Monday, 30 November 2009
Friends : This reflective, thought-provoking, at points provocative,
and very easy-to-read essay on the WSF by Pierre Rousset, a member of
the executive committee of the Fourth International and as such, a
member of the WSF’s International Council, deserves to be widely read
– and discussed. Partly because it poses some hard questions; but
mostly because it is so rare that members of the International Council
actually reflect publicly on what they are supposedly governing (and
this, indeed, is something that Pierre does not talk about, at least
directly).
Apologies, therefore, for this late posting on this list; it was
originally published on November 9 2009 [1] and has been circulating quite
widely since then, and we at CACIM are therefore very late in doing so
here.
Pierre asks some very necessary questions. About structure, about
process, about organisational politics; and, very directly, to the
leadership of the WSF, even though they like to pretend that there is
no leadership. Among other things, he also makes clear that there are
certain kinds of organisations within the International Council that
should not be there (but stops short of asking them to ‘recuse’
themselves – to step down, just as judges are sometimes asked to do,
accepting that there is a massive conflict of interest). We all need
to debate and ask, and attempt to answer, these questions – including
those of us who work in such organisations. And, I believe, if we
agree then we also translate his suggestion into reality : Place
pressure on such organisations to step down from the International
Council, and on the International Council to not try and duck such
contradictions but to confront and address them.
He in particular mentions Church-related organisations (and raises the
very sensitive but necessary point that if equivalent organisations
from other religions had tried to join the Council, would they even
have been accepted ?), but he also points out the constantly growing
and very contradictory influence of big NGOs and of funding agencies.
Although he does at one point ask whether the WSF is a sustainable
model, in many ways the title given to the essay does not reveal its
focus (and maybe even draws attention away from it). As I see it, the
essay is more about whether the WSF can survive the multiple
contradictions it is facing. Yes, it’s true, this is in a sense also
about whether it is ‘sustainable’, but that is a very polite and
ambiguous way of posing things !
But the key issue that comes through to me from his essay is – in
large part as a result of these contradictions - how much the WSF has
become / is becoming a thing-unto-itself, disconnected from struggle
in the world out there, and how much it has become riddled with vested
interests. While I have, along with others, also celebrated the
emergence of the WSF and, in particular, the pattern of emergence it
has exhibited – almost like an organism, learning as it goes along – I
think it is only to the good of the Forum - and of this emergence - if
the contradictions are also spelt out. I am therefore taking the
liberty of adding a comment here.
In particular, I think that there are three other related, and
interrelated, points that Pierre does not raise but that compliment
his arguments, that need to be added – and that we all need to
address. One is the rise to dominance within the Forum of a class of
what are virtually professional-political functionaries, and the
manner in which this too is contributing to this disconnectedness and
the thing-unto-itself quality of the Forum now - and the contradiction
that this in itself poses. This is something that is always there in
political parties; here it is only that much larger, because of the
sheer size and spread of the WSF (yes, the WSF is bigger than any
political party, perhaps anywhere), and is that much more problematic
because of the Forum’s claim to be rooted in social movement.
Undoubtedly because they believe they are doing good, they have woven
diaphanous webs of influence and control that thread throughout the
Forum, its organisation, and its process; they are on (and often lead)
all its committees; and they run just about everything and in many
ways they are now so much a part of the machine that they have become
indispensible to the process. They – most of whom were already
functionaries within the civil organisations and movements that they
represent - have also aligned across ideologies, and we are probably
already past the stage where this web can be dismantled, unwoven. But
the question is what, then, should we do about this ?
Second, and as I have argued elsewhere, we need also to recognise the
growing power of the IC at a world level – and therefore, its
influence and impact. In particular, we need to recognise the social
and political reality that those who are in the leadership of the WSF
– in particular, as manifested in the membership of its International
Council – are also in the leadership of many other significant civil
alliances and coalitions at global, regional, and national levels; not
only among civil organisations but also among social and political
movements. In social and structural terms however, this is remarkably
similar to the case of the conventional corporate world, which Leslie
Sklair has described as the emergence of a ‘transnational capitalist
class’. [2] On the one hand, this prominence in national and global
society has been the driving logic behind the formation and expansion
of the IC; on the other, it makes the IC an extremely powerful body
(again, despite the WSF’s Charter and spokespersons insistently saying
that it does not see itself as a locus of power). In effect, it has
become a supra-board of the civil world. We need to read the
implications of this, and its implications for social movement and for
the possibilities of social transformation. The role of professional-
political functionaries, and of their webs of control, is of course
vital in this.
And third, the social reality of the Forum is that although it is
changing, with the recent widening of the membership of its
International Council to include more movements, it still remains
largely led by aging males, mostly white or honorary white, from
middle and upper class and caste sections from settler societies
around the world. (I have argued before and also say here that this
assertion is not contradicted by the seemingly overwhelming presence
of Dalits at the Mumbai Forum in 2004, or by the presence of some
indigenous peoples at the Belém Forum in 2009.) We need, I believe,
to recognise that even as we are witnessing for the first time in
history the emergence of struggles at a world level of those whom I
call the ‘incivil’ – of indigenous peoples, of the Dalits, and others
who have been historically and structurally marginalised – the WSF is
becoming a major vehicle in the world today for the subtle, invisible
reassertion of the hegemonic control of national and global civil
society over the incivil.
It is nothing less than this. We need to face this. But now, read
on… and with thanks to Pierre for writing this essay. Because it’s a
little long, I am pasting on just the first few paragraphs of his
essay, and have given the link.
Jai Sen