At the end of January the sixth edition of the World Social Forum will be held in Porto Alegre (Brazil). As never before in its history, for the Forum this year a crisis can be seen on the horizon.
Its being held in the city which saw it first see the light in the year 2000 (and the venue for four of its five editions) was seriously in doubt as a consequence of the electoral defeat suffered by the PT, which lost the mayor's race, which it had won for the last 16 years. The winner, the PPS, is formed by former Stalinists who at the time of the elections formed part of Lula's cabinet on a national level. The new municipal authorities, however, quickly confirmed its being held, which reveals that the right-wing is not contradictory with the political tendencies that dominate the Forum and, at the same time, that it is not willing to lose the "tourist" benefits arising from the tens of thousands of people attending the event.
A perspective of crisis
The host party -the PT of Brazil- ha already served two years as a manifestly pro-imperialist and anti-working class government. In the two years of the PT government, the banks enjoyed their greatest profits in all their history. The sending of Brazilian troops to Haiti is another rotten manifestation of the pro-imperialist policies of the PT.
The PT will attempt to get from the WSF a "left-wing" cover for these policies, with the backing of its Latin American allies (the Uruguayan Frente Amplio (Broad Front), the Chilean Partido Socialista (Socialist Party), the Kirchnerite "transversals" of Argentina).
A series of Carribean organizations of the Forum (from La Martinica, Guadalupe and Haití) have announced a first encounter of the Social Forum of the Carribean for November, but they do not say a single word against the imperialist occupation of Haiti. They have just held a preparatory meeting in Havana with the sponsorship of the Cuban Committee of the WSF. The PT, for its part, has become the main support for the Plateforme haitienne de Plaidoyer pour un Developement Alternatif, led by Camille Chalmers; it is an Haitian ("another-world-is-possible-ist") organizaton backed by French imperialism (the French SP and CP support the invasion). The Carribean "another-world-is-possible-ists" are to the right of their own governments they claim to critize, because the Caricom still refuses to recognize the government of Latortue, almost a year after the invasion.
The Forum of Porto Alegre is being organized, then, by the occupiers of Haití.
Any pretension of lining up support for this pro-imperialist intervention among the tens of thousands of activists who will be attending Porto Alegre will explode the crisis incubating at the event.
Europe, Europe
Lula's coming into the government signified a kind of getting into power for the WSF. The running of the government showed up the full extent of their pro-imperialist tendencies. This is the real reason for the crisis in the ("another-world-is-possible-ist") movement, which has been making itself clear in an ever-increasingly sharp manner, as seen in the recent European Social Forum, which met in London last October.
The London Forum attracted some 25,000 people, a number significantly below that of prior encounters. The closing march attracted 70,000 demonstrators, very far from the million people that had demonstrated in Florence in 2002, or those who had demonstrated against the war in London itself in early 2003. The numbers in London placed in evidence that the forum movement is gradually shrinking, particularly with respect to the younger generation of activists.
This is not, however, only about a quantitative decline. In their balance sheet of the London Forum, the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR) -French section of the so-called United Secretariat and one of the main promoters of the encounter- is obliged to recognize that 'there was no real assembly of women, which had been the big success in Saint-Denis (París) the year before" and that "the unemployed and temporary workers and those with non-union contracts were left out" ( International Viewpoint , Dec 2004). That is, that the most opressed were absent from the Forum.
Two political tendencies that had been working in common agreement for some time clashed at the London Forum: the Socialist Workers Party of Great Britain and the French NGO Attac, backed by the LCR. El SWP was backed by Kevin Livingston, London mayor and member of the party of Blair -the "financier" of the Forum-, and by the Association of Muslims of Great Britain and the liberal British pacifists. Fausto Bertinotti and the Partido de la Refundación Comunista of Italy played the role of "center" mediator.
"The British give priority to the struggle against the imperialist wars in the Middle East and Central Asia, while the French, above all those of Attac, are opposed to such an orientation, alleging that social problems are being underestimated together with the 'struggle for a social and democratic Europe'. It is no coincidence that Bernard Cassen, the former president of Attac and still its 'grey emminence', had opposed the historic decision, taken in Florence, to organize on February 15, 2003, the first simultaneous world-wide anti-war protest, against the war in Iraq. But while the British SWP give strong emphasis to the question of the war, it underestimates social problems, separating them from the struggle against the war, obviously in order not to irritate its local allies such as the former Labour Party deputy Galloway, mayor Livingston, other social democrats and, above all, the bourgeois leadership of the British Muslim Association" (Savas Matsas, "The European Social Forum in London: The end of the road?", Prensa Obrera , 11 Nov 04).
The tension between both blocs gave way to a series of scandalous incidents. The one which stood out the most was the failed attempt on the part of the SWP to impose Subhi Al Mashadani, of the Iraqi Trade Union Federation, collaborator of the Prime Minister of the Baghdad puppet government, as an invited speaker, which was a strange way of placing the axis of the struggle against the imperialist occupation of Iraq. The other incident took place in reaction to the organizing of a paid conference to be given by mayor Livingston, over the exhorbitant cost of 20 pounds admission.
These shameful political positions could not be covered up by the eclectic "final declaration", arduously written behind closed doors. "The text of the London agreement nowhere challenges the European Union; it tries only to present the abstract reactionary Utopia of a reformed 'social and democratic" capitalist Europe. In relation to the Middle East and despite the islamophile, pro-Arab. Pro-Palestinian, rhetoric of the SWP, the Call states that "Iraqis are prisoners of war and terror" condemning both the barbarism of imperialist occupation and the armed struggle of the Iraqi Resistance. It supports "the Palestinian and Israeli movements fighting for a just and lasting peace" and refers to the authority of the UN International Court and the "unanimous vote of the European countries in the UN General Assembly" to legitimize the "call for an end to the Israeli occupation and the dismantling of the apartheid wall". In other words not only this is an official recognition of the State of Israel and rejection of any idea for a democratic, secular and socialist Republic in the entire historic territory of Palestine where Jews and Arabs will live together but also it promotes unashamedly the goals of the European imperialists in the Middle East by covering up their pro-Arab hypocrisy and giving legitimacy to the moribund imperialist 'Kitchen of the Thieves', the United Nations with all its bodies, Courts and assemblies. With such pro-imperialist policies, the hijacking of the anti-globalization movement by the Forum leaderships can only generate confusion and disorientation. So the incidents are not accidental. (Savas Matsas, ídem).
What occured in London confirms the characterization made in the draft programmatic theses of the Fourth International, passed in Buenos Aires in April 2004.
The 'alterglobal' characterizes itself as movementist ('movement of movements'), that is, as opposing the building of an international party, especially a class struggle one. That is, it lacks a proposal of power and avoids the means to struggle for power and combats them fiercely. Functionally it benefits established capitalist power. It confesses, in this way, to refusing to play an independent role in the world crisis and that it will not be able to intervene in it except empirically or circumstantially. The "alterglobal" is determined in its denial of the possibility of revolutionary situations born of the decomposition of capital. It denounces the attempts to convert them into revolutions and into the historical path towards the taking of power by the working class. Its "Trotskyist" wing (USec) adds, from its own harvest, that the world revolutionary epoch initiated with the Revolution of October has concluded. This posing of the question comes from Euro-communism, in 1970, and before it from the theory of "socialism in one country." However, even in a period of capitalist restoration, of backward movements in class consciousness and of the loss of historical gains whose achievement marked a long epoch of the world proletariat, the insurmountable contradictions of capital lead to the creation of revolutionary situations, which can only be resolved in a favorable manner for the working class if they are transformed into proletarian revolutions and in the context of the taking of power by the workers and for the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat on the world plane. (Programmatic Theses for the Fourth International, April 2004.)