The international movement against capitalist globalisation has been
globally visible for nearly a decade now. It started with the Chiapas
rising of January 1994 and the French public sector strikes of
November_December 1995, and exploded onto the global stage at the
Seattle protests in November 1999. It then enjoyed a period of dynamic
expansion through the launch of the World Social Forum (WSF) in Porto
Alegre, Brazil, in January 2001, the massive confrontation at the G8
summit in Genoa in July 2001, and the first European Social Forum in
Florence in November 2002. The culmination was the enormous
demonstrations against the war in Iraq between February and April 2003.
Subsequently, however, there has not been the same forward impetus.
Indeed, increasingly centrifugal pressures and even a degree of
disarray have become evident. [1]

The seventh World Social Forum, held in Nairobi, Kenya, in January
2007, may have marked a turning point. The forum was far from being a
disaster, despite the questionable decision to hold it in a country
with weak social movements. Some 46,000 people participated, the
majority from Kenya itself and around a quarter from the rest of
Africa—no mean achievement, given the poverty and vast distances of the
continent. The coming together of activists involved movements from
across Africa and the rest of the Global South, as well as from the
North, generated some of the energy on display at the earlier world and
European forums. And the opening and closing marches, from the slum
settlements of Kibera and Kariobongi respectively, did offer a vivid
sense of the convergence of global struggles, even if they were
relatively small.

Nevertheless, the forum was also crippled by internal controversy. Many
local and foreign activists expressed the view, summarised by one of
the organisers, Onyango Oloo, national coordinator of the Kenya Social
Forum, that “the event gave rise to disturbing and negative tendencies
such as commercialisation, militarisation and authoritarian and
undemocratic decision-making”. [2] Particular anger was caused by the
sponsorship of the forum by a mobile phone company, the high entrance
fees charged to Kenyan participants, the dominance of catering by elite
local hospitality firms such as the Windsor and Norfolk, and the
pervasive presence of the police and military. The tensions climaxed
when a coalition of Kenyan slum_dwellers and foreign activists led by
Trevor Ngwane of the South African Anti-Privatisation Forum stormed the
Windsor restaurant, owned by John Michuki, minister of internal
security (and known by Kenyans as Kimendeero, the crusher, because of
his role for the British colonial regime during the 1950s Mau Mau
rebellion), and redistributed its contents. Oloo paints a damning
insider’s portrait of the undemocratic way in which the forum was run.
He tells of “a political evaluation of the WSF” by “perhaps the most
high profile member of the organising committee” which refers to
“glue-sucking urchins from Korogocho” (a slum in northern Nairobi),
while dismissing most of the critics of the process as “condescending
Trotskyites from the North”. [3] The Filipino intellectual and activist Walden Bello, one of the movement’s most consistent strategic thinkers, writes, “There was a strong sense of going backward rather than forward in Nairobi”. [4]

Italian trade unionist Bruno Ciccaglione criticises what he calls “the
tendencies…to transform the WSF into a folklorist/commercial event”,
but argues that these are only symptoms. “The real problem” is the
divergence in what is happening to the different movements that were
the driving force in the WSF process:

On the one side the European movements, able to produce large
mobilisations and concrete victories in past years, are today in a deep
crisis and do not look capable to have unitary and common mobilisations
at a continental level, and, sometimes, like Italy, even at a national
level. On the other side the Latin American movements, very strong at
the moment, are living an interesting and successful period…but they
are a lot more concentrated on their own continent rather than on a
worldwide perspective. [5]

This loss of impetus can be traced in the trajectory of the most
powerful anti-capitalist organisation in Europe, Attac France. Founded
in 1998 to campaign for the regulation of financial speculation, it
initially grew explosively, attaining a membership of 30,000 by 2001,
and spawning affiliates in many other countries. However, Attac’s
membership stagnated in 2002-4 and then started to decline, falling to
21,000 in 2006. This reflected an increasingly bitter internal crisis
that drove Attac to the verge of a split by the end of last year. [6]

There are in fact a number of issues that we need to analyse to begin
to understand this sense of crisis in the European movement. There are
inherent difficulties with common mobilisations, there are weaknesses
in the methods and practices of the social forum movement, and there
are political problems that have emerged in the process of developing
the wider movements. This article aims to help develop this
understanding. Its focus is largely on Europe because this is the
region that we know best and it is here that the crisis in the
anti-capitalist movement is most visible.

 The dialectic of national and global

Global capitalism is subject to what Leon Trotsky called the law of
uneven and combined development. So too are the movements that resist
it. The anti-capitalist movement developed certain key national bases
during its initial phase of dynamic expansion. The Al Qaida attacks on
New York and Washington on 11 September 2001 crippled the North
American coalition of activists that had been responsible for the
Seattle protests and had expanded rapidly thereafter. Fortunately, an
axis had already developed through the first WSF in Porto Alegre
between Attac in France and a coalition of Brazilian NGOs and social
movements (notably the MST landless labourers’ movement and the CUT
trade union federation), which gave the movement a stable global
framework. A powerful third partner came from the explosive development
of the social forum movement in Italy, under the inspiration of the WSF
and hugely accelerated by the confrontation at the Genoa G8 summit in
July 2001. [7] Others played an important role—for instance the Indian
organisers of the most successful WSF to date, in Mumbai in January
2004—but the most politically important relationships were between
these three partners.

Relations within the Franco-Italian-Brazilian trinity were never
exactly harmonious. Neither Attac nor its partners in the Brazilian
based WSF organising committee were happy about the high profile
involvement of the Partito della Rifondazione Comunista (the Refounded
Communist Party) in the Italian movement. Bernard Cassen, first
president of Attac, was openly critical of the emphasis on the war at
the first European Social Forum in Florence in November 2002. [8] That
emphasis also drew the Italians closer in 2001-3 to the emerging
anti-war movement in Britain—the object of much mistrust from both
Attac and various autonomists because of the role of the radical left
in its leadership. Nevertheless, these tensions were relatively easy to
manage till after Florence and the anti-war protests of early 2003.

Greater internal polarisation became visible in 2003-4, reaching a
crescendo at the third European Social Forum in London in October 2004.
In part it involved a natural process of political differentiation. As
the movement developed, it confronted increasingly demanding questions
about how to pursue the struggle both against neoliberalism and against
the imperialist offensive mounted by the United States and its allies.
The diverging responses led to the crystallisation of distinct
political tendencies within the movement—a reformist right wing,
focused on Attac and its international network, seeking a return to a
more regulated capitalism; autonomists who claimed to be transcending
traditional debates on the left and building localised alternatives to
capitalism in the here and now; and a radical left seeking to get rid
of capitalism altogether. Such a clash of different political
perspectives was inevitable, though debate was often obfuscated by the
tendency of the right wing to use autonomist language and even (as at
the London European Social Forum) to ally with the autonomists against
the left. [9]

But the subsequent evolution of the movement has shown it has other
problems. A key characteristic of the anti-capitalist movement has been
its transnational character (hence it was always a misnomer to call it
the “anti-globalisation movement”, since it has from its inception been
the most international of movements: for those reluctant to apply the
label “anti-capitalist”, “the movement for another globalisation” and
“altermondialiste movement” are much better alternatives). But this
poses the problem of how it pursues a genuinely transnational struggle.
International mobilisations against G8 summits and World Trade
Organisation meetings are one answer, but these are intermittent and
artificial events, and are too vulnerable to the contingencies of
location (which tend, precisely because of the protests, to be ever
more remote) to be the basis for a sustained movement.

Opposition to the war in Iraq offered a genuinely universal unifying
issue. No wonder, then, that 15 February 2003 represents a historic
peak of global mass protest. But the bulk of the movement did not
persist with anti-war mobilisation once Baghdad had fallen on 9 April
2003. There were a variety of reasons for this. As we have seen, one
very influential actor, Attac, regarded the war as a diversion from the
real priority of opposing neoliberal globalisation. Moreover, in much
of continental Europe the peace movements also gave up serious anti-war
campaigning. This reflected their origins as pacifist groupings
campaigning against nuclear weapons during the Cold War. Ideologically
and temperamentally they were ill-equipped to respond to a conflict
pitting American imperialism against enemies it portrayed as
“Islamo-fascist”, and so threw in the towel with some relief.

In the US itself the luxury of not talking about the war wasn’t
available, and the US anti-war movement has mobilised on a very
impressive scale. A series of historic demonstrations and the stand of
anti-war troops and their families have helped to turn US opinion
overwhelmingly against the war, a feat many had felt was impossible.
But from the start the anti-war movement was divided. There was Answer,
led by pro-North Korean Stalinists who have subsequently themselves
split, and there was the much broader and more mainstream United for
Peace and Justice. Many of this organisation’s leaders and supporters
allowed themselves to be diverted into John Kerry’s presidential
campaign in 2004, in the vain hope that even a pro-war Democrat would
be better than George Bush. The distraction was doubly damaging because
of the demoralisation caused by Kerry’s defeat. It is only in the past
year or so that the American anti-war movement has begun to recover
from these setbacks.

There were, of course, exceptions to the pattern of dropping the issue
of the war once it had started. The Spanish anti-war movement, though
never well coordinated at a national level, played an important role in
turning the tragedy of the Madrid train bombings into a rout for the
warmongering Aznar government in March 2004. The movements in Turkey
and Greece have continued to make an impact on their national political
scene. But the most important exception has been the Stop the War
Coalition in Britain, a new kind of anti-war movement founded
specifically to oppose the “war on terrorism”, whose radical left
leadership has been able to sustain a broad coalition with considerable
popular support and mobilising power.

At an international level, Focus on the Global South, whose roots lie
in the 1990s campaigns against trade and debt from which the
anti_capitalist movement emerged, has shown a very clear understanding
of the connections between neoliberalism and imperialism and has
devoted considerable effort to maintaining a global anti-war network.
The annual Cairo Conference has built powerful links between the
opposition in the most important Arab state and some Northern anti-war
coalitions. But, important though these different initiatives are, and
despite the fact that there is deep seated popular opposition
everywhere to Bush’s “long war”, the fact remains that there is
currently no real global movement against the war.

No other issue has emerged to replace the war as a transnational
mobilising focus. The idea was floated at a meeting in Genoa in July
2003 of building “a social 15 February”. It was a wonderful idea, but,
in the circumstances, utopian. Everyone, wherever they were, could
campaign against the war in Iraq. But neoliberal attacks necessarily
unfold on a national terrain. Even when they reflect global or (within
the European Union) continental initiatives by capital, the timing and
content of their implementation are shaped by the nation-state
concerned. Taking up what in the European movement has come to be
called “the social question” therefore has a centrifugal logic.

Now in many ways this is a welcome development. The old establishment
taunt at the anti-capitalist movement was that it was an elitist
travelling circus. But the movement has in fact sunk real, national
roots in some parts of the world. In Europe this has happened in a
number of countries, notably France, Italy, Germany, Greece and
Britain. But this has produced diverging political priorities in
different countries.

For example, there has been a long-running debate between the movements
in France and Britain over the relative priority of the war and “the
social question”. In part, this reflects real political disagreements
arising from different appreciations of the relationship between
neoliberalism and imperialism. [10]

At the same time, the different socio-political realities of the two
countries mean that the issues differ in their mobilising power. France
is the European country that has witnessed the most sustained
resistance to neoliberalism, with social explosions in 1995, 2003,
2005, and 2006. In Britain, perhaps because neoliberalism was imposed
here first and most comprehensively under the Thatcher government in
the 1980s, there is a degree of popular fatalism about the possibility
of stopping or reversing the inroads of the market that has, for
example, made it difficult to mount effective mass agitation against
the Bolkestein Directive aimed at privatising public services in the
European Union. The war in Iraq has, by contrast, generated enormous
popular anger that continues to bring large demonstrations onto the
streets.

These difficulties have not made cross-border mobilisations against
neoliberalism impossible. On the contrary, respectable altermondialiste
contingents took part in protests in Brussels in March 2005 and
Strasbourg in February 2006. But the reach of these mobilisations was
limited to north western Europe and participants numbered in thousands,
not tens or hundreds of thousands. This pattern will no doubt change
with the further development of social resistance to
neoliberalism—Britain included, since increasing pressure on living
standards may lead to a revival in workers’ struggles here—but this
future prospect doesn’t alter the present limitations of the movement.

 The troubled return of politics

Greater engagement by the movements with their national realities has a
further complicating effect. The more anti-capitalist coalitions find
themselves operating in a national arena, the harder it is to evade the
political field. But one of the founding myths of the movement is its
separation from political parties, reflected in the famous ban on their
participation in social forums in the WSF Charter of Principles. This
was a symptom of what Daniel Bensaïd has aptly called:

A “social illusion”...an illusion in the self-sufficiency of social
movements reflected in the experiences after Seattle (1999) and the
first World Social Forum in Porto Alegre (2001). Simplifying somewhat,
I call this the “utopian moment” of social movements, which took
different forms: utopias based on the regulation of free markets;
Keynesian utopias; and above all neo_libertarian utopias, in which the
world can be changed without taking power or making do with
counter-powers (John Holloway, Toni Negri, Richard Day). [11]

The ideology of autonomous social movements developed during the 1970s
and 1980s, as the left and the organised working class suffered serious
defeats. It is therefore not surprising that it should be a major
influence on activists mobilising against neoliberalism. Many of them
were veterans of these defeats. They are often based in
non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that, by virtue of their social
role, have a complex relationship of both distance from and dependence
on official politics, or, as in France and Italy, they are based in the
broad activist coalitions through which the altermondialiste movement
began to develop in the course of the 1990s. [12] As time has gone on,
this ideology has become a growing obstacle to the further development
of the movement.

This can be seen in all three countries of the dominant trinity. In
Brazil the ban on parties in the Porto Alegre charter was hypocrisy
from the start. The WSF depended on a tacit understanding between its
founders and the Workers’ Party, which was, at the time of the WSF
launch, in opposition at the federal level but in control of the city
of Porto Alegre and the state of Rio Grande do Sul of which it is the
capital. The election of Workers’ Party leader Lula as president in
October 2002 posed an acute problem for the movement both locally and
internationally, since he stuck to the neoliberal economic policies of
his predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso.

The increasing integration of the Workers’ Party leadership in
Brazilian capitalism caused revulsion among many activists and
intellectuals previously loyal to the party. [13] The Porto Alegre WSF in
January 2005 was marked by a visible polarisation, with Lula addressing
the forum at its start and Hugo Chávez speaking to a huge rally of the
young at its end. That put the Porto Alegre charter on life support and
dramatised the choice facing the left in Latin America between a
regional version of Blairism and the search for 21^st century socialism.

In France the pressure of the political field has been both more
complex and more demanding. Probably the most important single impact
that the anti-capitalist movement has had in a national arena was the
role altermondialistes played in the campaign that defeated the
neoliberal European Constitutional Treaty in the French referendum of
29 May 2005. Considerable credit must go to the leadership of Attac for
identifying the issue of the constitution as a major challenge to the
movement. But a decisive role in that movement was played by the
traditional political organisations of the left, despite the
contribution of Attac and other altermondialiste groups.

The French Socialist Party split as its rank and file rebelled against
its leadership—a development that was matched in the CGT, the biggest
trade union federation. A leading role within the national network of
29 May collectives was played by the Socialist Party left (and not so
left) alongside the Communist Party and the Ligue Communiste
Révolutionnaire (LCR). This was, as Stathis Kouvelakis put it, “the
triumph of the political”: “The real significance of the referendum
process was the popular mobilisation which took hold of political
questions on a scale not seen since the early 1970s”. [14]

Building on this victory has, alas, proved very difficult. A strong
will developed after the referendum to continue the coalition that had
delivered the No vote and to give it a political expression by running
a unitary anti_neoliberal candidate in the presidential elections of
April-May 2007. This was, however, sabotaged by the two most important
political organisations of the radical left, though they did so by
pursuing opposed strategies. The Communist Party sought to embrace and
indeed in many cases take over the 29 May collectives in order to gain
their support for the candidacy of the party’s general secretary,
Marie_George Buffet. The LCR, by contrast, kept aloof and concentrated
on preparing the presidential campaign of its candidate, Olivier
Besancenot, a stance it justified on the grounds that the collectives
had failed to rule out in principle participating in a social_liberal
coalition government headed by the Socialist Party.

The result was chaos, rancour and division in the collectives. Instead
of a unitary anti-neoliberal candidate running in the first round of
the presidential elections on 22 April, the political fragmentation on
the radical left actually increased compared to the first round five
years before, with José Bové running as the candidate of the rump of
the collectives against Buffet, Besancenot and two other Trotskyist
candidates. The cohesion of the organised left has also been weakened,
with powerful minorities in both the Communist Party and the LCR
opposed to their parties’ official positions.

The behaviour of the political organisations has increased hostility to
parties and thereby strengthened the ideology of autonomous social
movements. Besancenot’s success in coming fifth in the first round with
over
4 percent of the vote, well ahead of Buffet and Bové, salvaged
something from this debacle, but it places a heavy responsibility on
the LCR to take the initiative in building a genuinely united radical
left.

The crisis of the French radical left also affected Attac. The
replacement in 2002 of Cassen as president of Attac France by his
chosen heir Jacques Nikonoff marked the beginning of an increasingly
bitter faction fight. It pitted the two of them against a loose left
that saw Attac as an important ingredient in a broader coalition of
social movements rather than, as Susan George (sponsor of the
opposition slate for the Attac leadership) put it, “a hierarchical,
top-down pyramidal organisation with a strong executive, able to give
orders to its troops and eventually to serve their private political
ambitions on the French left”. [15]

Cassen and Nikonoff made an abortive attempt to run an altermondialiste
list in the European parliamentary elections in May 2004 and sought
unsuccessfully to keep Attac local committees out of the collectives
formed to oppose the European Constitution a year later. But, as
Raphaël Wintrebert has documented in his important study of Attac, the
shockingly autocratic methods used by Cassen and particularly by
Nikonoff were an important factor in the developing polarisation. After
the referendum victory Attac imploded into a fierce internal struggle
that became worse after the National Administrative Council elections
held in June 2006 were denounced by the defeated left opposition on
grounds of fraud (their claims were upheld by two internal inquiries).
The opposition won the restaged elections the following December but
Cassen and Nikonoff showed their intention to continue the struggle by
forming their own network, Avenir d’Attac. [16]

It was in Italy that the troubling question of the political
representation of the social movements has had the most disastrous
consequences. Fausto Bertinotti, general secretary of Rifondazione,
closely identified his party with the social forums during their heady
expansion between Genoa and Florence. He brilliantly used the abstract
and ambiguous vocabulary of autonomism to give the impression that
Rifondazione fully identified with the most radical ambitions of the
anti-capitalist movement, without committing himself to anything very
definite. But, as the social forums lost impetus, Bertinotti turned
back towards mainstream politics.

He prepared the way for the party’s return to the centre-left (from
which it had broken in 1998) with a campaign in 2004 committing
Rifondazione to pacifism and opposition to political violence. The
logical culmination of the process was Rifondazione’s entry into the
centre-left government formed by Romano Prodi after he narrowly won the
Italian general election in April 2006. Ironically, in the light of
Bertinotti’s earlier pacifist professions, this led to Rifondazione
voting to support Italy’s participation in the Nato military mission in
Afghanistan and expelling a far left senator who abstained in one
parliamentary division on this issue.

The effect on the anti-war movement in Italy, hitherto the largest in
Europe, was nothing short of catastrophic. Piero Bernocchi of the left
union Cobas described the situation at the end of 2006:

There is now a big split in the Italian anti-war movement. A first
part doesn’t give to the occupation of Afghanistan the same importance
as the occupation of Iraq; to avoid going against Prodi’s government,
it didn’t want to organise anything when the government decided to
maintain the troops in Afghanistan and this part is for the Italian
troops in Lebanon. The second part is for withdrawal from Afghanistan
but not from Lebanon. The third part, in which Cobas are, is for the
end of all the Italian war missions (Afghanistan, Lebanon, Kosovo,
etc). [17]

The consequences of these divisions were visible on the streets of
Rome. On the first anniversary of the invasion of Iraq in March 2004 a
million people had marched in Rome. Three years later only 30,000
demonstrated. Given the central role that the Italian social forums had
played for the anti-capitalist movement globally at the time of Genoa
and Florence, this was a disastrous development.

If the French case showed the difficulty in gaining political
representation for the social movements and of overcoming the divisions
among the established left organisations, the Italian situation
highlighted the dependence of movements on parties. Despite all the
talk of autonomous social movements, when Bertinotti moved rightwards,
he pulled the Italian movement along with him, fragmenting it in the
process. Both examples illustrate, unfortunately in negative terms,
that movements seeking to challenge neoliberalism and imperialism
cannot escape the political field.

 Fragmentation and drift

These political divisions were greatly reinforced by the increasingly
dysfunctional way in which the anti-capitalist movement organises
itself. From Seattle onwards the principle has prevailed that decisions
are taken in assemblies open to all and on the basis of consensus. This
method of decision making did have some advantages in the early phase
of the movement’s development. Giving everyone a veto helped to build
trust in a new coalition involving actors from very different
backgrounds and it bypassed the problem of deciding how to weigh the
votes of different organisations, which would have been raised by a
system of delegate democracy.

Nevertheless, there are very high costs to this supposedly “horizontal”
form of democracy. It is subject to what was long ago identified in the
American women’s movement as “the tyranny of structurelessness”: in the
absence of formal structure, informal elites emerge to ensure that the
movement actually functions. [18] This has been very visible in the
European Social Forum (ESF) process, where an alliance of the French
and Italian altermondialiste coalitions has largely dominated decision
making.

From the start, securing consensus has frequently involved backdoor
bargaining to arrive at compromises; recalcitrant minorities have
sometimes been bullied into not exercising their right to veto
decisions; chair_people, seeking to manage difficult and often lengthy
meetings, have always sought to steer discussion, sometimes in a very
directive way. Moreover, the quickly established procedure of taking
decisions at the European Preparatory Assembly, whose venue shifts each
time from one European city to another, tended to ensure the dominance
of large organisations—trade unions, NGOs, the different branches of
Attac, political parties—with the resources to send delegates to these
meetings.

Instead of recognition of these defects, leading to a serious attempt
to improve the democratic functioning of the process, there has been a
marked degeneration. In the lead-up to the London ESF, Italian and to a
lesser extent French delegates persistently intervened to support the
opposition of a fairly marginal grouping of autonomists to the British
coalition responsible for bringing the forum to London, and acquiesced
in the attempts violently to disrupt the forum and the closing rally.
Subsequently, however, the situation became substantially worse.

The Athens ESF, held in May 2006, had to contend with deep political
divisions. On one side was the Greek Social Forum, a coalition of far
left sects sponsored by the radical left party Synaspismos and by the
Franco_Italian axis, and on the other was Genoa 2001, involving the
Greek Socialist Workers Party and the Greens, and linked to the Greek
trade union federation. The result of a bitterly contested preparatory
process was the smallest ESF to date, where even the large concluding
demonstration was marred by a row over the order of march that saw
violent attacks by Greek Social Forum “stewards” on the anti-war
contingent.

None of this stopped the dominant forces in the ESF process from
proclaiming Athens a success. But the difficulties that they have faced
in finding a viable national coalition willing to host the fifth ESF
were symptomatic—it took till April 2007, nearly a year after Athens,
to reach agreement that the next Forum will take place in Scandinavia
in September 2008, and even then the venue—either the Danish capital,
Copenhagen, or the Swedish city of Malmö—remains undecided. No wonder
attendance at European Preparatory Assemblies has dwindled, as many
participants have voted with their feet, leaving the Franco-Italian
hard core and their hangers on to dominate. Despite the growing
evidence of crisis, however, this group has, ever since the London ESF,
responded by seeking organisational solutions, reflected by a growing
obsession with “methodology” that has spawned yet more all-European
meetings and thereby made the decision_making process even more opaque
and unaccountable.

The same preoccupation with procedure was evident in the faction fight
inside Attac, where the leaders of the opposition (many of them, such
as Pierre Khalfa, prominent in the ESF process) made what Wintrebert
calls the “important ‘strategic’ error” of arguing that “it wasn’t
fundamental problems that divided the leading members [of Attac], but
only a problem of the ‘style of leadership’.” This conceded the
initiative to Nikonoff and Cassen, who were much more willing to
introduce political issues, such as their defence of French republican
“laicity” against the Muslim veil. [19]

The problems created by this kind of organisational overload were
reinforced by the increasing influence of the conception of the social
forums advanced by Cassen and another of the founders of the WSF, the
Brazilian Chico Whitaker. For them, the social forums do not belong to
a movement, or even the “movements of movements”. Rather, they are “a
socially horizontal space” where different actors can converge to
discuss and share perspectives. [20] In particular—and this is a constant
source of puzzlement to participants in social forums who are
uninitiated into these mysteries—the international forums don’t take
decisions. This risks alienating activists who want to be part of the
movement’s decision-making process and who are often radicalised partly
by the way neoliberalism has hollowed out democratic political forms at
national level. It is also off-putting because it can turn the social
forums into talking shops pure and simple. An interplay between
discussion, decision and mobilisation is the lifeblood of any real
movement.

The left within the movement has sought to bypass the problem by
inventing the Assembly of the Social Movements, where different social
movements get together at the end of each social forum and adopt an
action plan of mobilisations. The device immediately attracted the
hostility of Whitaker, Cassen and others on the right of the movement.
Their response has involved celebrating “diversity” by fragmenting
social forums around different “thematic priorities”. Thus the fifth
WSF in Brazil in January 2005 was spread along the banks of the river
Guiba in Porto Alegre with the division of the site into 11 distinct
“thematic terrains”. As we wrote at the time:

Space A was devoted to autonomous thought, B to defending
diversity, plurality, and identities, C to art and creation, and so on.
The effect was tremendously to fragment the forum. If you were
interested in a particular subject—say, culture or war or human
rights—you could easily spend the entire four days in one relatively
small area without coming into contact with people interested in
different subjects. [21]

Even though European activists reacted negatively to that WSF, the
drive to fragment the Social Forums was used to justify the absence of
any unifying events at the Athens ESF. Even figures generally on the
left of the movement gave way to the new cult of diversity. Piero
Bernocchi argued at an European preparatory meeting in Istanbul in
September 2005 that the altermondialiste movement was a “rainbow
coalition” that could not take decisions over priorities. But the very
strength of the movement from Seattle onwards lay in the convergence of
different coalitions in a common struggle against neoliberalism and
war. Had the view Bernocchi expressed in Istanbul prevailed before
Florence, 15 February would never have happened.

Fragmentation reached the level of caricature in Nairobi. Cramped
physical conditions and organisational chaos meant that there was no
repetition of the physical partition into “thematic terrains”. But the
official programme concluded with “big forums of struggles and
alternatives” meeting separately to discuss 22 different themes,
followed by “a tree-planting event”. The left successfully insisted on
ending instead with an unscheduled Assembly of the Social Movements,
which at least agreed on a common schedule of future mobilisations.

But the assemblies are organised within the prevailing ideology of
autonomous social movements and therefore reflect the weaknesses
already discussed. As in other cases, the method of consensus decision
making tends to ensure the dominance of “insiders” with resources and
connections. The agenda and order of speakers are fixed in advance by
meetings that, though theoretically open to all, are run by veterans
and those with the greatest resources and stamina. There is very rarely
any real discussion at the assemblies themselves—and never any voting.
This rules out the possibility of any serious popular discussion or
development of strategy. They do serve a real function and represent a
sincere effort by those who organise them to give some coherence to the
movement. But they don’t provide the kind of democratic decision making
the movement needs.

Many activists have grown increasingly impatient with the fragmentation
and drift that have come to prevail. At last year’s WSF in Bamako,
Mali, Samir Amin of Egypt and François Houtart of Belgium initiated an
appeal. It “aims at consolidating the gains made” at the social forums
by “defining and promoting alternatives capable of mobilising social
and political forces. The goal is a radical transformation of the
capitalist system”. [22]

Amin, a leading radical dependency theorist in the 1960s and 1970s, has
been a key figure in pressing for a much greater strategic focus for
the anti-capitalist movement:

There is no room for self-congratulation about these successes [of
the movement]. They remain insufficient to shift the balance of social
and political forces in favour of the popular classes, and therefore
remain vulnerable to the extent that the movement has not moved from
defensive resistance to the offensive… Progress is and will be
difficult. For it implies (i) the radicalisation of struggles and (ii)
their convergence in diversity…in common action plans, which imply a
strategic political vision, the definition of immediate and more
distant objectives (the “perspective” that defines the alternative).
The radicalisation of struggles is not that of the rhetoric of their
discourses, but their articulation of an alternative project with which
they propose to replace the prevailing systems of social
power…convergence can only be the product of a “politicisation” (in the
good sense of the word) of the fragmented movements. This necessity is
resisted by the discourse of “apolitical civil society”, an ideology
imported directly from the United States, which continues to exert its
ravages. [23]

Amin, who goes on to criticise “the theorists of autonomist currents
[who] affirm that we can change the world without taking power”, for
denying the necessity of a strategic convergence of struggles, also
notes that the Bamako Appeal had “irritated the WSF ‘Secretariat’.”
Indeed a seminar on the appeal in Nairobi saw a fierce clash when Chico
Whitaker objected strongly to Trevor Ngwane’s critical defence of the
appeal and criticisms of the fragmentation and absence of strategy in
the WSF. But it was clear that large numbers of activists were worried
about the lack of direction of the movement. The response of the WSF
international council was to issue a call for worldwide mobilisations
to coincide with the big business World Economic Forum in January
2008—a decision that both contradicted the ideology of the social
forums as simply “spaces” and implied that a summons to action from the
stratosphere could somehow magically give unity and impetus to the
movement.

 Moving forward

It is important not to take too cataclysmic a view of the current
condition of the anti-capitalist movement. Above all, the other side
isn’t in too good a state. The World Trade Organisation’s Doha round,
launched in November 2001 and intended radically to deepen global
capitalism’s reach into national economies and to demonstrate the unity
of the world’s ruling classes after 9/11, has run to a halt. True, the
anti-capitalist movement can’t claim the chief credit for this, which
lies with the deep and persisting divisions between the United States
and the European Union and the emergence of a new bloc of powerful
Third World states, the Group of 20. Moreover, both Washington and
Brussels are seeking to bypass the deadlock by negotiating bilateral
economic partnership agreements with individual countries.
Nevertheless, the disarray in the World Bank with Paul Wolfowitz’s
sacking symbolises the larger difficulties faced by the neoliberal
camp.

The plight of the imperialist offensive launched by the Bush
administration after 11 September 2001 is, of course, much more
serious. US failure to impose its will on Iraq led to the
administration’s defeat in the mid-term elections in November 2006 and
goaded Bush into ordering a military “surge” that shows no signs of
succeeding. America and its Nato allies are mired in a long_term
guerrilla war in Afghanistan that may prove equally intractable. There
is a crisis of legitimacy for US global hegemony that will limit
Washington’s ability to exercise “soft” ideological power as well.

A poll of 26,000 people in 25 countries for the BBC World Service in
January 2007 revealed that 73 percent disapproved of the Iraq War,
while “majorities across the 25 countries also disapprove of US
handling of Guantanamo detainees (67 percent), the Israeli-Hezbollah
war (65 percent), Iran’s nuclear programme (60 percent), global warming
(56 percent), and North Korea’s nuclear programme (54 percent)”. 49
percent of those polled said that the US is playing a mainly negative
role in the world. [24] This erosion of America’s global standing has real
effects. Commenting on US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice’s shift
towards a more compromising position on issues such as North Korean
nukes, the Financial Times explained:

Ms Rice has been forced by America’s drastically compromised
situation in Iraq into making changes from a position of weakness.
“When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” said a former
senior diplomat in the Clinton administration. “But, because of Iraq,
these guys don’t have much of a hammer any more”. [25]

The weakening of US hegemony isn’t just a consequence of the ham_fisted
arrogance of the Bush administration. It is an achievement of those who
have opposed the global state of exception proclaimed by Bush after
9/11. Pride of place here must go to the resistance in Iraq itself, but
the international anti-war movement can claim a share of credit.

Washington’s descent into the Iraqi quagmire has in turn created a
space in which resistance can develop elsewhere. The most important
case in point here is Latin America, especially in Venezuela and
Bolivia where the interaction between mass movements and political
leaders has produced governments that have begun, in however hesitant
and inconsistent a way, to pursue a logic that breaks with
neoliberalism.

None of these very positive features of the present situation alter or
remove the difficulties that we have discussed above. What they do cast
into question is any suggestion that the balance of forces is shifting
decisively to the right or that the cycle of struggles that began in
the mid-1990s is drawing to a close. Even in Europe, where the movement
is in greatest trouble, we are barely a year away from the massive
revolt by French students and trade unionists that smashed the CPE law
reducing the rights of young workers. The persistence of the neoliberal
offensive will undoubtedly produce more social explosions, particularly
if France’s new right wing president, Nicolas Sarkozy, carries out his
threat to drive through market “reforms”.

The critical issue is that posed by Samir Amin when he asks: “Does the
World Social Forum benefit popular struggles?” In other words, what is
the relationship between the anti-capitalist movement as an organised
force and mass resistance to neoliberalism and imperialism? The honest
answer is that is pretty variable and is likely to remain so. The
organisational implosion of the European movement does not make one
especially optimistic about the ESF. If the next forum does indeed take
place in Scandinavia, this will be in a region where anti-capitalist
resistance has been at a comparatively low level (with the exception of
the protests at the Gothenburg EU summit in June 2001). A Scandinavian
ESF will probably be the most right wing yet, dominated by NGOs and the
local branches of Attac.

The same need not be true of the WSF. Even in Nairobi there were, as we
have already suggested, hints of the explosion of energy that can be
generated by the convergence of different movements. Unfortunately, as
we have seen, the dominant forces in the WSF process are pushing in the
opposite direction, and promoting fragmentation rather than what Amin
calls “convergence in diversity”. It is the duty of the left within the
anti_capitalist movement firmly to resist these tendencies. This
resistance, however, needs to be accompanied by an alternative strategy
that is informed by an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of
the movement to date.

This understanding has to involve an open break with the ideology of
autonomous social movements. Too often the left has taken its stand
within the framework of that ideology, whether for tactical reasons or
from principled agreement. But a break is required by an honest
appreciation of the interplay between political parties and social
movements. The truth is that cooperation between the two actually
strengthens both. However much retrospect is coloured by Bertinotti’s
subsequent right turn, the high points of the European movement at
Genoa and Florence were informed by this cooperation, involving not
merely Rifondazione but also smaller parties of the radical left such
as the LCR and the Socialist Workers Party as well as more radical
elements of Italy’s centre-left Left Democrats.

The same is true at a global level. The peak so far reached by the WSF
took place, not at any of the Porto Alegre Forums, but in Mumbai in
January 2004, infused as it was by both a strong anti-imperialist
consciousness and the movements of India’s vast poor. But the two key
organisations of the Indian left—the Communist Party (Marxist) and the
Communist Party of India—alongside various Maoist organisations, played
a critical role both in making the forum possible and in restraining
themselves from trying to dominate the forum or competing too openly
among themselves.

An honest reappraisal of the relationship between parties and movements
would allow the social forums to play to their strengths. The two most
successful forums—Florence and Mumbai—were ones where opposition to the
“war on terror” was a dominant theme. Saying this does not mean
returning to the tedious and sterile argument—either the war or the
“social question”. Opposition to both neoliberalism and war are
constitutive themes of the anti-capitalist movement. But recognition of
both the principled significance and the mobilising power of
anti-imperialism needs to be built into how the social forums operate.
This was proved by the success of last year’s “polycentric” WSF in
Caracas, Venezuela. It was taken for granted among the tens of
thousands of mainly Latin American activists assembled there that the
US poses a real and present threat to the gains being made by movements
in Bolivia, Venezuela and Ecuador. President Hugo Chávez echoed many
others when he spoke there of the importance of the movement against
the Iraq war in weakening the US’s ability to act in what it regards
traditionally as its own backyard.

Yet the Caracas forum also showed up the limitations of the WSF
process. It should have been possible, for example, to launch a very
high profile, high powered campaign from the forum calling on all the
movements round the world to pledge defence of the gains of the
Chavista experience so far. Many present were suggesting it. But
because of the autonomist principles so jealously guarded by the WSF
leadership, no such centralised initiative was taken.

In breaking out of this impasse, it will be necessary to define
precisely what the radical left is within the movement. This is no
simple matter. The big Indian Communist parties, despite the very
positive role they played in the Mumbai WSF, participate in neoliberal
coalitions at the all-India and state levels: the Left Front government
in West Bengal has violently clashed with workers and peasants in
recent months. The sorry record of Rifondazione has already been
discussed. A much more principled organisation, the LCR, has kept aloof
from the anti-capitalist movement as an organisation, because of its
acceptance of a version of the ideology of autonomous social movements
(although individual LCR members such as Christophe Aguiton, Pierre
Rousset and Sophie Zafari have played important roles in the movement
at global and/or European levels).

Documents of the left within the movement tend to espouse versions of
radical reformism. The Bamako Appeal’s first plank is, “For a
multipolar world founded on peace, LAW and negotiation”. [26] Amin’s
pronouncements are sometimes redolent of nostalgia for the high tide of
Third World nationalism between the 1950s and 1970s: “The
reconstruction of a ‘front of the countries and peoples of the South’
is one of the fundamental conditions for the emergence of ‘another
world’ not based on imperialist domination”. [27] Another important figure
on the left of the movement, Walden Bello of Focus on the Global South,
shows a similar approach in his calls for “deglobalisation”. [28] Such
formulations do not sufficiently address the reality that confronting
imperialism as a system will require global social transformation based
on the collective power and organisation of the oppressed and exploited
in the North as well as the South.

None of this should prevent cooperation among different forces on the
left seeking to give the anti-capitalist movement a more coherent and
strategically focused direction. Such cooperation is essential. But it
needs to be accompanied by open debate about the nature of the enemy
that we are confronted with and of the alternatives that we should be
seeking. [29] Striking the right balance between disagreement and
cooperation once again requires a break with the ideology of autonomous
social movements.

This ideology conceives social movements as a neutral space somehow
beyond politics. But fighting neoliberalism and war is necessarily a
highly political affair, and nowhere is free of the antagonisms of
wider capitalist society. The development of the movements necessarily
generates political disagreements that cannot be kept separate from
party organisations. The emergence of new anti-capitalist political
formations that are at least partly the product of movements of
resistance—Portugal’s Left Bloc, the Left Party in Germany, Respect in
Britain—shows the extent to which activists recognise the need for a
political voice as part of the development of opposition to
neoliberalism and war.

We believe that the concept of the united front, developed by the
revolutionary Marxist tradition, provides a better guide to building
democratic, dynamic movements than does the model that has prevailed so
far. A united front involves the coming together of different forces
around a common but limited platform of action. Precisely because they
are different, these forces will have disagreements about political
programme; they may also differ over how to pursue the common actions
that have brought them together. But so long as they come together
round limited and relatively specific aims, such alliances can be
politically inclusive and maximise the chances of practical campaigning
agreement. Because they are focused round action, they can be a testing
ground for different tactics and strategies. This is the way to break
movements away from abstract position taking or sectarian point
scoring, so providing a framework in which political debate and
practical organising can fruitfully interplay.

Constructing such united fronts is not easy: it requires initiative and
clear leadership on the one hand, and openness and humility on the
other. But at a time when the anger against neoliberalism is growing
everywhere and so many people are reassessing their political
loyalties, it seems to us that the anti-capitalist left needs urgently
to try such methods if it is to reach out and connect with its
potential audience.

There is unlikely to be agreement between the different tendencies in
the movement in the short or medium term over general political
alternatives. But we can reach constructive agreement on the many
issues—opposition to neoliberalism and war—that unite a large spectrum
of forces. It is precisely this kind of unity in action that many
people are looking for in the current situation. Through the experience
of such campaigning, new political coalitions can emerge. Moreover, the
left within the movement, whether revolutionary or reformist, should
working together in order to fight to give the movement a more
strategic and focused direction.

Many of the ideas and arguments of the anti-capitalist movement have
gone mainstream in the seven long years since Seattle. Neoliberalism
has been widely discredited. The world’s “hyper-power” is in the
process of a terrible humiliation in the Middle East that will have
major repercussions for its ability to intervene and shape geopolitics.
In these circumstances the left has a responsibility to examine the
weaknesses as well as the strengths of the anti-capitalist movement as
it has functioned up to now, and not allow the movement to be trapped
in an impasse.

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