Some thoughts on the European Social Forum and the way forward now in the "new anti-capitalist agitation". By Martin Thomas. Click here to download as pdf file.
I went to the European Social forum, in Florence on 7-10 November 2002, on a coach organised by No Sweat, a group which campaigns against sweatshop labour conditions both internationally and within Britain.
On the cross-channel ferry coming back from Italy, we held a short impromptu meeting on what we made of it and where to go now. It was a very tiny cross-section of the 60,000 people attending the Forum. One thing struck me immediately as we talked: the Forum itself had had much less of the debate and exchange between different anti-"neoliberal" viewpoints that we had here in this small meeting.
Talking to people at and after the Forum, I found that most had attended very few of the many hundreds of formal sessions. Overwhelmed by the vast welter of events, they had spent more time joining the swirl of humanity at the Forum's main sites, dropping in and out of sessions, picking up the atmosphere. Few formal sessions - none that I heard of - had any structured, systematic debate.
Our little meeting started off with a young man complaining that the Forum's "non-party" stance had been insufficiently enforced. He had been dismayed on arrival at the Forum's main site to find people selling Socialist Worker outside, just like back home in Huddersfield. He was happy to have gone to the Forum, but, more generally, he had found just "too much information" there, presented in too scattershot a way, to take in.
Others replied that the "non-party" stance was a fake. In fact, the main shaping influence in the Forum had been Rifondazione (the Party of Communist Refoundation: it originated from the left wing of the old mass Italian Communist Party when it broke up after the collapse of the USSR, but now contains a lot more activists from non-CP backgrounds, including Trotskyists, than old CPers). "Non-party" cannot abolish party influences, but only keep them behind the scenes. Better that the parties' contention be upfront, where they can be openly disputed and assessed.
A number of people wanted us to make sure that we, coming as we did from very diverse groups, kept in touch after we returned to Britain. Some middle-aged women proposed that we could meet up again at one or another environmentalist gathering, preferably in the open air, in "mud and rain", which would heighten togetherness. The younger people did not want that. When an assembly organised by "Earth First" was mentioned, the young woman next to me muttered: "What about humanity first?"
Gatherings are good, others said, but they have to draw on ongoing activism. The fuel of the Forum in Italy had been activism - trade union struggles, agitation against the planned US war on Iraq. We should develop such activism in Britain. We mentioned anti-war agitation and a conference called by No Sweat for a couple of weeks after the Forum, focused on such issues as building international links with the Mexican workers who have successfully established a trade union at the Kukdong/Mexmode factory, subcontractors for Nike and Reebok, and working with British unions to inform sweatshop workers in East London about their legal rights.
One of us, an art student who (so he had explained to me on the coach) had got into politics by way of studying situationism in his college course, then branching out to read Negri, and now a bit of Marx, was sceptical about the trade unions. The trade unions are conservative, he said, and tied to the Blair government. They will never do anything radical. Another person, from the older generation, had a different objection. She would find it difficult, though maybe not impossible, to work with people involved in production she found ethically unacceptable, like building new cars. Others of us were in favour of working in and with the trade unions, especially with the rank and file.
Soon we were docking in Dover. We decided to keep in touch by email. For me, the meeting had brought back memories of another political epoch - the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament of the 1960s. That had something of the same kaleidoscope of political colours, mobilised together by a common opposition to the ruling infamy of the day.
CND, however, was a movement - a more or less common structure, with recognised common goals, demonstrations, activities. The "anti-neoliberal" or "anti-capitalist" movement assembled at the Forum is not a single movement in anything like the same sense. Back-to-nature greenies, liberal NGOs, and militant Marxists will, like it or not, mostly go their own ways after the Forum, criss-crossing again to be sure, but not converging into a single movement.
I am writing this article in Brisbane, Australia. Here much more has been done to organise the new anti-capitalist mood into a "movement". The Brisbane Social Forum held a gathering in March this year of 400 people (huge for here), has a committee which still meets, and is planning another large Forum next year. Yet it remains a get-together point, rather than an organising centre for anti-war, refugee-rights, environmental or trade-union agitation.
The mood is significant without being a movement - an entry point to radical politics for many young people. To sneer would be as stupid as it was in the 1960s to stand aloof from the "middle-class, pacifist" CND. The job is really to build a movement, or movements, from the mood.
The main centre of the Forum was an old military base, the Fortezza, with meeting halls spread across its large area. At any given time there were half a dozen large "conferences" running, with a thousand or two thousand people in each, 20-odd middle-sized "seminars" (up to two hundred strong), and dozens of smaller "workshops". Translation facilities ranged from excellent to nil. There were two main sites outside the Fortezza for conferences and seminars, and the workshops were spread across Florence and the surrounding villages, sometimes a long bus journey away.
To get an overview of the discussions was physically impossible, and I doubt that anyone tried. Talking to other people at the Forum, I found that almost all of them had not even attempted to follow any large number of sessions, and had settled for just soaking up the atmosphere.
Mind you, they thought that atmosphere worth coming to Florence for. The 60,000 were mostly young and mostly Italian; on a rough sample count they included as many young women as young men; posters, leaflets, banners, placards everywhere proclaimed enthusiastic, generous identification with people's struggles everywhere against entrenched power. The Fortezza was constantly swarming with people looking for meetings (to find where they were was not always easy!), searching for food, holding impromptu extra meetings or demonstrations of one sort or another...
For those who came from Britain, the highlight was the anti-war march on the Saturday. Contingents started to move off at 11am, four hours before the scheduled start of the march. The crowd was far too big to fit into the scheduled finishing area, so we stopped short, and marchers filled the streets for miles around.
There were large contingents from the most militant of Italy's big trade union federations, CGIL, and hundreds of thousands of young people. At the head of the demonstration, a contingent of Fiat car workers, engaged in strikes against 8000 planned job cuts. Songs - Bandiera Rossa, the Internationale, Bella ciao - dominated the demonstration, rather than chants. Banners and placards denounced the Berlusconi government and its attacks on workers' rights. Many demonstrators carried Palestinian flags and wore keffiyehs to show solidarity with the Palestinians, but I saw none of the sour, calculating "hate Israel" agitation common on the British left.
Despite the cautious moderation of the Forum's official slogans - "against neo-liberalism, war and racism" - and the political diversity of the people there, no-one felt the need to demur visibly or audibly from the dominant political tone of the demonstration, set by the red flags, banners and insignia of Rifondazione.
The younger, at least, of the people in the new anti-capitalist milieu feel a kinship with the idioms and ideals of working-class struggle, common ownership and solidarity, even if they hesitate to label themselves "socialist" or "communist". I was reminded of France in the 1990s, when tens of thousands of school students would proclaim their hostility to "parties", including those of the revolutionary left, yet sing the Internationale with enthusiasm.
Another example. Many of the younger people who came to the Forum were sleeping in a sports centre. On the bus back from the Fortezza to that sports centre one evening, someone shouted, in English, "The workers united will never be defeated!" The chant was quickly taken up in Spanish, Italian and German, and the busload ended up singing the Internationale in English and French.
The main building at the Fortezza had two floors of political stalls, almost all from campaign groups rather than parties. Sitting on the Workers' Liberty stall, I had Women in Black on one side, a Kurdish solidarity group on the other, Peace Brigades International opposite us, and a campaign against sanctions on Iraq next to them. Political debate was not very upfront.
One "conference" I attended, on "social and state economy", illustrated that too. So far as I can tell it was not untypical. If the Forum's aim was, as the official slogan said, to show that "another Europe is possible" than that of "neo-liberalism, war and racism", then the "conference" on social economy looked as if it should be a pivot of debate on how Europe could be "other" than "neo-liberal".
But it was a debate that wasn't a debate. The long introduction from the chair, Giorgio Dal Fiume, his interpolations between speeches, and most of those speeches, focused on building a "social economy" alongside the private business and state sectors.
Felice Scalvini, president of a European federation of cooperatives, thought that cooperatives could influence the conduct of private big business if they chose their tactics right. Carola Reintjes from Spain explained that her dream was an alternative supermarket chain across Europe, selling social-economy products.
Michael Albert from the USA expounded his model of participatory economics, which excludes all central planning but has been put into practice in a small publishing firm, South End Press. Giorgio Dal Fiume himself thought it necessary to stress that in advocating the social economy he was not proposing privatisation of services currently run by the state.
Then, at the end - after the late hour, and the lack of heating in the hall, had reduced the audience to a few hundred - the last speaker was called. It was Yannis Milios, a Marxist economist from Athens.
Briefly and coolly, he argued that an economy regulated by money can not but be capitalist. Those with more money buy the labour power of those with less, and use the transaction to make more money by way of exploitation.
No persuasion, no good example, can make the money-owners guide their business affairs other than for profit. There is no way out without a fundamental political change through which the working people can collectively take over the productive wealth of society.
Milios got warm applause from the audience; but the short discussion that followed, round written questions from the audience, suggested that his arguments had gone way over the heads of the other platform speakers.
The Forum gave me an encouraging, exciting sense of a new political generation emerging. But the formal arrangements of the Forum seemed old-fashioned. The typical scene of those formal arrangements was a meeting hall; rows of chairs; a table at the front; the audience addressed by speakers much older, much more likely to be male, and probably more prosperous and settled than themselves; then a quick chance for "questions" at the end. (Also, a disproportionate majority of the speakers were white. But that was true of the people attending the Forum too).
I did not attend the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, but at a socialist conference in Sydney, Australia, this Easter, I listened to four people who did. Two were from Europe or North America, two from the ex-colonial world. The leftists from the North offered warm, avuncular words about the Forum representing a wholesome process within which the left should not be too pushy. The Third World speakers were altogether less bland. A comrade from Aceh recounted how he had unexpectedly got finance to go to Porto Alegre, hoped to meet revolutionaries from Indonesia there, and been disappointed that instead he mostly found NGO people; a comrade from India explained how the "non-party" rule of the Forum had actually been a cloak for domination by the PT, the Workers' Party of Brazil. Neither of them wanted to dismiss the Forum as worthless; but neither was as reverential as the speakers from the richer countries.
A whole Social Forum "process" is indeed under way. There is to be another European Social Forum in Paris in October-November 2003; an African Social Forum and an Asian Social Forum, both in early January 2003; a pan-Amazon Social Forum in mid-January; the next World Social Forum at the end of January 2003; and many other more local Forums. Reverence; eager behind-the-scenes scurrying to secure key positions in the various organising committees; and efforts to establish a distinctive profile by rather abstract bluster about "revolution" - those have been the three approaches, often combined in different ways, most used by organised socialists to relate to this "process". None seems quite to meet the case.
For now, probably the nearest thing the new mood has to a unified movement tying it together in activity is mobilisation against the USA's planned war on Iraq. Shortly before going to the Forum, I attended a left-wing conference on globalisation, in Brighton, where Alex Callinicos of the SWP argued that the "anti-capitalist movement" now faces a political sorting-out, its best elements being separated out from the dross by extending their anti-capitalism into anti-imperialism.
I suppose there may be a smidgeon of truth to this for the USA. In Europe, and, I would guess, worldwide, it is false. Practically everyone who identifies with the "new anti-capitalism" also opposes the planned war. And to tell them that "anti-imperialism" is the higher wisdom to which they should graduate from the kindergarten of "anti-capitalism" is radically false.
In somewhat the same way, maybe, as Russian rebels of the late 19th century wanted not to dally or digress, but to knock out with a single blow what they saw as the keystone of the oppressive order, the Tsar, so also the "new anti-capitalists" have wanted to go straight for the "Tsars" of the current world order, the WTO, the IMF, the G8. That they also call themselves "anti-capitalist" or "anti-corporate" or "global justice" activists points to a broader view, to be developed by analysing the internal contradictions of capitalism or "corporate power".
As Rosa Luxemburg put it: "Where the chains of capitalism are forged, there they must be broken... The socialisation of society can be achieved only through tenacious, tireless struggle by the working mass along its entire front, on all points where labour and capital, people and bourgeois class rule, can see the whites of one another's eyes". To judge by the titles of workshops, seminars and conference, the discussions at the Forum had mostly not yet moved along to such ideas: the concepts "class" or "worker" occurred very seldom. That can change. But to point new activists towards a nebulously defined "imperialism" (often, only a Marxist-jargon way of denoting the US government and its closest allies) as the true ailment behind the symptom "capitalism" is to turn them away from investigating the inner workings of the system and into vague populist coalitions against the supposed "Tsar".
Class criteria - whether the anti-capitalist and anti-war enthusiasm of the new radicals leads them to get involved in the vital, but lengthy, work of involvement in grassroots working-class and trade-union organising - remain central.