During early January the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in Brazil met at the same time as the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The former was counterposed too the latter. The WEF met to celebrate globalisation, the WSF to condemn it.
At Porto Alegre there were 4,702 delegates from 117 countries, 165 special guests, 2,000 youth and 700 indigenous people camped in the city parks, 764 media outlets represented by 1,870 journalists. Around 20,000 marched through the main streets of the city to open the event. There were more than 400 workshops.
The grand plenary sessions were graced by politicians from reformist parties of the Latin American left and centre-left, writers, academics, economists, parliamentarians—even "social entrepreneurs", and government ministers from France.
VIPs included the 1950s and 60s Algerian independence leader Ahmed Ben Bella. Danielle Mitterrand-wife of the former president— from the highly respectable human rights movement Also much in evidence were Latin American opposition politicians like Cuathemoc Cárdenas, Luis and Ignacio Da Silva (Lula), representatives of the Colombian FARC, and Hebe de Bonafini, president of the Argentinian Madres de Plaza de Mayo.
The organisation of the WSF was undertaken by the state of Río Grande del Sur and the municipality of Porto Alegre, both ruled by the Brasilian Workers Party (PT). From the European end the conference was sponsored by Attac and Bernard Cassen, director of Le Monde Diplomatique He summed up the respectable reformist outlook of the organisers
"We are here to discuss ideas. Then we have to seek forms of translating them into struggles. In some years we will be ready to propose measures" adding disdainfully that he was not "interested in polarisations between right and left which have lost their meaning"
Ignacio Ramonet in an article on Porto Alegre in Le Monde Diplomatique, January 2001, put forward the same view. The purpose of the WSF was not to protest "as in Seattle, Washington or Prague ... but to try, this time with a constructive spirit, to propose a theoretical framework and practice that allows us to advocate a new globalisation and affirm that a new world is possible, less inhuman and more solidarity-based."
Debate here centred on the cancellation (total or partial, conditional or unconditional) of the Third World debt, the imposition of the Tobin tax on international financial transactions, "fair trade not free trade", the "ecological debt" which the rich countries should pay to "reduce inequality" and the democratic-popular experience of the "participatory budget" introduced by the PT in Porto Alegre
A report from Naomi Klein in The Nation indicated that there was some dissatisfaction with the French reformist intellectuals trying constantly to push their "constructive plans" and insisting utopian programmes to reform the world economic system came before militant action to defeat the assaults of the corporate globalisers.
With such sponsors it is not surprising that events in the main conference venue were dominated by the VIPs and representatives of the NGOs, Attac, politicians from the PT and other Sao Paulo Forum. Parties. Government ministers from the French Socialist Party, such as Jean-Pierre Chevenement and Francois Huwart, however came in for criticism—even from the NGO bigwigs.
Clearly "official" Porto Alegre was a grand attempt to revive reformism in its social democratic or third world bourgeois nationalist forms—the bankrupt UNCTAD "development" policies of the 1970s should be the object of open, honest and hard hitting criticism by revolutionary anticapitalist forces. Instead the closet revolutionaries of the USFI—who had a big presence at Porto Alegre— confined themselves to the most oblique and diplomatic criticism of only the more outrageous defenders of capitalism.
The struggle to build a militant mass international movement against capitalism and imperialism is absolutely inseperable from the sharpest criticism of these NGO and Sao Paulo Forum reform policies, whose aim—a pretty naked one at that— is to "humanise" global capitalism not overthrow and replace it.
Even the forces which organised a direct action in Porto Alegre—the occupation and destruction of genetically modified crops—Via Campesina, headed by Brazilian Sem Tera leader Egidio Brunetto, Honduran peasant leader Rafael Alegría and the French Confédération paysanne leader José Bové have a thoroughly reformist programme, albeit one couched in utopian language and tied to direct action of a more militant character than Cassen and Ramonet are willing to call for.
Their programme is centred on the vapid humanist (and factually inaccurate) slogans "Agriculture is not a business" and that "food should not be treated as a commodity, but as a human right". How this can be done without the expropriation of the plantations of agribusinneses and the ranches of the latifundists, without the seizure of the technological and scientific resources from the big corporations, without the cooperativisation of peasant agriculture they do no say.
Even within the main forums whilst most were on the right a few were more radical than the others. Eric Toussaint, president of the Committee for the Cancellation of the Third World Debt (COCAD), and Walden Bello criticised Lula and the PT and the Brazilian economist Luciano Coutinho, for calling for an "audit" rather than a cancellation of the debt.
In the workshops the forces were more populist and less bourgeois but none the less still reformist. In the official workshops according to IV, "discussion centred on concrete and immediate demands" and .social activists, trades unionists and rank and file militants were predominant. In the USFI’s journal International Viewpoint’s inimitable language — "the desire and concern to sketch out possible alternatives supplanted the grand narratives"—or translated into ordinary language "reform supplanted out revolution".
Likewise there was a verbally camouflaged debate between the advocates of "extra-institutional resistance", "radical civil disobedience" or "popular power" or a "pragmatic and realistic" strategy of "the deepening of democracy" and "participation". The liberal terms "civil society" and "civic movement were ubiquitous in the plenaries and official forums—the terms "people" and "class" were more common in the workshops, But they were the dominant terms dominant in the camps.
It was to the camps that one had to turn to find any sort of radicalism and subjective anti-capitalism. There, according to International Viewpoint amongst the landless peasants, rank and file trade unionists the indigenous peoples and youth, "the mood was one of rebellion and barricades" and the discussion centred on using ."all methods of struggle" and "moving on to action" A mood which IV sniffily describes as having "a utopian air".
Not surprisingly since FI member Christophe Aguiton (wearing his Attac hat) was one of the main organisers and spokesmen of the main event. Likewise the USFI is the main originator wholesaler of limp and vacuous slogans such as the main theme of the conference "another world is possible" . The role of cheerleaders and organisers for reformist bigwigs is an ignoble one for people who —obviously falsely— lay claim to the mantle of Len Trotsky.
The argument that we have to help "the movement" to advance by allowing these VIPs unchallenged leadership "for a period" is a totally false one. No one should, of course oppose the presence of the leaders of mass organisation of the workers and peasants, especially when their presence is a result of the pressure from their rank and file. But this does not mean covering up criticism of their organisations strategic weaknesses nor their leaders blunders and betrayals. This course of action will only aid them to refurbish reformism for the twenty first century.
The organisers of Porto Alegre praise diversity and freedom of views-in the abstract at least. Why should revolutionaries censor themselves? Another politics is possible — from the outset. Revolutionary politics that pose clearly "the property question" and the question of the state.
An anticapitalism which does not pose clearly the need to expropriate all the big corporations an their medium sized capitalist dependent companies, all the banks and finance houses, it not worthy of the name.
An anticapitalism is not worthy of the name which does not address the question of the capitalist and imperialist state— that does not make clear that this monstrous engine of repression–of the rule of the corporations— must be SMASHED.
The only "other world" which is a real alternative to the present one of hunger, disease and oppression is one where the immense material and human resources that exist today can be democratically planed and mobilised to end poverty and oppression. This "other world" must can only be based on the power of the working masses. organised in councils of elected and recallable delegates with no permanent caste of bureaucrats
In short an anti-capitalism that dares not utter the "S word— "SOCIALISM or the "R word"— REVOLUTION is a gigantic fraud. A movement based on such fraud will shiver into a thousand pieces at the first test.
Porto Alegre’s positive side was that it provided and assembly point for militants of some of the sections of the anticapitalist movement. But only in the "peripheral" camps was there any echo of the militant struggles against the austerity policies of the IMF in Latin America over the last four years. The militant denunciation of the reformist main forum was embodied in the declaration of various Latin Amercian youth group at the camp. They said:
" Now, here,in Porto Alegre , at the World Social Forum, the NGO's, the union bureacracies, and the directors of the institutionalized political parties change the content of the struggle of the young anticapitalists to the reactionary policy of "humanizing capital". Humanizing capitalism with the French ministers that persecute immigrants, who form a government that, together with NATO, bombed Yugoslavia, killing thousands of people and repressed the anti-capitalists in Nice. Humanizing capitalism together with the bankers and the multinationals. Humanizing capitalism together with the governments who, like the PT [Worker's Party], continue paying the foreign debt, repressed the strike of the professors of Rio Grande do Sul and the occupation of a federal building in Porto Alegre, and continue repressing the street merchants and the homeless on their squatted land. Governments that continue to make payments to the multinationals.
Humanizing capitalism is utopian and reactionary. Thus, we, anti-capitalist youth from the Youth Camp, form a part of the anti-capitalist movement and stand in solidarity with the youth denouncing the World Economic Forum in Davos.
We say: The World Social Forum is a ruse of those who wish to detour the anti-capitalist fight towards the policy of class collaboration and elections, continuing to apply the misery of capitalism.
Thus we continue our efforts in the construction of a national anti-capitalist network under the slogans of : "Down with the World Economic Forum, IMF World Bank and WTO"; to which the World Social Forum is not an alternative,"down with the plan Colombia!", "Long live the Palestinean Intifada", "No to the payment of the domestic and foreign debts!", "No to Privatizations!" Capitalism kills, we will kill capitalism. It is up to the anti-capitalist youth, the workers, and the poor people, loyal to the spirit of Seattle, Nice, Prague and Davos to impede the distortion of the anti-capitalist intervention and its usage by its enemies."
Clearly an event of the scale of Porto Alegre — held in the "global south"— presents enormous opportunities for networking, for assembling militants from the semicolonial countries an the imperialist heartlands, But what is desperately needed is an organised and militant revolutionary alternative to "official" Porto Alegre and its "revolutionary" apologists.
The LRCI will approach militant class struggle forces—as well as organisations that consider themselves to be revolutionary to combine their forces next year to ensure that this happens.
