PROVOKING MEETINGS USING NETWORKS, BUILDING NETWORKS
THROUGH MEETINGS
"Act in assembly when together, act in network when apart"
(as suggested by the National Native Congress, Mexico)
(report presented at the II International Encounter for Humanity
and against Neoliberalism, Almuñecar, Ruesta, El Indiano,
Madrid, Barcelone; Spain; July 26-August 2, 1997)
1. The Second Declaration of Realidad (August 3, 1996) served to
outline four major objectives: a world conference on the issues of
the First Meeting, a new Intergalactic, an intercontinental network
and a network of resistance, fight and action against n eoliberalism.
Unlike meetings and consultations, organizing through networks is not
specific to Zapatist movements, but rather the natural development of
a social model applied throughout man's history by free people on all
continents and revolutionaries everywhere: direct democracy.
Historically this model is characterized by the direct and equal
participation in sovereign assemblies of people of the same
community, who by so doing collectively express, deliberate and act
on all the issues relating to the government of their community.
Different communities were connected via delegates to their
respective assemblies. The mandate to said delegates could be revoked
at any time, and their presence did not affect the autonomy of the
assembly. Taking this model as a starting point, a network should
serve to weave the relations of single individuals and groups into a
mosaic of different interests, without over shadowing the community's
collective functions, based on the pure pleasure of freedom.
2. Even if they do not call it so, Native Americans have always
practiced direct democracy. In their communities, authority is
exercised through assemblies and their delegates, elected according
to the principle of "mandan obedeciendo" (to command by obeying). In
other words they act exclusively according to the letter and spirit
of the various mandates they receive. Both the deliberation of
authority and its practice are monitored in different ways by a
council of wise men and elders called "principals". Among the Mayas
of Chiapas, for instance, this social model is based on consensus,
and has been used and perfected over centuries as a weapon of
resistance. Their particular version of direct democracy is at the
same time a mechanism which allows the community to function, a
thermometer of its vitality and an objective to strive for. For them,
major decisions such as war and peace are not deliberated until
consensus among all the members of the community is reached. In this
way, Mayan communities have continuously redefined themselves over
time, giving historical significance to that concept of "us" which in
their eyes constitutes true freedom. Likewise, those communities now
fighting under the EZLN banner maintain constant relations through a
network of revocable delegates, and the CCRI-CG itself, despite it
being a military structure (and therefore heirarchical), answers to
the same communities through consultation and control from the base.
3. This form of direct democracy based on consensus which we found
in the mountains of Southwestern Mexico is inevitably tied to a
social context of small rural communities where each member knows the
other personally. Those of us who instead live in the monster's belly
must invent different ways of applying the same principles. The
Zapatists themselves are the first to say that their movement cannot
be exported. What we can do is fight to maintain a collective control
over authority, as envisioned, among others, by Western
antiauthoritarian movements which have consistently criticized
representative democracy. In the words of the Enragé John
Oswald (1793): "representation is the deceptive veil used to hide all
forms of despotism and political manipulation". Today we stand to
witness the unmitigated failure of all the movements and
organizations which over the past two centuries have attempted to
direct, provoke, or simply accompany radical change. The latest
metamorphosis of the monster, called neoliberalism, has spread its
ruin precisely in the wake of so many defeated revolutions and dreams
turned to nightmares. Modern economy is much more than social
organization, it is an eclipse cast unto the minds, eyes and hearts
of people the world over, in the North as in the South, in the East
as in the West, preempting life in exchange for simple survival.
4. Our adventure is really an attempt to conjugate collective
freedom, as intended by Pablo González Casanova, with the
perspective of individual liberation. The Second Declaration of the
Realidad identifies networking as the tool for building a world from
the meeting of many worlds. The break with the past is well evidenced
by the results of the round table: in the new way of thinking the end
does not justify the means, but, on the contrary, the means affect
and determine the end (Table 1: What is our policy, what policy do we
need. La Realidad, Chiapas, 1996). The means become a qualifying
factor: to build a network of worlds we use the network itself. This
allows us to overcome the precepts of traditional political practice:
totalitarian obsession, program as an abstract model and
consequently, the complimentary issues of tactics and strategy. And
to preempt the notion itself of political party and of systems of
thought - once called ideologies - developed to force our existence
onto a predefined track. So we start to use our heads and our hearts.
The concept itself of "fight" is thereby shifted from a negative
antagonism, necessarily conditioned by patterns of survival, to the
daily construction of a new life, or better, a new civilization.
5. The traditional political method involves an artificial
separation between the "drafting" of a program, effected by
specialized intelle ctuals, and its "circulation", entrusted to bored
and listless militants. Both these moments are separated from its
"realization", projected in a vague and uncertain future. As we
intend it, the network should instead by the starting point, the
motor, and the end of a new movement of self-liberation for hu
mankind: a realm of plurality and liberty, a world which contains
many worlds. A place where the future takes root in the present.
Putting free communities in touch. Communities which express
themselves through autonomous assemblies, made richer by a rainbow of
exchange and nomadism. The network therefore places itself at the end
of history built over our heads and at the beginning of history
experienced consciously. Through a common project, identifying the
building blocks of individual action and those of public action. With
these weapons we can face up to monolithic thought and bring
decisions back to the only level where they can be controlled - the
local level, and cast our nets unto the mysterious ocean of
resonances and echoes. And, place the noble ideal of the old worker's
movement back on the table: the international will be humankind.
6. In our case the obstacles to this proposal are to be found in
the almost total fragmentation of communities, which should be the
lifeblood of this organism, and the consequent difficulty which
individuals have of thinking their liberation in collective terms.
Not only. The elements through which centralized power dominates are
such that they multiply and expand infinitely, nuturing
identification with these and fostering axes of conflict, making it
difficult to discern their global sense. It is by no means easy to
break this vicious circle. Nor is it easy to speak out of the mold,
to speak of ourselves, our hopes and how to realize them with others:
neoliberalism not only privatizes companies, but our lives as well. A
network of communities without communities, this is how we stand on
the threshold of the new millenium. The feeling is that we are on the
right track, but that we have lost our strength along the way. How do
we break the veil of dissimulation and mediation which society has
tended between each of us and our lives? How can we repropose in
practice that "unitary triad of participation, realization and
communication", to use the words of the Situationist Raoul Vaneigem?
How can we lay the basis of truly autonomous assemblies, starting
from communities of independent subjects and real lives, rather than
of interest groups and ideas, in the desolateness of our metropolies?
7. Without pretending to offer miraculous solutions for undoing
these knots, the network can supply the technical infrastructure
needed to reverse our perspective and once again give us the capacity
to fight and resist, to create, through its infinite real-life
situations, the many ways of collectively practicing and expressing
free thought and its responsibilities. We can do so by connecting
with other networks via international campaigns to help common causes
such as global citizenship, intended as the freedom of movement
across borders, or boycots of companies which do not respect human
rights, of military states, etc. The practice of Intercontinental
meetings amplifies this type of action and retraces backwards, so to
speak, the original path which should lead from local communities to
the network. Such a structure is necessarily based on the principle
of voluntarism. Is there a different way of recreating community
consciousness, where the concept of community itself is lost? In an
unsustainable society and an ungovernable world, all we can do is
beseige utopia. Despite the many difficulties and the strong minority
connotation, the experiences of the past two years in creating a
network of relations in the sense outlined above, induce us to a
reasoned optimism. Starting from this we can invent a language and
practice which - like the Zapatist movement in Mexico - serves to
connect past and future revolutions, oppressed people everywhere and
proletarians of our industrial urban areas.
8. At the same time ,we feel the need to clear the field of
unfortunate intepretations which have the potential of becoming a
fast track back to the quagmire of the old world. The network we are
building is not a popular front, and even less is it " for lack of
anything better" in these sad time, characterized by the death of so
many illusions. At the same time the concept of hosting many worlds
does not mean we are open to all ideologies, but rather that we would
like to be a method and place for men and women to rethink their
lives. A place where ideologies, as closed and sclerotic systems of
thought, have no reason for existing. Through the network we can try
to write a chapter of our existence together, experimenting new ways
of experiencing and transforming the world. The network is not a weak
organization adapted to a time of weak thought, but the free
instrument of a time which needs to rediscover freedom. The
translation in practice of the words contained in the First
Declaration of the Realidad: "We need not conquer the world, but
rebuild it. Together, today."
9. Because every single method of human self-liberation requires
its space and sounding board, the network must steer free of
institutions and power, destined by their nature to defend specific
interests. We can instead contemplate forms of defensive
self-organization such as mutualism or other forms of solidarity
inherited from the dawn of the worker's movement. Since political
parties and unions have always been the managers of our defeat, it is
impossible for us to envision their participation in the network. It
is vital that each individual have the possibility of rethinking his
or her life free from ideological affiliations. We believe this is
the only way to create a truly inclusive practice, because we cannot
fight alienation through alienated structures. It should also be
clarified that while formally speaking there are no local assemblies,
only we can give ourselves the mandate to attend and deliberate, we
and the hate which the old world always dealt us, our ideas, our
dreams, our lives. It is therefore important to immediately create
the local decision-making level, ensuring that coordination between
local groups is conducted solely in the spirit and with the objective
of giving local decisions the greatest amplification and strength. An
additional advantage of keeping decision-making at the local level is
that it makes it impossible to implement or even think of huge
projects, from the pyramids to nuclear power plants. In the course of
this century the political left cultivated the obsession of
substituting capitalism with an equally global system (socialism,
communism). Today, although it may not be always true that small is
beautiful, it is unquestionably true that large is monstruous and
anti-human.
10. The progressive, joyful contagion of other local realties
through meetings, the free interweaving of personal relations, the
impassioned emulation of play and the fervid enchantment of thought
seems to be the only legitimate way of building the network without
giving life to new supreme soviets and oppressive beaurocracies. The
local assemblies constituted in Committees, which could be called
"For Humanity against Neoliberalism", are the nodes connected by the
network of networks which we propose to cast around the world. A
network which uses telematic communication, but, far from being
virtual, is composed of names and faces, blood and dreams. A network
capable of giving form and content to the need expressed by people
everywhere to reappropriate themselves of politics. An invisible
network, the visibility of which will grow with the conscience of its
participants, men and women who join to be different. A network which
puts hope and passion in touch, laying the ground for the biggest
party of the 21st century. A network which, overcoming the
mystification of representative democracy, recaptures that red thread
of direct democracy which connects in time and space the agora in
ancient Greece with the Paris Commune, workers in Canton with the
Catalonian collectives, Budapest in arms against beaurocracy with the
Zapatist communities in Mexico. All this, not out of methodological
purity but out of coherence with those steps which each of us alike
must take if we want to build our world without mediation, whether
such mediation be called neoliberalism, real socialism or whatever
else the powers that be and that were have devised to divide and
dominate us.
Claudio Albertani, Paolo Ranieri June, 1997