The Will of the Many: How the Alterglobalisation Movement is Changing the Face of Democracy

by Marianne Maeckelbergh

Never before has the idea of democracy enjoyed the global dominance it holds today, but neoliberalism has left the practice of democracy in deep crisis.

Marianne Maeckelbergh argues that the most promising model for global democracy is not coming from traditional political parties or international institutions, but from the global networks of resistance to neoliberal economics, known collectively as the Alter-globalisation movement. Through extensive ethnography of decision-making practices within these movements, Maeckelbergh describes an alternative form of global democracy in the making.

Perfect for activists and students of political anthropology, this powerful and enlightening book offers radical changes.

Genres: Nonfiction

296 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2009

Reviews

[Malcolm]

Towards the end of 2011 when an activists’ camp in downtown New York City produced a corporate media awareness of mass anger over the global economic crisis, its neo-liberal causes and a growing rejection of the policies of austerity, a recurrent criticism and sometime plaintive interjection into the resulting debates was to do with what these activists wanted; sometimes it was phrased as wanting to know their demands, others it was wanting to know their proposals. The response was, almost always, that that was the wrong question; that part of the reason for the occupations – of Wall St, of the London Stock Exchange, of Oakland, of Sydney, of Tel Aviv, of Akron, of Rio de Janiero and the hundreds of other places around the world – was to work out what the 99% wanted to do. The other thing many of these commentators who did not get it missed was that these occupations were building on already existing occupations in places where the crisis had hit hard – Madrid, Athens, Cairo; places where the demands and expectations were similar and different.

It wasn’t as if these occupations came from nowhere. Adbusters and others had been promoting Occupy Wall Street all through 2011 and there were close links between the various groups involved in Tahrir, Syntagma and the Indignados of Plaza del Sol. The tactics, of occupying space and organising a new way of being and doing politics and everyday life, had been growing for years as various social movements had tried to work out what it meant to say that ‘another world is possible’. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of China’s version of state capitalism had brought home to many that trying to work to a predetermined plan carried great risk. What’s more, the exclusion of the interests and voices of the many from politics and economics, from a business-as-usual way of the world, meant that making demands of a system that clearly had not only failed, but actively excluded the many, the 99%, was futile and that it would have been an act of great arrogance on the part of the organisers of these occupations to become their self-appointed spokespeople.

As a result, the talking heads of the corporate media found themselves having to grapple with new and unsettling notions – a politics based in horizontalism, prefiguration, consensus, bottom up debate, inclusion and a notion of democracy that did not fit their preconceived notions of representation or of participatory democracy leading to a single winner-takes-all outcome. Again, this was not new to Occupy or to the Indignados, but had been an emerging tactic and practice in the alterglobalisation movement for many years, and before that in various activist groups for much longer.

This excellent ethnography is a great introduction to how prefigurative horizontalism works and what it means for democracy. Maeckelbergh, an anthropologist and movement activist, focusses on two events from the movement, the European Social Forum in London in 2004 and the mobilisation against the G8 meeting in Gleneagles in 2005. This gives her the chance to explore the organisation of an oppositional event (G8) and an event focussed on movement development and growth (the ESF). It also allows her to consider the politics of horizontalism in contexts where there was a strong presence of the tendency known as ‘verticals’, those with an attachment to a more hierarchical form of political organisation and decision making. In the case of the G8, these verticals included major NGOs and celebrity figures, while in the ESF the predominant vertical forces were the Greater London Authority and elements of the vanguardist left, principally the Socialist Workers Party. She writer with an insider’s sympathy, the nuance of a longstanding activist who gets the subtlety of group positions and movement dynamics and the rigour of a professional anthropologist who has a duty of care to her ‘informants’ and the social network they (and she) are part of. It is, in that sense, an excellent piece of anthropology.

Maeckelbergh builds her case in four stages. The first explores the meanings and practices of prefiguration and the key role that process plays in building an inclusive activist movement. This, then, leads to an important discussion of the significance of conflict in the movement drawing on a concern expressed by many activists that consensus that fails to recognise diversity and difference, and often irreconcilable difference, may be a form of oppressive behaviour and exclusionary. In these two stages of the analysis she is asking some profound and challenging about the way we, in activist groups, have tended to organise ourselves and our ways of doing things.

This leads her to an investigation of the implications of horizontalist politics based in notions of conflictive consensus (itself a profound seemingly oxymoronic challenge to common uses of the latter term) for our understanding of democracy. In this section, she uses a case study approach to discussion and decision-making. This leads to her argument that to understand this recast form of democracy we need to consider it as marked by equality, liberty and diversity – to move beyond the claim to fraternity and consider the way that the principle of diversity as fundamental to democracy can build through ‘conflictive consensus’ a social movement allowing the coexistence of a huge range of people and groups who may agree on little. The key issue here is that this is a democratic social movement where the key concern is not the decision reached – the outcome – but the way that decision is reached – the path. She is presenting a vision of democracy that moves well beyond the end justifying the means to one where it is about the means.

This model of democracy poses a profound problem for social movements trying to manage the tension between diversity and commonality, where there is often an intense implicit pressure for convergence. Maeckelbergh explores this, as the fourth element of her argument, by considering ways that social movements operate as networks to resist unity. Here she is talking about much more sophisticated movements that single issue or identity-politics-based movements and much more inclusive movements than (exclusive) vanguardist parties. It is this section, the final substantive chapter, that is for me the most exciting; she explores notions of social change through connectivity where there is reciprocal contamination (that is, we are all changed as a result of the links maintaining the movement) while also considering the problems of both individuality and agency in movements building collective but not common interest. She does all of this by drawing partly on early positions advanced by groups such as the Zapatistas but more so by developing complexity theory from biology into the operation of human groups premised on diversity; it is an exciting and productive analysis that merits much more consideration.

One of the great things about the case is Maeckelbergh’s methodological and theoretical eclecticism. Her complexity theory shows traces of the influence of Deleuze and Guatarri, elsewhere there is a critical deployment of some work by Hardt and Negri along with hints of Graeber’s work on democracy. There is a healthy dose of Proudhon and a smattering of Kropotkin from the classics, leavened by a little Mouffe – but none of these big theorists drive her analysis. As with all good anthropology the analysis is driven but not determined from within to grant considerable authority to the voices of movement activists (in the jargon, the balance between the between emic – descriptions relevant to and with meanings derived from units and distinctions internal to the system – and etic – descriptions relevant to and with meanings derived from units and distinctions external to the system – is managed in favour of the emic).

This is a fabulous insight to the operation of one of the most significant social movements of our time, and one that poses vital questions for how we do and understand politics. It is now five years since it was published and it retains freshness and insight, challenging us to think and do the better world we want better.