Complexity and Social Movements: Multitudes at the Edge of Chaos ...

Ecologies of action 97
impacts upon communities of having been ‘switched off’ and abandoned to
the fate of marginality, have also facilitated a return to the self, in the form of
self-reliance and the valorisation of particularistic or ‘local’ identities, hence
the polarisation between ‘Net’ and ‘Self’ in Castells’ account. The network
form is not unique to corporations however, and the evolution of networked
relationships between diverse social groups has been an increasing feature of
protest and social activism. Increasingly the threat from ‘fluid’ capital in an
era of ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman 2000) and its capacity to organise the
means of production in dispersed locales without external controls or regulatory
frameworks has led to the expansion of oppositional networks which
are necessarily international and increasingly global in character (Edelman
2001). These networks are sometimes facilitated through direct contact, but
are increasingly maintained through CMC, and such networks have been
successful on a range of issues including the ‘electronic fabric of struggle’
(Cleaver 1998) woven during the Zapatista insurrection and the successful
opposition to the proposed Multilateral Agreement on Investment.
As these networks have employed confrontational, imaginative, and
highly symbolic repertoires of collective action based upon the ethos of
‘direct action for direct democracy’, they have generated ripples beyond
their obvious impacts upon international trade summits and related policy
fora. The militant and participative character of these movements has been
significant in catalysing reflection amongst civil society actors, including
some prominent NGOs. Greenpeace International, for example, professed
to feeling ‘outflanked’ by the effectiveness of these movements (Greenpeace
2001) and promptly embarked upon a five year rolling programme of internal
debate – Breaking Down the Walls – with proposals for action and deliberation
aimed at addressing both its own democratic deficit and broadening
its focus of opposition.
What is being described here is the emergence of an antagonistic current
to GCS that is composed of networked actors often in dense national or
regional clusters, connected into global affinity structures maintained by
CMC and reconfigured during intense periods of social interaction around
specific protest events or reflexive gatherings. However, as we have already
demonstrated attempts to understand this were hampered by the overconcentration
on the ‘novelty’ of the WTO protests in Seattle in November–
December 1999, which belied the prior existence of these international
networking processes, without which the ‘success’ of Seattle makes very
little sense (Notes from Nowhere 2003, Chesters and Welsh 2004).
Analysis of this antagonistic current can be facilitated through reference
to the typological distinction Melucci (1996a) makes between forms of collective
action and social movements. This allows us to differentiate between
the majoritarian representation of social movements within GCS and the
antagonist movement instantiated in the AGM. Melucci (1996a: 28) defines
a social movement as a collective action which: (i) invokes solidarity,
(ii) makes manifest a conflict and (iii) entails a breach of the limits of