[ssf] Callinicos on the WSF!

[Dan]

Slightly more readable version...

Dan
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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