Toward the Integration of Urban Social Movements at the World Scale: Dialogue with W. Warren Wagar' s"Toward a Praxis of World Integration"

Abstract

Wagar is correct to heap scorn on the notion that "any movement in any degree of opposition to the capitalist world-system and/or its colluding dominant national states is somehow, almost mystically, a comrade-movement of all the others. The great question is whether antisystemic movements are really antisystemic." That is indeed a great question, which we want to address forthrightly by describing ways the urban component of South Africa's semi-victorious liberation movement might resonate with what's happening elsewhere. That way, we confront Wagar's charge that too many protest movements, even those based in Third World mega-cities, represent little more than a "slender and wobbly reed, at all odds little inclined to collaborate."