1. How important is it to appeal to the Communist roots of globalization today?
It is enough to skim through the cross-referenced links on the IndyMedia list to understand the force and size of international solidarity. If capitalism is global, then resistance is international. On the other hand, we Russians have been excluded from this intellectual laboratory and its inspiring activity.
We have yet to understand the meaning and content of Soviet Internationalism we are all living on its shards. To global/international humanity, the defeat of the Soviet state became a wound or trauma, which continues to obscure its view of its own past. This can be compared to a blind spot in the field of vision. Please note that I am not saying that the society of the future should be built upon a Soviet model. However, first, we need to consider the Soviet experience. Personally, I think that it is a great historical challenge that we all face namely, to understand, focus and examine this experience, in order to bring some clarity to the matter. Why did the Soviet empire crumble and fall? The answer is important for them as well as us. This is the local context, which we need to connect to the context of globality.
2. How important is it today to stop the conveyors of big events, opting instead for internationalist work on location?
The technologies of resistance need to be adequate to their local situations, but if globalization, by definition, is bringing the same values, orders, techniques of coercion to many different countries, activists from all of these different places have good reason to trade notes of how to resist them. While the European Left is always the first to discover and set “trends” new technologies, for an example in order to develop its method of resistance, Third World countries tend to receive these methodologies, reworking them to fit their own situation, enriching them with their non-Western experience and returning them in an altered form. This is even more interesting in a situation where there are suddenly many “centers” and many peripheries, when the exchange becomes more and more interesting and the root rises exponentially, to three or five…
This is what actually happened with the conception of “tactical media”. It developed in Amsterdam, and then, it was used successfully in India, Brazil and Italy.
3. In how far is the experience of new local communities that draw their linguistic legitimacy from global pop-culture? In how far do they influence the development of contemporary art?
The organization of the movement as a network (and not as a hierarchy, such as the traditional International) is really one of the discoveries and achievements of the contemporary Left. But for how long can this continue? As Empire grows stronger in terms of politics and military force, will the Left find itself in need of a more rigid, disciplinary form of self-organization? Or can this self-organization find some new developmental vector, free of partisan interest and discipline?
4. Is international style the only relevant possibility for addressing the local problematic? Is there any room left for creative misunderstandings, lost in translation, experiences that are both subjective and local? Which experiences have you made in highlighting the uniqueness of a local cultural context as something of general relevance?
As far as the specifics of working with context are concerned, the worldwide movement only needs clear and comprehensive information to know what exactly is going on. I don’t see any way other than speaking to one another extensively and appropriately, telling stories, asking “them” what’s going over “there”, and telling “them” what’s happening here with “us”. By probing and making mistakes, we can come to a mutual understanding that corresponds to the contemporary world’s high level of complexity.
See the Russian version of the site for the author’s complete answer.
