WSF 2007 in Africa must build a mass movement against capitalism

by Trevor Ngwane

The World Social Forum (WSF) is coming to Africa in 2007. This is great news. But how exactly will the coming of the WSF to Africa in 2007 advance the struggle against neo-liberalism and capitalist domination? This is an important question for people who want to stop the centuries-long pain and suffering of the masses in Africa and other parts of the world.

Having attended all the world social forums, I think that they continue to be an important rallying point for all struggles against neo-liberalism in the world. But there are certain tendencies developing in the WSF which have me very worried. My wish is that when the WSF comes to Africa we should be able to build on its strengths and eradicate its weaknesses.

President Lula chose to address the WSF 2005 during the launch of the Global Campaign Against Poverty (G-CAP) rather than as many expected in the bigger rally after the opening march. To me, the G-CAP is a campaign conceptualised and designed in the boardrooms of NGOs and funding organisations rather than in the streets and trenches of practical grassroots struggles by social movements, trade unions and other mass organisations of the working class. While the WSF vision is "another world is possible" the G-CAP campaign seeks to build this new world using the scaffolding of the old, namely, the United Nations' Millenium Development Goals, G8 commitments, IMF/World Bank prevarications and southern governments' capitalist policies.

There was a beautiful moment when Coumba Toure of Senegal, during the G-CAP launch, sang a freedom song and then told a story about how we should destroy the cage imprisoning all the birds rather than pay 50 cents to buy a single bird's freedom as people seeking luck do in the streets of Dakar. This must be our vision for the WSF in Africa: to destroy the capitalist cage which imprisons Africans and all of humanity's social, economic, political and cultural development. Any lesser vision will be a capitulation to the bird-seller who sells us the birds' freedom but is the one who imprisoned - and continues to imprison - the birds in the first place.

The African Social Forum's founding principles recognise the primacy of social movements over NGOs in the struggle against neo-liberalism. NGOs, research institutes, individuals and academics are important but they must play a supportive role. It is the masses themselves who possess the power to liberate themselves - hence the importance of social movements and other mass organisations such as trade unions, grassroots women and youth groups, informal traders' associations, homeless people's federations, etc. But it seems that the African delegations to the WSF still largely consist of NGO types. This was clearly the case in the meetings of the African Social Forum (ASF) council held in Porto Alegre during the WSF 2005.

The WSF governing structures - its international council and secretariat - are unwittingly allowing the marginalisation and eclipse of social movements by their hands-off, laissez-faire approach to the organisation of events and activities in the WSF space. Thus the G-CAP campaign was able to steal the show during the WSF 2005 because Oxfam, Action Aid, the United Nations and other agencies had the resources to secure Lula's time and overwhelm the proceedings with their giant-sized zeppelins and hundreds of thousands of brochures and pamphlets.

If we compare Latin America's social movements with those in Africa we must admit that ours are fledgling infants. In many countries we still do not have national social forums despite the resolutions taken by the ASF in Addis Ababa. Where they exist they are still mostly dominated by NGOs rather than by grassroots organisations and social movements. If the funding agencies could so easily dominate the WSF 2005 in its birthplace in Brazil, can you imagine what will happen in Africa? The more cynical among the pro-status quo agencies are probably banking on the Africans tearing each other to pieces fighting over which country must host the WSF in 2007. The vultures are already circling waiting for the right moment to pounce on the dead corpse of the African movement and then to triumphantly hoist their neo-liberal flag.

Comrades, I humbly submit that as the ASF we should be aware of these dangers and take vigorous steps to circumvent them. In all that we do let us put the interests of the African masses first. This means the interests of the working class and its constituent elements, namely, employed and unemployed workers, the landless peasants, women, youth, informal traders, cross border traders, the aged, people living with HIV/AIDS and all the social groups smashed by capitalism. None of these sectors can truly advance their cause so long as capitalism is the dominant economic system in the world.

We should use the build-up to the WSF 2007 to build and strengthen the social movements in Africa. We need a programme of action for this momentous task. We should broaden and strengthen the ASF as the tool to co-ordinate this work. Maximum internal democracy, accountability, collective leadership and mass participation are crucial in building the ASF. NGOs and research institutes are important and welcome in the ASF but only those who agree to the primacy of mass organisations in the struggle; only those who privilege methods of struggle which actively involve the rank and file rather than rely on few specialists to fight it out. The WSF 2007 in Africa should be structured logistically, organisationally and politically to favour the social movements and their daily struggles.

The WSF 2007 in Africa cannot afford to be a talk-shop. We should consider a specific concrete campaign and outcome which will benefit the African masses practically. Some have suggested linking the WSF 2007 with the call for the actual cancellation of the debt and the struggle for reparations. I personally support this approach as it unites us with Africans in the diaspora who are also fighting for reparations. But whatever specific campaign we decide upon, be it HIV/AIDS linked to gender equality or trade, we must not forget the analogy of the birds in the cage. The WSF in Africa must help us gather the social forces and build the power to destroy the cage rather than buy us the freedom of one bird.

In our preparations for the WSF in Africa we will need to draw the class line between exploiter and exploited, capitalist and victim/opponent of capitalism.Let us unite and build towards a WSF 2007 that will take forward the struggle to destroy capitalism rather than merely reform it. Amandla awethu! (The power is in our hands!)

10 REASONS WHY THE WSF 2007 SHOULD NOT COME TO SOUTH AFRICA

1) The foundation of the WSF is international solidarity. The main reason the WSF is coming to Africa in 2007 is because we must give solidarity where there is the greatest need. Africa, taken as a whole, is undoubtedly the one continent where the greatest suffering of humanity is to be found in the world today. Capitalism has been exceptionally destructive in Africa: slavery, plunder, colonialism, apartheid, neo-colonialism, structural adjustment policies, etc. Africa has paid a very heavy price to facilitate capitalist development. That is why it is absolutely correct that the WSF must come to Africa just as it was correct to take it to India last year. Following the same principle and logic we cannot turn around and say the WSF in Africa must be held in SA because that is not where the greatest need is in Africa. To the contrary, SA is a relatively rich country in Africa and is classified as a middle income economy in the world. This is notwithstanding SA being the second most unequal country in the world. It would, in my opinion, be a grave mistake to take the WSF to SA because it would be counter to this principle of going to where the greatest need is and thus be a barrier to building solidarity inside Africa and internationally. The points below are elaborations of this basic argument. I also believe that it is more likely that we can make the WSF less into an event, no matter how "successful", and more like a campaign if we avoid having it in SA. It is for these reasons that I think the left in SA should support the WSF going to Kenya especially as this is the only country which has submitted a proposal to host the WSF in 2007.

2) South Africa (SA) is a neo-liberal state and no "better" than any African state in this regard. In my opinion SA is worse because, as a middle income economy in Africa, it has, at least theoretically, more space to resist imperialism's neo-liberal impositions than other poorer African states. Instead of using its limited breathing space SA has chosen rather the role of a perpetrator and conniver in strengthening and spreading neo-liberalism on the continent. During recent WTO ministerial negotiations the SA government has mostly come out on the side of the imperialist countries against the position of its fellow African and southern countries. The SA government has at times exerted pressure on SADC states trying to coerce them into adopting neo-liberal policies. Instead of using its position of relative strength to resist neo-liberalism SA has opted to join the exploiter and play the game according to capitalist rules e.g. GEAR is a form of structural adjustment programme which most African were coerced to adopt by the World Bank and IMF but the SA government voluntarily adopted.

3) Too many conferences and international events are coming to SA, namely, the WSSD,WCAR, international HIV/AIDS, rugby world cup, soccer world cup 2010, etc. This is unfair on other African countries; they too must be given an opportunity to host important international events and showcase their countries and get whatever benefits accrue from hosting such events. It is not right that SA should exploit its economic and political ascendancy to dominate African events. This ascendancy is an inheritance from SA's ruthless and predatory capitalist policy in the past and the struggle this endangered. Lest we forget, the wealth, economic development and superior infrastructure found in (certain parts of) SA are the spoils from the past super-exploitation of black labour in the mines and factories. This labour was sourced from all over Africa notably Mozambique, Malawi, Zimbabwe etc. Nor should we uncritically accept SA's credentials as the model democratic country in Africa. A lie beloved by the international and local bourgeoisie is that the people's victory over apartheid was a "miracle" born of political good will, reasonableness, reconciliation and letting bygones be bygones. Nothing could be further from the truth! The victory over apartheid was no miracle. It was achieved on the backs of millions of ordinary workers who suffered, many of them dying, for centuries and decades under the evil capitalist system in SA. Remember the Sharpeville massacre, the June 16 uprising, the Vaal 1984 uprising, etc. Remember how Stephen Biko, Chris Hani, and many other leaders were murdered. It was the struggle of the millions and millions and the attendant sacrifices by numerous rank and file people that made possible the new democratic SA. Remember the sacrifices many African countries gave in the struggle against apartheid: hosting our guerillas, receiving fugitives from apartheid, sticking to their guns in their principled opposition to apartheid in international forums and so on. Mozambique, Angola and Namibia are countries which were wrecked by the apartheid psychopaths because they stood with us against statutory racism. If it was not for apartheid's destabilization policies these countries would be much more developed than they are today. Samora Machel, the Mozambican socialist president, paid with his life when the apartheid state crashed his airplane at Mbuzini near Nelspruit because he stood firm against apartheid under very difficult circumstances.

4) SA has so far failed to repay the debt it owes to African states and peoples who sacrificed to help us attain our freedom and the world acclaim we enjoy today as the most democratic and rogressive country in Africa. Indeed, Mbeki's opposition to apartheid-financing reparations and default on odious apartheid debt remains one of the biggest stumbling blocks to international financial reform. Instead, SA has chosen to play the role of a sub-imperialist power, encouraging its big capitalists and bankers to re-colonise Africa through taking over African businesses and resources. The mining houses like Anglo and DeBeers have locked up much of the mineral wealth; ESKOM is buying African power stations for privatisation; Vodacom and MTN are cornering the African cellular market; Shoprite Checkers is not only demolishing the African retail sector but is also changing buying patterns away from even local produce to imports; SABreweries has devoured many African beer manufacturers; the Johannesburg banks are marching up the continent. For many companies, profits that flow from Africa to South Africa, then flow out to London which is the site of their new financial headquarters. Does such a country's bourgeoisie deserve to be "rewarded" once again - but this time by our movement, the global justice movement, a movement expressly formed to fight against imperialism and the rich getting richer?

5) South Africa does not convincingly reflect the cultural, political and economic conditions in Africa if that is what the WSF seeks to find out by coming to Africa. And even where there are similarities with African countries, it is unlikely that the people coming to the WSF would be adequately exposed to the realities faced by the South African working class and the poor. Most delegates will content themselves to shuttling between the seminar venues and their hallowed and comfortable hotel rooms and B&Bs; they will be encouraged to do so by the hysterical warnings they will get from the bourgeois press and the middle classes about crime in SA. In Porto Alegre people were sticking to their air-conditioned rooms just because of the heat! As a result the true condition of the Brazilian working class, in particular, that of the Afro-Brazilians, is unknown to many who went to attend WSF 2005. What indeed is the point of taking the WSF to Africa and then choosing to have it in a country which in many respects is most unlike Africa. It is like taking someone to Sandton in the name of showing them what life is really like in Johannesburg for the masses.

6) The South African political and economic elite, in particular, President Mbeki and the (black and white) bourgeoisie and its political corps, will take full advantage of the WSF and use it to promote their hegemonic ambitions in Africa. Already NEPAD is increasingly revealing itself as a cover for Mbeki's bid to go down in history as the leading African statesman in the globalization-afflicted new millennium. Obasanjo, Bouteflika, Wade and other African neo-liberal leaders are contesting Mbeki on this but the WSF in SA would certainly strengthen his hand. He will in all likelihood project himself as the Lula of Africa. Lula has already unwittingly (or perhaps wittingly) opened the door to this by his dubious G3 project where Brazil, India and SA are meant to lead the world's poor countries by being the main cocks on top of the neo-liberal dunghill of the south.

7) Mandela has been - wrongly - projected by the naïve left and the far-sighted right as the political saint of the new millennium. If the WSF in 2007 finds him alive and politically active this will be a source of great confusion to many activists and NGOers coming to SA. He will be the neo-liberals' trump card. No doubt the bourgeoisie and political elite will use him to make fantastic claims about how progressive SA is and how much is being done for the poor and why the world should support the South African government's capitalist machinations. Don't be surprised if Bill Gates and Bono end up in the WSF rather than in Davos with the aim of grabbing a photo opportunity with St. Mandela. And Mandela will charm everyone and tell the world how he is a disciplined member of the ANC and answerable to "the movement" (not to be confused with the anti-capitalist movement). Gracious as always he won't attack anyone and use epithets like "ultra lefts" but will leave this important duty to Mbeki, Ngonyama, et al.

8) The WSF's coming to SA will not challenge South African social movements, trade unions, progressive NGOs and research institutes to broaden their social base by working harder and closer to the ground. But this is exactly what is required of them at this crucial moment in history, in particular, to extend their work beyond South Africa's borders and endeavour to unite the continent around an anti-capitalist platform and programme. Instead, if the WSF comes to SA, they will get complacent in their comfort zones and assume the posture of the South African bourgeoisie vis-à-vis African movements because their "leading role" in Africa will be confirmed without them having to lift a finger. Sadly some lefts in the movements and the unions are already talking the same language as the capitalists and their surrogate funding organizations; they express their doubts about whether any other country in Africa besides SA can make a "success" of the WSF. Africa is in a mess and South Africa is the exception. That was Verwoerd's and Vorster's rationalisation of apartheid, remember? The South African capitalists justify their plunder of African business and markets using the same argument. The South African movement and union leaders seem to be speaking the same language in relation to their exploited and oppressed brothers and sisters in the rest of Africa. What a shame.

9) The WSF will prove to be divisive and damaging to the re-invigorated struggle in SA and Africa. A complicated repeat of the tensions and divisions that visited us during the World Summit on Sustainable Development is bound to happen. Except there will be no World Bank and IMF to unite against and thus help us to clarify our positions against neo-liberalism and exposing the vacillators and collaborators. There will be no repeat of the great march from Alexander to Sandton to forge our anti-capitalist platform because the WSF is usually a medley of activities which absorbs the energies of activists and blurs their political focus. With the WSF defined as an open "space" where any organization can stage an activity the genuine anti-capitalist movements will be swamped in the bog marsh of endless workshops and seminars and exhibitions allowing the reformists to do their dirty work under cover of the open space, horizontal decision-making and the laissez faire atmosphere. The SABC will not be promoting the anti-capitalist side nor will the funders fall over themselves giving us money to stage more events. We will have no choice but to fight for the visibility and hegemony of our anti-capitalist platform and ideas but I foresee a spirited but frustrated contestation by the genuine left given the odds against us.

10) The East African sub-region of the African Social Forum has already submitted a proposal ("bid") to hold the WSF in Nairobi, Kenya. No other sub-region or country has done so and we are left with barely 2 months before the WSF international council makes its final decision at the end of March. If SA were to submit their proposal now I think it will create tensions and divisions. This won't contribute to building unity in Africa nor help reduce the resentment some African comrades already feel towards SA. I think it would be a mistake to develop a "fallback position" which involves us writing(and submitting) a South African bid in order to pre-empt any other organization doing so. The SMI took a clear position against the WSF coming to Africa because it felt that too many events are coming to SA to the exclusion of other African countries. Everyone including ourselves will be totally confused if we now develop our own bid. Comrades from Kenya and East Africa made a point of asking for South African comrades' support for their bid in Porto Alegre. When the SMI discusses this issue my suggestion will be that we should stick to supporting the East African bid. Kenya, like SA, also has a rich history of struggle and movements. Kenya is the land of the legendary Mau Mau; Kenyan movements were recently part of thev victorious mass mobilization to get rid of the dictator Arap Moi. Our job as South African comrades is to build on Kenya and East Africa's strengths and help them overcome their weakness where these are identified.

Conclusion The vision of the African Social Forum is to make the WSF 2007 the biggest initiative and meeting in post-colonial Africa. All African countries got their independence but uhuru is bound by capitalist chains. In 2007 it will be 5 years of NEPAD and the occasion can be used to evaluate this capitalist policy and expose those leaders who champion it. Going to Kenya will be our chance to take the message of resistance and grassroots struggle to Africa as we understand it. Africa has a lot to teach us. Apartheid cut us off from the rest of Africa. It is better to get to know a person by visiting them in their house and neighbourhood rather than inviting them over to your own place. Let us work with our comrades in East Africa and other parts of Africa and other continents to prepare for the WSF 2007 through mass mobilization. If we want to connect to the African masses outside our borders we should think of filling a 100 buses and going to Nairobi rather than expect the African masses to jet into SA. When we get to Nairobi we should orgnise to sleep in tents and with villagers in their houses and community halls. It is time to get out of our comfort zones, to eschew insular and inward-looking methods of struggle and ways of doing things. It is time to climb Mount Kilimanjaro and from this vantage point see the whole of Africa. Africa is a canvass and through struggle waged together with our fellow exploited African brothers and sisters we can paint a new future, a future without capitalism. Let us go to Kenya in 2007.

Slow death of old left

Weekly Worker, Communist Party of Great Britain

This year's World Social Forum, which has just closed in Brazil, has highlighted the fact that the left is still struggling to come to terms with the end of the Soviet Union. A new generation is reacting against capitalism's triumphalism, says Tina Becker - and instead of revolutionary answers the left serves them the rotten crap of the past

On February 1, the fifth WSF in Brazil came to an end. More than 155,000 people from over 135 countries attended the event in Porto Alegre. The first WSF was set up in 2000 in opposition to the simultaneous gathering of the World Economic Forum in the Swiss city of Davos.

In fact, this year it might have been quite difficult to distinguish between the two. In Davos, Bono, Bill Gates and Tony Blair were attempting to outdo each other with their plans to 'make poverty history' and push for debt relief. UN ambassador Angelina Jolie argued passionately for more money for the poor and Sharon Stone went round with a bucket, raising money for mosquito nets in Tanzania.

In fact, so 'caring' has the WEF been that Digby Jones, the head of Confederation of British Industry, complained that it had been taken over by NGOs: "Davos has been hijacked by those who want business to apologise for itself. We have heard how we are greedy and how we pollute and how we have got to help Africa. But a celebration of business? No" (The Guardian January 31).

The World Economic Forum might have become more fluffy, shifting its emphasis towards more 'corporate responsibility', but global capitalism certainly has not. A political alternative from the left is more urgent than ever.

Boos for Lula But, while there were definitely fewer celebrities in Porto Alegre, the message from many of the participants was quite similar. Numerous NGOs were present at both events, as was of course Brazil's president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. He was quite happy to take his new $56 million Airbus on its maiden voyage from Porto Alegre to Davos. No wonder he was booed ferociously when he tried to give his speech in a football stadium in Porto Alegre (Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, incidentally, was greeted like a rock star).

Lula's Workers Party (PT) was of course the driving force behind the establishment and financing of the WSF. Since then, a lot has happened: Lula has betrayed the hopes that many on the left had in him by dutifully sticking to the vicious economic reforms the IMF is demanding in return for its loans. The Workers Party has lost control in a number of Brazilian regions, including Porto Alegre. And a number of splits have weakened the organisation, with the new Party of Socialism and Liberty (P-SOL) being the most leftwing.

Booing him at the WSF is all very well, but what exactly did people expect of him? Even before he had been elected, Lula had sent signals to world capitalism that he would not rock the boat. He made this clear in advance by agreeing to run for president in tandem with an outright enemy of the Brazilian masses, an open representative of the landlords and the big bourgeoisie. Jose Alencar, a millionaire textile magnate and leader of the conservative Liberal Party was his running mate - this sent out the message that, despite all the rhetoric, the presidency of Lula would not be that different from that of his bourgeois predecessor, Cardoso.

As we noted at the time: "Indeed, a number of more canny international bourgeois commentators have taken note of Lula's crossing the Rubicon from metalworkers' leader and initiator of strikes against military dictatorship to respectable front man for the neoliberals" (Weekly Worker October 17 2002). We went on to quote The Economist: "Mr da Silva and his advisers are trying hard to win investors' trust: far from threatening to rip up the IMF accord, as they once would have, they nodded it through . Mr da Silva would continue with Mr Cardoso's public sector reforms, and some of his infrastructure and social projects. There would be less privatisation. But Mr da Silva would be prepared, for example, to let private firms run water services" (September 19 2002).

Despite this, much of the organised left internationally sowed illusions in this centre-left reformist and what he could achieve. And in Brazil itself, members of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International and the Communist Party of Brazil sat in his bourgeois government. Meanwhile the disillusionment of the masses rapidly spread.

Despite all this, the PT is still a key player in the WSF: its members are at the core of the self-appointed international secretariat and can veto any moves it does not like. Of course, this organisation has no interest in building a global united left that can really take on capitalism.

The old left Much of the international left is no better. They accept the 'leadership' of the Workers Party in the WSF and the outrageous and hypocritical rules it has imposed on all social forums in the form of the 'Charter of principles'. We have seen members of tightly organised political sects arguing against the participation of political parties; we have seen 'official communists' dressed up as mere anti-globalisation activists and socialists arguing for capitalism to be reformed. Despite attempts to present the WSF and European Social Forum as totally new phenomena, in truth we see the rotten politics of the past rearticulated.

Of course it is obligatory to relate to new moods in society. A new generation is reacting to capitalist triumphalism and is looking for answers - but where is the communist programme to lead them? Instead of dealing with its own Stalinist, social democratic or sectarian past in an open and honest manner, much of the 'old left' simply holds up a mirror to the 'movement' - in the hope of using the social forums as a transmission belt into their own discredited organisations.

Likewise, the so-called parties of recomposition, which were supposed to be shining examples of the new - where are they now? The German Party of Democratic Socialism has moved faster to the right than you can say 'Stalinists'. The Spanish Izquierda Unida has all but vanished. And Italy's Rifondazione Comunista, regarded as much healthier, is again joining the Olive Tree Federation (previously coalition) of Romano Prodi's social democratic Democratic Left (DS). In 1998, Rifondazione left the Oliver Tree after just two years in order to jump onto the anti- capitalist bandwagon. In France, much of the old left (particularly the Communist Party and the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire) are hiding in the lobby group Attac - a force that has constituted the right wing of the ESF, vetoing even the smallest step forward.

We are still witnessing the slow death of the old, not yet the birth of the new. The WSF underlines the fact that the objective conditions for the new are ripe, but the subjective factor lags way behind. The WSF itself is now moving in an even more decentralised and disorganised direction. For a start, for the first time there has been no centrally produced 'WSF final declaration' at this year's event. In previous years, the declaration has issued calls for the global anti-war protests on March 13 2003 and similar actions.

Decentralisation But now the organisers have said they want to "decentralise the event, spur new grassroots movements and give power to participants to pursue their own agendas". So instead of a common declaration (however inadequate) there were hundreds of individual appeals and statements pinned on a huge notice board by a forum stage next to the river Guaiba.

Amongst them is - interestingly - a proposal from 19 'WSF personalities', many of whom are members of the international committee. This group seems to have been against the scrapping of the final declaration - but has instead issued a text that stinks of sub-reformism: the main points are the adoption of the Tobin tax on international financial transfers, the dismantling of tax havens, the promotion of 'equitable' forms of trade and the "democratisation of international organisations", including the demand to move the United Nations headquarters from its current New York location to the south. The document was put together by, amongst others, Attac founder Bernard Cassen, Samir Amin, Walden Bello and our own Tariq Ali.

Interestingly, among those who chose not to sign the text were a number of members of the Brazilian Workers Party - for them, even this nonsense seemed to be going too far. Of course, the left needs its own programme that maps the way from the here and now to a future in which the working classes - ie, the vast majority of humanity - can run society.

On January 25, the international council further decided that the next WSF would take place in a "decentralised manner", with meetings in "various countries". The details will be confirmed in April, but it looks like events will take place in Morocco, Pakistan and Venezuela. Initially, the plan was to have no WSF in 2006, but move to a two-yearly cycle (just like the ESF). However, if the "decentralised" WSF 2006 proves successful, who can say that the 2007 WSF - due to be held somewhere in Africa - will not be split up too? Undoubtedly, with three or more venues attendance figures could well be up - a major factor in determining 'success' no doubt.

Clearly, the WSF in its present form, just like the ESF, is totally useless as an agency for change. What is the point of these forums if they do not help to cohere our forces on the highest possible level?

Moving Against-and-Beyond or Interstitial Revolution

John Holloway

1. Why are we here in Porto Alegre? To say NO. NO to war, NO to the destruction of the environment, NO to injustice and exploitation, NO to neo-liberalism, NO to capitalism. We come from a whole world of rebellions, of insubordinations, of refusals, of people saying NO to capitalism: ³NO, we shall not live our lives according to the dictates of capitalism, we shall do what we consider necessary or desirable and not what capital tells us to do.² These refusals can be seen as fissures, as cracks in the system of capitalist domination. At times they are so small that even those involved do not perceive them as refusals, but often they are collective projects searching for an alternative way forward and sometimes they are as big as the lacandon jungle or the argentinazo of three years ago or the revolt in Bolivia just over a year ago.

2.All of these insubordinations are characterised by a drive towards self-determination, an impulse that says ³No, you will not tell us what to do, we shall decide for ourselves what we must do.² The question of how we multiply and expand our rebellions is at the same time the question of how we strengthen the drive towards social self-determination. What I want to do in this talk is simply to make a few points about this drive towards social self-determination. a) I say social self-determination because individual self-determination does not and can not exist in any society: our doing is so interwoven with the doing of others that the individual self-determination of our doing is an illusion. b) I say drive towards because social self-determination does not and can not exist in a capitalist society: capital, in all its forms, is the negation of self-determination. The drive towards self-determination is a moving against-and-beyond: a moving against the society which is based on the negation of self-determination and at the same time a projection beyond existing society. This is a moving outwards from where we are, a pushing against and beyond limits, a process of experimentation, not the following of a programme, but always guided by a utopian star, by the idea of conscious determination of our own lives. This drive towards self-determination is the core of the struggle to create another world. c) The drive towards self-determination is rooted in everyday practice. The drive to self-determination is anchored in the everyday practice of its negation. If that were not the case, the struggle for communism (or for another world) would make no sense. Self-emancipation would be impossible and the only possibility of revolution would be a revolution on behalf of, a revolution led by an elite which would do nothing more than lead to a restructuring of class domination. This is the terrible political-theoretical challenge hurled at us by the zapatistas in their simple statement that "We are women and men, children and old people who are quite ordinary, that is rebels, non-conformists, awkward, dreamers² (La Jornada, 4 de agosto de 1999).

That does not mean that everyone is a radical anti-capitalist at heart, but simply that radical anti-capitalism is part of the daily experience of capitalist oppression. The problem of organisation is not to bring consciousness from outside to inherently limited subjects, but to draw out the knowledge that is already present, albeit in repressed and contradictory form. The task is like that of the psychoanalyst who tries to make conscious that which is unconscious and repressed. But there is no psychoanalyst standing outside the subject: the "psychoanalysis" can only be a collective self-analysis a collective self-education. This implies a politics not of talking, but of listening, or, better, of talking-listening. The revolutionary process is a collective coming-to-eruption of stifled volcanoes. Note that this approach is not characterised in any way by a romantic assumption that people are "good", but simply by the assumption that in a society based on class antagonism, we are all permeated by this antagonism, we are all self-contradictory. The notion that we are all rebels, that revolution is ordinary, can only be sustained if we see people as contradictory, as self-divided subjects. We are rebels fighting for the survival of humanity in one moment, then we go to the supermarket and participate actively in processes that we know are leading to the destruction of humanity.

The drive towards self-determination is not a characteristic exclusive to a particular group of people but something present in contradictory form in all of us.To put the point slightly differently: we are all composed of different, often contradictory parts. The question is how these parts are articulated. Capitalism is a form of organisation that promotes an articulation of our contradictions which is highly destructive, socially and personally. The problem of revolutionary organisation is to promote a different articulation of these parts, an articulation which promotes the distillation of creativity and the drive to social self-determination. d) The drive towards self-determination implies a critique of representation, a moving against- and-beyond representation. Representation involves exclusion and separation. Exclusion because in choosing a representative, we exclude ourselves. In elections we choose someone to speak on our behalf, to take our place. We create a separation between those who represent and those who are represented and we freeze it in time, giving it a duration, excluding ourselves as subjects until we have an opportunity to confirm the separation in the next elections. A world of politics is created, separate from the daily life of society, a world of politics populated by a distinct caste of politicians who speak their own language and have their own logic, the logic of power. e) The drive towards self-determination is not compatible with the aim of taking state power. The state as a form of organisation is the negation of self-determination.The state is not a thing, it is not a neutral object: it is a form of social relations, a form of organisation, a way of doing things which has been developed over cseveral centuries for the purpose of maintaining or developing the rule of capital, that is, for the purpose of excluding us from the social determination of our own lives. The state seeks to impose upon us a separation of our struggles from society, to convert our struggle into a struggle on behalf of, in the name of. It separates leaders from the masses, the representatives from the represented, it draws us into a different way of talking, a different way of thinking. It also draws us into a spatial definition of how we do things, a spatial definition which makes a clear distinction and a clear distinction between citizens and foreigners.

The state excludes and fragments us.The drive towards self-determination moves in one direction, the attempt to win state power moves in the opposite direction. The former starts to knit a self-determining community, the latter unravels the knitting. f) The drive towards self-determination moves against-and-beyond representation, against-and- beyond the state and, above all, against-and-beyond labour. Although the issue of democracy and the organisation of assemblies attracts more attention, the central problem that underlies all attempts to develop the drive towards self-determination is the movement of doing against labour. If by labour we understand alienated labour, labour which we do not control, then clearly the drive for self-determination is a drive against labour, a drive for the emancipation of socially self-determined doing, a push towards the conscious control of the social flow of doing.

Democracy, no matter how ³direct² its structures, will have relatively little impact unless it is part of a challenge to the capitalist organisation of doing as labour. That is why it is important to think not just of democracy but of communism, not just of people but of class, not just of rebellion but of revolution, meaning by that not a process of social change instigated from above by professional revolutionaries, but a social change which transforms the basic organisation of doing in society. To separate the struggle for radical democracy from the struggle of doing against labour means to overlook the anger and the resistance that is part of the experience and tradition of the labour movement. If by communism we understand a self- determining society, then democracy means communism: it is simple, obvious and should be stated explicitly.

This is no doubt the most difficult part to conceive. How can we free ourselves from labour? Doing exists in constant revolt against labour. Collectively or individually, we are probably all involved in some sort of struggle against the alien determination of our activity by refusing to work, by arriving late, by sabotage, by trying to shape our lives according to what we want to do and not just according to the dictates of money, by trying to infuse meaning into our activities, by coming together to form alternative projects for the organisation of our doing, by occupying factories or other places of work.

That doing exists in constant revolt against labour is clear. The more difficult question is whether it is possible for doing to move beyond labour before there is a revolutionary abolition of capitalism.

The creation of cooperatives solves nothing unless the articulation between different groups of doers is tackled at the same time. The move towards self-determination cannot be seen simply in terms of particular activities but must inevitably embrace the articulation between those activities, the re-articulation of the social flow of doing (not just production, but production and circulation). The drive to self-determination cannot be understood in terms of the creation of autonomies, but necessarily involves a moving beyond those autonomies. Factory occupations or the creation of cooperatives are insufficient unless they are part of a movement, that is, unless they simultaneously reach beyond to the creation of new articulations between people who are beyond the particular cooperative project.

The only way that we can begin to answer this problem is by thinking of it as movement, as a constant moving against-and-beyond labour.

3. It is clear that revolution is both necessary and urgent. It is clear too that the only way in which we can think of revolution is interstitially, as the growth and spread of different social relations in the interstices of capitalism. All these interstices are different, but what they have in common is the drive towards self-determination. It is clear that the way forward is full of problems, but that is why we are here to discuss these problems.

Additional note: Does this mean that we should have no contact at all with the state? Does it in certain circumstance make sense to say: "we are building forms of self-determination and we know that the state is a process of negating self-determination, but in spite of that, we think that, in this particular situation, struggling through the state can give us a way of strengthening or protecting our struggle for self-determination"?

This is a question that is, initially at least, quite distinct from the question of taking state power. There are many people who quite clearly reject the notion of taking state power but nevertheless see it as important for their struggle to influence or gain control of parts of the state apparatus.

This is a difficult question. Most of us cannot avoid contact with the state. We have, as it were, a ³situational² contact with the state: our situation, our condition in life brings us into contact with the state, we are forced to engage with the state in some way. This may be because of our employment, or because we depend on state unemployment subsidies or because we use public transport, or whatever.

The question is how we deal with this contact and the contradictions that are inseparable from it. I work as a professor in a state institution: this channels my activity into forms which promote the reproduction of capital: authoritarian forms of teaching and grading, for example. By working in the state (or in any other employment) I am actively involved in the reproduction of capital, but, in spite of that I try to struggle against the state form to strengthen the drive towards self-determination. Living in capital means that we live in the midst of contradiction. It is important to recognise these contradictions rather than to brush them under the carpet with a "but also". It is important to understand our engagement with the state in such situations as a movement in-and-against the state, as a movement in-against-and-beyond the forms of social relations which the existence of the state implies.

Can we extend this argument to extra-situational, chosen contact with the state? Can we say, for example: "we, in this social centre, are struggling for the development of a self- determining society; we know that the state is a capitalist state and therefore a form opposed to self-determination; nevertheless, in spite of this, we think that, by controlling our local council, we can strengthen our movement against capitalism"? This is essentially the argument made by certain social centres in Italy and by movements in Brazil, Argentina and elsewhere.

Probably the validity of such arguments for a voluntary, chosen contact with the state will always depend on the particular conditions: there is no golden rule, no purity to be sought. Thus, for example, the Zapatistas in Chiapas make an important principle of not accepting any support from the state, whereas many urban pro-zapatista groups in different parts of the world accept that they cannot survive without some form of state support (be it in the form of unemployment assistance or student grants or in some cases - legal recognition of their right to occupy a social centre). The important thing, perhaps, is not to paint over the contradictions, not to hide the antagonistic nature of the undertaking with phrases such as "participatory democracy", not to convert the but in spite of into a but also.[2] But the translation of ³in spite of² into ³but also² is precisely what is involved in our contact with the state.

Engagement with the state is never innocent of consequences: it always involves the pulling of action or organisation into certain forms(leadership, representation, bureaucracy) that move against the drive to self-determination.[3] The crushing force of institutionalisation should never be underestimated, as experience in all the world has shown, time and time and time again.

The WSF: Where to now?

by Michael Albert

[This is an essay in progress...modest changes will be incorporated until its final version appears in Z Magazine, in March 2003. Ideas for improvements are welcome -- mail to [email protected]

The worldwide Social Forum phenomenon is thriving. In contrast, the World Social Forum once- a-year international event has run up against internal limits and needs renovation.

Forums Worldwide The forums worldwide include relatively local events for small towns, cities, counties, whole states, and even regions. Examples are forums for Ithaca NY, Brisbane Australia, South Africa, and Asia. There are many instances at each level, including, for example, about a hundred in towns throughout Italy.

These forums worldwide have two universal aims, and beyond that, much variation.

(1) Promote respectful communications and solidarity.

(2) Prioritize vision and strategy as well as analysis.

Moreover, by all evidence, the forums worldwide cause even disagreeing activists to congregate, to hear one another, to develop new ties, and to take seriously economic, political, gender, race, culture, ecology, globalization, and international goals and strategies. Some local forums excellently generate shared program and actions among subsets of participants. But even short of that, by at least enhancing solidarity and enlarging vision, all the local forums powerfully aid movements.

Another attribute of the forums worldwide, more in evidence the more local they are, is accountability and transparency. Local forum organizers are generally well known to the people participating and attending. Even for forums lacking a fully democratic process, the decision-makers are at least known enough to the attendees to be accountable. Decisions are subject to challenge, refinement, and renovation.

Similarly, local forums have a manageable scale. Arrangements, fees, setting up panels and getting people to them, all occur relatively smoothly. Local agendas tend to include many interactive sessions so that everyone involved participates more or less equally. People can access one another. Presenters and audience aren't sharply divided. A few people don't enjoy elite status. Others aren't marginalized.

Without exaggerating the virtues of the forums worldwide, they are having positive effects and moving in participatory, transparent, and democratic directions.

The World Social Forum, however, is different.

The World Social Forum The bottom-up forums worldwide were spurred into existence by a very top-down World Social Forum. The former have yet to reform the latter. So in contrast to the forums worldwide, the WSF is not yet transparent or accountable much less democratic. It has become unmanageable. And while it has profoundly valuable participation, there are often sharp and even destructive differences between the WSF's layers of participants. While some of these difficulties certainly derive from doing a massive event with unreliable and insufficient resources, there are other avenues of improvement, as well.

The WSF's Decision-Making The WSF was born from discussions in France and Brazil. The originators took a great idea, made a courageous leap, and inspired effective work. In time, however, they became a leadership in a tighter, more determinative, and less exemplary manner. Oddly, they began and they remained largely unknown. They began and remained unaccountable, save perhaps tangentially to their own organizations. This was likely caused in part by the difficulties of operating on such an unprecedented scale, partly by the structure and philosophies of some of the NGOs and other organizations involved such as French ATTAC, and probably due to more singular factors as well.

After WSF 2, I was enlisted to help with a variety of forum-related projects and, as a means to facilitate my doing so, I was asked to join the WSF's International Council. I missed a Spring and a Summer meeting, one in Thailand, the other in Barcelona. However, I did attend a meeting in Italy in the Fall. My experience was that the council wasn't a serious seat of power. In fact, my impression was that the International Council of the World Social Forum was barely a rubber stamp.

It wasn't that the people sitting around the table in Florence weren't an impressive group. They were worldly and wise and a good number of them came from movements and constituencies of great importance around the world. And it wasn't that the people at the table didn't want a more democratic and participatory approach. This desire was raised repeatedly. It was just that after a short time at that meeting it became obvious that despite the members' stature and desires, the people on the council were not the real locus of WSF power. The powers that be had some functionaries present, chairing the meeting…and it was clear that the powers that be had decided what the agenda was, what would be made known regarding the overall WSF situation to the people in the room, and what the international council could be permitted to discuss—but that those present had only very limited impact.

I circled around the room asking many of those present, "who are the real decision-makers of the WSF?" "Who is it that allots limited choices to this group, saving important matters for their own eyes?" "Who is it that makes the bigger decisions that never come before this group?"

While a few folks could hesitantly name a leader or two based on knowing the history of the WSF, no one I talked to was confident about even that, much less a whole list of leaders. It was as if I had been dragged onto a central committee in a country that had a still higher body that dictated key results, and I had asked my fellow central committee members who those higher authorities were--and no one knew.

The real WSF leadership, I think, makes many key decisions. Will the event have Lula present, and in what capacity? What about Castro, or Chavez? Will there be exclusions, and if so on what grounds? The Zapatistas? Will being in a party, advocating violent tactics, or even just being from some group that the inner circle finds too radical or otherwise dislikes (such as the Disobedienti from Italy, or the international People's Global Action) preclude prominent participation? What content will be part of the core of the events (more on this below) and what content will be left as periphery? Who will have their way paid--and who will not? Will there be a march, and who will be the key speakers? Will there be a collective statement, with what content? What efforts will or won’t be made to achieve gender balance, race balance, geographic balance? How will class differences be addressed, if at all, within the process and more broadly? How will press be handled, both mainstream and alternative? Will the WSF start to discuss facilitating an international movement of movements, or will it persist only as a forum? What will be the accommodation between advocating reform of capitalism and advocating a new system entirely?

The decision-making of the WSF is not transparent despite that being transparent could be easily attained--just post the relevant names and make known significant decisions. The decision-making is not accountable, which would be far harder to attain, but could at least be better approached, even for so complicated an entity. And there is no widespread democratic input before the fact, from regions around the world, for example, which is perhaps most difficult for such an undertaking, but ought to be on the agenda, and implies some obvious organizational changes.

The WSF's Operational Viability At this year's WSF, just regarding the actual details of speaking, listening, eating, sleeping, and marching -- most people probably perceived great success. This is because what happened, happened well. People going to events largely enjoyed them -- whether it was marches or rallies, big panels or meetings, or the youth camp. People perceived and will report that the things they attended were carried off adequately and even smoothly. And indeed, the events that most people attended were, as they perceived, no doubt carried off well. Which is quite amazing and immensely praiseworthy.

But what about the 400 or so panels that were cancelled very near the time of the WSF and long after people planned to participate in them? No one attended or presented at those panels because those panels didn't take place at all. No one saw that they weren't there, other than those who suffered the cancellations.

What about the events that weren't on any printed schedule, and that attendees couldn't find and that therefore attracted a fraction of the participation they deserved? Only a very few people attended those events, all other people being ignorant of their existence. Though the few who did attend were quite distraught, the full loss was again unrecorded since it was a loss of the benefits that might have been had if people who didn’t know to go to sessions had been able to go, under better conditions.

And what about the events whose rooms kept being changed, again disrupting or even obliterating their attendance? In some cases even presenters couldn't find panels. Again, few knew about this.

Maybe all these problems could have been avoided by stricter limits on the numbers of events and panels, by earlier scheduling, and so on. Or maybe, while there might have been less chaotic disruption with better preparations, most of the chaos wasn't ultimately the fault of those doing the work -- but was a nearly inevitable by-product of the WSF's having grown too large and embodying too many unpredictable factors for the resources available.

In short, the WSF, at its current size, seems to a considerable extent unmanageable. It isn't that leftists can't handle large scale, per se. It is that having so few resources, no one could effectively manage so many unpredictable variables.

WSF Hierarchies Each year the WSF anoints a subset of events as their own. These events are all prominent in the official schedules. They all have appropriate-sized rooms and resources. Their presenters are afforded considerable comforts, including paid hotel rooms and sometimes travel allowances. Moreover, their housing was at hotels which were better the more prominent the person, not the more needy. I would guess this group's numbers to be roughly 100 people and I am quite sure that among them were some people who needed the financial aid but a great many who did not, relatively speaking.

On the other hand, there were the rest of the presenters. I don't know their numbers but I would guess a few thousand or so. The events that these participants planned in many cases did not even appear in the official schedules and were subject to last minute termination or, short of that, to room changes. These second-tier presenters were afforded few comforts and little financial support though they included overwhelmingly less well-off people then the 100 or so at the hotels. Gender still seems to play a horrible and destructive role in people’s roles and visibility, as well. Beyond presenters, moreover, there were the youth who were housed in a camp with barely sufficient water and barely acceptable sewage. That the roughly 30,000 people in the youth camp made it a vibrant community in which there were no hierarchies is immensely admirable, but the many virtues of those who endure harsh conditions joyfully don't excuse that they were treated as a separate entity, with little visible effort to incorporate them.

Is there no alternative to having some participants living in camps, others in bearable environs, and a few in luxurious housing? Couldn’t there be sliding scales of fees and accommodations more in accord with need than with notoriety, and with those better able tithed to help those less able? Younger folks can bear worse conditions better. Older folks need better conditions to manage such a strenuous undertaking. Some variation of accommodations is certainly warranted on this account, but being prominent shouldn't be the criterion.

Without attention, layering of participants’ material circumstances abets as well even less warranted differences -- due to gender, race, class, place of origin, and fame -- in how people are regarded in general, in the media attention they are accorded, and in the visibility and promotion they receive. Often attention afforded rises in nearly inverse proportion to the activism people do, to the extent they are anti-hierarchical in their own lives, and to the lessons and insights they have to offer and to share with other people at the WSF's events. It isn't surprising that in the youth camp there is sharing and equity dwarfing what prevails in the hotels. So while it would probably be impossible to do without the hotels, it is the logic and culture at the hotels that needs examination. Of course we need presentations, sometimes even to very large audiences, but it ought to be possible to reduce or even eliminate relative passivity and subordination of those who come to the WSF mainly to listen, and of those who present but have less known names.

There is another odd if very much unintended layering effect at the WSF. The WSF is called a world forum. We all say "the WSF had 100,000 participants." And when I say and hear phrases like that, to me it sounds like a claim that 100,000 people from all over the world gathered. But while the WSF 3 did attract roughly 100,000 people, understandably perhaps as many as 70,000 were from Brazil, and perhaps another 15,000 were from neighboring countries in South America. So one might as reasonably say that this was a major South American Forum that invited 10-15,000 people from around the world to attend as presenters or as guests, as to say it was a world forum. Shouldn’t a world forum be worldly representative, with some degree of proportion among its delegates to movements and activism around the world?

Where To Now? So what is to be done about the WSF? It has been a remarkable phenomenon three times so far. It has propelled forums worldwide. It has educated, inspired, and engendered ties and connections. Its structure and processes were a miracle the first year, amazing the second year, but have begun to fall short the third year. The WSF, with all its virtues, is in diverse ways reaching the limits of its current incarnation.

The issues raised above and many more that other participants no doubt have on their minds must be explored and debated. New ideas need to be put forth, evaluated, refined, and implemented. Here are ten thoughts that may have some merit--but whether they do or not, certainly changes must be made.

(1) Emphasize local forums as the foundation of the worldwide forum process.

(2) Have each new level of forums, from towns, to cities, to countries, to continents, to the world, be built largely on those below.

(3) Have the decision-making leadership of the most local events locally determined.

(4) Have the decision-making leadership at each higher level chosen, at least in considerable part, by the local forums that are within the higher entity. Italy's national forum leadership is chosen by the smaller local forums in Italy. The European forum's leadership is chosen by the national forums within Europe, and similarly elsewhere.

(5) Mandate that the decision-making leadership at every level should be at least 50% women.

(6) Have the forums from wealthier parts of the world charge delegates and organizations and attendees a tax on their fees to apply to helping finance the forums in poorer parts of the world and to subsidize delegate attendance at the world forum from poorer locales, as well.

(7) Make the once a year international WSF a delegate event. Cities and states in Brazil should have a forum. So should Brazil as a whole. So should other countries in South America, and so should South America as a whole. And likewise for India and South Asia, for South Africa and Africa, and so on. But the World Event should be different. It should be representative.

(8) Have the WSF attendance be 5,000-10,000 people delegated to it from the major regional forums around the world. Have the WSF leadership be selected by regional forums. Mandate the WSF to share and compare and propose based on all that is emerging worldwide -- not to listen again to the same famous speakers who everyone hears worldwide all the time anyhow -- and have the WSF's results, like those of all other forums, published and public, and of course reported by delegates back to the regions.

(9) Feature grassroots activists from movements around the world much more prominently in major events and throughout all forums to strengthen the WSF and local forums as vehicles for their activity and counter tendencies toward elitism.

(10) Ensure that the WSF as a whole and the forums worldwide not make the mistake of trying to become an international, a movement of movements, or even just a voice of the world's movements. To be a forum, the WSF and the smaller component forums need to be as broad and diverse as possible. But, being that broad and that diverse is simply being too broad and too diverse to be an organization. The forums can and should be venues for meeting. They can and should facilitate networking among mutually congenial participants that leads to shared actions. But to be an organization that takes decisions about anything other than its component forums would transcend the forum project's degree of unity.

(11) Mandate that the forums at every level, including the WSF, welcome people from diverse constituencies using the forums and their processes to make contacts and to develop ties that can in turn yield national, regional, or even international networks or movements of movements which do share sufficiently their political aspirations to work closely together, but which exist alongside rather than instead of the forum phenomenon. www.zmag.org

The ‘Old’ and the ‘New’ in the Global Justice and Solidarity Movement

Institutional Alliance-Building and Communicational Dialectics around the World Social Forum Process

Peter Waterman [email protected]

ESF London 2004: horizontals and verticals The European Social Forum, London, 2004 (ESF 2004) suggested, at least to me, a dramatic contrast, indeed a contradiction, between an old and a new way of operating within and around this evidently new phenomenon (this was only the third such annual ESF). Dominating its preparation was a committee consisting primarily of: the Socialist Workers Party (a traditional Trotskyist/Leninist vanguard party operating three or four front organisations at the ESF itself); certain major national trade unions of a traditionally labourist nature and pyramidical structure - if of a more-militant or leftist tendency; certain major NGOs; and the Greater London Authority (actually, a group of advisors to the Mayor, identified with another Leninist tendency, Socialist Action).

Excluded from this dominant grouping were a broad range of libertarian-autonomist-anarchist and feminist (Cruells 2005) groups, of left or just liberal-democratic NGOs, of critically-minded intellectuals, artists and professionals, unprepared to accept the domination of power (politics) and money (capital) that the organising committee represented. Both the unions and the GLA had threatened to withdraw funding if their demands were not met. This conflict was conceptualised, by the thus marginalised, as one between the ‘verticals’ and ‘horizontals’. Eventually the ESF took place within a massive complex, Alexandra Palace, at massive cost, with equally massive over-representation of, for example, the union head offices (which had signally failed to mobilise their members to attend). The SWP and its front organisations were similarly over-represented. Meanwhile, the horizontals either made the most of their marginal position, or set up a number of sites and activities elsewhere in London, or did both simultaneously. (Nunes 2004, CPGB Website).

What was the nature of the relationship between the very varied parties (and Parties) which dominated the organising committee? What was the relationship of the horizontals which permits Rodrigo Nunes to identify a commonality between their separate sites, events and orientations? The answer lies, crudely, in a notion of politics as ‘power over’, as distinguished from ‘power for’. At the top or the front (where else?) we had an ‘alliance of the willing’ - of forces that recognise each other as having a certain financial or organisational capacity and interest to carry out a specific and limited programme or purpose. This was a marriage of convenience, a successful example of machtpolitik as it continues to operate within the global justice and solidarity movement (GJ&SM). Each of those involved in the control exercise were hoping to reap a particular harvest from such, whatever other members of the alliance might be intending. The SWP for instance, was concerned, at all costs, to avoid address to Europe- specific concerns (particularly the ‘boring’ issue of its Constitution) in favour of their Priority- Revolutionary-Issue-Till-The-Next-One, the war in Iraq. My final impression of ESF2004 was, nonetheless, of a modestly-successful event, particularly for those participants who were coming to a Forum for the first time: ‘Anti-Globalisation 101’, as they would say in the USA. Initiative or even domination, anyway, is not the same as control. This could not, I recollect, be assured even at the Communist-front World Youth Festivals of the 1950s, organised by the authoritarian world Communist movement within totalitarian Communist states! The attempt to nonetheless impose such control surely represents an archaic (not to say capitalist or even feudal) notion of power. Machiavelli would have recognised the modus operandi (Sanbonmatsu 2005).

From the old emancipatory movements to the new We are, however, moving from the 19th-20th Century era of primarily institutional power to the 21st Century of an increasingly communicational and cultural one (for a labour movement recognition and specification of this, see Katz 2000). The hegemons know this. Whilst they may not abandon their political and economic fortresses, they are increasingly able and willing to operate on the terrains of communication and culture. The Republicans won - we are told they won - the Presidential elections in the US by fighting, in considerable part, a cultural war (‘God, Guns and Gays’) which the Democrats were unable or unwilling to contest (Mertes 2004). The world hegemons are also more sensitive than we may be to the fact that what one of their organs called ‘the second world power’ is computerised and networked…and operates on the terrain of culture: consider Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11.

It seems to me that, under a globalised networked capitalism, those who want to surpass such need to relate to each other in terms of communication and culture. For us, in the global justice and solidarity movement, communication surely means building a new global community not only on the internet but also using, offline, the relational principles of networking that computerisation incorporates. As for ‘culture’, this has to mean relevant values, images, son et lumière, favourable to ‘a world that allows for many others’. For us, both terms surely imply a dialectic of word and action which is subversive of capitalist, hierarchical, racist, patriarchal, militarist and other alienating structures and processes, and that is supportive of cooperative, creative, critical and self-reflective ways of being.

Relating to each other (each Other) implies debate, discussion and dialogue. These can, of course, take place between traditional institutions, organisations and alliances, each involved in games of hierarchy and competition. But they can also take place without or despite such. Global social emancipation surely requires that the debate, discussion and dialogue replace hierarchy and competitition. Let me specify. By ‘debate’ I mean polemic, the carrying out of war by linguistic means (Churchill: ‘To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war’). By ‘discussion’ I mean an exchange in which each listens to the other. By ‘dialogue’ I mean an exchange in which each learns from the other, or in which the parties are able to surpass the original terms of the exchange and reach agreement at a more-advanced or more complex level.

All these forms or levels of inter-relationship do anyway occur in and around the Forum process. Thus, despite their cautious and often instrumental attitude to the Forums, and despite their profound continuing attachment to ‘social partnership’ (a fundamental partnership with capital and/or state, national or international), the international trade-union organisations reveal the impact of the new ways of relating to each other which the Forum and other instances of the global justice movement demonstrate (Waterman and Timms 2004).

Indeed, the International Committee of the World Social Forum itself reveals the impact of criticism from those – often without money, numbers, institutions or any conventional measures of power – who have been publicly and energetically pointing out the contradictions between its often new values and its often old practices (for the WSF2005 innovations, see Osava 2005). We - yes, I confess to being one of these critics - have been chanting, subversively, ‘Another World is For Sale!’, or ‘Another Forum is Possible!’, or talking about the tension between the ‘verticals’ and ‘horizontals’ within the movement (and demonstrating that horizontals don’t take things lying down).

Promising is this: that most of the critics do not abandon the Forum, or even threaten it - except tongue in cheek? - but, rather, argue for mutual respect and equal…umm?…space, they operate in the interstices, they set up tent on the periphery. And, it seems to me, that in so doing, they at least implicitly recognise that they do not own ‘libertarianism’ or ‘emancipation’, but that these principles can also reside at the centre, or within the old institutions. Or, rather, that they are to be constructed in debate, discussion and – preferably - dialogue with those at the centre of the WSF.

Whether or not those with power within our new movement are moving from institutional alliances to global dialogue may be followed in the evolving relationship between, for example, the international trade-union organisations and the global justice movement. On both sides there exists the old temptation to negotiate, behind the scenes, an instrumental alliance (one in which each calculates how it can use the other for its own purpose, to its own advantage). This is likely to be in function of ‘Another Possible Capitalist World’. Simultaneously, however, there are, within the new movement, voices that expose such archaic processes and unambitious purposes (recall the feminist joke that women who want equality with men lack ambition). And which, operating on the terrains of communication and culture, propose that ‘A World Other than Capitalism is Possible’. The future of the movement – meaning continued movement within the movement - will depend on whether and to what extent it operates in terms of old institutional alliances or of new open dialogues.

The meaning of old and new Old institutional alliances, new open dialogues? This seems a commonsense understanding of the matter. But let us think further about how ‘old’ and ‘new’ operate in relation to social movements. On the one hand it is easy to talk about the old and the new in relation to the World Social Forum process and the GJ&SM. On the other hand, the new dialogical process and a dialectical understanding should require one (or at least this one!) to reject this as yet another binary or, even worse, Manichean opposition (in which the opposed terms have attached to them Vice or Virtue).

Let’s start with the easy talk. What is old here? The national/industrial/colonial phase of capitalism is maybe 150 years old. The nation-state, or state-defined-nation, is several hundred years old, the inter-state institution is a century or so old, the modern political party (for which the German Social Democratic Party stands model) is about 125 years old. The trade union is about two hundred years old. Marxism (and class struggle as the sole or primary motive force of history) is around 150 years old. Socialism is older. Armed insurrection is, well, really old. ‘The social movement’ as one of popular social classes/categories is a 19th century concept. Parliaments, as major platforms for social movements, are pretty old. Internationalism, understood and practised as a relationship between nations, nationalists, nationalisms (often mimicking the power relations between states) is a century old. One could continue…

What is new then? A globalised/networked/informatised/financial and services capitalism (GNC) is pretty new, whether one considers the beginning of the transformation or the generalisation of the concept. The GJ&SM (born 1994?), and which includes a considerable anarchist/autonomist/libertarian element, is pretty damn new. The WSF (born Porto Alegre 2001) is even newer. Whilst ‘new social movements’ are now old hat, the global justice and solidarity movement is new (the concept was born 2002). So is ‘global solidarity’, which includes but surpasses as its constituency nation-state-defined participants. The ‘new social movement’ as a cross-class one expressing progressive values is newish. Networking as a principle of articulation (meaning both joining together and expression) in social movements may be 25 years old, but its recognition (in recent hegemonic discourse as ‘netwar’) is new. So we should not perhaps be surprised that the WSF opposes itself or distances itself (or is autonomous from) the state-national, the inter-state institution, political parties, militarism and insurrection, institutionalised unionism, Marxism, socialism and class-struggle (at least as the primary motive force of history).

Now let’s complicate the matter. I think this means raising our understanding from an everyday or commonsense level to a more sophisticated or theoretical one. It certainly means surpassing an understanding of old and new as a Manichean division.

The non-governmental organisation (NGO) goes back to the 19th century but, as a widespread and influential inter/national phenomenon, particularly as related to ‘development’, often state- or foundation-funded, is 25-50 years old. Yet these have played a major, if not a dominant, role within the WSF. The WSF restriction on political parties is honoured, willy-nilly, more in the breach than the observance. The cross-class WSF has been dominated in both leadership and participation by the university-educated (but see again Osava 2005). Institutionalised unionism, deeply involved in international ‘social (i.e. capitalist) partnership’ is courted. The International Labour Organisation (an inter-state institution of reformist hue, but itself profoundly compromised with capitalist globalisation) is present, with nary an eyebrow raised. Whilst major elements within the WSF may like to think of it as a new kind of ‘open space’, it is increasingly institutionalised, or increasingly accused of being so. Or it is under pressure to take policy positions, or even to become, or support, some kind of global political party, or even a world parliament. And, then, the new anarchist/autonomist/libertarian tendency, and even the Zapatistas who gave the original impulse to the new movement, are excluded from or marginalised within the WSF. Whilst, finally, the GJ&SM (in which the anarcho/autonomo/libertarians are highly visible) is also highly communicationally/culturally active, the WSF has been weak in both spheres.

Rethinking the old and the new So does it make any sense to contrast old and new in relation to the new movements? Or do we have to 1) recognise how the old and the new might operate within the old and the new, and 2) recuperate for new purposes, incorporate within new understandings, valued elements of the old? And does this make it necessary, 3) to abandon not only the Manichean but the binary opposition altogether?

1. The old and the new operate both within the old and the new international movements! There are, as already suggested, old elements within the WSF. But, obviously, the WSF is novel in myriad ways – including the capacity of its central leadership, so far, to transform the event in the light of criticism from its libertarian margin. There are equally novel elements within the old institutionalised trade unions, which have been learning from the WSF, and which in significant cases preceded the WSF in their positive response to women and even feminism.

2. The new movements need to recuperate old social movement elements! If we do not understand old and new, or traditional and innovatory, in terms of a Manichean opposition, then we are required to reconsider critically the old. This does not, of course, imply reversing the terms of the opposition: old is better; new is worse (as might various Simplistic Workers Parties). Nor, obviously, does it mean understanding the old in a traditional manner. I think, for example, there is a necessity to recuperate the old(est) internationalism and the struggle for the emancipation of labour – recognising these as interdependent. Within the context of the WSF, if not possibly also of the GJ&SM more generally, labour and labour struggles have never been a major theme, nor a cross-thematic issue. Labour questions have been typically presented either in the largely ossified form of the traditional unions (see above), or as separate issues concerning worker rights, women workers, migrants, rural labour, land reform, the social economy, etc. Yet, in so far as we are interested in emancipation, labour (over- work, worklessness, privatisation, increasing worker control of products and the production process) need to be made as central to the Forum and the Movement as have been Trade, Aid, Peace, Ecology and – lately - Women and Youth. (Nunes 2004 argues that Precarious Labour was the big issue at ESF2004).

3. Use binary - and even Manichean? - oppositions carefully! I recall that Alberto Melucci, credited with inventing the concept ‘New Social Movements’ later regretted he had done so. Less thoughtful scholars spent a decade or two opposing the NSMs (good) to the OSMs (bad). As a result they, and maybe even he, failed to recognise the emancipatory energy locked into the OSMs and, more fatally perhaps, to recognise that (the) major popular NSMs of his day and ours were or are communalist, racist and fundamentalist! In everyday shorthand, on banners and in the ideological mode, it is hard to avoid binary oppositions and giving these oppositions Manichean qualities. Not only are such procedures ingrained in human history but they surely express certain psychological and emotional needs. If, however, we are 1) concerned precisely to surpass the emancipatory movements of the past, and their common limitations or defeats, and 2) to develop a logic that can handle an increasingly complex reality, then we obviously need a dialectical methodology to accompany a dialogical behaviour. This is ‘the philosophy of internal relations’ according to Ollman (1971), who then usefully specifies it in terms of outlook, inquiry and exposition. Within and around the Forum and the Movement we need to surpass thinking primarily in terms of binaries. We need, in other words, to develop those qualities of thought and action urged on the Movement of 1968 by Hans Magnus Enzensberger (1970) and become ‘as free as dancers, as aware as football players, as surprising as guerillas’. In so far as we follow such precepts, I think there is little danger in using binary oppositions between old and new (as practical shorthand)…and even Manichean oppositions (to express values and motivate action)?

To return to ESF2004 in London. I feel quite comfortable in characterising as old the manner in which this new type of event was set up, structured and controlled. It is not simply that the leadership consisted of an institutional alliance since one can imagine that, in trying to reach a broader constituency, it was more than this. Nor is it that the institutions involved come out of a past period of emancipatory struggle (labour struggle, incrementalist or insurrectionary), since the NGOs that joined the alliance more probably come out of the 1960s anyway. Nor that the dominant actor here, the SWP, thinks primarily in binary-oppositional terms - Reform v. Revolution; Spontaneity v. Organisation; Working-Class v. (Petty-)Bourgeoisie), Imperialism v…hmm? Nationalism again! It is, rather, the combination of these factors that allows one (or at least, again, this one!) to characterise them as old. The new is only beginning to be born. Within, of course, the womb of the old and bearing its marks. Which is why our critical and creative capacities need to be energetically addressed to this also.

Resources

Communist Party of Great Britain Website (European Social Forum pages). http://www.cpgb.org.uk/esf/index.html

Cruells, Eva. 2005. ‘European Social Forum : A Huge Lack of Inclusiveness at the 2004 Edition in London’. Les Pénélopes. http://www.penelopes.org/Anglais/xarticle.php3?id_article=1162.

Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. 1970. ‘Constituents of a Theory of the Media’, New Left Review, No. 64, pp. 13-36. http://www.tcnj.edu/~miranda/classes/topics/reading/enzensberger.pdf

Katz, Wally. 2000. ‘Don’t Mourn, Globalize!’, New Labor Forum, Spring/Summer 2000

Mertes, Tom. 2004. ‘A Republican Proletariat’, New Left Review, No. 30).

Nunes, Rodrigo. 2004. ‘Territory and Deterritory: Inside and Outside the ESF 2004, New Movement Subjectivities’, November 23, 2004 2:29 PM, [email protected].

Ollman, Bertell. 1971. Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Osava, Mario. 2005. ‘World Social Forum: Porto Alegre Puts Mumbai’s Lessons to the Test’, Inter Press Service New Agency, January 21.

Sanbonmatsu, John. 2004. The Postmodern Prince: Critical Theory, Left Strategy, and the Making of a New Political Subject. New York: Monthly Review Press. 272 pp.

Waterman, Peter and Jill Timms. 2004. ‘Trade Union Internationalism and A Global Civil Society in the Making’, in Kaldor, Mary, Helmut Anheier and Marlies Glasius (eds), Global Civil Society 2004/5. London: Sage. Pp. 178-202.

Venezuela’s Chavez Closes World Social Forum with Call to Transcend Capitalism

Imperialism is not invincible

By: Cleto A. Sojo - Venezuelanalysis.com

Caracas, Jan 30, 2005 (Venezuelanalysis.com).- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was warmly received at the 2005 edition of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where he held several meetings with local leaders, intellectuals and activists, and gave the closing speech at the Gigantinho Stadium. Chavez generated great interest among Forum participants, many of whom see Chavez and his project of political transformations being implemented in Venezuela, as an inspiration in the struggles for a more better world.

The Venezuelan President visited the Lagoa do Junco agrarian settlement in Tapes set up by Brazil's Landless Movement (MST), and later held a press conference with more than 120 media organizations, where he criticized the U.S. government for claiming to lead a fight against terrorism while undermining Democracy in Venezuela.

Chavez highlighted the recent creation of Latin American satellite TV network TeleSur, "which will allow us to tell our people’s reality in our own words." He added that TeleSur will be at the disposal of the people, not of governments.

The leader added that his country's military forces are undergoing a period of modernization of its weapon systems and resources, but asserted that it is aimed at defending the country's sovereignty. "Venezuela will not attack anybody, but don’t attack Venezuela, because you will find us ready to defend our sovereignty, and the project we are carrying forward," he added.

"The FTAA is death" During the closing speech at the Gigantinho Stadium, the president added that 2005 arrived and the FTAA was not implemented. "The FTAA is death, what they go was mini-FTAA’s because the U.S. imperialism did not have the strength to impose the neocolonial model of the FTAA."

The President highlighted the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), a proposal made by Venezuela in opposition to the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA), and which emphasizes social and cultural exchanges above profit-based economic deals. "We can’t wait for a sustained economic growth of 10 years in order to start reducing poverty through the trickledown effect, as the neoliberal economic theories propose."

He praised the cooperation with Cuba, which, along with several Central American countries, receives Venezuelan oil at below market prices, in exchange for assistance in healthcare, education, agriculture and other areas. He highlighted that about 20.000 Cuban doctors work in Venezuela at free medical clinics in poor neighborhoods, and that Venezuela has used a Cuban literacy method approved by UNESCO that has allowed more than 1.3 million Venezuelans learn how to read and write. He said Venezuela is using Cuban vaccines, which now allow poor children to be vaccinated against diseases such as hepatitis.

The President criticized alleged media distortions with regard to plans by Fidel Castro and him to spread Communism in the Americas, overthrow governments and set up guerrillas, "after 10 years it seems like we haven’t been very successful."

"Cuba has its own profile and Venezuela has its own, but we have respect for each other, but we celebrate accords and advance together for the interest of our peoples." He said that any aggression against either country will have to confront the other, "because we are united in spirit from Mexico down to the Patagonia."

Chavez said U.S.-Venezuela political relations are unhealthy because of “permanent aggressions from there”. He criticized U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who recently asserted that Chavez was “a negative force in the region.” He said those relations will stay unhealthy as long as the U.S. continues its policies of aggression. "The most negative force in the world today is the government of the United States," he said.

The President criticized the U.S. government for asking other countries to pressure Venezuela in the crisis with Colombia over the kidnapping of a Colombian guerrilla activist in Caracas last December. “Nobody answered their call… they are more lonely everyday.” He praised the cooperation of other Latin American countries in the resolution of the crisis, and mentioned that Cuban President Fidel Castro held talks with Colombian President Alvaro Uribe to try to help in the resolution of the crisis. Chavez agreed to meet Uribe early in February to settle the dispute.

"Imperialism not invincible" Chavez added that U.S. imperialism is not invincible. "Look at Vietnam, look at Iraq and Cuba resisting, and now look at Venezuela." In reference to the recommendations of some of his close advisors, he said that "some people say that we cannot say nor do anything that can irritate those in Washington." He repeated the words of Argentine independence hero José de San Martin "let’s be free without caring about anyone else says."

"When imperialism feels weak, it resorts to brute force. The attacks on Venezuela are a sign of weakness, ideological weakness. Nowadays almost nobody defends neoliberalism. Up until three years ago, just Fidel [Castro] and I raised those criticisms at Presidential meetings. We felt lonely, as if we infiltrated those meetings."

He added that those ideological and economic weaknesses will continue to increase. "Just look at the internal repression inside the United States, the Patriot Act, which is a repressive law against U.S. citizens. They have put in jail a group of journalists for not revealing their sources. They won't allow them to take pictures of the bodies of the dead soldiers, many of them Latinos, coming from Iraq. Those are signs of Goliath's weaknesses."

"The south also exists" He said there were old and new actors in the geopolitical map who are coming into the scene and have an influence in the weaknesses and strengths of the U.S. hegemony. "Today's Russia is not Yeltsin's... there is new Russian nationalism, and I have seen it in the streets of Moscow... there is a good president, Mr. Putin, at the wheel." He also praised China's fast economic growth, and highlighted the new Spanish socialist government, "which no longer bends its knees in front of U.S. imperialism."

"The south also exists... the future of the north depends on the south. If we don't make that better world possible, if we fail, and through the rifles of the U.S. Marines, and through Mr. Bush's murderous bombs, if the is no coincidence and organization necessary in the south to resist the offensive of neo-imperialism, and the Bush doctrine is imposed upon the world, the world will be destroyed," he said.

Chavez warned of drastic weather changes that would bring catastrophic events if no action is taken soon, in reference to uncontrolled or little regulated industrial activity. Chavez added that perhaps before those drastic changes take place, there will be rebellions everywhere "because the peoples are not going to accept in peace impositions such as neoliberalism or such as colonialism."

"The U.S. people are our brothers" He added that all empires come to an end. "One day the decay inside U.S. imperialism will end up toppling it, and the great people of Martin Luther King will be set free. The great people of the United States are our brothers, my salute to them."

"We must start talking again about equality. The U.S. government talks about freedom and liberty, but never about equality. "They are not interested in equality. This is a distorted concept of liberty. The U.S. people, with whom we share dreams and ideals, must free themselves… A country of heroes, dreamers, and fighters, the people of Martin Luther King, and Cesar Chavez."

Christ "revolutionary" Chavez thanked Spanish intellectual and director of Le Monde Diplomatique Ignacio Ramonet for saying that Chavez was a new type of leader. He said he is inspired by old types of leaders such as Christ, whom he described as "one of the greatest anti-imperialist fighters, the redeemers of the poor, and one of the greatest revolutionaries of the history of the world." The President mentioned Venezuela’s independence hero Simon Bolivar, Brazil's José Ignacio Abreu Elima, Che Guevara, "that Argentine doctor that traveled through the continent in a motorcycle and who was a witness of the U.S. invasion of Guatemala in 1955, one of the many invasion of the U.S. empire in this continent," and Cuban President Fidel Castro.

“Capitalism must be transcended” "Everyday I become more convinced, there is no doubt in my mind, and as many intellectuals have said, that it is necessary to transcend capitalism. But capitalism can’t be transcended from with capitalism itself, but through socialism, true socialism, with equality and justice. But I’m also convinced that it is possible to do it under democracy, but not in the type of democracy being imposed from Washington," he said.

"We have to re-invent socialism. It can’t be the kind of socialism that we saw in the Soviet Union, but it will emerge as we develop new systems that are built on cooperation, not competition," he added.

Chavez said that Venezuela is trying to implement a social economy. "It is impossible, within the framework of the capitalist system to solve the grave problems of poverty of the majority of the world’s population. We must transcend capitalism. But we cannot resort to state capitalism, which would be the same perversion of the Soviet Union. We must reclaim socialism as a thesis, a project and a path, but a new type of socialism, a humanist one, which puts humans and not machines or the state ahead of everything. That’s the debate we must promote around the world, and the WSF is a good place to do it."

He added that in spite of his admiration for Argentine revolutionary Che Guevara, he said Che's methods are not applicable. "That thesis of one, two, or three Vietnams, did not work, especially in Venezuela."

The President cited Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky by saying that "each revolution needs the whip of the counterrevolution to advance." He listed actions by the opposition and the U.S. government to drive him out of power. "But we resisted, and now have gone into the offensive. For instance, we recovered our oil industry... In 2004, from the oil industry budget we utilized $4 billion in social investments, education, health, micro-credits, scholarships, and housing, aimed at the poorest of the poor, what neoliberals call waste of money. But that is not a waste of money because it is aimed at empowering the poor so that they can defeat poverty. He added that "that money before stayed out of Venezuela or just benefited the rich."

He criticized privatizations by saying that "privatization is a neoliberal and imperialist plan. Health can’t be privatized because it is a fundamental human right, nor can education, water, electricity and other public services. They can’t be surrendered to private capital that denies the people from their rights."

Defends Lula Chavez defended Brazilian President Luis "Lula" Da Silva, who has been sharply criticized by the Latin American left, and who was booed during his speech at the World Social Forum.

"I say this from the bottom of my heart. In Venezuela at the beginning of my presidency, many of my supporters criticized me and asked me to go at a faster pace [to implement changes], and be more radical, but I considered that it was not the right moment because each process has several phases and different rhythms that not only have to do with internal situations in each country, but with the international situation at the time. So, risking that you make some strange noise, I want to say that I like Lula, I appreciate him, and he is a good man, of a great heart. He is a brother, a comrade and I send him a hug, my love and affection. I'm sure that with Lula and the people of Brazil, with Nestor Kirchner and the Argentine people, with Tabaré Vasquez and the Uruguayan people, we will be opening the path to realizing the dream of a united Latin America." www.venezuelanalysis.com

The following debate was the result of this article:

Going to listen to Chavez was indeed a unique experience not all of Which is confinded to Chavez...but more of that later. However, it was strange to hear him say Putin was a friend-I wonder what the people being slaughtered by Putin would think of that. Mind you he also prasied Chinese socialism-so figure that out!

Moreover, in the context of the growing and intense debate on the Brazilian left (and indeed inside the anti-capitalist movement) about the direction of Lula and what it meqans for the movement I think his references to Lula were clearly an attempt to provide left cover for Lula.

Finally, as with much of the forum Brazilian politics subtly domianted The pre-Chavez entertainment. The leader of CUT could not be heard during his 15 minute speech as so many people drowned him out with boos. Many by us (some of whom supported Lula) said it was because people think he is not leading the fight against the bosses and to a lesser extent Lula (given what Patrick said about the drop in peoples wages in the last 2 years no wonder people are angry with the trade union bureaucrats). Yet the former governor Rio Grande Sul of the PT was cheered to the rafters I suspect because he is seen as being to the left of Lula.

Related to all of this was the verbal sparing match between 100% Lula Supporters (BTW I saw a nice riposte to the "100% Lula" t-shirts that simply said "100% socialist") that electrified the whole night. What transpired was that any song that criticised Lula directly (such as a song that referred to how Lula has money to buy a private presidential jet but not for education) was taken up by about a third of the audience. But songs that criticised government policy generally like the song "1,2,3,thousands, if you dont stop the reforms we will stop Brazil"-which was sung with such passion-was taken up by everbody.

Other banners included "No to the adjustment of IMF and Lula", "Uribe and Bush hands of Colombia" and my fave "Chavez please come and be our President" Also, those who attdeend both Lula and Chavez rallies said that the Chavez rally was more exciitng, vibrant and "political"-the lack of PT banners was so evident to anyone there. As one young guy by us said "This is our (The anti-capitaist) rally". It is clear that whilst the audience was divided over LUla Chavez united them. Why? Surely becasue he represents much that Lula doesn't and that is someone who is perceived to be taking on the bosses, the rich and The neo-liberal IMF etc. Another interesting thing was why wasnt this rally held in the much bigger stadium right next door? Given that this rally was much, much younger than the Lula rally is strikes me that practically everyone from the huge (and seemingly ever growing ) youth camp would have attended and many others. Again, a subtle attempt to control the overtly political extent and nature of large rallies at the forum? Added to which is the contradiction of supposedly moving away from "star performers" and keeping independent of the state yet inviting Lula and Chavez- once again I think it is an attempt by some leading members of the WSF to claim some of the radicalism of the movement, as symbolised by Chavez and to particularly steer the youth towards reformist leaders.

>> >> Peter

Thanks to Manny for his correction - especially since neither enthusiastic participants nor eagle-eyed reporters seem to have noticed the significant distinction he makes.

I do agree that WSF cannot and should not prevent such people turning up. But I suppose that if it was, say, the Prime Minister of the UK, or the National Liberation Army (ELN) of Colombia, WSF would take care to publicly dissociate itself from them.

Can anyone tell us who not only invited Lula and Chavez but also presumably hired the requisite stadiums?

And I missed being there with Manny and Many.

This means that I am, like the Many, dependent on media coverage. Like the Few, I have access to the web and lists and reports from friends.

But the WSF, as I have been complaining since my first WSF in 2002, is surprisingly weak in its communications efforts. And that means that neither the Many nor the Few of us really have an overview.

Looking forward to Manny's eventual commentary on this WSF.

Peter W

i don't know who rented the halls. but i suspect that, in both cases, it was the brazilian government or the pt. the prefect of rio grande do sul met both at the airport and there were government ministers on the platform at both speeches. the members of the organizing committee of the wsf were not on the platform, as far as i know. as for blair coming, which seems most improbable, i don't think the wsf would disassociate itself but i don't think that the participants would show up either. incidentally, the one public disassociation that was made was to the suggestion by lula at davos that there should be a meeting between the wef and wsf in paris in june. several members of the brazilian organizing committee said, no way would they go, and lula then redefined what he had said, in effect backing down. what most commentators leave out of the discussion is that the relations between lula and chavez are very strong. chavez went out of his way to praise lula, defending him against the critiques from parts of the brazilian left, at a meeting where the brazilian chavistas were booing lula. the best short report that i have seen on the meeting was by the urugayan journalist/activist raul zibechi. it's in spanish. i am forwarding it, since i can't figure out how to attach it. yours/Immanuel

If the PT organised the Chavez visit they have a funny way of showing it as I and thsoie around did not see a single PT banner which seems very strange from a political/organisational point of view.

Secondly, whilst the WSF may not have formally invited Chavez or Lula I am sure they were asked to consent to the meeting being held in effectively a "WSF space". I think the distinction about it not being a WSF event is political sophistry. Moreover, whilst the WSF may not have formally sanctioned the rallies Candido from Ibase chaired the LUla meeting and both he and one of the main figures and founders o the WSF form Le Monde Diplomatique (whose name eludes me right now) also spoke before Chavez and praised him.

In the context of the WSF, of the intense ideological debate over Lulas political directions and what Chavez represents to the global movement to imply that we should consider this as an independent political event I think is asking us to suspend our judgment of real politik.

Peter Dweyer

Like others, I think it's too early to draw conclusive conclusions from the reports we have so far had about the WSF. However, I do want to respond (and in general support) some of the important points Peter W made re the Chavez speech, fascinating and worrying. I think his description of the uncritical recycling of 1960s discourses is particularly telling.

Firstly, I think it is unsurprising, but still worrying, that Heads of State, even the likes of Chavez, are invited to speak in whatever capacity at the WSF (like Peter D, I think the niceties of who invited him and in what capacity he spoke are mostly besides the point - he has certainly been seen to be part of the Forum). I used to think one of the great strengths of the global social justice movement was that the vast majority of its activists had broken from the model of looking for already existing states where socialism, or some version or progressive policies, were already being implemented, by heroic iconographic leaders, that could simply be replicated elsewhere.

The heroes of the social movements appeared to be activists, women and men, and even they had to defend their ideas in comradely but rigorous debate. We seem to have lost ground in this regard: the movement, or at least parts of it, again appear to be looking to state leaders for leadership and inspiration, and Peter W is right to warn of the dangers of intoxication in this regard.

The other thing that has happened, I think since September 11, is that too many of us have too easily taken up Bush's 'with us or against us' challenge in an overly simplistic way. Don't get me wrong: I am of course 100% against Bush, and all he stands for. But there is a tendency amongst some to assume that our enemy's enemy is our friend, and so anyone who declares themselves to be against Bush, neo-colonialism, imperialism, neo-liberalism and so on, must necessarily be an ally of the social justice movement.

I well remember attending a meeting of progressive students at the University of Zambia a couple of years ago, when the Zimbabwean High Commissioner received a standing ovation for his cleverly worded attacks on the US, UK etc, all designed to detract attention from criticisms of Mugabe's vile dictatorship, which they succeeded in doing. Of course, I'm not suggesting that Chavez can be equated to Mugabe in any sense. Nevertheless, his remarks regarding Russia, China, etc are instructive in this regard.

There is a tendency in some quarters to see versions of authoritarian nationalism as the only viable alternative to free market neo-liberal capitalism. It is a message that resonates with millions of poor people who have suffered the devastating impact of economic liberalisation, and desperately seek an alternative to it. It is unsurprising that such people might look (as they once looked to the Soviet Union, to China, etc) to such apparently existing solutions, rather than believing it possible to change the world through their own self-activity. In such circumstances, people may discount the lack of democracy in such places, associating such demands for democracy with the West and its double-standards on such issues.

So, what do we do about this? At one level, we need to express solidarity with peoples under attack from the main enemy, by campaigns like 'Hands off Cuba', and so on. We also need to stress that our solidarity with oppressed peoples does not require an endorsement of their states and governments. 'Neither neo-liberal capitalism nor authoritarian nationalism' seems to me a partial answer, albeit one requiring us to acknowledge that some nationalisms are more progressive and less authoritarian than others. We may have to accept that the WSF is not, and cannot be, representative of the wider social justice movement, perhaps seeing it instead as the tip of an iceberg of myriad local campaigns and activities throughout the world.

I wrote recently about the difficulties for grassroots African activists to attend the ASF in Lusaka, and the dangers of depending on international NGOs in funding, organising, and (thereby) setting the agenda for such events. We should of course strive to make the WSF as inclusive as possible, but we should also bring together activists in manageable and accessible local and national forums - and maybe we can keep these free of both statesmen, and prefabricated models of a better world.

Miles

The WSF ended today with a very lively march of about 20,000 people some of whom then led the Porto Alegre exodus of bulging backpacks and Delsey suitcases-perhaps never to return or not for at least several years as 2006 will see regional forums in the build up to the Africanisation of the WSF in 2007. Where it actually goes that year nobody knows but the starting line up (in no particular order) is Morocco, Kenya and South Africa.

For me this week has been summed up by a contradiction. That is a growing movement (geographically and politically) that seems to have less of a sense of purpose and greater political unity than it did coming out of Mumbai. With the Lula rally and burying the issue of the war in Iraq there was a clear attempt by the more conservative forces (big NGOs, certain individuals) in the WSF processes (who perhaps see the movement growing numerically and politically beyond their influence) to take some of the radicalism and energy out of the movement by subtly confining it to placing demands on the great and the good-some call it capitalism with a human face.

This is partly reflected in the move by some big NGOs to push the Make Poverty History campaign and through saddling it up to Brown and Blairs one upmanship (the contest to lead the Labour Party) over the paltry proposed debt cancellations. As always in ignoring the structural and systemic problems generated by capitalist social relations the implication is that our future lays within the capitalist system-not beyond it.

But still, as a whole bunch of global and local activists chatting to me last night made it very, very clear they now feel or feel more part of a "global movement". The challenge they said was to take this palpable feeling, this enthusiasm and inspiration they all drew from the WSF, back home to their workplaces, colleges and communities and to inject the anger, energy, creativity, smiles and tears into their "local" campaigns and political work.

Peter

Anna Weekes wrote back with a question:

Can somebody who attended this year's WSF please give me a figure - how many SA attendees people were ordinary, landless/waterless/jobless, people from the ground, living in townships/shacks? And how many were suburban, professional activists from NGO's?

I'm thinking that it might not be quite so challenging to inject anger and energy into local struggles, post WSF participation, if those injecting the anger were actually from the movements and living in those communities. --

Anna

Peter Dweyer’s response to Anna:

I don't think this is a genuine question but a polemical one. Despite this I will treat it seriously as it raises some important issues. However, am tired right now but will have a stab at it.

Substantively, despite it being hard to say, and am not sure how useful it is to simply and only sociologically catergorise the WSF participants, I came across SA people such as Trevor N, Maureen from LPM, several SA youth (of about 40 youth Trevor told me) taken by the ASF, participants from a range of NGOs (some I guess could be classed as 'professional activists'- although am no sure what that really means as several I know live in townships)such as Jubillee, AIDC, TCOE, SA council of churches national COSATU (elected) leaders, NUMSA (elected) leaders and appointed officials and SA Council of Churches...

Yes it is obviously an arena with some opportunists, careerists and false friends in, but show me a political space in which that has never existed. I accept that NGOs area relatively new phenomena-some good, a lot terrible, of the late 20 century. But simply saying that does not explain much and whilst this is not the place to analyse this phenomena they are for better or worse (often both I think)a product of the political period of the last 20 years. Indeed, I expect them to be swept aside in a serious, sustained and deep up-turn of global struggle. But for now they are a facet of political life and we have to find a way of dealing with them without cuting ourselves of thsoe who admire and look to them. And we have to accept that in Europe some NGOs have been vital in building the anti-deby campaign and mobilsing large numbers of people.

On the first day strolling around the Youth Camp Trevor and I got talking around the Youth Camp Trevor and I got talking (in between playing our very minor part in helping to kick out the youth group belonging to Cardoso's party in Brazil from the Youth camp) about the difficulty in getting people over here and how good it would be for the likes of APF activists to attend the WSF.

Perhaps Trevor only got here as his flight was paid for as he often speaks but maybe like AIDC he could rotate what people attend so as to give others the learning experience, maybe NGOs like AIDC should fund-raise or pay for others to go-if it is a not a problem for funders-which I susepct it is. No doubt some organsiations as with AIDC will continue to have an internal assessment of why we go, if we should consider going in the future or maybe none of us should bother attending in the future?

It was notable for me and some others (including a Canadian guy who has spent 10 years working with the Karen people in Burmah-Thailand) that indigenous peoples struggles seeemd sidelined. Several indiegnous activists publicy noted this and condemned publicy the WSF organsisers and I went on a march of about 200 indigenous people on Monday.

Then again some peasant-indigenous speakers and a couple of ranka nd file trade unionsist from the UK-USA-Phillipines, South Korea, India and Japan that I came across seemed very keen to take advantage of the space to publicise and generate some form of support for their struggles. Of course Mumbai was very different in its sociological make up and I think (?) it helped more than it hindered the struggle for a whole range of groups in India.

I think that it would be a mistake to abandon the WSF proceses. And for me this is linked to an implict question that all of us on the left face globally and it is quite simply this: how do we relate to the hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, perhaps mainly actvists of some sort, who identify symbolically, politically with what the WSF processes are and what it represents for our movement at this historical moment. Who may, for some of us be too uncritical towards the WSF, some of its main organisers etc? IS this not a similar question as to how do we relate to those people who identify with the existing mass based reformist groups such as ANC, PT, Labour Party...and of course thsoe who do~'t-both groupsare important? How do we do that without isolating ourselves from the mass or people as the far-elft ahs done for far too long?

What we dont do is take a sectarian approach like Mumbai Resistance and refuse to participate BTW several Indian trade union people told me the Mumbai Resistance has collapsed and some of its main people attended the WSF this week-although I can' substantiate this).

Is it not better to see this movement and terrain as a 'fight within a fight' and so should we not participate in it so as to be able to offer thsoe involved and to shape it?

For me the WSF processes, for all their tensions, contradictions and weaknesses, some of which I have tried to report about this week, are a step in the right direction (not the only one- witness the strikes over welfare in Europe and revolts in LA) given 20 years of neo-liberalism and defeats, particularly in the main western countries, for the left. In fact no February 13 2003, the most successfula nd biggest day of gobal action in history I think. Whilst it was a political fight to get the day of action through the WSf-ESF spaces, that alone makes the WSF etc something worth fighting for-for now.

Peter

Anna responded:

Actually it was a genuine question.

Although every time this kind of question is raised, even by ordinary people themselves, it arouses a lot of defensiveness. This is quite surprising given that a lot of people have pointed out that WSF participation is generally a privelige afforded to mainly "passport wielding, credit card swiping, voyager mile accumulating, cyber connected, defenders of the rights of the working class" (We Write, Vol 2 No 1). Its not a new assertion.

Really, what is the point of the very same people going to the WSF each and every year to network and pass resolutions? So far it hasn't produced outstanding results. Some people have been every year for the past 4 years. Its also very selfish because the kind of people who attend are the very same ones who have almost 24 hour access to email, and so can be in touch with the rest of the world anyway (as opposed to many members of movements/unions' who don't even have electricity or TV).

There have been many attempts to get NGO's to fund ordinary peoples' participation in this and other activities and the NGOs are just not interested. Jubilee SA in particular has a history of sending the same people all over the world to events, with only one or two grassroots people getting sent once in a blue moon.

If you ask such organisations why they have taken this approach they will tell you that they need people who are able to 'raise the issues in the proper way', and if you press the point that ordinary, working class people should attend, they will say you are problematic and have personal problems with some of them.

Union leaders also fall into the category of the funded world travellers. Some of them are attending 7 or 8 international conferences and congresses every year. When are we going to see some grassroots shopstewards or (heaven forbid) actual workers at these shindigs? Anna

Response by Miles

These are excellent contributions from Trevor. However, I want to question whether his emphasis on WSF 2007 and on the ASF (in its present form) is the right approach for social movement activists in Africa. Trevor rightly makes the point that African participation in WSF 2005 tended to be dominated by large international NGOs, both organisationally and in terms of the largely reformist agenda that they play a large part in setting - it is a point I made in my piece about the 2004 ASF, an event Trevor was present for.

Whilst I obviously think it is right for radicals to resist and oppose the undue influence of NGOs, we should be realistic about to what degree this is possible with the ASF itself as an event. The vast inequalities in access to information, transport, money between the international NGOs and their hand-picked partners on the one hand, and the hundreds of grassroots social movements across the continent on the other, is not going to disappear overnight. This resulted in a highly uneven ASF, with some very good overarching declarations, but with a significant lack of active participation by local social movements from across the continent.

As I reported, there has been significant progress with national Social Forums in 2004. These were held in Zim (for the second time), Malawi, Kenya, and Nigeria (and maybe elsewhere, Ghana in a different form?). These appear to have been highly successful, enabling a much greater degree of grassroots participation. Where they did occur, they seem to have strengthened the input from those countries into the ASF in Lusaka. Nigerian participants at the ASF arrived with a clear set of declarations from their national SF, which they then fed into the ASF.

I strongly believe that national Social Forums, and even local and community ones (as occurred in the poorest townships of Nairobi), should be a priority for 2005. They can enable an African social movement agenda to be built more concretely from the bottom-up, based on a much greater level of grassroots participation than may ever occur at the ASF. This is not to argue that participation in the ASF or WSF 2007 should be based on strict delegation - we should still do everything possible to ensure that as many social movement activists attend these events as possible, and make their voices heard. But a larger number of national Social Forums (how about it, South Africa?) in 2005 would, I believe, provide the building blocks for these events to be far more participatory and representative than they have been so far.

I have no strong view of where the WSF 2007 should be held, but hope that it doesn't turn into an unedifying squabble. I will never forget the moment at the ASF 2003, when the Congolese delegate suggested the next event should be held in Kinshasa - the horrified looks on the faces of hardened activists was priceless!

Final Update from the World Social Forum by Mandisa Mbali by Mandisa Mbali in Porto Alegre

The World Social Forum ended yesterday. It's amazing how quickly the city is emptying. I spent much of Saturday and Sunday (the last two days of seminars and meetings at the Forum) attending African Social Forum meetings. A big highlight was hearing Hugo Chavez speak. The end of the Forum has also given me time to reflect on the Forum as a whole, and I wish to share with you some of my overall observations.

On Saturday I attended the African Tribunal of Women, where African women and women of African descent from the diaspora spoke about injustices they face. This tribunal followed a similar format to the one which was held at the African Social Forum meeting in Lusaka: a format where several women would give testimony under different themes followed by comment from the panel of judges (also civil society members). There was patchy translation in places, particularly from Portuguese to English (and vice versa), but there were a few presentations which were particularly interesting.

For instance, a Haitian activist from a rogressive women's organisation described how despite Haitian women's role in the Haitian revolution to end slavery and colonialism, two centuries later their livelihoods have not improved. Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world and the International Financial Institutions dictate the economic policies Haiti adopts. The neoliberalism they impose on Haiti means that women cannot access hospitals in the country, most of which are private and demand payment for services. This in turn means that many women in Haiti cannot access antenatal services, resulting in a high maternal and infant mortality rate. Drinking water is scarce in Haiti and there is insufficient irrigation. Haiti's environment has been destroyed and there is soil erosion which makes subsistence agriculture difficult.

While this Haitian activist did not directly discuss Aristide's recent ousting, it is clear that the country is still in a great deal of violent turmoil: children have to dodge gunshots on their way to school and armed gangsters, including adolescents kill, rape and rob the population. The harshness of the struggle to survive in Haiti leads to Haitian women emigrating to other countries such as the United States and the Dominican Republic where they face racism, exploitation, xenophobia and if they are illegal immigrants constant threat of deportation.

In the face of such difficulties Haitian women are still engaging in advocacy and organising themselves "as black women who live in a developing country with a right to self- determination": a statement which was clearly critiquing French and American meddling in the country's affairs.

A Kenyan activist from a group called Muvangano Wa Wanavijiji (Federation of Slum-dwellers) described how government housing schemes in Kenya gave houses to those who could already afford them without government assistance. This led the slum dwellers to establish a savings scheme (with some contributions as low as one Kenyan shilling) to build a house and each participant volunteers to provide labour for building one day a week. The scheme has to date built four such houses for its members.

Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs)currently being negotiated between African countries and the European Union will also further entrench the everyday misery for poor people in Africa. An activist from SEATINI a trade justice group complained that they will rob African countries of revenue from customs duty, which could be used to protect domestic industry and products. African countries such as Kenya primarily export primary commodities such as coffee and the inequalities in the coffee trade are stark: whereas coffee growers will only receive US$0,22 per gram of coffee, a cup of coffee can cost up to US$3 at a coffee shop in rich countries. Most of the profit goes to 'middle men' in rich countries such as Nestle, Kraft et al who roast, package and market coffee. This activist mentioned to me that ideally African countries would add value to and package their raw commodities into finished products and that tariffs could be a means towards protecting infant industries which could be established to do this.

On Sunday, I attended a meeting to discuss Africa's hosting of the World Social Forum in 2007, which has been ratified by the International Council governing the Forum. It was clear from attending the meeting that there may be intense debates developing over who will host the Forum meeting to be held in Africa. While it is rumoured that the Morocco Social Forum has been lobbying the international council very hard to host the 2007 Forum, some questioning of this proposal is already emerging. For example, Neil Coleman of COSATU argued that the venue should be chosen according to criteria "consistent with the ideals of the World Social Forum" and that "a country should not be chosen which oppresses or occupies another nation". I speculated that this statement may have been a veiled criticism of Morocco's bid to host the Forum, especially given Morocco's ongoing claim to Western Sahara (whose government was recently recognised by the South African government).

It is unclear whether this statement may herald the possibility of a South African hosting bid being discussed at any serious level by members of South African civil society. South Africa certainly has the infrastructure and experience in hosting large meetings and so would on one level would be an obvious choice. However, some South African activists from groups further to the left have expressed a concern that were South Africa to host the event it could be used for political grandstanding by the ruling alliance: in a way similar to how Lula used the Forum to promote his policies and party just before rushing off to Davos. Others felt that South Africa has already had the chance to host a great many gatherings on global issues and that the opportunity to host such gathering ought to be shared between African countries, especially given what they view as South Africa's domineering 'sub-imperialist' role on the continent. It may be the case that behind the scenes lobbying is going on for South Africa to host the next Forum, but it is difficult to tell where such debates rest at the moment.

Many of the speakers mentioned the need to ensure proper, transparent, inclusive and participatory approaches to planning the 2007 Forum. It was also stated that 'African diversities' and a sharing of ideas needed to take place, which I interpreted as meaning that regional (Northern and sub-Saharan Africa) and linguistic divisions (Francophone, Lusophone and Anglophone) needed to be managed in a sensitive way. What is certainly clear is that the organisational issues of how the Africa Social Forum council is structured and how transparent and legitimate its dealings are perceived to be by civil society groups may remain an ongoing issue, especially in the light of the fact that Africa will be hosting the 2007 global Forum.

My last Forum event and certainly a highlight of my time in Porto Alegre was going to see Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez speak at the giant stadium (the Gigantinho) on Sunday evening. Chavez spoke at the same venue as Lula had a few days before, but the events were completely different. The stadium was hot and packed to capacity (I estimate that at least 20 000 people were there, if not more) and the excitement about hearing Chavez speak was palpable: he was the rock star of the Forum.

His talk started three and a half hours later than advertised. Assorted musical items and boring speeches by WSF council, government and union figures where punctuated by cries of "Ole, Ole, Ole, Ole Chavez, Chavez!' and most interestingly, 'Chavez yes, Lula no!'. Some activists held banners saying "Chavez, Be Our President!". As with the Lula talk there were PT supporters and people from parties to the left of the PT such as P-SOL (made up of dissidents who recently left the PT over social security reforms) and PSTU who did counter booing and cheering (lefties who left the PT ten years ago over earlier for similar reasons). Whereas PT supporters made up the bulk of the audience at Lula's talk, most people at the Chavez talk clearly fell into the later camps.

Chavez spoke following an ecstatic reception to him as he walked to the podium. A young Latino American from Harlem kindly translated his speech for me in noisy and hot conditions, for which I'm extremely grateful. I'm sure that better summaries of his speech are doing the rounds on left e-mail lists so I'll rather stick to describing my overall impressions of his speech. There were strong populist overtures in his speech: for instance, he said he was an ordinary man, in touch with the needs of the peasants and the poor, as he has been a farmer, who knows how to take care of a family and a soldier, who knows how to fight for what is right. He spent much of the first 30 minutes of his two hour speech describing how the struggle of Latin America against imperialism stems from the work of earlier revolutionaries such as Che Guevara, Bolivar and so on.

The main theme of his speech was the need for anti-imperialism. At times in arguing for this, his speech got quite rhetorical: he said that "Christ was the first anti-imperialist", that "Che's blood runs through our veins". A few anti-imperialist quotes from the speech which are worth sharing include: "the North depends on the South"; "If the South followed Bush's agenda, the world could be destroyed"; "we must continue to fight for what is right even if that requires violence because I'd rather die fighting than die of hunger" "That the Patriot Act hinders freedom of speech meaning that the dead bodies in Iraq are piling up" He also mentioned that he rejected the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA, known as ALCA in Latin America) at a meeting in Canada.

Another big section of his speech was devoted to discussing events in Venezuela. He referred to attempts by conservatives to oust him as being an attempt at counter-revolution. In 2004, he agreed to a referendum called for by the conservatives even when the petition calling for one included fake signatures and signatures of dead people. He won 60% in that referendum partly because of the successes of his administration in delivering social services. His administration famously nationalised oil (a very radical step in this day and age, especially in the context of the invasion and occupation of Iraq) and has spent revenues thus obtained on education, health, micro-credit and housing all of which are provided free. Tariq Ali drew attention to these successes in a recent Wolpe lecture given at CCS in Durban, which is what stimulated my curiosity about Chavez in the first place.

I must say that he is one of the most charismatic and inspiring speakers I have ever heard, even though I heard him translated from Spanish in difficult conditions in a stadium of 40 degrees centigrade with little water and food for four hours. Having said that, I feel that the Forum may have been dominated far too much by speakers given by 'great leaders', whereas social movements are made up of many people and should be stronger than relying on charismatic leaders. More plenary debates should have been held between civil society leaders and intellectuals on key controversial issues facing the Forum and civil society, such as: "Should we have any dealings with International Financial Institutions such as the World Bank?", "What are appropriate relationships between social movements and NGOs within and from the North and South?" "How do we avoid reproducing the world we are trying to change in our movements by excluding women, poor people, black people, gay people or reflecting dominant social relations in our organisational hierarchies?"

To move into more general critiques of the Forum, the spread out, self-organised meetings made it extremely hard to move from one meeting to the next. Most meetings were held in extremely hot tents, which made it almost impossible to concentrate for long periods. Many people in the youth camp seemed to be simply at the Forum to party, which made it hard for serious politicised youths (such as progressive youth activists from Zimbabwe) to get any rest. Similarly, scheduled activist meetings in the evenings which were programmed to happen from 7 to 9 every night were often interrupted by loud music. So, for instance, an activist meeting on Zimbabwe we interrupted by loud techno music at 8:30pm, just as activists from Crisis in Zimbabwe Coalition was describing what solidarity measures they want from activists in neighbouring countries such as South Africa.

There were innumerable reports of theft in the camp, which was poorly lit and completely open to anyone to walk around, including non-delegates/camp residents. These security issues meant women in the camp did not feel at all safe, especially given allegations we heard that five women had been raped in the camp on the final night and that an alleged perpetrator had even been murdered. It's unclear what (if any) support rape survivors could receive (such as health services, counselling and support accessing criminal justice) in the event of a rape at the Forum, but its clear that these issues need to be addressed at the next Forum. Our PT- supporting Brazilian friends argue that since the conservative government took over Porto Alegre there has been noticeably less support for the Forum and that Forum security may have been a casualty of these change in government in the city.

Broader questions also remain: for instance can the Forum remain an "open space for discussion of alternatives" indefinitely? Many activists I spoke to expressed a desire for the Forum to be more action-orientated and even possibly to begin to take positions on certain key issues (eg. The occupation of Iraq). It's very questionable to me to characterise the Forums as a movement of movements, when at best they are a space to network with different organisations and activists. The lack of clear politics at the Forum means that some delegates literally moved between Davos and Porto Alegre, suggesting that the Forum may no longer be challenging global capital as it has in times past. Delegates at Porto Alegre were urged to wear white headbands, but so did delegates in Davos. Perhaps as Social Movements Indaba argued at Lusaka the time may have come to "jealously guard" spaces for organising in the interests of the working class and poor against cooption to the agendas of other interests??

And so I left Porto Alegre with mixed feelings and many unanswered questions about where the global movement against corporate globalisation and imperialism was headed and what role the Forums could play in bolstering that movement. I hope that Africa, by hosting the global Forum can add ultimately improve it as an instrument to express resistance. However, I have felt pleased to have had the opportunity to have met so many wonderfully warm, committed and intelligent people from around the world of all ages and walks of life, working so hard to see the realisation of their ideals for a better world. In this sense, the Forum gave me enormous hope for the future. More reports by Mandisa Mbali

The Global Justice and Solidarity Movement: A backgrounder The Global Justice and Solidarity Movement: A backgrounder

By Peter Waterman

The WSF is probably best identified with the recent international wave of protest known as the 'anti-globalisation movement'. While intimately interrelated with the latter, the WSF is just one emanation of this much more general phenomenon and process. How can these and their inter- relationship be best understood ? It is possible to make a 19th-20th century comparison, with the relationship between trade unions or labour parties on the one hand and 'the labour movement' on the other. But the labour movement, whilst obviously broader and looser than any particular institution, and having international expression, consisted largely of other, primarily national, institutions (co-operatives, women's organisations, publications). The WSF is an essentially international event (or an expanding series of such). And on the other hand, we have an essentially international movement that might not even (yet ?) recognise itself as such. So we are confronted with two new social phenomena — of the period of globalisation, that are both international and global, and that have a novel relationship with each other.

The WSF — promoted by an identifiable group of Brazilian, French and other non-governmental organisations, trade unions and individuals — is itself linked organically to the more general movement. This is through an informal Forum event, known as the ‘Call of Social Movements’, which has been attended, and its regular declarations signed, by many WSF participant bodies (see this volume). The Call formalised itself between WSF2-3 with a Social Movements International Secretariat. But this body, or tendency, is a matter of discomfort for those within the WSF who want to see the Forum as a 'space' rather than a 'movement'.1 The 'Global Justice and Solidarity Movement' (GJ&SM) is actually a name proposed by the Call, for the general wave of protest againstcorporate-dominated globalisation, against US-sponsored neoliberalism / neo-conservatism and war, one name for the new wave of radical-democratic protest and counter-proposition.

This 'movement of movements' is marked by its network form and communication activity; a matter recognised by friends and enemies alike.2 Moreover, 'it' seems to change size, shape, reach, scale, target and aims according to events. So, at one moment it might be focussed against neoliberal economic globalisation, at another against the US-led war on Iraq. This makes it even more challenging to analyse than to name. Like any novel phenomenon, the GJ&SM is easier to characterise by what it is not than by what it is : • It is not an international labour or socialist movement, though unions and socialists are prominently involved; • It is not a 'transnational advocacy network',3 though it is much marked by the presence of international and national NGOs; • It is not a reincarnation of the international protest wave following 1968, though Che Guevara icons are still popular, and it includes other clear echoes of the sixties and seventies; • It is not an anarchist movement, though anarchists, autonomists and libertarians are highly active within it; • It is not a nationalist or thirdworldist movement, though nationalist, thirdworldist and anti- imperialist forces and notes can be clearly identified within it;

It is, on the other hand, not too difficult to identify a rising number of processes that have provoked this movement. These include :

• the increasing predominance, in the international sphere, of multinational corporations and international financial institutions, along with the neoliberal policies that have been imposed on both North and the South • The shrinking of the public sphere and reduction of State social programmes and subsidies; • the feminisation of poverty, the commodification of women (the sex trade), the simultaneous formal endorsement and political denial of women's and sexual rights; • de-industrialisation, unemployment and the informalisation of employment; • the ideology of competitiveness as the court of first and last appeal; • the undermining of market protection (primarily of weaker national economies); • the simultaneous preaching and practical undermining of traditional structures and notions of national sovereignty; • the simultaneous creation of new international institutions and regulations, alongside the marginalisation of the United Nations and such agencies as the International Labour Organisation (ILO); • increasing talk of and the continuing undermining of ecological sustainability; corporate attempts to copyright genetic resources, to genetically modify foodstuffs, to commercialise them and then coerce people into buying them; the continuation and even increase of militarism, militarisation and warfare despite hopes raised by the end of the Cold War; • the increase in globalised epidemics and threats to the climate; • the demonisation of immigrants, asylum-seekers, and of Islam and other 'others'.

All these have dramatically raised social tensions, particularly in the South, but also in the East (the ex-Communist world) and even in such model core capitalist welfare states as Canada and Sweden. The pressures have also provoked major conservative, reactionary, religious and ethnic backlashes, of a violent and repressive nature, sometimes internationally co-ordinated. Many identify the new protest movements of the emerging century with the North — Seattle 1999, Prague 2000, Genoa 2001, Gothenburg 2001, Barcelona 2002, Evian 2003. They also associate it with the middle classes, students and youth, who have indeed been prominent within it. But so have women, forming around 50 per cent at the World Social Forums, though this is little commented on. But the movement cannot be limited to major protest events, nor to what has occurred since 1999. It must be traced both back and down, at least to the ‘food riots’ provoked by the IMF in the South of the eighties, when there were urban uprisings against the externally-imposed end of food subsidies. Widespread protests against gigantic and ecologically damaging dam projects, promoted by the World Bank and developmentalist local elites, go back to the eighties and earlier. There were major demonstrations and riots against the poll tax in Britain in 1990. Through the 1990s, there were myriad protests across the South against the euphemistically-named Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) in particular, and neoliberal policies more generally. And the appearance of the often corporatist, sometimes chauvinist and ommonly quiescent US AFL-CIO on the anti-WTO demonstration in Seattle, was welcomed — (somewhat prematurely ?) — by the slogan ‘Teamsters and Turtles : Together at Last!’.4

One major manifestation of US-initiated neoliberalism has been the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which provoked widespread protest in both Canada and Mexico. In the case of Canada, it turned an initial national-protectionist campaign into one of international solidarity, first with Mexico, then with Latin America more generally, leading to the Hemispheric Social Alliance, which included the USA. In the case of Mexico, the launching date of the NAFTA, January 1, 1994, was used for the launching also of the Zapatista movement in the severely globalised, marginalised and exploited state of Chiapas, in the South of Mexico.5 Initially appearing as a classical armed guerrilla movement based on the discriminated and land-hungry Mayan ethnic communities of Chiapas, the Zapatistas rapidly revealed entirely novel characteristics : an address to Mexican civil society, a high-profile internationalism, a sophisticated understanding and use of both the mass media and alternative electronic communications. All can be found in the speeches and writings of its primary spokesperson, Sub-Commander Marcos (Rafael Guillén) a university-educated non-indigene, trained in guerrilla warfare in Cuba. Activities of the Zapatistas, particularly two international encuentros, one in Chiapas, 1996, one in Spain, 1997, gave rise, or shape, to a new wave of internationalism. The powerful, poetic and playful words of Marcos, who switches between, or combines, popular Mayan and Mexican idiom with the language of cosmopolitan intellectuals, enchanted a dulled world. It had a dramatic appeal on several fronts. An international Left, battered, bruised and disoriented by : the downscaling of the welfare state; the downsizing of the working class; the halting of the forward march of labour; the collapse of Eastern Communist and Southern Populist states; and the crisis of the international movements identified with such. Zapatista encounters also inspired at least two significant emanations of the movement, People’s Global Action (PGA) and the WSF itself.6 Other major sources of, or contributors to the new movement must be mentioned particularly the rising wave of protest against unemployment, privatisation and cuts in social services gathering steam throughout the nineties, markedly in Europe and the increasing development of ‘counter-expertise’, concentrated in international and national NGOs which had been honed at a series of UN conferences and summits through the 1990s — notably the 1992 World Conference on Environment and Development and the 1995 UN Fourth World Conference on Women. Also, the rise of irreverent, often anarchisttinted, direct action movements of customarily internationalist appeal, such as Reclaim the Streets in the UK. This supported the courageous, but eventually defeated Liverpool Dockers’ protest against corporate attack, state legislation and union passivity in the face of such.

A significant international libertarian initiative, related to this kind of national activity was that of PGA, which held meetings in Geneva, Bangalore and Cochabamba.7 Finally, the seventies and eighties movements which served as forerunners to the rise of the so-called New Social Movements. Considered as expressing ‘identity’ more than ‘interest’, these movements — of women, indigenous peoples, and sexual minorities, for media democratisation, on ecology and consumption — were noted in the South as well as the North. They brought to public attention hidden forms of alienation, suggested new forms of ‘self-articulation’ (both joining and expression). As much addressed to the transformation of civil society as of the economy or state, these movements raised issues that the major old international ‘interest’ movement — that of unionised labour — had long subordinated, ignored or marginalised.8 The rise of the ‘anti-globalisation movement’ did not so much re-assert ‘interest’ over ‘identity’ as surpass the alleged opposition — or even the distinction. Highlighting the increasing power of corporations over states, and of their negative impact on people and peoples — North, South, East — the movement was as much a challenge to institutionalised labour and the Left worldwide as to an international women’s movement suffering severe ‘ngo-isation’.9

It is clear, from yet another name — the ‘anti-capitalist movement’ — that this ‘movement of movements’ is as much an aspiration as an actuality, as much a becoming as a being. It has, however, passed one major test. When the terrorist attack on New York and Washington occurred on September 11, 2001, there was a stalemate in the growing movement in North America (Seattle 1999; Washington DC 2000; Quebec 2001). Yet, with the US-led wars against Afghanistan, 2002 and Iraq, 2003, a movement often considered to be primarily ‘anti- corporate’ morphed into the biggest international anti-war protest in history. A ‘New York Times’ columnist stated, February 18, 2003, ‘there may still be in our planet, two super- powers : the United States and world public opinion’.

A 300-strong anti-war demonstration took place even in Lima, Peru. This is a country profoundly traumatised and isolated by decades of neoliberalism, counter-insurgency and authoritarian rule, and which had — unlike neighbouring Brazil, Ecuador andBolivia —previously revealed only marginal awareness of the new internationalist wave.10 The language of the new radical-democratic protest movements is increasingly infecting some of the 50–100-year-old international trade union organisations, such as the recently renamed Global Union Federations (GUFs). And trade unions, which have150–200 million members worldwide, are increasingly attracted by the WSF.11 The WSF has been held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, 2001–3, and is scheduled for Mumbai, India, in 2004. If the earlier mentioned protest events were frequently marked more by opposition than proposition, the Forums have not only been devoted to counter proposition over a remarkably wide range of social issues (with a wide range of significant collective actors). They have also demonstrated that what is shaping up is much more than a northern, or even a western hemispheric internationalism. The Forum process, moreover, has now reached take off, with national, regional and thematic forums taking place all over the world. Some of these may be independent of the WSF itself. The WSF has also become both the subject and the site of intense reflection concerning its own significance, nature and future.12

Names and Definitions This movement, as suggested, has many names, these reflecting sometimes conflicting, sometimes overlapping approaches, theories, strategies and aspirations. These understandings vary from the traditional leftist, the non-traditional leftist to the innovatory, and even the insistence that this is not a movement but a ‘field’. Attempts have been made to capture, or at least conceptualise the phenomenon under the rubric of ‘global civil society’. The ways even sympathetic theorists and strategists try to identify groups or tendencies within the movement is revealing both of their orientation and of the novel nature of the phenomenon.13 Thus, Alex Callinicos from the UK, whilst admitting that the majority of its activists are not anti-capitalist, refers to its ‘developing consciousness’ as justification for calling it so. He then draws up a typology of anti-capitalism that includes the ‘reactionary’, ‘bourgeois’, ‘localist’, ‘reformist’ ‘autonomist’ and ‘socialist’ (himself identifying with a sub-category of this last type, the ‘revolutionary’).14 Christophe Aguiton from France, a Trotskyite of another feather, and a leading figure within the WSF, tentatively identifies three ‘poles’ within the global justice movement : ‘Radical internationalist’, ‘nationalist’, and ‘neo-reformist’. The first looks beyond both capitalism and the nation-state, the second is a mostly-Southern response, and the third is the kind of ‘global governance’ tendency also strongly present within the WSF.15 Starr and Adams from the USA, who would be ‘localists’ in the Callinicos typology, characterise the movement as ‘anti-globalisation’, and identify as significant, ‘modes’ or ‘archetypes’ within it : ‘radical reform’, which is state- friendly; ‘people’s globalisation’, associated with the WSF; and ‘autonomy’, identified with the ecological friendliness and democratic qualities of freely co-operating communities (their own).

The Portuguese researcher, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, who concentrates on the WSF, suggests its radical implications for the surpassing of traditional sociologies, Left strategies and even western epistemology. He argues that any significant new emancipatory movement cannot be understood in pre-existing terms, and proposes the necessity, in our epoch, of developing a ‘sociology of absence’ and a ‘sociology of emergence’. This is to surpass the sociologies of the existent and apparent, and allow voice to what has been ignored or suppressed. These new sociologies are also necessary to surpass ‘conservative utopias’, whether of the Right or Left. Italian Mario Pianta, considering the movement in ‘global civil society’ terms, divides responses to neoliberal globalisation into ‘supporters of current arrangements,’ ‘reformists,’ ‘radical critics favouring another globalisation,’ ‘alternatives outside the mainstream’, and ‘nationalist rejectionists’. What is suggestive is that, with the exception of Callinicos, none of the above uses the terminology of Left (Right or Centre) and that, in practice, each of these understandings cuts across the Left-as-we-know-it, the Left of a national-industrial- (anti-)colonial-capitalism. Whilst many activists and some internationally influential Left movements do refer solely to this tradition, the question of whether the GS&JM is not potentially surpassing traditional Left internationalism is also being raised. ‘Emancipation’ might seem a more appropriate term than ‘Left’ when discussing today the transformation of society, nature, culture, work and psychology — as well as, of course, that increasingly important but placeless place, cyberspace.16

Formation of the Movement — the Local, National, Regional and Global Whilst some writers set up, in oppositional terms, the national and the global, the local and the global, it would seem more fruitful to see these as existing in creative tension, with each of these levels, instances or spaces informed by the other. Or at least needing to be so informed.17

If we compare the last major wave of world-wide protest symbolised by 1968, we have to recognise that the movements of that period were parallel rather than linked. Despite all the similarities, there appears to have been little direct contact or movement communication between Paris and Prague, between the European protests and uprisings and those of Dakar, Tokyo or Mexico City. Neither participant accounts nor contemporary ones seem to claim such.18 ‘1968’ was certainly inspired by the Cuban Revolution (1959), the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1965), the Vietnamese resistance to the US (1960s), by the dramatic rise of the US Civil Rights Movement (1960s), by the creation of the Cubansponsored Tri-continental solidarity movement and the Organisation of Latin American Solidarity (1966–7).

It was certainly also informed, in the literal sense, by mass media reports. But 1968 was neither organised nor co-ordinated by these. And the commercial media proved to be a predictably problematic means of movement communication.19 In so far as the movement was informed by the ‘Situationist International’ of that period, connected with the names of Vaneighem and Debord, this would have been in Paris rather than Prague and mostly because of such provocative new notions as ‘the revolution in everyday life’.

A hoped-for ‘Coming of the New International’ was confined to the Third World, marked by a state-oriented ‘thirdworldism’ and truncated even here.20 The period following 1968 can now be seen rather as revealing the crisis of the old, institutionalised, ideological, party, nationalist or bloc inter-nationalisms than as proposing an alternative kind of internationalism. What the vacuum was often filled with was a uni-directional ‘First-World-Third-World’ solidarity, itself sometimes conflated with state-funded ‘development co-operation’ projects, carried out by NGOs with an often-ambiguous autonomy from states, North or South.21 For a meaningful alternative internationalism to take shape, a revolution within capitalism caused by the combination of globalisation and informatisation was needed. The nature of this alternative may be at least suggested by the world’s biggest and most widespread (if unsuccessful) protest demonstration, the anti-war protest of February 15–16, 2003. This had been called for at the ESF 2002 and echoed at WSF 3. The provocation here was clearly the new kind of global war launched by the most conservative powers in the North. But the co-ordination of the protest was now largely dependent on dozens of ‘alternative’ websites and lists. It may have been further supported by traditional anti-war and anti-imperialist elements within the movement, but it would surely have been impossible without the web.22 The new localisms and internationalisms of the present day are inspired by the explicit or implicit recognition that ‘the nation-state...is at once too large and too small for the range of real social purposes’.23 What holds these levels, spaces, foci together, in a possibly conflictive but unavoidable tension, is the more-recent recognition, by the Zapatistas, of the necessity for “a world where many worlds fit”.24 Let us reflect on the spatial relations of two national cases. There has been a dramatic wave of varied social protests across South Africa in the last few years. Largely popular, non-white, poor, cross-class and multi-ethnic. As in the rather effective AIDS campaign, these movements can be seen, or presented, as local, and / or national, and / or regional (Southern African), and / or global. In much of the commentary, this kind of cross- scale referencing is quite spontaneous. To what extent such awareness exists amongst participants (or what significance a more-than-nationalist consciousness might have amongst them) remains to be investigated. But the very existence of such awareness amongst both organisers and commentators suggests a ‘world of difference’ from that of 1968, or of course, 1917. Its importance is indeed also witnessed in the South African case by those ‘Left’ politicians in power, and / or profoundly compromised with neoliberal policies, which appeal to old internationalisms against the new global movements !25 India has seen similar or even greater waves of such protests over the last decade, traceable back to half a century or more. They include worker, rural, urban, regional, adivasi (indigenous) and Dalit (‘untouchable’; oppressed) movements, religious and ethnic protests (often sectarian or communalist), ecological and women’s movements. Over the past two decades there has been an increase in dramatic, often massive, protest demonstrations and marches, explicitly aimed against neoliberalisation, globalisation and imperialism. With the possible exception of the ecological and women’s movements, and projects for regional civil society linkages, however, these have shown little consciousness of, or significant linkage with, movements elsewhere.

That this has continued till recently may not be due simply to the relative size, poverty or isolation of India but to the framing of such protests within the protest discourses of the 19th– 20th century, such as socialism (of a decreasingly internationalist nature), nationalism and populism. The recently rising consciousness of, and connection with, the GJ&SM, is symbolised by the holding of the first ASF (Hyderabad 2002), and the hosting of the first WSF outside Brazil, in Mumbai, in 2004. Exceptionally, in India, the old Left has taken this initiative. Whether, at Mumbai, the clearest note will be struck by the old traditions of national subaltern protest, or the new ones of global counter-assertion — or how these will be mutually articulated — may be significant for the future of not only the WSF but for the GJ&SM in general.26

Forming the Movement — Culture, Communication and Cyberspace Distancing ourselves somewhat from current analyses, claims or prognostications concerning culture, communication or cyberspace, or aspects, of the new movement,27 it is worthwhile tracing the line back to, or forward from, the old internationalisms. Marx and Engels were excited by the communication impact of national railways and the telegraph as it became trans-European. When Lenin declared that “Cinema for us is the most important of arts”, he meant that silent film could communicate across literacy and language barriers. Twentieth century communist internationalism was sensitive to the area of communications and culture, one of its most creative spirits declaring, notably, that “communications are the nervous system of ...internationalism and human solidarity”.28 In the 1920s, the Moscow-based Third International sponsored a multitude of often-innovatory cultural and communication forms, both popular and avant-garde, from Germany to India and Japan. Leaping forward to ‘1968’, we can note the brilliant poster art, often internationalist in spirit, following the Cuban Revolution, and that generated by Paris in 1968 itself. At the same time, however, the widespread hostility of the new Left to ‘capitalist technology’ and the ‘commercial mass media’ was criticised by Enzensberger.29 He argued that engagement with the electronic media would allow people to mobilise themselves — to become “as free as dancers, as aware as football players, as surprising as guerrillas”. From this period on we note the development of community-specific local-to-international radio, ‘guerrilla’ video groups and computer- communication experiments.30 A part of the new social movements of the eighties and nineties retained, and still retains, its suspicion of computer-based ‘communications internationalism’ and of the internet and cyberspace more generally. More pragmatic spirits simply adopted and adapted each new development. And the more visionary began to see the internet not simply as a tool but as a space to be disputed and even as community creating. Amongst the most pragmatic have been the union organisations and many independent labour and socialist internationalists. Amongst the more visionary and experimental have been the Zapatistas and their supporters, some feminists and those coming out of the ‘community’, ‘alternative’ and other media movements — themselves descendents of 1968.

The best-known expression is the de-centred, multi-media, Indymedia Center which sprang to life during Seattle 1999, and which now has nodes in such unlikely places as India, Palestine, and Russia.31 Alongside such new internationalist media practices we see democratic international media-campaigning, itself traceable back to the thirdworldist (i.e. statist) New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) of the seventies and eighties Today this has a more radical-democratic or social-movement orientation. Media and cyberspace activity finds multi-faceted expression within the WSF, partly in official panels, partly in more marginal ones. It may also, however, find expression within alternative or oppositional spaces during the World Summit on the Information Society WSIS), 2003–5. Such activities within the UN system may now be seen as secondary to activity within the framework of the WSF.32 Given their low- level of institutionalisation and of the conventional quest for political power, both the WSF and the GJ&SM have to be considered in cultural and communication terms. But whereas the Movement’s protest events have been dramatically networked, and concerned with mass-media and alternative-media address, those of proposition, such as the WSF, have been rather less so, relying on such traditional (new) Left forms as the panel and the demonstration. A path- breaking exception here has been, however, the anti-fundamentalist and anti-war masks, videos, posters and hoardings of the feminist Marcosur group at WSF 2 and 3.33

Conclusion : A Fifth International ? A new internationalism is taking shape and place, though it might be more realistic to put this in the plural, or to distinguish it as ‘the new global solidarity’. There will be argument about whether it surpasses the First-to-Fourth Internationals or provides a basis for some kind of Fifth one. However, it is also quite possible that it will reproduce the errors and failures of previous internationals. The GJ&SM has not, so far, proven to be a movement much aware of that history, which is also part of its own history — or at least of its inheritance. Those involved in such debates are, however, likely to agree that a movement that is not aware of its history is in danger of repeating it.34 Patrick Bond’s table may clarify positions and processes identified in the paper or provoke alternative conceptualisations of the Global Justice and Solidarity Movement.35

AUGUST 2003 Peter Waterman.

Critical Reflections On The Fifth World Social Forum

by Alex Callinicos and Chris Nineham

Znet, 8 February 2005 www.globalresearch.ca 9 February 2005

The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/CAL502A.html

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.

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 take 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.

The following comment is a response to the article above: Peter Waterman comments:

Here is the SWP, criticising the presence of President Lula at the WSF 2005:

'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.'

The SWP is the Trotskyist/Stalinist Vanguard party that, together with the Greater London Authority office (the town mayor of London), ran the European Social Forum in London, October 2004.

It did this in a centralised and top-down manner, using two or three of its well-known front organisations, attempting to thus dominate the event through its newspaper sellers at entrances, its stalls in exhibition spaces and its presence on platforms.

It also instrumentalised the ESF, which is intended to give a European specificity to the global movement, by dismissing the issue of the EU Constitution (and alternatives to such)as 'boring', compared with what the SWP's priority-revolutionary-issue-till-the-next-one - the occupation of Iraq.

SWP manipulation of the ESF led to the most extensive and vocal protests against such heard around any ESF so far. It also gave rise, however, to equally energetic efforts to circumvent the 'vertical' controls by the creation of 'horizontal' events and processes on the periphery of the ESF. The creation of what might be called 'open social space' around 'controlled political place' actually created an interesting new model, true to the spirit, if not always the practice, of the Forum movement so far.

It may, finally, be remembered by participants at ESF2003, in Florence, that the SWP leadership, followed by its retinue, thrust its way through the rest of us poor beggars at the closing demonstration, to proclaim its love of the poor by proclaiming, archaically and inanely, 'One Solution, Revolution!'.

The SWP, in other words, represents everything about the traditional forms of counter- hegemonic movement/organisation that the World Social Forum was intended, by its charter, to surpass. For many participants in the WSF, and in the broader global justice and solidarity movement (as it was baptised by the Call of Social Movements in 2002), there is not 'one solution' but, in the words of the Zapatistas, 'one no and many yesses'. And for many others, particularly those who have experienced revolution on their own bodies in the South or the East, revolution is not so much a solution as a problem.

None of the above implies a dismissal of the article that follows. What it does imply is a critical reading of these particular critics.

Such a critical reading might start with the failure of these top leaders of the SWP to make clear that the bookending of the WSF by Presidents Lula and Chávez, occurred outside the WSF site, even if with the complicit goodwill of the WSF organisers. It might continue with comparing SWP hostility to the presence of President Lula with its...equanimity?...concerning the presence of President Chávez (to be later traded in for equal hostility when the SWP decides that Chávez has 'betrayed the one solution revolution' it already has in mind).

A critical reader of the SWP critique below, might end by asking him/herself whether any such would have appeared had Lula been replaced by Alex Callinicos and Chávez by Chris Nineham...

Many of the issues raised by the SWP have already been raised by groups or individuals with less contradictory backgrounds and motives. The critique made by the SWP has, nonetheless, to be responded to, paragraph by paragraph. I have no doubt that this will be done, particularly by others who attended WSF2005. I look forward to the consequent exchange of opinions. And I hope - against previous experience - that such discussion will be carried in full by the SWP's own publications. This might indicate that the SWP is moving from debate (the carrying out of war by verbal means) to dialogue (learning from the other, mutually surpassing the original terms of the exchange).

The following are the responses to the above comment.

Peter

I would hate to become known as the SWP's defender on this list, mainly because I have significant disagreements with it myself. But I am disappointed in the way in which you present this posting. Rather than engaging with its specifics (and despite your belated call to engage with it paragraph by paragraph), you seek to effectively negate any serious consideration of its contents with your introductory remarks about your personal perspective of the SWP and its alleged role in the ESF.

Apart from your bizarre characterisation of it as 'Stalinist', I for one simply don't recognise your description of what happened at the ESF in London. You're of course entitled to your opinion of this, but by making childish comparisons in your critique (e.g. between Lula and Callinicos, as if this in any way a meaningful comparison), you seek to write off the posting before any reader engages with it. You give the game away by your comment that "Many of the issues raised by the SWP have already been raised by groups or individuals with less contradictory backgrounds and motives." - creating a sense that the SWP is not worth engaging with, not because of what it says, but because of where it comes from. Isn't this a breach in the spirit of dialogue that you rightly call for? The Social Forum approach should be to genuinely listen to what all contributors have to say, and critically engaging with it, rather than simply expressing your own prejudices about who is saying it.

Given our recent constructive exchanges on this list, it's a shame to see you come down with the classic symptoms of what any old leftie would diagnose as sectarianism.

Miles

Dear, Miles, welcome to the very contradictory and frustrating world of Peter Waterman in Debate mode! I seem to recall posting a compliment about Peter W's more serious engagements with me, you adn others on teh list not 2 weeks ago whilst I was at the WSF but adding the proviso that he will, as has always been the case in the past, return to his childish rants.

Sadly, he has proven me to be correct.

Beyond the World Social Forum: the need for new institutions

Ezequiel Adamovsky

As campaigners from around the world prepare for the fifth World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, Ezequiel Adamovsky argues that the “movement of movements” has reached a crossroads. It needs a new political focus: inventing institutions that embody not hierarchies of power but cooperation among equals.

For all the extraordinary variety of issues under discussion at the World Social Forum, each year there seems to be one fundamental question floating in the air. 2001 was mostly about establishing the source of our problems and naming our enemy – capitalism or neo-liberalism, as you prefer. 2002 was about presenting concrete alternatives to the neo-liberal order. 2003, having identified the enemy and discussed possible ways to change the world, was mainly about strategy – the political ways to make real the slogan: “Another world is possible”. At Mumbai in January 2004, the most visible concern in some of the main events was arguably that of exposing the hidden link between neo-liberalism and the United States’s neo-colonial foreign policy. But strategy is always the most contentious issue for social movements, so it is not surprising that it was again one of the main concerns in the fourth WSF. Within this wider field, Mumbai seems to have been particularly haunted by the question of what political institutions must we use to change the world; in particular, can we use or reform existing institutions or must we invent new ones?

After the sad, scary results of the United States elections, I am afraid that the January 2005 meeting of WSF in Porto Alegre is likely to be mostly about “God, what do we do now?!”. Indeed, we need to seriously discuss how to defend our movements from the growing authoritarianism of the empire. I hope, however, that the sense of disorientation and fear we all experience at the moment will not stop us from continuing our explorations on strategy and alternative organising. If we are to stop the ever-expanding violence of the capitalist world- system and change the way we live, we will need serious, effective ways to organise ourselves and act at the global level.

Institutions for change There is still little agreement among the movements regarding issues of strategy and organisation. For the kind of party-minded people described in Paul Kingsnorth’s reflection on the European Social Forum in London in October 2004, for example, there is nothing new to invent: the key to social change is building and supporting traditional left-wing parties and internationals. But other ideas were available at the fourth WSF in Mumbai.

At least four kinds of approaches were presented there. Some proposed to reform the United Nations to make it a truly representative body with real power; others were in favour of creating an international (even world) parliament; in several workshops, participants advocated transforming the WSF into a representative assembly of social movements, by using a federative structure with delegates able to make decisions and to design a common strategy for the global struggle. A fourth grouping preferred to invest energy into organising and strengthening the informal networks of movements and activists that have emerged in the last few years; they believe that networks are a powerful instrument to change the world since they “anticipate” the features of the new world we want to build – they are decentralised, democratic, coercion-free, and radically non-hierarchical. This debate on the institutions that can be the vehicle towards a post-capitalist future is only starting. It is likely to continue for a long time before concrete options crystallise. For myself, I do not believe in projects such as reforming the UN or establishing an international parliament: these options would surely reproduce, at the global level, the problems and limitations that representative democracies currently experience at the national level. Besides, it is not likely that we will ever have such institutions if we are to trust an agreement of national governments to implement it.

Yet I do not believe that the key to social change lies either in the attempt to create (after so many failed efforts, and ignoring the lessons of history) the “truly” revolutionary party/international, or in the let’s-get-one-of-us-elected alternatives. It should be clear by now that strategies based on seizing power by means of popular leaders and/or hierarchical political parties never work. Moreover, historical experience shows that the leaders/parties thus empowered often end up ruling for the existing elites, or imposing a new elite upon society, while they hijack and even sometimes deactivate the popular movements that helped them get to power. This is – to mention but one example – the hard lesson that Lula is teaching the Brazilians.

Would a Communist, Trotskyist or Maoist leader/party escape that fate? Considering how little they have changed since the times when they ruled extensive parts of the world (with the catastrophic results we all know), I really doubt it. A brand new New Labour or a group of new social democrats? Oh, please, get serious!

While the idea to transform the WSF into a representative body may be worth exploring, I think networks have an enormous potential to bring together social movements at the global level. True, we are still in the pre-history of network-like organising. But the current situation of existing networks may help us visualise both their potential and their limitations. My experience of observing the activities and evolution of three networks during 2004 – the Social Movements International Network, the Global Resistance Network, and Peoples’ Global Action – has left me with some thoughts on the path ahead.

Beyond an assembly of activists The first example concerns the Social Movements International Network (Smin), which emerged within the WSF in 2002-2003 through the cooperation of a number of organisations – Central Única de Trabalhadores (Cut) and the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) in Brazil; the World March of Women in Quebec; Focus on the Global South in Thailand; and part of Attac France. Under the auspices of Smin, a group called the “Assembly of Activists” (AA) – the continuation of the “Assembly of Social Movements” created at the third WSF (also in Porto Alegre) – developed, seeking to attract more activists and movements. It held four meetings at Mumbai, which were highly publicised and which anyone was welcome to attend. Yet the AA’s performance was far less impressive than might have been expected: only 100-200 people came to its meetings – in a forum involving hundreds of thousands of people.

Why, for such a promising project, was the AA’s performance so poor? The basic facts about Smin remain obscure and its whole operation lacks transparency; we know that the network has an international secretariat (quite perplexing in itself – networks are not supposed to have secretariats) controlled by Cut, but even basic information about its internal processes is unavailable to the public.

Despite these limitations, Smin (and its AA component) has helped produce some important political moves. The AA succeeded in reaching a consensus on a list of days of global action for 2004 (beginning with the worldwide demonstrations against the war on Iraq on 20 March) which many movements across the world supported; and Smin was at the heart of the appeal to the third conference of anti-war movements, networks and NGOs, held in Beirut in September.

This conference gathered representatives from over 200 organisations and movements from 54 countries (including strong delegations from Iraq and Palestine). As a result of the proceedings, an official statement was issued, which uncompromisingly condemned the American and Israeli “racist” attacks on the Arab countries, and categorically supported the Iraqi and Palestinian movements of resistance. Thus, thanks to this conference, the “movement of movements” came much closer to the struggles in the middle east – a fundamental step in the making of a truly global network of resistance.

If such far-reaching decisions can be made by a small and hardly participatory organisation, what greater potential is there for a truly open and more transparent global network of social movements? In this respect, the people behind Smin share with the WSF organisers (and elements of the two groups are interchangeable) a curious situation: they are helping to unleash the energy of the movement of movements despite their reluctance to open their decision-making processes to wider participation. One can only hope that these people will come to understand the enormous responsibility on their shoulders, and act accordingly.

A turn towards such openness is made even more urgent by divisions within the organising committee of the 2005 WSF over the past year. As anticipated by many commentators (myself included), the influence of the most “moderate” NGOs, the Catholic church and social democrats is growing – a reflection of the resources and funding they can mobilise rather than any legitimacy they may have within the movement of movements. Insiders’ reports suggest that – in an environment where Lula’s ruling Workers’ Party has lost much of its interest in the WSF, and social movements in general are facing difficulties – the few social movements left within the WSF organising committee have been involved in a hard struggle over the draft agenda for Porto Alegre. One source suggests that the original list of issues proposed for discussion was so “moderate” that it would have changed the WSF into some tamed “celebration of diversity” and a “World Bank-like encounter of ‘civil society’”. The more radical members of the committee had to fight strong resistance to ensure that some more “antagonistic” issues were included. They finally succeeded, but will they be able to hold out much longer?

The only way to counter the disproportionate influence of NGOs and other institutions without real roots in social struggle is to bring more social movements into the WSF’s decision-making process. And the easiest way to do that is to open up Smin to the participation of all.

Keeping it radical The second example worth considering is that of the Global Resistance Network (RRG), a project conceived at the youth camp during the 2002 forum in Porto Alegre and gathering together a handful of small global resistance collectives drawing on the experience of the camp. The purpose of RRG seemed initially to be to create the “youth chapter” of Smin, but the autonomous nature of the project soon became clear.

RRG maintained a ghostly existence during 2003, mainly as a (barely active) email list and set of informal contacts between activists. But a meeting at the youth camp in Mumbai, held with only one day’s notice, attracted over thirty young people from eighteen countries. Sitting in a circle under the stars, activists from Europe, Latin America and North America, India, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Australia, Indonesia, and elsewhere decided to endorse the global days of action proposed by Smin and to strengthen RRG by reorganising its internal functions and responsibilities.

On the whole, RRG did not become much stronger and better organised during 2004 (although it did hold two or three global chat-meetings on the internet, a simple and in its way significant “innovation”). The main point, however, is that this informal grouping has already played an important role by critically engaging with the WSF and producing some of the most interesting events in the forum’s short history.

The loose association of activists who would come together in RRG created the now-legendary “Intergalactika” space at the 2002 forum – a platform to share experiences and debate new ideas between activists from many parts of the world. This in turn led to the creation of Intergalactika Buenos Aires (which organised another Intergalactika space in 2003) and to the Village Intergalactique during the anti-G8 protests in Evian. RRG was also involved in the Hub established during the European Social Forum in Florence. Now, some members of RRG plan to set up an ambitious project/space in Porto Alegre – a sort of radical “interface” between the youth camp and the rest of the forum.

These examples of mutual “contamination” – the circulation of ideas and experiences across the planet – help us visualise the power of networks, even when they are as small and poorly organised as the Global Resistance Network.

Reviving Peoples’ Global Action The third network I observed during 2004 was the “elder sister” of global networks, Peoples’ Global Action (PGA). PGA was created in 1998 – to a great extent thanks to the efforts of the Zapatistas and their “encounters for humankind and against neo-liberalism” – and played a crucial role in the dissemination of the idea of “globalisation from below”, including the invention of the concept of days of global action.

In contrast to RRG, large social movements (mainly peasant and aborigine organisations from Asia and Latin America) as well as individual activists and small collectives are represented in PGA. And unlike Smin, PGA stands clearly against capitalism, and for decentralisation, autonomy, and direct action. This makes the relationship between Peoples’ Global Action and the WSF somewhat awkward.

I attended a PGA meeting in Mumbai in a small building five kilometres from the main WSF venue. There were over thirty-five participants from fifteen countries, representing organisations like the Anti-Privatisation Forum in South Africa, the National Alliance of People’s Movements in India, peasant unions from Nepal and Italy, and anti-war organisations from the US.

As reports were presented on the situation of PGA in different continents, it quickly became evident that the network had not been very active during 2003, despite (or because of?) the fact that the movements composing it had been involved in many important local struggles. One long-term PGA activist suggested that the group was in a way “the victim of its own success” – having launched the global movement, it saw other organisations (like Smin and the WSF as a whole) adopting its initiatives.

There was consensus at the meeting that PGA was still necessary, especially to bring a radical and clearly anti-capitalist perspective to the global movement. But what was the reason for PGA’s lack of activity during 2003? The same activist said:“PGA has always had great difficulty maintaining communication and developing real working relations between convenors, precisely because the convenor organisations are not NGOs, but authentic grassroots organisations”. These organisations, he continued, are engaged in constant and highly demanding local struggles, which often means that they cannot spare people and economic resources to operate at the global level. As a result, they tend to keep functioning thanks to the initiative of the “support group” and of a few individuals, mainly from western Europe. But this unwanted situation was uncomfortable for people so consciously anti-hierarchical as those involved in PGA. The result was that, for fear of “taking too much the lead” and of unwillingly Europeanising the network, “the support group stopped taking initiatives to push the process. But so far, the convenors or other southern organisations haven’t taken their place.”

Some reforms of PGA structure were adopted to resolve this situation, and the meeting finished with general agreement among those present to reinforce the network during 2004. They decided also to endorse the list of days of global action decided by Smin, and to focus energies into organising actions for 17 April 2004 – the world day of farmers, a date particularly relevant for the Indian organisations represented at the meeting. And in 2004, PGA seems to have experienced a kind of “resurrection”. The many signs of vitality in its Asian network include a successful regional and gender conference in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and the food sovereignty caravan which culminated in Kathmandu, Nepal, in September (the fourth global conference of the PGA will be held in Kathmandu in 2005).

The European branch was also very active. Its third European conference in Belgrade in July explored new ideas, themes and organisational forms, and succeeded in connecting with local issues and struggles – Roma, refugees, Serbian gay and Lesbian collectives. Andrej Grubacic reports: “PGA organised a workers’ assembly as part of the Conference, with participation of seven struggling workers’ communities from all over Serbia. Some 200 workers attended the meeting. There was an interesting international debate with workers from Greece and Belgium. As a result, workers established a ‘co-ordination for the struggle against the privatisation’”. For all such promising developments, however, Peoples’ Global Alliance is still unable to organise action by large numbers of people and organisations in the global public space.

Creating institutions of a new type The record of these three networks in 2002-04 leads me to two conclusions. The first is that even informal and loose networks are producing some of the most important political shifts of recent decades. Through these networks and the events they organise – the WSF, days of global action, alternative spaces at the youth camp, Indymedia – a new generation of activists and social movements are nourishing and inspiring each other. The traditional organisations of the left and workers’ movement – parties, internationals and unions – could not have conceived and organised events such as Seattle or Genoa, or meetings such as the WSF. The importance and potential of these new political developments cannot be overemphasised.

My second conclusion comes with a warning. I believe that the networks of global movements and activists, and the WSF itself, are now at an impasse; without significant changes, they are unlikely to keep growing and strengthening themselves. Networks are suffering from “the tyranny of the lack of structures”, to put it in the words of the North American feminist activist Jo Freeman. This “tyranny” means that the networks either develop informal and unacknowledged – but still very real and potentially harmful – ways of leadership and centralisation (WSF/Smin), or become frustratingly unable to mobilise an otherwise strong membership (PGA), or exist as little more than “virtual” networks (RRG).

In escaping from the hierarchical and authoritarian institutions of the old left, we often ended up rejecting the very idea of having basic rules, a sensible and transparent division of tasks, and a distribution of specific responsibilities according to our needs. That was arguably a healthy and necessary stage in order to get rid of the politics of the old left. But now we need to move forward.

I learned the same lesson from my involvement in Argentinean movements, which emerged out of (and embodied) a huge popular desire to change society by means different from those of the state, the caste of professional politicians and their parties, and the authoritarian and unsuccessful methods of the traditional left. There, the movements that sparked the imagination and hopes of so many people are suffering now from their own inability to develop transparent and non-hierarchical political institutions, and to cooperate with each other beyond the level of small collectives and local communities.

What, then, needs to happen? It is time to invent and explore institutions of a new type. By “institutions” I do not mean a hierarchy of authorities, or a building full of bureaucrats, but rather two things: a basic set of rules and procedures that everybody knows and accepts (such as how to become a member of a network, and how to balance the relative weight of an individual activist and a large movement), plus a reasonable, non-hierarchical division of tasks that formally distributes duties and responsibilities while ensuring accountability (such as who is to make which decisions between plenary meetings, who is to be media spokesperson, how are funds to be managed, how to avoid empowering individuals at the expense of others and of the whole network).

The common assumption among many activists that all institutions and rules are necessarily oppressive and ineluctably bring about a hierarchy of power is untrue. In fact, democratically- decided rules and procedures and non-hierarchical institutions are indispensable if we are going to reach a higher level of human cooperation (and we are definitely going to need a much higher level if we are to defeat capitalism and replace it with a post-capitalist society).

True, we still have little idea of how those institutions of a new type will look, although many interesting experiments are being carried out throughout the world as part of the struggles of social movements. Most of the institutions we know follow a basic inclination of social life: centralisation. In spirit and design they mirror the basic shape of power, the pyramid. The modern state and private companies “imitated” the pyramidal structure of armies, and most other institutions followed the same blueprint: political parties, school, hospitals, professional associations, “official” unions, mass media and even most NGOs.

It is time to start conceiving institutions that “imitate” another fundamental inclination of social life: cooperation between equals. Many institutions shaped in the spirit of cooperation are already there, in the hidden spots of an otherwise hierarchical world. Surrounded by the pyramid and over-determined by power, these institutions cannot but play a subordinate (though still indispensable) role in society. Is it possible to expand these non-hierarchical institutions so that we get rid of those shaped by power? Is it possible to transform the current relationship between the two types of institutions – in ways that make use of some forms of limited centralisation, distribution of tasks, and (if needed) “soft” leadership, but which can ensure the predominance of cooperation between equals? I think it is; moreover, that is exactly what the anti-capitalist struggles are “instinctively” trying to do at the moment.

But this spontaneous pursuit faces serious limitations. In order to go beyond the level of local, face-to-face experiences of non-hierarchical self-organising, the movement of movements needs to develop new ways to cooperate on a larger scale. And this is when institutions of a new type become indispensable.

My guess is that, if we understand better what we are already (albeit unconsciously) doing, that may give us some clues as to how to design and build those institutions. We need to study and reflect on the spontaneous behaviour of networks and the phenomenon that scientists have recently called “emergence” - in Arturo Escobar’s words: “…when the actions of multiple agents interacting dynamically and following local rules rather than top-up commands result in some kind of visible macro-behaviour or structure”.

We need to invent political institutions of a new type that “imitate” the social shapes and forms that networks and other forms of cooperation develop as part of their daily life. Only thus can we give solidity and effectiveness to our struggles beyond the small, local space, while at the same time preserving our organisations from the dangers of power, centralisation and hierarchies.

The invention of institutions of a new type will not be an easy task. The sooner we start, the better.

Copyright ©Ezequiel Adamovsky 2005. Published by openDemocracy Ltd. You may download and print extracts from this article for your own personal and non-commercial use only. If you are a library, university, teaching institution, business or media organisation, you must acquire an Academic License or Organisational License from openDemocracy, or seek permission directly from the author, before making copies, circulating or reproducing this article for teaching or commercial.

World Social Forum 2005 * Eyewitness report *

The movement deepens and mere gestures on poverty from Bush, Blair and Lula will not suffice

By Rory Hearne

Delegate from the Irish Anti War Movement to the recent World Social Forum. He is also deputy president of USI (Union of Students in Ireland). Views expressed are his own.

The fifth World Social Forum (WSF) which took place last week in Porto Alegre, Brazil was a vital event for all those who are concerned with the state of the world. The WSF showed clearly that five years on from the Seattle protests, the ‘alter-globalisation’ movement continues to grow in strength and importance.

120,000 registered for the forum, almost 200,000 took part in the Opening march and three hundred and fifty two proposals and calls for action came out of the more than 2000 panels and workshops that took place.

There were three important aspects to the fifth WSF, they are the Important diversity and strength of the movement shown in the opening demonstration, the call that came from the final assembly for global action on March 19th against the occupation of Iraq and finally, the debate over the future direction and strategy of the WSF movement.

Diversity and Strength of the Movement- lets keep it growing The opening demonstration was a clear manifestation of the important Diversity and strength of the movement. Almost 200,000 people took part in the march.

It was a sea of colour and noise, united in chanting ‘um otro mundo e possivel’ (another world is possible!). There were gay and lesbian groups, trade unions and workers such as the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions and the World Trade Union Forum with its banner ‘workers unite in solidarity for a fair world’. Also there, were Christian peace groups, indigenous peoples from Latin America and Asia (most visible were the Dalits from India), NGOs like Action Aid, student groups, anti-war movements, African movements against the debt and women’s organisations.

The popular support amongst Brazilians for the forum was visible from the banners they hung from their windows and bridges and, beautifully, an old couple who leaned out of their apartment window banging pots and pans in solidarity with the marchers below.

It is vital that everyone continues to build this movement as diverse And united as possible so that we can continue and strengthen the global offensive against neo- liberalism. There will be many opportunities in the near future to do this here in Ireland and abroad. Examples include the mobilisations on March 19th and the mobilisation against Bush and the G8 Summit in Scotland in July (see www.g8alternatives.org.uk.

Internationally, the movement will also be mobilising for the Summit of the American Governments in November in Argentina and against the meeting of the WTO in Hong Kong in December.

March 19th- Global Day of Action-Troops Out Now-No More Wars Secondly, the final assembly of the social movements which involved Campaigners and activists from all five continents made a call for the "people in every country to mobilise for a global day of action against war on March 19th demanding troops out of Iraq now and no more wars"(see http://www.focusweb.org for details of the call). Over 30 countries are already committed to participating, including Iraq, Palestine, Argentina, Brazil, India, US (400 cities), Italy, Ireland, Japan, Philippines, Australia, Sri Lanka, Hungary, Poland, Venezuela and many more. A similar call was made in January 2003 for global action on February 15th 2003 which resulted in a historic day where over 40 million marched against war. Medea Benjamin, (Global Exchange and United for Peace and Justice) from the USA said at the assembly, "a country like the US that sends its young people particularly the poor and immigrants to fight a war based on lies is decaying from within.

A country spending €270 million a day on a war in Iraq when we are closing our schools and hospitals at home is decaying from within. We are working together to have the empire decay from within and from resistance outside.

On March 19th the organisation I represent United for Peace and Justice with over 1000 organisations as part of it * will get 1 million people on the streets in over 500 US cities to protest against the occupation of Iraq, Palestine and empire." Here in Ireland the Irish Anti-War Movement is encouraging everyone to march in Dublin and Belfast on March 19th against the occupation of Iraq and Palestine and for and end To US military landing at Shannon airport.

Which way now for the movement Finally, there was a clear difference of perspectives over the future Direction of the movement. Some organisers of the WSF such as Bernard Cassan (Campaign for the Tobin Tax, France) and prominent NGOs want the movement to focus on pressurising government leaders like Bush, Blair and Lula (President of Brazil) into signing the Global Call to Action against Poverty (GCAP). They want to avoid the movement focussing on the war and uniting its struggles whether in opposition to Lula’s reforms or to capitalism itself.

They organised the forum according to the principle of horizontal self-organised zones. This meant that the venues were some distance apart geographically and each one discussed only one individual theme over the entire week. This limited the possibilities of campaigners against poverty, the environment and indigenous movements uniting with, for example anti-war and anti-capitalists into common struggles and critiques. There were only two large rallies where such unity of purpose could have been forged. Both, however, were the very tightly organized and controlled rallies of the political leaders Lula and Chavez.

Interestingly WSF principles state that political parties and Representatives are not supposed to be given official representation at the forum. Indeed some of the leading intellectuals and organisers of the WSF broke the consensus, horizontal, open space model of the WSF and issued a statement on democracy, debt and the Tobin tax that appeared to be on behalf of the forum.

A deepening radicalisation cannot be avoided However, this attempt to channel the movement towards simply Pressurizing heads of government did not dampen the increasing radicalisation at the base of the movement. Considerable work by anti-war activists from the UK, Greece, the Philippines and the USA meant that the main call from the assembly of the social movements was the call for the global day of action on March 19th against the US occupation of Iraq.

When one talked to many participants at the forum and observed the Opening demonstration and the meeting of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, it was clear that those at the base of the movement felt that gestures from government leaders will not be enough to end poverty. They said that in order to end poverty, it is necessary for the masses of people and workers to struggle themselves, rather than relying on heads of state, to end war, neo-liberalism and ultimately replace capitalism.

They talked about their disillusionment with Lula’s unfulfilled promises of action on poverty and hunger and asked how could Bush and Blair, responsible for the murder of over 100,000 innocent People in Iraq be serious about ending poverty?

This sentiment was visible throughout the forum, among the 200,000 People took part in the opening demonstration and the 25,000 who filled the youth camp. It was visible in the contributions from the MST (the landless peasants and workers movement of Brazil), in the spontaneous demonstrations against the war and the occupation of Palestine; in the meetings where thousands, young and old, sat and stood in 40 degree heat to debate and discuss poverty, power and revolution and, in the tens of thousands who queued for hours to hear Brazilian President Lula, and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez speak.

Lula and Chavez *two different worlds Thousands of Lula’s Workers’ Party (PT) faithful were bussed in to the Gigantinho Stadium before he spoke. The gates were closed when the Stadium was only three-quarters full but thousands more still queued outside. Chants of ‘ole, ole, ole, ole, Lula, Lula’ rang around the stadium but were not unanimously supported and 200 or so activists booed Lula’s entire speech.

Lula was defensive and he condescendingly turned to those booing and said ‘you are immature, and will grow up and then we will be waiting for you to come back to us".

There is growing disillusionment with Lula’s PT government. It has Broken promises made before its election just over two years ago, signing an agreement with the IMF, attacking pension rights and backing the employers in a bitter strike of bank workers. A number of deputies expelled from the PT have formed a new party: P-SOL, that was very visible throughout the WSF. Despite all this it was obvious that Lula still commands huge respect and support from the workers and poor of Brazil.

Chavez, Chavez However, it was at the meeting of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez that The grass roots anti-capitalist sentiment was most visible. 20,000 people, predominantly young packed the stadium (which should put lie to those who describe all young people today as ‘apathetic youth’). Their radical and anti-imperialist chants rang around the stadium before he arrived. They sang; ‘ole, ole, ole, ole, Chavez, Chavez’; and in reference to Lula’s recent education and workers legislation reforms: "1,2,3,4,5..1000..Stop the reforms or we will shut down Brazil".

A large section of the audience chanted, "Lula nao, Chavez si" (Lula no, Chavez yes), to booing from some other sections, showing that you can criticise his reforms but not Lula himself.

A break with neo-liberal capitalism They demanded not mere reforms but a break with neo-liberal capitalism. The 20,000 voices joined in unison singing the Internationale. Hugo Chavez’s speech was much more left-wing than Lula’s, even though he said that each country in Latin America had to proceed according to its own conditions.

He also showed a worrying attitude towards some other regimes, saying: ‘there is a good president in Russia, Mr. Putin’, and when he uncritically praised China's fast economic growth. This aside, Chavez is undoubtedly the Latin American leader most in touch with the new movements of resistance against neo-liberalism and imperialism in Latin America.. He said in his speech "We must reclaim socialism as a thesis, a project and a path, but a new type of socialism, a humanist one which puts humans, and not machines or the state ahead of everything. That’s the debate we must promote around the world."

His aim is to use a block of poorer governments as a lever against US power. He wants to build up unions and civil society to support his reforms in Venezuela. These reforms have, however, been very ‘top-down’ in their approach.

While Chavez’ anti-imperialist stance and social reforms should be supported, the growth of independent movements of the poor and workers is necessary so that when Chavez or other leaders bow to neo-liberal pressure or when US imperialism intervenes, there is an organised force of workers to resist and build a new world from the bottom up.

Conclusion The World Social Forum continues to be an inspiration for all those Struggling against neo- liberalism and imperialism around the world. It is a vital space for the movements to come together and show our strength, forge common actions, learn from practical experiences and discuss strategy and the politics of hope and resistance.

We must therefore continue to build and support social Forums around the world like the WSF and ESF.

There are clearly divergent views over the future strategy for the movement. These are vital debates that need to be discussed openly. Our common enemies imperialism and neo-liberalism have lost all legitimacy. They have the lost the battle for the hearts and minds of the worlds population.

The World Bank, the IMF and the WTO are failures. But they are far from defeated. We should support and build the common actions like the G8 mobilisation in Scotland called by the Global Call for Action against Poverty. But we should not simply ask the global leaders to wear white ribbons and make nicely worded statements on poverty.

They have shown through their actions in Iraq or through the Lula government sending troops to Haiti that any kind words uttered are only a diversion from the reality. These leaders are liars, mass murderers and serve only the interests of the rich and powerful. Those at the base of the movements see this clearly and are clamouring for much more than words. As a representative from the MST (movement of workers and peasants without land) said to me: "We are in opposition to the current government of president Lula because they are implementing anti- worker policies, they have not met their promises from before the elections. Our struggle by workers and peasants is a fight not just against the Brazilian economic system but against capitalism which is the source of our problems."

Production: Thoughts On the World Social Forum, 2005

By Prishani Naidoo

Wise eyes of little boys selling water and beer in the all-day heat; old and dirtied little feet and hands that run to collect your empty cans as you take your last sip; warn smiles of homeless women washing their babies under the taps of the youth camp; tired tans of artists hawking their works (and Che Guevara T-shirts) on the pavements of Porto Alegre…

While the World Social Forum (WSF) has grown out of an antagonism to capitalism, standing in direct opposition to the World Economic Forum (WEF) of the world’s economic superpowers; mounting certain significant global campaigns against capital e.g. the anti-war demonstrations; and facilitating the coming together of local acts of resistance against capitalism in various ways, it has been produced within this very system it opposes. But this has meant that the WSF is inevitably a product of a process of engagement and interaction with capitalism. The fifth WSF, representing a significant collective history and experience of resistance to neoliberalism, was significant in highlighting the differences and contradictions that exist within the ‘movement of movements’ that is growing through spaces like the WSF as a result of our production by capitalism - differences and contradictions that are significant in speaking against the foreclosure of critique, conflict and engagement that any notion of political consensus would entail.

This year, lines of difference have also become more visible between those activists arguing for a ‘seizure’ of power understood in its traditional sense, in particular state power, in order for capitalism to be ‘overthrown’, and those arguing for new understandings of power and the need for ‘self-government’ and ‘self-emancipation’ to take priority over state-centred notions of power. Also emerging in these discussions are related concerns of notions of resistance and struggle, with differences emerging between those wanting to make the WSF a consensus- building space through which ‘concrete alternatives’ to the current world political and economic system can be proposed within the existing United Nations (UN) system, and those activists seeing the WSF as a space through which the diverse and different aims and objectives of all those organisations, movements and individuals fighting capitalism are able to be met through the creation of non-hierarchical, horizontal and democratic relations amongst a community of activists that see their common mission as the collective creation of alternatives to capitalism in and through struggle and engagement.

These debates enjoyed much interest and engagement throughout the forum. Approaches to state power, was a concern of a number of seminars during the forum, with the decline of Lula’s popularity and the growth of Chavez’s determining the character of many of the discussions. While seminar sessions during the day saw people fighting for space to listen to (and, if you were lucky, question) big name activists and theorists, such as John Holloway, Michael Hardt, and Alex Callinicos, debate the questions, equally popular night sessions in the Intergalactica Caracol saw the interaction of activists from various autonomous movements around the world, including the MTDs (Argentina) – unemployed workers’ unions that have occupied and live in ‘unoccupied’ factories; Collectivo Situaciones (Argentina) – activist researchers; sympathisers of the Zapatistas; members of social centres in Italy; and members of various direct action groups around the world. Unlike the largely white, male-dominated discussions that happened during the day in which there was very little space and time for discussion and debate, these night sessions saw women being actively encouraged to participate and taking a visible and meaningful role in discussions. Discussions were managed in a manner that best facilitated interaction and exchange amongst activists, producing new ways of relating as comrades in conversation and new forms of knowledge about our lives under capitalism and our struggles against it. In this production, questions of the state, power and the ways in which we choose to engage power were raised. Through conversations amongst activists within and across movements, lived experiences of experiments with demands for state grants (e.g. the social welfare grant in Argentina accepted by some MTDs and rejected by others), constitution of non-state forms of power (e.g. communes in Germany, movements that ‘steal’ food to survive, collective child care approaches in Argentina and Brazil), and acts of power against the state (e.g. blocking of roads in Argentina and direct action in Italy), were engaged.

In an independent workshop facilitated by John Holloway and Dorothea Harlin, activists from movements in Argentina, Brazil, Thailand, Germany, South Africa, Italy, India, Mexico, and the USA came together in conversation about their experiences of anti-state power. Without seeking to derive any consensus out of the discussions, activists were able to share and engage in a discussion about the creation of alternatives to capitalism through new, shared understandings of power to understand ways in which capitalism controls us as individuals and ways in which we are able to live outside of it. In these discussions we came to agree that there are no easy or clear choices to be made for or against state power. Power has changed in its form and in the ways that it is exercised, even the traditional power of the state. We are all forced to engage with the power of the state, the power of capital under neoliberalism, but in different and new ways. In the words of a comrade from the MTD-Matanzas, “Is it possible today for one person to govern on behalf of others when multinational corporations rule, not presidents? Governments today have the role of providing for the basic needs of their people while answering to the needs of multinational corporations…Before, our slogans were for freeing the prisoners, fighting neoliberalism; today, our struggle is on a different terrain – it is in our heads; in how we live; in our family structures; it is in creating new forms of family and love; it is in rethinking life.”

In these discussions, activists were able to share experiences of these new forms of power under neoliberalism and, more significantly, share experiences of reclaiming life under capitalism. In their rethinking of life, the Argentinian MTD members present spoke of a current debate in their movement about their name, which characterises them by their status of ‘unemployed’. They argued that they need to start seeing themselves positively again in terms of their production, their new terms of production – the production of life itself – rather than in terms of their negative relation to the traditional site of production, the factory – instead, they want to define themselves positively in terms of the new social relations that are created through their community under capitalism. They don’t know what their new name will be. For now they know it should not be defined in negative relation to capitalism, but positively, affirming their productive (as opposed to unproductive) life as labour.

This spirit of defining ourselves positively in relation to life as we make it, rather than beginning with our negative affection by capitalism, is a significant development in the language of movements fighting capitalism that characterised most of the discussions held in autonomous spaces in the WSF. Starting with the belief that there is no predetermined model for resisting capitalism, discussions in these spaces allowed for the nature of this new production to be discussed in a manner that saw itself as a process of producing new knowledges. In these spaces, real questions about the problems encountered in trying to practice horizontalism were engaged through the experiences of the effects of the acceptance of the social welfare grants in Argentina, and the Zapatistas, for example. And, the age-old unsolved problems of gender were dealt with in conversation between women from the MTDs in Argentina and the MTD in Brazil, and between men and women feeling the effects of neoliberalism and fighting it. In these spaces, real alternatives emerged as the problems of raising children in community were dealt with and notions of ‘non-nuclear’ families were shared, as well as the problems felt by men as a result of unemployment and poverty.

… and with the wise eyes, the old and dirty hands, the warn smiles, I can only make myself understood asking ‘how much? Each night, as I make my way home, beyond the comfort of simultaneous translation and comradely smiles, there are the gaping silences of neoliberalism’s experiences etched in the old faces and desperate bodies of those I struggle to hear and to speak to…

In 2003, there were no more than ten or twenty of us at a time participating in such discussions as described above, on the outskirts of the youth camp, on the margins of the forum. This year, the organisation of all groups and events in one continuous space allowed such spaces more centrality in the forum, and simultaneous translation and the growth of the activist network being built through Intergalactica and other autonomous networks, saw this space hosting crowds of hundreds of activists, with active participation and discussion taking place. While this might reflect growing support for autonomous forms of engagement and thought, this has not meant any less support for state-centred approaches to activism or hierarchical forms of organisation. Neither has it addressed the relationship of those producing their lives on the edges of the WSF, to such spaces and discussions – the hawkers, street vendors, beggars… to whom the WSF means little else but opportunities for work and survival.

While Lula received criticism from within his own ranks, this criticism was directed at his person rather than at the state form as such. And Chavez certainly received as much attention this year as Lula did in 2003. A sore point for many at the WSF this year, in particular South African participants, was the participation of Civicus, in the person of Kumi Naidoo, in the WEF in Davos. Wearing a white headband, and representing the voice of the poor and marginalized as represented by NGOs internationally, Naidoo’s celebration of the UN’s Millenium Development Goals as the measure of progress in the world was a slap in the face for many participants in the WSF whose critique of the poverty entrenched by neoliberalism is a scathing attack on the UN system as protector of the interests of global capital. In 2003, Lula came under fire for participating in the WEF. This year, ‘global civil society’ itself spoke at the WEF! While the WSF may be growing as a space for diverse and critical thought and production around alternatives to capitalism, growing recognition of its potentialities has resulted in growing contestation for control over its representation from within and from without. In this fight, its real potential as site of critical and autonomous production against capitalism is under threat.

As the WSF makes its way to Africa, we need to broaden the discussion and debate about its potentials for our own struggles against neoliberalism and capitalism. Until now, participation in the WSF from South Africans has largely been by those of us fortunate enough to make the criteria of donors supporting the WSF or working in NGO jobs that require us to participate. When community organisations and movements have been lucky enough to send one or two participants, this has not always allowed for the integration of WSF discussions into the life of these movements. Instead it has been largely left up to individuals to determine how they participate within the forum. At best, the WSF has been a meeting place for activists to share experiences, strategies and tactics; to build solidarity; to develop joint campaigns; and to lobby for certain issues to be taken up by others. Individual activists have chosen to participate differently in the WSF, with various organisations, movements and political tendencies in South African civil society being represented. The representation of our differences in such a forum has caused concern for many, in particular COSATU (South Africa’s largest trade union federation) which has vocally expressed their discomfort with the Anti-Privatisation Forum’s (APF’s) open critiques of the African National Congress (ANC) government in WSF space. Within and across all movements in South African civil society, there are major differences of approach to the questions of state power and resistance that have gained prominence in WSF discussions, as well as to ways of organising.

In such a context, it would be easy for us to throw ourselves into fights over representation in, through and of the WSF, as the WSF remains seen only as a means for representing the collective and unified voice of a ‘global civil society’ against the effects of neoliberalism and capitalism within a unified global system of rule. In trying to gain control over the representation of this ‘global civil society’ or for greater representation of our views within the WSF, we lose sight of the spaces that the WSF provides for the meeting of movements in creation with all their diversity, difference and open agendas. The WSF seen rather as a site of production recognises difference, diversity and the creation of alternatives in and through interaction, engagement and struggle with the capitalist system as it manifests in the global order, the nation state, our communities, our neighbours, our selves. In this production, there are no predetermined solutions or answers, just the collective power of people in action and interaction against the capitalist system in all its manifestations. Here, power lies in the desires and dreams of each of us as we collectively work for their realisation, and not in consensus positions or representations written or spoken on behalf of all of us. Our biggest challenge is to ensure that the largest number of people fighting capitalism, are able to be part of such an experience as they choose.

… such times could make our silences speak …

WSF: The colonisation of Resistance

by Andile Mngxitama

It’s a sign of how bad things are when even the modest proposal that everyone on planet earth gets fresh water and enough to eat is fighting talk. - Terry Eagleton

Naomi Klein aptly described the first World Social forum as ‘the end of the end of history’. The fall of the Berlin Wall signified the end of a utopia gone badly wrong. Thatcher and her followers were able to speak with confidence that There Is No Alternative to the barbarism of capitalism devouring the guts of most of humanity. For sometime, Fukuyama’s apocalyptic ‘end of history’ seemed real. It became almost impossible to breathe and dream. The hegemony of global capitalism had reached maddening proportions. It is said that in 1992 Nike paid Michael Jordan to advertise its shoes, and here was the madness - he earned more than the entire East Asian industry which produces those shoes.

Then in 2001, the city of Porto Alegre, situated in Brazil’s southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, reverberated with a fresh call: ‘Another World is Possible!’. The birth of the World Social Forum was a noisy affair. The force of this new possibility stood in contrast and opposition to the rigid and soulless World Economic Forum happening at the same time on the beautiful island of Davos in Switzerland. Those who took the side of the wretched of the earth looked to Porto Alegre, and those who worship the power and logic of money turned to Davos. The battle lines were drawn. Ever since, world politics have not been the same. This year will see the fifth installment of the World Social Forum return to its base after the 2004 event was held in Mumbai, India. The WSF has come to mean many things to many people: celebration of hope, new ways of doing and thinking, and the limits of resistance to capitalism in our times.

African murmurs The 80s saw Africa saying NO! to the devastation visited upon the continent through the killer medicine of the Structural Adjustment Projects (SAPs) of the World Bank and the IMF, which required iron-fisted men to carry out their mission - from the safe distance and sanctity of parliament and state houses - in the name of development and democracy. To achieve this madness nothing was spared; even the anti-colonial history and memory was appropriated, as was revolution and socialism. But the African NO! was simply named ‘food riots’; this was a resistance which did not speak for itself and the IMF quickly worked these ‘ food riots’ into its four-staged re-colonisation strategy, revealed by Joseph Stiglitz after his sojourner as a servant of the devil.

The call for Africa’s ‘second liberation’ was stillborn and was appropriated into a limited desire for ‘multi-party democracy’. Instead of freedom from the shackles of neo-colonial bondage, multi-party democracies continued the one-way traffic of African wealth to the North and domestic suburbs where the national representatives of the system reside. In the words of the African revolutionary thinker A.M. Babu:

‘It is much better for the international bourgeoisie for locals to supervise their own dependency, it lessens tensions and the real master is invincible. We are busy chopping each other’s heads through military coups and the struggle for power in order simply to prove ourselves better supervisors on behalf of international capital, and to enjoy the rewards in wealth or absolute power’.

What Babu did not anticipate was the effective utilization of democratic discourses and the ideology of development to sustain the same position in the interest of global capitalism. African leaders chose to do unto themselves what global capital would otherwise do unto them. As South Africa’s ruling party (Mandela’s African National Congress) policy ideologue put it:

‘We don’t oppose the WTO. We never joined the call to abolish it, or to abolish the World Bank or the IMF. Should we be out there condemning Imperialism? If you do those things, how long will you last?’

Resistance was colonized, tamed and tailored to serve the purpose of the hegemony of money. Resistance needed to liberate itself from the party, the leader, the old orthodoxies, hierarchies and empty discourses. It was the creative power of resistance and poetry of the indigenous people of Chiapas in Mexico which gave the world the beginnings of a new language - a language which found expression within the WSF. What started in Africa as a murmur now found a name - the monster was named ‘neo-liberalism’. The dream returned, history could be made again. Chiapas fortified the possibility of the peoples of the world to say a collective NO! and many YESES!

In the past five years, the view that there is no one answer, no one single manifesto, no pre- determined history (as the nineteenth-century Russian populist Herzen declared, ‘History has no libretto’) seemed both to gain ground and drive the desire to make history afresh through trial and error, rather than rely upon the certainty of yesteryears’ political fantasies. Of course, those who held old views found new energy from the emergent global peoples’ resistance - Marx, Lenin, Mao and even Stalin occasionally reared their heads. The freedom from the burden of certainty was best articulated by one of the World Social Forum’s superstars, the French small-scale farmers’ leader and bane of agri-business, Jose Bove. When asked whether the Seattle gathering represented a new internationalism, Bove answered:

‘There are no pre-conceived ideas. Those days have gone - thank goodness - when popular movements were slotted into theoretical constructs. Seattle showed the opposite. People came together not with any worked out theory, but to take action... far too long, theories and analysis have been shuffled around, promising change. People today have lost confidence in these theories. Seattle revealed the existence of an informal worldwide network. ‘

The birth of the WSF is generally perceived to have carried on the spirit of the 1999 battle of Seattle. The collective NO! saw the closure of a meeting of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) right within the belly of the beast. From there onwards the evil triad of the WTO, World Bank and IMF could only hold their meetings behind army barricades. The people of the world had won the moral high ground despite their leaders’ shameful genuflection to these institutions. The WSF gave the new resistance a space to share the new language. By and large, the forum strove to be anti-hierarchical and non-vanguardist. The WSF spoke about ‘space’, ‘reflections’ and ‘networks of resistance’. These new discourses and praxis somehow gave expression to a movement of movements, but there were shortcomings - and deep ones, too.

If Klein was ecstatic about the first forum, by the third she was crying ‘highjack!’. The event had been taken over by established left-leaning political parties and the Latin American big men: Lula of Brazil, Chavez of Venezuela and the ever-presence of Castro, even in his physical absence. Perhaps the most devastating critique came from the pen of the respected radical thinker James Petras, who saw the 2002 meeting as a ‘tale of two forums’. One forum promoting reformism and accommodation could be found representing the established political parties, NGOs and a myriad of intellectuals, and was based in the main venue, the Pontifical Catholic University (PUC). On the other hand, there was the more radical, anti-establishment forum which occurred in hundreds of small and big meetings, circles of articulation and self- organized spontaneous conversation away from the university and media attention. Others began to argue that the WSF had become a jamboree of a motley concoction of agendas and interests, as recent greetings from one of the regular attendees shows:

‘Hope you all doing well. I’m in Porto, and now joining the throngs who pretend to struggle, we the passport wielding, credit card swiping, voyager mile accumulating, cyber connected, defenders of the rights of the working class, the Dalits, the landless peoples’ rights for self- determination. I watched with glee as the internationalists were hooking up at airports, hotels, taxis. ‘Hi comrade, long time. Since Mumbai’. ‘Hi comrade, long time, since Cancun, are you going to Hong Kong. I am still struggling to get funding’. Yeaaaaa., this is the new age struggle; and I am part of it. Now that I have more time on my hands (thanks to?donor sponsored air- conditioned hotel room)...’

The biggest conceptual and organizational challenge to the WSF came from a parallel meeting, organized under the catchy name ‘Mumbai Resistance 2004’ (MR). The critique delivered by MR 2004 was devastating (if not over-stated at times); tough questions were asked around the origins and funders of the WSF. One of the most serious charges was that the WSF is nothing but a valve and a permitted space of dissent, and does not really threaten the interest of global capital. MR 2004 pointed to the once CIA-controlled Ford Foundation as one of the main funders, and the agenda of the moderate French players, such as ATTAC and Le Monde Diplomatique, was also held up as evidence of the castrated possibilities of the WSF. MR 2004 did not mince its words: he who pays the piper plays the tune. True, more and more global South NGOs found legitimacy by association, and Northern Funders continue to determine, in particular, the African representation to the WSF. These were often the same donors who would not touch national movements and counter-hegemonic projects at a national level. Increasingly, those who have sustained and given impetus and life to the WSF find themselves outside; the Zapatistas are excluded because they are involved in armed combat, the FARC of Colombia was denied space for a press conference in 2002.

Lack of Black Voices One of the key fault lines in the WSF activities has been the lack of a platform to build and raise the black voice and black issues. This is surprising given the fact that Brazil is home to the biggest black population outside of Africa, and racism continues to ensure that the darker you are, the lower you find yourself in the Brazilian social ladder. The lack of prominence of the black question in the global resistance, and at the WSF in particular, can be accounted for by examining the historical inequities which developed along the color line. A second factor is the historical denial of race as a legitimate area of resistance. This is partly a result of the out- dated Marxist philosophies raven with arrogant universalizing Eurocentrisms, which privileged class over any other category of exclusion.

* Andile Mngxitama is a Johannesburg based land rights activist and member of the Wewrite editorial collective. This is the introductory editorial to the latest edition of www.wewrite.org - A Journal for Black Thought. In the edition, the problem of exclusion is discussed by Radha D’ Souza and Michael Abrahams. Frank Wilderson debates the uneasy relationship between Marxism and the Black Subject, and Aziz Choudry points to how global struggles run the risk of eclipsing older struggles such as those of the indigenous peoples in places like Canada, USA and New Zealand. The promises and challenges facing the ASF are examined in a piece by Amanda Alexander and Mandisa Mbali.

Call to action of the Anti-War Assembly

World Social Forum 2005, Porto Alegre, Brazil

On the day of elections in Iraq, anti-war movements, coalitions and organizations the world over came together in an Anti-War Assembly and called for massive mobilizations on March 19 and 20.

Representatives from over 33 countries, including Iraq and Palestine, also discussed strategies and actions beyond March 20. This is the report of the proposals made at the Assembly. To get involved with the different campaigns, please email [email protected]

Two years after the invasion of Iraq, there is more opposition to the war in the US, in the coalition countries, and all over the world than ever before. The justifications for the war have all been proven to be lies. A widespread and popular resistance has risen up against the occupation forces. Over 100,000 Iraqis and over 1,500 coalition soldiers have been killed. With the global condemnation of the war and the inability of the United States to quell the resistance in Iraq, we stand at a critical moment in which there is a real chance that the war could be stopped.

Now is the time for the anti-war movement to take action, not to retreat. It is time to escalate the protests, not to give up. A defeat for US-led forces in Iraq will be a victory for everybody facing US aggression globally. We demand an end to the occupations of Iraq and Palestine.

We demand that the US desists from attacking Iran, North Korea, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela and other countries. We must highlight the dangers of global war especially in Latin America where the US threatens to intervene in many countries. We call for a Global Day of Action against War on March 19/20 demanding troops out of Iraq now, no more wars. We call for a rolling wave of massive demonstrations, civil disobedience, and other forms of protest around the world.

IRAQ We call for the immediate withdrawal of occupation troops and support all efforts to bring them home. We support efforts to organize soldiers, conscientious objectors, and military families against the war. We support the counterrecruitment campaign and demand political asylum for deserters. We support the right of the Iraqi people to resist occupation while condemning the killing of innocent civilians. We support efforts to understand the full range of civil, political, and armed resistance in Iraq to further strengthen our campaigns. We commit to deepening our links of solidarity with the people of the Middle East.

We demand the closure of US military bases around the world and support efforts towards the abolition of nuclear weapons, the banning of the arms trade, and other moves towards demilitarization. We support efforts to stop the economic occupation of Iraq by corporations and international financial institutions. And we will escalate our campaign against these war profiteers through boycotts and direct action. We call for protests against Bush and his allies wherever they go.

PALESTINE We support the Palestinian people's struggle for justice, self-determination, a sovereign independent state with Jerusalem as its capital and the implementation of the right of return in accordance with UN resolution 194. We call upon the international community and governments to impose political and economic sanctions on Israel, including an embargo on armaments. We call upon the social movements to mobilize also for divestment and boycotts. These efforts aim to force Israel to implement international resolutions, and the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice, to stop and take down the illegal wall and end all occupation and apartheid policies.

We support the Israeli anti-colonialist, anti-Zionist activists who share this struggle. We reaffirm the call for a Global Day of Action on March 19/20 and a wave of protest to stop war and end the occupations.

*To send plans for demonstrations on March 19/20, email: [email protected] or [email protected] for more information on campaigns, email [email protected]

COUNTRIES DEMONSTRATING ON MARCH 19/20: (preliminary list) Iraq, Palestine, Argentina, Brasil, India, US (400 cities), Italy, Greece, Ireland, Japan, Britain, Turkey, Macedonia, Cyprus, Philippines, Australia, Thailand, South Africa, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Hungary, Poland, Canada, Austria, Mexico, Spain (Barcelona, Madrid), Hawaii, Venezuela, New Zealand, The Netherlands

DETAILED ACTION PLAN PROPOSALS FOR MARCH 19/20:

- Common slogan: Troops Out of Iraq Now! No more wars! Each country is of course free to use their own slogans. - To hold big demonstrations or other forms of protest in your own countries - List all cities and countries demonstrating on a common website: www.march19th.org

PROPOSALS FOR BUILDING LINKS WITH THE MIDDLE EAST AND STRENGTHENING THE RESISTANCE:

- Organize a roundtable conference outside Iraq inviting all the different groups and anti-occupation forces in Iraq to dialogue with the global anti-war movement - Support the existing campaigns that build links between civil society in Iraq and other countries. - Send a team to Iraq to work with Iraqis to produce a multimedia project, Voices of Resistance, that shows all the different forms of resistance in Iraq to serve as a mobilizing tool to get rid of US occupation. - Make use of all opportunities to link with the Middle East, including the Cairo Conference March 24-27, the Mediterranean Social Forum in June, the World Tribunal in Iraq in 2005 and the World Peace Forum in Vancouver, Canada on June 21-27, 2006. - Encourage all groups to share contacts and information so as to avoid replication of efforts.

PROPOSALS TO OPPOSE OTHER US THREATS OF INTERVENTION

- Because George Bush is the symbol of global war, there should be protests wherever he goes: (1) July 2nd-6th: Edinburgh Scotland, Global Action against Bush and the G8. (2) November: Mar del Plata, Protest against Bush and American Summit of Presidents. - Link our anti-war work to campaigns against attacks or threats of intervention in Iran, North Korea, Syria, Cuba, Venezuela and other countries.

PROPOSALS AGAINST WAR PROFITEERS AND INTERNATIONAL FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONS

- Strenghten protests and direct action against the 2 largest war profiteers: Halliburton and Bechtel. - Encourage people not to buy goods from US/UK multinationals and encourage people instead to buy from local businesses. - Encourage socially responsible companies to take a stand against the war - Protest against the World Trade Organization (WTO), especially on the 6th Ministerial on December 13-18 in Hong Kong - Launch a campaign to stop Iraq from becoming a member of the WTO - Disseminate materials on the war profiteers in Arabic

PROPOSALS FOR PALESTINE

- Send civilian missions to Palestine - Launch a campaign of sanctions, boycott and divestments - Launch a campaign for embargo on arms and suspension of economic agreements with Israel

PROPOSALS FOR WAR RESISTERS

- Organize a gathering of anti-war forces from the countries that support the coalition forces in Iraq to coordinate strategies - Strengthen efforts to encourage young people NOT to join the military - Provide support for soldiers who refuse to fight in Iraq including: (1) encourage countries like Canada and individual cities to provide asylum (2) organize speaking tours of dissenting soldiers (3) collect stories from various countries of soldiers who refused to fight

PROPOSALS AGAINST MILITARY BASES AND NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION

- Support and get involved in the process of building an international movement demanding the closure of foreign military bases around the world - Show solidarity with the struggle of the Okinawans to stop the construction of US bases in Henoko - Support global actions on May 1 to demand the abolition of nuclear weapons - On the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, call for global actions on August 6-9 to say "No more Hiroshimas! No more Nagasakis.