Politics, Parties and the World Social Forum : A comment on the paper of Patomäki and Teivainen

Heikki Patomäki and Teivo Teivainen: "The World Social Forum: An Open Space or a Movement of Movements?", Theory, Culture & Society Vol. 21, No. 5, 2004, pp. 145-154).

Peter Waterman

This is not meant to be a careful and balanced critique of P&T but, rather, some thoughts arising from their paper. Or, rather, some challenges provoked by it. That paper, incidentally, is a very useful piece in so far as it is one of few that provide some information on and analysis of WSF processes that are still largely hidden from even an interested and committed part of the public (me for one!). I would be interested in their response, joint or separate.

I want to concentrate on two points in the analysis:
1) the failure to address and even name capitalism (far less to consider its present transformation);
2) an understanding of politics dependent on this capitalism before that transformation.

1. Capitalism

P&T reproduce a common shortcoming of the WSF - or at least of significant participants in it and commentators on it: the avoidance of even the word 'capitalism' (indeed, even the word 'globalisation' only occurs once in their paper). Imagine a feminist analysis that intended to be emancipatory but avoided such words as 'gender' or 'partriarchy'. Yet here we have political-economists failing to name that which political-economy has always been about.

Capitalists call the system 'capitalist', are committed to it and concerned to defend and promote it. Failing to name it is an obstacle to transforming or even significantly reforming it.

I can only imagine that P&T and those many others avoid the term because of its past association with Marxism, Communism and strategies of insurrection, and its current use, in the archaic, schematic and reductionist manner, by Simplistic Workers Parties.

There is a third motive, possibly unconscious, of those who avoid this term, and that is to avoid frightening off present or potential sponsors, allies or partners - such as even the international trade unions - that are against globalisation (or its 'bad' aspects) but in favour of a gentler, kinder globalised capitalism.

Whatever the case, however, this avoidance implies an inability to develop an adequate politics - or what I would prefer to think of as a counter-hegemonic strategy. The failure to identify stages in capitalist development, the last two stages of which I call National-Industrial-Colonial Capitalism (NIC) and a Globalised-Networked-Informatised-Financial and Services Capitalism (GNC), implies that in attempting to surpass the second we may be attempting to reinvent the first - in the form, for example, of a global neo-keynesianism. This, again, is what the international trade unions are still trying to do.

2. Politics

The parameters of this paper are determined by a particular understanding of 'politics' laid down during earlier phases of capitalist development. The references here are to nation-states, inter-state institutions and political parties. And, of course, to their renewal or reform.

Social movements are brought into this scenario as forces that can reform or transform politics (a reproduction of a 19th-20thC strategy): the social is to breath new life into the political.

The three institutions listed above developed under earlier phases of world capitalist development. The modern political party was, I think, invented by the German labour movement and socialists, in the form of the German Social Democratic Party, at the end of the 19th century. This model has been explicitly or implicitly referred to by almost every modern political party from the Russian Bolsheviks to the British Conservatives (a formally representative-democratic organisation, pyramidical in form, with subordinate sections for Women, Youth, and other interests). Initially a mobilising, consciousness-raising and emancipatory institution, this form is now one that so reduces and ritualises social issues and struggles that it i s in crisis nearly everywhere.

As Paul Valery once said, 'Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in matters that properly concern them'. This suggests another crucial issue: politics as reification and alienation of social power. The problem affecting the P&T paper, in its discussion of power struggles globally is, thus, not so much that of inappropriately raising nation-state structures to a global level but of raising alienated power to such.

3. The WSF

The World Social Forum process, it seems to me, expresses a process of transformation from the old to the new. The novelty is in the shift of its base from the state-national and the political to the global and the civil-social, the shift from the notion of the inter/national party-as-emancipator to the global-radical-democratic-social-movement-as-emancipatory.

Yet in its institutional forms (e.g. an International Council consisting largely of state- or foundation-funded 'non-governmental organisations', as well as traditional trade unions and (hidden) fronts of political parties), it retains and reproduces politics as alienation and reification. Whilst innovatory in insisting on the agora form (the self-transformatory potential of a wide range of radical-democratic ideas, experiences and dialogue meeting in one space), it is traditional in its shortcomings in two inter-related arenas/aspects of a GNC - communication and culture.

The WSF is extraordinarily limited in its forms of communication, from an official website lacking in both transparency and dialogue to its representation on a colourful but quite arbitrary site (in terms of both content and updating), Planet Porto Alegre, provided by the customarily unaccountable NGO, the Inter Press Service. Various other sites or lists come and go, such as the WSFItself one. And otherwise one is dependent on sites/lists such as that of the excellent, bilingual, Choike and the ubiquitous Independent Media Centres (IMC).

The WSF is also heavily biased toward the printed and spoken word. For the first I refer to the leaflets, brochures and books either given away or sold at Forums. For the second I refer to the plenaries, seminars and workshops which dominate the Forum events.

Whilst I cannot imagine a Forum without either of these, one notes the limited quantity and quality of cultural expression - whether of music, parades, drama, radio, video, dvd, etc. Some refer to the explosion of cultural expression at Mumbai, but others have pointed out that this was actually another 'tale of two forums', one Anglophone and intellectual, the other in Indian languages and cultural!

For me the outstanding cultural expression remains the Anti-Fundamentalism campaign of the tiny Articulación Feminista Marcosur, in Porto Alegre, using billboards, masks, a balloon, and a Flash DVD of just a few minutes (I have shown this to hyper-critical but cyber-sensitive friends who have been bowled over by it). For the epitome of cultural failure I would refer to the Porto Alegre jingle in Portuguese, which I have never heard anyone sing or whistle, and which I doubt anyone outside Brazil could.

Whereas Seattle gave birth to IMC, now a more or less permanent network of such worldwide, the WSF seems to have given birth to no equivalent initiative or achievement in the area of communication/culture. IMC and allied communicational/cultural activities, of course, are also carried out without or around the social forums. But I am wondering whether there is still not a division between the more central policy discussions and events (focussed on incremental reform) and the more marginal demonstrations and exhibitions (of a more libertarian).

Let me come back to the discussion on the WSF as space and/or as movement. I am not sure whether this matter has been conceived in the right way, by P&T, or those they report (perhaps we need to know more about the positions of those mentioned). This space has never been pure or simple. It was conceived of as having a particular purpose and a general aim. These have been much debated and fought over. And the space has therefore changed its character over time - largely, I think, in a radical-democratic direction.

We all know that the exclusion of political parties has been honoured as much in the breach as in the observance. And I note that the WSF has hosted - without complaint - the International Labour Organisation, an inter-state organisation with a social/liberal-democratic aura (and origin in the NIC era) but a highly ambiguous attitude toward globalisation and those other inter-state bodies promoting such. The WSF is, thus a thoroughly ambiguous ('dirty') space, despite its remarkably innovatory character and its continuing reforms.

I would argue for the continuing exclusion or limitation on political parties, militaristic-insurrectionary movements (which would not for me include the Zapatistas), state and inter-state organisations. Let them operate on or beyond the margins (like the self-marginalising Mumbai Resistance - a front organisation for the Maoist Communist Party of the Philippines and allied bodies). And let the discussion on their position in relation to the WSF process continue in the open and to be unabated!

The conflict or contradiction between the WSF and the Call of Social Movements at Mumbai (of which I, an interested observer, was unaware until I read this paper), is also misconceived, in so far as the Call of Social Movements appears to be modelled on WSF and to be even less transparent! Its Calls, moreover, appear to be limited to a recommended list of forthcoming protest events. It is clearly not into self-revelatory or self-critical mode. So even the notion of what a 'social movement' is for the purpose of such calls remains quite obscure.

I would consider, finally, that P&T miss the most significant tension within the WSF, that between amelioration and emancipation. This is not a post-modern equivalent for the traditional 'reform/revolution' opposition within the old social movement (labour and socialist). That was a binary opposition - reform OR revolution - which was not only reductionist but which hypostatised inter-relations between the two terms or tendencies. As I have often said, elsewhere, each of those old (and these new) paired opposites are actually dependent on each other. Which means that they have to be understood as interpenetrating and mutually influencing. More important, strategically, is that each of these requires the other for its own self-development. This may be obvious in the dependency of the ameliorative tendency on the emancipatory one, in so far as an emancipatory threat can make hegemons open to the ameliorative projects. It is less obvious in the similar dependence of the emancipatory tendency on the ameliorative one (in so far as the reforms brought about by the latter require of the former that it become smarter and more sophisticated).

What I have argued above could be considered question-begging about the meaning of amelioration and emancipation. Yet, I think, it will be evident to most observers that both the WSF and the Network Institute for Global Democratisation (to which both our authors prominently belong) lean heavily in the ameliorative direction. And, in so far as the latter do set up their argument in this paper in the manner I have suggested, they place themselves within a political and conceptual camp confined within the parameters of a capitalist world. Emancipatory thought and action require, I think, new categories of thought and new repertoires of action. Emancipation is also radically distinguished from archaic notions of 'revolution' (a third and regretably not-inconsiderable influence within the forum process). It is distinguished not least by its pluralism, its radical-democratic inclinations, and its openness to other social contradictions and movements that cannot be placed on a reformist/revolutionary spectrum.

Read the reply of Teivo Teivainen to Peter Waterman
Read the reply of Heikki Patomäki to Peter Waterman