeu ao campo das representações políticas, como foi sintetizado nas palavras do deputado federal Maurício Rands (PE): “A ata do MP [Ministério Público] gaúcho é uma demonstração de tudo que um órgão de Estado não pode fazer, pois contém preconceito e tentativa de criminalização de um movimento social” (JC OnLine – Recife, 9/7/08); bem como se estendeu a vários setores da sociedade civil, militantes de direitos humanos, intelectuais, artistas, etc., das quais o desabafo do escritor gaúcho Luiz Fernando Veríssimo é bem expressiva:

"A ineqüidade que criou essa multidão de deserdados no país com a maior extensão de terras aráveis do mundo é a mesma que expulsou outra multidão para as ruas e favelas das grandes cidades, deixando o campo despovoado para o latifúndio e o agronegócio predatório. A demora de uma reforma agrária para valer, tão prometida e tão adiada, só agrava a exclusão e aumenta a revolta. As invasões e manifestações dos Sem Terra se sucedem e assustam. Proprietários rurais se mobilizam e se armam, a violência e o medo aumentam, a reação se organiza. Agora mesmo no Rio Grande do Sul, enquanto endurece a repressão policial às ações do MST, um documento do Ministério Público estadual prega a criminalização de vez do movimento, caracterizando-o como uma guerrilha que ameaça a segurança nacional, com ajuda de fora. É improvável que uma maioria de promotores de Justiça do Estado, transformados em promotores de ordem acima de tudo, tivesse abonado o documento como estava redigido, com seu vocabulário evocativo de outra era. Mas ele dá uma idéia da força crescente do outro lado..." (Jornal Estado de São Paulo - 03/07/2008)

A tentativa, completamente descabida, do Ministério Público do RGS em comparar o MST à FARC e a redes terroristas deve ser discutida política e academicamente. O seguinte quadro comparativo entre uma rede de movimentos sociais e uma rede terrorista, nos indica como de fato o MST pertence em totalidade ao primeiro tipo de rede política:

Tipos de redes

Fonte: Scherer-Warren, 2002 [nota 7]

A violência no campo não é de hoje, é estrutural e institucional, além de sempre ter buscado se legitimar no campo ideológico e político através das classes dominantes rurais, conforme já nos alertava Tavares dos Santos (2000):

"Sintetizando as informações disponíveis, podemos traçar algumas características da violência no campo: trata-se de uma violência difusa, de caráter social, político e simbólico, envolvendo tanto a violência social como a violência política. Neste caso, ela se exerce, freqüentemente com alto grau de letalidade, contra alvos selecionados (contra as organizações dos camponeses e trabalhadores rurais) e seus agentes são membros da burguesia agrária, fazendeiros e comerciantes locais, mediante o recurso a "pistoleiros" e milícias organizadas. Também se registra a presença do aparelho repressivo estatal, comprovado pela freqüente participação das polícias civis e militares. Enfim, a omissão de membros do Poder Judiciário reforça o caráter de impunidade. Como resultado, produz-se a carência do acesso ao Poder Judiciário para as populações camponesas e dos trabalhadores rurais, resultando em uma descrença na eficácia da Justiça para resolver conflitos ou mesmo para garantir direitos constitucionais, como o direito da função social da terra."

No caso do MTST, este acompanha em grande medida o discurso de contestação do MST, o qual coloca em confronto o valor do latifúndio e da terra improdutiva, isto é, o valor de troca da propriedade para os grandes proprietários versus valor de uso e da necessidade de democratização na distribuição das terras para os despossuídos. Todavia os sem-teto colocam uma ênfase especial em seus discursos sobre o valor da terra e moradia fixas para a criação de possibilidades para a superação das prementes carências do cotidiano e melhoria na qualidade de vida. Segundo Ferreira (2008), foi neste contexto conflituoso que o MTST nasceu em 1997, por iniciativa do Movimento dos Sem Terra (MST). Segundo Gilmar Mauro, membro da direção nacional do MST, sua criação partiu da constatação de que 85% da população brasileira, na época, residia em zona urbana e constituiu uma tentativa de articular as lutas pela terra e as lutas das populações urbanas. A primeira operação de envergadura do MTST aconteceu em Campinas, uma cidade próxima de São Paulo, quando cinco mil famílias ocuparam um terreno abandonado que foi batizado por eles de Eldorado dos Carajás. (Le Monde Diplomatique, 2007).

O nome Eldorado dos Carajás comporta, além de outras possibilidades interpretativas, um duplo significado simbólico, o de vinculação solidarística à rede do próprio MST e a de reação e luta contra a violência estrutural e institucionalizada. Ou conforme a retórica do próprio movimento:

"Quando ocupam um latifúndio urbano ocioso, os sem-teto resistem contra a lógica difundida como natural de que pobre nasce, vive e morre oprimido. Não aceitam a espoliação que muitos chamam de sina. Ao montar seus barracos de lona preta num terreno vazio, essas famílias cortam a cerca nada imaginária que protege a concentração de riqueza e de terra nas mãos de poucos. E num terreno de onde uma só pessoa esperava o lucro, os sem-teto plantam a transformação, uma semente de cidadania." [nota 8]

É, assim, através do enfrentamento a sua condição de subalternidade, reinterpretando os fundamentos da espoliação, que os sem-teto como os sem-terra vão construindo suas condições de cidadania. Mas para que isto ocorresse tiveram também que reinterpretar a materialidade da exclusão em termos simbólicos, conforme veremos a seguir.

3. Dimensão material-simbólica
Haesbaert (2006, p. 294) nos alerta para não confundir redes territoriais com redes físicas ou técnicas, enfatizando “o papel das redes em processos (re)territorializadores, ou seja, na construção de territórios em seu sentido de controle ou domínio material e/ou apropriação simbólica”. Parece, portanto, oportuno discutir como os movimentos sociais desenvolvem em suas práticas este duplo papel.

Conforme já mencionado, os movimentos sociais para atuarem na (re)territorialização de seus espaços segregados e para migrar de seus aglomerados de exclusão para territórios-rede, terão que se organizar em redes de movimentos [nota 9]. Por outro lado, a passagem dos sujeitos individualizados ou de organizações com demandas restritas para organizações em rede requer ultrapassar o imediatismo reivindicatório em direção à construção de nexos entre as demandas materiais ou as privações no cotidiano e o sentido subjetivo destas privações, traduzindo estes nexos em formas expressivas, simbólicas, comunicativas e em pautas políticas comuns a várias organizações, criando identidades coletivas que possibilitam a articulação dos movimentos específicos numa rede de movimentos sociais [nota 10].

A possibilidade da construção de sujeitos e da transformação destes sujeitos em atores politicamente ativos nas redes não transcorre como uma necessidade imediata da vivência de carências. A carência por si só não produz movimentos sociais. O movimento resulta do sentido coletivo atribuído a esta carência e da possibilidade de identificação subjetiva e da subseqüente possibilidade de criação de símbolos de representação em torno dela (p. ex: as músicas, o boné, a bandeira, etc. no MST). Neste processo há que se considerar o reconhecimento recíproco sobre a vivência da exclusão ou da discriminação dos sujeitos e a tradução desta vivência em novos valores coletivos dos grupos, na definição dos conflitos geradores da exclusão e dos principais adversários políticos. Resulta também da subseqüente transformação dos sujeitos em atores políticos, da respectiva transformação das carências em demandas, destas demandas em pautas políticas e das pautas políticas em ações de protestos, calcados em projetos e utopias de mudança [nota 11]. Assim, o movimento se constitui através da participação dos sujeitos no próprio processo da luta social. Na mesma direção, Martin (1997) concluiu que:

"Assim, como já vimos no campo com o MST, os movimentos sociais urbanos (MSU) têm também um papel importante na ampliação e acumulação de forças e experiências, pois: “marcam o início de um processo que tende a afetar a vida daqueles que dele participam, pelo enriquecimento que o contato com o outro propicia e que o debate estimula”. Nesse sentido [citando Carlos, 1992], a participação nos MSU pode ser a origem duma “revelação da identidade do homem, através da ação”, na medida que “o contato cotidiano com o outro implica na descoberta de modos de vidas, problemas e perspectivas comuns”. Por outro lado, esta participação produz “junto com a identidade, a consciência da desigualdade e das contradições nas quais se funda a vida humana». "

Portanto, em ambas organizações (MST e MTST) tem sido observado os três momento de constituição de um movimento social – formação de uma identidade coletiva, definição de um campo de conflito e um projeto de transformação social. Em estudo sobre o surgimento e desenvolvimento do MTST, Lima (2004) afirma que «ao longo deste percurso, uma das preocupações centrais dos militantes que coordenavam a ocupação, era procurar esclarecer aqueles com quem discutiam o projeto, que este não se limitava, exclusivamente, à obtenção da moradia, mas sim, expressava a luta por reforma urbana e pela transformação social ». Ainda na análise da autora isto ocorre porque passou-se, « ... no processo de constituição do MTST, da existência de um projeto que busca articular as demandas imediatas e concretas de um determinado segmento de classe trabalhadora à demanda mediata por transformação social ». Efetua-se aí um processo de politização onde o sujeito passa a entender que para além de conquistas materiais válidas, há a necessidade de redefinir a sua condição de cidadania (ou de completa falta anterior de sua realização) e de redefinição de seu espaço de moradia, anteriormente um conglomerado de exclusão e agora um território de cidadania em construção, que assim foi expressado no depoimento de uma militante do MTST à pesquisadora acima:

"[...] A preocupação nossa em dividir em lotes, formalizar o que aconteceu aqui dentro, um bairro, onde todo mundo tem acesso... É organizado? É. Nós, pelo menos, tentamos ser organizados e desenvolver aqui um bairro e não uma favela. Nada contra uma favela. Eu acho que a grande maioria do povo que vive aqui veio de favela. Uma boa parte veio do aluguel. Perderam o emprego e as condições e tiveram que vir para cá. Mas se nós fizemos uma ocupação e no final das contas ficassem becos? O que nós estávamos fazendo? Que organização é essa? Isso aqui não seria uma organização, era uma bagunça. Foi onde nós formamos um bairro, mas um bairro muito chique. Está na madeira? Mas está chique" (Isaura, depoimento à autora, 2003).

Porém, a passagem da vivência dos participantes do MST e do MTST, de um aglomerado de exclusão para um território em rede, com auto-estima e sentimento de cidadania em construção, foi também fruto de uma participação efetiva e continuada numa rede de movimento que valoriza a democracia interna e externa, conforme veremos no próximo item.

4. Dimensão participativa-estratégica
Para aprofundar o entendimento da interação entre redes e territórios, gostaríamos de acompanhar Leila Dias (2007, p. 20), quando a autora afirma que a lógica das redes é definida por atores que as desenham, modelam e regulam. De outro lado, acompanhando Santos (2000, p. 259), a autora afirma que a lógica do território é arena de oposição entre o mercado – que singulariza – e a sociedade civil – que generaliza. Assim, “o território é suporte das redes que transportam as verticalidades, isto é, regras e normas egoísticas e utilitárias (do ponto de vista dos atores hegemônicos), enquanto as horizontalidades levam em conta a totalidade dos atores e das ações” (ibid, p. 259). Neste contexto das horizontalidades poderemos incluir a ação dos atores contra-hegemônicos que atuam em rede. É a partir deste embate entre verticalidade e horizontalidade que os movimentos sociais atuam, transitando entre territórios-zona e territórios-rede e, assim, definindo suas formas de participação na esfera pública, na democracia ou para a democratização da terra e da moradia, no caso dos movimentos que estamos analisando.

Todavia, a participação dos atores organizados em rede com impacto no campo democrático, deve ser examinada a partir de três ângulos: o da democratização no interior da própria rede; o da participação da rede nos processos de democratização da esfera pública; o papel da rede na promoção da justiça social, da eqüidade e, portanto, da democratização da riqueza e de avanços na cidadania.

Tavares dos Santos (2000), numa retrospectiva das lutas sociais no campo, concluiu que há avanços especialmente na promoção da cidadania aos sujeitos das redes de movimentos, para além dos registros de conflitos e violências as quais estes sujeitos tem sido submetidos pelas forças do capital e as vezes pelo próprio Estado:

"Delimitou-se, portanto, um campo de conflitos agrários, no qual a proposta de reforma agrária aparece, uma vez mais, como possibilidade de aprofundamento da democracia na sociedade brasileira. A reiteração das lutas sociais no campo, no entanto, tem demonstrado, neste século, que a capacidade da ação histórica das classes, categorias e grupos sociais dominadas tem conseguido construir, além das variadas formas de violência, modos de viver, de produzir e de falar que ilustram possibilidades de uma relação de alteridade mais equânime e solidária, construindo uma nova forma de cidadania."

A construção da cidadania no contexto deste território-rede, desenvolvido a partir de um novo tipo de participação político organizativa do movimento, é interpretada pelo próprio MST, como um espaço de relevantes mudanças de significados no cotidiano de seus membros e nas relações de poder na sociedade envolvente:

"Os trabalhadores ao conquistarem o seu próprio espaço, construíram o espaço de socialização política... ampliam o sentido da luta pela terra que passa a ser entendida para além da questão econômica, ou seja, é também um projeto sociocultural de transformação de suas realidades. Os efeitos sociais deste movimento sobre as relações sociais atinge toda a sociedade. Estes são frutos de conflito e, também, das ações destes sujeitos que têm por objetivo causar transformações específicas e gerais nas relações de poder". (www.mst.org.br, 14/3/2000) [nota 12].

Portanto, o significado simbólico e efetivo da luta é buscado aqui na possibilidade de produzir transformações no interior da própria rede e no contexto das relações de poder na esfera pública. A estratégia política para o empoderamento da rede na esfera pública também é buscada através de articulações mais abrangentes, como entre o MST e o MTST, destes com a Via Campesina, Movimento de Barragens, Movimento de Mulheres Camponesas, Movimento dos Desempregados e outros movimentos sociais do campo e da cidade, além de articulações em rede, como o Fórum Nacional de Reforma Agrária e Justiça no Campo (FNRA) o Fórum Nacional de Reforma Urbana (FNRU), a Assembléia Nacional Popular, a Semana Social Brasileira, a Coordenação dos Movimentos Sociais, dentre outros.

Finalmente, o papel da rede na promoção da justiça social, da eqüidade e da democratização da riqueza tem como documento síntese a Carta da Terra, que dá a unidade total ao movimento, segundo o FNRA [nota 13]. Nesta versão da Carta, assumida pelo Fórum em 2004, é proposta a desapropriação de todos os latifúndios, das propriedades de estrangeiros e de bancos e daquelas que praticam o trabalho escravo. Refere-se à luta pela demarcação de todas as terras indígenas e de comunidades remanescentes de quilombos, para erradicar a pobreza como um imperativo ético, social e ambiental e faz referências aos interesses da cidadania num sentido mais universal, de promoção da democracia, da paz, da ecologia, etc [nota 14].

O MTST, juntamente com outros movimentos de luta pela moradia, também construiu seu manifesto [nota 15], em prol de uma democratização da riqueza, onde reivindica “desapropriações de terrenos e edifícios urbanos que não cumprem função social, destinando-os às demandas populares organizadas”, além de demandas por políticas sociais de inclusão social, numa tentativa de passagem de seus aglomerados de exclusão para novos territórios-rede, onde seus personagens vivem de forma socialmente mais justa e com direitos de cidadania assegurados.

5. Concluindo
Pode-se deduzir que estes vários grupos populacionais referidos até aqui, migrantes entre vários aglomerados de exclusão, seja na terra rural ou na periferia urbana, ou circulando de uma região a outra, numa constante dispersão espacial e cultural, na busca de alternativas de sobrevivência face a suas condições de sem-terra e sem-teto, caracterizam-se por uma espécie de vivência da diáspora [nota 16] dentro das fronteiras do Estado-nação.

Será através de suas participações nas lutas pela terra e pela moradia, que estas populações se transformam em sujeitos que lutam por direitos e em atores politicamente ativos nas redes de movimento. É nesta condição que realizam a passagem atópica dos aglomerados de exclusão para o sonho utópico nos novos territórios-zona (assentamentos e lugares fixos de moradia) e com o sentimento de pertencimento e reconhecimento enquanto cidadão e sujeito coletivo nos territórios-redes, através de sua participação nas redes de movimentos de referência. Para fechar, recorremos mais uma vez a Martin, que relembra Lefebvre (1974, p. 484):

"Hoje em dia (...) uma transformação da sociedade supõe a possessão e a gestão coletiva do espaço, com intervenção dos interessados, com os seus múltiplos interesses, diversos e mesmo contraditórios. Portanto, a confrontação e o seu trunfo é o domínio do mesmo espaço”. Não se trata mais do espaço abstrato, reificado, mas de todos os lugares socializados, no campo e na cidade, dos conflitos no e pelo espaço... É exatamente por causa de tudo isso, que uma abordagem verdadeiramente geográfica dos movimentos sociais, ou seja, sem esquecer a sua dimensão espacial, parece hoje tão importante."

Foi justamente nesta direção que se pretendeu desenvolver a presente reflexão: estabelecer um diálogo construtivo entre as perspectivas geográfica e sociológica e que permitisse compreender os recentes processos de (re)territorialização de espaços segregados e em conflito, desenvolvidos pelo MST e MTST no Brasil.

Referências bibliográficas:

CALDART, Roseli Salete. Pedagogia do Movimento Sem Terra. São Paulo, Expressão Popular, 2004.

CARLOS, Ana F. A. Espaço urbano e movimentos sociais. Boletim de Geografia Teorética, n° 43-44, 1992, p.147-153.

CASTELLS, Manuel. The Power of Identity, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Vol. II. Cambridge, MA; Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1997.

DIAS, Leila Christina. Os sentidos da rede: notas para uma discussão. In: DIAS, Leila Christina; SILVEIRA, Rogério L. da (Orgs.). Redes, sociedade e território. Santa Cruz do Sul: EDUNISC, 2007, 2a. ed.

FERNANDES, Bernardo M. O todo é a parte e a parte é o todo, a interação Espaço-Sujeito, Revista Geográfica, São-Paulo, n°151, 1992, p. 31-39.

FERREIRA, Alvaro. Conflitos no espaço urbano: labirinto e dialética. In: X Coloquio Internacional de Geocrítica (Diez años de cambios en el mundo, en la geografía y en las ciencias sociales, 1999-2008), Universidad de Barcelona, 26-30 de maio de 2008.

HAESBAERT, Rogério. O mito da desterritorialização – Do “fim dos territórios” à multiterritorialidade. Rio de Janeiro: Bertrand Brasil, 2006, 2a. ed.

HALL, Stuart. Da diáspora: identidades e mediações culturais. Belo Horizonte: Ed UFMG, 2003.

HARVEY, David, Condição Pós-Moderna. São Paulo: Loyola, 1989.

LIMA, Sonia Lúcio Rodrigues de. Metamorfoses na luta por habitação: o Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto (MTST). Tese (Doutorado em Planejamento Urbano e Regional) – Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, 2004.

MARTIN, Jean-Yves. A geograficidade dos movimentos socioespaciais. Caderno Prudentino de Geografia, Presidente Prudente (SP), n°19/20, p.26-41, Nov. 1997.

ROTHMAN, Franklin Daniel (ed.). Vidas alagadas – Conflitos socioambientais, licenciamento e barragens. Viçosa: EFV, 2008.

SCHERER-WARREN, Ilse. Redes de movimentos sociais na América Latina - Caminhos para uma política emancipatória? Conferência de abertura a Sessão 4 – O “global em questão: redes e movimentos transnacionais, In: Seminário Nacional “Movimentos Sociais e os novos sentidos da política". UFBA, Salvador, 5 a 7 de junho de 2008.

_______. Fóruns e redes da sociedade civil: percepção sobre exclusão social e cidadania. Revista Política & Sociedade. Florianópolis: PPGSP/UFSC, v. 6, n. 11, out. 2007a, p. 19-40.

_______. Redes sociais: trajetórias e fronteiras. In: DIAS, Leila Christina; SILVEIRA, Rogério L. L. da (Orgs.). Redes, sociedade e território. Santa Cruz do Sul: EDUNISC, 2007b, 2a. ed.

_______. Redes sociais e de movimentos. In: Luiz Antonio Ferraro Júnior. (Org.). Encontros e caminhos: formação de educadoras (es) ambientais e coletivos educadoras. Brasília: MMA, 2007c, v. 02, p. 323-332.

_______. A política dos movimentos sociais para o mundo rural. Estudos Sociedade e Agricultura. Rio de Janeiro: CPDA, vol. 15, n. 1, 2007d, pp 5 – 22. ISNN 1513-0580. Versão em Ingles: The social movements’ politics for the rural world. http://socialsciences.scielo.org/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1413-05802007000100002&lng=en&nrm=iso

_______. Das mobilizações às redes de movimentos sociais. Revista Sociedade e Estado, Brasília, v. 21, 2006., p. 109-130.

_______.Redes sociales y de movimientos en la sociedad de la información. Nueva Sociedad, Venezuela, n. 196, mar-abr. 2005.

_______. Social movements networks in a multicultural world: The case of Latin America. In: Seminar Democracy and Recognition: a North-South Debate. Berlim, 15-17/04/2002.

_______. Movimentos em cena... as teorias por onde andam? In: SCHERER-WARREN, Ilse, et al. Cidadania e multiculturalismo: a teoria social no Brasil contemporâneo. Lisboa: Socius, Florianópolis: Editora da UFSC, 2000. p. 23-51.

_______. Cidadania sem fronteiras: ações coletivas na era da globalização. São Paulo: Hucitec, 1999.

SCHERER-WARREN, Ilse & FERREIRA, J. M. Carvalho (orgs.). Transformações sociais e dilemas da globalização: um diálogo Brasil/Portugal. Portlugal: Celta Editora, 2002 e São Paulo: Cortez, 2002.

TAVARES DOS SANTOS, José Vicente. Conflictos agrários e violência no Brasil: agentes sociais, lutas pela terra e reforma agrária. Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Seminario Internacional, Bogotá, Colombia, ago. 2000. In: Red de Bibliotecas Virtuales de Ciencias Sociales de America Latina y el Caribe, http://www.clacso.org.ar/biblioteca.

TOURAINE, Alain. ¿Podremos vivir juntos? La discusión pendiente: el destino del hombre en la aldea global. Trad. Horácio Pons. Buenos Aires, Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1997.

_______. Actores sociales y sistemas politicos em America Latina. Chile, OIT/PREALC, 1987.

Palestra proferida na temática Lutas sociais e produção do espaço, no Seminário Política e Planejamento:
Economia, Sociedade e Território, Curitiba, 06 a 08/08/2008.

Ilse Scherer-Warren:
Coordenadora do Núcleo de Pesquisa em Movimentos Sociais, professora da UFSC e pesquisadora 1A do CNPq.

Coordinator of the Research Cluster on Social Movements, professor at the Federal University of Santa Catarina and researcher for the National Council of Scientific and Technological Development

Notas
1 Sobre a trajetória do MST, vide Caldart, 2004; Scherer-Warren & Carvalho Ferreira (orgs.), 2002,
especialmente Cap. 12: A atualidade dos movimentos sociais rurais na nova ordem mundial, e também
Scherer-Warren, 2007d.

2 Sobre a trajetória do MTST, vide a tese de doutoramento de Lima, 2004.

3 Sobre organizações em rede e redes de movimentos sociais vide alguns de meus trabalhos anteriores,
especialmente, Scherer-Warren, 1999, 2000. 2005, 2006 e 2007b, 2007c, 2007d.

4 Vide a este respeito Touraine, 1987, 1997; Castells, 1997; Scherer-Warren, 1999, 2000 e 2007b.

5 Vale mencionar a organização de uma rede denominada Frente Internacionalista dos Sem-Teto (FIST),
que é um Fórum geral de articulação dos movimentos de luta pela moradia, com atuação principalmente
no Rio de Janeiro, com o objetivo de que “as ocupações saiam da política estritamente local, que diz
respeito só à comunidade, e passem a trabalhar articuladas com as outras ocupações, com práticas de
solidariedade e apoio mútuo” (www.fondation-besnard.org/article.php3?id_article=498, 31/01/2007).

6 Vice a este respeito Rothman (ed.), 2008.

7 Trabalho apresentado no Seminário Democracy and Recognition: a North-South Debate, Berlim, abril de
2002.

8 Cf. mencionado em www.mtst.info/?q=quem_somos.

9 Redes que se constroem em torno de um identidade coletiva, da definição de conflitos e adversários e de
um projeto ou utopia de mudança, conforme já mencionado.

10 Maiores desdobramentos deste debate foi desenvolvido em Scherer-Warren, 2008.

11 A passagem de um movimento meramente reivindicativo para um movimento social propriamente dito
requer, além disso, a realização dos três passos já mencionados acima. Outros desdobramentos, Scherer-
Warren, 1999, 2000.

12 Maiores desdobramentos em torno deste ponto, vide em Scherer-Warren & Carvalho Ferreira, 2002.

13 Cf. nossa pesquisa junto ao Fórum, citada em Scherer-Warren, 2006, 2007a.

14 De acordo com Carta da Terra internacional, fruto de uma ampla rede e movimento, apoiada e assinada
pela UNESCO em 2000, a qual parte de uma visão integradora e holística, considerando a pobreza, a
degradação ambiental, a injustiça social, os conflitos étnicos, a paz, a democracia e a crise espiritual como
problemas interdependentes (vide: www.cartadaterrabrasil.org/), e assumida, dentre outros pelo MST,
pelo FNRA, constando da Carta do 5o. Congresso Nacional do MST: www.mst.org.br, 15/06/2007.

15 Manifesto Popular de 28/03/2008, vide: www.mtst.info/?q=taxonomy/term/66%2B67

16 Sobre a relação da condição diaspórica com o territórios de referência, vide Haesbaert, 2006 e Halls,
2003.