Footnotes

1. Whilst I am using the conventional shorthand distinction between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’, I am aware of the numerous ways in which these two categories overlap and in which, for example, the ‘new’ can reproduce today the characteristics associated with the ‘old’ - 50 or 100 years ago! Whilst, further, I am identified with the GJ&SM, I hope this is not to the point of being partisan. As passing comments and other listed writings of my own might suggest, I have a critical posture toward such. It is simply here a matter of arguing the significance of a globalised networked capitalism, the GJ&SM, and the emancipatory possibilities of networking, with advocates of the traditional labour institutions, the union and the party.
' 2. Non-Brits may need guidance to this famous, if extinct, creature: it comes from a sketch in the TV comedy series, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, in which a pet-shop owner is trying to persuade a potential if sceptical customer that a stuffed parrot, nailed to its perch, is actually alive, if presently resting.
3.Significantly, Civicus, a previously hyper-moderate NGO that claims to represent global civil society, fails to share the enthusiasm of the ICFTU for the Global Compact. It would seem that the NGO status allows it to be less devoted to at least partnership with TNCs than the ICFTU (García-Delgado 2005).
4. Paradoxical is that the position of the international labour movement is so much more incorporated into the inter-state institutions and discourses than a radical-nationalist state. Thus, at the 60th anniversary of the UN, New York, September 2005, Guy Ryder, General Secretary of the ICFTU, was clearly talking from inside an existing system, proposing the reform, improvement, implementation of something taken as already existing, at least potentially. And then appealing to the augean state system to clean out its own stable:

Joining together to achieve [social] justice is our [UN plus nation-states and unions? PW] best contribution to making sure that we and our children can live in a world free from poverty, desperation and conflict in future years. Let us all rise to the challenge. The UN has known its greatest successes, and won its lasting authority from those occasions when its member states have risen above narrow self interest to the uplands from which the vision of a better common future becomes clear. This Summit must be one such occasion. It is in your hands to make it so.
http://www.un.org/webcast/summit2005/statements.html
5. On the other hand, the President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez was going beyond the parameters of the inter-state system, as accepted not only by the unions but most representatives of global civil society. He was raising fundamental questions about the UN, proposing to remove its headquarters from the United States, as a rogue state, and the re-invention of the UN to meet popular needs:

The original purpose of this meeting has been completely distorted. The imposed center of debate has been a so-called reform process that overshadows the most urgent issues, what the peoples of the world claim with urgency: the adoption of measures that deal with the real problems that block and sabotage the efforts made by our countries for real development and life. http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=46000

The difference here would seem to be between thinking within and thinking without (beyond) the box. Global civil society is going to pay little attention to the ICFTU’s timid proposals. I would expect those of Chavez to provoke more debate.

Dieter Lesage has not only written a major reflection on Empire, in Dutch/Flemish (Lesage 2005?), but also spoken - more relevantly than at the colloquium - about the global justice movement (http://www.indymedia.be/news/2004/10/88654.php ). I am inclined to feel, however, that Lesage was discussing the wrong book! The more recent work by Hardt and Negri, Multitude (2004), would surely have provided a more relevant point of reference. It addresses itself to new forms of labour, to workers, peasants, unions, to a new understanding of oppression/exploitation, to new emancipatory forms of self-articulation and sites of struggle, to war and to democracy – and even to the reform of interstate institutions! There is, of course, no reason why the colloquium should have felt obliged to start with this book, but it would at least have begun the event in the right century.
6. I was was assured that every effort had been made by Amsab to obtain Southern speakers. But this hardly explains the presence of the Brussels-based union twins, whose institutional declarations really added nothing to my earlier characterisation of the ICFTU.
7. This was Marcel van der Linden (2005), making an original contribution of wide empirical and literary reference.
8. This voice was somewhat surprising given that it was that of Anne Morelli, whose co-edited compilation (Gotovitch and Morelli 2003), makes a serious contribution to the history of internationalism.
9. Thus, Debate List is a remarkably busy, lively and virtually unedited left list, covering matters national, regional, continental, international (other countries) and global (globalisation and the global justice movement). Whilst leaning in the direction of the new movements in South Africa and internationally, it is also pluralistic, permitting contributions from anarchists, autonomists, Cosatu officers, Communists, African National Congress supporters, social democrats, liberal democrats (I think) and half a dozen other possibly unidentifiable tendencies. It should not, moreover, be assumed that South Africa is the only country in the South in which traditional union practices are being forcefully questioned. In Argentina, and elsewhere in Latin America, related challenges are being made. Consider http://www.iisg.nl/labouragain/publications.html and other pages on the Labour Again site at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. Nor is the necessary new orientation confined to the South. A modest Canadian socialist initiative seems to me rather more open to the global justice movement than the Belgians appeared to be. This is the Socialist Project http://www.socialistproject.ca/, which has published a provocative piece on a new labour internationalism (Gindin 2004), and has proposed the necessity for networking if the labour movement is to be revived http://www.web.net/~sclstpjt2003/relay/r01_Rethinking_the_Labour_Movement.html.