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

Beyond resistance to global nexus 115
16–17 May before moving on to Geneva on 18 May for the Ministerial
Conference of the WTO and a celebration of 50 years of the GATT. This
was the first time an explict call for the use of civil disobedience against the
WTO and G8 had been made and the global response catalysed by the PGA
process was dramatic.
On 16 May between 6,000–8,000 people occupied the Bullring area of
Birmingham in close proximity to the conference centre where the G8 were
meeting. This was a small part of the ‘Global Street Party’ initiated by
London Reclaim The Streets, who were soon to become European convenors
of PGA. On the same day in Geneva approximately 10,000 people
marched on the WTO building smashing the windows of banks and overturning
the Mercedes of the Director General of the WTO. Elsewhere, street
blockades and parties involving tens of thousands of people took place in a
number of cities worldwide including Athens, Berlin, Berkeley, Bogota,
Darwin, Lyon, Melbourne, Prague, Stockholm, Tel Aviv, Toronto and
Vancouver. As the protests against the WTO continued in Geneva in the
days after the global street party, reports were posted on the internet by
PGA including accounts of a mass mobilisation in Hyderabad, India involving
nearly 300,000 people marching against the WTO. Whilst in Brazil a
50,000 strong ‘star’ march converged in Brasilia on the 20th May having
set off from the four cardinal points of the country and led by organisations
including Movimento Sem Terra (MST) whose representative at the Geneva
protests declared ‘The mobilizations in Brazil are the logical response of
peasants and workers against the policies imposed by the WTO. These policies
are being readily implemented by the Brazilian government, and as a
result, the social polarization is growing rapidly.’ Those marching in
Brasilia went on to invade a number of supermarkets and distribute the
food to the poor of the capital.
These were the first globally co-ordinated events in the ‘field of collective
action’ (Melucci 1996a, Alvarez 2000) that contextualised the emergent
AGM, although the simultaneous and networked nature of these events went
largely unobserved by either the media or academic commentators. Amongst
those participating however, there was an explicit acknowledgement of the
potential evinced by this globally networked and co-ordinated activity. As the
PGA’s own analysis put it: ‘The success in Switzerland has many people asking,
“is this the first flutter of a new global social movement?” After so many
years of saying “it’s no use resisting here, we would have to organize
globally”, people are thinking “hey, maybe we can!” ’ (PGA Bulletin Issue 2).
Co-ordinating encounters: the PGA multiplier effect/affect
Movements in complex societies are hidden networks of groups, meeting
points, and circuits of solidarity which differ profoundly from the image of the
politically organized actor.
(Melucci 1996a: 115)