 |
||||
| CACIM | ||||
| CCS | ||||
| HOME | ||||
| Acknowledgements | ||||
| Contributors to the Reader | ||||
| TABLE OF CONTENTS | ||||
|
||||
| The Communist Manifesto | ||||
| Bandung | ||||
| The World Social Forum | ||||
| Call of Social Movements | ||||
| Porto Alegre Manifesto | ||||
| The Bamako Appeal | ||||
| Reactions to the Bamako Appeal | ||||
| Beyond Bamako : Many Worlds, Many Languages |
| Introductions |
1.2
|
The immediate purpose of this Reader is to facilitate critical engagement with the content and the process of a document called ‘the Bamako Appeal’, at an workshop being organised at the World Social Forum at Nairobi, Kenya titled ‘Revisiting the Bamako Appeal : Issues of Democracy and Substance in world movement’’, on January 21 2007. It attempts to do so by bringing together not only the debate that has taken place around the Appeal over this past year since it was announced (at Bamako, Mali, on January 19 2006, just before the inauguration of the polycentric World Social Forum held there from January 19-23 2006) but also several key documents in history and some discussion around them, in order to locate the Bamako Appeal in history. The documents we have chosen to feature are the Communist Manifesto in 1848, the Bandung Final Communiqué in 1955, two key documents authored by the Zapatistas (1996 and 2006), the Charter of Principles of the World Social Forum (2001), and also the so-called ‘Porto Alegre Manifesto’ that was announced at the end of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in January 2005 and two of the ‘calls’ made the Assembly of Social Movements that have come to be held and/or in relation to during the WSF (2002 and 2003). We had also wanted to include the Havana Declaration from the Tricontinental Meeting held there in 1966, but sadly were unable to find a soft copy of that in time for inclusion here. As we see it, the Bamako Appeal, as well as the latter two documents, is aimed at articulating a political programme for the emerging world movement at the present juncture in world history – and by implication for the World Social Forum. We have felt that as we meet to critically debate the Appeal, it would be useful to not only focus on this one document but to see it relative to what else is being said and also to similar things that have been said in history. We do this by bringing together in one place all these proposals, thus allowing us to compare the Appeal and the other contemporary proposals with other proposals in history – and where the authors of the Bamako Appeal themselves of course acknowledge the inspiration they have drawn from the Bandung Declaration and even titled their meeting ‘Conference of the Peoples of Bandung – A reconstruction of alliances of the South’. For those less familiar with the Bamako Appeal, it is a document that calls for a redoubling of resistance again imperialism, and lays out a programme for doing this. The initiative to prepare this document was taken by the World Forum for Alternatives, based in Dakar, Senegal, headed by Egyptian economist Samir Amin and Belgian sociologist François Houtart. This document was tabled at a major meeting called by the WFA and local Malian organisations on January 18 2006 in Bamako, Mali (spilling over onto the 19th), discussed there, and finalised by the meeting. To the best of our knowledge it was not presented anywhere at the Bamako Forum but was presented by its authors, in its finalised form, at the Social Movements Assembly at the Caracas Social Forum held in Caracas, Venezuela, soon after, during January 24-29 2006. We do not know why it was not presented at the Bamako Forum. The present English version of the Appeal, as published here, was then circulated by Samir Amin on the NIGD (Network Institute for Global Democratisation) listserve on February 7 2006, and it also appeared on several websites around that time, in particular that of the Third World Forum (http://thirdworldforum.net/fren/index.htm), for further signatures. The full text of the Appeal as well as the list of signatories as of a certain date are included in this Reader. More details on the history of the Appeal appear in several of the texts included in this Reader (in particular, in Geoffrey Pleyers’ background piece ‘The World Social Forum lands in Africa’, and also in his more analytical essay ‘From the ‘Conference of the Peoples of Bandung’ to the Bamako Appeal’), so let this presentation suffice here. This Reader and the event for which it is prepared are a continuation of the debate that we at CACIM have tried to generate around the Bamako Appeal since March 2006. At that time, our opinion – developed in the course of conversation with Peter Waterman, labour specialist and internationalist based in The Hague, The Netherlands – was that the preparation and articulation of the Appeal was a very significant intervention in world movement but that both the manner in which it was developed and announced and the style of the document – in short, the language it spoke - implicitly (though not declaredly) also had major implications for the future of the World Social Forum and what we at CACIM see as the culture of ‘open’ and horizontal politics that it has come to represent. The big question however, is whether either the world movement or the WSF need a defined political programme – and even if so, what the nature of such a programme would be and how it should be defined. Given that we have been and continue to be intensely engaged with the WSF and the world movement (through the listserve we administer, WSFDiscuss, and the webspace we run on behalf of the EIOS - Explorations in/of Open Space – Collective, OpenSpaceForum www.openspaceforum.net, as well as several seminars we have organised, books CACIM members have been involved in producing, and research that some of us are doing), we therefore felt that it was necessary for us to also similarly and directly engage with the Bamako Appeal. Not only on a direct basis but also by doing what we at CACIM are set up to do – to create spaces for critical engagement and action. Our initial process-related reading was that the one day that the Appeal had been debated (at the meeting in Bamako where it was announced) was for too limited for such an ambitious and significant document, and that the limitations that we felt that it suffered in terms of content were in some part at least, a consequence of this very limited debate. We therefore approached the organisers of the Appeal in March 2006 to request that they open the document for debate and offering our help in doing so. Their response however was that both the Appeal and the debate around it had been brought to a close (though it was open for further signatures), and that they were by then already moving ahead to implement the proposals contained in the document, through working groups set up for the purpose. We enquired about the working groups, but did not receive any details. While respecting the autonomy of the organisers to do this, our reading remained that both the content and political idea and implications of the Appeal were, as above, far too wide-reaching for it to have been debated just for one day at one meeting in one part of the world (and then too, a meeting by invitation only), and since it was by then already in the public domain, we from CACIM, in consultation with Peter Waterman, decided to open it for debate, in the public interest. We took several steps towards this. We posted the Appeal on OpenSpaceForum; we also posted it on WSFDiscuss and invited debate and comment; we sent the document out to several prominent publications (journals, magazines, newspapers) and organisations who run public websites, in India and across the world, to publish and publicise it; and we also specially wrote to over a hundred individuals across the world inviting them to comment and critically engage with it. Several people responded, in some cases attempting to engage with the authors of the Appeal and in others engaging with each other’s arguments, as did quite a few journals and websites. Others took it up for discussion within the institutions and/or movements they work in. For an archive of articles on the Appeal as well as initiatives taken by CACIM towards promoting public debate, see http://www.openspaceforum.net/twiki/tiki-index.php?page=Bamakoappeal. (All this material is reproduced in this Reader.) We also planned to organise a public debate of the Appeal at the polycentric WSF that was held in Karachi, Pakistan, in late March 2006, but unfortunately had to cancel that event because most of the CACIM team did not get visas to go to Pakistan. Several important developments have taken place at the world level in the year since the articulation of the Appeal. Most notably perhaps, a perceptible turning of the tide in the war that the US and its allies have been waging on Iraq, and also a perceptible, and related, flagging of spirit in their related war on Afghanistan; not yet an end to empire but perhaps a beginning, a turning point. But also the remarkable events in Latin America, ranging from the defiance of the hegemony of the US by the leadership in Venezuela; the historic election of an indigenous person as president in Bolivia and his articulation of a vision of national and world politics that is extraordinary in relation to conventional world inter-state politics; the successive election (and re-election) of what appear to be left-leaning presidents in country after country – signalling not only the rise of new, more generalised consciousness in that part of the world but also the impotence of the major imperial world power (and where Latin America has of course been its happy hunting ground, literally, for the past century); and last but by no means least, the sustained resistance and articulation of an alternative by the people of Chiapas, the Zapatistas, to the neoliberal vision that has blinded so much of the world. As well as the rising struggles and militancy of so-called ‘immigrant communities’ across the North; most crucially during this period, in France. In these emerging conditions, we at CACIM, in collaboration with CCS (the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society, Durban) and in consultation with Peter Waterman, have decided to use the opportunity afforded by the Nairobi Forum to convene a major meeting around the Bamako Appeal, to critically debate questions of democracy and substance in the Bamako Appeal and more generally in the global justice movements. Let me take the privilege of this introduction to add that we at CACIM feel very honoured indeed to have had the chance of this collaboration, and the critical spirit in which CCS and Peter have joined us in this venture. We also feel honoured by the very positive response that we have so far got both to invitations we have sent out to people to take part in this meeting, and more generally in terms of endorsement of our initiative to organise this event at the Nairobi Forum and also a related meeting we are organising there, again together with CCS, ‘In Defence of Open Space’. In all these actions, and in others we have taken, we attempt to do our work by as an open a process as possible, and in the course of what we do, to create open spaces for frank and open debate. In our understanding, this is an essential prerequisite, and even organising principle, of the world we today live in, and of the new politics that are emerging; and so we have also attempted to do this in this case – and even as we continue to critically interrogate the concept and practice of open space. By convening with CCS the event around the Bamako Appeal at the Nairobi Forum, and by taking the initiative of publishing this Reader and of including all the debate that we have been able to find, and most particularly by inviting the authors, signatories, and critics of the Bamako Appeal to the Nairobi meeting, as well as critical but independent commentators, we are in our own way attempting to follow and practice and give life to this principle; and where we see this practice as a necessary and even essential culture of politics in the world movement. Jai Sen List of expected speakers for the session on ‘Revisiting the Bamako Appeal’ : |