The Economics and Politics of the World Social Forum:
Lessons for the Struggle against 'Globalisation'
Part 2 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)
**********
(continued ...)
Who was included
Despite
the WSF Charter's prohibition of political parties, Lula, head of the PT
and now head of the federal government of Brazil, prominently
participated at all three WSF meets. For that matter the PT, the ruling
party at the local and now national level, has been omnipresent at the
WSF meets. And Lula, as part of his new presidential responsibilities,
traveled straight from the WSF 2003 to Davos, to participate in the
World Economic Forum meet. Thus it is possible to take part in both
forums.
It is worth looking at the credentials of some of the other participants
at the WSF. The French government -- still more or less a colonial ruler
in parts of Africa -- has sent high-level delegations to the WSF,
containing several cabinet ministers. Among those whom the organising
body of WSF presumably considers "accept the commitments" of
its charter were the French minister of cooperation (directly
responsible for dealing with the foreign debt of the African countries
-- in particular former French colonies), the minister of housing, the
minister of education, and so on. Also present at the WSF was a
top-ranking delegation of the United Nations, a body in whose name
several heinous wars have been fought since 1991. A special message from
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was read out at the WSF -- as it was
also in the World Economic Forum at Davos.
At any rate the bar on political parties is selective: any number of
representatives of political parties attend in their "individual
capacities", and even hold important positions in the WSF bodies.
The bar is actually an enabling provision, to keep out those the
organisers wish to keep out.
Even some prominent representatives of the WSF have been embarrassed by
the contradiction. According to Jose Luis del Rojo, the Italian
coordinator of the WSF: "We have a problem. There are several
thousand politicians present, many of whom are members of parliament,
mainly from Europe, who voted for the US war against Afghanistan. Many
of these had declared themselves to be against our movement. And now
they are all here, giving interviews to the international press...We
have problems especially with the French and Italian members of
parliament. For example, there is the secretary of the Left Democrats
from Italy, Piero Fassino, who spoke strongly in favour of Italy
entering this war. These are the same people, who in Genoa, while the
police was beating us up, called upon the population not to join the
demonstration, in order to isolate us and leave us in the hands of the
repressive state apparatus...This should be a Forum of local
government politicians, but here we have prefects from Europe taking
part. These people in their municipalities and regions have expelled
immigrants. All this has nothing to do with our principles."
Of the German delegation, "The majority was made up of
Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs), like the Evangelische
Entwicklungsdienst (Protestant Voluntary Service Overseas). The bulk of
the delegation was formed by foundations linked to political parties,
such as the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung (Friedrich Ebert Foundation) with a
total of 19 delegates, the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung (Rosa Luxemburg
Foundation) with 9 delegates, the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung (Heinrich Böll
Foundation) with 2 delegates and the DGB (German Federation of Trade
Unions) with 7 representatives."
An International Council member notes that certain UN organs were
actively involved in the WSF despite the bar on intergovernmental
bodies. "In order to partially overcome such dilemmas, a new form
of participation was attempted in 2002 when it was decided that the WSF
would have a new category of events: roundtables of dialogue and
controversy. Through these roundtables, representatives of
institutions banned from the list of official delegates can be invited
to debate and discuss."
NGOs are major recipients of financing from the very institutions that
the WSF is purportedly fighting. "For the last decade", said
the World Bank president to the WSF 2003, "we have held an active
dialogue with the organisations of civil society, including through the
projects that we are financing." Thirteen per cent of the World
Bank's loans to various governments have to be channeled to finance the
"participation" of NGOs. On this account, in 2001, the
borrowing countries were indebted for a neat $2.25 billion to the World
Bank. The NGOs in turn do their political bit for the Bank and Fund. The
Economist notes that "The IMF, long regarded as impermeable
to outsiders, now runs seminars to teach NGOs the nuts and bolts of
country-programme design, so that they can better monitor what the Fund
is doing and (presumably) understand the rationale for the Fund's loan
conditions. Horst Kohler, the IMF's new boss, has been courting NGOs.
Jim Wolfensohn, the Bank's boss, has long fawned in their direction, but
in the Bank too the pace of bowing down has been stepped up.... Mark
Malloch Brown, the administrator of the United Nations Development
Programme, has gone further. He has a board of NGOs (including some
fairly radical ones) to advise him..."
While the bulk of the participants at the WSF were Brazilian (67 per
cent at WSF 2002), the largest non-Brazilian representation was of those
who had funds, or who could be sponsored by those who had funds -- not
social movements, but NGOs and parliamentary parties. Inevitably, the
bulk of the deliberations were 'constructive' in the sense that ATTAC
uses that word. The 'dialogue' with the powers that rule the world has
begun. World Bank president James Wolfensohn closed his message to the
WSF 2003 with these words: "My colleagues and I have followed the
debates of the last two World Social Forums, and we will discuss with
interest the ideas and proposals that will emerge this year... We can
work together much more closely."
Who was excluded
While NGOs and political leaders of the existing system flooded the
city's five-star hotels, there were significant absences at the WSF.
Given the charter's bar on "political parties" and
"military organisations", it was inevitable that popular
insurgencies would be barred from participation by the organisers of the
WSF. "During the first WSF, FARC [the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia, who have been carrying on a long-standing armed struggle
against the Colombian government; they are the main target of the US's
massive Plan Colombia] received a lot of sympathy from some
participants. In Brazil, relatively strong anti-US sentiments are often
reflected in solidarity attitudes towards Colombian rebels. Unofficial
moves were even afoot to recruit internationalist brigades to travel to
Colombia." However, for the second and third WSF meets, FARC
representatives were not allowed to register as participants. The
Zapatista fighters of Mexico, one of Latin America's most prominent
anti-`globalisation' movements, too were excluded, presumably because
they, like FARC, are an armed force.
The Cuban delegation too at WSF 2002 was not given an official status,
nor given a prominent role. Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, battling
intense US efforts at overthrowing his elected government, was not
invited to WSF 2003. When he turned up nevertheless, he was not accorded
space within the official Forum, despite his evident popularity among
the participants.
Equally significant is the exclusion of an unarmed organisation, the
Madres de Plaza de Mayo, an organisation of the mothers of those
'disappeared' by the Argentinian military dictatorship of 1976-83. The
MST (the Brazilian Movement of the Landless), although formally on the
Brazilian Organising Committee of the WSF, was unable to do anything
about this exclusion of the Madres -- a sign of who really calls the
shots. The MST could only send an invitation to the Madres to attend in
their personal capacity, along with an air ticket for the head of that
organisation, Hebe Bonafini. We reproduce excerpts here from her speech
at a mass rally in Buenos Aires, Argentina, after the WSF 2002:
"Comrades:
"We were in Porto Alegre on the occasion of the Second World Social
Forum (WSF). More than 50,000 participated in this weeklong event. There
were large numbers of people from all over the world, including
thousands of youth.
"There were three different levels to this WSF. First, there were
the small gatherings of those who were in charge, controlling things.
They were led by the French, mainly from an association called ATTAC,
and by others from a few other countries.
"Then there were all the commissions and seminars, where all the
intellectuals, philosophers and thinkers participated.
"And then there were the rank-and-file folks. We participated at
that level, and we discussed with all sorts of people. But the fact is
that we were brought to the WSF so we could listen -- not so the
rank-and-file could participate.
"Fidel Castro was not invited to participate and nor were the FARC.
That's a shame. Nor were the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo invited.
"I went to Porto Alegre because I was invited in a personal
capacity by the Landless Peasants Movement of Brazil, the MST. And it
was important that I was there, because I, along with a few others, was
one of the first ones to put forward our sharp criticisms of this World
Social Forum.
"We said that `Social Democracy' and `socialism' are not the same
thing. We said that the European Social Democracy had taken over and
appropriated this WSF. We said that the French organizers [i.e., ATTAC]
and their cohorts could, of course, participate in this process, but
that they should not control it.
"We said that in our view, people had flocked to this WSF to fight
and organize against globalization only to find out, when they arrived,
that the organizers had staged the event so that all we were supposed
to be talking about was `putting a human face' on globalization.
"The people I spoke to heard a different message: I told them, in
relation to Argentina, that we, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, had
taken over the Plaza de Mayo -- which is just in front of the President
Palace in Buenos Aires -- 25 years ago.
"And I said that today, taking up where we left off, hundreds of
thousands of people are assembling regularly and are bringing down the
new wave of country-selling presidents."
Democracy at the WSF
Who decides who is to be invited and who not? While the WSF makes
much of its commitment to openness and democracy, in fact its structure
is opaque and undemocratic. According to Teivainen, an International
Council member, "Formal decision-making power has been mainly in
the hands of the Organising Committee (OC), consisting of the
[PT-affiliated] Central Trade Union Confederation (CUT), the MST and six
smaller Brazilian civil society organisations". Of those six
smaller "civil society organisations", five are funded NGOs
(Brazilian Association of NGOs; ATTAC; Justice and Peace Brazilian
Committee; Global Justice Centre; and Brazilian Institute of Social and
Economic Analysis (IBASE). Teivainen points out that although CUT and
MST are much larger in terms of membership, "Some of the
participating Brazilian NGOs have better access to financial resources:
for example, IBASE, a Rio-based research institute, has been an
important fund-raiser for the WSF."
The International Council for the WSF was founded in June 2001, and
currently has 113 organisations (including the eight Brazilian OC
members), though in practice many of them do not actively participate.
As yet there is no clear division of labour and authority between the
BOC and the IC. At any rate, as Teivainen, himself one of the IC
members, states, "the WSF does not have internal procedures for
collective democratic will-formation".
Whether democratically or not, decisions are taken. The WSF structure
is, we are told, "horizontal" -- a large number of groups
interacting without any centralising force. In fact, however, some force
decides who will be invited and who not; who will be given prominence at
the plenary sessions and press meets, and who will be consigned to the
oblivion of a workshop. A "vertical" structure has scope for
communication and representation from below to the top, whereas a
pseudo-horizontal structure has scope for only top-down decisions by an
inaccessible body -- there is no scope for representation of the mass.
Naomi Klein, a writer sympathetic to the mission of the WSF, writes:
"The organizational structure of the forum was so opaque that it
was nearly impossible to figure out how decisions were made or to find
ways to question those decisions. There were no open plenaries and no
chance to vote on the structure of future events. In the absence of a
transparent process, fierce NGO brand wars were waged behind the
scenes--about whose stars would get the most airtime, who would get
access to the press and who would be seen as the true leaders of this
movement."
Hardly surprising, then, that the WSF sessions (as well as the Asian
Social Forum held in January 2003 in Hyderabad) are being confronted by
demonstrations outside their sessions. Twenty office-bearers of
Brazilian unions (including of CUT) distributed an "Open
Letter" to the WSF 2002, questioning the WSF, exposing the role of
NGOs, and asking, "Is it possible to put a human face on
globalisation and war?" Klein mentions how "the PSTU, a
breakaway faction of the Workers Party, began interrupting speeches
about the possibility of another world with loud chants of `Another
world is not possible, unless you smash capitalism and bring in
socialism!"
No less than three World Social Forums have taken place; they are only
the beginning. The World Social Forum is a "permanent
process", one that is to spread to new parts of the world -- the
next "open meeting place" is to be held in India, and
thereafter, presumably, in other uncharted lands. If one could quantify
discussion, unprecedented quantities have been generated by the first
three meets. Yet, in stark contrast to the movement to which it traces
its birth, the WSF has not yielded a single action against imperialism.
As its charter states, it is not a locus of power. However, in
entangling many genuine forces fighting imperialism in its collective
inaction, the WSF serves the purpose of imperialism.
II. WSF Mumbai 2004 and the NGO phenomenon in India
Buoyed by the success of the Porto Alegre meets, the WSF organisers
have been trying systematically to expand the Forum's influence even
further. In the course of the last year they have organised an Argentina
Social Forum meet in Buenos Aires, a European Social Forum in Florence,
a Palestine Thematic Forum in Ramallah (on "negotiated solutions
for conflicts"), an Asian Social Forum in Hyderabad, and an African
Social Forum in Addis Ababa. It is as part of this "internationalisation"
process that the WSF bodies (the Brazilian Organising Committee and the
International Council) decided to hold the next WSF gathering not in
Brazil, but in India.
The holding of the "Asian Social Forum" at Hyderabad on
January 2-7, 2003, confirmed that such an event could be successfully
held in India. Large funds were mobilised from foreign funding agencies
for this event too, including from Ford Foundation, which is, as we have
seen, one of the major funders of the WSF.
Just as in Brazil the WSF was initiated by ATTAC and PT, in India the
WSF meet is being organised by an alliance of non-governmental
organisations (NGOs) and leading cadre from certain political parties --
in the main, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Communist
Party of India, along with their mass organisations of workers,
students, peasants, and women. Certain mass organisations with close
ties to NGOs are also involved. While these are the forces taking the
initiative to organise the meet, and which are able to provide the
full-time manpower to do so, a large number of other forces and
individuals are likely to join the proceedings in one way or another,
either as organisers of discussions or simply as participants.
Large requirement of funds
The foreign funding here, as in Porto Alegre, is of two types:
first, the infrastructural funding which comes to the WSF central
bodies; secondly, the funding for various participating organisations,
which is much larger, but which is near-impossible to trace.
As for the first, the "Part Funding Policy" as adopted by the
India General Council of the WSF at its April 7-8 2003 meeting at BTR
Bhawan in Delhi, "Maximum international funds [are] to be raised
and managed by IC/BOC (International Council/Brazilian Organising
Council) as per their policy". No principle is laid down here for
what type of sources may be tapped, just as the WSF Charter is silent on
this score. Apart from this, the Part Funding Policy says that "NRI's
[and] organisations other than funding organisations and individuals may
be approached for contribution to solidarity fund." The document
"Project World Social Forum 2004" (World Social Forum
Secretariat -- Brazilian Organising Committee and Indian Organising
Committee) estimates that $2.5 million will have to be raised.
However, as mentioned above, this does not capture the full role of
funding agencies. In fact "Project World Social Forum 2004"
estimates total expenditure for the event at $29.7 million (about
Rs 135 crore), the bulk of which, $26.2 million, is the cost of the
delegates' participation (transportation, accommodation and food).
Funding agencies would bear much of this cost, since an army of NGO
functionaries and employees would be attending -- nearly all of the
country's foreign-funded NGOs would be present, as well as many from
abroad. The visits of many important personages too would be sponsored
by NGOs. However, these sums would be disbursed directly to delegates
without entering the WSF Secretariat accounts. The amount provided by
foundations/funding agencies directly to the WSF Secretariat is a small
fraction of such funds actually involved in the WSF meet (see Appendix
II for some examples of this).
The NGO sector in India
Let us turn, then, to the activities of the NGOs -- one of the two
main forces organising the WSF in India. In Appendix I, we have
discussed Ford Foundation's activities at length because of its role as
funder of the WSF, and also as a case study of foreign funding. The
broad pattern displayed by the Ford Foundation holds for the entire NGO
sector in India.
There are a number of sincere individuals working in NGOs or associated
with NGOs. Many such persons are moved by a desire to reach some
immediate assistance to needy people. Seen in specific contexts, they do
in fact reach some relief to sections of people. Without questioning the
commitment and genuineness of such individuals, our concern here is to
point to the broader political significance of the NGO
institutional phenomenon.
The 1980s and 1990s witnessed an extraordinary proliferation of
foreign-funded NGOs in India: according to the Home Ministry, by the
year 2000 nearly 20,000 organisations were registered under the Foreign
Contribution Regulation Act, though only 13,800 of them submitted their
accounts to the government as required. Total foreign funds received by
these organisations rose from Rs 3,403 crore in 1998-99 to Rs 3,925
crore in 1999-2000 to Rs 4,535 crore (about $993 million) in 2000-01.
Not a spontaneous social phenomenon
NGOs make out that they have spontaneously emerged from society,
hence the earlier term `voluntary agency' and the now-favoured term
`civil society organisation'. In fact, however, international funding
agencies (from which smaller NGOs in various countries in the third
world receive their funds) depend heavily on funds from government,
corporate and institutional sources. For example, according to the World
Bank document "Report on Development: 2000-2001", more than 70
per cent of projects approved by the World Bank in 1999 included the
participation of NGOs and representatives of "civil society"
-- a single project aimed at bolstering NGOs over seven countries cost
$900 million. The Bank assigned two of its functionaries to relations
with NGOs and representatives of "civil society"; that figure
has grown to 80 today. As for governmental support, another report puts
funds to NGOs from advanced industrial countries other than the US at
$2.3 billion in 1995; including the US, the figure would be much larger.
As one writer puts it, "These gigantic sums reveal the hoax of
presenting the rapid growth of NGOs as a `social phenomenon'."
Why do multinational corporations, the imperialist governments, and
institutions such as the World Bank and the United Nations channel such
funds to NGOs?
Indeed the extraordinary proliferation of NGOs serves imperialism in a
variety of ways.
1. NGOs, especially those working to provide various services -- health,
education, nutrition, rural development -- act as a buffer between the
State and people. Many States find it useful to maintain the trappings
of democracy even as they slash people's most basic survival
requirements from their budgets. NGOs come to the rescue by acting as
the private contractors of the State, with the benefit that the State is
absolved of all responsibilities. People cannot demand anything as a
right from the NGOs: what they get from them is `charity'.
Till the 1980s, NGO activity in India was limited to `developmental'
activities -- rural uplift, literacy, nutrition for women and children,
small loans for self-employment, public health, and so on. This
continues to be a major sphere of NGO activity -- in 2000-01, Rs 970
crore, or 21 per cent of the total foreign funds, was designated for
rural development, health and family welfare; other 'developmental'
heads would have added to this figure.
But in what context are these 'developmental' activities taking place?
In the basic context of enormous, conscious suppression of
development. Under the guidance of the IMF and World Bank,
successive Indian governments slashed their expenditure on rural
development (including expenditure on agriculture, rural development,
special areas programme, irrigation and flood control, village industry,
energy and transport; the figures are for Centre and states combined)
from 14.5 per cent of GDP in 1985-90 to 5.9 per cent in 2000-01. Rural
employment growth is now flat; per capita foodgrains consumption has
fallen dramatically to levels lower than the 1939-44 famine; the
situation is calamitous. Were expenditure by Centre and states on rural
development to have remained at the same percentage of GDP as in
1985-90, it would not have been Rs 124,000 crore in 2000-01, but Rs
305,000 crore, or more than two and a half times the actual amount.
In comparison with this giant spending gap, the sums being spent by
NGOs in India are trivial. But, by their presence, the notion is
conveyed all round that private organisations are stepping in to fill
the gap left by the State. This is doubly useful to the rulers. The
political propaganda of 'privatisation' is bolstered; and, as said
before, people are unable to demand anything as their right. In effect,
NGO activities help the State to whittle down even the existing meagre
social claims that people have on the social product.
Thus NGOs are multiplied fastest where State policies -- usually as part
of an IMF/World Bank-directed policy -- are withdrawing basic services
such as food, health care, and education. The greater the devastation
wreaked by the policy, the greater the proliferation of NGOs sponsored
to help the victims. (Indeed, before the US prepares to invade a
country, it funds and prepares leading NGOs to provide `relief' after it
has rained destruction. Thus in the second half of 2002 NGOs began
cutting their spending on, and manpower deployed in, still-devastated
Afghanistan -- as part of their preparation to join the US caravan to
Iraq.)
2. In the course of recruiting their manpower, the NGOs give employment
and a small share of the cream to certain local persons. These persons
might be locally influential persons, whose influence and operations
then benefit the NGO. Or they might be vocal and restive persons,
potential opponents of the authorities, who are in effect bought over.
In either case, NGO employment, although tiny in comparison with the
levels of unemployment in third world countries, serves as a network of
local political influence, stabilising the existing order.
3. In the field of people's movements, 'activist' or 'advocacy' NGOs
help to redirect struggles of the people for basic change from the path
of confrontation to that of negotiation, preserving the existing
political frame. The World Bank explains in its "Report on
Development" (cited above) its political reasons for
promoting NGOs. It says: "Social tensions and divisions can be
eased by bringing political opponents together within the framework of
formal and informal forums and by channeling their energies through
political processes, rather than leaving confrontation as the only form
of release." Thus ever since the early seventies Andhra Pradesh, a
state with a strong tradition of revolutionary movements, has witnessed
a massive proliferation of NGOs, and is indeed among the states
receiving the maximum foreign NGO funds today.
NGOs bureaucratise people's movements. Traditionally, people's movements
are self-reliant: they have to raise their own resources, and are led by
representatives from among the people. These representatives, to one
extent or another, thus have to be accountable to the people. By
contrast, NGO-led movements, while claiming to represent the people, are
led by officers of the NGOs, who are paid by funding agencies to carry
on activity. Naturally, they are not accountable to the people, nor can
they be removed by them; so they are also free to act without regard for
people's opinions. On the other hand, NGOs are accountable to
their funders, and cannot afford to stray beyond certain bounds. Minus
foreign and government funding, the entire NGO sector in India would
collapse in a day.
Indeed, as NGOs proliferate and spread their wings, setting up funded
adivasi organisations, dalit organisations, women's organisations,
'human rights' organisations, cultural organisations, and organisations
of unorganised labour, it is often NGOs that are the first to respond to
any political or social issue -- including 'globalisation' and its
harmful effects. Political life itself is increasingly NGOised, that is,
bureaucratised and alienated from popular presence and representation.
Ideological underpinnings
The foreign-funded NGO sector has, with remarkable uniformity,
propagated certain political concepts. The first such, as we have
mentioned in the case of Ford Foundation's projects (see Appendix I), is
the primacy of 'identity' -- gender, ethnicity, caste, nationality --
over class.
The ideological underpinnings, such as they are, of this trend are
provided by what has come to be known as 'post-modernism.' This is an
international intellectual current -- now powerful, if not dominant, in
social science academic institutions worldwide. Not its own strength as
a school of thought, but the rich stream of funds and academic positions
flowing to it, has ensured post-modernists institutional dominance
-- an echo of what Ford Foundation did in the 1950s.
Although 'post-modernism' is not really systematic thought, and so is
difficult to pin down and refute, the following is an important strand
of it, and the one that is relevant for the topic we are discussing
here. This strand argues against any worldview which attempts (however
approximately or tentatively) to comprehend all of reality in an
integrated fashion. The post-modernists argue that such a worldview
imposes its project on other realities. Instead, this strand posits that
there are any number of realities, equally valid, and that the
very tools of analysis for these realities differ.
Class analysis and post-modernism produce sharply contrasting analyses
of social phenomena, which have sharply differing implications for the
practice of social movements. Class analysis argues that, for example,
the vast majority of women have an objective, material basis to join
their movement with those of other sections (including dalits, adivasis,
workers, and so on) in a struggle against the existing social order;
that women's liberation is tied up with (though a distinct sphere of)
such a broader struggle; that male chauvinist attitudes of, say, male
workers are against all workers' own long-term interest; and that such
attitudes have to be fought by making ruling class influences the
target, not ordinary workers as such.
Post-modernism, however, considers such a view "reductionist"
(the term used in the World Social Forum Charter). Rather,
post-modernism places all struggles on par, with class as just another
social category jostling with gender, ethnicity, nationality, and so on
for attention. Post-modernism thus rules out the possibility of united
action by various social sections on the basis of common objective
interests; rather, it talks of varying coalitions/alliances of
forces, joining hands to one extent or another for specific aims.
The post-modernist approach implies that members of the same coalition
might be pitted against each other in some other respect -- for example,
male workers and women might join hands in a particular cause, but
remain antagonists on gender issues. This in turn implies that no
clear line can be drawn between the "camp of the people"
and the camp of those who are responsible for exploitation and
oppression of people. Both camps are open to all.
When male workers, who (in post-modernist eyes) are the target of
struggle by women, can be part of the World Social Forum in which
women's organisations too participate, nothing need prevent
industrialists from joining the Forum along with workers. Nothing, for
that matter, prevents a UN delegation attending the Forum, or a
prominent member of the Forum dashing off to attend the World Economic
Forum as well. All of them -- the workers and the capitalists, the
protester and the World Bank functionary -- are part of what the
post-modernists call `civil society'. (Thus the April 2002 Bhopal
declaration of WSF India clarifies that the WSF "must make
space" not only "for workers, peasants, indigenous peoples,
dalits, women, hawkers, minorities, immigrants, students, academicians,
artisans, artists and other members of the creative world,
professionals", but also for "the media, and for local
businessmen and industrialists, as well as for parliamentarians,
sympathetic bureaucrats and other concerned sections from within and
outside the state". -- emphasis added. The word
"state" is used here in the sense of the organ of established
political authority.)
The aim of class analysis is to strive for a social system worldwide
which eliminates all exploitation and oppression. Whatever the specific
and tortuous path the different contingents of humanity may have to
traverse in different countries to get there, it is a common project
of the people of the world.
Post-modernism rejects such an approach. Edward Herrman describes it
succinctly as follows:
An important element of the intellectual trend called 'postmodernism' is
the repudiation of global models of social analysis and global
solutions, and their replacement with a focus on local and group
differences and the ways in which ordinary individuals adapt to and help
reshape their environments. Its proponents often present themselves as
populists, hostile to the elitism of modernists, who, on the basis of
`essentialist' and 'totalizing' theories, suggest that ordinary people
are being manipulated and victimized on an unlevel playing field.
Emerging as a political 'alternative'
Naturally, this school of post-modernism implies that no single
political force can represent the common long-term interests of all
sections of the people in a country. Along the same lines, NGOs and
various funded intellectuals in India have since the early 1980s
advanced the notion of a "non-party political process". It is
this understanding that lies behind the World Social Forum's
hypocritical bar on the participation of political parties.
If the bar on political parties were in order to allow mass
organisations and mass movements to occupy centre stage, one could
understand the rationale. In fact it is the contrary. Political parties
actually do take part in the WSF, appearing as 'individuals' -- as can
be seen by the leading role of PT in the Brazil WSF meets and the droves
of parliamentarians who attended those gatherings. The point here is the
ideological concept that post-modernists/NGO theorists strain hard to
propagate: Namely, that any single political force aiming to represent
all sections of the people amounts to an imposition on the tapestry of
different groups or ways of being.
Indeed, for those who run the existing order, it is vital to ensure the
absence of any coherent political force which can integrate the myriad
sections in opposition against that order.
While NGOs thus oppose the concept of a single political party leading
various sections of the people, they themselves are emerging as a single
political force in their own right. They have unanimity on most issues.
Their explicitly political activities span a wide range of social
sections: they run organisations of women, adivasis, dalits, unorganised
workers, fishermen, and slumdwellers; they also run organisations for
the protection of the environment, cultural organisations, and human
rights organisations (indeed, much admirable work in providing relief to
the victims of the Gujarat massacres, and documentation of the crimes
there, has been done by NGOs).
Till now, however, NGOs by and large have not been treated as a
legitimate political force by the traditional mass organisations -- the
trade unions, peasant unions, student organisations, women's
organisations. And it continues to be the case that the mass
organisations command much greater capacity to mobilise masses of
people. Through platforms such as the World Social Forum now, NGOs are
being provided an opportunity to legitimise themselves as a political
force and expand their influence among sections to which they earlier
had little access.
CPI(M)'s earlier stand
One of the early critiques of NGO politics and practice in India was
written in 1988 by an important CPI(M) activist, now a politburo member,
Prakash Karat; it first appeared in the CPI(M)'s theoretical journal, The
Marxist. Titled Foreign Funding and the Philosophy of Voluntary
Organisations, the publication describes in some detail this
phenomenon, and gathers various data and anecdotal information on the
topic, and points to what it considers to be its dangers.
Karat stated his thesis in brief as follows:
"There is a sophisticated and comprehensive strategy worked out in
imperialist quarters to harness the forces of voluntary agencies/action
groups to their strategic design to penetrate Indian society and
influence its course of development. It is the imperialist ruling
circles which have provided through their academic outfits the political
and ideological basis for the outlook of a substantial number of these
proliferating groups in India. By providing liberal funds to these
groups, imperialism has created avenues to penetrate directly vital
sections of Indian society and simultaneously use this movement as a
vehicle to counter and disrupt the potential of the Left movement....
The CPI(M) and the Left forces have to take serious note of this arm of
imperialist penetration while focussing on the instruments and tactics
of imperialism. An ideological offensive to rebut the philosophy
propagated by these groups is urgently necessary as it tends to attract
petty bourgeois youth imbued with idealism." (pp 2-3)
Karat argued that the new seemingly 'activist' stance adopted by the
NGOs was a sophisticated imperialist strategy: "...along with the
funding for the second phase [ie of 'activism' by NGOs] came the
ideological package also. For how else can one explain the strange
spectacle of imperialist agencies and governments funding organisations
to organise the rural and urban poor to fight for their rights and
against exploitation?" (p. 8)
In the course of the critique Karat mentioned several of the same
foundations which have been funding the World Social Forum and
affiliated activities -- ICCO-Netherlands; Friedrich Ebert Foundation;
NOVIB; Ford Foundation; Canadian International Development Agency; and
Oxfam. "It would be no exaggeration to say that the whole voluntary
agencies/action groups network is maintained and nurtured by funds from
western capitalist countries. The scale of funding and the vast amounts
involved are so striking that it is surprising that this has not become
a matter of urgent public debate in this country.... This open access to
foreign funds allowed by the Government of India has become one of the
major sources of imperialist penetration financially in the
country." (p. 34)
He ended with a call for political struggle:
"The Left should treat all action groups (ie those directly
involved in mobilisation and organisation of the people) as political
entities. All those organisations receiving foreign funds are
automatically suspect and must be screened to clear their bonafides."
(p. 64)
"The widest campaign has to be built up to force the Government of
India to abandon its present posture of allowing free flow of foreign
funds on the grounds that it contributes to the foreign exchange fund.
The Foreign Contribution Regulation Act which allows such massive
penetration of imperialist funds will have to be further amended to
ensure: All voluntary organisations which claim to organise people for
whatever form of political activity should be included in the list of
organisations (just as political parties) which are prohibited for
receiving foreign funds.... Most urgent is the necessity for a sustained
ideological campaign against the eclectic and pseudo-radical postures of
action groups." (pp 64-65)
Indeed, he proudly states that "it is well known that it is the
CPI(M) cadres and activists who have been in the lead all over the
country in exposing the designs of foreign-funded voluntary work as they
are clear about its implications". (p. 60)
Sharp turnaround
Such was the official CPI(M) stand in 1988. Drastic changes appear
to have taken place since the end of the eighties. In a number of
forums, CPI(M) members and NGOs now cooperate and share costs -- for
example, at the People's Health Conference held in Kolkata in 2002, the
Asian Social Forum held in Hyderabad in January 2003, or the World
Social Forum to be held in Mumbai in January 2004. Further, CPI(M)
ideologues appear to be developing theoretical justifications for their
stand, as can be seen from the following excerpt from a Frontline
interview with Dr Thomas Isaac, CPI(M) MLA, former member of the State
Planning Board in charge of decentralisation:
"Interviewer: There is criticism against the role of NGOs too, like
the one you have floated in your constituency, as being that of 'agents
of globalisation and economic imperialism' and the seemingly anti-globalisation
struggles and programmes they are organising as being a clever strategy
to promote essentially imperialist interests.
"Isaac: There is no doubt that there is a larger imperialist
strategy to utilise the so-called voluntary sector to influence civil
society in Third World countries. But you have also got to realise that
there are also NGOs and a large number of similar civil society
organisations and formations that are essential ingredients of any
social structure. Therefore, while being vigilant about the imperialist
designs, we have to distinguish between civil society organisations that
are pro-imperialist and pro-globalisation and those that are not....
Isaac went on to blur the distinction between the Seattle-stream of
protests and the World Social Forum:
"And today the world reality, particularly after the fall of the
Soviet Union, the world revolutionary process is assuming new
organisational forms of struggle. The best exhibition of this is the
spontaneous mass protests against the WTO, the World Bank and the IMF,
their conferences and also the anti-war movements that sprung up
recently. Only those who are unaware of these divergent trends in the
world today would claim that the World Social Forum and the anti-war
movement are part of an imperialist conspiracy. They do not understand
the contemporary world revolutionary process."
In fact, quite to the contrary: the WSF is intended, among other things,
precisely to co-opt the "new organisational forms of struggle"
that arose around the Seattle protests. This is what we have tried to
show at some length above.
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