richard-day-gramsci-is-dead

Ethics, Affinity and the Coming Communities 191mountains. Marcos is all the exploited, marginalized, oppressed minoritiesresisting and saying ‘Enough’. He is every minority who is now beginning tospeak and every majority that must shut up and listen. He makes the goodconsciences of those in power uncomfortable—this is Marcos. (Marcos inPeople’s Global Action 2002)Many of the groups involved in mobilizing for the Battle of Seattle in1999, such as Peoples’ Global Action (PGA), Direct Action Network(DAN), and those who organized the first Independent Media Centre(IMC), had direct links with the Zapatistas (Callahan 2001: 38).Among these, PGA is particularly interesting in terms of practicesof solidarity, in that it was organized by ten activist groups from fivedifferent continents, including the Zapatistas, the Movimento dosTrabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST, Brazilian Landless PeasantsMovement), and Karnataka State Farmer’s Union (KKRS), known fordirect action against genetically engineered crops in southern India(PGA 2002). The group traces its roots to the encuentros, or meetingsof solidarity, held in Chiapas in 1996 and Spain in 1997, and hassince held global conferences in Geneva (1998), Bangalore (1999)and Cochabamba (2001). Its core principles, or hallmarks, include a‘very clear rejection of capitalism, imperialism and feudalism’, as wellas ‘all trade agreements, institutions and governments that promotedestructive globalization’ (PGA 2004a, 1st hallmark). The rejectionof feudalism may seem anachronistic to many readers; the group’swebsite explains that it was added at the request of the Indian andNepalese delegates, whose immediate struggles are oriented in thisway. This is an excellent example of how Eurocentric assumptionsabout the nature of globalization can be challenged and the discourseof resistance enriched, given the right sort of organizationalstructure—one based on ‘decentralization and autonomy’ ratherthan hierarchical command (PGA 2004a, 5th hallmark). To maintainthis structure, PGA has refused to take on a legal existence, andmaintains that ‘no organization or person represents the PGA, nordoes the PGA represent any organization or person’ (PGA 2004b).The group also maintains a multidimensional analysis of oppressionwithin the neoliberal order, arguing that ‘[t]he denunciation of“free” trade without an analysis of patriarchy, racism, and processesof homogenization is a basic element of the discourse of the right’(PGA in Singh 2001: 49; cf. PGA 2004a, 2nd hallmark). Finally, itadopts what it calls a ‘confrontational attitude’, on the assumptionthat the politics of demand cannot have much effect on ‘biased and