[ssf] Callinicos on the WSF!
dave thompson
mpower0 at yahoo.com
Wed Feb 9 13:09:30 GMT 2005
The masters of our movement: Alex Callinicos(SWP) and
Chris Nineham(SWP/GR) muse on the Fifth World Social
Forum…
‘How then to justify the fact that, on the day the WSF
proper began, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva addressed what
was notionally a seminar, but was really a mass rally
of the ruling Workers Party (PT), within the WSF? Lula
is not only leader of the PT, but President of the
Republic of Brazil. His participation in the Forum
doesn’t seem very 'horizontal'. It's as if the village
mayor, followed by his retinue, thrust his way through
the beggars in the square to proclaim his love of the
poor.'
Oh the irony of it all , does anyone remember their
imposition of centralised command, hero worship of Ken
Livingstone, etc, leading upto the ESF.
warning very long!
dt
riginal Message:
-----------------
From: Alex Callinicos atc1 at york.ac.uk
Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 08:49:42 -0000
To: Undisclosed-Recipient:;"@me.freeserve.com
Subject: [FSE-ESF] Critical Reflections on the Fifth
World Social Forum
CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON THE FIFTH WORLD SOCIAL FORUM
1. The Fifth World Social Forum, which met in Porto
Alegre, Brazil,
between 26 and 31 January 2005, demonstrated once
again the
enormous strength of the global movement that became
visible in the
struggles of Chiapas, Seattle, and Genoa. 200,000 at
the opening
demonstration, 155,000 participants involved in 2,500
activities, a
wealth of cultural events, the concluding Assembly of
the Social
Movements that took up the call for a global day of
protest against the
occupation of Iraq on 19 March - all of these are
things to celebrate.
As two participants from Britain, we greatly enjoyed
sharing all this,
well
as encountering once again the warmth and hospitality
of the Brazilian
people and the dynamism of their social movements. It
is clear that the
ideas and agenda of the global justice movement have
as wide an
appeal as ever. All the same, there was another side
to the 5th WSF,
one that raises serious concerns about its potential
impact on the
world-wide movement against neo-liberal globalization
and imperial
war.
2. Let's start with the most obvious thing. The famous
'Porto Alegre
Charter' - the Charter of Principles of the World
Social Forum - is
much
invoked in controversies within the movement because
it bans 'party
representations' from participating and forbids social
forums to take
decisions. The prominence of the parties of the
radical left at the
European Social Forums in Florence and London was
strongly
criticized for violating the Charter.
Chico Whittaker, one of the founders of the WSF, has
justified the
Charter in highly poetic terms: like a village 'square
without an
owner', a
social forum is 'a socially horizontal space'. How
then to justify the
fact
that, on the day the WSF proper began, Luiz Inácio
Lula da Silva
addressed what was notionally a seminar, but was
really a mass rally
of the ruling Workers Party (PT), within the WSF? Lula
is not only
leader
of the PT, but President of the Republic of Brazil.
His participation
in
the
Forum doesn’t seem very 'horizontal'. It's as if the
village mayor,
followed by his retinue, thrust his way through the
beggars in the
square to proclaim his love of the poor.
Two issues are involved here. One is the question of
principle. In our
view it was a mistake to impose a ban on parties,
since political
organizations are inextricably intermingled with
social movements and
articulate different strategies and visions that are a
legitimate
contribution to the debates that take place in the
social forums. In
fact,
the Porto Alegre Charter has always been circumvented,
but the Lula
rally has made the resulting hypocrisy absolutely
flagrant. It would
surely be more honest to amend or scrap this tattered
ban. 1
The second issue is more urgent. Whatever he was in
the past, Lula is
now one of the global leaders of social liberalism,
belonging to a
political axis that binds him to Thabo Mbeki, Gerhard
Schröder, Bill
Clinton, and - terrible to say - Tony Blair. His
government voluntarily
adopted a target for the budget surplus higher than
that demanded by
the International Monetary Fund and recently pushed up
interest rates
to levels condemned by Brazilian industrialists as
serving the
interests
of finance capital.
In this context, the nature of the rally that Lula
addressed is also
instructive. It was supporting the Global Call for
Action against
Poverty.
Lula's agenda seems identical to that being pursued by
Blair and his
finance minister, Gordon Brown, in the lead-up to the
next Group of
Eight summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, in July. Blair,
discredited by
his
role in George W. Bush's war-drive, is trying to
project himself as the
saviour of the world's poor. He and Brown are trying
to recruit the
support of the leading non-governmental organizations,
which in Britain
have taken the welcome initiative of launching a
powerful coalition,
Make Poverty History, to pressure the G8 into
seriously addressing the
problem of global poverty.
The fact that even an imperialist warmonger like Blair
feels obliged to
express a concern for the plight of the global South
is a tribute to
the
impact of our movement, whose origins lie in part in
the campaign
against Third World debt that gathered pace during the
1990s. But the
transfer of resources involved in, for example,
Brown's proposed
'Marshall Plan for Africa' falls far short of what is
required really
to
change the lives of the wretched of the earth. More
than that, every
aid
or debt reduction package comes charged with
conditions that would
introduce yet more of the neo-liberal poison that
helped to produce the
present immiseration in the first place.
Lula's intervention in Porto Alegre was part of this
project to rebuild
support for social-liberal governments by repackaging
neo-liberalism
as the way to help the world's poor. Responding to
this Orwellian
enterprise by building mass protests demanding a
profound global
redistribution of resources, starting with the
cancellation of all
Third
World debt, is becoming a major challenge for our
movement,
particularly in the lead-up to the Gleneagles summit.
3. Maybe the domestic political pressures on the
Brazilian organizers
of
the WSF were simply too great for them to resist the
demand that the
Forum itself should be a venue for the attempt of
Third Way politicians
to appropriate the agenda of the altermondialiste
movement. But they
must taken responsibility for how the WSF itself was
organized. Taking
inspiration from the 4th WSF in Mumbai, they moved the
Forum from its
old main site at the Catholic University (PUC) to a
specially dedicated
zone along the right bank of the Guiba river.
This had the great advantage, compared to previous
forums at Porto
Alegre, of physical contiguity (although the walk from
one end to the
other, particularly in the summer heat of a city in
the grips of a
drought,
was pretty arduous!). But this gain was undercut by
the division of the
site into 11 distinct 'Thematic Terrains', each
devoted to their own
political theme: Thus Space A was devoted to
Autonomous Thought, B
to Defending Diversity, Plurality, and Identities, C
to Art and
Creation,
and so on. The effect was tremendously to fragment the
Forum. If you
were interested in a particular subject - say, culture
or war or human
rights - you could easily spend the entire four days
in one relatively
small area without coming into contact with people
interested in
different subjects.
This is, in our view, a potentially disastrous
development. One of the
great beauties of our movement - and of the forums
that have emerged
from and helped to sustain it - is the way in which
people from all
sorts
of backgrounds and with the most diverse
preoccupations come and
mix together, participating in a process of mutual
contamination in
which we learn and gain confidence from one another.
This dynamic
was greatly weakened by the thematic fragmentation and
vast size of
the WSF site in Porto Alegre this year - all the more
so because there
were no generalizing events to compare with the
magical opening
ceremony at Mumbai, when 100,000 sat listening to
speakers like
Arundhati Roy, Chico Whitaker, and Jeremy Corbyn
against the velvet
backdrop of an Indian night. We know from the
experience of the
European Social Forum in London that putting together
collectively
organized plenaries is painstaking work. But it is
work that helps to
hammer out priorities for the movement, and to give
the forum focus
and direction.
This effect of this fragmentation, particularly in
combination with
Lula’s
intervention, is not politically neutral. It runs
counter to the trend
in
the
wider movement to make connections between the
challenges we
face, between neo-liberalism and environmental
catastrophe, for
example, and crucially between corporate globalization
and war. As
Emir Sader, one of the leading intellectuals of the
Brazilian left and
a
WSF founder, put it,'while the Forum emphasizes
secondary issues,
there is no major debate about the most important
issue of the day -
the struggle against the war and imperial hegemony in
the world.'
4, It would be a mistake to make too much of these
weaknesses. The
5th WSF was the occasion for many successes. The
Anti-War
Assembly, for example, marked a real step forward in
cooperation
among activists from different parts of the world. An
alliance of
environmental groups managed to launch a much needed
week of
action against climate change from Porto Alegre. No
doubt other
thematic assemblies and networks were able to take
initiatives, though
the general fragmentation makes it hard to tell. The
final Assembly of
the Social Movements, though regrettably not
publicized in the WSF
Programme, did provide a real sense of diverse
activists converging
together on a common agenda of struggles. And there
were, as far as
we know, some good debates.
And we should acknowledge that some of the
difficulties are a product
of political disagreements. The giant meeting that
Hugo Chávez
addressed towards the end of the Forum was a rallying
point for the
anti-imperialist left, and as such a tacit answer to
the Lula rally
earlier
on - the implicit confrontation between the two
leaders was underlined
by the fact that both spoke to equally packed meetings
in the same
Gigantinho Stadium. We need to continue to have forums
and
mobilizations where the followers of Lula and Chávez -
as well as
those of us who have reservations about Chávez too -
can comfortably
work together and debate.
But the purpose of drawing a balance sheet is surely
to offer some
guidance for the future. The WSF in India a year ago
set a benchmark
that others - the organizers of the last ESF in
London, as well as of
the
latest Porto Alegre Forum - have striven to match. For
all its
strengths,
however, the latest WSF doesn't offer a comparable
model. In some
respects, indeed - in particular the thematic
fragmentation that we
have
described, its example is positively to be avoided.
All the same, however, the Fifth World Social Forum
did throw down a
gauntlet to us. The challenge that it posed is not
simply to denounce
and to expose the falsity of the 'rescue' of the
global poor promised
by
Blair and Lula. Anyone can do that. What we have to do
is to build a
movement capable of showing that it has a better
alternative.
Alex Callinicos and Chris Nineham. 8 February
2005
1 For further discussion of some of the issues
involved, see A.
Callinicos, 'The Future of the Anti-Capitalist
Movement', in H. Dee,
ed.,
Anti-Capitalism: Where Now? (London, 2004).
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The all-new My Yahoo! - Get yours free!
http://my.yahoo.com
More information about the ssf
mailing list