The Economics and Politics of the World Social Forum: Lessons For the Struggle Against "Globalisation"
by Global Research
September, 2003
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-- Resolution on the Misuse of U.S. Government "Democracy Promotion" Initiatives: Undermining Progressive Governments and Movements in the Americas, by National Lawyers Guild International Committee
-- Branding Democracy: U.S. Regime Change in Post-Soviet Eastern Europe, by Gerald Sussman
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-- The Ford Foundation and the CIA, by James Petras
The Bank, Fund, U.N., and other such institutions have for some years been sponsoring parallel NGO meets at each major international gathering. Indeed, at Seattle, in December 1999, the WTO itself hosted a parallel Social Summit the day before the opening of the WTO conference, where the new International Labour Office Director-General Juan Somavia spelled out the programme: "What we need today is a more fruitful collaboration between the ILO, the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank with the objective of creating a Social Chapter within the incipient structures of world governance.... We need to create structures where the fears and anxieties of civil society can be fully aired and addressed."
At the same gathering, former WTO Director General Renatto Ruggiero warned that "if all actors in today's global economy are not included to address the widening range of public concerns within this global system... they may turn to alternative solutions that could possibly destabilize the entire architecture of the global economy.... Certainly we must continue to advance trade liberalization within the multilateral system. But unless we achieve a consensus and cooperation with all the political actors, we cannot build the necessary support for trade liberalization and the global economy."...
This vision of a happy family of European labour and capital would warm any corporate chieftain's heart.
-- The Economics and Politics of the World Social Forum: Lessons For the Struggle Against Globalisation", by Global Research
Globalisation'
It became fashionable in the 1990s to use the term 'globalisation' to describe the economic changes being brought about worldwide. We were told that economies worldwide were becoming more integrated, and that prosperity would spread to all.
The great range of actual measures carried on under the label of globalisation, however, were not those of integration and development. Rather, they were processes of imposition, disintegration, underdevelopment and appropriation. They were of continued extraction of debt servicing payments of the third world; depression of the prices of raw materials exported by the same countries; removal of tariff protection for their vulnerable productive sectors; removal of restraints on foreign direct investment, allowing giant foreign corporations to grab larger sectors of the third world's economies; removal of restraints on the entry and exit of massive flows of speculative international capital, allowing their movements to dictate economic life; reduction of State spending on productive activity, development and welfare; privatisation of activities, assets and natural resources; sharp increases in the cost of essential services and goods such as electricity, fuel, health care, education, transport, and food (accompanied by the harsher depression of women's consumption within each family's declining consumption); withdrawal of subsidised credit earlier directed to starved sectors; dismantling of workers' security of employment; reduction of the share of wages in the social product; suppression of domestic industry in the third world and closures of manufacturing firms on a massive scale; ruination of independent small industries; ruination of the handicraft/handloom sector; replacement of subsistence crops with cash crops and destruction of food security; removal of ceilings on landholdings; dispossession of tribal lands and the handing over of forests to corporate interests; developing dependence of peasants on the new (and profoundly hazardous) products of biotechnology; dumping of hazardous wastes in, and the shifting of harmful processes to, the third world; use of women as sweated factory labour; growth of prostitution amid large-scale unemployment; invasion of images aimed at making women consumers of the beauty industry; entry of multinational media corporations and their cultural products; and systematic development of islands of consumerism amid a vast sea of poverty.
Little wonder that, far from becoming more integrated and prosperous, the world economy is today even more starkly divided. By the indices of the World Bank, 45 per cent of the world lives on less than two dollars a day, and the number of the poor worldwide has grown during the 1990s. A third of the world's labour force is unemployed or underemployed because of the economic order ruling today. At the same time, in 1993, the top one per cent of the world's population received a larger share of the world's income than the bottom 57 per cent; the top five per cent had an income share approaching that of the bottom 85 per cent.
Distribution has become even more unequal as growth has flattened. Within the wealthy economies themselves growth has slowed sharply in the past two decades compared to the previous two decades. Within the developing countries, the situation is much worse: average income growth per head has sunk to zero during 1980-98.
While poverty and inequality are not new, the last decade has been specially marked by frequent, devastating financial crises and collapses, which have spread even to economies that were hitherto considered safe. They affected a number of countries at a time, aided by the freeing of financial flows: the East and South-east Asian crisis of 1997-98 -- itself involving seven or eight countries -- was followed by the Russian collapse of August 1998; Brazil collapsed in August-September 1998, and again in the first half of 1999; in the course of the Brazilian collapse, Argentina's fragile economy was shaken; it too collapsed dramatically in 2000, and has still not recovered. Instability, bordering on chaos, was the hallmark of the decade. Exchange rates fluctuated more sharply; so too did trade growth, for all the talk of the gains of 'global integration'. Prices exports of raw materials from the third world fell sharply.
The devastation wreaked by such financial crises was comparable to that of a war. In many cases standards of living in the affected country were thrown back decades -- in the case of Russia, by a century (male life expectancy in Russia fell to 57 in the 1990s). In Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, almost none of the countries had the same GDP at the end of the decade as they did in 1989. Russia's GDP at the end of the decade was just two-thirds its 1989 figure; Moldova's and Ukraine's were a third of their 1989 figures. Unemployment rates during the Asian crisis tripled in Thailand, quadrupled in South Korea, rose ten-fold in Indonesia.
The imperialist countries, while scrambling to stabilise the financial situation arising from these crises (that is, ensuring continued debt payments by the crisis-affected country), also extracted gains from these devastations. The drop in prices of raw materials exports from the third world slashed costs of multinational corporations. Capital exiting East Asia, Russia and Brazil travelled to imperialist countries (the sums were massive: outflow from Thailand amounted to 7.9 per cent of GDP in 1997; 12.3 per cent in 1998; seven per cent in the first half of 1999). And as the East Asian, Russian, Brazilian and Argentinian currencies fell, their assets in the public and private sectors were now cheaper for foreign investors to snap up. (The bounty was huge. For example, in the 1990s, even before the latest collapse, multinationals bought up Brazil's large privatised infrastructure and service sectors; they repatriated $7 billion in profits in 1998 alone.)
The term 'globalisation' is a gross distortion. Labour remains as trapped in national boundaries. Capital, no doubt, is armed with freedom of entry and exit worldwide (allowing it to maximise its exploitation of labour worldwide). But ownership of capital is by no means dispersed over the globe; it is more centralised and concentrated than ever before in imperialist hands.
It was not the working class in the imperialist countries that prospered from these processes. Income inequality in the US is estimated to be at its highest level since the 1930s, and growing steadily worse. The richest five per cent of the US -- indeed largely the richest 1-2 per cent -- pocketed almost all the gain from the 30 per cent that GDP grew over the 1990s. Now Census figures show a sharp upturn in US poverty in 2001. And in Europe, the current drive for economic integration and for greater 'competitiveness' is also in fact a drive to strip the European working class of its rights and social claims.
Resistance to 'globalisation' -- or rather, resistance to the intensified imperialist onslaught -- thus took shape both in the third world countries who were the worst sufferers as well as in the imperialist countries themselves, where the working class faced the onslaught. To tackle such resistance, imperialism has never hesitated to employ repression at home and military suppression abroad. But such measures, while basic, would not suffice; more sophisticated political means are required as well.
A new initiative
In January 2001, in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, a large gathering took place voicing opposition to 'globalisation'. It was composed of organisations and thousands of individuals from around the world. This gathering called itself the "World Social Forum", counterposing itself to the World Economic Forum of corporate leaders and finance ministers which meets every year in Davos, Switzerland, to discuss the concerns of multinational corporations and how to advance 'globalisation'. At the World Social Forum, various organisations held discussions, cultural events, rallies, exhibitions, and other forms of self-expression, on issues ranging from the environment to the women's movement to economic policy to alternative social orders. The large participation encouraged the organisers to hold similar gatherings in January 2002 and January 2003 as well, and each such witnessed even larger mobilisations, numbering over 100,000 in the last such.
These gatherings, and the wide publicity given to them, had an impact far beyond the circle of direct participants. The Forum began to be treated by many as a political alternative to the current political trends worldwide, and as a potential source of a new politics. Movements, organisations and circles of individuals all over the world that are opposed to, or in struggle against, imperialism, had to take note of the World Social Forum.
Further, while the direct impact of the earlier gatherings was largely limited to Latin America, it is no longer so. A series of regional meetings under the aegis and on the pattern of the World Social Forum have been held over the course of the past year in Argentina, Italy, Palestine, India and Ethiopia. It has now been announced that the next World Social Forum gathering will take place in Mumbai in January 2004.
It is against this background that, in order to understand the real objects and character of the World Social Forum (WSF), we must look into its emergence and development. This is being attempted here so all those struggling against imperialism can take an informed stand on their future course of action.
A brief summary of what follows
In the following we see how, in the US and Europe, a militant protest movement against the depredations of international capital came to the fore at the December 1999 Seattle conference of the World Trade Organisation, and raged for one and a half years thereafter. Attempts by the ruling circles of those countries to suppress this movement met with no success; indeed, the movement grew. It was in this context that the WSF was initiated by ATTAC, a French NGO (non-governmental organisation) platform devoted to lobbying international financial institutions to reform and humanise themselves, and by the Brazilian Workers' Party, whose leftist image and 'participatory' techniques of government have not prevented it from scrupulously implementing the stipulations of the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The WSF meet in Brazil for the past three years have attracted not only mammoth crowds but a wide range of participants, including many distinguished forces and individuals who are opponents of imperialism. The WSF slogan, "Another world is possible", while vague, taps the widespread, inarticulate yearning for another social system. However, the very principles and structure of the WSF ensure that it will not evolve into a platform of people's action and power against imperialism. Its claims to being a 'horizontal' (not a hierarchical) 'process' (not a body) are belied by the fact that decisions are controlled by a handful of organisations, many of them with considerable financial resources and ties to the very countries which control the existing world order. As the WSF disavows arriving at any decisions as a body, it is incapable of collective expression of will and action. Its gatherings are structured to give prominence to celebrities of the NGO world, who propagate the NGO worldview. Thus, in all the talk on 'alternatives', the spotlight remains on alternative policies within the existing system, rather than a change of the very system itself.
Indeed the ties of the WSF to the existing system are evidenced in a number of ways. While several political forces fighting for a change of the system have been excluded from the WSF meets, droves of political leaders of the imperialist countries have been attending. Not only does the WSF as a body receive funds from agencies which are tied to imperialist interests and operations, but innumerable bodies participating in the WSF too are dependent on such agencies. The implications of this can be seen from the history of one such agency, Ford Foundation, which has closely collaborated with the US Central Intelligence Agency internationally, and in India has helped to shape the government's policies in favour of American interests.
In recent years such funding has grown rapidly in India, leading to a vast proliferation of NGOs. While NGOs earlier restricted themselves to 'developmental' activities, they have expanded since the 1980s to 'activism' or 'advocacy', that is, funded political activity. This phenomenon serves to further bureaucratise social movements and remove them from popular control. A critique of the role of such funding agencies in Indian political life was produced in the late 1980s by the Communist Party of India (Marxist); however, now its leading cadre are among the chief organisers of the WSF in India.
'Globalisation', a misleading word for the current onslaught by imperialism, can be resisted, and even defeated, by a combination of struggles at various levels, in various countries, in various forms; and forces fighting 'globalisation' will need to join hands in struggle against it. However, a careful analysis reveals that the World Social Forum is not an instrument of such struggle. It is a diversion from it.
The World Social Forum and the Struggle against 'Globalisation'
I. How and Why the World Social Forum Emerged
The fourth gathering of the World Social Forum (WSF) is to take place in Mumbai in January 2004. This would be an event of unprecedented international visibility for India, and is already a subject of great curiosity, discussion and debate among circles opposed to what is termed 'globalisation'. A number of insightful analytical articles have already been written on the WSF, both in India and abroad. Our purpose here is to gather some of these perceptions, substantiate certain points, and add a few further points.
The Seattle demonstrations and thereafter
The emergence of the WSF can be traced (in a contrary way) to the remarkable international upsurge of protest and confrontation that took place in the wake of the November 1999 conference of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) at Seattle in the US. That WTO conference, wracked by disputes among the world's richest economies, was disrupted further, and crucially, by a great storm of protest in the streets. The over 50,000 marchers were a very diverse mass, including anti-capitalist propagandists, anarchists, campaigners for the abolition of third world debt, environmentalists and even, remarkably, sections of U.S. organised labour. The conference ended in a fiasco without completing its agenda. For those fighting against globalisation, Seattle was a signal victory, evidence that such a fight was possible and worthwhile.
For the next one and a half years, a series of protests inspired by Seattle seriously disrupted every major gathering of the leading international powers and institutions, including the World Economic Forum (WEF) meet (a gathering of representatives of the world's leading corporations and countries) at Davos in January 2000; the IMF-World Bank spring meeting in Washington in April 2000; the WEF summit at Melbourne in September 2000; the IMF-World Bank annual meeting in Prague in September 2000; the European Union (EU) summit in Nice in December 2000; the Davos meet in January 2001; the Quebec economic summit of the Americas in April 2001; the EU summit in Gothenburg in June 2001; the WEF meet in Salzburg in July 2001; and the World Economic Summit of the Group of Eight (G-8) in Genoa in July 2001.
Inevitably, the summit chiefs and the corporate media accused the protesters of carrying out acts of meaningless destruction. However, the main immediate thrust of the protesters' actions was quite straightforward: to physically prevent the delegates gathering and thus prevent these conferences from completing their agenda.
For that agenda was, broadly speaking, to turn the screws tighter: to yank open third world economies even further to invasion and occupation by imports, foreign investment, and privatisation; to devalue labour power (directly and indirectly) further in both advanced industrialised countries and the third world; to concentrate capital even more greatly than at present; and to sort out disputes among the leading imperialist powers in this game.
Demonstrations alone have never ultimately blocked the plans of international capital, but the wave of militant demonstrations at Seattle and after was at least remarkably effective in disrupting "business as usual". At Seattle, the conference's inaugural session was cancelled as the delegates -- including the head of the WTO, the UN Secretary-General, the US Secretary of State, and the US Trade Representative -- were virtually imprisoned in their hotels on the first day; and on the following days, as demonstrators fought cat-and-mouse battles with the police on the streets, the trade talks inside broke down. During the Washington Fund-Bank meet, the US government had to shut offices in a sizeable area around the two institutions' headquarters, and demonstrators managed to block many top officials -- including the French finance minister -- from reaching the venue. At Melbourne the Australian prime minister, John Howard, and the world's richest man, Bill Gates, were trapped along with other delegates at the venue. Since the entrances and exits were blocked by 30,000 demonstrators, the delegates had to be ferried back and forth by helicopters and boats. At Prague the conference centre was completely blocked for hours, and many prospective delegates stayed away from the event. At Nice, the authorities' attempts to keep out 100,000 protesters kept the delegates themselves in a state of siege. A NATO conference scheduled to be held in December 2000 at Victoria (Canada) was cancelled for fear of demonstrations, as was a World Bank development meet in Barcelona in June 2001. At Davos in January 2001, what the Financial Times described as "unprecedented security" (including mass arrests and a shut down of road and rail) did not prevent hundreds of protesters making it to the site. At Quebec, the entire focus of attention shifted from the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas to the demonstrators. And in Sweden, the inner city of Gothenburg was converted into a virtual battlefield.
Each successive meet attempted to place larger areas officially out of bounds by erecting legal and physical barricades. These efforts peaked in Genoa, where a four metre high iron fence protected a large deserted "red zone" near the venue. Inhabitants were not allowed to receive visitors for days, and sharpshooters manned terraces and balconies. Even this level of quarantine was insufficient for the leaders of the world's eight most powerful countries, who stayed on the cruise ship "European Vision", guarded by minesweepers, specialist divers, and units with anti-aircraft guns. Rail and air traffic to the city were stopped; motorways were blocked; bus, underground and tram traffic were largely shut down; and large numbers of people were turned back at the Italian border. Revealingly, the very authorities who talked of a 'united Europe' and were busy removing national restraints on capital flows aggressively used national borders to block the flow of protesters. Hence the slogan of the marchers in Prague: "Open up the borders, smash the IMF".
The slogans and causes of the participants in this series of demonstrations varied greatly, ranging from the reformist to the revolutionary (and even, in the US, a few chauvinist ones). But as the Economist put it, by and large what the marchers "have in common is a loathing of the established economic order, and of the institutions -- the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO -- which they regard as either running it or serving it." The rallies indeed became schools to their heterogenous participants: many previously non-political forces, or forces limited to single issues, were exposed to broader political perspectives and were radicalised in the course of their experience. And far from flagging, their strength appeared to be growing: at Genoa a record 150,000 protesters overcame extraordinary hurdles and managed to reach the city.
For those behind the project of a united Europe -- the European corporations -- the unprecedented involvement of organised labour in these protests was a particularly ominous sign. The European corporations and their political representatives, in the course of fashioning a single superpower, are moving step by step to strip the European working class of all its security and social rights. A militant working class challenge joining hands across borders would endanger their project.
The response: repression
From the start the protesters had to face considerable repression. At Seattle-1999 tear gas (canisters were sometimes fired at protesters' faces), truncheons, plastic bullets and concussion grenades were used. Over 600 were arrested, often merely for handing out or even receiving leaflets within the giant "no-protest zone"; the national guard was called out; night-time curfew and martial law were declared. At Davos 2000 and 2001, the police used water throwers (at below-freezing temperatures), tear gas and warning shots; at Washington April 2000 tear gas, pepper gas (some demonstrators were sprayed in the eyes) and truncheons; at Nice, stun grenades and tear gas; at Quebec, water-throwers, tear gas and rubber pellets.
The Gothenburg EU summit of June 2001 marked a turning point. The Swedish police not only attacked the protesters with horses, truncheons and dogs, but, for the first time in the post-Seattle protests, fired live ammunition. Three protesters were wounded, one seriously. British prime minister Blair nevertheless asserted that people were "far too apologetic" about demonstrators who disrupt gatherings of world leaders. "These guys don't represent anyone.... I just think we've got to be a lot more robust about this."
In line with Blair's sentiments, the repression at Genoa was unprecedented. Demonstrations were banned in a large zone. The police had the power to stop and search anyone in the city. There was a complete ban on distribution of leaflets. On the first day of the conference, police shot in the head Carlo Giuliani, a 23-year-old protester who allegedly threw a fire extinguisher at a police van; the van then reversed over Giuliani where he lay on the ground, killing him. On the night of July 21-22, the police stormed the school building which served as the dormitory of the protesters. Those sleeping there were beaten with steel torches, wooden truncheons and fists so badly that 72 were injured; more than a dozen had to be carried out on stretchers, some unconscious; and many had to be hospitalised. All were eventually released without charge. According to Amnesty International, detainees were "slapped, kicked, punched and spat on and subjected to verbal abuse, sometimes of an obscene sexual nature.... deprived of food, water and sleep for lengthy periods, made to line up with their faces against the wall and remain for hours spread-eagled, and beaten if they failed to maintain this position." In addition, "some were apparently threatened with death and, in the case of female detainees, rape."
Eighteen months later, the Italian police confessed to a parliamentary inquiry that they had fabricated evidence against the protesters: one senior officer admitted planting two Molotov cocktails in the school, and another admitted faking the stabbing of a police officer. A Guardian investigation at the time of the protests had found that certain 'demonstrators' who committed acts of looting and attacks on reporters were in fact provocateurs from European security forces. Not surprisingly, "few, if any" of these persons were arrested. This was, then, a pre-planned assault by the leaders of Europe on the burgeoning anti-imperialist movement.
More sophisticated response required
While "robust" repression remained an essential tool of dealing with the movement, it was not sufficient. For, contrary to Blair's assertion that "These guys don't represent anyone", it was clear that indeed they represented vast and growing numbers affected, in some cases even ruined, even within the imperialist countries themselves by the current processes. Early on, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service warned that "Seattle and Washington reflect how large the antagonistic audience has become, and the lengths to which participants will go in their desire to shut down or impede the spread of globalization". The aggressively pro-'globalisation' Economist, in an editorial titled "Angry and effective", lamented that "The threat of renewed demonstrations against global capitalism hangs over next week's annual meetings of the IMF and World Bank. This new kind of protest is more than a mere nuisance: it is getting its way." It warned that "it would be a big mistake to dismiss this global militant tendency as nothing more than a public nuisance, with little potential to change things. It already has changed things", counting the Multilateral Agreement on Investment as its first victim.
The Economist traced the effectiveness of the protests not to the methods employed but to the fact that they "enjoy the sympathy of many people in the West.... Many of the issues they raise reflect popular concern about the hard edges of globalisation -- fears, genuine if muddled, about leaving the poor behind, harming the environment, caring about profits more than people, unleashing dubious genetically modified foods, and the rest. The radicals on the streets are voicing an organised and extremist expression of these widely shared anxieties.... the protesters are prevailing over firms, international institutions and governments partly because, for now, they do reflect that broader mood. If their continuing success stimulates rather than satisfies their appetite for power, global economic integration may be at greater risk than many suppose."
A sophisticated response was required. At Melbourne, at a conference site besieged by demonstrators, World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab commented revealingly that "If I have learned one thing from here, I will try in future to install a dialogue corner where some business people here and some people in the street could meet in a safe corner and just exchange ideas." The Economist noted that the Czech president tried unsuccessfully "to broker a meeting between the protesters [at Prague] and the boss of the World Bank.... Mr. Havel has since managed to set up a forum on September 23rd that will be attended by Bank and Fund officials and by assorted opponents of globalisation."
Such efforts are not new: The Bank, Fund, U.N., and other such institutions have for some years been sponsoring parallel NGO meets at each major international gathering. Indeed, at Seattle, in December 1999, the WTO itself hosted a parallel Social Summit the day before the opening of the WTO conference, where the new International Labour Office Director-General Juan Somavia spelled out the programme: "What we need today is a more fruitful collaboration between the ILO, the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank with the objective of creating a Social Chapter within the incipient structures of world governance.... We need to create structures where the fears and anxieties of civil society can be fully aired and addressed."
At the same gathering, former WTO Director General Renatto Ruggiero warned that "if all actors in today's global economy are not included to address the widening range of public concerns within this global system... they may turn to alternative solutions that could possibly destabilize the entire architecture of the global economy.... Certainly we must continue to advance trade liberalization within the multilateral system. But unless we achieve a consensus and cooperation with all the political actors, we cannot build the necessary support for trade liberalization and the global economy."
The efforts of the 1999 Seattle Social Summit to engage the protesters in consensus-building for trade liberalisation were, to put it mildly, unsuccessful. And through all the militant protests that followed, it was clear that those sponsored efforts at consensus-building with the protesters, organised as they were under the auspices of the same international bodies that were the targets of the protests, carried no credibility with the marchers.
World Social Forum is given shape
It was during the following turbulent year, 2000, that the "alternative" to Seattle-type confrontations took shape -- with remarkable speed, starting within three months of the Seattle events.
According to a member of the International Council of the WSF, in February 2000, Bernard Cassen, the head of a French NGO platform ATTAC, Oded Grajew, head of a Brazilian employers' organisation, and Francisco Whitaker, head of an association of Brazilian NGOs, met to discuss a proposal for a "world civil society event"; by March 2000, they formally secured the support of the municipal government of Porto Alegre and the state government of Rio Grande do Sul, both controlled at the time by the Brazilian Workers' Party (PT). In June 2000, the proposal for such an event was placed by the vice-governor of Rio Grande do Sul at an alternative UN meeting in Geneva. The World Bank website dates the WSF to this meeting, referring to it as "a new organizational perspective launched in June 2000 in Geneva by the major organisations of civil society".
This political trend, which was already present within the protest movement, stepped up its efforts to influence it. A group of French NGOs, including ATTAC, Friends of L'Humanité, and Friends of Le Monde Diplomatique, sponsored an Alternative Social Forum in Paris titled "One Year after Seattle", in order to prepare an agenda for the protests to be staged at the upcoming European Union summit at Nice. The speakers called for "reorienting certain international institutions such as the IMF, World Bank, WTO... so as to create a globalization from below" and "building an international citizens' movement, not to destroy the IMF but to reorient its missions." While strongly endorsing the project of the European Union (one of the central aims of which in fact is to strip the hard-won rights of European workers and their various forms of social protection), the organisers called for a Social Europe, "on the basis of a Third Way [i.e. neither capitalism nor socialism], that could implement policies against unemployment, insecurity, and the undermining of workers' rights."
The organisers had considerable success in foisting this agenda on the protest demonstrations at Nice, where the general secretary of the European Confederation of Trade Unions (ETUC) declared that "all components of civil society must play a major role in the construction of the European Union. The message of our demonstration is unmistakable: There needs to be the incorporation of the trade unions and NGOs into the decision-making structures in Brussels.... We agree that Europe must become more competitive, yes. But the new Europe must also contain a dignified quality of life for all its citizens." This vision of a happy family of European labour and capital would warm any corporate chieftain's heart.
Let us take a closer look here at the two principal authors of the World Social Forum: ATTAC of France and the Workers' Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT) of Brazil. It is worth looking at the background of these two forces.
ATTAC: devoted to dialogue with international financial institutions
ATTAC is an NGO platform that aims to build a coalition of diverse groups -- farmers, trade unions, intellectuals -- for a reform of the world financial system. Its name is the French acronym for Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens. It was originally set up in 1998 by Bernard Cassens and Susan George, the editors of Le Monde Diplomatique, to campaign for the Tobin tax. This is a tax long ago proposed by the American economist James Tobin, whereby speculative financial transactions would be taxed at the rate of 0.1 per cent in order to raise funds for productive and socially desirable purposes. (While ATTAC has broadened its concerns in the past several years, it has not abandoned its base in the Tobin tax proposal.) Tobin, a Nobel Prize-winning establishment economist who has advised US administrations, in no sense considered his proposal radical, anti-corporate or anti-globalization -- indeed, he envisioned the tax revenues being administered by the IMF (ATTAC wants the United Nations to do so instead). At any rate, given the dominance of financial sector activity, and the hectic pace of speculative transactions worldwide, the Tobin tax stands nil chance of being actually enacted by any country wishing to remain in the existing world financial institutions, international capital flows and international trade; the country that made such a tax law would immediately be punished by the world financial community withdrawing capital from it. To be effective, it presumably would have to be enacted by all countries in the world, or at least the leading powers, which could then impose it on the rest of the world. The Tobin tax proposal is a mirage.
Apart from the Tobin tax, ATTAC advanced three other propositions at the World Social Forum: the reform of the World Bank and IMF; a global commission to slow down multinationals and increase competition; and "a procedure of mediation for countries of the 'Third World' in debt, where creditors and debtors should name their representatives and who then have to come to an agreement in regard to an arbitrator". All this was to be achieved through "dialogue" with governments and international institutions like the Fund and Bank.
This understanding is also reflected in the work of one of ATTAC's leading lights, Susan George, who argues against a write-off of the Third World debt, and instead for its "creative" renegotiation. She indeed defends the institution of the IMF: "Should the South seek to replace or abolish the IMF? Even if such a Herculean feat were possible, this strikes me as the wrong goal, precisely because the Fund is supra-national and because it is an instrument. If enough pressure and political skill were applied, it could become an instrument for governments more enlightened than that of the United States under Reagan." While the intellectuals of ATTAC prominently occupied platforms and press conferences at each major post-Seattle protest, their actual politics starkly contrasts that of the protesters who called for writing off the Third World debt or "smashing the IMF".
Nor does ATTAC have much in common with the traditional trade union goal of defending jobs. In a May 2001 document (The rules of the new shareholding capitalism), ATTAC upholds the right of the sack: "Clearly, the right to capitalist property includes the right to hire and fire. The question is knowing up to what point. As far as we are concerned, we want job-cuts to be the last resort, once all other possibilities of guaranteeing the survival of the company have been exhausted."
For ATTAC the militant anti-'globalisation' protests failed in a crucial sense: they lacked the 'constructive' development of 'alternatives'. According to Christophe Aguiton of ATTAC, "The failure of Seattle was the inability to come up with a common agenda, a global alliance at the world level to fight against globalisation". Hence the need for WSF. Says Bernard Cassens, the first president of ATTAC, "We are not just protesters, our ambition is to propose credible alternatives to show that another world is possible by once more putting the economy and finance at the service of society."
To whom were these alternatives to be proposed, in whose eyes were they to be "credible"? Evidently, to those in charge of the existing world. ATTAC has been courted by various European social democratic governments: "In September last year (2001) the French prime minister, Lionel Jospin, and the German chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, both facing closely fought elections in the near future, agreed to set up a joint working party on how to regulate financial markets. The leadership of ATTAC France have held several meetings with Jospin's chief of staff. The French National Assembly passed a resolution in November supporting the Tobin tax on international financial speculation. Perhaps because of this courtship, the ATTAC leadership did not mobilise its considerable influence against the war in Afghanistan. This courtship will continue at Porto Alegre. Among the notables present will be Danielle Mitterrand, widow of the former French president." It is alleged that at various forums ATTAC have intervened to exclude discussion of issues such as Iraq and Afghanistan, and prevent discussion of state racism, immigrant rights, and explicit references to fascism and Islamophobia.
Indeed ATTAC sees no wrong in receiving funds from ruling quarters in Europe. The French business daily Les Echos (10/1/02) reported that "Last year ATTAC received 300,000 Euros in grants alone. Among the contributors were the European Commission (of the EU), the French government's Department of Social Economy, the National Ministry of Education and Culture and a whole host of local governments." According to the daily Le Monde (1/2/02), "ATTAC and Le Monde Diplomatique received 80,000 Euros from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs to help them organise the World Social Forum." Les Echos (1/2/02) comments accurately that "The financing of the NGOs, whose role is not always transparent, often comes from multinational corporations who prefer to back them discreetly so as to be able to use them for their own purposes. It would appear that these are two opposing ideologies. In fact, more and more these ideologies are becoming intertwined."
Of course, ATTAC's construction experts ignore the fact that a genuine alternative cannot merely be mounted on top of the existing structure, but must be preceded by clearing away the burden of the past.