The
Forum At The Crossroads
By Walden Bello
09 May, 2007
Fpif.org
A
new stage in the evolution of the global justice movement was reached
with the inauguration of the World Social Forum (WSF) in Porto Alegre,
Brazil, in January 2001.
The WSF was the brainchild
of social movements loosely associated with the Workers’ Party
(PT) in Brazil. Strong support for the idea was given at an early stage
by the ATTAC movement in France, key figures of which were connected
with the newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique. In Asia, the Brazilian proposal,
floated in June 2000, received the early enthusiastic endorsement of,
among others, the research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global
South based in Bangkok.
Porto Alegre was meant to
be a counterpoint to “Davos,” the annual event in a resort
town in the Swiss Alps where the world’s most powerful business
and political figures congregated annually to spot and assess the latest
trends in global affairs. Indeed, the highlight of the first WSF was
a televised transcontinental debate between George Soros and other figures
in Davos with representatives of social movements gathered in Porto
Alegre.
The world of Davos was contrasted
to the world of Porto Alegre, the world of the global rich with the
world of the rest of humanity. It was this contrast that gave rise to
the very resonant theme “Another world is possible.”
There was another important
symbolic dimension: while Seattle was the site of the first major victory
of the transnational anti-corporate globalization movement -- the collapse
amidst massive street protests of the third ministerial meeting of the
World Trade Organization -- Porto Alegre represented the transfer to
the South of the center of gravity of that movement. Proclaimed as an
“open space,” the WSF became a magnet for global networks
focused on different issues, from war to globalization to communalism
to racism to gender oppression to alternatives. Regional versions of
the WSF were spun off, the most important being the European Social
Forum and the African Social Forum; and in scores of cities throughout
the world, local social fora were held and institutionalized.
The Functions of the WSF
Since its establishment,
the WSF has performed three critical functions for global civil society:
First, it represents a space
-- both physical and temporal -- for this diverse movement to meet,
network, and, quite simply, to feel and affirm itself.
Second, it is a retreat during
which the movement gathers its energies and charts the directions of
its continuing drive to confront and roll back the processes, institutions,
and structures of global capitalism. Naomi Klein, author of No Logo,
underlined this function when she told a Porto Alegre audience in January
2002 that the need of the moment was “less civil society and more
civil disobedience.”
Third, the WSF provides a
site and space for the movement to elaborate, discuss, and debate the
vision, values, and institutions of an alternative world order built
on a real community of interests. The WSF is, indeed, a macrocosm of
so many smaller but equally significant enterprises carried out throughout
the world by millions who have told the reformists, the cynics, and
the “realists” to move aside because, indeed, another world
is possible…and necessary.
Direct Democracy in Action
The WSF and its many offspring
are significant not only as sites of affirmation and debate but also
as direct democracy in action. Agenda and meetings are planned with
meticulous attention to democratic process. Through a combination of
periodic face-to-face meetings and intense email and Internet contact
in between, the WSF network was able to pull off events and arrive at
consensus decisions. At times, this could be very time-consuming and
also frustrating, and when you were part of an organizing effort involving
hundreds of organizations, as we at Focus on the Global South were during
the organizing of the 2004 WSF in Mumbai, it could be very frustrating
indeed.
But this was direct democracy,
and direct democracy was at its best at the WSF. One might say, parenthetically,
that the direct democratic experiences of Seattle, Prague, Genoa, and
the other big mobilizations of the decade were institutionalized in
the WSF or Porto Alegre process.
The central principle of
the organizing approach of the new movement is that getting to the desired
objective is not worth it if the methods violate democratic process,
if democratic goals are reached via authoritarian means. Perhaps Subcomandante
Marcos of the Zapatistas best expressed the organizing bias of the new
movements: “The movement has no future if its future is military.
If the EZLN [Zapatistas] perpetuates itself as an armed military structure,
it is headed for failure. Failure as an alternative set of ideas, an
alternative attitude to the world. The worst that could happen to it
apart from that, would be for it to come to power and install itself
there as a revolutionary army.” The WSF shares this perspective.
What is interesting is that
there has hardly been an attempt by any group or network to “take
over” the WSF process. Quite a number of “old movement”
groups participate in the WSF, including old-line “democratic
centralist” parties as well as traditional social democratic parties
affiliated with the Socialist International. Yet none of these has put
much effort into steering the WSF towards more centralized or hierarchical
modes of organizing. At the same time, despite their suspicion of political
parties, the “new movements” never sought to exclude the
parties and their affiliates from playing a significant role in the
Forum. Indeed, the 2004 WSF in Mumbai was organized jointly by an unlikely
coalition of social movements and Marxist Leninist parties, a set of
actors that are not known for harmonious relations on the domestic front.
Perhaps a compelling reason
for the modus vivendi of the old and new movements was the realization
that they needed one another in the struggle against global capitalism
and that the strength of the fledgling global movement lay in a strategy
of decentralized networking that rested not on the doctrinal belief
that one class was destined to lead the struggle but on the reality
of the common marginalization of practically all subordinate classes,
strata, and groups under the reign of global capital.
What Constitutes “Open
Space”
The WSF has, however, not
been exempt from criticism, even from its own ranks. One in particular
appears to have merit. This is the charge that the WSF as an institution
is unanchored in actual global political struggles, and this is turning
it into an annual festival with limited social impact.
There is, in my view, a not
insignificant truth to this. Many of the founders of the WSF have interpreted
the “open space” concept in a liberal fashion, that is,
for the WSF not to explicit endorse any political position or particular
struggle, though its constituent groups are free to do so.
Others have disagreed, saying
the idea of an “open space” should be interpreted in a partisan
fashion, as explicitly promoting some views over others and as openly
taking sides in key global struggles. In this view, the WSF is under
an illusion that it can stand above the fray, and this will lead to
its becoming some sort of neutral forum, where discussion will increasingly
be isolated from action. The energy of civil society networks derives
from their being engaged in political struggles, say proponents of this
perspective. The reason that the WSF was so exciting in its early years
was because of its affective impact: it provided an opportunity to recreate
and reaffirm solidarity against injustice, against war, and for a world
that was not subjected to the rule of empire and capital. The WSF’s
not taking a stand on the Iraq War, on the Palestine issue, and on the
WTO is said to be making it less relevant and less inspiring to many
of the networks it had brought together.
Caracas versus Nairobi
This is why the 6th WSF held
in Caracas in January 2006 was so bracing and reinvigorating: it inserted
some 50,000 delegates into the storm center of an ongoing struggle against
empire, where they mingled with militant Venezuelans, mostly the poor,
engaged in a process of social transformation, while observing other
Venezuelans, mostly the elite and middle class, engaged in bitter opposition.
Caracas was an exhilarating reality check.
This is also the reason why
the Seventh WSF held in Nairobi was so disappointing, since its politics
was so diluted and big business interests linked to the Kenyan ruling
elite were so brazen in commercializing it. Even Petrobras, the Brazilian
state corporation that is a leading exploiter of the natural resource
wealth of Latin America, was busy trumpeting itself as a friend of the
Forum. There was a strong sense of going backward rather than forward
in Nairobi.
The WSF is at a crossroads.
Hugo Chavez captured the essence of the conjuncture when he warned delegates
in January 2006 about the danger of the WSF becoming simply a forum
of ideas with no agenda for action. He told participants that they had
no choice but to address the question of power: “We must have
a strategy of ‘counter-power.’ We, the social movements
and political movements, must be able to move into spaces of power at
the local, national, and regional level.”
Developing a strategy of
counter-power or counter-hegemony need not mean lapsing back into the
old hierarchical and centralized modes of organizing characteristic
of the old left. Such a strategy can, in fact, be best advanced through
the multilevel and horizontal networking that the movements and organizations
represented in the WSF have excelled in advancing their particular struggles.
Articulating their struggles in action will mean forging a common strategy
while drawing strength from and respecting diversity.
After the disappointment
that was Nairobi, many long-standing participants in the Forum are asking
themselves: Is the WSF still the most appropriate vehicle for the new
stage in the struggle of the global justice and peace movement? Or,
having fulfilled its historic function of aggregating and linking the
diverse counter-movements spawned by global capitalism, is it time for
the WSF to fold up its tent and give way to new modes of global organization
of resistance and transformation?
Walden Bello is executive director of Focus on the
Global South, the Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute, and
professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines.
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