[Reader-list] Open letter and call for papers from the Italian magazine DeriveApprodi

[Florian Schneider]

Open letter and call for papers from the Italian magazine DeriveApprodi 
to social movements in Latin America, Africa, and Asia

Who we are

This letter is from the editorial collective of the Italian magazine 
DeriveApprodi, a publication of the radical left. DeriveApprodi was 
first published about ten years ago and since then has appeared at 
irregular intervals. It was founded at the beginning of the 1990s with 
a view to continuing the project of critical thought and practical 
politics initiated by the autonomist Marxist and revolutionary 
“workerist” movements. In the 1960s and 1970s, these movements were 
active in interpreting and orienting the worker, proletarian, and 
student struggles that had made Italy into an extraordinary laboratory 
of revolution in the West, truly the “weak link” in the chain of 
imperialist command. During the 1980s, however, the continuity of these 
struggles was violently disrupted: thousands of militants from the 
radical left were imprisoned, aggressive capitalist restructuring 
completely redefined the geography and forms of production, large 
working class concentrations disappeared, and the power of trade unions 
was gradually weakened. Individualism, cynicism, and careerism 
triumphed within institutional politics and throughout society at large.

The great planetary upheavals symbolically identified with the year 
1989 provide the general framework in which our magazine was 
established (along with other factors connected in various ways to the 
theoretical and political legacy discussed above). The following years 
saw the birth of a new movement within the universities, the diffusion 
in the main Italian cities of centri sociali occupati e autogestiti 
(occupied, self-managed social centers) as vehicles of political 
activism and embryos of alternative life forms, and the development of 
new forms of grassroots unionism in service and manufacturing 
industries. All this seemed to confirm our conviction that new 
political spaces were opening up, whereby the radical criticism of the 
present could be linked to a project of social change appropriate to 
the times. During the 1990s, DeriveApprodi became one of the 
theoretical-political laboratories that developed an attempt to examine 
the potential for social conflict inherent within new societal forms 
and in the productive regime established upon the ruins of “Fordism.” 
Topics dealt with in the past by our magazine have included: the 
metamorphosis of labor and new migrations, techniques of social control 
in relation to transformations in the form of citizenship and in the 
political constitution, forms of “exodus,” disobedience and the 
critique of institutional politics, the crises of representative 
democracy and the welfare state. All this was done without adhering to 
a prescribed formula, drawing on some of the most original theoretical 
and political innovations that have emerged from Italy in recent years.

Our proposal

The first twenty-one issues of the magazine have been mostly concerned 
with Italy and more generally with the capitalist “West.” The logic 
here was that any attempt to build solidarity with social movements in 
the global South would be shortsighted until we had managed to expose 
the fault lines and internal crises within what many of us still call 
the “metropolis.” But things changed when, following a path somewhat 
different to the one we had predicted, a huge social and political 
explosion took place in our country. We are referring to the vast 
movement that expressed itself for the first time in the protests 
against the G8 summit in Genoa in July last year. Since then, the 
movement has not stopped growing, giving expression to huge campaigns 
against the “permanent global war,” for migrant rights, and against the 
neoliberal reform of the labor market.

After the momentous and tragic events in Genoa, we held a discussion 
among ourselves, which resulted in the decision to partly modify the 
editorial agenda of DeriveApprodi and to launch a new series. Below are 
listed, in a highly synthetic and necessarily schematic way, some of 
the points on which we reached a consensus within our editorial 
collective.

1. We have been deeply impressed by the feature of a true eruption that 
the movement has assumed for the first time last year in Genoa. In a 
truly surprising way, very heterogeneous individual and collective 
subjects met in the streets and squares of that city. These subjects 
had followed different paths of political development, often difficult 
to detect from the standpoint of official politics, but they had found 
a common political voice in a radical critique of the new order of 
capitalism. In Genoa, and the many demonstrations that followed, this 
became apparent above all in a level of participation that exceeded by 
far the rosiest expectations of the organizers. Subsequently, questions 
arose concerning the emergence of a new type of political agency that 
could not be reduced to the traditional geometry of belonging and 
solidarity characteristic of the radical or institutional left. We 
suggested that it is possible to interpret the new composition of the 
movement by using the concept of the multitude, which was very present 
in our discussions during the 1990s. By deploying this concept, we 
wanted to emphasize the internal richness of the movement (its 
competencies, experiences, knowledges, individual and collective 
demands), a richness that cannot be easily reduced to a unity. While 
highlighting the movement’s extraordinary potential, we carefully 
avoided falling into an ecstatic contemplation of its multitudinous 
composition, insisting rather on the difficulty and unprecedented 
challenge that this multiplicity poses for political thought and 
action. In particular we maintained, often in disagreement with other 
uses of the concept of the multitude, that this concept should not be 
opposed to that of class. To the contrary, we asserted that the concept 
of the multitude acquires its fullest and most proper significance only 
when it refers to a work force dominated by capital (living labor). 
Furthermore, we recognized that such living labor has incorporated 
mobility into its most ingrained habits (from this derives our special 
interest in migratory movements) and finds in its heterogeneity one of 
the crucial elements of its contemporary existence.

2. The new and largely unforeseen characteristics of the movement 
attested the need to devise innovative practices of interpretation and 
analysis. We affirmed that the movement represents a new principle of 
reality, and it is upon this principle, we suggested, that political 
propositions and interpretative hypotheses concerning contemporary 
capitalist reality should be tested. It seemed to us that the existence 
of a strong and radical movement required not a suspension of 
theoretical inquiry for an immersion in everyday politics but an 
additional effort of research and reflection that would accompany 
political militancy and meticulously register its limits and problems. 
Far from renouncing the research and investigations carried out in the 
magazine over the past ten years, we decided to renew, test, and update 
our working principles under new conditions. Thus the decision to 
launch a new series of DeriveApprodi, whose intention is to be fully 
internal to the development of the movement without advocating any 
political line.

3. In planning this new series we also took account of another matter 
that appeared important to us in the wake of Genoa; that is, the 
pressing need for the Italian movement to open itself to global 
dynamics. In fact, one of the most innovative characteristics of the 
wave of mobilizations that began in Seattle was the attempt to 
establish a global movement. Rather than being against globalization, 
such a movement would recognize globalization as the horizon of 
capitalist development, fashioning itself as the agent of another 
globalization, a globalization of struggles and resistance. Integral to 
this realization was an explicit polemic against those, both within and 
outside the movement, who were privileging (and continue to privilege)  
national spaces and the classical mechanisms of the 20th-century 
welfare state as a means of “channeling”, attenuating or blocking the 
processes of “neoliberal” globalization. It is important to understand 
that for us the point is not to declare the unfeasibility of political 
projects that mobilize on the local and/or national levels to organize 
struggles and resistance against global capital. However we do maintain 
that every political project, regardless of the territorial scale upon 
which it operates, should open itself to the global dimension. We 
contend that the global networks that straddle the contemporary world 
were materially constructed not only by capitalist development but also 
by experiences of struggle, from those of workers to those directed 
against colonial powers. Notwithstanding its limits, its ambiguities, 
and the difficulty it has faced in freeing itself from the eurocentric 
nature of many of its concepts and languages, we believe that the 
movement born in Seattle potentially embodies this global dimension of 
resistance. As such, it offers an extraordinary opportunity to 
establish stable channels for the political communication of struggles, 
experiences, and knowledge at the planetary level. We also remain 
convinced, as we wrote in October last year, that the global movement 
“finds a substantial anticipation of its themes, subjects, and 
practices in the globalized workplaces of Asia and Africa during the 
1980s. While we were experiencing the triumph of cynicism, opportunism, 
and fear, new hopes were being kindled outside the Western metropolis. 
New movements were arising against the principle of enclosures and the 
ferocity of the new forms of primitive accumulation: the student 
struggles against the structural adjustment programs of the 
International Monetary Fund, the prolonged workers’ insurrection that 
has accompanied the expansive rhythm of the Korean economy, the 
struggles against the South African apartheid and the Israeli 
occupation of the Palestinian territories, the huge democratic movement 
that repeatedly challenged the dictatorship of Suharto in Indonesia, 
the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas. It would be difficult to speak of a 
global movement today if it did not carry the marks of this genealogy 
in its material constitution.”

It is better to be clear about this: to speak of a global movement is 
neither to deny the need to respect the specificity of local struggles 
nor to ignore the limits that have marked the work of activists and 
organizers in the global north. A certain paternalism on the part of 
the latter has tended to represent the global movement as a series of 
interactions between activist cadres and elites. We believe, to the 
contrary, that the construction of relationships from below should be 
valorized as the most immediate and direct contribution to practices of 
struggle and resistance.

In any case, the affirmation of the global character of the movement is 
much more urgent today in the climate created by the “permanent global 
war” and the new “Bush doctrine” in foreign affairs. This is why we 
decided to launch the new series of DeriveApprodi by asking whether the 
concept of a “global movement” bears weight, by initiating an 
investigation into the current state of the world’s movements. We began 
with an issue dedicated entirely to European movements, made of about 
twenty articles, launched at the European Social Forum in Florence at 
the beginning of November (if you ask we can send this to you in 
Italian, or you can download the materials in their original languages 
from www.deriveapprodi.org). Now we want to follow that up with an 
issue covering the movements in the three continents that once formed 
what was known as the “third world,” and then to complete the first 
phase of the project with an issue dedicated to North America, Oceania, 
and Japan. Our aim is not only to gather informative materials about 
situations that are often under recognized in Italy, but also to 
construct a web of connections in which to subsequently position the 
magazine DeriveApprodi in a transnational context.

Not accidentally have we used the word investigation, since it recalls 
a method of theoretical-political inquiry that is undoubtedly one of 
the most important legacies of the Italian “workerist” tradition that 
we mentioned at the beginning of this letter and in which many of us 
find our intellectual and political roots. By our understanding, an 
investigation is an open cognitive process that produces 
transformation. It can begin with a series of hypotheses but it must 
continually test and problematize these over the course of the inquiry. 
An investigation also presupposes a continuous exchange of ideas and 
experiences between all the different subjectivities involved. In this 
sense, we invite you not simply to tell us “what you think about the 
world”, but to conduct an analysis of the reality that surrounds you, 
putting certainties aside, if only for an instant, to search for new 
potentialities of transformation of what exists. More specifically, we 
ask you for an article of between 4,000 and 6,000 words that describes 
the “state of the social movements” in the context in which you 
operate. The article should steer a middle line between the “narration” 
of political experiences and theoretical reflection. Obviously you are 
free to choose the context you refer to (a community, a city, a 
country, a continent, a specific field of political activity, and so 
on), starting from the specificities of your experience. Considering 
that the magazine should be published at the beginning of May, we ask 
that you send the article to us by 28 February. It would be best, 
however, if you could send us an abstract or a draft beforehand, so 
that we might have a chance to discuss it.

Some working hypotheses

We would like to add a few more lines about the hypotheses upon which 
this investigation is founded. It may be that many of you find the 
receiver of this open letter as the “social movements in Latin America, 
Africa, and Asia” unsatisfactory. It is certainly not our intention to 
suggest that these three continents are in any way homogeneous. To the 
contrary, when it was the norm for both capitalists and revolutionary 
movements to speak of the “third world” as a general category that 
included the “three continents,” it was perfectly clear that the 
realities in which they were taking part were extremely heterogeneous 
(from historical, cultural, social, economic, and political points of 
view). But the “third world” did have a specific reality, which for the 
capitalists consisted in the fact that it referred to territories open 
to the “neocolonial” conquest of markets and raw materials, and from a 
revolutionary standpoint it referred to the potential convergence of 
struggles and revolutionary processes that displayed a common 
anti-imperialist perspective.

It is our conviction that today things are noticeably different. For 
sure, discourses about the so-called end of the third world have a tone 
that is merely and cynically celebratory in the mouth of neoliberal 
theorists. But we believe that such discourses can also have a critical 
dimension, which emphasizes the persistence of huge inequalities in the 
global distribution of wealth and the ongoing unevenness of the 
relations of dependency and hierarchies upon which global capitalism is 
built. At the same time, we hold that these relations are no longer 
organized along simple lines such as those referred to by concepts like 
first, second, and third worlds, but also north and south, or center 
and periphery. When we speak of the “end of the third world,” we refer 
to a situation in which there is a gradual convergence between the 
“metropolis” and the “periphery.” In other words, one finds in both 
these sites (although clearly in a fundamentally unequal way), the 
entire span of forms of production, work, and social life that coexist 
under global capitalism.

Within global capitalism there seems to exist a determined economic 
sector, the so-called “global economy,” which plays a leading role in 
processes of production and reproduction that are at once processes of 
domination and exploitation. This sector comprises a combination of 
segments of industries, national and regional economies that have 
ramifications, in varying proportions, throughout the world. It 
conditions directly or indirectly the life of a growing multitude of 
men and women, in prospect the entire world population. It is extremely 
dynamic but also highly selective and exclusive. In addition, its 
boundaries are profoundly unstable: the majority of the planet’s 
inhabitants, again in accordance with factors that vary widely between 
countries and regions, live outside the “global economy.” Nonetheless 
they must come to terms daily, often with extraordinary creativity, 
with its effects.

We have sketched out this hypothesis only very roughly, and we would 
like to test and develop it over the course of the investigation. What 
we want to emphasize is that these developments carry great potential 
for the communication and circulation of political struggles and 
experiences. At a time when powerful warlords, be they Christians, 
Jews, Muslims, or Hindus, carry on about the “clash of civilizations,” 
it is surprising to note how often social movements use an 
extraordinarily similar language among themselves: how the zapatista 
struggle are echoed in the practices of movements in the United States 
and Germany, how Indian peasants and African rural communities are 
rewriting the grammar of environmentalism in ways analogous to the 
green movements in Western Europe, or how the dramatic Argentine revolt 
of December 2001 seemed to impart fundamental lessons to the Italian 
movement. One could continue to expand this list, without forgetting 
the way in which the European radical and reformist left looked at the 
victory of Lulu in Brazil as if it were something that concerned them 
directly, and not in terms of dated schemes of “internationalist 
solidarity.”

In our judgment, one of the most pressing tasks of the present time is 
to reconstruct internationalism under changed conditions. We would 
phrase it this way: to develop through global communication between 
movements the intuition of world unity that lives in the everyday 
dynamics of struggles.

On this basis, then, we would like to conduct the investigation in 
which we invite you to participate. Below we indicate, in a schematic 
and absolutely nonexclusive way, a series of problems on which we think 
it is appropriate to develop a work of inquiry, and upon which we 
invite you to elaborate. In any case, it goes without saying that you 
are free to follow this scheme only in part or not at all.

1) First we would like to understand what type of resonance the great 
initiatives of the global movement from Seattle to Genoa, from 
Johannesburg to Durban, have had in the environment in which you live. 
In the issue of DeriveApprodi dedicated to European movements we 
published an interview with an Algerian comrade who emphasized the 
eurocentric and merely spectacular character of these initiatives. Do 
you share this opinion, or do you think that, regardless of its limits, 
the message of a radical revolt against global capital can circulate at 
the planetary level?

2) After two meetings in Porto Alegre in Brazil, the World Social Forum 
attempted to organize itself on a territorial basis, planning 
continental meetings in Asia, Africa, and Latin America? How do you 
judge this effort?

3) Apart from the initiatives that we have described as the “global 
movement,” is there a single experience of struggle (for example, the 
zapatista movement in Latin America, the Palestinian Intifada, or the 
struggle of the landless in Brazil) that has provided you with a 
reference point for a new wave of struggles and social mobilizations?

4) What are the main issues of mobilization in the context in which you 
operate? What relations exist between mobilizations concerned with 
labor issues, trade unions, those concerned with social groups that 
live under harsh conditions of exclusion, and those concerned with 
issues like the condition of minorities?

5) How would you describe the composition of the social movements in 
your context? How are the relations between militants and social groups 
structured? What relations exist between militants of different 
generations and of the different genders? What are the most active 
social groups, and what role do women play within them? How do 
different social groups communicate and converge in acts of 
mobilization?

6) How has the concept of militancy changed in recent years? What is 
the impact of militancy on the everyday life of activists? What is the 
relation between communities and organizations in the construction of 
your political practices?

7) We would be interested to know, when the question is relevant, how 
the politicization of cultural and religious identities interacts with 
the development of social struggles, both in organizational terms and 
in terms of the mobilization of specific groups.

8) What are the forms of expression, within your specific situation, of 
the demands and needs of those groups (women, migrants, indigenous 
populations, rural populations) whose historical vulnerability and 
marginalization have been aggravated by the processes of neoliberal 
globalization?

9) What type of relation exists between social movements and 
institutions? How have institutions (and the political and social 
classes that sustain them) changed in the context of the neoliberal 
politics characterized by the total commodification of the lifeworld, 
the privatization of public services, and the attack on the living 
standards of the working classes?

Let us repeat that these questions are only a list of issues that seem 
relevant to us. It is possible that some of them will have no relevance 
in your situation. If this is the case, ignore them … and write about 
something else!

In the hope that our initiative raises your interest, we send you a hug 
from Italy …

The editorial collective of DeriveApprodi magazine.