posted 08-02-2003 01:22 AM               

by Christophe Aguiton (ATTAC France)

The rise in abstention from voting and the crises of political militancy and traditional trade unionism are phenomena common to most developed countries.

Two systems of explanation are generally advanced to explain this crisis in the legitimacy of systems of political and social representation: that derived from long-term tendencies in our society, in particular the rise of individualism and in the field of politics that derived from the gap between the aspirations of electors, electoral promises and the policies pursued by successive governments.

This article is interested in the emergence of a new mode of political and social representation, based on the operation of
networks and on decision-making by consensus: a mode of representation which does not substitute for older forms of
representation but erodes their legitimacy.

The world movement of system contestation, which affirmed itself at Seattle and grew in size at every subsequent international date, in particular on the occasion of the social forums at Porto Alegre, Florence and, tomorrow, Paris and St. Denis, exemplifies this new mode of representation.

This world-wide movement is capable of integrating completely diverse components, in terms of concerns, numerical importance,
organizational forms: trade unions, parties, NGOs, informal movements, intellectuals, etc. And the only possible organizational
form for an alliance of this type is the network, with decision-making by consensus.

Many analysts thought initially that none of this was viable and that such a system was doomed to paralysis and then to collapse because of the heterogeneity of its components. The experience of recent years
has proved the opposite of this prognostication: that this movement
can expand geographically and broaden itself socially and that it can also integrate new concerns and react to important conjunctural
changes. Those who didn't believe in the resilience of the movement for "another world" and thought that it wouldn't survive 11th September 2001 (such as the "Wall Street Journal", which entitled one
of its editorials in October 2001 "Adieu Seattle") have been proven wrong. The movement expanded and was at the heart of the largest antiwar mobilisations that this world has ever known: the date of
15th February 2003, when more than 10 million demonstrators marched
world-wide, was set at the social forums of Florence and Porto Alegre.

If the network organizational structure is characteristic of the world-wide movement of contestation, it can be found in many other
spheres of human activity also, first and foremost in capitalism itself.

Business enterprises have undergone rapid transformation under the pressures of liberal globalization: networks between customers placing orders and sub-contractors fulfilling them have become the norm. These are very hierarchical networks, centred in the countries of the North, but they represent an important break from the
vertically-organized and integrated enterprises that we knew in the past: the fashion is for enterprises without either factories or workers, à la Nike or Cisco, but also Alcatel, enterprises where the
brand and the logo become the essential values. It is these transformations that have obliged trade unions, confronted by
transfer of production centres to the Third World, to forge links with NGOs and youth movements, to lead campaigns against companies like Gap or Nike with new targets, like the logo, and launching
morally-oriented campaigns that have shown themselves to be effective. These new practices come from the United States, but the appeal for a boycott of Danone after the Lu sackings shows that they are becoming generalized.

International institutions have seen a similar evolution. The IMF and the World Bank, founded in 1943, operate on the basis of a form of suffrage where the votes of each state are weighted in accordance
with its financial contribution. At the UNO each country has one vote, but the Security Council with its five permanent members holds the key to the system. The WTO, established in 1995, follows a different arrangement. On paper it is a democratic UNO: one country one vote, but without a Security Council or any formal predominance
of the "great powers". But, hostage to a system where it is not imaginable for the United States or the European Union to be placed in the minority by a coalition of small countries, the WTO does not put anything to the vote, and never will: consensus is the rule.

One might find similar evolutions in the structures of local politics, such as those which co-ordinate action between local
councils, or even in the scientific world, which has to take into account a wide spectrum of aspirations and pressures.

This emergence of the power of networks appears at the same time that traditional decision-making structures, based on nation-states and majoritarian procedures, is losing its legitimacy and credibility,
typically eliciting one of two reactions: either a defence of networking as supposedly making possible real citizen involvement, or
its radical rejection in the name of defending "democracy" in the
sense of the traditional system of political representation.

Those who reject networking generally criticize it for lack of transparency, absence of control of delegates, in short absence of democratic procedures.

But often such critics never ask themselves what a democratic procedure is.

The reference is almost always to the majority vote and representative democracy. What is forgotten is that long before there
was any questioning of the power of the "enarchs" (graduates of the Ecole Nationale d'Administration) or of the establishment, the philosophers of the Enlightenment explained that election by voting could only ever end up in selection of elites and a course leading to
professionalization and nstitutionalization. This is why the Enlightenment preferred the ancient Greek and Roman model of
sortition, based on drawing of lots, a system which continues to exist, in its ancient format, in trial by jury and which one sees proposed again in the proposal for hybrid forums and citizens' conferences for taking decisions on scientific and technological questions.

Criticisms of networks are not all valid – for example it is not true that the network gives special power to the expert: this problem is not specific to networks. It exists everywhere and always.

Nevertheless, two major problems do exist in the functioning of networks.

First of all there is the "exclusive" character of consensus. Networks do not escape from the logic of the balance of forces and the relative weight of participants. But this is played out on the
basis of different rules to those of majority voting. In the representative system based on voting, the majority can regulate the problem of minorities by guaranteeing them their rights of
expression, for example. In a network more time, more `negotiating' is needed to arrive at a consensus than if one employed the majority vote, and it is obvious that the consensus is in the first instance that of the most important participants in the network. There can be a variety of criteria for determining the importance of a
participant in a network, including symbolic importance, such as that of a particularly oppressed group.

The second weakness in the functioning of networks has to do with the poor visibility of choices, including for the members of the
network. There is less transparency in a network than in the majority vote system, which enables choices to be made explicit in
the clearest possible way.

The decisive advantage of networking is capacity it provides for autonomous initiative.

In the voting system, once the "general will" has been established, everyone has to observe it and the rule of the majority must apply for everything and everyone. Minorities thus have nothing to do but
prepare for the next election or the next congress, in the case of a trade union or political party. This `stand-by' stance is exacerbated through subordination to vertical executive structures. The voting
system solves two problems at once: it establishes a position and selects the executive – the elites – in charge of implementing it. Nobody should be surprised that such a system serves the
reproduction of elites and assures the supremacy of males and of the old, even if correctives, such as parity, are introduced in response to protests from the victims of this system.

In a network things don't work like this. To come back to the world of militants, if a group, or even an individuals, wants to do
something, to launch a new campaign or test a new form of action, he just does it. This characteristic gives networks a pronounced
advantage. To put if briefly, the network offers many more opportunities for self-emancipation than the system of majority
voting: as a system of political apprenticeship and initiative-taking, the network is unequalled. For example networking makes it possible for affinity groups to function, on the model of feminism
as it operated in the United States or even in Europe in the 70s, or of what managed to exist in libertarian circles in the nineteenth century. Networking recyles the old forms, broadening their range of
action and giving them a new lease of life.

The emergence of the networks upsets the routine of the parties, the trade unions, the traditional organizations.

It upsets them the more for the fact that at the same time the perspectives for social transformation appear vaguer and more
distant than ever and that the coherence between the political, economic and social levels of action is disappearing. The left, all currents included, had constructed its strategic thought and its political perspectives on the nation-state system which took shape at the end of the 19th century, on the basis of the dismantling of the system of free-trade globalization which ran its course in Europe from 1850 to 1880/90. Strategic thinking in phase with economies centred on nations, with the development of industrial capitalism
based on big Taylorized enterprises and with the development of public services and centralized infrastructures. Before Lenin's
declaration that socialism is "the soviets plus electricity" Kautsky, the theoretician of the Second International, had already announced that "socialism is the administration of the railways enlarged to the scale of society as a whole".

The emergence of the networks goes hand in hand with the globalization of economies and the weakening – relative, as the American intervention in Iraq reminds us – of the role of nation states.

In the face of these upheavals, the Left is confronted with two risks: that of nostalgia for the previous models and that of
adaptation to liberal capitalism in the name of the ineluctable character of globalization and the necessities of European integration,

From the transformation in progress, of which the emergence of the networks is one element, there emerges a completely new kind of breach with the logic of capitalist profit.

The appearance and development of free software such as Linux takes on such dimensions that Microsoft is forced to launch an offensive to struggle against what it describes as "the cancer of innovation in
the capitalist economy", attempting to impose the extension of patent law to the creation of software. These programmes are mounted and upgraded free of charge, on the basis of the gift relationship, the pleasure of innovation and creation, the culture of generosity, by a community of developers, professionals or talented amateurs,
functioning at the international level, rejecting every form of state coercion and bureaucratic planning.

For Proudhon the struggle against industrial capitalism followed the route of defense of co-operatives and mutual funds, but also of small craftsmen and small-scale property against industrial concentration. Later the theoreticians of the 2nd International elaborated their conceptions of socialism in relation to the technical and social
developments of their time, as has recently been rediscovered.

The development of free software has its place in this tradition. It offers a completely different model for the breach with the law of profit, in line with the technologies of today, which are also
those, with Internet and communication technology, that allow of an extension of networking. A model in phase with an open world, refusing both rear-guard nationalism and bureaucratic regimentation. A break which clearly does not correspond to the totality of social needs - we shall always need railway administration and a kind of
schooling where the role of teachers will expand – but which shows that the alternative does not boil down merely to planned economy versus market economy.

But the development of free software is interesting in another respect, very relevant to current political controversy. It is one of the domains where the battle for intellectual property is being
waged. In parallel with that over generic drug names or patenting of living organisms. There is a great danger that we shall see European decision makers, with Pascal Lamy at their head, accepting a hardening of the rules of intellectual property that will be to the disadvantage both of the countries of the south and to the militants of the associative Internet and of free software.

Thinking democracy in the age of networks and conceptualizing another breach with the logic of capitalist profit are two important terrains demanding a co-ordinated response from political militants, researchers and trade union and other associative decision makers.

For all contact concerning this article: aguiton@r...

(Translation: WH)

COMMENT:

Christophe Aguiton's "Democracy and Networks", recapitulating many of
the themes of his stirring speech of last February at the inauguration of the Hellenic Social Forum,
(http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Ama_lahi/message/684)
is a welcome reminder that the slogan "Another World is Possible"
represents not just empty words but an institutional counter-proposal:

His model of democracy, based on the operation of networks and on
decision-making by consensus, "a mode of representation which does not substitute for older forms of representation but erodes their legitimacy", was also outlined by Bernard Cassen at the inaugural meeting of ATTAC-Hellas fifteen months earlier, so that it takes on the status of not merely personal recommendations but something
approaching official policy.

That is a fact that deserves to be better known, and better understood.

In my November 2002 paper "European Convention, European Constitution" http://www.spectrezine.org/europe/waynehall.htm I suggested one way that the "eroding of the legitimacy" of older forms of representation might be accelerated: through the European [for a start] social forums making a specific demand for involvement in the procedures for finding a European head of state. Each member state of the European Union should send its head of state and a representative of the national social forum to participate in the workings of a
European Sovereign Council whose tasks would include selecting (by vote, sortition, or any method of their choice) the European head of state.

National parliaments would naturally not take kindly to seeing their role as bearers of sovereignty of EU member states taken over by heads of state and social forums, so it should be possible for them to call for a referendum to claim back from the social forum the role of participation in the Sovereign Council. A benign form of
competition would thus be instituted between national parliaments based on the rule of the majority and national social forums based on the rule of consensus.

ATTAC-Hellas in my view should propose José Bové to the Hellenic Social Forum as our nominee for European head of state. Such a move would enable us to harness for our purposes European institutions at present working against us, or at least not for us.

Rather than tailending, or ignoring, the BBC and the Guardian's campaign to get rid of Queen Elizabeth we could, as it were, 'co-opt' Queen Elizabeth into a campaign to raise José Bové to the status of European head of state. Given the place in the European integration process that they have so far been systematically denied by
bourgeois parliamentary politicians, European monarchies would be unlikely to unite their rivals against them by supporting one of their own number as European head of state. They would support a
candidate from the social forums. Why not Bové?

The trouble, at least in Greece, is that the extent of ATTAC's influence over the decisions of the Hellenic Social Forum is limited, as can be seen from the events surrounding the Thessaloniki Summit of
June 2003. If ATTAC had had more influence over the policies of the Forum it is less likely that state policy and the priorities of the media would have succeeded in turning the mass movement's input into the Thessaloniki Summit into a circus of counterproductive media-orientated violence. For a start there would have been a better
chance of the Hellenic Social Forum at least demanding to take responsibility for security in Thessaloniki, however remote the
likelihood of a European Union government actually subscribing to such a tangible gesture of support for a Europe of Citizens.

There is little chance of this influence being acquired for as long as the caricature of ATTAC as a "reformist" force has currency. And that is an image that is likely to persist in the absence of
initiatives capable of undercutting the pseudo-radicalism of street violence, though many initiatives could be taken.

For a start, there is the fact that the most radical elements of the post September 11 opposition in the United States, those openly proclaiming not merely that the Bush regime "took advantage" of the terrorist attacks but that it is complicit in them, have so far enjoyed very little support in Europe. ATTAC could link up with them. Then there is the issue of global warming, for which the American government is widely condemned internationally owing to its
unwillingness to support the Treaty of Kyoto. So far so good, but how much of the ecological movement, or the movement against neo-liberal globalism is prepared to tell the other half of the story: the fact
that the United States has its own "alternative" approach to the
problem of global warming, an approach which involves massive spraying of toxic aerosols into the atmosphere, and which has already
been under implementation, globally, for at least five years? The largest planned intervention into the biosphere in the history of the human race, rendering all theoretical discussions over the urgency of
global warming absolutely irrelevant.

Or there is the trial of Slobodan Milosevic, on which subject Nico Varkevisser recently commented: : ""They demonize a people for 12
years; they destroy the country; they throw the elected President in jail in Belgrade and then they kidnap him in defiance of the
Constitutional Court and ship him to The Hague; they keep in a dungeon of a jail for two years while he exposes every witness as a liar; and after all that, they shall now "begin focusing" on providing evidence against him?"

"The Security Council is about to discuss a letter from Kofi Anan requesting that The Hague and Rwanda tribunals be separated, with each having a full complement of prosecutors, organizational staff, and so on. Perhaps this has something to do with the heavy military and other involvement of the US and the former European colonial
powers in Central Africa. But also, perhaps this is a reprimand for del Ponte, as if they were to say: 'You have failed, miserable creature. Now, go and devote all energy to The Hague. You and your
hundreds of assistants better reverse the humiliating defeat we suffered from Milosevic!'

"So this is del Ponte's reward for being the servile attack dog: she takes the blame. Perhaps she will end up in jail."

These are all issues that could be taken up, and could do much to reverse the image of the relative `radicalism' of ATTAC and the
social forums, to our mutual advantage.

Wayne Hall, ATTAC-Hellas, 1st August 2003