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

124 Beyond resistance to global nexus
coincided with escalating State violence against the AGM (Shabi and
Hooper 2005). These events, combined with 11 September 2001, raised
strategic issues of alignment including how to differentiate ‘anti-capitalism’
from ‘anti-Americanism’, mobilising against restrictions on civil liberties
and US aggression against Afghanistan and Iraq. In this context, the process
initiated by the WSF provides a means to ‘catch up’, to reflect upon a period
of accelerated and sustained mobilisations and to continue to explore the
possibilities immanent to the emerging planetary action system.
However, the influence of larger NGOs and the Brazilian Worker’s
Party – the PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores) who until 2004 controlled the
municipality of Porto Alegre led to suspicion within some anti-capitalist
networks, including PGA, that the WSF was a comparatively ‘top-down’
initiative. Whereas PGA was envisaged by its participants as a system of
relays to co-ordinate and multiply energies released within protest plateaux
at what Deleuze and Guattari (2002: 275) refer to as the ‘molecular’ level,
the WSF process appeared to these same activists as a system of capture, a
‘molarising’ force that treated groups as aggregates from which norms
could be produced and generalised. The subsequent raft of criticisms by
those active within PGA and associated networks (Grubacic 2003,
Waterman 2003, Farrer 2004) led to a ‘one foot in one foot out’ approach,
leading to a proliferation of events and spaces on the peripheries of the
‘main event’. 5 These included autonomous gatherings of various sorts,
including peasants’ fora, 6 youth camps, social laboratories, cultural events
and so on.
Once again, we can observe in this process the importance of the
‘periphery’, 7 where competing (antagonistic) attractors produce symmetrybreaking
behaviour, that in Melucci’s terms ‘entails a breach of the limits
of compatibility of the system within which the action takes place’ (1996:
28). In other words, we can see the emergence of movement forms in the
phase space of GCS described by the WSF. In complexity terms, the system
of relations constituting the WSF has tended towards a point of selforganised
criticality, an ‘edge of chaos’ represented in the balance of attractors
constituted by the official forum and the self-organised alternatives.
Thus the willingness of antagonistic actors to critically engage and the
permeability of the WSF has been its strength, leading to a high degree of
sensitivity to external inputs enabling it to assimilate ideas and initiatives
whilst internally adapting its structures to move between steady states
without violent perturbation. Indeed, we would argue that the constant
iteration through reflexive framing that characterises the emergence of
feedback loops within the AGM has been particularly apparent within the
WSF, where the use of CMC, including wikis and other online publishing
by autonomous actors, 8 has crowded out ‘official spaces’ of articulation in
cyberspace. The emphasis placed upon process by both the International
Secretariat (IS) and the International Committee (IC) of the WSF also catalyses
self-learning and adaptation and there is evidence that the structures