The second European Social Forum in Paris next month meets at a crucial time for the anti-capitalist movement.
Yes, it will be a time to encounter new ideas, to debate and to network. But it will also have political tasks put before it if not by the major participants, by the struggle itself. The great anti-war movement, the collapse of the WTO at Cancun, Lula’s election in Brazil and the general strikes in Europe have raised the question of strategy and goals to a higher level than ever.
If we don’t learn the correct lessons from this year of mass struggles, our movement will go backwards, not forwards. That’s why every activist should come to Paris with one aim in mind: How can we defeat capitalism.
Over the last decade, global capitalism has massively increased the grip of monopoly capital on all parts of the globe. This was a direct result of the collapse of Stalinism. At first it led to retreat and demoralisation in the working class. Yet From the mid-1990s onward we have witnessed a recovery of struggles against global capitalism and its institutions, imperialism and its wars.
A new, anti-capitalist movement, internationalist in its reach and ambitions emerged, most signally after the street battles in Seattle in 1999. This movement brought together activists and organisations from a wide spectrum of anti-capitalist groupings, socialist, anarchist and communist organisations, trade unions, anti-globalisation campaigns, peasant organisations, NGOs, and left reformist parties from all other the world.
It mobilised hundreds of thousands against meetings of the IMF, WTO, and G8. It has held Social Forums on international, continental, national or regional levels, bringing together tens of thousands.
The anti-capitalist movement is a response to global capitalism. It is a recognition of the need for international co-operation and joint initiatives to win the battle against the monopolies, against exploitation and oppression, against racism and imperialism.
The anti-capitalist movement is a developing, living mass force; one which could not simply be put down by police repression.
By killing Carlo Giuliani and brutalising hundreds of others on the streets of Genoa it provoked a massive wave of strikes and demonstrations. Not only did its mobilisation continue but its activists became, after 11th September, anti-war and anti-imperialist too.
The first European Social Forum in November 2002 called for the historic the demonstrations on 15th February, a world mobilisation of 20 to 30 millions against the imperialist war threat.
The workers’ movement and a whole new generation of youth joined with it in these actions. It gave a foretaste of what could be achieved, if the anti-capitalist movement united with the workers movement, the anti-imperialist struggles, the immigrant communities, and the youth.
This promise was expressed in the growth of the Brazilian landless movement and the election of Lula, a former strike leader; in the heroism of the second Palestinian intifada; in the development of new, more militant currents in the unions.
However, all these struggles suffered and suffer from one tremendous defect: a crisis of leadership.
The tremendous possibilities of the anti-war movement were derailed by the trade union and reformist leaders who failed to use 15th February to build an international general strike against the warmongers. Rather, the great marches became the end-point of the struggle.
Lula – who came to power via the unions, the unemployed, the landless peasants -is now doing the job for the IMF, ruling together with the liberal bourgeoisie and attacking the working class who elected him.
In the anti-capitalist movement, we can observe a similar development. Initially, it was a movement of “many yeses but one no” – capitalist globalisation. It was clear that this political “neutrality” about which goals the movement should adopt was a weakness, but the reformists in the movement supported such neutrality – certainly for the time being, since it gave them protection against more militant and revolutionary ideas.
But time has moved on. Precisely because the anti-capitalist movement is a developing, living mass force – if it doesn’t continue to go forward and overcome the obstacles in its path, it will inevitably go backwards.
More and more in the anti-capitalist movements have felt the need to go beyond common initiatives, for this or that gathering of the globalisers. 60.000 activists came to Florence not only to discuss how to take common actions, but also to discuss what strategy, whose policy, what programme does the movement need?
This is the burning question not only for this movement. It is also a burning questions for the millions who struggle against capitalism and imperialism in countries like Argentina, Brazil, Indonesia. For the militants of the Intifada, for the workers and youth in Iran, for the millions in Turkey, all of whom are threatened to get squeezed between the dead ends of political Islam and nationalism.
Inside the anti-capitalist movement, the neo-reformists of Attac Bernard Cassen and Susan George, plus figures like George Monbiot in Britain, are now trying to impose on the movement their agenda for “another world", for a capitalism with a human face. They are allied to the Brazilian PT, its accommodation with capitalists, and its fraud of “participatory budgets", the Italian Rifondazione Comunista, the French Communist and Socialist “opposition” leaders.
Revolutionaries have to oppose any attempt to commit the movement to this 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” brand of the very same reformism.
The reformists – as well as the Socialist Workers Party in Britain, and Ligue Communiste Revolutionaire in France – have put forward manifestos, programmes, perspectives for the movement. Many of them give a detailed account, some a sharp, even inspiring, critiques of the madness and insanity of global capitalism.
But none of them dare 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.” The leaders of the movement are afraid to call this a socialist world and to name class struggle and revolution as the means to achieve it. Yet in Florence and on the streets of Europe this spring, in Brazil, Bolivia, Mexico and India millions have mobilised who show no fear of these words.
The crisis of mankind is essentially the crisis of working class leadership. Overcoming this is only possible if revolutionaries fight for what is necessary, for a programme for working class power.
In order to achieve this they have to fight for the anti-capitalist movement, for the Social Forums, for the (re)emerging working class rank and file structures and organisations, for the youth and anti-imperialist struggles to create an organisation which can lead – not in order to replace these forms of organisation, but in order to make them stronger and more effective and able to mount a real challenge to the capitalist system.
In short, the anti-capitalist movement, the workers movement, the oppressed and the youth must be brought to together to create a new, Fifth international – a world party of socialist revolution. The current movement, the reshaping of the working class, the crisis of capitalism and reformism all mean that the new international can be a mass international from the very beginning. While mobilising against privatisation and unemployment, social cuts and debt, imperialist wars and the martyrdom of the Palestinians it can debate and decide on a new revolutionary strategy.
With such a tool the working class and the oppressed will meet the challenges, master the risks and take up the chances of the new, pre-revolutionary period which is opening before our eyes – a period in which the international working class needs to set itself the goal the final overthrow of the system on a global scale.