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The New Solidarity: A Case Study of Cross-Border Labor Networks and Mural Art in the Age of Globalization

Fred Evans, Duquesne University
Barbara McCloskey, University of Pittsburgh

Abstract

We argue that the traditional notion of solidarity is being, and should be, replaced by “network solidarity.” This ew, non-hierarchical type of solidarity links labor unions, activist organizations, progressive academic groups such as Radical Philosophy Association, and concerned individuals in relation to various endeavors including cross-border organizing. It also supports equally both modernism’s penchant for unity and postmodernism’s commitment to heterogeneity and novelty. In order to illustrate this new type of solidarity and support our claims for it, we focus on a concrete example of a cross-border labor network. Moreover, we will show how art, specifically labor murals, provides this network with the identity necessary for its cohesiveness and yet preserves the heterogeneity of the groups composing it.

In the 1980's, the anarchist Living Theater of New York staged a production of "Prometheus at the Winter Palace." Near the end of the play, the audience was invited to join the actors in reenacting a key moment in the Russian Revolution of 1917: the storming of the Czar’s winter palace. We all rushed on stage, overpowered the "guards," and piled our bodies atop the replica of the edifice that had marked the end of the Czar's power and the beginning of a new social-political experiment. This experiment (Soviet Russia’s Marxist-Leninist system) and the understanding of Marxism that inspired it involved a concept of solidarity. Many of us took this concept to mean allegiance to the working class in its world-historical role as the vehicle of human emancipation and the overcoming of exploitation and alienation. To be progressive entailed promoting actions and policies that advanced the working class's struggle against the bourgeoisie; to be reactionary meant that one was going in the other direction, retarding the hesitant movement of history toward a classless society. The concept of solidarity, in sum, designated unity with others in the name of the working class and the progressive direction of history.

Women and minorities were right to question the narrowness of this notion of solidarity. There was no guarantee that a working class victory would entail their freedom once social economic classes were eliminated. Because the world-historical role of the working class or of any other group seemed at best only partial, women and minorities placed more emphasis on the distinctive aims of their own movements. Working class issues were not forgotten by these groups, but they were no longer at the top of the agenda or at least were not accepted without serious qualifications. The proliferation of these and other alternative movements, for example, environmentalism and gay and lesbian rights, has increasingly blurred the meaning of solidarity. As we will try to make clear, a new form of solidarity should, and is, replacing the more limited version of that concept.

Globalization and the Issue of Solidarity

Although the role of women's and other social movements is of tremendous importance in relation to the changing concept of solidarity, it is part of a broader transformation. The cultural critic Fredric Jameson, for example, portrays society as a spatial and social labyrinth or “postmodern” setting that lacks a center and is paradoxically everywhere and nowhere. Because this setting no longer has clearly defined social classes and other traditional points of reference, he feels that we must learn to construct a new “cognitive map” in order to understand and confront society as well as to chart our location within it. He and many other thinkers add that all societies have been overtaken by “globalization.” They characterize globalization as the subordination of all parts of the world to the capitalist economic system and the latter’s accelerated means of control through communication, travel, and financial markets; or, even more abstractly, as a “network of powers and counterpowers structured in a boundless and inclusive architecture,” a “non-place,” simultaneously “everywhere and nowhere,” that expands by including other powers within the “open-space” of its network rather than by annexing or destroying them.

Part and parcel to postmodern, globalized society is the idea that no fixed human nature or identity exists; that each of us is instead a plurality of selves, for instance, our class, gender, ethnic, or religious identities that themselves are ever changing. As a consequence, the notion of liberation no longer means overcoming alienation from some authentic fixed mode of existence or universal human essence. Nor does iliberation anymore reduce to the elimination of economic exploitation or of racism and sexism. Rather, the emphasis is now on continually creating new forms of existence. The French philosopher Michel Foucault, for example, valorizes “the undefined work of freedom” and "the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance."

What can solidarity mean in relation to societies without centers, persons without stable identities, and liberation dedicated to the endless production of new forms of existence? Moreover, even if we can dream of a counter-movement against capitalism’s world-wide reach, especially a “globalization from below” of workers, women, minorities, environmentalists, and other marginalized or exploited groups, we are still confronted with a grave problem implicit in the characterization of postmodern society and globalization that we have just reviewed: how could those groups “from below” transform this global social structure – one described as being simultaneously everywhere and nowhere – into the “somewhere” necessary for effective resistance? What possible “cognitive map” could one draw of it?

Our answer to this problem is two-fold. First, we recognize the complex, network structure of globalized society. But we see this as a network of “social voices” rather than of abstract, disembodied structures and processes. On the one hand, these voices are composed of discourses – bodies of words – and the non-linguistic practices and structures of the economic and social institutions connected to those discourses. For example, the expert talk and books of capitalist economists, as well as the propaganda and praise (“free enterprise!”) of those who benefit from capitalism, is combined with the accumulation and circulation of capital, the extraction of surplus value from labor, and the other practices and structures of the profit-motivated part of the U.S. economic system. On the other hand, voices also include the bodies or “subjects” who enact these discourses and non-linguistic practices. Globalized society, therefore, may be complex, but it can be located or mapped in terms of the flesh and blood bodies that carry out its functions and are shaped by those functions.

The second part of our answer to the anonymity of global capital concerns a counter-network that can help convert the “everywhere and nowhere” status of global capital into the “somewhere” necessary for confronting it. We will argue that the groups resisting global capital today also share a network form of identity, that is, a creative intersection or interplay of voices, that stands in opposition to the “globalization from above” of the corporations and their supporting institutions. This network is different from the network of globalized capital in that it is not hierarchical and it does not aim at subordinating its diversity to a uniform standard such as monetary exchange value and technocratic procedures. At the same time, it involves a “network solidarity” that is distinct from the traditional, “vanguardist” and hierarchical form of organization and solidarity that confronted, but also mimicked, the hierarchical organization of both traditional and globalized capitalism. Indeed, this new solidarity valorizes difference and novelty as much as it does the unified aims around which it coalesces in times of struggle.

In the case of both globalized capital and the opposition to it from below, the voices in these networks are interconnected, shot-through with and formed by one another. Each voice, in other words, is simultaneously part of the identity and “the other” of the rest. Each of the two types of network is therefore a “hybrid body,” the interplay of jointly-constituting forces, though with the different characteristics – hierarchical or democratic organization – that we have indicated. Because these two bodies or types of networks also partially determine the form of existence of each other, they together form the overall hybrid structure or “multi-voiced body” of our globalized world.

This new notion of network solidarity requires an extended example in order to render it clear and compelling. We will therefore discuss a project that has occupied us in the last few years – cross-border labor solidarity and the mural art that has accompanied it. In particular, we will show the extent to which the labor murals connected to cross-border labor solidarity play an important role in illuminating the tension between the network and the individual components that make it up. The murals we shall consider ceaselessly confront the hybrid voice of the labor network with the latter’s self-contradictory tendency to adopt a hierarchical form of unity. These murals thus lend concrete and instructive form to the central problems involved in today’s project of globalization from below.

The Priority of Network Solidarity

The network solidarity we will discuss is ultimately more promising than a hierarchically organized social movement or institution with a univocal (single-voiced) form of solidarity. In an article on transnational workers’ networks, Thalia Kidder and Mary McGinn distinguish networks from hierarchical organizations and coalitions. Hierarchical organizations, such as labor unions and academic institutions, tend toward a homogeneous identity by way of common ownership or a contractual framework. Similarly, coalitions focus on a common goal to be achieved by a single strategy or centrally coordinated sets of actions. In contrast, networks are made up of laterally organized groups of independent individuals and organizations that share a common but general vision, work on various campaigns for a period of time, and pursue a variety of tactics on separate time lines. They engage in a dense exchange of information and services, insert new ideas in international and local debates, frame and attract attention to issues, and encourage action. Besides unions, international labor networks often involve foundation, church, academic or other non-union conveners, groups, and fund raisers. These networks also emphasize empowerment, consciousness raising, changes in the norms and policies of institutions, community development, gender and racial equality, health and the environment, and other concerns that are not directly economic.

There are both advantages and disadvantages to networks like these. Some of the advantages are flexibility on issues and methods of dealing with them. The networks' dense exchanges of information allow their participants to disseminate news, interpret information, and make decisions rapidly. The mutual dependency or reciprocity of the different nodes or groups in the network for this information and services means that any gain for a particular node is a gain for all the participants in the network. Kidder and McGinn point out that this mutual indebtedness links the members together more strongly and encourages each to forego the right to pursue their own interests at the expense of the other members. Because of the diversity of their nodes, networks "encourage reframing of issues and of our understanding of ourselves in relationship to others in the global economy." The network, in other words, both supports innovation and reflects and reinforces the solidarity among the nodes of the network.

The disadvantages of networks are that they have a weaker financial base and less accountability than do many unions and other hierarchical or centralized organizations. Nor can networks rival hierarchical organizations in producing uniform and high quality results repeatedly, for example, union labor contracts and mass political mobilization for elections. Kidder and McGinn point out that combining networks and hierarchical organizations can be very effective. They give the example of Guatemalan Coca Cola workers in the late 1970s using both large international unions and the networks among unions, students, and religious organizations to win recognition for their union and to force parent companies to take responsibility for the illegal actions of their subsidiaries. The international unions allowed for rapid mobilization of large numbers of people and resources, and the networks "broadened the campaign and increased its strength in influencing government and stockholder actions at Coca Cola."

Kidder and McGinn are clearly right that networks and hierarchical organizations are effective in combination with one another. But the relationship between the two is of key importance. Networks more accurately reflect the positive side of postmodern society – its diversity and innovativeness – than do hierarchical forms of organizations. Therefore, part of the purpose of hierarchical organizations should always be to serve the functioning of networks, and ultimately the primacy of society’s hybridity and ever-metamorphosing existence, over the counter tendency to produce unitary and dominant identities.

Illustrations of Network Solidarity in Action

Our characterization of activist and international solidarity networks can be made more concrete by considering the Pittsburgh Labor Action Network to the Americas (PLANTA) and its relationship to other organizations, including the Radical Philosophy Association (RPA). Because labor art murals are part of the story of this international network, they will also help us deal with a serious problem: how can a network preserve its heterogeneity and still have enough identity to avoid becoming lost in its component organizations?

Included within PLANTA’s immediate network are the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), other trade unions, a number of community activist organizations, and students and faculty from Pittsburgh universities and high schools. The general purpose of PLANTA is to raise consciousness concerning the issue of human and labor rights, and to promote social and economic justice within the Americas. PLANTA uses its newsletter to inform the local community on issues of labor abuses in the Americas, of local events concerning these issues, and the broader perspective of the history and politics of globalization. Members have protested international sweatshop practices as well as labor injustice in the maquiladoras. PLANTA has also supported cross-border public lectures by Mexican labor leaders, workers, and activists.

For the past several years, PLANTA has taken on a project that involves close coordination with more hierarchically organized labor unions. The project's aim is to support the cross-border “strategic [labor] organizing alliance” between UE (located in the U.S.) and a Mexican federation of independent unions, Frente Auténtico del Trabajo (FAT) or Authentic Labor Front (headquartered in Mexico City). The alliance “is an ongoing effort to build a new kind of international solidarity focused on organizing and based on rank-and-file involvement.” Both UE and FAT advocate rank-and-file democracy in the workplaces they organize. Since the 1930s, UE has promoted democracy and ethnic and gender equality in the workplace and in the labor movement. FAT has championed these same goals in Mexico since 1960 under the banner of “autogestión” or “rank and file democratic management.” Besides coordinating the organization of unions across a number of industries (including the textile, garment, shoemaking, rubber, and auto parts industries, and agriculture and construction), FAT has established worker-owned cooperatives and farm worker and community organizations. FAT was a founder and remains an active participant in the Mexican Action Network against Free Trade (RMALC), a group of more than 100 Mexican organizations that opposed NAFTA. That network, in turn, is part of a larger network that includes networks in the US and Canada. Besides its struggles for workers’ rights in Mexico, FAT has provided help to the Zapatistas in organizing indigenous workers in Chiapas and has aided the Teamsters and the United Farm Workers in organizing apple workers in Washington State as well as the UE in organizing Latino workers in Milwaukee.

In recent years, the Radical Philosophy Association (RPA) has become linked to this network through the efforts of several members, including Evans, a co-author of this article and a member of PLANTA. Since 1995, RPA members have met with FAT organizers within the context of international philosophers’ conferences in Mexico and RPA conferences in the US. These exchanges have been reported in the RPA newsletter where they have served the purpose of alerting members to the importance of independent labor unions in Mexico for enhancing democracy and achieving social justice both at home and across borders. In response, members of RPA have been contributing generously to the FAT solidarity project that raises funds for FAT labor organizers. Besides expressing cross-border solidarity, these funds help fired Mexican workers to continue with organizing efforts in their former place of employment.

As this above account makes clear, PLANTA is a network organization and is also a node in a larger cross-border network revolving at least temporarily around the Mexican labor organizer project. PLANTA and this larger network both appear to fit the arrangement between laterally and hierarchically organized groups that is favored by Kidder and McGinn. But art also intersects with this network and is especially illuminating of the potentials and residual problems of network solidarity at the present historical moment.

In conjunction with UE, FAT has undertaken a mural exchange project. The idea for the mural exchange originated with Christine Gauvreau, founder-director of a New Jersey-based activist artists’ organization called LAMP (Labor Art and Mural Project). Institutionally independent of unions and political parties, LAMP regularly undertakes solidarity work with organized labor and parties on the left. In addition to murals, LAMP creates agit-prop materials for demonstrations, including banners and large-scale puppets. LAMP’s self-conscious purpose is to mobilize signs and symbols in the interests of globalization from below. The group’s artistic director, Mike Alewitz, publishes an internet newsletter, The Agit-Prop News, which further disseminates LAMP’s activities. It also informs its readership about ongoing labor struggles and activism around the world.

Alewitz was chosen by the leaders of UE and FAT to produce a mural for the main hall of FAT headquarters in Mexico City. His Mexican counterpart, Daniel Manrique Arias, arrived in the US in 1997 to render his mural on the exterior wall of UE headquarters in Chicago. In both cases, the artists faced the challenge of expressing the labor movement’s new aspirations and responding in their work to the kind of cross-cultural cooperation the murals were to embody.

Alewitz’s mural, which was unveiled in April 1997, reactivates labor’s repressed history as an instrument of its ongoing struggle. The form and content of his work make explicit reference to the imagery of the Mexican muralist, Diego Rivera, whose art of the 1930s embraced an earlier version of pan-American labor solidarity. The mural’s binary structure also mimics Rivera’s aesthetic of class struggle that characteristically pitted oppressors against the oppressed. At the center of Alewitz’s mural is a figure composed of swelling torso, strong arms, and long hair whose purple skin defies racial specificity. The figure wears a yellow T-shirt with the clenched fist symbol of the UE-FAT Alliance. This purple, androgynous worker serves as a pointed reference to the diverse face of labor today. It also functions as a key emblem of the mural’s emphasis on hybridity as a central feature of today’s insurgent globalization from below.

Indeed, instances of the “hybrid” structure the mural’s overall production and subject matter. Alewitz first consulted at length with FAT workers concerning the contents of the mural. The end result offers a compendium of labor and artistic histories. Various facets of the mural point, at one and the same time, to shared labor struggle as well as to the specificity and differences of separate US and Mexican traditions. FAT workers insisted, for instance, on the inclusion of heroes of the FAT union, who flank the central FAT-UE Alliance worker. In consultation with FAT workers, Alewitz also decided to include two heroes of US labor history, Albert and Lucy Parsons who appear at the far left and right of the composition. Their presence in the mural links the history of cross-border Mexican labor activism to that of the United States. Albert Parsons was hanged for his role in the Haymarket riots of 1886 in Chicago, Illinois. His wife, Lucy, of mixed African and Mexican descent, dedicated the rest of her life to the labor movement, women’s rights, and the clearing of her husband’s name. The two hold in their hands bread and roses, symbols of the Lawrence Textile Workers’ strike of 1912. The Wobblies (Industrial Workers of the World) who assisted in the 1912 strike are also represented in the mural by their symbol, the black cat, which peers over the left shoulder of the central worker. An anarcho-syndicalist union formed in 1905, the Wobblies dedicated themselves to organizing workers from all industries into a single union undivided by gender, ethnicity, or skill. They embraced the concept of cross-border labor solidarity in the beginning of the century by assisting the Flores Magón brothers in planning the first battles of the Mexican Revolution of 1910.

Looming over the entire composition is the figure of Emiliano Zapata, the revered leader of the Mexican Revolution whose presence serves to link the dynamic hybridity of the murals’ other motifs to a new form of political struggle. Zapata’s name has most recently been invoked in the current Zapatista struggle in Chiapas, which, through strategic use of cyberspace, has pioneered a genuinely networked form of resistance against globalized capital and labor exploitation. Champion of agrarianism and the rights of Mexico’s peasantry, Zapata’s connection to the land is suggested by integration of his rounded shoulders and striped jacket into the furrows of Mexico’s tilled mountainous slopes. His outstretched hands encompass the land and the major representatives of US and Mexican labor radicalism, past and present, defining the current struggle as a continuation of labor’s historical and unfinished project of economic and social justice. The composition is enframed by a border of variously colored outstretched hands, traced from those of FAT workers and organizers, that stand as symbols of the gesture of solidarity invoked by the mural project overall.

Daniel Manrique Arias, who designed the Chicago mural of the UE-FAT cross-border mural project, was present in Mexico City while Alewitz was in the process of producing his mural. He assisted Alewitz by blocking in portions of the underdrawing. Manrique came to the attention of FAT and UE because of his artistic activism and mural work in Tepito, a poor, ethnically diverse urban neighborhood located north of the historic center of Mexico City. Traveling from Mexico to the US in 1997, Manrique presented his mural plans to a group of UE union members. These members made recommendations designed to render the mural more responsive to the urban experience of US labor and its ethnic and gender diversity. Entitled in Spanish and English “Manos Solidarias—Manos Libres; Hands in Solidarity—Hands of Freedom,” the mural was unveiled in September 1997 on the exterior wall of the UE workers’ district hall in Chicago.

While Alewitz drew upon the tradition of Mexican muralism for the realization of his mural project, Manrique reciprocated by invoking the European tradition of cubism in portraying the jubilant figures who serve as the main focus of his composition. Foregoing the militant brigades of workers common in labor imagery of the 1920s and 1930s, Manrique instead rendered the central group of workers with a graceful sweep of line that emphasizes their dance-like features of extended legs and upraised arms. Male and female figures, constituted through a mixing of multi-colored attributes, are separated off from one another by a cubistic spatial grid, yet united through the clasping of wrists and shared balletic movement. The clenched fists of the jubilant figures contrast with outstretched hands represented on the banner that they hold aloft. The binary structure of class struggle that defined Alewitz’s contribution to the mural exchange gives way in Manrique’s image to a dialectic of open and closed hands, of solidarity and resistance, as defining features of insurgent globalization from below.

State and local government officials as well as labor leaders used the unveiling of the Chicago mural as an opportunity to set forth a different approach to international trade and to denounce pending Fast-Track legislation and NAFTA expansion. Since their unveiling, the UE-FAT murals continue to serve as rallying points and educational tools for raising public consciousness in Mexico and the US about the need for cross-cultural understanding and cross-border labor solidarity in today’s globalized economy.

A second mural exchange is underway, this time between two women artists. Their works concentrate first and foremost on women’s experience and contribution to the labor movement. The first of these murals was completed in 2000 and occupies the long wall of the UE local meeting hall in Erie, Pennsylvania. Entitled “A Woman’s Place: A Warrior in the Struggle for International Solidarity,” the work is by the acclaimed San Francisco muralist, Juana Alicia. Alicia’s mural, like those of Alewitz and Manrique, employs a rich and detailed iconography that draws on the history of labor in the US and Mexico.

Taken together, these works visualize a complex exchange and commingling of diverse social, historical, and cultural languages that nonetheless remain specifiable and coherent. The murals affirm the centrality of art and cultural exchange as key components in developing the kind of cross-cultural understanding necessary for labor’s international solidarity in the face of corporate globalization. They serve both to translate organized labor into a broader social movement and to extend the network of which they are a part. The network, in turn, places these murals within the social space of continuous reinvention and reinterpretation where different constituencies of the network are able to challenge the murals’ tendency to subsume difference – gender, ethnic, sexual, and so on – under the banner of class and class struggle. Since their creation, these murals have been posted on the internet; one of the authors of this paper, McCloskey, has discussed them at academic conferences and in articles published in the US and Europe. This activity has added artists and academics to the network of global labor struggle.

Besides these achievements, the murals have three other roles with respect to the labor network’s resistance to global capital. The first of these is their ability to localize, indeed concretize, labor. This localization in conjunction with labor’s network form or organization challenge skepticism regarding organized labor’s ability to confront and effectively resist global capital. This skepticism assumes that organized labor’s hierarchical structure makes it an integral part of the capitalist order. It overlooks that labor can be part of a network like the one we have detailed here – an organization of heterogeneous threads that both mirrors the network of globalized capital and provides a basis for resistance to it.

Secondly, these murals remind us that globalization continues to carry within it class divisions that have ramifications for how resistant networks must be constructed. The form of these murals, as paint on walls, stands outside the internet and mobile agit-prop interventions that now constitute privileged modes of artistic globalization from below. Like their on-line and street counterparts, however, these murals concentrate time and space, the history of labor and its international reach, into an immediate present that mobilizes the continuous struggle of labor networks against capitalism.

But the labor murals also fulfill a third role as part of their involvement in networks of resistance to capital. The relationship between the various organizations in the U.S.-Mexico cross-border labor project illustrates the idea of a resistant network. A sub-unit of PLANTA overlaps with a sub-unit of LAMP and RPA and thus links these last two organizations to UE and FAT. The voice formed by this network is dispersed over its various component nodes or voices, as it should be. But this very dispersal threatens its disappearance among the nodes of the network. Countering this risk, the mural art project provides a concrete emblem of the network’s hybrid identity. This emblem helps save the network from becoming lost in the heterogeneous concerns and activities of its component nodes. Indeed, the murals and the network set up a creative tension between one another. Each of the two murals tends to subordinate its heterogeneous content to a single aim or unitary image of solidarity. The murals therefore provide the network with a needed substantiality. But the involvement of the murals in a network increases the audibility and creative tension of the myriad voices they represent. The murals provide the network with a more visible identity, but one that is hybrid, multi-voiced rather than unitary. They thus have the potential to reflect and serve the hybrid reality of the network and of society’s intrinsic heterogeneity.

This discussion of the Mexican labor organizer project and mural art has provided a concrete example of resistance networks. With this idea in mind, we can return to Kidder and McGinn’s remarks concerning the combination of networks and hierarchical organizations. In relation to projects like that of the Mexican labor organizer, permanent and resource rich organizations have more power within the network and a longer-term purpose than the Mexican labor organizer project itself. But the network can always be reconstructed for this or other purposes. It is the “software” that temporarily and flexibly reconfigures the multiple bodies that constitute its “hardware.” Because the network reflects society, that is, a unity composed of heterogeneous and hybrid voices, its nodal organizations operate most effectively and truly when they do so in the name of the interplay of society’s voices as well as the specific project that the component groups undertake together. Whereas the traditional form of solidarity valorized only the common goal of its component groups, the new, network solidarity, aided by the types of murals we have been discussing as well as by other art forms, affirms immediate goals but also, and more profoundly, the heterogeneous groups that make up the network and ultimately society as a multi-voiced body. This affirmation of the network also helps maintain solidarity among the groups even during those periods in which the immediate goal of the intersecting groups has received temporary setbacks or has been weakened for other reasons.

Valorization of the network is also an affirmation of us as individuals. Once we come to terms with the reality that none of us can be reduced to a single, univocal identity – we are at one and the same time male, female, gay, straight, workers, students, and professionals of diverse ethnicities who belong to various religious, activist, and social groups – our engagement in network solidarity and the multifaceted identifications that this form of unity entails can only be understood as an endorsement of who we each are. To affirm the network is to acknowledge ourselves more fully and completely and in the interests of creating a better society. Self-affirmation and interpersonal bonds across, and because of, the diversity within the network therefore provide a stronger reason than any abstract principle for staying together.

Conclusion: Voices and the New Solidarity

We have characterized globalization as a hierarchical and leveling network of capital. Confronting that hierarchy, however, are networks like the one we have just described. They consist of lateral rather than hierarchical relations among their participating organizations and individuals. Artwork, such as the Alewitz, Manrique, and Alicia labor murals, help to provide a thickness or identity to a network’s voice without undermining the heterogeneity of its nodes or the creative interplay among them. Networks like these approximate the ideal of equal audibility among the contesting voices of society and therefore are an important force in confronting the “empire” of global capitalism. Although one may think that the source of global capital’s oracular voice is well hidden among the intersecting nodes that make up its network, at once everywhere and nowhere, the networks from below have not been fooled by capitalism’s rhetoric nor the shower of sparks thrown up by its ceaseless activity. From Seattle to Brazil, Tokyo to Berlin, the multitudinous networks from below are revealing and challenging the many “somewheres” of capital.

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