World Social Forum: Lula on the wane, Chavez on the rise as class tensions surface in Porto Alegre
8 February 2005

The fifth World Social Forum (WSF) returned to the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre. From 25 to 31 January it brought together 155,000 people for six days of discussion, debate and demonstrations on the fight against war, racism and neoliberalism. Though it was the biggest yet, its division into " self-organised spaces” meant that it was totally unfocused when it came to formulating any concrete strategy for achieving "another world".

This defocusing was a deliberate ploy by the organising committee, dominated by the Brazilian Workers Party (PT). It aimed to stifle criticism of their president, Lula, who is busy carrying out neoliberal "reforms” . But this in turn produced cracks in the right wing dominance of the movement, with most of the Attac France leaders joining more radical figures to produce an attempted " consensus" of policies for the movement as whole.

Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez stole the show, with his mass rally far outshining that of Brazil&Mac226;s Lula, who once again jetted straight off to Davos to hobnob with the World Economic Forum billionaires. The Assembly of Social Movements issued calls to action on a series of important issues including a global day of action against the occupation of Iraq on 19th March.

The forum centred on the port area. Nine thematic zones, labelled A to I, stretched along the riverfront for several miles.

A vast Youth Camp, occupying a large wooded park, had 35,000 young people camping throughout the week and holding a whole series of meetings, impromptu demonstrations, concerts and parties.

Young people participated massively in all the areas of the " official” forum. Indeed, there was no distinction between the two and no checking of tickets.

The forum&Mac226;s opening demonstration brought 200,000 people onto the streets. On the demo were large contingents of the Brazilian trade union confederation (CUT) and the Landless Workers Movement (MST). Quite a few activists throughout the demo could be seen wearing " 100% Lula” t-shirts, displaying their support for the Brazilian president who is now in his third year of office. Other contingents chanted slogans mocking Lula for caving in to the policies of the IMF, breaking promises on land reform, and attacking public sector workers&Mac226; rights.

But this was not simply a Latin American Social Forum. Trade unions and social movements from across the globe could be found on the demo, giving it a genuine international flavour. European trade unionists marched behind Indian Dalits. South East Asian peasant organisations marched behind the World March of Women. It was certainly a moving sight to see such a truly international mobilisation against neoliberal capitalism, imperialism and war.

As before, the " self-organised” spaces provided a good opportunity for networking between grassroots activists from social movements, political parties and trade unions. But the breaking up into eleven themes and the long walk between them meant that it was tempting to stay in at most two or three adjacent zones.

The large plenaries, the only meetings in which the entire movement could come together, had been abolished. Of course, they were always dominated by the " big names” of the NGOs, radical academics and journalists, and the thinly disguised representative of big reformist parties. But they did, to some extent, debate competing strategies on the way forward. This debate is what is crucial.

But politics abhors a vacuum. Into it stepped two Presidents &Mac246; Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula) of Brazil and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela &Mac246; despite the hypocritical ban on political parties. The League for the Fifth International has resolutely denounced this humbug since the Principles of Porto Alegre were adopted by a small cabal after the first World Social Forum in 2001.

Chávez star was in the ascendant in 2005. Lula, the star of the 2003 WSF, was in steep decline.

Cheers fade for Lula
On the first morning of the event, Lula spoke to a meeting of 12,000 in the Gigantinho stadium on the " Global Call to Action against Poverty” (GCAP), a campaign aimed at pressurising the G8 governments to fulfil promises they have repeatedly made and broken since the year 2000 to " eradicate poverty” .

Lula, like Gordon Brown, has signed up to this attempt to use world public opinion to pressure the G8 into making yet another promise - which will be broken just as the promises extracted by the Jubilee 2000 campaign were broken. In any case, who will send in the bailiffs to the imperialist private banks, the Federal Reserve or the Bank of England?

Nevertheless NGOs and the churches will probably " mobilise millions” of young and caring people worldwide. This cannot be ignored by the anticapitalist movement, which must give a lead and demand more than empty promises. We must demand the immediate and unconditional cancellation of the debts of the global South &Mac246; to private banks, as well as to the imperialist states. Unconditional, because no clauses mandating privatisation, opening of markets, nor even control and supervision by the NGOs must be included. Immediate, because no " negotiations” (i.e. arm twisting for trade concessions) should be allowed.

Outside the same stadium where Lula was mouthing platitudes about ending poverty, around 3,000 activists, organised by public sector trade unions and leftwing parties like P-Sol and PSTU, showed their militant opposition to his neoliberal reforms that have hit students and workers alike.

Hugo Chávez steals the show
In sharp contrast to Lula&Mac226;s performance, at the end of the forum Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez addressed 17,000 wildly cheering activists packed into the same stadium. Chávez&Mac226; audience was probably divided 50-50 between pro- and anti-Lula supporters. But all of them cheered Chávez.

The reason: he has used his country&Mac226;s oil wealth to push through healthcare and literacy programmes, making him a hero right across Latin America and enraging the United States. Lula, on the other hand, has attacked sections of workers so he can continue paying the country&Mac226;s huge debt to the World Bank.

During his 90 minute speech, Chávez savaged the United States, its war in Iraq, its exploitation of the global south and its repeated interventions in Latin American countries, including Venezuela.

He intervened directly in the debate about where the WSF should be going:
" It is time to take a step and this fifth WSF could be the beginning of a new phase, and the next five years should be accompanied by a world social agenda. To that agenda we must add a strategy of power.”

He added to enthusiastic applause, " It is difficult to work within this capitalism system - we need socialism.”

He also confirmed that Venezuela would host the next Hemispheric Social Forum in 2006, which was greeted with a roar of approval. Chávez called for a " new International” during his recent visit to Spain. Who knows, he may even be contemplating some sort of refounding of the 1964 Tricontinental Conference of his hero Che Guevara, whose name he invoked more than once in his speeches in Porto Alegre.


Cracks in the WSF " leadership”
Since its foundation in 2001, the World Social Forum had been dominated by the most openly reformist sections of the movement, having been established by Lula&Mac226;s Workers&Mac226; Party (PT) in alliance with Attac and a worldwide coalition of radical NGOs. They have consistently sought to sideline the more openly " anticapitalist” elements within the movement.

In Porto Alegre in 2005, this alliance publicly cracked apart under the strain of Lula&Mac226;s neoliberal record in government. Chico Whitaker, the PT&Mac226;s main ideologue in the social forum movement, advocates the WSF remaining only an " open space” and argues strongly against its development into a movement that could organise struggle against capitalism and war.

Nineteen academics and journalists produced what they called the Porto Alegre Consensus: a programmatic declaration they believed everyone at the social forum could agree on.

The first 19 signatories to the Manifesto include Nobel prize winning novelist José Saramago; long time development theorists like Eduardo Galeano, Samir Amin and Immanuel Wallerstein; key writers from Le Monde Diplomatique like François Houtart, Ignacio Ramonet, and Bernard Cassen; and anti-war and anti-capitalist writers/activists like Tariq Ali and Walden Bello.

That Bello and Ali are impatient with the paralysis of the WSF is no surprise, but when Cassen abandons the defence of empty " space” we can see that something is wrong. In all probability it was their influence that kept the document so anodyne - but they obviously fear being discredited by the Lula presidency and leaving the field open to the more radical elements, like Chávez or the militants of the Assembly of the Social Movements.

The declaration - as might be expected - includes a series of mild reforms, such as cancelling the state debt of the countries of the South, adopting the Tobin Tax, food sovereignty, fair trade, etc.

Not a word about how these reforms can be realised. No strategy for power, to use Chavez&Mac226; own words. But the most staggering omission is the failure to even mention the Iraq occupation, the US threats against Iran, Venezuela, North Korea or Cuba. Even more remarkable: no mention of the Palestinian struggle.


A call to action
The World Assembly of the Social Movements met on the last morning in Porto Alegre and issued a call for an international anti-war day of action on 19th March.

After sharp criticism of the WSF from delegates of the Iraqi National Resistance, the Assembly came closer to explicit support for the anti-imperialist struggle against the Anglo-American occupation. It also demanded the evacuation of illegal settlements on Palestinian land and the pulling down of the Apartheid Wall.

The Assembly supported the anti-G8 mobilisations in Scotland in July, but under the more radical slogan of an immediate and unconditional cancellation and repudiation of the entire debt of the global south. It likewise supported a number of key campaigns by women and indigenous peoples. Unfortunately the text of the Call was only read out and the translation of it has yet to appear. Future issues of the FifthInternational.Org Global Newswire will record and analyse its calls to action.

The World Social Forum was thus marked by increasing polarisation and division &Mac246; even if this was probably far from clear to many of its participants, because of the lack of a mass debate over these differences.

The spectre of the WSF giving birth to an anti-imperialist International, with agreed policies and co-ordinated action, was invoked by Chavez and others. Bernard Cassen, Walden Bello and Co, cautiously hint at recreating reformist or third world nationalist " internationals” . The old Stalinist parties are linking up too. The fragments of the Fourth International were well represented in the Assembly of Social Movements.

There is a revolutionary alternative to all attempts to revive these dead Internationals. It is to transform the new mass internationalism and anti-imperialism into a new world party of socialist revolution. In Porto Alegre we made the call for a Fifth International wherever we had the opportunity and we found that it met with a warm response from rank and file activists and provoked serious discussion.

For an archive of all articles on the ESF since Florence 2002 see here>>

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