Britain: chance to launch social forums is lost - for now
Workers Power Global, London: 26 May 2002

The anti-capitalist movement has held some pretty impressive events recently. The second World Social Forum took place in Porto Alegre, Brazil in January. Some 80,000 people participated and the appeal which emerged from the main conference marked a shift to the left. It explicitly linked the imperialist aggression of the United States with racism, poverty and globalisation and cited them as the major threats to humanity.

It was followed by huge mobilisations in Barcelona, Munich, Washington, Madrid and Berlin involving hundreds of thousands of activists and drawing in major trade unions and social democratic parties. The anti-EU protests in Seville in June will mark a further step forward as it will be accompanied by a general strike.

And with the European Social Forum in Florence, Italy in November to plan for, you'd think it was a good time to hold an anti-capitalist conference. Yet Globalise Resistance (GR), the organisation set up by the Socialist Workers Party last year to intervene into the movement, held a disappointing conference in London on 20 May.

GR is one of the SWP's "new" united fronts. The SWP claim several thousand members and have rightly argued the anti-capitalist movement is a tremendously progressive phenomenon . Indeed, the SWP expelled its US section from its international tendency last year for allegedly "failing" to make a turn to the new movement.

Given resources and driven forward by the SWP, GR got off to a great start. Around 1,500 attended its founding event and dozens of lively local groups mushroomed in the build-up to the Genoa anti-G8 protest in July 2001.

Yet the second conference this month was poorly attended, with some 250 participants of whom just 100 or so were paid-up voting members. Its website www.resist.org.uk claims just a dozen active branches - and even this figure is stretching it since at least a couple of these were set up only in the last week or two.

So why did the conference not take GR forward? Certainly, the price of the event was a factor - at £10 to get in and a further £20 if you wanted to join and be entitled to vote, many activists would have been put off coming. But the main reason is that GR remains a deeply flawed project. Confused in its purpose and artificially delimited in its politics, it is a top-down organisation (anathema to the anti-capitalist movement), centralised to the point of stifling local initiative and strangled by the dead hand of bureaucratism.

This is not to say that GR does nothing right - far from it. The attempt to stop war criminal Henry Kissinger speaking in London in May drew in a number of human rights and exile community groups. The United for May Day march was the biggest in London for 50 years and the most significant linking-up of the trade union and anti-capitalist movements Britain has seen to date.

The conference showed another side of GR that is commendable: its ability to give a platform to good speakers with interesting ideas. Leila Khaled, the veteran Palestinian freedom fighter, gave an impassioned defence of revolutionary violence. Tariq Ali, from Stop the War, in an insightful speech focusing on the world's flashpoints, focused on the need for leadership, noting that even in Argentina the popular assemblies, important as they are, had so far failed to provide an alternative solution to the bosses' crisis.

Unfortunately, the SWP failed to build on these speakers' contributions. They effectively boycotted their own politics for fear of frightening off their allies. This was most clear in a workshop on the trade unions. Billy Hayes, General Secretary of the postal workers' union, the CWU, addressed the workshop but it wasn't until the last speaker - a Workers Power supporter - was taken from the floor that he had to field a single hostile question concerning undemocratic union structures and the lack of strike action at a time when the post is facing 40,000 job cuts, 3,000 branch closures and privatisation.

But it was the debate on the need to build social forums in Britain that really exposed the SWP's refusal to learn and adopt new methods of organisation. Workers Power supporters and a group of activists based in London proposed to the conference that GR should support the building of social forums on the Italian model.

By drawing in local trade union branches, tenants' associations, student groups, anti-racist and immigrant organisations, environmentalists, anti-war activists and so on into social forums, we argued that the divisions between the different strands of the movement could be broken down through open-ended discussion and joint action.

This way, not only could we maximise the involvement of those fighting different aspects of globalisation, we could also politicise them and increase their effectiveness. Led by Chris Nineham and Chris Bambery, the SWP insisted that the time was not right to build such forums, that it would be "imposing" a structure on the movement from above, that such bodies had to be thrown up by each national movement in the course of its natural development.

These arguments are completely false but indicative of the SWP's chronic tailism. The class struggle in Britain is precisely characterised by fragmented campaigns - Stop the War, the Anti-Nazi League, the electoralist Socialist Alliance, the Campaign to Defend Asylum Seekers, the sectional trade unions, anti-privatisation campaigns. Many involve the same people even.

What we need, in every city, town and district are forums where all these campaigns can come together to discuss the issues that effect us all and plan solidarity actions. That such forums don't exist as yet is by no means the same thing as saying that they cannot be built by activists consciously agitating for them or that they would not have enough to do if they did exist.

Of course they can't be artificially declared and "imposed" on an already existing movement - though it's a bit rich for the SWP to counsel against such behaviour when GR itself was declared the umbrella group for the anti-capitalist movement without so much as a word of consultation with those of us who had been developing the movement for some years before Seattle!

As for importing methods of organisation and tactics from abroad, how else did the anti-capitalist movement develop? How did European activists come to mount massive blockades of the global capitalists' conferences if it wasn't through slogans like "Turn Prague into Seattle"?

Instead the SWP argued for the project of building for a mass delegation to the European Social Forum in Florence in November, after which we can re-look at building social forums in Britain.

Fine. Let's do that. But if GR is to play a role in broadening and deepening the fight against global capitalism it should build for it by finding allies, launching real campaigns on the streets, in the workplaces, colleges and detention centres, debating ideas with a view to developing solidarity.

On the other hand, if it continues down the path of simply hopping from one grand event to the next, these will not be staging posts on the road to a new, unified movement but rallying points for an ever-diminishing number of activists.

Workers Power will be using the coming weeks and months to persuade the comrades of the SWP - by word and by deed, individually and collectively - that revolutionaries have nothing to fear from bringing activists from different campaigns together in broad, action-based forums. On the contrary, such a project can only strengthen all the individual battlefronts, can only increase the influence of revolutionary leadership.

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