Dear Parminder, <div><br></div><div>Thanks for sharing the article.</div><div><br></div><div>Two points on your remarks:</div><div>- fully agree on "new institutional possibilities of participatory democracy" not fully explored yet; probably new tools can be invented;</div>
<div>- I know your reticences - often voiced on the list - regarding the current modalities of "multi-stakeholderism" and some of them do deserve attention (such as the risks of capture, the weight of some actors, the north-south unbalances and the representation of the unrepresented); however, what I am missing in your very critical comment ("<i>it is very much the wrong direction</i>") is the proposed alternative; imperfect as they are, aren't the experiences currently under way presenting more potential for broad participation, openness and "deeper democracy" (to use your formulation) than using only intergovernmental interaction in the UN or the G8 ? </div>
<div><br></div><div>In a nutshell, what would you like to see that would be so different from what is being attempted in the IGF, for instance, that it would justify thrashing it instead of perfecting it ?</div><div><br>
</div>
<div>Best</div><div><br></div><div>Bertrand</div><div><br></div><div> <br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 2:43 PM, parminder <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:parminder@itforchange.net">parminder@itforchange.net</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
<div bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#333333">
Hi All<br>
<br>
The article below from India gives a southern view of the current
political impacts of the internet and the deeper politics behind it.
<br>
<br>
Important to notice how the key issue here was economic but it
turned into a demand for political change and new practices of 'real
democracy'. We dont necessarily have an alternative model here, but
it is such new institutional possibilities of participatory
democracy that may have become available today that are exciting
and must be explored. Regret to say, the simplistic notions
(involving co-option) of multistakeholderism that we hear so much
about as the next political system is not at all the right
direction. In fact, in the form it mostly gets spoken of and
practised in IG arena, it is very much the wrong direction.
Parminder<br>
<br>
<a href="http://kafila.org/2011/05/30/the-viral-revolutions-spread-across-europe/" target="_blank">http://kafila.org/2011/05/30/the-viral-revolutions-spread-across-europe/</a><br>
<br>
The ‘Viral’ Revolutions Spread Across Europe
<div>
<div>May 30, 2011</div>
</div>
<div>
<div>tags: <a href="http://en.wordpress.com/tag/austerity-measures/" rel="tag" target="_blank">austerity measures</a>, <a href="http://en.wordpress.com/tag/democracy/" rel="tag" target="_blank">democracy</a>,
<a href="http://en.wordpress.com/tag/greece-protests/" rel="tag" target="_blank">Greece
protests</a>, <a href="http://en.wordpress.com/tag/indignants/" rel="tag" target="_blank">Indignants</a>,
<a href="http://en.wordpress.com/tag/spain/" rel="tag" target="_blank">Spain</a></div>
<div>by Aditya Nigam</div>
</div>
<p><strong>The New Democratic Upsurges</strong></p>
<p>The mainstream Western media that celebrated the democracy
movements in the Arab world not very long back, is relatively
silent now. For, then it was the Arab youth’s striving for the
‘western values’ of democracy that it was celebrating. Now that
the cry of ‘democracy’ is arising from its very midst, it does not
seem to quite know what to do. From May 15 on, for almost two
weeks Madrid and other Spanish cities have been witnessing some of
the largest demonstrations in recent memory. Protesters have
thronged the Puerta del Sol, virtually camping there. As
government forces started cracking down, demonstrations began to
grow in an ever expanding scale spreading to many other Spanish
cities. When the government moved to ban demonstrations on May 20,
in the run up to the regional and municipal elections, the
protests acquired an even more militant form. A ‘snapshot’ of the
rallies in defiance of the ban:</p>
<span style="text-align:center;display:block"> </span>
<p>The initial protests against the planned multibillion euro
bailout plan for banks, austerity measures and against high
unemployment almost 45 percent among the youth), according to
reports, were not very large but when the government responded by
arresting several activists and demonstrators, things started
going out of hand. That was the ‘spark that lit the prairie fire’.
As <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2011/05/puerto-square-spanish-work" target="_blank">Ryan Gallagher’s report</a> in the <em>New
Statesman</em>put it:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A demonstration against the arrests was organised in the city’s
main square, Puerta del Sol, and numbers soon snowballed when
word got out over the internet. What began as a group of fewer
than a hundred activists reached an estimated 50,000 within less
than six days.</p>
<p>The protesters whose arrests had sparked the initial
demonstration were released and immediately returned to the
square. By the time they arrived, the demonstration was no
longer just about their treatment at the hands of the police. It
was about government corruption, lack of media freedom, bank
bailouts, unemployment, austerity measures and privatisation.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Here is another video of a fierce battle being fought on the
streets of Madrid:<span></span></p>
<span style="text-align:center;display:block"> </span>
<p>According to a <a href="http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,763836,00.html" target="_blank">report in Der Speigel</a>,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The protesters have occupied the square for days now, with some
comparing the gatherings to those that took place on Cairo’s
Tahrir Square earlier this year, and demonstrations also
continued for the fifth day in a row on Thursday in Barcelona,
Valencia, Bilbao and Santiago de Compostela. Spaniards living
abroad have also set up protest camps outside the country’s
embassies in Berlin, Paris, London and Amsterdam. Most of the
events have been organized online. After organizing
demonstrations in around 50 cities last Sunday, the Real
Democracy Now (the name of the movement that coordinates the
Spanish struggle – AN) movement became a household name
virtually overnight.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>By the end of May, the movement had now spread to Greece where,
for the fifth consecutive day yesterday, an estimated 100, 000
people were demonstrating at the Syntagma square in Athens. Below
the parliament building they stood, chanting ‘thieves’, ‘thieves’
and carrying placards that said ‘Poverty is the greatest abuse’.
Initially calling themselves the ‘indignants’, the protesters in
both Spain and Greece gradually coalesced into this loose
federation with a website and a Facebook page by the name of Real
Democracy Now (see their <a href="http://www.democraciarealya.es/?page_id=814" target="_blank">Manifesto in English translation here</a>) that
rapidly had over three and a half lakh members signing up. And
virtually in tandem with the Spanish movement’s call for ‘real
democracy’, the Greek movement too has transformed the struggle
against austerity and bailout measures into <em>a struggle for a
changing the political system itself, into a struggle for
radicalizing democracy</em>.</p>
<div style="width:310px"><img title="Athens
Syntagma square, image courtesy Greek Reporter" src="cid:part1.06050608.02080007@itforchange.net" alt="Athens
demonstrations" height="166" width="300">
<p>Athens Syntagma square, image courtesy
Greek Reporter</p>
</div>
<p><strong>The Question of ‘Politics’</strong></p>
<p>This mutation of the essentially ‘economic’ struggle against the
bailout plans and austerity measures into a political struggle for
the transformation of the very terrain of democracy tells us
something serious about the relationship of traditional forms and
institutions of politics and their growing conflict with popular
aspirations. The call for ‘real democracy’ comes in a context
where the political parties and the formal political domain is
being seen as highly corrupt and deeply implicated in the politics
of predatory corporations and banks. By and large, not only
political parties but often, even the unions have been bypassed by
the mass mobilizations – an index of the relative redundancy of
these structures of formal democratic politics. A <a href="http://www.humaniteinenglish.com/spip.php?article1782" target="_blank">report in the l’Humanité</a> put it:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><em>No trade union, let alone a political party. The workings
of traditional dispute are outmoded, and even deliberately
excluded.</em> Internet, through the exchange in real time via
social networks and chats, has allowed the emergence of a
spontaneous free and radical protest movement by a generation
that’s had enough…</p>
<p>The Internet has become a structural element of the movement. <em>What
is expressed is anger, a desire for radical change and a
rejection of all traditional forms of politics. Which explains
the refusal to be co-opted by any political party or trade
union and calls to spoil ballot cards or vote blank.</em>
Confidence in the Spanish democratic system is broken; the
indignants have the impression that their voices are never
heard. The descent into the street came naturally, as an
extension. The street is also where they want to be heard.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Many observers see the protests in Spain as a continuation of the
May Day demonstration earlier this year. Interestingly, the May
Day demonstration itself, <a href="http://browsertunnel.info/page/000000A/687474703a2f2f626c6f67732e65756f627365727665722e636f6d2f67616c646f6e2f" target="_blank">according to Gemma Galdon Clavell</a> of the
Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, was organized independently of
the mainstream political parties and trade unions and was ignored
by the media. The point is itself worth some serious thought for
it clearly indicates that even those formally bearing the legacy
of the Left and the workers’ movement, were clearly quite out of
sync with large sections of the youth who also aligned themselves
to the legacy of the Left through the May Day demonstration.
That is why the entire atmosphere in these protests was said to
be permeated by an anti-politics sentiment and with a contempt for
all political parties. Once the movement acquired the form of a
huge mass movement, obviously things must have changed further. No
longer would the movement have consisted only of left-wing
supporters of the workers’ struggles. People with different
political/ ideological inclinations, people with no particular
political preferences, all started joining into this mass of ‘the
indignant’. The manifesto of Real Democracy Now emphasized this
apparently nonpolitical character of the movement when it
underlined something to the effect that ‘we are believers and
nonbelievers, we have different political convictions but the
thing that unites us is that we are angry at economic the state of
affairs’.</p>
<p><strong>The Arab Virus</strong></p>
<p>What we see playing out here in Spain and Greece is not simply an
aberration. The resonances of the struggles in the Arab world are
very obvious and widely acknowledged. Activist-organizer Beatriz
Pérez, 29, underlines: ‘Egypt and Tunisia was a very important
catalyst for the movement in Spain’, which constituted an
inspiration and a trigger, apart from inspiration of the recent
student demonstrations in the UK. A <a href="http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php?n=a-bird8217s-eye-view---the-revolution-spreads-north-2011-05-27" target="_blank">report in Hurriyat Daily News</a>, recently
recalled its own speculations sometime ago, about the possibility
of the North African and Middle Eastern revolution engulfing
Europe – a possibility that it now saw becoming a reality. The
resonances however, are not simply limited to the fact that the
Internet and Facebook etc became the major vehicles of organizing
the protests. These similarities are in fact linked to some other
quite significant issues – those that pertain to the ‘implosion of
the political’. Throughout the Arab world, this was in a very
different context, precisely the situation of the formal domain of
politics. Political parties lay at the feet of the establishment
or had reduced themselves to complete inefficacy. In country after
country across North Africa and West Asia, we have seen people in
their hundreds of thousands march at the head and parties follow.
The vanguards – Leninist and non-Leninist – all reduced to the
ultimate pathos of ineffective, closed sects in some cases; or to
political instruments in service of bankers and corporations. In
earlier times, there was no way of communicating without the
mediation of these organizations and their leaders. Things have
changed now and direct communication and discussion has become
possible through the Internet. A lot of discussion now happens
there. But the Arab revolutions also have a ‘spiritual’ effect
over these movements insofar as they are equally invested in the
values of democracy.</p>
<p>Thus <a href="http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/47731" target="_blank">Dick
Nichols of the Green Left Weekly</a>, reports from Barcelona:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The central plazas of dozens of cities and towns across Spain
bear an uncanny resemblance to Tahrir Square in Cairo. They have
been taken over by thousands of demonstrators demanding a “new
system”. As of May 29, dozens of other central plazas in Spanish
cities and towns look the same — taken over by thousands of
ordinary people demanding “a new system.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As speculations mount about Greece defaulting on its loan
repayment from the IMF, the pressure has been building up on the
government from international financial and corporate circles. In
earlier times, such pressure would have worked and all political
parties, seduced by the logic of neo-liberalism would have fallen
in line. Not any more. It is clear here, to ordinary people as
well, that if austerity measures a put in place after the debt is
repaid, that will lead to further cuts in salaries and pension and
result in further increase in unemployment and homelessness. That
is no longer acceptable. And as the Hurriyat report underlines, if
Greece defaults, that will not be the end of the story; it will
most certainly be followed by Portugal, Ireland and Spain – with
Italy not very far behind.</p>
<p>Here too, the link with the Arab revolts is quite obvious –
though the issues may not be quite the same. But whatever the
differences between the European and the Arab situation, one thing
is quite clear: the question of livelihoods is central here and
the fact that increasingly decisions about peoples’ lives are
being taken away from their hands and manipulated in the name of
some abstract notions of well-being which ultimately amount to the
enrichment of some at the cost of vast majorities of populations.</p>
<p><strong>Democracy in Practice</strong></p>
<p>There is no doubt that none of the great movements sweeping the
world in this part of the twenty-first century has any attachment
to or any fixation with a programme. On the contrary, it cares two
hoots about those who have. For those who have made programmes
behind closed doors and do not want them to be discussed
democratically, there is nothing but contempt in these movements.
Yes, they do want to transform things but the critical question
here is, rather than capture power and start mimicking the
erstwhile powerful, one of creating new ground rules. The critical
thing is to enunciate a different political practice so that
whoever comes to power – the bourgeois or his Leninist mimic –
will all have to be governed by those new ground rules. Not
revolutionary? So be it. That is the fantasy of revolutionaries,
not of the masses. It never was. Meanwhile, Puerta del Sol has
been converted into a huge popular assembly where policies are
being debated. Different commissions are drawing out policy
proposals that are then discussed in the assembly, which has
itself become a huge training camp, in between fighting street
battles with government forces. Here is a glimpse from the <em>New
Statesman</em> report:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The protesters at Puerta del Sol are interested only in action,
not rhetoric. In the square, they built a makeshift campsite,
including everything from a children’s nursery and a library to
a kitchen offering free food donated by local businesses.</p>
<p>In the space of a few days they had created separate working
commissions to form proposals for change to current government
policy. A social and migration commission would look at
immigration policy, the health commission would focus on how to
deprivatise health-care services. Other commissions were formed
to handle politics, education, the economy and the environment.</p>
<p>Among the camp’s immediate demands were calls for electoral
reform, the dissolution of the Spanish parliament’s second
chamber, and an end to a much-despised policy of “salaries for
life” for politicians.</p>
<p>The movement itself has no single leader or figurehead; all
decisions are made by consensus at general assemblies, held
twice daily. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, attend the meetings,
and no decision is taken until every single person is in
agreement.</p>
<p>The meetings are long and laborious – occasionally lasting more
than four hours at a time – but seem so far to have been
successful.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Do you get a whiff of anti-Leninist, anti-vanguardist, anarchism?
How can the people ever discuss and decide! They can and they do.
Maybe that is where the twenty-first century will reverse the
perversions of the twentieth. </p>
<br>
<div><br>
</div>
</div>
<br>____________________________________________________________<br>
You received this message as a subscriber on the list:<br>
<a href="mailto:governance@lists.cpsr.org">governance@lists.cpsr.org</a><br>
To be removed from the list, visit:<br>
<a href="http://www.igcaucus.org/unsubscribing" target="_blank">http://www.igcaucus.org/unsubscribing</a><br>
<br>
For all other list information and functions, see:<br>
<a href="http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance" target="_blank">http://lists.cpsr.org/lists/info/governance</a><br>
To edit your profile and to find the IGC's charter, see:<br>
<a href="http://www.igcaucus.org/" target="_blank">http://www.igcaucus.org/</a><br>
<br>
Translate this email: <a href="http://translate.google.com/translate_t" target="_blank">http://translate.google.com/translate_t</a><br>
<br>
<br></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>____________________<br>Bertrand de La Chapelle<br>Tel : +33 (0)6 11 88 33 32<br><br>"Le plus beau métier des hommes, c'est d'unir les hommes" Antoine de Saint Exupéry<br>
("there is no greater mission for humans than uniting humans")<br>
</div>