An exchange of ideas that took place in the context of the preparations for the WSF-related meetings in Durban, South Africa, and in reaction to the article of Roberto Savio (IPS) "World Social forum : the cradle of global civil society".

Peter Waterman, 24 July 2006, Social forum e-lists and to others. At this point the debate is coined WSF/GJ&SM : What is to be done?

Heikki:

I appreciate this clarification of your original response to Susan George. The discussion is clearly moving from 'Reactions to Roberto' to 'What is to be Done' (to coin a cliche).

I wonder whether you are not putting excessive emphasis on the 'excessive emphasis on the negative lessons of past experience' around the WSF.

After all, there are, as you yourself recognise, various tendencies visible here. And in so far as what I call the WSF Centre (both more and less than the IC) is concerned, the effect of 'the concept of open space...pluralism and diversity' MIGHT be one of AVOIDING a more confrontational discourse or posture in relation to state, capital, the funding relationship and the political party (as privileged form of democratic expression).

In any case, Heikki, the WSF is only one, if the most prominent, instance of the broader, looser, global justice and solidarity movement (GJ&SM), which surely itself represents 'new ways of organising our activities'. This movement, or concept of a movement, can include within itself or at its margins both 'new political parties' and 'workers self-managed ecological, gender-sensitive communes' (to paraphrase Monty Python's 'Holy Grail'). What the GJ&SM itself represents, however, is a new way of emancipatory social movement 'articulation' (both expression and joining), which surpasses the partial or counter-productive forms of - yes - capitalist modernity.

It is also post-political, if one understands Valery's aphorism: 'Politics is the art of preventing people taking part in matters which are properly of their concern'. This is politics understood as alienation: the taking away from people(s) of their past powers, and the denial to them of possible future ones.

In question here, within the movement as in the aphorism, would be the political party you are proposing to breath new life into and to raise to the global level. Yet both the political party and parliament and 'politics' are in growing disrepute, even in societies that have only recently won them (South Africa).

I do not recall your having here or previously come to terms, further, with the past history of international political parties - right, centre and, particularly, left. (And I thought that the NIGD project on global political parties had already turned itself into one on global political PROCESSES).

I worked twice for what was left of the Communist International after WW2, and have found it quite difficult to avoid 'excessive emphasis' on its negative lessons (though I am making the effort in an autobiography-in-progress).

As for the Socialist International, I arrived in Peru, in 1986, whilst its Congress was being hosted by the dubiously social-democratic APRA party of President Alan Garcia (the first time is tragedy...), and one day after he had massacred hundreds of Shining Path prisoners in Lima prisons. The SI beat, as far as I recall, a hasty retreat, back to its European heartland.

As far as I am concerned, the most interesting remainder of this tradition is 'The Virtual & Global Social Democratic Party - World-Wide Political Exchange & Education, http://www.virglob-sp.org/'. This seems to be an attempt to re-invent the tradition in the light of the fundamental transformation of capitalism (Castells considers it much more than this, an epochal transformation, like the invention of the alphabet) which you seem to either diminish or ignore. Otherwise, I note as a significant social-democratic initiative, the Global Civil Society annual at the LSE - one that gives, so far, little or no weight to political parties.(For a personal comment on its latest product, see http://www.nigd.org/docs/GCSSagaContinuesOctober2005PeterWaterman.

I will watch with interest your attempt to create a global political party that is radically-democratic, non-western, that acts as a REARGUARD for social movements and a radically-democratic civil society (i.e. one autonomous from and struggling to surpass the perverse and destructive capital-state nexus). I will, however, continue to believe that life is elsewhere. Neither the state-nation nor capitalist economy nor political party (nor the supposedly democratic trade union) can be abolished. But they can be circumvented or outgrown - as Ezequiel Adamovsky, in an item I posted to this list, has provocatively suggested.

Best,

Peter W

PS. The relationship between Communism and Fascism, as state forms, is complex, as is that between Soviet Communism and Russian Tsarism - and the Communist Party and the German Social-Democratic one. The Red Army, to take one example, was trained by Germany army officers during the Weimar period. The German Social Democrats INVENTED the modern political party - a model later universalised - whilst it was Russified in the Soviet case. The concentration camp was invented by the British during the Boer War. I guess that it was reinvented before 1932 in Russia? As I may have said earlier on this list, the Soviet authorities banned, in the 1960s, a Soviet film, 'Ordinary Fascism', fearing that Soviet viewers would draw parallels with the Soviet Union! What, however, is important here is not who originated and who copied but the extent to which one can identify common discourses, processes and structures amongst societies otherwise so different and sometimes even at total war with each other. This is exemplified in many East European jokes: 1) Under capitalism there is the exploitation of man by man; under Communism it's the other way round; 2) Socialism is the stage of development between capitalism and...capitalism. In any case, the present period of a globalised, networked, informatised, finance and services capitalism clearly both undermines these early forms and poses to emancipatory forces the problem of surpassing them.