The meeting: “No to the FTAA (ALCA) – another America is possible” has become a tradition and is part of a strategy of presenting the new historical subject to the world. This process can be traced back to the end of the 1980s, 25 years after the Consensus of Washington was launched and ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. A number of initiatives prepared the way: the PPXXI (People’s Power 21) in Asia, which brought together several dozen Asian non-governmental organizations and some social movements; the ‘intergalactic’ meeting against neoliberalism of the Zapatistas in Chiapas; and the ‘Other Davos’ which, at the beginning of 1999, assembled a number of social movements from the four continents, during the very week of the World Economic Forum.

All this led, on the one hand, to a chain of systematic protests against the centres of global power: the WTO, the World Bank, the IMF, the G8, the European Summit, the Summit of the Americas, etc. and, on the other hand, to the World Social Forums – continental, national and thematic, which brought together movements and organizations combatting neoliberalism. The social movements played a key role in this process and it is useful to propose a general framework for reflecting on the development of these events.

 Why a new historical subject?

The history of humanity has been constituted by many collective subjects, which have advanced the values of justice, equality and law, and have been protagonists in protests and struggles. These include, for example, the slave revolts, resistance against the invasions in Africa and Asia, the peasant struggles in the Middle Ages in Europe, all the resistance by the indigenous peoples of America, the religious protest movements in Brazil, Sudan and China.

A historic leap forward was accomplished by capitalism which, after four centuries of existence, set up the material bases of its reproduction, which are the division of labour and industrialization. The proletariat as a potential subject was born, based on the contradiction between capital and labour. Workers were subordinated to capital at the very heart of the production process soi that the working class was totally integrated and at the same time constituted by capital. This is what Karl Marx called the real subsumption of work by capital.

The new class became a historical subject when it developed within the very heart of the struggles, passing from a “class in itself to a class for itself”. It was not the only actor, but it was the historical subject, that is, the main instrument of humanity’s struggle for emancipation, in function of the role played by capital.

Capitalism not only dominated in the economic field, but also influenced the pattern of the Nation State, colonial conquest and world wars, not forgetting its leading role in transmitting modernity. Of course the history of the working class as a historical subject did not develop in a linear manner. It passed from being a movement to being a political party and from operating at the national level to the international. It experienced successes and failures, victories and recoupments.

Today the social subject has broadened. Capitalism is going through a new stage in its history. New technologies are extending the material base of its reproduction, information and communication technology, which give it a genuinely global dimension. Capitalism needs accelerated accumulation to respond to the size of its investment in more and more sophisticated techniques to cover the costs of increasing concentration and to meet the requirements of financial capital which, since the dollar became floating in 1971, has been massively transformed into speculative capital.

For these reasons the actors in the capitalist system have fought both Keynesianism and its social pacts between capital, work and the State, as well as the national development of the South (the Bandung model, according to Samir Amin), the ‘developmentalism’ promoted by ECLA (the UN agency for the development of the continent) in Latin America and, of course, the socialist regimes. Thus began the neoliberal phase of the development of capitalism, also known as the Consensus of Washington. This strategy was composed of a double offensive against work (lowering real wages, deregulation, delocalization) and against the State (privatizations). Now we see the search after new frontiers of accumulation, as both productive and financial capital face crises. Peasant agriculture tends to be converted into capitalist productivist agriculture, public services have to pass into the private sector and biodiversity is to become the new sources of energy and raw materials.

As a result, all human beings without exception have been subordinated to the law of the market, not only the waged working class (real subsumption), but the indigenous peoples, women, those working in the informal economy, the small peasants. This has been the effect of other mechanisms, financial (decreasing prices of raw materials and agricultural products, service of the external debt, fiscal havens, etc.) and juridical (the norms of the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO), all of which signify a formal subsumption of work by capital.

Another effect is that the destructive nature of capitalism (according to Schumpeter’s expression) has taken over from its creative character (of goods and services). More than ever before capitalism, as Karl Marx already noted over a century and a half ago, destroys the two sources of its wealth: nature and human beings. Ecological destruction now affects all human beings and the law of the market embraces all social categories. Commodification dominates almost all social relations, in an increasing number of fields, like health, education, culture, sport and religion.

Moreover, capitalist logic requires its own institutions. For it is a logic and not the conspiracy of a few economic actors (otherwise it would be enough to convert them and correct the abuses and excesses). A businessman in Santo Domingo, who is a Jehovah’s Witness, said that he had a very Christian love for his workers: “I call my workers wizards, as I don’t know how they can live on the wages that I pay them.” Change needs action on structures, now globalized, from determined actors, with precise agendas.

Globalized capital has very specific agencies - the WTO, the World Bank, the IMF, regional banks - but it also has its ideological machinery: social communications that are increasingly concentrated in a few hands. And, finally, it disposes of an empire, that of the United States. The American dollar is the international currency. The United States is the only country to have the power of veto at the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund and it shares veto power at the Security Council. It has a quasi monopoly in the military field, with control over NATO and the capacity to carry out preventive wars. It intervenes militarily in Iraq and Afghanistan to control sources of energy. Its military bases extend round the whole world and the government claims its vocation is to repress resistance everywhere, with no hesitation in resorting to torture and terrorism. Nevertheless, the empire has its weaknesses. Nature is now having its vengeance while the anti-imperialist opposition is worldwide. Other signs of weakness lead Immanuel Wallerstein to believe that what he calls ‘the long 20^th century”, dominated by capitalism, could come to an end halfway through the present century.

For all these reasons, the new historical subject embraces all the subordinate social groups, both those those who suffer real submission (represented by what are sometimes known as the old social movements) as well of those who suffer formal submission (the new social movements).

The new historical subject to be created will be people-based and plural, that is, constituted by many different actors, but not Hardt and Negri’s ‘multitude’. This is a vague and dangerous concept, because it demobilizes people. The working-class will continue to play an important role, but it will be shared. The historical subject will also be democratic, not only because of its objectives, but through the very process of its creation. It will be multipolar, built up from the start in different continents and various regions in the world. It will be a subject in the full sense of the word, including rediscovered subjectivity, bringing together all human beings and constituting humanity as a real subject (expression of Franz Hinkelammert in his book El sujeto y la ley which was awarded Venezuela’s Libertador Prize). The new historical subject must be able to act on both multiple and global reality, with the sense of urgency required by contemporary genocide and ecocide.

 The social movements

Social movements are the result of contradictions, which are now globalised. If they are to become genuine collective actors, they must – according to Alain Touraine – possess a sense of historicity (located in time), a multidimensional vision of their own situation, a clear definition of the adversary, and organization. They are more than a simple revolt (the peasant ‘jacqueries’), more than a grouping of interests (the chambers of commerce), more than an initiative independent of the State (non-governmental organizations).

Movements are born from a perception of the objectives serving to guide people towards action, but in order to stay in the course, they need to go through an institutionalization process. Roles are created, which are indispensable for social reproduction. Thus there is a permanent dialectic, between aims and organization, with the danger of domination by the reproduction logic over the requirements of the objectives. In history there is an infinite number of examples of this dialectic.

Thus, for instance, Christianity was born, as the Argentinian theologian Ruben Dri puts it, as ‘the Jesus movement”, the religious expression of social protest and thus dangerous for the Roman Empire, which repressed it. By integrating into Roman society it became an ecclesiastic institution which followed the model of centralized and vertical political organization, often allied with the powers of oppression. The weight of the institution has not killed the spirit, but it introduced a permanent contradiction. The Vatican II Council was an effort to re-establish the predominance of the values of the evangelical message over the institutional character of the ecclestiastical organization but, over the following years, the attempt was foiled by a current that pressed for restoration.

Many trade unions and left-wing parties constitute another example. These were initiatives taken by workers and popular sectors in struggle. With time, they became bureaucracies, defining their tasks in essentially defensive terms – in other words, in function of the adversary’s agenda and not as a project for the radical transformation of the system. In the specific case of political parties, it is the electoral logic that dominates over the original objective and that defines their practice, which follows a reproduction logic, without a prospect of profound (revolutionary) change. This does not mean that there are not numerous genuine militants in these organizations, but that they are often fettered by a logic over which they have no control.

Nevertheless, social reality is not predetermined and it is possible to influence collective processes. If the social movements are going to be able to construct the new historical subject, there are two prior conditions. First of all they must be capable of making internal criticism, in order to institutionalize changes and ensure a permanent reference to objectives. Then, they have to respond to the challenges of globalization which are both general as well as specific to each movement: workers, peasants, women, indigenous peoples, youth – in other words, all those who are victims of globalized neoliberalism.

There are however other requirements. Social movements defining themselves as ‘civil society’ should clarify whether it is the civil society from below, thus returning to the concept of Gramsci, who considered it the arena of social struggle. This prevents falling into the trap of the semantic offensive of dominant groups like the World Bank, for whom to broaden the field of civil society means restricting the role of the State. Or sharing the naivete of many NGOs for whom civil society is all those who desire the well-being of humanity. At the global level, civil society at the top meets at Davos and civil society from below, at Porto Alegre.

Another requirement for constructing the historical subject is to establish the link with a renovated politics. At the beginning of the World Social Forums there was a real fear of political bodies, partly for justifiable reasons. Thus there was a rejection of being instrumentalized for electoral needs or as a simple tool for the parties in power. Partly, too, it was caused by attitudes that were deeply anti-State or even anti-politics – this was especially the case of certain leading NGOs. Hence the success of the thesis of John Holloway who asks how can societies be changed without taking over power. If this means that social transformation requires much more than taking formal political power, the executive and the legislative, this thesis is perfectly acceptable. But if it means that fundamental changes, like agrarian reform or a literacy campaign, can be carried out without exercising power, it is completely illusory.

Thus social movements must contribute to the renovation of the political field, as Isabel Rauber has put it so well in her book Sujetos Políticos. The loss of credibility by political parties is a global reality and it is urgent to find ways of reconstructing the field. An interesting example comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Kinshasa) where grassroots movements and organizations have mobilized for organizing the July 2006 elections. After forty years of dictatorship and warfare (over the last five years there have been more than three million victims), the popular sectors, in spite of efforts to fragment the country in order to control natural resources more effectively, have affirmed the need to defend the integrity of the nation and prevent it from being dismantled. They have also invented forms of participatory democracy, together with representative democracy. Thousands of local organizations, of women, peasants, small traders, youth, Catholic and Protestant Christian communities, have moblized to present candidates who are linked to a pact with their community (spokespeople, and not representatives, as specified by Venezuela’s law on community councils), at the local and provincial levels, with a few people presented at the national level, but without a candidate for the presidency. They feel that the process must first be consolidated at the grassroots. There is a genuine reconstruction under way of a new political arena, which had been almost totally destroyed by the practices (corruption and tribalism) of existing parties.

Finally, the convergences of the social movements must find a way to involve the many local popular initiatives which have not become organized movements, in spite of the fact that they represent an important part of the resistance (at the level of villages and regions, against the construction of a dam, against the privatization of water, electricity, health, and against the privatization of forests in favour of the transnational corporations, etc.). There are other examples, like MONLAR in Sri Lanka, the organization that is fighting for agrarian reform and that groups more than a hundred local initiatives, as well as being a national peasant movement. It has accumulated enough strength to be able to act at the national level as a protest body (national demonstrations), but it is also engaged in dialogue and confrontation with the government and the World Bank.

 How to build the new historical subject ?

To produce the new historical subject there has to be several phases. The first condition is to build a collective consciousness based on an analysis of the reality and an ethic.

As far as the analysis is concerned, it is a question of using tools that study the mechanisms of how society functions and to understand its logic, with criteria that make it possible to distinguish between effects and causes, discourses and practices. This does not mean any old analysis, but the most appropriate critical, theoretical apparatus to respond to the desperate cries from below. It requires a very rigorous methodology and openness to all hypotheses that are useful to accomplishing this. It is true that choosing an option that favours the oppressed means a prescientific and ideological approach that will guide the selection of an analysis, but this last one belongs to a scientific order with which there can be no compromise whatever. It will be a new kind of knowledge which will help to create a collective consciousness.

Let us take a contemporary example. Much has been said about the objectives of the Millennium Round, decided by Heads of State at New York in 2000. Who could be against the elimination of poverty and destitution (absolute poverty) or be against development? For this reason the vote was unanimous. However, that the objective fixed for 2015 consists only of reducing extreme poverty by half, which means that there will still be over 800 million poor people in the world by that date (which is already absolutely disgraceful because the means of tackling the problem already exist), there is every indication that it will be very difficult to achieve the objectives that have been set. The reason for this is that there is no critical approach of the logic that guides the capitalist development model, which favours only the top 20 per cent of the population in the countries of the South. This minority develops in a spectacular way, forming a significant mass of consumption for capital and accentuating the visibility of a certain wealth. At the same time social differentiation increases. To understand such a contradiction, there has to be a critical approach of the very concept of development, such as it is utilized and upon which depend the criteria for defining the Millennium objectives Qualitative elements, like well-being, equality and food sovereignty are not taken into account in the definition. This is why Marta Harnecker at the Miranda Centre of Caracas is working on the creation of analytical tools that make it possible to measure development criteria. In fact, the concepts used by the Millennium at the United Nations are those of the market and are little related to the life of human beings.

The second element for building a collective consciousness is an ethic. Not a series of norms elaborated in the abstract, but constantly put together by the social actors as a whole, referring to human dignity and the welfare of all. The concrete definitions can change, according to place and time. As we are talking about globalized reality, the ethical perspective must be elaborated by all the cultural traditions, which is implied in a holistic conception of human rights. An ethic with this prospect is not to be dogmatically imposed, but a collective work whose purpose is to defend humanity

The main accomplishment of the social forums, as convergences of both movements and popular organizations, was the gradual elaboration of a collective consciousness, with various levels of analysis and comprehension, it is true, but including an ethic both of protest against all kinds of injustice and inequality, and of a social and democratic creation of another possible world. The existence of the Forums is itself a political fact already, without counting other achievements, such as the constitution of networks, the exchanges on alternatives, the functioning of the Assembly of the social movements, and the contribution of committed intellectuals.

After creating a collective consciousness, the second essential step is the mobilization of all kinds of actors - popular, democratic and multipolar. Here we come to the subjective aspect of action. Human actors are multi-dimensional beings and they do not only function according to the rationality of social logic. Commitment is a social act influenced by a strong and even central affective element. Hence the importance of culture, both the ensemble of representations of reality and the essential role of the many channels of spreading it: art, music, theatre, poetry, literature, the dance. Culture is an objective but it is also a means of human emancipation.

The same thing could be said about the potential role of religion, which deals with fundamental aspects of human existence like life and death. There is the reference to a faith that one may or may not share, but one cannot ignore. It was probably one of the errors of a certain kind of socialism that did not take this into account. The liberating potential of religion is real. Besides, religions can also bring a spirituality and a collective and personal ethic that is indispensable to social reconstruction.

The third element is made up of strategies, in order to build the three levels of alternatives. The first is that of utopia, in a sense that does not exist today, but it could become reality tomorrow: in other words, a utopia that is non-illusory, but necessary, as the French philosopher Paul Ricœur has described it. What kind of society do we want? How to define post-capitalism or socialism? Thus utopia is also a collective and permanent construction, not something that falls from the sky. For it to be attained, there needs to be long-term action: changing a mode of production is not accomplished only by a political revolution, although this can be the beginning of the process. Capitalism required four centuries to establish the material bases of its reproduction (the division of labour and industrialization). To create a new mode of production will obviously take time. Also, the cultural changes that form an essential part of this process have a different rhythm from that of political and economic transformations.

The two other levels, the medium and the short term, depend on a combination of circumstances but they must be the object of agreed strategies and carried out in convergence among the different social actors. This is where alliances come in. However, it is not a simple addition of alternatives in economic, social, cultural, ecological and political sectors that will enable a new historical subject to consolidate itself. It is essential to be consistent. Programmes must be created that relate to the utopia. This also has to be a collective work and not the result of a monopoly of knowledge and learning by an avant-garde, the depositary of all truth. It is a continuous process and not a dogma affirmed once and for all.

From this point of view it is important to stress the indispensable nature of some strategic collective actions - even partial ones, but which bring together many different social actors in one significant initiative that is linked to the utopian dimension of the global project. Luckily there are several examples of this kind of action, of which two will be cited here.

The Latin American campaign against the FTAA (ALCA) brought together many social movements, from trade unions to peasant organizations, not forgetting women’s and indigenous peoples’ associations. Non-governmental organizations of various kinds joined in the initiative. In some countries, the churches took up a position against the treaty because of its unegalitarian character and its social consequences. All sorts of actions have been used, including the organization of popular referendums that attracted millions of signatures. Another example is the popular alternative plan for reconstruction after the tsunami in Sri Lanka. The official plan, administered by the World Bank, was essentially concerned to promote international tourism and did not meet the basic needs of the local population. It was indeed a way of accelerating neoliberal policy at the world level. This is why it was possible to build up a very broad alliance of movements and social organizations, including Buddhist and Christian institutions, to oppose the governmental plan and to propose alternatives.

Faced by the need for a prospect of action at the world level to create a new historical subject, two complementary initiatives have been taken. One of them is the network ‘For the defence of humanity’, established in Mexico on the initiative of Pablo González Casanova and which has branches in several countries, mainly in Latin America. Another is the ‘Bamako Appeal’, promoted by the World Forum for Alternatives, of which Samir Amin is the president (an initiative launched at Louvain-la-Neuve in 1996 on the 20^th anniversary of the Tricontinental Centre and officially formalized in Cairo the following year), the Third World Forum (Dakar), ENDA (an African NGO) and the Social Forum of Mali.

The ‘For the defence of humanity’ network proposed, at the end of 2005, the constitution of a promotion body, for the purpose of bringing together and proposing common actions and the ‘Bamako Appeal’ has, in 2006, identified ten themes for reflection by collective actors and a number of strategies, mostly inspirted by the Porto Alegre Manifesto, elaborated by a group of intellectuals during the World Social Forum of 2005. These two initiatives complete the work of the Assembly of Social Movements which, within each forum, draws up a document and proposes common campaigns (like the demonstration against the war in Iraq which, in 2003, assembled more than 15 million people in 600 cities throughout the world).

Finally, within this general perspective, there is need for partial but significant victories. Maintaining the action and keeping up the motivation requires results. It does not very much matter what is attained, apart from the fact that many social actors have been mobilized in a common action, with objectives that are linked to a vision of their overall situation, and with a global dimension. There are also a number of examples of this. The Latin American campaign against the FTAA can again be cited. In Europe the ‘No’ to the Constitutional Treaty based on a neoliberal orientation and submission to the United States in the military field, is another example. The successful rejection of the First Job Contract in France and the abandon of the US naval base in Porto Rico after a long drawn-out popular mobilization are other exemplary cases. In the political field, the election of the first indigenous president in Bolivia is also a very important cultural, social and economic victory.

To conclude, the path to take from the elaboration of a collective consciousness to the creation of collective actors is already being traced out and all this heralds the emergence of a new historical subject.