ALEX CALLINICOS
1. The third European Social Forum in London (14-17 October 2004)
provided further evidence – if more were needed – of the vitality
of
the altermondialiste movement. It also confirmed – after Porto Alegre
and Paris, Mumbai and Florence – that the social forum remains an
astonishingly dynamic and successful political form. The success of the
London ESF can demonstrated in various dimensions:
• First of all, the figures:
approximately 25,000 took part in 500
plenaries, seminars, workshops, and cultural events, which were
addressed by over 2,500 speakers: the figures for pre-registered
delegates show that the participants came from right across the
continent and beyond the boundaries of even the expanded European
Union:
Belgium 593
France 1,003
Germany 834
Greece 363
Italy 1,362
Poland 499
Russia 190
Spain 1,271
Sweden 170
• The concentration of
the bulk of the ESF at Alexandra Palace
recaptured something of the atmosphere of the Fortezza at Florence,
producing an intensification of energies by bringing together a large
number of different actors and debates in a confined space for two and
a half days;
• London also displayed the same interplay of mobilization and debate
that has been the driving force of all the great social forums: the ESF
culminated in a demonstration in central London of around 100,000,
before which the Assembly of the Social Movements launched a call for
international protests against neo-liberalism and war on the weekend of
19-20 March 2005.
These are all measures common
to the London ESF and its predecessors.
But in certain respects, the ESF marked a significant step forward.
• The mainstream of the
trade union movement in Britain was actively
involved in both the preparatory process and the Forum itself: feedback
from various unions has been overwhelmingly positive, with reports of
highly successful seminars involving important networks of activists;
• There was also a marked increased in participation by black, Asian,
Muslim, and refugee networks: this is an important achievement given
the Europe-wide offensive against civil liberties and the rights of
migrants and asylum-seekers;
• There was a very rich and ambitious cultural programme;
• The number of plenaries was sharply reduced, giving more space
to
self-organized events. Moreover, the efforts to reduce the number of
plenary speakers, establish a gender balance among them, and allow more
time for discussion from the floor were quite successful;
• My impression – and that of others to whom I have spoken
– was of a
significant increase in the intellectual quality of the debate: in the
seminars that I attended I was very struck by the extent to which both
platform speakers and contributors from the floor avoided the ritual
denunciations of neo-liberalism and imperialism for serious analysis
and discussion.
All these improvements did
not occur randomly. They were among the aims
of those centrally involved in organizing the ESF. We are therefore
entitled to claim a fair measure of success.
The ESF in London was smaller
than its predecessors in Florence and
Paris, which each attracted around 50,000 people. This is hardly
surprising: the altermondialiste movement first began to take shape in
Europe with the formation of ATTAC in France in 1998; since Genoa the
movement has been strongest in Italy. In Britain there has been a very
strong anti-war movement, but only a widespread, but diffuse
anti-globalization consciousness.
The London Forum, which involved
the plentiful participation of young
people and a broad coverage of all the issues of concern to the
movement in the plenaries and seminars, should, together with the
mobilization for the G8 summit in Gleneagles next July, help to
transform this consciousness into much stronger organized networks in
Britain. The corporate media in Britain are notoriously reluctant to
provide serious coverage of the altermondialiste movement, but the
Guardian (18 October 2004) acknowledged the significance of the Forum,
warning that
mainstream politicians are
out of touch with both the spirit, content
and the style of the inclusive non-party politics now emerging under
the ESF umbrella. Any professional politician observing the audiences
of 1,000 or more people raptly listening to debates on globalisation,
the power of corporations, racism, food or the environment would do
well to reflect on the narrowness of their own political agenda and the
genuine transnationalism now clearly informing European youth…Out
of
the connections being made between radically different groups, it is
possible to see in years to come the emergence of a genuine new
politics of the European left.
Of course, there were weaknesses.
No one comes to London for the food,
but the food at Alexandra Palace was terrible, and terribly expensive.
The experience of the preparatory work on the programme confirms
Bernard Cassen’s criticism of the first two ESFs that an enormous
amount of time and energy is devoted to deciding the subjects of the
plenaries and selecting the speakers. It will be interesting to see the
experiment at the next World Social Forum at Porto Alegre of dispensing
entirely with plenaries and having only self-organized events.
Other problems were more subjective.
Some people didn’t like the way in
which the division of the rooms at Alexandra Palace meant that noise
from one seminar or plenary spilled over into others. Personally, I
thought the noise was manageable and that it did have the virtue of
making audible the diversity of voices that is such a powerful feature
of our movement.
2. The London ESF was accompanied
by plenty of political noise. To a
significant degree this reflected the fact that our very diversity
means that there are plenty of political disagreements. For example,
many comrades, especially from France, didn’t like the fact that
the
war in Iraq was very prominent in London, as it was in Florence.
In part this disagreement reflects
differences in national context. In
Britain the war dominates politics and is far and away the biggest
mobilizing issue. Without the prominence of the war and the leading
involvement in the ESF of the British peace movement, the Forum would
have been a far less dynamic affair, and the final demonstration would
have been little larger than the participation in the Forum itself.
But there is more involved
here. The war in Iraq is also the dominant
issue in world politics. This is not simply because of the divisions
that it has provoked among the major powers. The Bush administration’s
unilateral assertion of military power, the brutality of the
occupation, its accompaniment by the imposition of the full neo-liberal
economic programme on Iraq – all of this for many activists sums
up
what is wrong with corporate globalization.
Others – and they are
particularly influential in France – disagree.
They believe there is no necessary connection between the Bush war
drive and neo-liberal globalization. I think they are mistaken, and
that every day that passes underlines the importance of understanding
the links between economic and military power that are at the heart of
modern imperialism. This is a substantive political disagreement with
which we are going to have to learn to live while working together in
the same movement.
Often it is more difficult
to acknowledge the significance of these
disagreements because they are presented as procedural problems. Thus
a
number of French networks have complained about the fact that the
platform at one seminar were all agreed in defending the right of young
Muslim women to wear the hejab, even though this does not seem to have
prevented a very vigorous debate taking place from the floor. This
seems to me like an evasion of the real issue.
The truth is very many activists
in the rest of Europe find the support
that much of the French left and union movement gave the law banning
the hejab in French state schools quite incomprehensible. ATTAC
France’s recent assessment of the ESF complains about the role of
‘confessional organizations’ in London. But a secularism that
excludes
the most oppressed sections of French society is as communalist as any
of the Islamist organizations it denounces.
The issue of the hejab is really
a symptom of the real problem, which
is how to expand our movement to embrace those at the bottom of
European society who suffer both economic exploitation and racial
oppression and many of whom, for that very reason, strongly attach
themselves to their Muslim faith. Once again, this isn’t a question
on
which we will reach rapid or easy agreement. But at least we should
recognize the importance of the debate, rather than take refuge in
arguments about how one seminar was organized.
3. These disagreements spilled
over into several attempts at
disruption. Overall these incidents had very little impact on the ESF.
The vast bulk of events went on completely unaffected by them, and most
participants in the Forum and the final demonstration and concert
didn’t see them. But both because they received some attention in
the
media and on the net, and because this is the first time that an ESF
has been successfully disrupted (an attempt to attack a Socialist Party
representative in Paris was foiled by security guards), these attacks
are worth discussing.
Their apologists have offered
various excuses. One is the alleged lack
of democracy in the organizing process in Britain. One difficulty in
this process has certainly been that participants have very different
conceptions of democracy and often showed little tolerance of
definitions different from their own. But the real problem with the
British process lay elsewhere.
At different stages this process
embraced a very wide range of forces –
stretching from the Trade Union Congress and mainstream NGOs to
autonomist groups with a history of intermittent violence such as the
Wombles. Holding this coalition together would have been difficult in
any circumstances. Of course, the Italian and French comrades also have
developed very broad coalitions, but it was probably an advantage that
these had been constructed well in advance of actually organizing the
ESF, so that people had an experience of working together.
In Britain, by contrast, the
altermondialiste networks that had
participated in the earlier Forums were relatively weak. A coalition
had to be created from scratch to organize the London ESF. This
involved bringing together very diverse organizations with no history
of working together and huge differences in political culture. Working
together would have been hard in any circumstances.
Nevertheless, a very heavy
responsibility for the difficulties that
developed must rest with the autonomist circles. Their attitude towards
the ESF varied between outright opposition (theorized by the Wombles in
a critique of the Social Forums as inherently reformist) and variable
but usually not very constructive participation in the process (often
through the agency of various fellow travellers).
Every effort was made to accommodate
them: for example, the London ESF
provided an Autonomous Space along the lines of those organized in
Florence and Paris. As agreed at the European Preparatory Assembly, all
meetings of the UK Organizing and Coordinating Committees were open.
But many of those associated with the autonomists expressed hostility
to the experience of the Social Forums as mass events and therefore to
the participation of the unions and the NGOs. To have given way here
would have led to an ESF in London dramatically smaller than any of its
predecessors and confined to a self-selecting circle of the already
converted.
The case of the Iraq plenary
illustrates the problem. I think it was a
mistake to have invited a representative of the Iraqi Federation of
Trade Unions, which supports the Anglo-American occupation, to have
spoken at the ESF. The fact that one did was as a result of very strong
support for the IFTU from many British trade unions (the IFTU now has
an office in the headquarters of the largest union, UNISON).
The unwelcome presence of the
IFTU at the ESF was thus a consequence of
building a Forum that reached deep into the mainstream of the labour
movement. The foolish decision by a handful of protestors (in this case
mainly members of British and Middle Eastern far left sects) to shout
down a platform mainly composed of the convenor of the Stop the War
Coalition and Iraqis opposed to the occupation was thus a refusal to
engage with this mainstream. It represented exactly the kind of sterile
sectarian politics from which the rest of us are trying to escape.
4. The attacks made on the
anti-fascist plenary and the stage in
Trafalgar Square were the work largely of autonomists many of whom are
in principle opposed to the Social Forums. In addition to claims of
lack of democracy, two other excuses were given for these actions.
First of all, the ‘corporate ESF’ and the support given by
Ken
Livingstone, Mayor of London, were denounced.
It is hard to take this seriously.
Anyone who has attended the WSF in
Porto Alegre will remember the corporate adverts welcoming delegates
and the VIP suite at the PUC. The importance of support from local
government (and indeed from political parties) is indicated by the
proposal that was made to move the forthcoming WSF from Porto Alegre
after the PT lost control of the city in November.
The pattern has been the same
with the ESF. Florence received support
from the regional government. In addition to help from the
municipalities of Paris, St Denis, Bobigny and Ivry, the Paris ESF
received €1 million from the office of the right-wing Prime Minister,
Jean-Pierre Raffarin. No one criticized the French comrades for this,
presumably because we all understood that a mass Social Forum needs
money and money means compromises. In the case of London this money was
provided by a mayor who, despite his mistaken decision to rejoin the
Labour Party, has consistently supported the anti-war movement. Why are
different standards applied to London than to the other Social Forums?
The other excuse given for
the disruptions was the role of the police.
It has even been claimed that ESF organizers were responsible for the
arrests at the demonstration and in Trafalgar Square. These assertions
are entirely false and indeed libellous; but they are also ridiculous
–
how could a veteran revolutionary socialist like me have any influence
over the Metropolitan Police? The comrades who have made such claims
should withdraw them at once.
It is, moreover, is puzzling
that some arrests rather than others have
attracted attention. For example, during the registrations at Conway
Hall on Thursday 14 October a very aggressive police squad cleared Red
Lion Square of the queues and arrested a Socialist Workers Party
organizer. Two Globalise Resistance activists were stopped leaving the
final demonstration under the Terrorism Act 2000. One of them was
arrested and fined £80. An individual who appears to have been part
of
the group that tried to storm the stage in Trafalgar Square was also
arrested and fined the same amount. But only his case attracted
sympathy and attention, for example from some leading French activists.
Once again, a double standard seems to be at work.
But even if the criticisms
that have been made of the British
organizers were largely correct, this would not justify the
introduction of violence inside the Forum. Violence and debate are
antitheses: those who believe that diversity and discussion are among
the greatest strengths of our movement cannot tolerate attempts to
settle arguments by force. Moreover, those who bring violence into the
movement bring the state in with them: the attacks in Trafalgar Square
gave the police the pretext to intervene and arrest people. Those
European comrades who have refused to condemn, or condoned, or even
colluded in the disruption of the London ESF should reflect on the very
dangerous precedent they are creating for the future.
5. It is, in any case, the
future about which we need to be thinking.
The next ESF will be in Athens in the spring of 2006. What political
lessons does the experience of London offer? The most important is
that, as the Italian comrades pointed out after Florence, the great
strengths of the movement are radicality and diversity. We have managed
the near-miracle of developing a movement that embraces an
extraordinarily wide social and political range but that has mounted a
challenge to capitalist imperialism as a system. This was very evident
in London: as at Florence, many of the largest and most dynamic
meetings were dominated by the politics of the radical left.
But London also showed that
combining radicality and diversity becomes
harder, not easier, over time. Important divergences have crystallized
over a variety of issues – the war, the European Constitution, the
hejab, the role of the radical left. There are also differences over
how to build the movement: some networks are much more ambivalent about
involving the trade-union mainstream than others. This last difference
cuts across others: for example, I suspect I am closer to some French
comrades about bringing in the unions than I am to some Italian
comrades with whom, however, I agree much more about the war. This
makes holding together and expanding the coalitions we are trying to
build much more complicated.
We must also confront the fact
that the process itself is becoming
increasingly dysfunctional. ATTAC France rightly points to the fact
that attendance at the European Preparatory Assembly has stagnated
since Florence and argues that ‘the functioning of the EPA must
be
improved in a logic of democratization, of representativity and of
enlargement’. This is easier said than done, particularly given
the
stress laid in our procedures on meetings being open to all and
deciding by consensus, which can give great power to disruptive but
unrepresentative minorities.
Hence the strains that became
visible in London. We need to understand
this when we prepare for Athens. The divisions in the British process
tended to polarize between a coalition of significant social movements
and a disruptive but socially weak autonomist fringe. But there are
some four powerful forces that will need to be brought into the ESF –
the Greek Social Forum, the Genoa 2001 Campaign, the Greek Communist
Party, and the trade unions, whose leadership tend to be linked to
PASOK. Only the first two have been involved in the ESF process, and
all four have a history of mutual conflict. Bringing them together will
be a big challenge for us all.
So things are unlikely to get
any easier for us – and not primarily
because of our own petty squabbles. After all, George W. Bush has been
re-elected with what he regards as a mandate to carry on waging global
war and polluting the planet. This is a reminder of the distance we
have still to travel before we can imagine having achieved any of the
concrete goals adopted in all our seminars and plenaries. But our
successes – most recently at the London ESF – leave me confident
of our
ability to build a movement that can start to win real victories.
Alex Callinicos 26 November
2004