The Economics and Politics of the World Social Forum:
Lessons for the Struggle against 'Globalisation'
Part 1 of 3 Parts
(Prepared by the Research Unit for Political Economy, based in Mumbai,
India)
**********
Contents:
'Globalisation' (In Part 1 of
3)
The World Social Forum and the Struggle against 'Globalisation':
I. How
and Why the World Social Forum Emerged (In Part 1 of 3)
II. WSF Mumbai 2004 and the NGO Phenomenon
in India (In Part 2 of 3)
Appendix I: Ford Foundation
-- A Case Study of the Aims of Foreign Funding (In Part 3 of 3)
Appendix II: Funds for the World
Social Forum (In Part 3 of 3)
**********
RESEARCH UNIT FOR POLITICAL ECONOMY
Mumbai
September 2004
" Research Unit for Political Economy
First published September 2003
(reprinted with the permission of the authors)
Published Rajani X. Desai for Research Unit for Political Economy,
Ground Floor, Sidhwa Estate, N.A. Sawant Marg, Colaba, Mumbai 400005. Tel.
22817547
This document will be / is available on the following website :www.rupe-india.org
Any circulation of the document should only be done as a whole,
including the contact information.
The email address of the publishers is rupeindia@rediffmail.com
**********
'Globalisation'
It became fashionable in the 1990s to use the term 'globalisation'
to describe the economic changes being brought about worldwide. We were
told that economies worldwide were becoming more integrated, and that
prosperity would spread to all.
The great range of actual measures carried on under the label of
globalisation, however, were not those of integration and development.
Rather, they were processes of imposition, disintegration,
underdevelopment and appropriation. They were of continued extraction of
debt servicing payments of the third world; depression of the prices of
raw materials exported by the same countries; removal of tariff
protection for their vulnerable productive sectors; removal of
restraints on foreign direct investment, allowing giant foreign
corporations to grab larger sectors of the third world's economies;
removal of restraints on the entry and exit of massive flows of
speculative international capital, allowing their movements to dictate
economic life; reduction of State spending on productive activity,
development and welfare; privatisation of activities, assets and natural
resources; sharp increases in the cost of essential services and goods
such as electricity, fuel, health care, education, transport, and food
(accompanied by the harsher depression of women's consumption within
each family's declining consumption); withdrawal of subsidised credit
earlier directed to starved sectors; dismantling of workers' security of
employment; reduction of the share of wages in the social product;
suppression of domestic industry in the third world and closures of
manufacturing firms on a massive scale; ruination of independent small
industries; ruination of the handicraft/handloom sector; replacement of
subsistence crops with cash crops and destruction of food security;
removal of ceilings on landholdings; dispossession of tribal lands and
the handing over of forests to corporate interests; developing
dependence of peasants on the new (and profoundly hazardous) products of
biotechnology; dumping of hazardous wastes in, and the shifting of
harmful processes to, the third world; use of women as sweated factory
labour; growth of prostitution amid large-scale unemployment; invasion
of images aimed at making women consumers of the beauty industry; entry
of multinational media corporations and their cultural products; and
systematic development of islands of consumerism amid a vast sea of
poverty.
Little wonder that, far from becoming more integrated and prosperous,
the world economy is today even more starkly divided. By the
indices of the World Bank, 45 per cent of the world lives on less than
two dollars a day, and the number of the poor worldwide has grown during
the 1990s. A third of the world's labour force is unemployed or
underemployed because of the economic order ruling today. At the same
time, in 1993, the top one per cent of the world's population received a
larger share of the world's income than the bottom 57 per cent; the top
five per cent had an income share approaching that of the bottom 85 per
cent.
Distribution has become even more unequal as growth has flattened.
Within the wealthy economies themselves growth has slowed sharply in the
past two decades compared to the previous two decades. Within the
developing countries, the situation is much worse: average income growth
per head has sunk to zero during 1980-98.
While poverty and inequality are not new, the last decade has been
specially marked by frequent, devastating financial crises and
collapses, which have spread even to economies that were hitherto
considered safe. They affected a number of countries at a time,
aided by the freeing of financial flows: the East and South-east Asian
crisis of 1997-98 -- itself involving seven or eight countries -- was
followed by the Russian collapse of August 1998; Brazil collapsed in
August-September 1998, and again in the first half of 1999; in the
course of the Brazilian collapse, Argentina's fragile economy was
shaken; it too collapsed dramatically in 2000, and has still not
recovered. Instability, bordering on chaos, was the hallmark of the
decade. Exchange rates fluctuated more sharply; so too did trade growth,
for all the talk of the gains of `global integration'. Prices exports of
raw materials from the third world fell sharply.
The devastation wreaked by such financial crises was comparable to that
of a war. In many cases standards of living in the affected country were
thrown back decades -- in the case of Russia, by a century (male life
expectancy in Russia fell to 57 in the 1990s). In Eastern Europe and the
former Soviet Union, almost none of the countries had the same GDP at
the end of the decade as they did in 1989. Russia's GDP at the end of
the decade was just two-thirds its 1989 figure; Moldova's and Ukraine's
were a third of their 1989 figures. Unemployment rates during the Asian
crisis tripled in Thailand, quadrupled in South Korea, rose ten-fold in
Indonesia.
The imperialist countries, while scrambling to stabilise the financial
situation arising from these crises (that is, ensuring continued
debt payments by the crisis-affected country), also extracted gains from
these devastations. The drop in prices of raw materials exports from the
third world slashed costs of multinational corporations. Capital exiting
East Asia, Russia and Brazil travelled to imperialist countries (the
sums were massive: outflow from Thailand amounted to 7.9 per cent of GDP
in 1997; 12.3 per cent in 1998; seven per cent in the first half of
1999). And as the East Asian, Russian, Brazilian and Argentinian
currencies fell, their assets in the public and private sectors were now
cheaper for foreign investors to snap up. (The bounty was huge. For
example, in the 1990s, even before the latest collapse, multinationals
bought up Brazil's large privatised infrastructure and service sectors;
they repatriated $7 billion in profits in 1998 alone.)
The term `globalisation' is a gross distortion. Labour remains as
trapped in national boundaries. Capital, no doubt, is armed with freedom
of entry and exit worldwide (allowing it to maximise its exploitation of
labour worldwide). But ownership of capital is by no means
dispersed over the globe; it is more centralised and concentrated than
ever before in imperialist hands.
It was not the working class in the imperialist countries that prospered
from these processes. Income inequality in the US is estimated to be at
its highest level since the 1930s, and growing steadily worse. The
richest five per cent of the US -- indeed largely the richest 1-2 per
cent -- pocketed almost all the gain from the 30 per cent that GDP grew
over the 1990s. Now Census figures show a sharp upturn in US poverty in
2001. And in Europe, the current drive for economic integration and for
greater `competitiveness' is also in fact a drive to strip the European
working class of its rights and social claims.
Resistance to `globalisation' -- or rather, resistance to the
intensified imperialist onslaught -- thus took shape both in the third
world countries who were the worst sufferers as well as in the
imperialist countries themselves, where the working class faced the
onslaught. To tackle such resistance, imperialism has never hesitated to
employ repression at home and military suppression abroad. But such
measures, while basic, would not suffice; more sophisticated political
means are required as well.
A new initiative
In January 2001, in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, a large
gathering took place voicing opposition to `globalisation'. It was
composed of organisations and thousands of individuals from around the
world. This gathering called itself the "World Social Forum",
counterposing itself to the World Economic Forum of corporate leaders
and finance ministers which meets every year in Davos, Switzerland, to
discuss the concerns of multinational corporations and how to advance
'globalisation'. At the World Social Forum, various organisations held
discussions, cultural events, rallies, exhibitions, and other forms of
self-ex-pression, on issues ranging from the environment to women's
movement to economic policy to alternative social orders. The large
participation encouraged the organisers to hold similar gatherings in
January 2002 and January 2003 as well, and each such witnessed even
larger mobilisations, numbering over 100,000 in the last such.
These gatherings, and the wide publicity given to them, had an impact
far beyond the circle of direct participants. The Forum began to be
treated by many as a political alternative to the current political
trends worldwide, and as a potential source of a new politics.
Movements, organisations and circles of individuals all over the world
that are opposed to, or in struggle against, imperialism, had to take
note of the World Social Forum.
Further, while the direct impact of the earlier gatherings was largely
limited to Latin America, it is no longer so. A series of regional
meetings under the aegis and on the pattern of the World Social Forum
have been held over the course of the past year in Argentina, Italy,
Palestine, India and Ethiopia. It has now been announced that the next
World Social Forum gathering will take place in Mumbai in January 2004.
It is against this background that, in order to understand the real
objects and character of the World Social Forum (WSF), we must look into
its emergence and development. This is being attempted here so all those
struggling against imperialism can take an informed stand on their
future course of action.
A brief summary of what follows
In the following we see how, in the US and Europe, a militant
protest movement against the depredations of international capital came
to the fore at the December 1999 Seattle conference of the World Trade
Organisation, and raged for one and a half years thereafter. Attempts by
the ruling circles of those countries to suppress this movement met with
no success; indeed, the movement grew. It was in this context that the
WSF was initiated by ATTAC, a French NGO (non-governmental organisation)
platform devoted to lobbying international financial institutions to
reform and humanise themselves, and by the Brazilian Workers' Party,
whose leftist image and `participatory' techniques of government have
not prevented it from scrupulously implementing the stipulations of the
International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The WSF meets in Brazil for the past three years have attracted not only
mammoth crowds but a wide range of participants, including many
distinguished forces and individuals who are opponents of imperialism.
The WSF slogan, "Another world is possible", while vague, taps
the widespread, inarticulate yearning for another social system.
However, the very principles and structure of the WSF ensure that it
will not evolve into a platform of people's action and power against
imperialism. Its claims to being a `horizontal' (not a hierarchical)
`process' (not a body) are belied by the fact that decisions are
controlled by a handful of organisations, many of them with considerable
financial resources and ties to the very countries which control the
existing world order. As the WSF disavows arriving at any decisions as a
body, it is incapable of collective expression of will and
action. Its gatherings are structured to give prominence to celebrities
of the NGO world, who propagate the NGO worldview. Thus, in all the talk
on 'alternatives', the spotlight remains on alternative policies
within the existing system, rather than a change of the very system
itself.
Indeed the ties of the WSF to the existing system are evidenced in a
number of ways. While several political forces fighting for a change of
the system been excluded from the WSF meets, droves of political leaders
of the imperialist countries have been attending. Not only does the WSF
as a body receive funds from agencies which are tied to imperialist
interests and operations, but innumerable bodies participating in the
WSF too are dependent on such agencies. The implications of this can be
seen from the history of one such agency, Ford Foundation, which has
closely collaborated with the US Central Intelligence Agency
internationally, and in India has helped to shape the government's
policies in favour of American interests.
In recent years such funding has grown rapidly in India, leading to a
vast proliferation of NGOs. While NGOs earlier restricted themselves to
'developmental' activities, they have expanded since the 1980s to
`activism' or 'advocacy', that is, funded political activity. This
phenomenon serves to further bureaucratise social movements and remove
them from popular control. A critique of the role of such funding
agencies in Indian political life was produced in the late 1980s by the
Communist Party of India (Marxist); however, it now its leading cadre
are among the chief organisers of the WSF in India.
'Globalisation', a misleading word for the current onslaught by imperialism,
can be resisted, and even defeated, by a combination of struggles at
various levels, in various countries, in various forms; and forces
fighting 'globalisation' will need to join hands in struggle
against it. However, a careful analysis reveals that the World Social
Forum is not an instrument of such struggle. It is a diversion from it.
The World Social Forum and the Struggle against 'Globalisation'
I. How and Why the World Social Forum Emerged
The fourth gathering of the World Social Forum (WSF) is to take
place in Mumbai in January 2004. This would be an event of unprecedented
international visibility for India, and is already a subject of great
curiosity, discussion and debate among circles opposed to what is termed
'globalisation'. A number of insightful analytical articles have already
been written on the WSF, both in India and abroad. Our purpose here is
to gather some of these perceptions, substantiate certain points, and
add a few further points.
The Seattle demonstrations and thereafter
The emergence of the WSF can be traced (in a contrary way) to the
remarkable international upsurge of protest and confrontation that took
place in the wake of the November 1999 conference of the World Trade
Organisation (WTO) at Seattle in the US. That WTO conference, wracked by
disputes among the world's richest economies, was disrupted further, and
crucially, by a great storm of protest in the streets. The over 50,000
marchers were a very diverse mass, including anti-capitalist
propagandists, anarchists, campaigners for the abolition of third world
debt, environmentalists and even, remarkably, sections of U.S. organised
labour. The conference ended in a fiasco without completing its agenda.
For those fighting against globalisation, Seattle was a signal victory,
evidence that such a fight was possible and worthwhile.
For the next one and a half years, a series of protests inspired by
Seattle seriously disrupted every major gathering of the leading
international powers and institutions, including the World Economic
Forum (WEF) meet (a gathering of representatives of the world's leading
corporations and countries) at Davos in January 2000; the IMF-World Bank
spring meeting in Washington in April 2000; the WEF summit at Melbourne
in September 2000; the IMF-World Bank annual meeting in Prague in
September 2000; the European Union (EU) summit in Nice in December 2000;
the Davos meet in January 2001; the Quebec economic summit of the
Americas in April 2001; the EU summit in Gothenburg in June 2001; the
WEF meet in Salzburg in July 2001; and the World Economic Summit of the
Group of Eight (G-8) in Genoa in July 2001.
Inevitably, the summit chiefs and the corporate media accused the
protesters of carrying out acts of meaningless destruction. However, the
main immediate thrust of the protesters' actions was quite
straightforward: to physically prevent the delegates gathering and thus
prevent these conferences from completing their agenda.
For that agenda was, broadly speaking, to turn the screws tighter: to
yank open third world economies even further to invasion and occupation
by imports, foreign investment, and privatisation; to devalue labour
power (directly and indirectly) further in both advanced industrialised
countries and the third world; to concentrate capital even more greatly
than at present; and to sort out disputes among the leading imperialist
powers in this game.
Demonstrations alone have never ultimately blocked the plans of
international capital, but the wave of militant demonstrations at
Seattle and after was at least remarkably effective in disrupting
"business as usual". At Seattle, the conference's inaugural
session was cancelled as the delegates -- including the head of the WTO,
the UN Secretary-General, the US Secretary of State, and the US Trade
Representative -- were virtually imprisoned in their hotels on the first
day; and on the following days, as demonstrators fought cat-and-mouse
battles with the police on the streets, the trade talks inside broke
down. During the Washington Fund-Bank meet, the US government had to
shut offices in a sizeable area around the two institutions'
headquarters, and demonstrators managed to block many top officials --
including the French finance minister -- from reaching the venue. At
Melbourne the Australian prime minister, John Howard, and the world's
richest man, Bill Gates, were trapped along with other delegates at the
venue. Since the entrances and exits were blocked by 30,000
demonstrators, the delegates had to be ferried back and forth by
helicopters and boats. At Prague the conference centre was completely
blocked for hours, and many prospective delegates stayed away from the
event. At Nice, the authorities' attempts to keep out 100,000 protesters
kept the delegates themselves in a state of siege. A NATO conference
scheduled to be held in December 2000 at Victoria (Canada) was cancelled
for fear of demonstrations, as was a World Bank development meet in
Barcelona in June 2001. At Davos in January 2001, what the Financial
Times described as "unprecedented security" (including
mass arrests and a shut down of road and rail) did not prevent hundreds
of protesters making it to the site. At Quebec, the entire focus of
attention shifted from the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas to the
demonstrators. And in Sweden, the inner city of Gothenburg was converted
into a virtual battlefield.
Each successive meet attempted to place larger areas officially out of
bounds by erecting legal and physical barricades. These efforts peaked
in Genoa, where a four metre high iron fence protected a large deserted
"red zone" near the venue. Inhabitants were not allowed to
receive visitors for days, and sharpshooters manned terraces and
balconies. Even this level of quarantine was insufficient for the
leaders of the world's eight most powerful countries, who stayed on the
cruise ship "European Vision", guarded by minesweepers,
specialist divers, and units with anti-aircraft guns. Rail and air
traffic to the city were stopped; motorways were blocked; bus,
underground and tram traffic were largely shut down; and large numbers
of people were turned back at the Italian border. Revealingly, the very
authorities who talked of a 'united Europe' and were busy removing
national restraints on capital flows aggressively used national
borders to block the flow of protesters. Hence the slogan of the
marchers in Prague: "Open up the borders, smash the IMF".
The slogans and causes of the participants in this series of
demonstrations varied greatly, ranging from the reformist to the
revolutionary (and even, in the US, a few chauvinist ones). But as the Economist
put it, by and large what the marchers "have in common is a
loathing of the established economic order, and of the institutions --
the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO -- which they regard as either
running it or serving it." The rallies indeed became schools to
their heterogenous participants: many previously non-political forces,
or forces limited to single issues, were exposed to broader political
perspectives and were radicalised in the course of their experience. And
far from flagging, their strength appeared to be growing: at Genoa a
record 150,000 protesters overcame extraordinary hurdles and managed to
reach the city.
For those behind the project of a united Europe -- the European
corporations -- the unprecedented involvement of organised labour in
these protests was a particularly ominous sign. The European
corporations and their political representatives, in the course of
fashioning a single superpower, are moving step by step to strip the
European working class of all its security and social rights. A militant
working class challenge joining hands across borders would endanger
their project.
The response: repression
From the start the protesters had to face considerable repression.
At Seattle-1999 tear gas (canisters were sometimes fired at protesters'
faces), truncheons, plastic bullets and concussion grenades were used.
Over 600 were arrested, often merely for handing out or even receiving
leaflets within the giant "no-protest zone"; the national
guard was called out; night-time curfew and martial law were declared.
At Davos 2000 and 2001, the police used water throwers (at
below-freezing temperatures), tear gas and warning shots; at Washington
April 2000 tear gas, pepper gas (some demonstrators were sprayed in the
eyes) and truncheons; at Nice, stun grenades and tear gas; at Quebec,
water-throwers, tear gas and rubber pellets.
The Gothenburg EU summit of June 2001 marked a turning point. The
Swedish police not only attacked the protesters with horses, truncheons
and dogs, but, for the first time in the post-Seattle protests, fired
live ammunition. Three protesters were wounded, one seriously. British
prime minister Blair nevertheless asserted that people were "far
too apologetic" about demonstrators who disrupt gatherings of world
leaders. "These guys don't represent anyone.... I just think we've
got to be a lot more robust about this."
In line with Blair's sentiments, the repression at Genoa was
unprecedented. Demonstrations were banned in a large zone. The police
had the power to stop and search anyone in the city. There was a
complete ban on distribution of leaflets. On the first day of the
conference, police shot in the head Carlo Giuliani, a 23-year-old
protester who allegedly threw a fire extinguisher at a police van; the
van then reversed over Giuliani where he lay on the ground, killing him.
On the night of July 21-22, the police stormed the school building which
served as the dormitory of the protesters. Those sleeping there were
beaten with steel torches, wooden truncheons and fists so badly that 72
were injured; more than a dozen had to be carried out on stretchers,
some unconscious; and many had to be hospitalised. All were eventually
released without charge. According to Amnesty International, detainees
were "slapped, kicked, punched and spat on and subjected to verbal
abuse, sometimes of an obscene sexual nature.... deprived of food, water
and sleep for lengthy periods, made to line up with their faces against
the wall and remain for hours spread-eagled, and beaten if they failed
to maintain this position." In addition, "some were apparently
threatened with death and, in the case of female detainees, rape."
Eighteen months later, the Italian police confessed to a parliamentary
inquiry that they had fabricated evidence against the protesters: one
senior officer admitted planting two Molotov cocktails in the school,
and another admitted faking the stabbing of a police officer. A Guardian
investigation at the time of the protests had found that certain
`demonstrators' who committed acts of looting and attacks on reporters
were in fact provocateurs from European security forces. Not
surprisingly, "few, if any" of these persons were arrested.
This was, then, a pre-planned assault by the leaders of Europe on the
burgeoning anti-imperialist movement.
More sophisticated response required
While "robust" repression remained an essential tool of
dealing with the movement, it was not sufficient. For, contrary to
Blair's assertion that "These guys don't represent anyone", it
was clear that indeed they represented vast and growing numbers
affected, in some cases even ruined, even within the imperialist
countries themselves by the current processes. Early on, the
Canadian Security Intelligence Service warned that "Seattle and
Washington reflect how large the antagonistic audience has become, and
the lengths to which participants will go in their desire to shut down
or impede the spread of globalization". The aggressively
pro-`globalisation' Economist, in an editorial titled "Angry
and effective", lamented that "The threat of renewed
demonstrations against global capitalism hangs over next week's annual
meetings of the IMF and World Bank. This new kind of protest is more
than a mere nuisance: it is getting its way." It warned that
"it would be a big mistake to dismiss this global militant tendency
as nothing more than a public nuisance, with little potential to change
things. It already has changed things", counting the Multilateral
Agreement on Investment as its first victim.
The Economist traced the effectiveness of the protests not to the
methods employed but to the fact that they "enjoy the sympathy of
many people in the West.... Many of the issues they raise reflect
popular concern about the hard edges of globalisation -- fears, genuine
if muddled, about leaving the poor behind, harming the environment,
caring about profits more than people, unleashing dubious genetically
modified foods, and the rest. The radicals on the streets are voicing an
organised and extremist expression of these widely shared anxieties....
the protesters are prevailing over firms, international institutions and
governments partly because, for now, they do reflect that broader mood.
If their continuing success stimulates rather than satisfies their
appetite for power, global economic integration may be at greater risk
than many suppose."
A sophisticated response was required. At Melbourne, at a conference
site besieged by demonstrators, World Economic Forum founder Klaus
Schwab commented revealingly that "If I have learned one thing from
here, I will try in future to install a dialogue corner where some
business people here and some people in the street could meet in a safe
corner and just exchange ideas." The Economist noted that
the Czech president tried unsuccessfully "to broker a meeting
between the protesters [at Prague] and the boss of the World Bank.... Mr
Havel has since managed to set up a forum on September 23rd that will be
attended by Bank and Fund officials and by assorted opponents of
globalisation."
Such efforts are not new: The Bank, Fund, U.N., and other such
institutions have for some years been sponsoring parallel NGO meets at
each major international gathering. Indeed, at Seattle, in December
1999, the WTO itself hosted a parallel Social Summit the day before the
opening of the WTO conference, where the new International Labour Office
Director-General Juan Somavia spelled out the programme: "What we
need today is a more fruitful collaboration between the ILO, the WTO,
the IMF and the World Bank with the objective of creating a Social
Chapter within the incipient structures of world governance.... We need
to create structures where the fears and anxieties of civil society can
be fully aired and addressed."
At the same gathering, former WTO Director General Renatto Ruggiero
warned that "if all actors in today's global economy are not
included to address the widening range of public concerns within this
global system... they may turn to alternative solutions that could
possibly destabilize the entire architecture of the global economy....
Certainly we must continue to advance trade liberalization within the
multilateral system. But unless we achieve a consensus and
cooperation with all the political actors, we cannot build the necessary
support for trade liberalization and the global economy."
The efforts of the 1999 Seattle Social Summit to engage the protesters
in consensus-building for trade liberalisation were, to put it mildly,
unsuccessful. And through all the militant protests that followed, it
was clear that those sponsored efforts at consensus-building with the
protesters, organised as they were under the auspices of the same
international bodies that were the targets of the protests, carried no
credibility with the marchers.
World Social Forum is given shape
It was during the following turbulent year, 2000, that the
"alternative" to Seattle-type confrontations took shape --
with remarkable speed, starting within three months of the Seattle
events.
According to a member of the International Council of the WSF, in
February 2000, Bernard Cassen, the head of a French NGO platform ATTAC,
Oded Grajew, head of a Brazilian employers' organisation, and Francisco
Whitaker, head of an association of Brazilian NGOs, met to discuss a
proposal for a "world civil society event"; by March 2000,
they formally secured the support of the municipal government of Porto
Alegre and the state government of Rio Grande do Sul, both controlled at
the time by the Brazilian Workers' Party (PT). In June 2000, the
proposal for such an event was placed by the vice-governor of Rio Grande
do Sul at an alternative UN meeting in Geneva. The World Bank website
dates the WSF to this meeting, referring to it as "a new
organizational perspective launched in June 2000 in Geneva by the
major organisations of civil society".
This political trend, which was already present within the protest
movement, stepped up its efforts to influence it. A group of French
NGOs, including ATTAC, Friends of L'Humanité, and Friends of Le
Monde Diplomatique, sponsored an Alternative Social Forum in Paris
titled "One Year after Seattle", in order to prepare an agenda
for the protests to be staged at the upcoming European Union summit at
Nice. The speakers called for "reorienting certain international
institutions such as the IMF, World Bank, WTO... so as to create a
globalization from below" and "building an international
citizens' movement, not to destroy the IMF but to reorient its
missions." While strongly endorsing the project of the European
Union (one of the central aims of which in fact is to strip the hard-won
rights of European workers and their various forms of social
protection), the organisers called for a Social Europe, "on the
basis of a Third Way [ie neither capitalism nor socialism], that could
implement policies against unemployment, insecurity, and the undermining
of workers' rights."
The organisers had considerable success in foisting this agenda on the
protest demonstrations at Nice, where the general secretary of the
European Confederation of Trade Unions (ETUC) declared that "all
components of civil society must play a major role in the construction
of the European Union. The message of our demonstration is
unmistakable: There needs to be the incorporation of the trade unions
and NGOs into the decision-making structures in Brussels.... We agree
that Europe must become more competitive, yes. But the new Europe must
also contain a dignified quality of life for all its citizens."
This vision of a happy family of European labour and capital would warm
any corporate chieftain's heart.
Let us take a closer look here at the two principal authors of the World
Social Forum: ATTAC of France and the Workers' Party (Partido dos
Trabalhadores, PT) of Brazil. It is worth looking at the background of
these two forces.
ATTAC: devoted to dialogue with international financial institutions
ATTAC is an NGO platform that aims to build a coalition of diverse
groups -- farmers, trade unions, intellectuals -- for a reform of the
world financial system. Its name is the French acronym for Association
for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens. It
was originally set up in 1998 by Bernard Cassens and Susan George, the
editors of Le Monde Diplomatique, to campaign for the Tobin tax.
This is a tax long ago proposed by the American economist James Tobin,
whereby speculative financial transactions would be taxed at the rate of
0.1 per cent in order to raise funds for productive and socially
desirable purposes. (While ATTAC has broadened its concerns in the past
several years, it has not abandoned its base in the Tobin tax proposal.)
Tobin, a Nobel Prize-winning establishment economist who has advised US
administrations, in no sense considered his proposal radical,
anti-corporate or anti-globalization -- indeed, he envisioned the tax
revenues being administered by the IMF (ATTAC wants the United Nations
to do so instead). At any rate, given the dominance of financial sector
activity, and the hectic pace of speculative transactions worldwide, the
Tobin tax stands nil chance of being actually enacted by any country
wishing to remain in the existing world financial institutions,
international capital flows and international trade; the country that
made such a tax law would immediately be punished by the world financial
community withdrawing capital from it. To be effective, it presumably
would have to be enacted by all countries in the world, or at least the
leading powers, which could then impose it on the rest of the world. The
Tobin tax proposal is a mirage.
Apart from the Tobin tax, ATTAC advanced three other propositions at the
World Social Forum: the reform of the World Bank and IMF; a global
commission to slow down multinationals and increase competition;
and "a procedure of mediation for countries of the `Third
World' in debt, where creditors and debtors should name their
representatives and who then have to come to an agreement in regard
to an arbitrator". All this was to be achieved through
"dialogue" with governments and international institutions
like the Fund and Bank.
This understanding is also reflected in the work of one of ATTAC's
leading lights, Susan George, who argues against a write-off of
the Third World debt, and instead for its "creative"
renegotiation. She indeed defends the institution of the IMF:
"Should the South seek to replace or abolish the IMF? Even if such
a Herculean feat were possible, this strikes me as the wrong goal,
precisely because the Fund is supra-national and because it is an
instrument. If enough pressure and political skill were applied, it
could become an instrument for governments more enlightened than that of
the United States under Reagan." While the intellectuals of ATTAC
prominently occupied platforms and press conferences at each major
post-Seattle protest, their actual politics starkly contrasts that of
the protesters who called for writing off the Third World debt or
"smashing the IMF".
Nor does ATTAC have much in common with the traditional trade union goal
of defending jobs. In a May 2001 document (The rules of the new
shareholding capitalism), ATTAC upholds the right of the sack:
"Clearly, the right to capitalist property includes the right to
hire and fire. The question is knowing up to what point. As far as we
are concerned, we want job-cuts to be the last resort, once all other
possibilities of guaranteeing the survival of the company have been
exhausted."
For ATTAC the militant anti-`globalisation' protests failed in a
crucial sense: they lacked the `constructive' development of
`alternatives'. According to Christophe Aguiton of ATTAC, "The failure
of Seattle was the inability to come up with a common agenda, a
global alliance at the world level to fight against globalisation".
Hence the need for WSF. Says Bernard Cassens, the first president of
ATTAC, "We are not just protesters, our ambition is to propose
credible alternatives to show that another world is possible by once
more putting the economy and finance at the service of society."
To whom were these alternatives to be proposed, in whose eyes were they
to be "credible"? Evidently, to those in charge of the
existing world. ATTAC has been courted by various European social
democratic governments: "In September last year (2001)the French
prime minister, Lionel Jospin, and the German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder,
both facing closely fought elections in the near future, agreed to set
up a joint working party on how to regulate financial markets. The
leadership of ATTAC France have held several meetings with Jospin's
chief of staff. The French National Assembly passed a resolution in
November supporting the Tobin tax on international financial
speculation. Perhaps because of this courtship, the ATTAC leadership did
not mobilise its considerable influence against the war in Afghanistan.
This courtship will continue at Porto Alegre. Among the notables present
will be Danielle Mitterrand, widow of the former French president."
It is alleged that at various forums ATTAC have intervened to exclude
discussion of issues such as Iraq and Afghanistan, and prevent
discussion of state racism, immigrant rights, and explicit references to
fascism and Islamophobia.
Indeed ATTAC sees no wrong in receiving funds from ruling quarters in
Europe. The French business daily Les Echos (10/1/02) reported
that "Last year ATTAC received 300,000 Euros in grants alone. Among
the contributors were the European Commission (of the EU), the French
government's Department of Social Economy, the National Ministry of
Education and Culture and a whole host of local governments."
According to the daily Le Monde (1/2/02), "ATTAC and Le
Monde Diplomatique received 80,000 Euros from the French Ministry of
Foreign Affairs to help them organise the World Social Forum." Les
Echos (1/2/02) comments accurately that "The financing of the
NGOs, whose role is not always transparent, often comes from
multinational corporations who prefer to back them discreetly so as to
be able to use them for their own purposes. It would appear that these
are two opposing ideologies. In fact, more and more these ideologies are
becoming intertwined."
Of course, ATTAC's construction experts ignore the fact that a genuine
alternative cannot merely be mounted on top of the existing structure,
but must be preceded by clearing away the burden of the past.
Workers' Party: instrument of IMF rule
The other important force initiating the WSF, the PT of Brazil, can
hardly be termed an opponent of globalisation. When the first three WSF
meets took place, the PT was in power only in one province of Brazil,
Rio Grande de Sul, whose capital is Porto Alegre. At the time it was
celebrated for its "Participatory Budget" process. In this, an
assembly would be held of associations representing various sections of
society -- including trade unions, NGOs, and employers' associations.
First, from the funds available, the amount required for the
province's contribution towards servicing the foreign debt would be
subtracted. Then discussion would begin on how to spend the
remainder, with each association allowed time to speak to ask for funds
for its concern, and a vote at the end on all the proposals. None of the
priorities may be funded, if there are not sufficient funds for them.
Clearly such a procedure has nothing to do with opposing
'globalisation'. What it does is to set various exploited social
sections against one another and dissipate resentment for Bank-Fund
austerity measures. Indeed the IMF publication Finance and
Development, edited by the World Bank's Chief Economist, praises the
PT's "participatory budget" as helping to "reduce the
administrative and social constraints on economic activity and social
mobility".
Now that the PT has been elected to power at the national level, its
anti-`globalisation' pretensions have been dropped. In order to
"confront the fear that had taken hold of investors, both foreign
and Brazilian" before his election, "Lula [Luis Ignacio Silva,
the head of the PT and now the president of Brazil], in a 'letter to the
Brazilian people,' had committed himself during the campaign to
maintaining the budget surpluses required by the IMF. When he took
office, he not only did this, but he went further and surprised Wall
Street by increasing the budget surplus from 3.5 percent of GDP to
4.6 percent" -- a remarkable extraction from a poverty-ridden
economy in recession. Unsurprisingly, "Officials at the IMF and
World Bank in Washington have praised the stringent fiscal orthodoxy
imposed by the new government." For the critical position of
president of the Central Bank, Lula appointed Henrique Meirelles, the
former president of global banking at FleetBoston Financial, and
"well known in US financial circles." International investors
are reassured: Since Lula took office on January 1, 2003, Brazil has
received some $5.6 billion in foreign investment. Lula has also kept a
distance from Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, one Latin American leader who is
disliked by international capital.
As Brazil continues to service its debt and attract foreign capital, its
basic interest rate, at 26.5 per cent, strangles domestic investment:
interest now accounts on average for 14 per cent of the cost of
production in Brazil and as much as 25 per cent in the steel and
auto-parts industry. More than a third of the population is officially
considered poor, and 15 per cent destitute. "Unemployment in the
greater São Paulo region, Brazil's industrial and financial heartland,
has risen to over 20 percent. Brazil's economic policy makers remain
under IMF surveillance, obliged to make payments on the $30 billion of
IMF loans that the previous government negotiated, which gives very
little space for the economy to grow." Brazil's policymakers now
talk the language of the IMF: "If budget surpluses can be
sustained, once growth picks up next year, as they anticipate it
will, they believe that they will at last be able to shift surpluses
from paying debt and toward social development, education, health, and
improving roads and other infrastructure." It is elementary that a
policy of extracting budget surpluses can only contract economic
activity, making the possibility of social development even more remote.
Little wonder that "Some of the left-wing members of the PT were
openly criticizing [Lula], and the party leaders were threatening the
most acerbic critics with expulsion if they voted against the
government's reform measures." The left-wing members would have
contrasted Lula's present positions with his words to the Havana Debt
Conference in 1985:
"Without being radical or overly bold, I will tell you that the
Third World War has already started -- a silent war, not for that reason
any the less sinister. This war is tearing down Brazil, Latin America
and practically all the Third World. Instead of soldiers dying there are
children, instead of millions of wounded there are millions of
unemployed; instead of destruction of bridges there is the tearing down
of factories, schools, hospitals, and entire economies.... It is a war
by the United States against the Latin American continent and the Third
World. It is a war over the foreign debt, one which has as its main
weapon interest, a weapon more deadly than the atom bomb, more
shattering than a laser beam...."
The context of class struggle in Latin America
Indeed the emergence of the WSF needs to be seen against the
background of not only the upsurge of militant protests against the
world's leading financial institutions and bodies. It must also be seen
against the great wave of struggles of workers and peasants sweeping
Latin America since the Mexican Zapatista uprising of 1994, and more
particularly in the last few years: a flowering of other movements on
the land question in Mexico inspired by the Zapatista uprising, many of
them armed; an extended and political Mexican student movement; the
continuing guerrilla war led by FARC and ELN in Colombia; the continuing
guerrilla war in Peru; a near-insurrection in Ecuador against
IMF-imposed policies, resulting in the fall of a government; mass
mobilisations in support of the Chavez government in Venezuela, in
defiance of the Venezuelan elite and US imperialism; the militant direct
occupation of land by the Movement of the Landless (MST) in Brazil; the
remarkable Argentinian popular uprising and occupation of factories and
sites of political power in 2001-02 in defiance of international
investors, forcing repeated defaults of payments on the foreign debt;
the Bolivian anti-privatisation struggles, including the successful
struggle of Cochabamba against the privatisation of water; and others.
Thus Latin America has become in recent years a particularly important
zone of class struggle in the world, in confrontation with
international capital. Many of these struggles have been spontaneous or
led by amorphous forces, in search of political moorings and a vision of
the future. Hence the importance for international capital of channeling
them, too, along the 'constructive' paths charted by organisations like
ATTAC.
So it was that, in 2002, the Porto Alegre municipality provided
approximately $300,000 and the Rio Grande do Sul state government (under
which the municipality falls) another $ one million for the WSF, despite
their austerity regime. In 2003, there was some increase in the money
provided by the municipal government and a substantial cut in the money
given by the state government (as a result of PT losing the state
elections). However, the new PT federal government, headed by Lula,
decided to compensate for the cut by the state government. ATTAC
channeled European Union funds for the setting up of the WSF, and it is
itself a recipient of European Union and French government funding (see
Appendix II for details). Apart from this, other WSF funders (or
`partners', as they are referred to in WSF terminology) included Ford
Foundation, which we will discuss later in this article -- suffice it to
say here that it has always operated in the closest collaboration with
the US Central Intelligence Agency and US overall strategic interests;
Heinrich Boll Foundation, which is controlled by the German Greens
party, a partner in the present German government and a supporter of the
wars on Yugoslavia and Afghanistan (its leader Joschka Fischer is the
German foreign minister); and major funding agencies such as Oxfam (UK),
Novib (Netherlands), ActionAid (UK), and so on.
Remarkably, an International Council member of the WSF reports that the
"considerable funds" received from these agencies have
"not hitherto awakened any significant debates [in the WSF bodies]
on the possible relations of dependence it could generate." Yet he
admits that "in order to get funding from the Ford Foundation,
the organisers had to convince the foundation that the Workers Party was
not involved in the process." Two points are worth noting here.
First, this establishes that the funders were able to twist arms and
determine the role of different forces in the WSF -- they needed to be
`convinced' of the credentials of those who would be involved. Secondly,
if the funders objected to the participation of the thoroughly
domesticated Workers Party, they would all the more strenuously object
to prominence being given to genuinely anti-imperialist forces.
That they did so object will be become clear as we describe who was
included and who excluded from the second and third meets of the WSF.
The WSF Charter
The charter of the WSF describes the Forum opaquely as "a
permanent process of seeking and building alternatives", "an
open meeting place for... groups and movements of civil society that are
opposed to neoliberalism and to domination of the world by capital and
any form of imperialism", a "plural, diversified,
non-confessional, non-governmental and non-party context", and so
on. However, the charter bars the WSF from any meaningful action.
"The meetings of the WSF do not deliberate on behalf of the WSF as
a body.... The participants in the Forum shall not be called on to take
decisions as a body, whether by vote or acclamatiion, on declarations or
proposals for action that would commit all, or the majority, of them....
It thus does not constitute a locus of power..." Thus the
WSF organisers have strenuously and successfully resisted taking a stand
on even such a glaring issue as the US invasion of Iraq.
The WSF's diversity has its limits. Some groups of "civil
society" -- or of the people, to use a clearer term -- are to be
excluded: "Neither party representations nor military organizations
shall participate in the Forum." (The April 2002 Bhopal declaration
of Indian organisations constituting WSF-India says that "The
meetings of the World Social Forum are always open to all those who wish
to take part in them, except organisations that seek to take people's
lives as a method of political action".) Thus any struggle which
defends or advances its cause by use of arms would be barred: for
example, had the Vietnamese liberation struggle existed today it would
not be able to attend the WSF, even were it to wish it; nor would
today's Palestinian or Iraqi resistance fighters. Examples can easily be
multiplied.
Yet the same charter states that "Government leaders and members of
legislatures who accept the commitments of this Charter may be invited
to participate in a personal capacity." (The Bhopal declaration of
WSF India emphasises that the WSF does not intend "to exclude from
the debates it promotes those in positions of political responsibility,
mandated by their peoples, who decide to enter into the commitments
resulting from those debates." In other words, they are not
participating in their "personal capacity", but in their
official capacity.) Given that these persons are leaders of political
parties, and given that as heads of state they lead military
organisations, this would seem to negate the earlier clause banning
party representations or military organisations.
Clearly the objects of the two clauses are different. The first is
intended to block certain `undesirable' radical parties and their
fighting forces. The second is to ensure the presence of representations
from the very governments carrying out globalisation.
While barring the participation of armed organisations, the WSF Charter
mentions that it will "increase the capacity for non-violent
social resistance to the process of dehumanization the world is
undergoing and to the violence used by the State." (emphasis added)
So the world is being dehumanized as a result of the intensification of
exploitation; states are employing violence to accomplish this; yet
resistance must be non-violent; failure to maintain non-violence will
bar one from attending WSF gatherings.
On the other hand, the question of funding does not even figure in the
charter of principles of the WSF, adopted in June 2001. Marxists, being
materialists, would point out that one should look at the material
base of the forum to grasp its nature. (One indeed does not have to
be a Marxist to understand that "he who pays the piper calls the
tune".) But the WSF does not agree. It can draw funds from
imperialist institutions like Ford Foundation while fighting
"domination of the world by capital and any form of
imperialism". Indeed, the WSF Charter makes clear that it is
opposed to all "reductionist views of economy, development and
history", meaning, presumably, Marxist analysis.
WSF 2001, 2002, 2003
The actual gatherings of the World Social Forum in 2001, 2002, and
2003 were marked by a sharp contrast. On the one hand there was the
vibrant presence of masses of people -- 5,000 registered participants
and thousands of other Brazilian participants at the first event; 12,000
official delegates and tens of thousands of other participants at the
second; and 20,000 delegates, at the third, which had a total attendance
of 100,000.
One report describes how, at the meets, "Bank employees distributed
leaflets with the title `all bankers are thieves' and burnt dollar and
euro banknotes. Metal and oil workers called for international
solidarity with the Palestinians. In the morning the organisation of the
homeless people occupied a building, which the city council had promised
to convert into state-subsidised flats a year ago."
There was a diversity similar to that of the anti-'globalisation'
protests, ranging from workers, peasants and students to
environmentalists, anti-debt campaigners, and NGOs. But the new addition
was high-powered officers of international institutions, academics, and
politicians. James Petras writes of the second WSF meet:
"The Forum was sharply polarized. On one side were the reformers --
the NGO'ers, academics and the majority of the organizers of the Forum,
ATTAC-Tobin tax advocates from France and leaders from the
social-liberal wing of the Brazilian Workers Party. On the other side
were the radicals from the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement, activist
intellectuals, piqueteros from Argentina, representatives of left-wing
parties, trade unions, urban movements and solidarity groups. There were
significant differences in the social composition of the meetings and
the public demonstrations. At the opening inaugural march, run by the
reformist officials, the marchers were from a diverse array of groups.
The unofficial march of 50,000 against the Latin American Free Trade
Agreement was organized by the radical groups and included a large
contingent of Brazilian workers, peasants and homeless, as well as
militant internationalists from ongoing struggles in Argentina, Bolivia
and other countries."
Naomi Klein notes that, while "any group that wanted to run a
workshop... simply had to get a title to the organizing committee",
"there were sometimes sixty of these workshops going on
simultaneously, while the main-stage events, where there was an
opportunity to address more than 1,000 delegates at a time, were
dominated not by activists but by politicians and academics."
Petras agrees: "It was the well-known intellectual notables from
the NGOs which crowded the platforms and informed the public about the
movements in their regions... The official plenary sessions and
`testimonials' were heavily biased in favour of NGO'ers and
intellectuals, while the parallel workshops and seminars were the
occasional site of fruitful exchange among activists from substantial
movements engaged in the significant battles against imperialism
(`globalization')."
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