Our everyday life is pervaded by control, the indispensable instrument of a world-wide hegemonic project. The precisely appearing forms of this power technique and ideology occur to us day-to-day and are the objects of our struggles. Therefore, the mechanisms, institutions, and discourses of control can be discovered on very different layers.

At the international level, control politics are pursued primarily by nation states, which are competing for an accumulation of resources and power, in order to become as successful as possible. They are pursued in the framework of global power structures, featuring inequality in economical competitiveness, military assertiveness and the political weight of states. This inequality is reproduced by the existing structures and institutions: This applies firstly on an economical level: Countries of the South are relying on hard currencies and credits from the global North to finance their imports. If they are not able to repay these credits, far-reaching possibilities emerge for the international financial institutions, dominated by industrial countries, which compel political reforms, which then in turn will benefit the exports of industrial countries.

Control also includes the disposition to resources and cheap labour. Here as well, the dominance of industrial countries is exercised in economical ways: As foreign direct investment or as outsourcing of labour intensive production to low-wage countries. Long time state control politics are not only reduced to the preferential treatment of economical safeguards: Where it is not sufficient, conflicts regarding resources are decided militarily. Worldwide conflicts as well as warlike conflicts on the control of energy resources are becoming ever more acute, be it openly as “full spectrum dominance” or inconspicuously as “guerra de baja intensidad“ (“low intensity warfare”).

Control politics on the global level result in control politics on the local level: The increasing polarisation of Poor and Wealthy, Integrated and Excluded, constitutes a risk for the profiteers of the existing order. The radicalised doctrines of security and control are their answers to growing social frictions. The result is the armament and sealing-off of islands of wealth. With an immense effort, borders are secured against unauthorised trespassing, with an acceptance of casualties. The cities are more and more turning into “secure” and “insecure” zones, the “secure” zones being protected by continuously perfected surveillance technologies and battalions of private security personnel. Security employees living under precarious conditions themselves are guarding and controlling poverty, cementing the border between top and bottom.

In control and security politics, forms of “external” control interact with forms of “internal” control. Central to the “internal” control as “governing of the self” is a specific understanding of normality. Firstly, it is defined by the patriarchal determination of gender roles, be it in the control of human bodies or in the valuation on the labour market. Secondly, linked to this doctrine of economical utility, constituting a central point is the definition of normal behaviour. Economical utility is the basis to exclude and stigmatise unemployed as well as to render labour and living conditions precarious. The racist discourse of normalisation called “integration” is another piece of a puzzle in the image of a society pervaded by hierarchical control and ruling relations.

In the discourse on “integration”, “(in)security”, “global competition” and in the spreading rhetoric about the “clash of civilisations” the neo-liberal comprehension of statehood is becoming clear: “State” is reduced to the guarantor of safety. The discursively produced “Other” thereby appears as a factor of insecurity which should be subdued. The European states are experiencing a structural change leading to the “safety state”. While in the past decades the postulated social balance was considered as a central principle of social integration within the “welfare state”, statehood today is predominantly defining itself through the alleged establishment of safety. It is substantiated in the increasingly repressive law and order policy, which is also requested from the lower classes of society, but also in the reinvigoration of nationalism as a principle of in- and exclusion. This prosecuted policy of social exclusion and insecurity consolidated by economical, ethnical and cultural categories is corresponding with an analogous development on the level of social relations: A process of subjectifying, in which people are relating themselves to their environment in terms of “risk” and “competition”, in which the counterpart is therefore appearing as a constant factor of one’s own insecurity.

Michel Foucault describes this process of subjectifying in his lectures on governmentality for Western societies. He is developing an idea of “ruling” and “being ruled” which permits us to include a micro-policy of self-techniques into the analysis. Self-techniques are understood as a practice that every individual applies to her/himself in order to be able to function within a society, to be accepted and regarded as “normal”. In the centre of his thoughts on neo-liberalism, Foucault places the “enterprise” considering it as the base unit of society, while at the same time, the principle of integration and political programme of the capitalist order. Human beings are the entrepreneurs of themselves, they are accumulating “human capital” and are constantly competing as an “Ich-AG” (1) with their social environment. In neo-liberal thinking the enterprise is understood as “a model of existence, a form of relation of the individual to her/himself, to her/his environment, to the future, to the group, to the family.” (2)

On the one hand, Foucault’s concept is making it possible to describe the self-positioning of individuals within a social environment understood as competitive and a factor of insecurity; on the other hand, he is extending the perspective and drawing a line between self-techniques and the neo-liberal transformations of the state and supra-state. It is essential to uncover and name these structures of rule, to be able to define the interests of single actors and their interdependencies and to radically criticise the logic of global capitalist exploitation. Equally it is necessary to name places and movements where control, paternalism and exploitation concentrate and where contradictions are becoming obvious. Presently, “the” globalisation critical movement is meeting these requirements only insufficiently. Indeed, in different places it is necessary to analyse contradictions, to articulate criticism and to organise resistance. But social movements can only work effectively as actors within a world order pervaded by hierarchical power relations, if they place their different various activities within global interrelations and if they network globally. This is not yet sufficiently done.

The project of radical global movements should, on the one hand, consist in symbolically clarifying and naming the control and power relations, which are often shapeless and decentralised. On the other hand they should create the – always contested – development of feasible alternatives. The effectiveness of these movements is dependant on their global networking, therefore particularly cherishing the knowledge about struggles collected in various places. Knowledge means to learn from experience, but also to adopt a critical solidarity position in word and deed. Knowledge empowers action. The freedom and will to become an actor is the precondition for breaking with loyalty in an unequal world order.

There are many examples for breaking with loyalty and radically challenging the legitimacy of the present global power relations. Since Seattle, the protests against summits and free trade meetings have been increasingly cast into the focus of media attention. Where ever the apologists of global capitalism are gathering, they are pursued by social movements and addressed. While the continuation of colonial power relationships is elaborated during the summits, social forums are developing new forms of cooperative and emancipated politics attempting to defy neo-liberal patterns of thought and therefore, to point beyond the present control regimes. The resistance is growing against the wars, which are fought to maintain the colonial exploitation relations regarding energy and resources and to achieve a better strategic position in the increasing competition between Russia, China, Japan, EU and USA. Similarly the protests against large-scale projects like dams and power plants, but also against the privatisation of water supplies and other public facilities is increasing. Millions of migrants are not stopped by the ever higher walls and fences around the “fortresses” of Europe, Northern America and Asia, but are resisting actively against the control of their freedom of movement. These are only a few examples for resistance. However, global networking is still insufficient.

The struggles for a self-determined life, against the instruments of hierarchisation and control, are assuming very different shapes throughout the world. During the BUKO 29, we will deal with those struggles from an internationalist perspective. We are planning forums on migration and colonialism, city and security, energy, as well as G8. The BUKO 29 will be a platform for political analysis, co-operative learning and perceives itself as a part of social struggles world-wide. Particularly the G8 forum will be organised in the context of the mobilisation mobilisation to confront the G8 summits of the most powerful industrial states which will be in St. Petersburg, Russia, in July 2006 and in 2007 in Heiligendamm near Rostock, Germany.

The BUKO 29 invites you to exchange and develop common strategies, points of view and political practice. Discuss with us realistic and radical utopias. We will meet in Berlin.

(1) Ich-AG (Me-Ltd.) is a German expression for enterprises that are founded by unemployed people under the pressure of the state and with its financial assistance. As an Ich-AG the entrepreneur is mostly selling her/his own wo/manpower as a freelancing person.

(2) Original German citation in: Michel Foucault, Geschichte der Gouvernementalität, Volume 2, Frankfurt/Main 2004, p. 334.