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Peregrinations of an (ex?)Pariah
Further Reflections of a Rootless Internationalist, Lima, 2006[1]
by Peter Waterman
Internationalist mutterings
My title is a paraphrase of Flora Tristán’s, Peregrinations of a Pariah (1838). Flora, a socialist, internationalist and feminist outcast in Post-Revolutionary France, came to Peru (1832-4), and eventually entered the national pantheon. Her name was later adopted by Peru’s best-known feminist NGO. Whilst I have myself no such possible capacities, aspirations, or expectations, I have felt something of a pariah – or at least a publicly invisible person - during my repeated peregrinations in Peru. Much of this is recorded in a report of my last trip to Peru (Waterman 2005).
The reason for my pariah status – apart from a severely limited understanding of spoken Spanish and a certain shyness – has been my internationalist concerns and convictions during a 20-year period in which internationalism in Peru had been reduced to ‘development cooperation’, to a traditional rhetorical socialist gesture, or even to an ‘empty signifier’ (a concept freely articulated with the most diverse others). I recall a Peruvian explaining to me that it could hardly develop internationalism when it did not yet have a national identity. I responded that, given globalisation, any democratic national identity required the development of an internationalist one.[1]
This situation is not unique to Peru. It was recognised in the UK in the 1970s, when the humanist Marxist historian and activist, Edward Thompson said:
The ‘banner’ of socialist internationalism has become tattered indeed in the last decades, and on every side. It has not been one to carry proudly aloft. At the most one has carried a few sheets of paper, and often one has been reduced to muttering to oneself. The commitment has been to an ‘International’ of the imagination, which has had only fleeting embodiment in real movements, detached unequivocally from both Stalinism and from complicity with the reasons of capitalist power. To maintain that commitment has been to be an ‘alien’ not only within this country but within great sections of the purported socialist and Marxist movement itself. (Thompson 1978:iv)
I had been coming, thus, to Peru, as an alien in more than one sense. Until 2006?
An offer I couldn’t refuse
I was invited to Lima by the Progama de Estudios Sobre Democracia y Transformación Global (henceforth, DemocraciaGlobal, the URL of its website). This is an academic-cum-activist project intimately related to the Helsinki-based Network Institute for Global Democratisation (NIGD, URL). The link is provided by the Finnish academic, Teivo Teivainen, an activist in and writer on the World Social Forum, a leading figure within the NIGD), who also created DemocraciaGlobal. Whilst, last year, the future of this project looked quite uncertain, it this year seems to have established itself in the academy (Social Sciences, University of San Marcos), in at least the radical-democratic corner of Peruvian civil society, and on the Web. This does not ensure its future, dependent as such projects are on key individuals, a cadre of committed supporters and – as ever – foreign funding (‘development cooperation’?). It turned out that the half-airticket provided me by the Programa was a considerable proportion of its annual budget.
I spent five weeks in Lima, August 12-September 16. The programme agreed with DemocraciaGlobal included the following:
· Commenting at the launch of one of the two DemocraciaGlobal books by the Portuguese academic/activist, Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2006a, b);
· A presentation on new thinking around the World Social Forum to a Programa event at the University of San Marcos (Waterman 2006a);
· A paper on internationalism and to an international conference on the brilliant Peruvian Marxist, José Maria Mariátegui (Waterman 2006b);
· A presentation at the Casa Mariátegui (URL) on a Global Labour Charter Movement project of my own (Waterman 2006c);
· And then a last paper at the launch of my own book in Spanish (Waterman 2006d).
· I was asked, further, along with my Peruvian compañera, Gina Vargas (another leading figure in the WSF) to advise on the future of DemocraciaGlobal.
Contacting a new friend, a Peruvian labour specialist, finally, I discovered:
A Latin-American trade-union seminar on the struggle against multinationals (Seminario Internacional Plades 2006), which I was able to observe as and when other commitments permitted. Although I made here no contribution, attendance contributed to a piece I had to write on a coming merger of the international unions (Waterman 2006e).
Three eras of internationalism?
As the programme unfolded, I began to feel as if I was passing through three eras of the Left in Peru.
The first was that of the 1920s, of Mariátegui and international Communism. The international Mariátegui conference was held in a lecture theatre, in the cellar of a major, if rundown, library in Lima. Speakers were obliged to speak down from the stage to an audience sitting in rows below. A number of the participants seemed to be involved in the ritual worship of, rather than critical engagement with, compañero Mariátegui.
My charter presentation took place some days later in the Casa Mariátegui, a library and museum that seems to be being kept alive by an otherwise isolated Communist Party. Or maybe it is the Casa that is keeping the party alive? Apart from the occasional piece of electronic equipment and the Mariátegui icons, the Casa looked pretty much as it must have done in the 1920s.
The second period was that of the long capitalist boom that followed World War II and the freezing of social movements into state-dominated patterns of the Cold War. This period was accompanied in the labour movement by notions of ‘social partnership’ in the West, Lenin’s ‘transmission belt’ role in the East. In the South it was, with exceptions, a period of subordination to the models of East or West, or of a party/state-oriented populism. This period was represented for me by the Latin-American union seminar I briefly attended, sponsored as it was by the regional organisation of the Brussels-based International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, known in the sub-continent as ORIT (URL), and hosted by a Western-funded labour resource centre in Lima, PLADES (URL).
The third era is that of the new and still fragile ‘global justice and solidarity movement’ (GJ&SM, born 1994?), related to the World Social Forum (from 2001), and represented by the events of DemocraciaGlobal itself. Things have moved on somewhat since Edward Thompson had to define his imagined internationalism negatively. This new movement is, according to various commentators, ‘anti-globalisation’, ‘alter-globalisation’, ‘anti-capitalist’, but also ‘the second world power’, ‘a network of radical-democratic networks’, or the ‘GJ&SM’. It is both an outcome and source of a new emancipatory internationalism. And it has been making its difficult entry into a Peru only lately aware of globalisation, hegemonic and anti-hegemonic.
However, I was evidently experiencing - or imagining - these three eras in present-day Peru and within a few days of each other. The implication is that they also represent different contemporary approaches to internationalism and emancipation. Today, moreover, these periods, spaces or approaches actually overlap, being less separate pyramids than networks with particular origins, interests and foci. This may become apparent in what follows. If not, it should become so in a not-unimaginable future. I will go through these eras/tendencies/spaces in the above-identified order rather than a contemporary chronological one.
Three experiences of internationalism?
First experience. My paper for the Mariátegui Conference (Waterman 2006b) was an exegesis and commentary on just one essay of Mariátegui, this being written ‘in the light of’ the new GJ&SM. For an audience consisting of Peruvian and international Mariátegui specialists, my contemporary critique of his thought must have been unusual, to say the least. It was, for example, followed by one that celebrated Mariátegui, as if His Thought and Works were holy writ, or, perhaps, an appendix of the Communist Manifesto. Although other presentations may have been more critical, the event exuded an antiquarian air. It hardly suggested any contribution to a re-invention of that left – national, continental or international - to which Mariátegui had made such contributions.
My other Mariátegui experience was actually sponsored by DemocraciaGlobal and hosted by the Casa Mariátegui (I did mention overlaps). This was on my project for a Global Labour Charter (Waterman 2006c). Two trade union leaders from the Confederación General de Trabajo del Peru (founded by Mariátegui) commented. The second was, indeed, its General Secretary, Juan José Gorritti. The CGT-P is still affiliated with the (ex-?) Communist World Federation of Trade Unions, and is unhappy with the West-European-based unification to take place this November (Pacho 2005). Gorritti seemed to feel that my proposal was consistent with the clasista (class) unionism that his centre propounds - just as it did when I first visited Peru a generation ago! Actually my charter proposal has been inspired by the GJ&SM, but it does draw from the 19th-20th century emancipatory tradition within which the CGTP is ensconced. Whilst this might suggest a possible dialogue between, for example, the CGTP and DemocraciaGlobal, this would require both motivation and effort on both sides.
My second experience was that of the 50-year-old and West-Europe-based international trade union organisations. However, the ORIT appears to also be the left of the Brussels-based ICFTU. ORIT’s recent campaigning declaration (Labour’s Platform for the Americas 2006) has even been effectively excluded from the ICFTU Website! The subject of the seminar was trade union action against multinational corporations (Seminario Internacional Plades, URL). I was intrigued to see that these MNCS included Latin-American ones, and that conflicts between Brazil and Bolivia, Uruguay and Argentina, were being frankly discussed. Moreover, the seminar had reserved at least two sessions for broader social issues. One was on community resistance to the ecological damage of MNC mining operations in Peru, the other a debate on ‘whether it is possible to articulate the actors: unions, networks, NGOs and social organisations’. In both cases the relevant ‘others’ (indigenous communities, NGOs and networks) were present on the panels or in the audience. I await the printed outcome of this seminar, at which I was – if clearly not a pariah - a somewhat silent observer. But my impression was actually of a set of union organisations influenced by the rise of general social protest in the Americas, by the World Social Forum and, therefore, not quite what they used to be even five years ago.
OK, my third era was that of the GJ&SM, this being represented by the activities of DemocraciaGlobal.
These activities began with the one-week visit of Boaventura de Sousa Santos, including the launching by DemocraciaGlobal of his two books, by other lectures, visits and informal events and consultations. Boa is a Portuguese academic legal specialist who spends half the year in a US university but who also has much experience of Brazil, and who has been deeply involved in, and has written about the World Social Forum. Previously little known in the Anglo-Saxon world, he currently has seven books in English listed on Amazon UK (URL). Possibly more movement-aware than Hardt and Negri (2004), certainly less romantic than John Holloway (2002), Boa is, in my opinion, one of the outstanding theorists of the new emancipatory movement. One of his projects, now appearing with Verso in London, is a multi-volume series entitled Reinventing Social Emancipation: Towards New Manifestos’. I have been long inspired by both title and subtitle, and, indeed, contributed to one of the volumes. Another of his works, about to appear with Zed in London, is The Rise of the Global Left: The World Social Forum and Beyond. The two books in Spanish, launched in Lima by DemocraciaGlobal, represent something of a coup for this tiny project. The first is a collection of essays subtitled For an Emancipatory Political Culture (Santos 2006a). The second is The Popular University of the 21st Century (Santos 2006b) and consists of an academic critique of and alternative to the increasingly neo-liberalised university, and a political proposal for a WSF-orientated ‘popular university of social movements’. In my own commentary at the launch (Waterman 2006f), I said:
Underlying his work is the provocative notion that any significant new social movement needs its own theory – variously referred to in this book as epistemology, ontology, sociology, etc. I think he is doing something extremely ambitious - offering us a new worldview. I may be wrong, but my present feeling is that his work requires comparison with such major social thinkers as Marx, Weber, the Frankfurt School of Critical Sociology and such postmodernists as Foucault. His writing is dense, in the sense of having a major new concept on every page. Or of extending such new concepts with two or three new supporting ones in following paragraphs. Boa’s book is also, I think, highly original, owing little to those I have mentioned. Whilst clearly at home with the last great emancipatory tradition – that of Marx and Marxism – he seems to treat it as part of the heritage of that national industrial colonial (or anti-colonial) capitalist phase that is now being surpassed. If Marxism was intended to be the theory, and socialism the politics, of a privileged emancipatory subject of the 19th and 20th centuries (the industrial proletariat), Boa seems to be offering us a theory and politics for the emancipatory movement of our new epoch – one that consists of an infinitely wider collection of numerous such hypothetically emancipatory subjects.
A miracle of solidarity, information technology and… umm… improvisation?
I have to say that the launching of my own book (Waterman 2006g) was a major experience for me, now aged 70 and pensioned. It was, after all, my first sole-authored book in Spanish, it has significant Peruvian roots, I was involved in the whole translating/editing/publishing process, and the project itself involved major inputs from an informal network extending from DemocraciaGlobal itself to at least Uruguay and South Africa. The launch was scheduled for my last day in Lima, I never thought it would actually appear on time, and when it did, this was in 17 copies of an announced 1,000. The 17 were more than sufficient for a launch, attended by only twice as many people (‘Internationalism’ is still only beginning to ring bells in Peru). My own presentation was based on the book’s introduction, ‘A Message from Mariátegui’. Embarrassingly generous commentaries were made by not only by Gina Vargas (my major, rumbustious, interlocutor for 16 years) but also by the Secretary of an NGO, Forum Solidaridad Peru (URL), Luisa Cruz Hefti (2006). The publication was thus itself a minor miracle of international solidarity work, information technology and improvisation. How could it possibly be more a child of its times? It is also, it must be said, a rather classy-looking product.
Improvisation, of course, is no necessary guarantee of success. It is true that the collaboration between DemocraciaGlobal and Social Sciences at San Marcos has now produced three books of international quality (one by Gina is planned for). Local distribution can be assumed – at least in Lima. But, like most of the smaller countries in Latin America, Peru has yet to establish Latin-American book distribution, never mind that in the USA or Spain. Improvisation also meant that we never got down to the projected consultation with DemocraciaGlobal. In principle, of course, this can take place electronically. It also should do so.
DemocraciaGlobal has not rested on such laurels as might have been demonstrated by a month or so of intense activity. Its renewed website indicates both the visit of a French lesbian-feminist specialist on Latin American and global issues, Jules Falquet, and the Third Forum of Solidarity Culture in Villa El Salvador (Lima’s Soweto). The creative efforts of a dozen or so young student supporters deserve the equally energetic support of the global justice movement that it is itself contributing to.
‘Internationalism’, ‘Transnationalism’, the ‘New Global Solidarity’ and ‘Global Cyberactivists’
Alberto Melucci (1943-2001), inventor of the concept ‘new social movements’ did refer to periods of ‘latency’, ‘invisibility’, or ‘submergence’ in the history of social movements, and argues their importance for what follows (Melucci 1991:208-9). My Lima trip, 2006, also reminded me that, yes, I had kept a boat afloat during the long trough between the internationalist peaks of 1968 and the present day...or maybe, at least, tomorrow.
It is not that there was no internationalism during the trough. Indeed, it is largely on the basis of such new experiences (mostly partial) or moments (often brief) that I base my own analyses and proposals. But it is true that for 20-30 years there was little or no new discourse on internationalism. Even today, indeed, the most sophisticated thinkers either repeat the conventional, but now surely-archaic, word ‘internationalism’ or that horrible new ‘value-free’ one ‘transnationalism’. These are commonsense terms that nonetheless make the notion irrevocably dependent on those of the ‘nation’, ‘nationality’, ‘nationalism’, ‘nationalists’ (compare the otherwise radically different orientations of Anderson (2002) and Tarrow (2005)) . In so far as I have attempted to surpass such concepts with the notion of ‘global solidarity’ then I have also certainly tried to innovate. I relate this latest ‘solidarity with distant others’ to the long history of emancipatory universalisms, as well as to the short one of internationalism.
In an evocative preface to my Lima book, which I also greatly appreciate, the doyen of South African labour studies, Eddie Webster (2006), refers to me as ‘a rooted cosmopolitan’ (for another South African understanding, see Rooted Cosmopolitan, URL). He is quoting from the book of Sidney Tarrow. Tarrow’s is perhaps the most significant contribution to what I might have once thought of as my personal obsession (or at least a wilderness in which I was shouting alone). It is therefore more than welcome and requires more consideration than I can possibly give it here. The problems with the epithet are, 1) that I am more than somewhat rootless and 2) that a ‘cosmopolitan’, has always been, for me, a Bourgeois Liberal European Enlightenment intellectual who thinks that we would have eternal international peace and justice if everyone spoke French (‘cosmopolitanism’ is actually a neologism with this provenance)!
I have been thinking that I will eventually have to make a case for us ‘rootless cosmopolitans’, who are inevitably thin on the ground – in both senses. We work primarily in Cyberia, our existence occasionally supplemented by more earthly air-travel, and we may have only marginal socio-political relations with our places of birth, of residence or temporary visit. I actually agree with the sentiment of Tarrow, though I would call these people, ‘locally-rooted global solidarity activists’. For me, however, ‘local’ would refer not only to a place (he privileges the state-national) but also to a specific social subject. This could mean an identification or attachment to women, to an indigenous community or – in my case – the labour movement. In so far, however, as regional, continental and global communities and identities become increasingly important, and in so far as cyberspace is an increasingly ‘real virtuality’ (Castells 1996-8), there are going to be activists who operate primarily at such levels or in such spaces. The slogan should surely be, ‘Two, three, many types of global solidarity activist!’. The question, as with those primarily identified with more limited localities/social subjects, is how each type understands, lives in and struggles within an increasingly interdependent universe. ‘Rootless cosmopolitan’ was, as Tarrow knows, a pejorative epithet, if not a death sentence, in the mouth of Stalin, where it was a euphemism for ‘Jew’ (of which I am also one, or one type of). This alone suggests a case for recognition rather than circumvention. Or maybe for reinvention, as ‘global cyberactivists’?
Back to the Peru I started with, the UK of my birth and the Netherlands in which I have lived for over 30 years.
After my third or fourth oral presentation in Spanish, I decided I really ought to retire from being a pensioned but globalised academic: it is just too demanding, at my age, to master another language or even improvise in one. But it later occurred to me that global solidarity requires my effort to speak Spanish, and my listeners’ effort to understand this. (It also required the admirable efforts of various amateur translators/interpreters to make sense between us).
Despite having lived outside the UK for all but five or ten years of my adult life, despite having spent less than one year of the last 20 in Peru, I still feel attached and grateful to both – if in different ways and for different reasons. There is always the danger of a specialist on internationalism knowing ‘nothing about anywhere and everything about nowhere’ (my own self-deprecatory epithet). Peru, the UK, the Netherlands (as well as South Africa, another country I have had a long solidarity history with) are places to which I also have these emotional attachments. They help keep my feet on the ground even when my head is in Cyberia (an earthly metaphor for an intangible cyberspace) and, of course, Utopia (which means both ‘nowhere’ and ‘good place’).
The Hague, October 2006.
References
Amazon UK. (URL)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/homepage.html/026-3022129-3978867
Anderson, Perry. 2002. ‘Editorial: Internationalism – a Breviary’, New Left Review, No.14, March-April. http://newleftreview.net/?page=article&view=2376
Casa Mariátegui (URL) http://www.yachay.com.pe/especiales/mariategui/index.htm
Casa Mariátegui (Blogspot) http://casamariategui.blogspot.com/2006/09/actividades-setiembre-2006.html
Castells, Manuel. 1996-8. The Information Age: Economy, Society, Culture (3 Vols). Oxford: Blackwells.
Coordinadora Andina de Organizaciones Indígenas. 2006. ‘Declaración de Cusco, miércoles 19 de julio de 2006: Hacia la construcción de estados plurinacionales y sociedades interculturales’. http://www.asc-hsa.org/article.php3?id_article=366
Cruz Hefti, Luisa. 2006.
DemocraciaGlobal, Programa de Estudios Sobre Democracia y Transformación Global (URL) www.democraciaglobal.org/
Forum Solidaridad Peru. (URL) www.psf.org.pe/
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2004. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin.
Holloway, John. 2002. Change the World Without Taking Power. London: Pluto.
Labour’s Platform for the Americas. 2006.
http://www.gpn.org/research/orit2005/index.html
Melucci, Alberto. 1991. Nomads of the Present Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society (edited by John Keane and Paul Mier). Philadelphia: Temple Press.
NIGD, Network Institute for Global Democracy (URL) www.nigd.org/
ORIT. Organización Interamericana de Trabajo (URL) http://www.cioslorit.net/espanol/index.asp
Pacho, Valentín. 2005. ‘La utopía de la unidad sindical’ (The Utopia of Union Unity), in Consejo Consultivo Laboral Andino. Reflexiones sobre la unidad internacional sindical. Lima: Consejo Consultivo Laboral Andino/Programa Laboral de Desarrollo. pp. 20-29.
http://www.ccla.org.pe/publicaciones/pdf/cuadernos/cuaderno14.pdf
PLADES, Programa Laboral de Desarrollo. (URL) http://www.plades.org.pe/index.php
Rootless Cosmopolitan. http://tonykaron.com/what-is-rootless-cosmopolitan/
Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2006a. Conocer desde el Sur: Para una cultura política emancipatoria (Southern Knowledge: For an Emancipatory Political Culture). Lima: Programa de Estudios Sobre Democracia y Transformación Global/Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos.
Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. 2006b. La universidad popular del siglo XXI (The Popular University of the 21st Century). Lima: Programa de Estudios Sobre Democracia y Transformación Global/Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos.
Seminario Internacional Plades. (URL) ‘Estrategias y Acciones Frente a las Empresas Transnacionales’, http://www.plades.org.pe/eventos/evento.php?id=8
Tarrow, Sydney. 2005. The New Transnational Activism. London: Cambridge University Press.
Thompson, Edward. 1978. The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays. London: Merlin.
Tristán, Flora. 1833-4. Peregrinations d'une Paria. 2 vols. Paris: Arthus Bertrand.
Waterman, Peter. 2005. ‘A Letter from Lima: Is the World Still Broad and Alien?’, http://www.nigd.org/docs/ALetterFromLimaPeterWaterman.
Waterman, Peter. 2006a. ‘Pensando sobre y alrededor del proceso del Foro Social Mundial’ (Thinking about and around the World Social Forum Process). (Lecture Notes).
Waterman, Peter. 2006b. ‘Internacionalismos desde Mariátegui a los movimientos de solidaridad global’ (Internationalisms from Mariátegui to the Global Solidarity Movements). (Unpublished).
Waterman, Peter. 2006c. ‘Un movimiento para una carta laboral global?’ (A Global Labour Charter Movement?’. (Unpublished).
Waterman, Peter. 2006d. ‘Introducción: Un mensaje de Mariátegui’ (Introduction: A Message from Mariátegui’, in Los nuevos tejidos nerviosos del internacionalismo y la solidaridad. Lima: Programa de Estudios Sobre Democracia y Transformación Global/Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos. Pp. 17-23.
Waterman, Peter. 2006e. ‘The International Union Merger of 2006: Virtually Invisible?’. (Forthcoming in International Labour Rights).
Waterman, Peter. 2006f. ‘Primeras reflexiones acerca de la ‘cultura política emancipatoria’ de Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ (First Reflections About the ‘Emancipatory Political Culture of Boaventura de Sousa Santos). (Unpublished).
Waterman, Peter. 2006g. Los nuevos tejidos nerviosos del internacionalismo y la solidaridad (The New Nervous Systems of Internationalism and Solidarity). Lima: Programa de Estudios Sobre Democracia y Transformación Global/Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos.
Webster, Eddie. 2006. ‘Presentación: Un cosmopolita arraigado’ (Foreword: A Rooted Cosmopolitan), in Peter Waterman, Los nuevos tejidos nerviosos del internacionalismo y la solidaridad. Lima: Programa de Estudios Sobre Democracia y Transformación Global/Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos. Pp.11-12.
by Peter Waterman
Internationalist mutterings
My title is a paraphrase of Flora Tristán’s, Peregrinations of a Pariah (1838). Flora, a socialist, internationalist and feminist outcast in Post-Revolutionary France, came to Peru (1832-4), and eventually entered the national pantheon. Her name was later adopted by Peru’s best-known feminist NGO. Whilst I have myself no such possible capacities, aspirations, or expectations, I have felt something of a pariah – or at least a publicly invisible person - during my repeated peregrinations in Peru. Much of this is recorded in a report of my last trip to Peru (Waterman 2005).
The reason for my pariah status – apart from a severely limited understanding of spoken Spanish and a certain shyness – has been my internationalist concerns and convictions during a 20-year period in which internationalism in Peru had been reduced to ‘development cooperation’, to a traditional rhetorical socialist gesture, or even to an ‘empty signifier’ (a concept freely articulated with the most diverse others). I recall a Peruvian explaining to me that it could hardly develop internationalism when it did not yet have a national identity. I responded that, given globalisation, any democratic national identity required the development of an internationalist one.[1]
This situation is not unique to Peru. It was recognised in the UK in the 1970s, when the humanist Marxist historian and activist, Edward Thompson said:
The ‘banner’ of socialist internationalism has become tattered indeed in the last decades, and on every side. It has not been one to carry proudly aloft. At the most one has carried a few sheets of paper, and often one has been reduced to muttering to oneself. The commitment has been to an ‘International’ of the imagination, which has had only fleeting embodiment in real movements, detached unequivocally from both Stalinism and from complicity with the reasons of capitalist power. To maintain that commitment has been to be an ‘alien’ not only within this country but within great sections of the purported socialist and Marxist movement itself. (Thompson 1978:iv)
I had been coming, thus, to Peru, as an alien in more than one sense. Until 2006?
An offer I couldn’t refuse
I was invited to Lima by the Progama de Estudios Sobre Democracia y Transformación Global (henceforth, DemocraciaGlobal, the URL of its website). This is an academic-cum-activist project intimately related to the Helsinki-based Network Institute for Global Democratisation (NIGD, URL). The link is provided by the Finnish academic, Teivo Teivainen, an activist in and writer on the World Social Forum, a leading figure within the NIGD), who also created DemocraciaGlobal. Whilst, last year, the future of this project looked quite uncertain, it this year seems to have established itself in the academy (Social Sciences, University of San Marcos), in at least the radical-democratic corner of Peruvian civil society, and on the Web. This does not ensure its future, dependent as such projects are on key individuals, a cadre of committed supporters and – as ever – foreign funding (‘development cooperation’?). It turned out that the half-airticket provided me by the Programa was a considerable proportion of its annual budget.
I spent five weeks in Lima, August 12-September 16. The programme agreed with DemocraciaGlobal included the following:
· Commenting at the launch of one of the two DemocraciaGlobal books by the Portuguese academic/activist, Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2006a, b);
· A presentation on new thinking around the World Social Forum to a Programa event at the University of San Marcos (Waterman 2006a);
· A paper on internationalism and to an international conference on the brilliant Peruvian Marxist, José Maria Mariátegui (Waterman 2006b);
· A presentation at the Casa Mariátegui (URL) on a Global Labour Charter Movement project of my own (Waterman 2006c);
· And then a last paper at the launch of my own book in Spanish (Waterman 2006d).
· I was asked, further, along with my Peruvian compañera, Gina Vargas (another leading figure in the WSF) to advise on the future of DemocraciaGlobal.
Contacting a new friend, a Peruvian labour specialist, finally, I discovered:
A Latin-American trade-union seminar on the struggle against multinationals (Seminario Internacional Plades 2006), which I was able to observe as and when other commitments permitted. Although I made here no contribution, attendance contributed to a piece I had to write on a coming merger of the international unions (Waterman 2006e).
Three eras of internationalism?
As the programme unfolded, I began to feel as if I was passing through three eras of the Left in Peru.
The first was that of the 1920s, of Mariátegui and international Communism. The international Mariátegui conference was held in a lecture theatre, in the cellar of a major, if rundown, library in Lima. Speakers were obliged to speak down from the stage to an audience sitting in rows below. A number of the participants seemed to be involved in the ritual worship of, rather than critical engagement with, compañero Mariátegui.
My charter presentation took place some days later in the Casa Mariátegui, a library and museum that seems to be being kept alive by an otherwise isolated Communist Party. Or maybe it is the Casa that is keeping the party alive? Apart from the occasional piece of electronic equipment and the Mariátegui icons, the Casa looked pretty much as it must have done in the 1920s.
The second period was that of the long capitalist boom that followed World War II and the freezing of social movements into state-dominated patterns of the Cold War. This period was accompanied in the labour movement by notions of ‘social partnership’ in the West, Lenin’s ‘transmission belt’ role in the East. In the South it was, with exceptions, a period of subordination to the models of East or West, or of a party/state-oriented populism. This period was represented for me by the Latin-American union seminar I briefly attended, sponsored as it was by the regional organisation of the Brussels-based International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, known in the sub-continent as ORIT (URL), and hosted by a Western-funded labour resource centre in Lima, PLADES (URL).
The third era is that of the new and still fragile ‘global justice and solidarity movement’ (GJ&SM, born 1994?), related to the World Social Forum (from 2001), and represented by the events of DemocraciaGlobal itself. Things have moved on somewhat since Edward Thompson had to define his imagined internationalism negatively. This new movement is, according to various commentators, ‘anti-globalisation’, ‘alter-globalisation’, ‘anti-capitalist’, but also ‘the second world power’, ‘a network of radical-democratic networks’, or the ‘GJ&SM’. It is both an outcome and source of a new emancipatory internationalism. And it has been making its difficult entry into a Peru only lately aware of globalisation, hegemonic and anti-hegemonic.
However, I was evidently experiencing - or imagining - these three eras in present-day Peru and within a few days of each other. The implication is that they also represent different contemporary approaches to internationalism and emancipation. Today, moreover, these periods, spaces or approaches actually overlap, being less separate pyramids than networks with particular origins, interests and foci. This may become apparent in what follows. If not, it should become so in a not-unimaginable future. I will go through these eras/tendencies/spaces in the above-identified order rather than a contemporary chronological one.
Three experiences of internationalism?
First experience. My paper for the Mariátegui Conference (Waterman 2006b) was an exegesis and commentary on just one essay of Mariátegui, this being written ‘in the light of’ the new GJ&SM. For an audience consisting of Peruvian and international Mariátegui specialists, my contemporary critique of his thought must have been unusual, to say the least. It was, for example, followed by one that celebrated Mariátegui, as if His Thought and Works were holy writ, or, perhaps, an appendix of the Communist Manifesto. Although other presentations may have been more critical, the event exuded an antiquarian air. It hardly suggested any contribution to a re-invention of that left – national, continental or international - to which Mariátegui had made such contributions.
My other Mariátegui experience was actually sponsored by DemocraciaGlobal and hosted by the Casa Mariátegui (I did mention overlaps). This was on my project for a Global Labour Charter (Waterman 2006c). Two trade union leaders from the Confederación General de Trabajo del Peru (founded by Mariátegui) commented. The second was, indeed, its General Secretary, Juan José Gorritti. The CGT-P is still affiliated with the (ex-?) Communist World Federation of Trade Unions, and is unhappy with the West-European-based unification to take place this November (Pacho 2005). Gorritti seemed to feel that my proposal was consistent with the clasista (class) unionism that his centre propounds - just as it did when I first visited Peru a generation ago! Actually my charter proposal has been inspired by the GJ&SM, but it does draw from the 19th-20th century emancipatory tradition within which the CGTP is ensconced. Whilst this might suggest a possible dialogue between, for example, the CGTP and DemocraciaGlobal, this would require both motivation and effort on both sides.
My second experience was that of the 50-year-old and West-Europe-based international trade union organisations. However, the ORIT appears to also be the left of the Brussels-based ICFTU. ORIT’s recent campaigning declaration (Labour’s Platform for the Americas 2006) has even been effectively excluded from the ICFTU Website! The subject of the seminar was trade union action against multinational corporations (Seminario Internacional Plades, URL). I was intrigued to see that these MNCS included Latin-American ones, and that conflicts between Brazil and Bolivia, Uruguay and Argentina, were being frankly discussed. Moreover, the seminar had reserved at least two sessions for broader social issues. One was on community resistance to the ecological damage of MNC mining operations in Peru, the other a debate on ‘whether it is possible to articulate the actors: unions, networks, NGOs and social organisations’. In both cases the relevant ‘others’ (indigenous communities, NGOs and networks) were present on the panels or in the audience. I await the printed outcome of this seminar, at which I was – if clearly not a pariah - a somewhat silent observer. But my impression was actually of a set of union organisations influenced by the rise of general social protest in the Americas, by the World Social Forum and, therefore, not quite what they used to be even five years ago.
OK, my third era was that of the GJ&SM, this being represented by the activities of DemocraciaGlobal.
These activities began with the one-week visit of Boaventura de Sousa Santos, including the launching by DemocraciaGlobal of his two books, by other lectures, visits and informal events and consultations. Boa is a Portuguese academic legal specialist who spends half the year in a US university but who also has much experience of Brazil, and who has been deeply involved in, and has written about the World Social Forum. Previously little known in the Anglo-Saxon world, he currently has seven books in English listed on Amazon UK (URL). Possibly more movement-aware than Hardt and Negri (2004), certainly less romantic than John Holloway (2002), Boa is, in my opinion, one of the outstanding theorists of the new emancipatory movement. One of his projects, now appearing with Verso in London, is a multi-volume series entitled Reinventing Social Emancipation: Towards New Manifestos’. I have been long inspired by both title and subtitle, and, indeed, contributed to one of the volumes. Another of his works, about to appear with Zed in London, is The Rise of the Global Left: The World Social Forum and Beyond. The two books in Spanish, launched in Lima by DemocraciaGlobal, represent something of a coup for this tiny project. The first is a collection of essays subtitled For an Emancipatory Political Culture (Santos 2006a). The second is The Popular University of the 21st Century (Santos 2006b) and consists of an academic critique of and alternative to the increasingly neo-liberalised university, and a political proposal for a WSF-orientated ‘popular university of social movements’. In my own commentary at the launch (Waterman 2006f), I said:
Underlying his work is the provocative notion that any significant new social movement needs its own theory – variously referred to in this book as epistemology, ontology, sociology, etc. I think he is doing something extremely ambitious - offering us a new worldview. I may be wrong, but my present feeling is that his work requires comparison with such major social thinkers as Marx, Weber, the Frankfurt School of Critical Sociology and such postmodernists as Foucault. His writing is dense, in the sense of having a major new concept on every page. Or of extending such new concepts with two or three new supporting ones in following paragraphs. Boa’s book is also, I think, highly original, owing little to those I have mentioned. Whilst clearly at home with the last great emancipatory tradition – that of Marx and Marxism – he seems to treat it as part of the heritage of that national industrial colonial (or anti-colonial) capitalist phase that is now being surpassed. If Marxism was intended to be the theory, and socialism the politics, of a privileged emancipatory subject of the 19th and 20th centuries (the industrial proletariat), Boa seems to be offering us a theory and politics for the emancipatory movement of our new epoch – one that consists of an infinitely wider collection of numerous such hypothetically emancipatory subjects.
A miracle of solidarity, information technology and… umm… improvisation?
I have to say that the launching of my own book (Waterman 2006g) was a major experience for me, now aged 70 and pensioned. It was, after all, my first sole-authored book in Spanish, it has significant Peruvian roots, I was involved in the whole translating/editing/publishing process, and the project itself involved major inputs from an informal network extending from DemocraciaGlobal itself to at least Uruguay and South Africa. The launch was scheduled for my last day in Lima, I never thought it would actually appear on time, and when it did, this was in 17 copies of an announced 1,000. The 17 were more than sufficient for a launch, attended by only twice as many people (‘Internationalism’ is still only beginning to ring bells in Peru). My own presentation was based on the book’s introduction, ‘A Message from Mariátegui’. Embarrassingly generous commentaries were made by not only by Gina Vargas (my major, rumbustious, interlocutor for 16 years) but also by the Secretary of an NGO, Forum Solidaridad Peru (URL), Luisa Cruz Hefti (2006). The publication was thus itself a minor miracle of international solidarity work, information technology and improvisation. How could it possibly be more a child of its times? It is also, it must be said, a rather classy-looking product.
Improvisation, of course, is no necessary guarantee of success. It is true that the collaboration between DemocraciaGlobal and Social Sciences at San Marcos has now produced three books of international quality (one by Gina is planned for). Local distribution can be assumed – at least in Lima. But, like most of the smaller countries in Latin America, Peru has yet to establish Latin-American book distribution, never mind that in the USA or Spain. Improvisation also meant that we never got down to the projected consultation with DemocraciaGlobal. In principle, of course, this can take place electronically. It also should do so.
DemocraciaGlobal has not rested on such laurels as might have been demonstrated by a month or so of intense activity. Its renewed website indicates both the visit of a French lesbian-feminist specialist on Latin American and global issues, Jules Falquet, and the Third Forum of Solidarity Culture in Villa El Salvador (Lima’s Soweto). The creative efforts of a dozen or so young student supporters deserve the equally energetic support of the global justice movement that it is itself contributing to.
‘Internationalism’, ‘Transnationalism’, the ‘New Global Solidarity’ and ‘Global Cyberactivists’
Alberto Melucci (1943-2001), inventor of the concept ‘new social movements’ did refer to periods of ‘latency’, ‘invisibility’, or ‘submergence’ in the history of social movements, and argues their importance for what follows (Melucci 1991:208-9). My Lima trip, 2006, also reminded me that, yes, I had kept a boat afloat during the long trough between the internationalist peaks of 1968 and the present day...or maybe, at least, tomorrow.
It is not that there was no internationalism during the trough. Indeed, it is largely on the basis of such new experiences (mostly partial) or moments (often brief) that I base my own analyses and proposals. But it is true that for 20-30 years there was little or no new discourse on internationalism. Even today, indeed, the most sophisticated thinkers either repeat the conventional, but now surely-archaic, word ‘internationalism’ or that horrible new ‘value-free’ one ‘transnationalism’. These are commonsense terms that nonetheless make the notion irrevocably dependent on those of the ‘nation’, ‘nationality’, ‘nationalism’, ‘nationalists’ (compare the otherwise radically different orientations of Anderson (2002) and Tarrow (2005)) . In so far as I have attempted to surpass such concepts with the notion of ‘global solidarity’ then I have also certainly tried to innovate. I relate this latest ‘solidarity with distant others’ to the long history of emancipatory universalisms, as well as to the short one of internationalism.
In an evocative preface to my Lima book, which I also greatly appreciate, the doyen of South African labour studies, Eddie Webster (2006), refers to me as ‘a rooted cosmopolitan’ (for another South African understanding, see Rooted Cosmopolitan, URL). He is quoting from the book of Sidney Tarrow. Tarrow’s is perhaps the most significant contribution to what I might have once thought of as my personal obsession (or at least a wilderness in which I was shouting alone). It is therefore more than welcome and requires more consideration than I can possibly give it here. The problems with the epithet are, 1) that I am more than somewhat rootless and 2) that a ‘cosmopolitan’, has always been, for me, a Bourgeois Liberal European Enlightenment intellectual who thinks that we would have eternal international peace and justice if everyone spoke French (‘cosmopolitanism’ is actually a neologism with this provenance)!
I have been thinking that I will eventually have to make a case for us ‘rootless cosmopolitans’, who are inevitably thin on the ground – in both senses. We work primarily in Cyberia, our existence occasionally supplemented by more earthly air-travel, and we may have only marginal socio-political relations with our places of birth, of residence or temporary visit. I actually agree with the sentiment of Tarrow, though I would call these people, ‘locally-rooted global solidarity activists’. For me, however, ‘local’ would refer not only to a place (he privileges the state-national) but also to a specific social subject. This could mean an identification or attachment to women, to an indigenous community or – in my case – the labour movement. In so far, however, as regional, continental and global communities and identities become increasingly important, and in so far as cyberspace is an increasingly ‘real virtuality’ (Castells 1996-8), there are going to be activists who operate primarily at such levels or in such spaces. The slogan should surely be, ‘Two, three, many types of global solidarity activist!’. The question, as with those primarily identified with more limited localities/social subjects, is how each type understands, lives in and struggles within an increasingly interdependent universe. ‘Rootless cosmopolitan’ was, as Tarrow knows, a pejorative epithet, if not a death sentence, in the mouth of Stalin, where it was a euphemism for ‘Jew’ (of which I am also one, or one type of). This alone suggests a case for recognition rather than circumvention. Or maybe for reinvention, as ‘global cyberactivists’?
Back to the Peru I started with, the UK of my birth and the Netherlands in which I have lived for over 30 years.
After my third or fourth oral presentation in Spanish, I decided I really ought to retire from being a pensioned but globalised academic: it is just too demanding, at my age, to master another language or even improvise in one. But it later occurred to me that global solidarity requires my effort to speak Spanish, and my listeners’ effort to understand this. (It also required the admirable efforts of various amateur translators/interpreters to make sense between us).
Despite having lived outside the UK for all but five or ten years of my adult life, despite having spent less than one year of the last 20 in Peru, I still feel attached and grateful to both – if in different ways and for different reasons. There is always the danger of a specialist on internationalism knowing ‘nothing about anywhere and everything about nowhere’ (my own self-deprecatory epithet). Peru, the UK, the Netherlands (as well as South Africa, another country I have had a long solidarity history with) are places to which I also have these emotional attachments. They help keep my feet on the ground even when my head is in Cyberia (an earthly metaphor for an intangible cyberspace) and, of course, Utopia (which means both ‘nowhere’ and ‘good place’).
The Hague, October 2006.
References
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http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/homepage.html/026-3022129-3978867
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