The third European Social Forum will take place in London between 14 and 17 October. It could be an enormously important, even historic event, with tens of thousands of international activists attending. But it is also part of a process, a living part of the history of the anticapitalist movement. But a crisis of leadership is gripping the movement.
The anticapitalist movement is suffering from a tremendous problem: it does not know where it is going. To make matters worse many of the most influential people who organise its gatherings and demonstrations hardly see this as a problem. In fact this represents what revolutionary Marxists call a crisis of leadership. It is directly related to the leadership crisis within the working class movement, the antiwar movement and all the movements of the oppressed.
This crisis is demonstrated in Brazil today. Lula came to power thanks to a mass workers party, the PT, and supported by the trade unions, the organisations of the unemployed and the landless peasants. But now he is doing the work of the IMF, ruling together with the liberal bourgeoisie and attacking the pensions and social rights of the working class which elected him.
This crisis can be seen in the anti-war movement, whose potential to stop the war from taking place was squandered by the trade union and reformist leaders who used their influence to make the 15 February not a staring point to stop the war, but rather its end-point.
This crisis of leadership can be seen in the resistance to the co-ordinated onslaught by the European bosses on workers’ social gains – healthcare, education, pensions. Last year huge strike waves which could have smashed this attack were reined in by the same union leaders, who continue to support the social democratic and Labour parties that are conducting these attacks.
It is not true, as many claim, that the anticapitalist movement has no leadership. It simply does not have a recognised, democratically chosen and accountable one. In fact different forces have led it during the various stages of its development. The leadership has changed as the movement has developed. The Zapatistas and the solidarity movements that arose in the West were an important early inspiration. They acted as midwives of what was to become anticapitalism.
People’s Global Action, an environmental initiative that turned towards anarchism, called a series of global days of action. In Britain, its major affiliate was Reclaim the Streets, while in Italy, the white overalls of Ya Basta! brought the PGA into public consciousness. The hugely successful actions held on 18 June 1999 brought financial districts across the world to a standstill. This phase of the movement- the summit sieges – would reach its zenith at Genoa in June 2001.
The question of capitalism, in its new aggressive, neoliberal, globalisation phase, was now on the mainstream political agenda. The struggles of workers and poor against its offensive was shifting and challenging the traditional forms of political representation. New forces were rapidly turning towards a movement reacting to these changing political landscapes.
In Genoa we saw Attac (a lobby group founded by the intellectual mandarins of Le Monde Diplomatique campaigning for a 0.01% tax on financial speculation), Rifondazione Comunista (a mass Italian former Stalinist party), the SWP (Britain’s largest far left organisation), radical NGOs working in the global south, campaigns against Third World Debt (notably Jubilee 2000), not to mention a whole series of European trade unions and others besides.
Inevitably, most brought with them their pre-existing reformist prejudices and programmes. This left the anarchists, radical ecologists and populists in a quandary. How could the movement maintain its radicalism?
Their own prejudices – their utopian local “solutions”, their anti-hierarchical organising fetishes (affinity groups, consensus models), their tactics (non-violent direct action or symbolic trashing) – did not provide a political answer to reformism.
Instead of welcoming the participation of the mass organisations of the working class, that have the potential to mobilise millions into decisive action against the system, the anarchists withdrew in a sectarian huff.
Ideologically we have seen a similar move from left to right. At first the movement was very radical but with a post-modern aversion to “the grand narratives” of Marxism, communism, social democracy. Under the influence of the Zapatistas, the PGA claimed it was a movement of “many yesses but one no”. Nor did the PGA want to bring any political unity to this. After all politics is about struggling for power.
The Zapatistas wanted to “empower” the diverse “people” and thus “disempower” the centralised capitalist state: but without smashing it or replacing it with a radically different form of state. They showed the typical anarchist fear of authority, believing that it cannot be made accountable.
But politics, like nature abhors a vacuum. The reformists disguising themselves as social movements, simply occupied the vacated space. They took over the movement in 2001-2002, by focussing it on huge global and continental Social Forums. Attac is a prime example: most of its leaders come from the French Socialist and Communist parties. In Brazil the PT similarly advanced its social front, the Brazilian NGOs, plus the non-political mass movements it led (the MST and the CUT). In Italy Rifondazione Comunista performed a similar trick.
The famous Principles of Porto Alegre, which banned the participation of political parties and the making of decisions by the Social Forums were imposed on the movement. Of course there was no mass discussion, no democratic agreement to adopt them. The reformists and NGOs supported them because it protected them against criticism from more militant ideas and organisations. The autonomists and horizontals were delighted since it seemed to ban politics and leadership. Until the penny dropped that it was all simply a façade.
This political “neutrality” as to what goals the movement should adopt was a great weakness, if what you wanted was worldwide co-ordinated action against capitalism, imperialism and war.
In fact the crying need to go beyond mobilising against this or that gathering of the globalisers, or assembling for pseudo-academic talkfests, made itself felt more and more with every passing year. 60,000 activists came to Florence not just to discuss what common actions to take in the year ahead, not even how to slow down the advance of global capitalism, but also in order to discuss what should replace it, how to replace it, and who could replace it. In short these vital questions opened up the issue of what strategy, what programme the movement needed.
Because Florence was the first ESF, the sheer intoxication of being “tous ensemble” meant that even dyed-in-the-wool reformists spoke like revolutionary firebrands. Everyone was carried forward too by the urgency of doing everything possible to stop George Bush’s war on Iraq. This remains the burning question not only for this movement, but for the millions who struggle against capitalism and imperialism in countries like Argentina, Brazil and Indonesia; for the militants of the Intifada, for the workers and youth in Iran, all of whom are threatened to get squeezed between the dead ends of political Islam and nationalism.
Inside the anticapitalist movement, the neo-reformists of Attac, Bernard Cassen and Susan George, plus figures like George Monbiot in Britain, are now trying to impose their version of “another world” on the movement – capitalism with a human face. They are directly allied to the old reformists too: with the Brazilian PT, ruling in a popular front with neoliberal bourgeois parties and using participatory budgets to make the poor divide the limited cake for themselves rather than canceling the foreign debt and seizing the wealth of the rich; with the Italian Rifondazione Comunista, the French CP and SP opposition leaders all preparing to repeat the disastrous governments and coalitions of the 1990s.
Revolutionaries have to oppose any attempt to commit the movement to this sort of political agenda. The workers who join in the Social Forums in countries like Italy, who are attracted to the movement because they are fed up with the dead end of reformism in the unions and social democracy deserve and need something better than a new logo for the very same reformism.
The reformists, but also a number of centrist tendencies (those forces who oscillate between reform and revolution) have also put forward manifestos, programmes and perspectives for the movement. Many of them give a detailed account, some a sharp critique of the madness of global capitalism. But none give a revolutionary answer to this cruel and insane system. How can the working class smash it and replace it with a fundamentally different world? What kind of state do we have to replace the bourgeois state apparatus with, in order to build “another world”?
Worst of all these socialists of the International Socialist Tendency (the SWP) and Trotskyists of the Fourth International (Socialist Resistance) refuse to challenge the reformists, like Cassen, meekly accepting the ban on parties. They hide behind a social movement façade, either working within Attac itself or Globalise Resistance, rather than challenging the spurious authority of the Porto Alegre principles. Likewise they accommodate to the spontaneism and libertarian structurelessness of the movement.
Faced with these awkward questions these leaders of the “left wing” of the movement hide behind the lame excuse that the time is not ripe for democracy or leadership and we cannot afford to drive away the grandes dames and grands seigneurs of the movement – Susan George, Bernard Cassen, Chico Whitaker. Too much class politics, too much radicalism would risk this.
In Susan George’s latest book “Another World is possible IF…” she devotes a whole section to attacking what she calls the trap of “the only solution is revolution.” Feigning a world-weary “I’ve seen it all before” approach she insists that class struggle is impossibly passé and that revolution is undesirable because of the suffering it would cause. But what of the suffering that capitalism with its famines and imperialist wars, its sweatshops and mass unemployment causes? Those who perished in revolutions are only a fraction of this ongoing holocaust.
No wonder that on the streets of Europe and the world on 15 February 2003 millions have shown no fear of these words. And it is when the masses take up the call for revolution that these leaders shake in their shoes. It is these leaders who are frightened to break their links with the capitalist order; with its comfortable editorial or professorial chairs and its trade union offices.
Does any anticapitalist fighter really believe that we can go forward with such leaders? That we can or should sacrifice our unity in action, the advance into battle which we need to make, just to keep the Bernard Cassens, Susan Georges or Chico Whitakers happy?
We don’t need to artificially arrange any split from them. But neither do we need to fear a split with them. If we go forward determinedly they will desert at once. What we do need to avoid is a split from decisive action, from the class struggle, from the revolutionary youth, workers and peasants. If the movement stands dithering in its present impasse then the ranks of the fighters will be divided. No way! Let’s go forward.
Nearly seventy years ago Leon Trotsky wrote that the crisis of mankind is essentially the crisis of working class leadership. The mass mobilisation of the last few years – magnificent, inspiring as they were and are – have not been able to bring down the real evil Empire of our times. The new anticapitalist movement, like the “old” workers movement, has developed its own form of the crisis of leadership, not least because it has borrowed a large number of its leaders from the workers’ movement and its intellectual hangers on. Overcoming this is only possible if revolutionaries fight for what is necessary, for a programme for working class power.
Likewise, as Europe’s bosses seek to divert anger against their misrule onto migrants and racial minorities, the spectre of the Nazis and the Fascists threatens to rise again. Militant anti-racist and anti-fascist organisations are needed to counter the lies of the hate-mongers, and physically smash their would-be stormtroopers.
The trade unions remain crucial weapons in the anticapitalist struggle, capable of turning off the tap of profits at source, establishing workers’ control over production and planning that production for social need. The rank and file workers need their own movement, however, to wrest control of the unions from the bureaucratic class collaborators who currently control them.
A number of radical unions in Europe and around the world have joined in the movement from the outset but most of the bigger unions have been slow and hesitant. Yet recently, in every militant struggle, the rank and file have sought to link up with the social movements – through social forums in Italy, inter-professional committees in France, social assemblies in Germany. With every new upsurge in the movement, we need to develop these links into real action councils for our movement.
Similarly, the major unions suffer from being tied to the socialist and Labour parties that are implementing neoliberal measures and building up arsenals of mass destruction. We need new working class parties that, rather than seek to rule for the capitalists, will implement anticapitalist measures and pave the way for a socialist society.
In short, the anticapitalist movement, the workers movement, the movements of the racially, nationally and sexually oppressed, youth, women – must all be brought to together to create a new International – a world party of socialist revolution. This must be a Fifth International, founded on the accumulated revolutionary communist heritage of the previous four workers’ Internationals but learning too the lessons of their collapse, degeneration or betrayals.
The size of the current movement, the reshaping of the working class, the repulsive face of global capitalism and impasse of reformism all mean that the new International can be a mass International from the very beginning. Whilst mobilising against privatisation and unemployment, social cuts and debt, environmental destruction and imperialist wars, it can debate out and at last decide on a new revolutionary strategy.
At the heart of such a strategy must be a determination to seize the wealth and property of the multinationals and the billionaires, so we can plan for the eradication of war, poverty and disease, and build a classless society, where oppression and exploitation will be things of the past.
To achieve this, we will need to paralyse, split and dismantle the repressive machinery of the state and replace it with the rule of democratic workers’ councils and a workers and popular militia. The leaders of Attac and the existing workers’ parties may holler about respect for parliamentary democracy – but they and their reformist predecessors have never hesitated to use the police, the courts and even the army to crush our movement when their capitalist masters demanded it.
Even the Naomi Kleins and Luca Casarinis will object to the “authoritarianism” of such a suggestion, preferring a never-ending symbolic push and shove with the state forces. They fear the direct rule of the working masses and the armed people; we don’t. And, if the great anticapitalist movement is not to sink back into the reformism of yesteryear, or be crushed by the state forces once it has talked itself into an isolated corner, then it must adopt a revolutionary programme and become an international revolutionary party to carry it out.