Hard questions on the WSF

Teivo Teivainen
16 January, 2006

Dear Jai,

As always, your questions and comments on the WSF are refreshing and help us collectively reflect on the process. In your recent letter, dated 10 January 2006, that has circulated in many lists, including that of the Network Institute for Global Democratization, you asked a couple of questions. Without pretending to fully elaborate adequate answers to them, let me just try to contribute to the debate with a couple of lines that, I hope, will provoke some further comments from you or others.

You write: "do you agree that the Forum should and can be organised by political parties and governments, towards their partisan ends? If Chávez in Venezuela, then why not Musharraf in Pakistan?

In a way, what seems to be happening is a kind of a creeping coup within the Forum; in its broadest sense, of old politics over new politics. Even if you happen to agree with, or be sympathetic to Hugo Chávez, or Lula, or the CPI(M) in India, if they can take over the Forum in their respective contexts, then why should other parties and politicians not do so in other contexts? Or is it ultimately only a question of left and right (where left is right, and right is wrong), and the ‘alternative power’ and influence that so many have said that civil movements can exercise is, in the final analysis, not relevant? Or do you have another take entirely, on what is happening? If so, let’s talk about it."

While I share many of the same doubts you and many others have about the role of governments in the WSF process, and in particular that of Hugo Chávez in the Caracas WSF, I feel your way of formulating the issue may be based on what I consider an overly depolitisiced (or “naïve”) understanding of “civil society”.

As to your first question, I agree with you that the WSF should not be organised by “parties and governments, toward their partisan ends”. At the same time, it is a fact, and not always a negative one, that some leftist parties, and sympathetic governments, have been supporting the WSF process in many ways, even if the decision-making has formally been in the hands of social movements and non-governmental organizations.

My intention is not to deny that Chavez’s government may be involved in the WSF in Caracas in ways that are highly problematic. To answer your second question, “if Chavez, why not Musharraf”, let me refer to the WSF Charter of Principles according to which “government leaders and members of legislatures who accept the commitments of this Charter may be invited to participate in a personal capacity”. This means that there does exist a way to differentiate between different government leaders. My feeling is that most of the WSF participants would find Chávez to be more committed to the WSF Charter than Musharraf. Of course, this does not mean that any government leaders should be allowed to “take over” the Forum, but it does mean that inviting some to speak does not imply that all others need to be invited.

This brings us to your last question, about whether it is it ultimately only a question of left and right. To the extent that being on the left can be considered quite close to accepting the broad ideological lines and goals expressed in the WSF Charter of Principles, the differentiation between the kinds of governments that can be invited to the forums is indeed pretty much a question of left and right. I am not totally sure to how sincerely Chávez (or Lula, for that matter) is “opposed to neoliberalism and to domination of the world by capital and any form of imperialism”, but according to the Charter of Principles this is one of the key issues in deciding who is given a space in the WSF. There have also been special mechanisms, such as, the roundtables of dialogue and controversy that allow for more flexibility in the invitations, but the ideological distinctions play a role in them as well.

Apart from distinguishing between different governments, the ideological lines expressed in the Charter of Principles also mean that despite its impressive plurality, the WSF is not (and I think should not be) an open space in the sense that "all civil movements” are encouraged to participate. I am not sure whether your last question implies that we have a disagreement on this particular point, but I remember you have (elsewhere) criticized the rule that one must be committed to "opposing neoliberalism" in order to participate in the forum. I have never been very convinced by that particular criticism of yours (whereas I have been quite convinced by some other brilliant critical insights you have made about the WSF process over the years).

In any case, I think we agree that constructing “alternative power”, different from the traditional state-centric forms of changing the world, is one of the most fundamental (potential) contributions of the WSF process. At the same time, the articulations among the movements constructing this process, and their links with political parties and governments, are questions that cannot simply be assessed with naïve dichotomies between “civic movements” and “traditional political actors” as if their ideological orientations would not matter. I personally tend to be quite happy to use left-right terminology to make ideological distinctions, but that terminology in itself is of course not the key issue here.