World Social Forum and the Bolivarian Revolution

Caracas Venezuela 23-30.01.06

by Hanna Laako, NIGD and PhD-Candidate at the University of Helsinki, Graduate School for North and Latin American Studies
Researcher of the Finnish Cultural Foundation

Novice Footnotes on the Experience

Immediately when I arrive at the airport in Venezuela, the rhythm changes. Quite stereotypically, leaving behind Mexico and its rancheras, I have obviously landed in a Caribbean country with its deep meringue bass. Since my first visit in Venezuela, in spring 2002, being then strongly influenced by its coup d’etat atmosphere, I am now here again to experience the World Social Forum (WSF) as a first-timer and to re-evaluate my previous impressions on the Bolivarian Revolution. Questions whiz in my mind: had anything changed? And how do the different left-wing processes, the WSF, and the Chavistas stand each other?

Plunging to the Bolivarian Revolution

As soon as I get into the bus that takes me from the airport to Caracas, through some rough barrios – shantytown zones – I figure that this, the WSF, would be the best place for the President Hugo Chavéz to contribute to some revolutionary marketing. I have the sense that I am not only Social Forum participant who feels this way, looking at the great interest for photo sessions in the mountainous route.

During the last years, as part of the so-called contemporary leftist phenomena in Latin America, there has been an emergence of a contradictory actor: the left-minded governments and parties. It is contradictory because as an actor they represent the traditional way of pursuing their goals; taking state power, and attempting the transformation via governments. Also, because the contemporary left-wing processes in the form of social movements have come about as a critique of this same actor – the parties and the governments. These social movements have appeared to challenge the state and the traditional parties. Among other things, these movements argue that political action ought to be horizontal rather than vertical; autonomic rather than state-incorporated. In part, this could also be seen as an outcome of the neoliberal processes wiped across the continent, resulting in states being largely cut off from their services, which again has contributed to citizens creating their own self-help organisations. These, on occasion, function also as centres of political awakening.

Despite all this, and sometimes for this reason exactly, the last years have also witnessed the emergence of these left-minded parties and governments, which many times have tried to accommodate the popular social movements, creating a curious cross-fire between conventional and unconventional activism.

One of the most interesting and radical examples of this is in Latin America is the Bolivarian Revolution of Venezuela, led by the President Hugo Chávez. The seven-year process has been epochal and polarizing, and now it is about to encounter the imperialism challenging WSF - the spokesman of horizontal action seemed to me to be very much reserved about the revolutionary process of Venezuela.

Whatever revolutionary marketing the Chavistas had wished to carry out during the week, it appeared that they needed to be on the defensive. Regarding various discussions, seminars, demonstrations and newspaper commentaries, there seemed to exist a critique on the part of the Social Forum towards too much involvement, or presence of the Chavistas, or the Bolivarian Revolution. Perhaps this was due to a fear of Chavismo taking attention from the Social Forum itself, and the possible effects on the policies of autonomy and horizontality of the Forum. After all, the Social Forum has to do its own marketing worldwide, too, right?

However, only considering my general street-view during the week, it seemed that the presence or involvement of Chávez or the Chavistas, was nothing more than in spring 2002 when I first visited Venezuela. In those days, already, I was impressed by the enormous quantity of symbols in the streets, both nationalist and Chavista; combined with Venezuelans strongly pro or anti opinions, and a few of those who preferred not to take sides regarding the process.

Even if the relation, or the collaboration, between the Chavistas and the WSF remained indefinable for the novice, the visit turned out to be a good opportunity to jump into the current Bolivarian Revolution, and to do some comparative work.

Gathering from the interviews accomplished, it started to seem that the division between a pro and anti is a bit short-sighted, the large and complex process includes, at least, two major sides that easily challenge the hasty conclusions on the Chavista process.

Firstly, the political system, especially including the party of Chavéz, is often perceived as populist, weak, personality-centred, and combined with an unknown and insecure continuity that appears to preoccupy a lot of Venezuelans. What if there is another coup? What if voter turnout diminishes?

Secondly, an informal system that includes significant missions and projects parallel to the formal state, with an objective to create another, preferably self-managing, a system to replace the old one. As a facilitator of these missions concluded in an interview, the two sides interweave, clash and are interdependent, but keep carrying out a revolution, parallel to the state, in order to change radically and violently the formal state structures of Venezuela.

Fluttering to the World Social Forum

So to continue, as I arrive in Caracas, the participants of the forum vanish and appear with their suitcases, and I find my way to one of the centres of the forum – the Hilton Hotel. This experience would actually come to characterise my first hunch about the celebrated WSF, of which, after all, I had read one thousand theoretical analyses beforehand. At the reception, I observe and was puzzled by the sight of hundreds of participants looking for their respective representative groups (the “us”), checking out who is who, and who gets whom. What it looked like to me, was a lobby hall, alive and kicking.

Generally speaking, the WSF has become pictured as both a political and social space, rather than as an actor. It represents the come-together of struggles against the imperialist and neoliberal world, with an idea that “another world is possible”. On one hand, it is the common front for alternatives against the tina-thinking (‘there is no alternative’). It is a forum to get to know others, and to make one’s own cocktail-set of methods to confront the local struggles. As one speaker in a seminar on the future of the forum concluded, the WSF has managed to offer evidence of oppression and situations of imperialism. Moreover, to put a ‘s’ at the end of ‘an alternative’, there is no alternative - there are many alternatives.

In this way, the WSF also becomes a contemporary left-wing process, curiously, in a form of an encounter. It wishes to acknowledge the many-edginess of the contemporary Left, and emphasis a horizontal nature between the actors. It is both a symbolical and concrete space for world change, without pretending to have a ready-made recipe to carry it out.

On the other hand, the WSF has been composed of, and strongly contributed to, the kind of left-minded politics that believes in “you must be the change you want to see”-action. This seems to have created a list of divisions; whereby, the former refers to the preferred nature of the forum: shared space v hub, prefigurative politics v political culture, representation v participatory, ad hoc v action, horizontals v verticals, inside v outside…

Not surprisingly then, the WSF observed the action on the part of the Bolivarian Revolution with reservation. However, although the successes of the forum must be well-defined and acknowledged, whilst circulating between the Hilton, the Theatre and Business Centre El Parque Central, and getting to know the different groupings and their discourses, I could not help raising the question: What are the actual indicators of this said horizontality as opposed to representation; or the shared space as opposed to actors and processes? Where can this be observed, exactly? What I mainly experienced, without trying to sound sceptical, was an interesting political encounter of different actors wanting to change the world, or to learn something about it. The majority of participants were representatives of something (including myself). Many times I felt a kind of lobby spirit going on, combined with a figuration of what was useful for this particular group. Is this so contradictory to party politics, representation or political culture?

To what extent, then, are these two left-minded phenomena different from each other? To say the least, they are not different in their contradictions or demands. What seems sure to a novice is that the dialogue should not be hindered by hypocrisy, or bipolar ranking lists.

Finally: the Brainstorms

As I was making my way towards the airport at the end of the week, through the same barrios that I now knew were built up on an old dumping site that had seriously contracted people living there, I had more questions howling in my mind than on arrival. I consider this as the best case scenario, really: what does all this mean for the left-wing processes?

At minimum, as it could be expected, the theoretical divisions between state-power and unconventional social movements appear blurred.

There are not just state systems but parallel state systems – apparently built by the formal state system, apparently, somewhat informally…. Is this state-power as we used to understand it? Or is this just nice icing on top of the concepts that have been transformed along the way? Could the Bolivarian Revolution provide some revision to the state systems we are used to talking about and ignored by ranking them as “Old Left”?

At the other end, the horizontal social movements appear, occasionally, to be the best White House-lobbies ever, at least when it comes to securing its position with the Bolivarian Revolution. I think the WSF, and the movements it is composed of, are not hesitant or insecure about the kind of picture of the world there are representing, and wish to represent. There is a visible common ground that aims to scratch beneath the surface, and pursue a common good – is this really what we call changing the world without taking power? And does the WSF do it less than the Bolivarian Revolution?

Just thinking.