The following comments on the politics of the World Social Forum and of global justice movements more generally were made from the floor at a major workshop hosted by the Centre for Civil Society at the University of KwaZulu-Natal Faculty Club in Durban, South Africa. They followed panel inputs by Samir Amin on the Bamako Appeal, by Franco Barchiesi and Prishani Naidoo on their critique, and by Geoffrey Pleyers. Please refer to their contributions in this Reader. The full debate – and the rest of the workshop proceedings – can be found on the CCS CIVIL SOCIETY WIRED dvd set. Video and transcription support is gratefully acknowledged from Shannon Walsh.
Nicola Bullard (Focus on the Global South)
The WSF is an extremely useful space for having, admittedly, a lot of workshops, which have a lot of strategic discussion and which bring together people who are active at all sorts of levels, including people from community organizations who have very particular issues with the impact of trade liberalization on farming communities in North-East Thailand for example. So I just sort of want to give another perspective on the WSF as an experience and it’s one that I don’t recognize at all in Franco’s description.
Peter Dwyer (Alternative Information and Development Centre)
Despite my, and other comrades’, continued insistence over many years to Franco, to recognize the greater nuances of the many traditions amongst Marx-isms, and I say ‘isms’ on purpose. We can’t have this one size fits all analysis of the Marxist Left. It simply won’t do whilst many Marxists, such as myself, have a long tradition of recognizing and fighting against the excesses of vulgar Marxism and Stalinism. That’s the first point. The second point is ‘we don’t miss the 20th century Left’. Of course based on my first point there is a great deal we don’t miss, but I do know that the working classes, let me talk about Europe and Britain which I know best, what they miss is a welfare state, what they miss is education that was free, what they miss is a decent health service, and that was fought for and won my what we might call the most lily-livered social democrats. So let’s not be so crude again and dismiss some of the brilliant and painstaking work and fantastic victories - yes they were partial - that the working class and even some of the worst trade unionists and Stalinists were part and parcel of. We will never look forward to a new Left if we are going to caricature and dismiss some of the brilliant victories of the old Left, even if we didn’t agree with some of those comrades.
About this idea that you can’t have an ideological menu: That is all political struggle is. It’s like a menu in a restaurant, we all put our appetizers and our main meals there, for all of us, communities, people, whoever, to choose which one we may like or dislike. But this politics of some [autonomist] comrades is ‘you can’t have the menu at all but by the way, this is our contribution to the very menu we seek to invalidate’. So there’s a grander ideological narrative here at play that really is a political sleight of hand. And finally, you can’t have your cake and eat it, and say that it some kind of pure struggle because all struggles lead to a form of anti-capitalism. They simply don’t.
I’m sure you’ll come back and say ‘we aren’t saying that’, but that is what it comes out as. Somehow these communities, whoever they are, who are completely diverse and often fighting amongst themselves, but it’s always a simple response: ‘no we weren’t saying that comrade, we weren’t romanticizing’, but I’m sorry it always comes out as if you are. There is no community struggle in the world that becomes anti-capitalist automatically - far from it. It can become almost reactionary, and we only have to look to some parts of the world where it has led to religious fundamentalism.
The final thing is: all political struggle is contested. Deal with it, comrades, and go on. You can’t go around saying ‘the World Social Forum has become this, has become that’. That is the very nature of political struggle. It is a fight within a fight. I don’t see a problem with it. The point is we have to find ways we can talk together. What I think is exciting about the World Social Forum and the new social movements is that at least some of those lefties who once could not even sit in the same room are at least beginning to find a way to talk together and work together, because what you have said and done in the past is simply not a guarantor of what you say and do today. What is important today is what you are doing today.
Angela Miles (University of Toronto)
I very much agree with those who emphasise the significance of local struggles and the importance of our daily lives as places of politics, and the personal and political connections, and I tend to share a dissatisfaction with notions that meaning has to be created by those who are separate from the struggles, including those who think they have the analysis that needs to be placed upon various struggles. However, I think it’s important not to dichotomise these - the local struggles, the daily struggles, the community struggles, the campaigns - from real political strategising and theorising that doesn’t just ‘happen’ [just] in daily life. In other words, an active commitment to the theoretical project of understanding our own struggles and their relationship to other struggles is essential. I was interested that one of the speakers talked about the World Social Forum as being a space to discover some of this from the Zapatistas, Picateros and various movements. It seems to me that a lot of this can be learned from feminism. which consciously theorises and practices a politics like that in the fullest sense, deepest sense, most revolutionary sense. Feminism is a political movement which has been local to the point of the family and the individual, and global over decades now, certainly since before the ‘anti-globalisation movement’. I think we need to be aware that we don’t dichotomise things to the point that some of the most interesting practice, which actually brings these things together, is lost from view.
Trevor Ngwane (Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee)
Our version of socialism is one from below. We build our socialism among the rank and file, among the daily struggles in the movements, in the trade unions. Of course we do bring certain ideas but these are not imposed. The reason why we build on concrete daily struggles which affect the working class is exactly so that our ideas can respond, interact and be shaped by those struggles. Also, our work all leads to the rank and file. Despite big words like nationalism, socialism, despite people…I think we should recognise and give praise to the ordinary people who fought the revolutions of the 20th century, even though they were misled, even though they were betrayed. Many times those masses struggled against their leadership who were maybe misleading them, the way Franco is worried. So maybe the fascination with the big theoretical contemporaries and ideologies such as socialism, nationalism, from the organization makes us blind to recognize the struggles of ordinary people. I think it would be throwing the baby together with the bath water, to be blind to that. Lastly, I think militancy alone at the local level and community level will not in itself answer questions of class and questions of power. I think Peter Dwyer tried to indicate that.
During the struggle against apartheid the politics of Stalinism and bourgeois nationalism through the ANC and National party, they made it easy for the bosses, the capitalist class, to hide, to camouflage themselves. Some capitalists were now the guys who wanted apartheid to die. And that was this idea, Mandela, reconciliation, and so on and so forth. So in that way the bosses were able to be immune from criticism and they were able to construct the new South Africa in their favour. So I’m just scared that the failure that we are seeing here to interrogate class issues, the lack of a class approach in part of the Panel’s approach, will help the bosses to hide again. Our enemy is the capitalist class and it makes profit by exploiting the working class, irrespective of how big the unemployed are or how small they are, so I’m just scared that maybe this emphasis on militancy and local struggles might help the bosses to hide.
Lau Kin Chi (Lingnan University, Hong Kong)
We all see the problems of vanguardism, especially coming from China. We all know these problems and yet, I don’t think we should simply dichotomize between the need for certain global expressions and all the experiments and attempts to try to empower communities and grassroots groups. I think we are all at the stage where we are trying to look for certain meaningful expressions and articulations. I don’t quite agree with saying that because certain people are trying to come up with a Bamako Appeal and trying to foster connections in certain ways that it would overshadow or exclude other attempts. I think precisely the World Social Forum is such a venue where there can be different expressions for the broad Left, and I think we are also trying to look for meaningful ways.
Hassan Sunmonu (Organisation of African Trade Union Unity)
The Bamako Appeal, as far as I’m concerned, is an initiative that is like a mango. If you go to the market or a restaurant, you pick what is useful for you. I have seen a lot of merit in that Bamako Appeal that we can use to transform the lives of ourselves, our organizations and our peoples. I’m not talking of structures now, I’m talking of the ideas. So I’m saying that in regard to the World Social Forum of which I’m a member of the traditional council, one of my frustrations is that billions of ideas have been generated since 2001 up till the last forum. How are we using it to transform the lives of the ordinary people for the better? How far are we using it to make the world a safer, peaceful place? How far are we using it to actually empower the people in the democratic process? Because the present association with democracy, is democracy of the rich, for the rich by the rich on behalf of the people. We want a people empowered democracy where the people decide themselves what they want and how they want it. |
