8.3
Does Bamako Appeal?
The World Social Forum versus the Life Strategies of the Subaltern

[Contribution to the Workshop on the World Social Forum, Durban Centre for Civil Society, 22-23 July 2006]

For many activists and academics, the “Bamako Appeal” that came out of the 2006 “polycentric” World Social Forum (WSF) in Mali is an important step in the development of an “other globalization” movement that is not merely opposed to neoliberalism, but is also capable of formulating concrete political proposals and programmes. After five years in which the WSF has taken place under the aegis of the “another world is possible” slogan, the Bamako Appeal provides nonetheless a reminder of how much the definition of such another world is shaped by the self-perpetuation of an old left tradition that is one of the saddest legacies of the present world. In this sense, we regard the Bamako Appeal as a document that, albeit irrelevant to the material development of social movements’ subjectivities, is nonetheless symptomatic of a longer-term transition that has affected the WSF and its most visible, mediatized institutional representations.

The Appeal, in fact, is a particularly extreme, but by no means unique, manifestation of two interconnected trends that originate from the mutation of the WSF from an arena of encounter for local social movements into an organized network of experts, academics and NGO practitioners. Such trends, on the other hand, transfer the legacy of modes of left politics well established in twentieth century industrialized capitalism to a context marked by the withering away of coherent revolutionary subjects defined on class lines. First, while building its status and standing on buzzwords and symbolic referents that have been widely circulating after the 1999 Seattle revolt, the cliques of experts and full-time activism vying for hegemony within the WSF aim to elaborate guidelines of social transformation of which they remain the sole wardens and true interpreters. On the one hand, the political discourse of such aspiring leaders is nurtured in a set of metaphors and images, which we define the “Seattle canon”, that have come to shape the parlance of anti-globalization movements. Therefore the continuous insistence on plurality, horizontality, consensus, and the creation of global political spaces that respect the characteristics of local struggles continue to play a decisive role in places where the left once praised unity, organizational discipline, democratic centralism and the respect of the party line. However, a resilient underlying trope continues to operate underneath these seeming innovations. That is the idea that between the material development of subjectivities at the level of communities, locales and struggles, and the place where they become properly political, capable to embody a universal yearning for change, there is a gap that social subjectivity and conflict by themselves cannot bridge. In this view, the politicization of local struggles requires a level in which disorderly, spontaneous, often contradictory claims that originate from local struggles are subsumed into neat, clearly defined blueprints and political demands. A central level of organization (as the writers of the Bamako Appeal apparently regard themselves) would then convey “our” demands into the realm of the properly political (as opposed to confusedly subjectivist) realm in which we face our historical antagonists, be they Capital, the State, or the Market.

The obsession with drafting the blueprint for the Revolution as a process qualitatively different from the material practices of struggle that enable its own emergence is combined with a second important legacy from the twentieth century left: The emphasis on the necessary role of political vanguards. It can be debated to what extent the transformation of the WSF into a conduit for vanguardist politics has advanced, or what the margins to contest it or even to stop it are. Documents like the Bamako Appeal, however, reveal how deeply entrenched the vanguardist temptation is in the WSF at its current stage. By vanguardism here we mean an organizational approach that holds that, even if material struggles and conflicts open up spaces of political possibilities, the definition of the ultimate meanings of such possibilities is not self-evident from the standpoint of subjectivity, and their elaboration requires a specialized layer of experts whose knowledge is not ordinarily accessible from the grassroots. From this point of view, the Bamako Appeal’s hardly naked ambition to articulate the authentic and true meaning of the exchanges that take place in the WSF within a set of clear, “positive” of course, demands is a clear manifestation of vanguardism. It in fact tries to “impute”, to use Lukacs’ phrase, a “true consciousness” over the confused desires that motivate real-life, immediate struggles. In a time-honored tradition, it wants to re-establish the role of professional revolutionaries as those in charge of making the housewives of Lenin’s metaphor truly understand the political significance of their own actions.

It would be difficult to understand the trajectory of the WSF without noticing the role played by the legacy of the twentieth century old left within the rhetorical trappings of the Seattle canon. Nationalism, developmentalism, and third worldism feature prominently among the self-representation devices of the WSF elite. The most publicized statements coming out of the WSF, usually never discussed or approved through processes of grassroots participation, reflect a growing concentration of decision-making and political visibility in the hands of an unaccountable stratum of academics and professional activists. Conversely, endless debates and workshops among less media-heavy, more dispersed social actors have been relegated to the role of innocuous background chatter and a pale semblance of mass mobilization. The Bamako Appeal is a reflection of the general political method of the WSF, as is its overarching preoccupation with institutionalizing the “other globalization movement”, of making it, under the guidance and tutelage of its self-appointed vanguards, a respectable counterpart in the “reform” of international economic architectures, political institutions, media apparatuses. Finally, neo-populist Latin American politicians and governments like those of Brazil, Bolivia and Venezuela, have become central political referents for the WSF. As a consequence, those who argue that the effectiveness of social movements is primarily a matter of shaping, or even seizing, power at the level of the nation-state claim to have been vindicated.

The WSF’s drift towards institutionalization and vanguardism marks the crisis of a political discourse that, following the 1999 “battle of Seattle”, had imagined the global movement as the convergence of singular, partial actors and subjectivities. The elaboration of common claims and struggles was then seen as premised on the constitutive autonomy of practices aimed at developing alternatives using methods of horizontality and consensus. Such practices and their autonomy questioned, moreover, the assumption that a central revolutionary subject, as in much working class mythology of the twentieth century Western left, is necessary or indeed desirable to achieve fundamental social change. On the other hand, the ontology of the central revolutionary subject has also been denied on the ground by multifarious conflicts like the Zapatista rebellion, landless movements in Latin America, environmental struggles in India, the struggles of welfare claimants and opposition to gentrification in the USA, migrants’ and precarious workers’ movements in Western Europe, the piquetero movement in Argentina, “IMF riots” in structurally adjusted Africa, and the South African struggles against the privatization and commodification of basic social services. The multitude of voices that have rejected the intolerable price imposed by neoliberalism on individual and collective forms of life has not been primarily rooted in a stable waged condition, has not especially come from formally employed and unionized workers, and has expressed no overarching nostalgia for an age in which a waged occupation is the main or even the only condition for a decent life, basic social security, or an income beyond mere poverty. Instead, the politics of "the poor” has contested the mere sociological connotation of this word, recodifying it to rightfully claim a sensuous enjoyment of everyday experience, and forms of life enabled by decommodified access to common goods, in ways that no longer depend on the prospect of becoming factory working class, or on delegating liberation to the revolutionary organization and its self-proclaimed vanguards. For these reasons, the official party and union left has often been contemptuous and dismissive of the struggles of the poor, blaming their “spontaneity” or “subjectivism” as “ultra-left”, while paying lip service to their dedication, and fondling their constituencies as potential grounds for recruiting. And now we have the Bamako Appeal, which, forgetful of the criticism to established left politics emerging from the very poor who see nonetheless the WSF as an opportunity of encounter and exchange, come up once again with ominous expressions like “workers’ united front”. It does not seem, therefore, possible to maintain the view that the “other globalization movement” is about “changing the world without taking power” without a head-on confrontation between the material practices of the poors and the current discourse of the WSF expertocracy.

Functional to the WSF expertocracy’s obsession with the institutionalization of social movement politics, is a view that reifies material, concrete social subjectivities into mechanic abstractions and purely ideological simplifications. The Bamako Appeal, for example, tells us that the “other globalization movement” is about democratizing politics and society. That basically means articulating a discourse of rights and claims to be asserted vis-à-vis the nation state and international organizations. As such, the movement questions hierarchy and authority, but only when they originate outside of it, as the product of corporate domination or state power. No mention is made of the fact that authoritarian modes of organizing are an integral part of the legacy of left vanguardism, and have been as such opposed and contested within social movement politics. Nor can we find anything of the intuitions of, among others, feminist, gay, lesbian and transgender movements, which criticize a right-based politics centered on the nation-state, as the state prerogative to codify rights is precisely what enables the disciplining and fragmentation of social subjectivities. Similarly, nothing is said of the ways in which demands for the decommodification of income and resources that emerge in the struggles of the unemployed and precarious workers (and not only in Western countries) have often nothing to do with “job creation”, which is rather intended as the perpetuation of wage slavery. Issues like whether wage labour should be celebrated or transcended, whether the nation state should be reconstituted or subverted, or what are the relations between vanguardism and organization continue to be a source of separation of left politics from the subjectivities of subaltern communities, rather than issues that can be glossed over under the reassuring mantles of “comradely debate” and “unity in action”.

The suppression by the WSF elites of diversity, complexity, and contestation as constitutive features of the globalization movements operates by virtue of an idealized globalization movement whose assumptions of unity and coherence are required by the institutional realm the elites themselves aspire to inhabit. It is precisely such a multitude of social subjectivities, and the unsuppressed autonomy of its constituents that we identify as a terrain of engagement and politicization. We move, moreover, from the premise that social movement politics and its potentialities are validated only by the material practices of the subaltern, and not by the ability of leaders and vanguards to encapsulate such practices in blueprints and guidelines in accordance with pre-existing, static theories. Putting material praxis and subjectivity at the center of social movement politics implies as a preliminary step to recognize the full political potential of struggles that want to shape “this” globalization, and not delegate the construction of “another” one to a self-styled activist personnel, especially when it emerges from the most discredited left trajectories. A healthy skepticism is therefore needed towards exercises of ideological imperialism that, under the pretense of building a common ground for an assumed global political subject, reorders and disempowers localized, diversified dynamics of insurgency.

It reassures us that documents like the Bamako Appeal will eventually prove totally irrelevant and inessential to struggles of communities in South Africa as elsewhere. Indeed, the WSF elite’s cold institutional and technicist soup, occasionally warmed up by some hints of tired poeticism, can provide little nourishment for local subjectivities whose daily responses to neoliberalism face more urgent needs to turn everyday survival into sustained confrontations with an increasingly repressive state. At the same time, building radical political discourse and imagery to be sustained over the long term requires a recognition of the fundamental ambiguities and contradictions that shape the politics of the poor at all levels, and as such do not lend themselves to facile idealizations. The permanence of sexism and authoritarianism, retrogressive national and ethnic identities, clientelar relations with state politicians and apparatuses, ideological discourses of populism and developmentalism are as integral to the development of the subjectivity of the subaltern as the desires it originates for a society liberated from the power of the market and the state. The interactions between survival, politicization, and organization in the unfolding politics of social movements are much fuzzier and far more problematic than what transpires in the rhetoric and pomp of WSF plenaries. It is, nonetheless, the muddiness of community politics on the ground, and its resilience to ossified institutional discourse, that provides the most powerful critique to the left’s established politics. Unruly and unspecified desires are here, indeed, productive of political potential and praxis. As an alternative to the WSF’s official discourse, therefore, we propose immanence, not mediated institutionalization, and yet-unsignified desire, not political blueprints and guidelines, as the foundation of social antagonism.

Recognizing the power of community struggles as a potential for radical change immanent to their very development, and for which a separate institutional layer is not required, raises important epistemological implications. The transformation of the WSF into a machine for the repressive disciplining of the politics of the poor is not just a matter of ideology, but has to do with knowledge as well. The established left discourse projects a mode of knowledge onto the social subjectivities of the subaltern, which aims to “format” them into desirable, prescribed political behaviors. The imposition of old left modes of analysis on the knowledge that social movement struggles produce of themselves, coupled to the temptation in the official discourse of forums like the WSF to argue for social movements that want to become institutions of state and global governance raises troubling questions. In South Africa as elsewhere in the global South, for example, states and ruling parties have never abandoned attempts to square their enduring adherence to neoliberal policymaking with rhetorical openings in the direction of state-driven developmentalism. What have the WSF representations, and documents like the Bamako Appeal, have to say in this regard? Are they to endorse struggles to shape the heart and soul of the state, or are they conducive to building, as we advocate, life forms and strategies that conflictually autonomize themselves from the state, capital, and wage labour?

For us the imperative, which lay at the heart of the WSF experience, to build connections between subaltern social subjectivities on a global scale, remains as urgent as ever. The reasons for the WSF’s phenomenal success remain in its ability to provide (however incomplete and often biased) an arena of contestation and politicization for diverse social subjectivities and practices. In so doing, the WSF itself becomes a potential site of production rather than just a means for the representation or translation of struggles.

In our own interactions in WSF space, we have learnt new ways of understanding and approaching our various struggles against capitalism. Our immediate struggles against the privatization of basic services, health and education, have found resonance with the struggles of groups all over the world. For us, the most meaningful experiences have been those facilitated through the autonomous spaces within the WSF, in interactions and engagements between activists directly involved in struggles e.g. discussions between the Anti-Eviction Campaign (Cape Town) and members of the piquetero movement in Buenos Aires in 2003. In these encounters, as short-lived as they have been, we have shared and learnt not only about the experiences of survival under neoliberalism, but also about living differently and antagonistically to capitalism. In these encounters, we have discussed and debated the creation of self-reliance - how to make demands of the state and how to live without the state, through the lived experiences of different people fighting neoliberalism in different places. In these encounters, lines between 'the local' and 'the global' have become blurred, both in a geographical sense and in the ways in which we have come to imagine our struggles, their interrelatedness, and their "impact".

In these encounters a method of communication between comrades in different struggles against a common enemy has come into operation, that is significantly different from the hierarchical modes of engagement that persist in the formal processes and spaces of the WSF. Outside of panel discussions that frame and shape the nature of an engagement prior to the meeting and long theoretical diatribes delivered by anti-globalisation gurus, spaces such as Intergalactica have provided the means by which activists from all over the world have been able to come together in discussions about struggle that prioritise "the encounter" as a productive means of interaction between people. In the tradition of Zapatismo, "the encounter" values both participants as equals in struggle who approach their engagement in the spirit of trying to find the answers to their common questions through the encounter itself. "Talking-listening" is prioritized as the means of engagement, with the only commitment prior to the encounter being to "walk, asking questions". In the struggles of movements such as the piqueteros of Argentina, the Zapatistas in Mexico, and for social centres in Italy, this collective acceptance that there is no prior known solution or alternative, but that the alternative is made by us in our common engagement and interaction, is a voice that has begun to resonate within our own struggles.

This embrace of our collective uncertainty in the creation of common alternatives to our common problem of capitalism stands in stark opposition to the certainty with which the Bamako Appeal states its plan for a new world order. In this difference, it allows each of us to be part of the struggle against capitalism as we face it in the here and now, and not as bearers of some future solution that is predetermined outside of our immediate struggles.

What remains a powerful undercurrent of informality in the WSF’s proceedings reveals the persistence of horizontal communication between movements, which is not based on mystical views of the revolutionary subject, or in the official discourse of the leaders, but in the life strategies of their participants. Desires expressed in exchanges that take place at events like the WSF are indeed manifestations of the strategies that antagonistically situate the subjectivities of the subaltern in the circuits through which the social life of communities is reproduced in the age of neoliberalism. The WSF’s officialdom as it presently stands reveals, however, a different order of priority: The “compression” of the movements’ irreducible diversity, the marginalization of life strategies, and the channeling of political communication by a distant, unrepresentative organizational vanguard. Such developments will unquestionably be contested in forthcoming editions of the WSF itself. Putting the subjectivity of the subaltern at the centre of political praxis, however, is not merely a matter of reforming or democratizing the WSF, or of restoring it to some pristine status of unhindered activist communication. In the final analysis, opposing the resurrection of the twentieth century old left, inside and outside the WSF, is, now more than ever, a matter of liberation of political desire.