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

118 Beyond resistance to global nexus
amenable to political articulation and mediation they are not reducible to
cycles of grievance – interest representation – or accommodation associated
with formal politics (Melucci 1996a: 117), placing considerable weight upon
cultural accounts of movements (Alvarez, Dagnimo and Escobar 1998).
These forces help constitute variables in the phase space of GCS wherein
attractors form from complex social, cultural and political demands. The
formulation of the demand for the Tobin Tax, first articulated within GCS
by ATTAC (Waters 2004) or the Jubilee campaign against Third World
Debt and the various attempts at political accommodation of these issues
by the French and British State, including Gordon Brown’s ‘Marshall Plan’ 2
for the majority world, are key examples. However, by forsaking the organisational
accoutrements of membership, representation and resources, and
rejecting opportunities for influence through formal political channels PGA
has sought to avoid this process of condensing and fixity pertaining to a
simple goal, preferring instead to articulate a further set of co-ordinates, to
militantly reframe GCS from within. In this sense, PGA is crucial to understanding
how the anti-capitalist attractor of the AGM functions within the
phase space of GCS, because its emphasis upon sociality, direct action and
confrontation has ensured the continuity of an antagonistic orientation
within the AGM. However, as Melucci points out (Melucci 1996a: 35–36)
if the means of articulating demands within an antagonistic movement are
completely divorced from any mechanism of political representation, there
exists a tendency to either retreat into expressive escapism or for the
conflict to be posed as a zero-sum proposition that elevates violence as
a modus operandi.
PGA has instead invoked a shared reference system based upon its
hallmarks, which emphasise autonomy, plurality and participation and preclude
the contraction of complexity by avoiding the formulation of specific
demands or any means of compulsion or forced adherence to a specific
‘party line’. By resisting the temptation to consolidate and bureaucratise
and deliberately functioning as a distributed network, PGA is still able to
mount sustained campaigns, which include focussed activity around militarism,
self-determination, privatisation and access to water without PGA
being determined or defined by these activities. These campaigns arise from
the priority ascribed to them by groups and individuals participating in
complex patterns of deliberation in real and virtual spaces. They become
network priorities through consensus decision-making processes during
PGA conferences where those participating do so freely and according
to their ‘biographical availability’ (Wall 1999) and assessment of the importance
or merit of the issue. Inevitably those groups or individuals for
whom the specific issue is the main focus of their time and energies are also
able to pursue linkages with organisations that would not adhere to the
PGA hallmarks including political parties, NGOs etc. In this sense, the
globally networked character of PGA allows it to sustain a ‘pure’ space of
antagonism within the AGM, yet precludes the dissolution of such an