Movement from below
Mohamed Sid-Ahmed reviews the rise of the World Social Forum and discusses the idea of creating an Egyptian Social Forum
The collapse of the Soviet Union, the bastion of world socialism, paved the way for the emergence of corporate globalisation, aka neo-liberal capitalism, as a formidable player on the world stage. Promoter of a global agenda that guarantees transnational corporations new and facilitated markets without regard to the economic needs of poor countries and often a t a high environmental cost, neo-liberalism has become the target of a global anti-globalisation movement.
The movement reached a peak in early 1998, when an agreement drawn up in secret first came to light. Dubbed the Multilateral Agreement on Investments (MAI), it was intended as a kind of World Constitution for Capital, which would give capital, in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, unlimited rights and almost no duties, especially in Third World countries where investments would be made. It was to be signed by the world's richest countries then "proposed" -- actually, imposed -- on the rest of the countries of the world. The French newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique published a first expose of MAI, prepared in the United States by the Public Citizens Movements led by former US presidential candidate Ralph Nader. The outcry at the inequities contained in the agreement led to the emergence of a social movement of protest, causing France to withdraw from the negotiations in late 1998 and finally preventing the agreement from being signed.
One of the organisations behind the mobilisation was ATTAC, at first the Association for a Tobin Tax for the Aid of Citizens (named after Economics Nobel laureate James Tobin), and now the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens, that was starting to take shape in France at the time. Today, the association has some 20 thousand supporters all over France and has produced ATTACs in other countries, including Brazil. The association is working to put into effect Tobin's proposal for a tax on speculative capital movements as a way of controlling their present absolute freedom to circulate worldwide, with the consequences everybody knows.
With the interactions these events helped to trigger, a number of different forms of opposition to this type of globalisation began to organise. Those which gained most fame were the protests in Seattle against the WTO, in Washington against the IMF and the World Bank, and more recently in Prague which led the government representatives gathered there to cut short their meeting one day ahead of schedule.
Since it was founded in 1971 as a private institution supported by its members, the World Economic forum has organised an annual meeting in Davos, a small luxury ski resort in Switzerland. The largest private meeting for the world's business elite, opinion leaders and decision-makers, the WEF has played a leading role in the last decade as a producer of ideology and promoter of a global economic agenda.
In the light of all this, a number of Brazilian intellectuals decided to launch a new stage of resistance to the ideas propagated in Davos, not limited to staging demonstrations and mass protests but extending to offering specific proposals and concrete responses to the challenges of building "another world" in which the economy would serve people, and not the other way round. The idea was to arrange, with the participation of a wide range of organisations that were already networking in the mass protests, a new kind of meeting on a world scale -- the World Social Forum (WSF) -- directed to social concerns. "Another World is Possible" was the theme and mission of the forum, to be held -- symbolically -- in a Third World country. The Brazilian town of Porto Alegre was chosen as a venue for the event. The WSF met in Porto Alegre for two consecutive years, and the next meeting is to be held next week in Mumbai to underscore that the process underway is unfolding worldwide and expanding rapidly.
According to its Charter of Principles, adopted in Sao Paolo in April 2001, the World Social Forum is "an open meeting place for reflective thinking, democratic debate of ideas, formulation of proposals, free exchange of experiences and interlinking for effective action by groups and movements of civil society that are opposed to neo-liberalism and the domination of the world by capital... From now on, in the certainty proclaimed at Porto Alegre that 'another world is possible', it (the WSF) becomes a permanent process of seeking and building alternatives which cannot be reduced to the events supporting it." The Charter also states that the WSF "brings together and interlinks only organisations and movements of civil society from all the countries in the world, but intends not to be a body representing world civil society itself."
Indeed, the meetings of the WSF do not deliberate on behalf of the Forum as a body. No one, therefore is authorised, on behalf of nay of the editions of the Forum, to express positions claiming to be those of all its participants. The WSF is plural, diversified, non-confessional, non-governmental and non-party. In a decentralised fashion, it interrelates organisations and movements engaged in concrete action at levels from the local to the national, to the regional, to the international, to build another world.
The WSF aspires to set up a new type of organisation, which would be the very opposite of an organisation based on the principle of "democratic centralism" advocated by communist parties. Experience proved that it is very difficult to strike a balance between centralism and democracy without jeopardising either. It is virtually impossible, in fact, to prevent the ascendancy of centralism over democracy, to avoid the collapse of democracy under the weight of centralism. Centralism can overshadow democracy, while the opposite is not true.
Another feature that sets the WSF apart from other organisational structures is that it shuns the free game of coexistence between factions that characterises most Social-Democratic parties. What it tries to avoid in particular is the emergence of a centre, a locus of power enjoying prerogatives and authority that no other site in the organisation has.
This requires nothing less than the invention of an altogether new type of non-hierarchical democratic organisation whose different chapters are linked together into a coherent whole not by orders from on high but by a collective consciousness that is fed and developed by means of dialogue and exchanges of views. Thanks to the information revolution, particularly the Internet and e-mail, information has become a commodity available to all, whenever the time, wherever the place, and no longer the privilege of a few leading figures who alone are equipped with a thorough knowledge of political reality. With the ability to know available everywhere, there is much less room for misinformation and demagogy.
The promise held out by the decolonisation process which began in the middle of the last century, the belief that humankind was on the threshold of a better and brighter world has not materialised. Among the dispossessed of the world hope gave way to despair, anger and frustration, to a sense that violence is the only effective tool for change. It is a logic that has encouraged nihilism, even terrorism.
The WSF embodies the very opposite of that logic. Its key endeavour is to restructure how ideas are to be disseminated, how to guarantee their access to the wider public. What is at stake in the final analysis is how to draw lessons from past experiences, how to avoid the mistakes left-oriented parties and organisations committed and which often ended up producing the very opposite of what was desired.
Last week, a number of Egyptian non- governmental organisations held a meeting at which they discussed the need for an Egyptian Social Forum as a first building block for a pan-Arab Social Forum. Building national or regional social forums should begin at the rank and file level so as to reflect the specific concerns of each society taken separately before being integrated into one overall whole in the context of the World Social Forum.
