Notes from Nowhere Collective (editors)
Verso
2003
521 pages
Hello out there on the internet! I borrowed We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism from the Toronto Public Library.
There are at least two texts that are fundamentally important to the study of the worldwide movement to resist globalization. The first of these texts is Naomi Klein’s No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, which examines the global effects of consumer branding and its associated activities, with regards to consumption, production, and opposition. The other text is Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt’s Empire, a theoretical text proposing that a shift in political and social organization has occurred from a period of modernist capitalism to a postmodernist ‘empire’ oriented around networks and perpetual crisis. We Are Everywhere can be added to this list as a companion text that details numerous accounts of resistance to the damaging actions of multi-national corporations and international administrative organizations.
We Are Everywhere is a book assembled by the Notes from Nowhere Collective, a group of western (I gather from reading each member’s brief bio at the back of the book that most of them are from the U.K. although at least one member appears to be American) writers, educators and activists. They are all involved with other activist media outlets and events such as Indymedia and Reclaim the Streets parties. Through their engagement with an international activist media, and with anti-globalization efforts in their home countries, the collective appeared to develop a holistic view of the worldwide activist scene, which they brought to this text.
We Are Everywhere is a comprehensive series of dispatches, written by a large number of different writers and in a number of different forms, from the global anti-capitalist movement. The book includes articles and anecdotes about various actions, writings whereby individuals representing an activist group survey that groups actions, photo-essays and interviews with activists. The book also maintains a timeline, of events of significance to the anti-globalization movement, that runs along a bottom register of most of its pages.
In addition to its wide array of textual forms, We Are Everywhere strives to be truly global in its scope. The Notes from Nowhere collective begin the book with accounts of the 1994 events in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas surrounding the foundation of the ELZN movement and their demands for autonomy for the indigenous populations of that region. Thus the book charts a history of international activism that begins in January 1994 in Mexico and attempts to include pieces on actions and protests from as many different locales as possible, from Mexico to Italy, Kenya, Brazil, Paupa New Guinea and so forth, everywhere, ending with a 2003(?) interview with South African activist and intellectual, Ashwin Desai. In Empire, Hardt and Negri discuss how multi-national corporations have realized some of the ideas put forth by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, where the localized nodes of networked corporations can adjust their operations to suit the contours of the location. Many pieces featured in We Are Everywhere describe the unique tactics of protest and sabotage developed by local activist organizations in counter-force to shape-shifting corporations. Furthermore, many pieces describe anti-globalization protests as carnivalesque (c.f. Reclaim the Streets), and out of the hundreds of black-and-white photos featured in the book many of them depict protesters in costume and blur the lines between revelry and serious political activity.
The Notes from Nowhere collective have compiled a volume that fits into a book-type that attempt to survey a global activist scene. Other such books include The New Revolutionaries, edited by Tariq Ali, which represents the global far-left scene of the 1960s, and Goran Therborn’s From Marxism to Post-Marxism?, which surveys Marxist activity worldwide in the contemporary period. Ali’s book is primarily written by well-known movement intellectuals and spokespeople, and From Marxism is the work of a single author. The editors of We Are Everywhere give voice to the participants of the movement and its associated sub-movements, and provides a view into global efforts to confront global capital between the years 1994 and 2003.
Related: see the Signalfire blog for daily accounts of anti-globalization activity, workers strikes, student protests and general unrest from around the world.
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