index of 2006 workshop papers

program

(DRAFT - for Another World is Necessary. Please don’t circulate. Comments solicited.)

World Social Forum at a Crossroads in Caracas: Fifth International or Solidarity Economy?

Betsy Bowman and Bob Stone
Center for Global Justice

We had been to the first regional social forum in 2002, the European Social Forum in Florence. Our first World Social Forum was the 6 th annual one, whose main part met January 24 th -29 th in Caracas, Venezuela. It felt like part self-generated Woodstock, part global action center, part solidarity economy workshop, and part oversized university-for-five-days. We made our way to many stuffy rooms, some calmed by academics, others apulse with activists. The largest delegations came from Venezuela, Brazil, and Colombia, but it was exhilaratingly global. One optimistic writer calls the Forums the “world parliament in exile.” All World Social Forums (WSFs) have debated who they are and where they are going. But at Caracas this “movement of movements” seemed to us to be facing particularly stark options with high stakes. We evoke this young but massive movement, review the debate, and propose a pathway.

A brief history of the Forums will provide necessary context.

It all started in February, 2000 when French and Brazilian opponents of the free-market policies of neo-liberal globalization met in Paris. A series of confrontations inspired by Zapatista “encounters” in Chiapas in 1996 and Spain

in 1997 had culminated the previous fall in the great 1999 Seattle protest against the World Trade Organization. With 30,000 participants, it had brought the new movement against globalization to the world’s attention. In Paris the task was to maintain the momentum. The idea was born of a January 2001 social forum opposite the annual World Economic Forum in Davos , Switzerland -- where bankers and politicians set global economic policy. As the Reagan/Thatcher decade started in 1980 economic orthodoxy switched from Keynesianism to a renewed Adam Smithian or “neo-liberal” capitalist faith in markets. “There is no alternative” was Thatcher’s mantra. In practice this had meant: privatize public goods, stop social spending, and regulate “free trade” by treaties favoring transnationals. So the Paris meeting badly needed to put a workable alternative on display. Porto Alegre, Brazil, cradle of “participatory budgeting,” was chosen. “Another world is possible” was to be the slogan. Its truth could be seen in Porto Alegre’s “solidarity economy.” A movement was born.

Participatory budgeting, is simple: a city’s citizens and not just its politicians, get to help allocate its capital expenditures by neighborhood. All civic groups may send representatives to regular meetings to prioritize spending on streets, education, whatever. The system’s own “goal,” apart from human intentions, is capital accumulation. Insofar as the goal of alternatives to it is set by joint human decision, that goal cannot be capital accumulation. Thus, like participatory budgeting, “alternative” economic forms typically involve democratic, local control of economic life so as to meet needs. Examples include producer or consumer co-ops, credit unions, or alternative media.

Such voluntary associations and their social property -- i.e. neither individual nor public property -- thus manifest a long-hidden capacity to meet needs and build communities, often without passing through the commodity form. They prove that governments and markets are not the only two ways to realize those goods. Multinationals suck out the value communities create, often storing it in tax havens. But such flows to the wealthy are short-circuited when plain citizens invent grassroots economic practices. Such practices are not only revolutionary, they work! Porto Alegre’s innovation has generated: fiscal transparency; regular budget surpluses; scores of successful worker co-ops; UNESCO designation as a model city; and emulation in some 200 Brazilian cities, with others in Canada, Scotland and elsewhere. The option for the WSF that we will propose involves reconnecting with these roots in the solidarity economy.

Except for one in Mumbai, India, all WSFs up to 2006 have been in Porto Alegre. The 2005 leaders, aiming at greater inclusiveness, set up a “polycentric” Forum for 2006. The first such “center” to meet was in Bamako, Mali, January 19-23, then 24-29 in Caracas , and then March 24-29 in Karachi , Pakistan . Drawing about 10k, 70k and 30k participants, respectively, this year’s total equaled the roughly 100k of each of the last four forums. Significantly, the 2007 Forum will be in Nairobi , Kenya , the first single-centered WSF to take place in Africa . In an informal survey of participants in the first two Forums, we asked what the Forums’ adversary was. “Globalization,” or “corporate globalization” were the usual answers. In Florence in 2002 “capitalism” was usually named. This radicalization is also expressed in new first-world/third-world and North/South alliances against the same system that have formed.

The Forums were started by social movements as distinct from political parties. The initial Paris meetings started with Bernard Cassen of ATTAC and Brazilians Oded Grajew and Chico Whitaker. In France, the Association for Taxation of Transactions to Help Citizens ( Association pour la Taxation des Transactions pour l'Aide aux Citoyens) advocates, among other reforms, taxation on all international capital transfers. An early Forum initiator in Brazil was the MST, the Movement of Landless Workers (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra). Independent of government and NGOs, the MST helps the rural poor occupy unused land so as to establish cooperatives for autonomous production. Such social movements, not parties, still control the WSF. Hundreds of them animate the Forums, defending: women, workers, peace, the unemployed, the indigenous, rain forests, bio-diversity, immigrants, alternative media, access to water and food, and of course the solidarity economy.

“Solidarity economy” names not just participatory budgeting but any economic activity that democratizes economies, subordinating profit to human ends. It includes: local solidarity and mutual aid networks; producer, buying and selling co-ops; ethical consumption; fair trade; local and social currencies and barter networks; credit unions and micro-finance; and community gardens and restaurants. Venezuela inaugurated a cabinet-level Ministry of the Popular Economy in 2004 and Brazil and Colombia have national authorities charged with helping the solidarity economy. Organizational forms of the solidarity economy often seen at the WSF include: inter-cooperation bodies of the solidarity economy at national, regional and global levels; civic and municipal groups for democratic development; and research and advocacy groups. Socialists and anarchists debate in the WSF, but it is itself independent of all governments, political parties, and ideologies (see the WSF website at www.forumsocialmundial.org.br). At its founding in 2001, this independence was enshrined in the central clause 6 of the Charter of Principles: "The participants in the Forum shall not be called on to take decisions as a body, whether by votes or by acclamation or declarations or proposals for action that would commit all, or the majority of them, or that propose to be taken as establishing positions of the Forum as a body. It thus does not constitute a locus of power to be disputed by the participants in its meetings." This seemingly uncontroversial statement was to become increasingly controversial.

The Forums’ guiding International Committee is sometimes criticized for lack of transparency in its decisions, but it is open to all. A regular participant, Alexandr Buzgalin, a Moscow University economist, told us that Committee members must leave their party’s position at the door. As a result, even though most belong to a party, focus is solely on what’s best for the WSF. Buzgalin reports that this is uniformly experienced as a liberation that is not to be lightly discarded. Committee members’ ties to nation-based parties having been bracketed, they also find it easier to think globally in a novel way.

Options Debated

Old hands said the Caracas forum was as much a big party as the Porto Alegre meetings, but less organized and centered. Oddly, the thronged Hilton lobby became a mini-center. Amidst potted palms an anti-Bush Canadian posed in a Condy costume. We chose sessions from over 2000 around town, accessible by subway - gratis to registrants. Ferment over the World Social Forum itself was also in the air. Ignacio Ramonet of Le Monde Diplomatique had written of the 2005 Forum: “One could see in it a sort of exhaustion of the initial formula: because of the number of participants, the forum couldn’t go on being just a space of meeting and debate which didn’t give rise to action…[If it does not,] it runs the risk of depoliticization and turning into folklore.” Explaining why she was not participating in the 2006 Karachi WSF, Arundhati Roy said the institution “has now become very NGO-ized…it's just become too comfortable a stage. I think it's played a very important role up to now, but now I think we've got to move on from there….I think we have to come up with new strategies.”

If the WSF is at a crossroads, what are the options?

Chavez represented an option. Hosting the Forum, he challenged it to "draw up strategies of power in an offensive to build a better world,” forming a socialist “front.” At the Assembly of Social Movements, a coalition of 300 central networks , he explained “We cannot allow [the WSF] to become a folkloric and touristic event….We must have diversity and autonomy, but also unity in a great anti-imperialist front.” Others called for a “Fifth International.” Atilio Boron, an Argentine theorist who directs a major group of Latin American social scientists. and participant in the International Council, called on the WSF to convert to “a new international to counter the international of the bourgeoisie.” The Fourth International, started by Trotsky’s 1938 dissent from Stalinism, embraces Trotskyist parties that seek state power. Recent election in Bolivia of the socialist Morales raised hopes among Forum participants that power politics could be an instrument of change. And Chavez’s advocacy of this option carried weight. The revolution which his government animates had empowered Venezuela’s electorate and the resulting legitimacy had been used to vastly expand the solidarity economy. And his aid to Bolivia, Argentina and Brazil was helping build regional economic autonomy and with it greater national sovereignty.

A variant of this option was proposed in a fascinating document that had been finished just before the 2006 Bamako, Mali meeting. The 9000-word text -- titled the Bamako Appeal -- was proposed at both Bamako and Caracas for debate and individual signatures (www.forumtiersmonde.net). It prioritizes restoring state sovereignty, but also acknowledges that wielding such power cannot by itself change a mode of production and consumption: producers and consumers must also act. It invokes as model the mutual aid alliances between Third World nations of the 1955 Bandung conference, which led in 1961 to the non-aligned movement. Echoing Bandung the Appeal would start by restoring national sovereignty in the global South. Regional alliances will help rebuild it. Drafted by some 80 WSF leaders, including Samir Amin and Walden Bello, it was the first detailed strategy to emerge after six years of Forums. It would dismantle all U.S. foreign bases, tax havens, and Third World debt. It would resume national control of national economies, and start study of how capitalism reproduces itself. Sections on environment, women, food sovereignty, media, and international law attempt consensus statements. It calls for “a world-wide anti-imperialist network that could coordinate a variety of mobilizations throughout the planet” and “a workers’ united front” of independent international trade unions. It envisions transcending capitalism but does not see democratizing production as means to that end; the solidarity economy is not mentioned. It is debated on Open Space Forum www.openspaceforum.net. We’ll return to the discussion of this document as we conclude.

Such proposals to wield a restored national sovereignty and to start an international we’ll call the Use-state-power-to-change-the-world Option.

On the other side were at least two groups: defenders of the Forums’ strict independence of states and party politics, and advocates of a less state-focused strategy. One Forum organizer said that to act globally through political parties, on the model of the various socialist “internationals,” would require a fatal uniformity of ideology. WSF activist Candido Gryzbowski warned: “If you look at the history of the left, these are the debates that happened in the internationals, and they explode when they try to impose that unity on everyone.” He added "there should not and cannot exist an Inquisition or Politburo to dictate what is correct and what is erroneous.” Created by social movements, the Forum has stuck to its founding charter and should not now abandon it, Gryzbowski contended. The charter prescribes “an open meeting place where social movements, networks, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and other civil society organizations opposed to neo-liberalism and a world dominated by capital or by any form of imperialism come together to pursue their thinking, to debate ideas democratically, to formulate proposals, share their experiences freely and network for effective action.” While Gryzbowski holds to starting principles, he offers (to our knowledge) no action alternative to a “front” or “international.”

Let’s call this the Continue-as-non-partisan-forum Option.

An incident shows that advocates of this last option remain the main force in the Forum movement for now. Fearing domination by chavista politics, an “alternative world social forum” was set up -- with Chavez government help. Its fears proved groundless. The day after Chavez’s socialist “front” appeal, a leadership session roundly rejected a proposal to make a statement in the name of the Forum, precisely the sort of thing a front would do. A Forum organizer told the Nation: “It makes sense that a political leader like Chavez would make that appeal, but even though we admire him, we can’t repeat the mistakes of the past century.” What, then, should we do? Defenders of the non-partisan option are weak here. These were two of the main options under debate in Caracas .

Merely by asking the WSF to take a direction, exponents of a Fifth International appear decisive. Those who would continue unchanged as neutral forum fear a split might develop between themselves and advocates of a Fifth International. The latter answer: “So there might. But it would be a split between those - including the real mass movements in Brazil - who want to fight, and those who only want to talk or pray.” This casts those who would continue the forum function as unwilling to fight. We don’t think this follows.

Neo-liberalism Loses Momentum

Distinctions would help this debate. Organizing massive global actions by social movements is not the same thing as starting an “international” or alliance of national parties bound by ideology. Doing the former does not mean doing the latter. The key is simply that coordinating even a global action requires no advance agreement on positive doctrine. A prime example was the global anti-Iraq war protest of February 15, 2003. Called at the November 2002 European Social Forum, planned at that January’s World Social Forum, this protest demonstrated global opposition to the U.S. and that opposition has only grown up to now. Can another global action be called for? Is there a third option?

February 15, 2003 was the largest demonstration in history and the first global one. In answer to a WSF call, main streets of 800 cities and towns on all continents were filled. Ideological uniformity was absent. The action built on and did not negate the WSF’s vast variety of regions, nations, ideologies, languages and cultures. No uniform belief system underlay the WSF’s role as impetus and coordinator.

No political party has been so global or has exhibited such pervasive organizational power. Millions acted in person and not through representatives. That day the Forum ceased being a mere platform and became a movement. Some argue that the action failed: the war started on March 20. But the aims were to demonstrate people power and to consolidate global opposition, which it did more quickly and pervasively than opposition to any previous war had done. A future in which humanity itself makes its own history became imaginable.

Listing the other WSF-mediated victories over neo-liberalism gives us the measure of the power that lies in the World Social Forum movement. These victories include:

-Massive protests outside all free trade meetings, planned at Forums, fostered new voting blocks within the World Trade Organization that managed to deadlock its Cancun meetings in 2003.

-New regional and local social forums in Europe, the Mediterranean, Latin American, and even New York City, have started grassroots system change.

-When, instead of the IMF setting terms of Argentina’s debt restructuring, Argentine president Nestor Kirchner set those terms, “the aura of invincibility surrounding the Fund was dispelled.” Prior to the Forums’ mobilization of Latin American public opinion against IMF imposition of neo-liberalism, such defiance was unthinkable. Kirchner may indeed have had no alternative.

-Blocking of Bush and his FTAA by Latin American leaders, acting as one at Mar del Plata in 2005, had also been made politically possible, even necessary, by the loud presence in their respective countries (and at Mar del Plata) of the global movement consolidated by the Forums.

- Bolivia’s recent election of a socialist and emergence in Uruguay, Ecuador, Nicaragua and the Caribbean of serious political opposition to neo-liberalism -- would have been unlikely absent the connecting and legitimating at Porto-Alegre Forums of open, continent-wide, mutually-empowering struggles against neo-liberalism.

-The global opposition to “free trade” generated by the Forums has virtually ended global trade negotiations and may foreclose Doha Round progress again this year.

-The WSF’s capacity, then, for successful global action is enormous and constitutes a powerful resource. “There is no contradiction between maintaining the Forum as an open space for discussion and using it to build alliances and platforms for action,” as noted by Gustavo Codas of Brazil’s Central Unica dos Trabalhadores (CUT). The Forum was so used to produce February 15, an effort that did not sacrifice its openness.

Such cases show social movements can have direct political impacts. And they need not convert themselves into parties to do so. The indigenous movements behind Evo Morales’s victory in Bolivia remain independent and ready to challenge him, should he deviate from the revolutionary path. A party committed to him could have no such autonomy. And recent successes of the “new European left” show a similar independence. Neo-liberalism is decimating Europe’s retirement funds, labor regulations, and youth opportunities. The result? As Hilary Wainwright notes, the more left parties in Norway and Italy ally as equals with huge but non-partisan social movements opposed to globalization, the more they win.

Far from yielding autonomy, these movements have bent parties to their ends. In Latin America and Europe even left parties are mistrusted for giving in to neo-liberalism. It may very well be because the Forums are non-partisan, not despite it, that they have engendered such political successes. Without recourse to electoral politics, February 15 and the seven victories listed above (plus the Bolivian and European cases) first slowed then arrested capitalist globalization’s diplomatic momentum. This was a major goal of alter-globalization movements. The World Economic Forum has been stymied, an attainment that might have taken a “front” or “international” a decade or more. It is too soon to say global justice movements have “won” but they are on a roll.

A New Stage of the Struggle

These advances have brought the struggle against neo-liberalism to a new stage. Initiative has passed to globalization’s opponents. What do they offer? Neo-liberalism is a flop. Another world must be possible. But its viability needs to be shown. The option that elicits a switch away from capitalism must not repeat the failures of neo-liberalism or authoritarian socialism. And it must meet human needs in an interdependent world. Then votes will come.

No need to look far for this alternative. It is under the noses of those debating the Forums’ future. For beside the Forums’ function as global action coordinator its other ongoing role, also often unnoticed, is as builder of the solidarity economy. WSFs do not just debate “another world” and “globalization from below,” they construct them in the Forums’ basement, as it were. National solidarity economy groups are forming regional ones for mutual aid, commerce, and intercooperation. And regional networks are now linking with larger South-South, North-South, and global networks -- thanks to the WSF “switchboard.”

We joining in meetings of three international solidarity economy groups:

The Ibero-american Network for Integration of Cooperatives and Organizations of Social Production (Red Iberoamericana de Integracion de Cooperativas y Organizaciones de Produccion Social, http://www.encuentrocooperativas.org ) was formed only in late 2005 in Caracas . Most delegates from the networks represented had occupied and cooperativized their workplaces. This network is separate from “official” national bodies for producer co-ops and democratic enterprises -- though the latter often go to Forums too. Delegations from networks in Venezuela , Argentina , Brazil , Nicaragua , Colombia , and Ecuador worked together on continent-wide cooperation (instead of competition) in education, communication, commerce, and finance. The principle that had initially brought individuals into co-ops was now bringing co-ops as such together: co-ops are individually more effective as Red members than on their own.

The International Network for the Promotion of the Social Solidarity Economy, (RIPESS www.ripess.net) coordinates solidarity economies globally. Delegates from national and regional organs -- especially in Europe and Africa -- try to resolve problems of advocacy and markets at the Forums.

The Third is the Workgroup on a Solidarity Socio-Economy (WSSE, www.socioeco.org ), the solidarity economy branch of Alliance 21 -- Alliance for a Responsible, Plural & United World (www.alliance21.org) a major global group. WSSE seeks to integrate initiatives in fair trade, social money, solidarity finance and co-ops in workable cross-border and cross-sector relationships.

These were just the meetings we attended. Regional solidarity economy groups meeting in Caracas included: La Confederación Latinoamericana de Cooperativas y Mutuales de Trabajadores (COLACOT); Red Latino-americano de Mujeres Transformando la Economia; Red de Mujeres Solidarias; Convergencia de Movimientos de los Pueblos de las Americas. Global groups present included: Alliance 21; Proutist Universal; International Association for Feminist Economics; Alternatives International; Network Institute for Global Democratization. Other global co-op groups frequently at World Social Forums include: International Organisation of Industrial, Artisanal and Service Producers' Co-operatives (CICOPA) -- the producer cooperative branch of the International Cooperative Alliance (www.cicopa.coop) ; Movement of the Solidarity Economy (MES, m-e-s@wanadoo.fr); and Radically Democratise Democracy Network (DRD), www.budget-participatif.org) -- a network of over 300 members in 18 countries joining to promote understanding of Porto Alegre’s “participatory budget” policy. Francois Houtart of the Third World Forum remarked: “If the Forums don’t want to become the Fifth International, they should also avoid becoming a social Woodstock. Therefore other initiatives must be taken.” We agree, but other initiatives have been taken. Forums have all along been building the solidarity economy. This avoids perils both of an “international” and of a social “ Woodstock,” that is, the “revolutionary tourism” that Chavez fears if Forums do not form political parties.

What, then, is our third option? Clearly we must both build the solidarity economy and take state power. The question is: with what emphasis and in what sequence? Instead of starting with electoral politics, we think the Forum movement should first use its established power to build the solidarity economy as alternative to capitalism. The February 15 capacity can be used to globally set up workable solidarity economies. This could kick off the biggest political action of all: transformation of the current system into something better. Forums would animate this new third way that is neither a front of national political parties nor mere continuation of the relatively inactive non-partisan forum function.

Another way of putting this is to conceive of the alter-globalization movement as having two sides, and our proposal is to have one of those sides dedicate itself to helping the other. Militarized corporate globalization has elicited two forms of organized resistance. Most media-visible are punctual protests. These embrace massive protests at meetings of architects of globalization: the World Trade Organization (Seattle 1999), the International Monetary Fund and World Bank (Washington 2000), the G8 (Genoa 2001), and World Economic Forum (Cancun 2003). Less visible but more pervasive are ongoing struggles: direct resistance to globalization by those it excludes from consumption and who are constructing new economic forms in order to survive. In this latter group are: the factory occupation movement in Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Venezuela; the economic and political autonomy being built daily by Zapatista “communities in resistance”; the land reform being effected by the MST in Brazil as it helps whole villages of landless farmers to occupy and cooperativize large tracts of unused land and return them to production; and the large and spreading movement of “participatory budgeting” mentioned above. In 1996 the punctual side of alter-globalization movements was born from this ongoing-struggle side at the first Zapatista encuentro which drew 5,000 to Chiapas, including many foreign supporters. The second encuentro in 1997 in Spain drew half again as many and gave birth to Peoples’ Global Action, which became in turn a major animator of the Seattle 1999 protest. On the protest side, new forms of global political agency were born on February 15. Both punctual and ongoing sides of the alter-globalization movement come together at solidarity-building gatherings like World Social Forums. We are proposing that this mass organization capacity behind the punctual protests be mobilized to build up the ongoing economic autonomy side of the World Social Forum movement. Let’s see how this might work.

Building the Solidarity Economy

Capitalism’s requirement to subject oneself to the will of another, who benefits disproportionately, as condition of meeting one’s own needs, creates even in those who benefit a revulsion similar to the revulsion against slavery and apartheid. The system’s daily, endemic exploitation is visible within and between nations. Growth of the global justice movement evinces this revulsion on a world scale. Still, absence of an alternative restrains its expression and further growth of that movement. The drift to fascism in the U.S., for example, is less a choice than a default -- absent an economically sustainable alternative. Were one visible, the floodgates would very likely open. Making visible the one known to global justice activists is therefore a central priority of the movement.

If something has been done it can be done again. Yet successes like February 15 that could be resources for future action have been overlooked as options alongside of the Fifth International proposal. Grassroots economic action is another resource: boycotts, supplier switches, strikes, investment strikes, divestitures and embargoes. In the U.S. there is another resource: more than 200 campuses have fought against sweatshops and more than 50 of them have already succeeded in eliminating sweatshop goods from their campuses. In short: the power of February 15 could elicit massive economic action. Examples of such a new combination:

-A global boycott of pertinent products, organized in advance by the WSF, could be triggered, say, by invasion of Iran or attempts to unseat President Chavez, or other imperialist aggressions. Multi-nationals are unhurt by and indifferent to purely political protest. But faced with the threat of economic action they might restrain such aggressions. WSF groups would only need to organize and expand the spontaneous, months-long boycott of U.S. products that followed start of the Iraq war on March 20, 2001 -- especially of brands like Coca-Cola and McDonalds and especially in the Mid-East and Europe.

-A global “neighborhood assembly” day. Neighbors would gather to begin to assess neighborhood needs and resources. They might start to set in place participatory budgeting modeled on the Brazilian neighborhood assemblies, or take a leaf from those that cropped up all over Argentina after the financial crisis, and from the “community councils” recently launched in Venezuela. At the level of local government, tax breaks and preferential bidding on public contracts could be directed to democratic firms; luxury taxes could build up loan funds for co-op start-ups and buy-outs.

-A global “buy co-op, boycott multi-nationals” day or week would at the same time both withdraw spending from the capitalist economy and devote it instead to building the solidarity economy. The spontaneity of the post-March 20 boycotts expressed in an unorganized manner the same power that was shown in the February 15 global action. This power could be summoned to complement the not-buying of boycott with a positive commitment and switch to the solidarity economy. One might, for example: meet one’s needs from community rather than private or hierarchical resources; pass by the national supermarket chain for a local family markets or co-ops; or in developed countries: get electricity, telephone, photocopying, and personal transportation services from new co-ops (start a car pool); meet child and elder-care needs with co-ops; bank at a credit union (whose depositer-members might direct investments to local democratic enterprises); and in general switch to an exploitation-free democratic economy. In Mexico one would buy Pasqual soft drinks instead of Coke or Pepsi. In Argentina one would buy shows from CUC (a cooperativized factory) rather than Adidas. Globally, the action would practice up for actually shifting away from capitalism to a more democratic and non-exploitative alternative based on direct worker and farmer control of the means of production.

-A global “economic democracy” day would be one in which workers would divert their labor away from the capitalist economy, switching it toward a democratic one. Instead of working to profit others, they would stay home to participate in a neighborhood assembly, or start a local currency, credit union, or co-op. Workers could assure their bosses who are suffering boycotts that cooperativizing the shop will immediately attract customers. The establishments from which those workers buy the goods and services they need to live could be offered the same terms.

-A global “general strike” perhaps initially just a day, might combine the buying switch with the labor switch and the neighborhood assembly day. Such a strike would directly confront the inherent injustice of wage labor in a system that pits classes and nations against each other. It would signal the start of a more equitable and cooperative way of meeting needs. Workers could join together to study and discuss how such a transition might be made.

From the start, in each of these steps, large amounts of neighborly mutual aid will be needed since the costs of non-exploitatively produced goods will be higher until supply catches up with demand. Since sources of livelihood are to be suspended, placing lives at stake, a moral commitment to global solidarity is involved; but such a commitment will also be the movement’s strength. Coordinated and escalated by world and regional forums, the aim would be to replace a system that subjects all humans to itself with a collective practice which subjects system as such to the end of meeting needs. Such a shift away from capitalism is unlikely unless there are the rudiments of an alternative human-centered economy that can be seen now and shifted to.

Under capitalism the consumer is king we are told. Some argue that to use this power at all is implicitly to accept the capitalist system that awards it -- by itself a moral and strategic error. We disagree. We think that this power which does flow from the essence of capitalism, can be used in a transformatory way from within, jiu-jitsu-like, to end the same system that had awarded it while subjecting future systems to human aims. So we are speaking of a revolutionary consumerism for ending system-domination. It is true that fair trade runs afoul of evidence that trade as such always favors the stronger party; however, non-cash barter, while restricting money purchase as much as possible to democratic enterprises, would, in the same act that terminates capitalism, initiate human domination of all economic systems. Boycotting “sweatshops” is also a half-way measure. It works only if you accept profit itself and just oppose super-profits from forms of capitalist labor deemed immoral. However, we propose boycotting and strikes of all capitalist enterprises, especially multi-nationals, while buying from and working for democratic enterprises. True,: use of consumer power only affects a certain (perhaps crucial) sector of modern, developed economies. But the envisioned economic democracy day and the general strike are economy-wide actions which, as May 1968 in France shows, have the power to place the economy in the people’s hands. Mounting a credible plan to boycott and strike capitalist enterprises (something the Forum movement can start) will by itself stimulate a willingness on the part of capitalists to negotiate democratization of their businesses -- contemplating the positive reward of retirement as they are bought out. In short, even playing by capitalism’s own rules, there is a non-violent way to end its domination of humanity. If capitalists initiate violence that’s their choice, for which they will individually have to answer. But legitimacy will have passed by then to the workplace democracy movement launched by the WSF.

The other side of our economic power as consumers is our even greater economic power as workers. As revolutionary consumerism gains strength these two main economic capacities be mobilized at the same time. The consumer boycott of capitalist firms would be joined by a withholding of labor rather than of cash from all enterprises unwilling to negotiate sale to employees or tenants. Freedoms of assembly, speech, press and travel would be intensively used to shift ownership of the means of production from capitalists to workers. Boycotts and strikes -- parts of capitalist “freedom” -- are for the most part legal in market economies and their criminalization is hard to enforce. Just as one has a choice not only among religions but against religion altogether, one may work and buy from any capitalist one chooses or from none at all. The freedom to buy and sell includes the freedom to do neither. Their revolutionary use is a mere extension of their capitalist use.

One of the WSF movement’s most distinctive historical contributions has been to foster highly varied economic experiments in civil society. A logical step would be to establish the viability of some of them. If instead, the WSF’s constituent movements were to suddenly ask for political power -- a new departure involving narrowing themselves to the ideological uniformity needed for electoral politics -- the shift could appear as a self-betrayal. An historical opportunity would be lost. On the other hand, little is risked by postponing that entry so as to establish that preferability. For it is precisely because it is non-partisan, that the social forum movement has enjoyed a credibility and freedom that allow it to engage millions in world-wide actions. Its purely political impacts have as a result been greater than those of Vietnam war resistance or than those to be expected from a “front” of national parties. For the WSFs’ indifference to state power has lent its actions a moral power. Arundhati Roy called the global protest of February 15: “The most spectacular display of public morality the world has ever seen.” If the WSF movement starts party recruiting, asking ideological commitment in order to take power, this potentially global power will be at risk. Once lost, such legitimacy will be hard to recover. By contrast, summoning it for a world-wide shift from the capitalist to the solidarity economy is fully consistent with the WSF movement’s past and with the global civic consciousness so evident on February 15.

Like pictures, actions are worth a thousand words (often many more), and actions are said to “speak” louder than words. We have so far outlined a strategy, a sketch of a plan of global action. We suggest that this action is coherent prior to stating any ideology or theory behind it. We submit as evidence the readers’ own comprehension of the proposal we’ve made up to here. For action has its own pre-verbal intelligibility. Explanations are in order only when that intelligibility contains holes or contradictions that make it impossible to divine the action’s goal on its face. Joint action does not require agreement on goals, which is to say identity of aims. Compatibility of goals suffices to ground joint forward motion. Perceptions of compatibility can be tacit or pre-verbally understood among participants in joint actions, especially if they share the situation of being oppressed and the project of liberation from that oppression. Just as the meaning of getting up and approaching a window in a hot and stuffy room is immediately comprehensible to others sitting in the room without having to ask, so each oppressed person immediately apprehends what the other is about insofar as their actions tend toward liberation of one kind or another.

Still, we would now like to explain the strategy we have proposed. We’ll do this by suggesting and imagining, much more than stating and arguing for, a framework in which this strategy makes sense.

A Revolutionary Scenario

As collective consumer and worker action impels a shift to democratic production, humanity will surely begin to awaken to its power to make its own history. World and regional forums and newly invented organizations can then address broader economic problems beyond reorganizing production, namely, transforming patterns of marketing, distribution, credit, technical innovation and planning. For having felt their collective power within production, workers will be less willing to subject themselves to the tyranny of the market as means of distribution beyond production. The tyranny of the capitalist workplace -- with its constant generation of poverty, hunger, race, class and gender polarization -- ought first to be undone. Replacing that tyranny with democracy has both moral and economic priority. However, having abolished exploitation the question of subjecting distribution to democracy will almost certainly push itself to the fore. Why struggle for autonomy in the workplace only to lose it again to “market forces” beyond the workplace? Domination of humans over their economies will be incomplete without some form of democratic planning.

We have argued elsewhere for a two-step revolutionary process: cooperativization of production followed by de-marketization of remaining parts of the economy, by means of expanding democratization. We find the “economic democracy” of David Schweickart and the “participatory economics” of Albert and Hahnel almost equally attractive and also complementary. While we think workers would not rest content with the co-op-based market socialism advocated by Schweickart, we think he has the main thing right: the urgency of democratizing production. And while we think Albert and Hahnel have devised the best scheme for replacing markets with democratic planning, we think markets as such will not present themselves as problems unless workers have experienced their own collective autonomy in fully cooperativized workplaces in economies dominated by such workplaces. Such workers will want to press on to subject markets to human control. After an occupation strike had seized 40% of French industry in May 1968, the French non-Communist Marxist philosopher, Lucien Goldmann, remarked: "It is false to say, as is often done, 'self-management is not possible except in socialism,' because generalized self-management is socialism." We agree but with a bit less optimism. Generalized worker control is for us a necessary step in abolishing the labor market and exploitation, but does not itself replace markets by production for need and democratic economic planning -- also key elements of the socialist vision.

We find such sequencing of seemingly incompatible options helpful in resolving other potentially divisive debates in the World Social Forum.

In 2002 a major debate was started among Latin American leftists by a book titled Change the World Without Taking Power. Its author, John Holloway, argued for a Zapatista-derived project of establishing “communities in struggle.” Ignoring official governments around them, such communities under peasant control practice economic democracy in spaces free of racism, sexism, and homophobia. “Political power” is not so much “taken” as resolved, in such economically autonomous communities, into the peoples’ power, yielding a new more practical notion of what political power itself is for. On the other side of that debate was a strategy of taking political power in order to change the world. This “change” would largely be effected by government programs. This debate has been sharpened by ascent of Chavez and Morales to state power. The alternative to Zapatismo now has a name and a history. Interestingly, economic autonomy via cooperativism -- the Zapatista practice -- is also the main aim of the Chavez government, which seems to be trying to work itself out of its job.

Looking at this debate we see no either/or. We can (and should) have both/and, but in sequence. That is, the Zaptista project of establishing the visible workability of an alternative to capitalism, is best understood as to be followed by consolidating gains politically. For if the Zapatista project succeeds, organizing to take state power will ultimately be hard to avoid. While markets can be replaced by decentralized planning, governments can help in the coordinating functions. Just as the bourgeoisie’s economic ascent preceded its political consolidation of power in the French revolution, so worker control of the economy will likely prepare a corresponding ascendancy into and transformation of, political life by the working class. That class can be authentically liberated, Marx insisted, only by itself. A strategy of taking economic power by strategies borrowed from the Zapatistas, the MST, and the Argentine recuperated factory movement -- all decisively aided by the World Social Forum movement -- will thus naturally lead to and introduce a consolidation of gains by taking state power (whose form will certainly have been radically transformed by that point). But first things first.

That last thought is the source of our hesitations about the Bamako Appeal. We welcome it as a debate-starter, but its omissions in content are related to the closed procedure that generated it. Derived by its authors from their own very extensive intellectual resources, the text proposes a consensus in manifesto form to the 6-year-old World Social Forum movement. WSF constituencies, presumably by agreeing to the proposed ideology, could move ahead together. But such joint position-taking, leading to someone speaking for the WSF based on that agreement, is just what Article 6 of its Charter rules out. Merely by proposing the Appeal for consensus, its authors ask the movement to go beyond Article 6. The problem is that to do so in keeping with the WSF spirit would require a grassroots consultation of the movement, i.e. a lengthy process of determining participants’ aims in the ongoing movements around the world and projecting the visions of another world implicit (or explicit) in those aims. Such a process differs radically from the manifesto procedure used. In any case, assent to a previously written ideology is unneeded for joint forward motion. To hold such motion hostage to agreement on a single ideology written prior to debate is an unnecessary constraint on that motion. And the very project of seeking consensus seems inappropriate at this time. For a movement whose active participants still do not include large sectors of humanity who are directly affected by globalizing capitalism, we think attempts to state a global consensus are premature. If the Bamako Appeal is useful it is only as a call to start aiming for consensus as soon as it is meaningful to do so.

Finally, the Bamako Appeal is short on revolutionary strategies. Co-ops are treated as an after-thought and the solidarity economy is not mentioned, much less recognized as a tool of transformation. Emphasis is on rebuilding lost national sovereignty. Like the 1966 Bandung conference on which it is modeled, the Appeal would use state power to set up alliances to defend against capitalism, not to abolish it, and to improve one’s country’s position within the global system dominated by the capitalist powers. We come back to the question: if the point is to change the world, why take state power as a means to that end when today’s insurgent movements are demonstrating that one can change the world directly by building the solidarity economy in globally coordinated steps?

On to Nairobi 2007

In the social movements the WSF brings together, unlike a front or international of political parties, ideological variety is a strength, not an impediment. This comes out in the slogan “one no, many yes’s” used by participants to refer to their own “movement of movements.” It implies that the “yes’s” can proceed down the same path together, perhaps a very long way, before diverging. And as their realizations draw closer these “yes’s” may turn out to be less incompatible than originally thought. Divergence may even prove unnecessary in the end. In the meantime, then, postponing it can only help. The best way to do that is to table discussion of ideologies and political parties. At the same time the Forum’s roots are in participatory budgeting, which is to say, in the solidarity economy. Building it up, as part of a revolutionary strategy, could be undertaking globally by the WSF without violating Article 6, as was February 15. It is a non-partisan and inherently inclusive undertaking, free of all ideological requirements. It is thus ideally suited to a still-growing movement.

Africa has been underrepresented in the WSF for various reasons. The strongest argument for postponing consensus-building is that none can be complete without this major part of humanity - perhaps the one most affected by neo-liberalism. At the Nairobi forum in January of 2007 many more of Africa’s peoples will at last speak. All manifestos will need re-writing after voices of a new spectrum of social movements struggles are heard.

We were inspired by the Caracas Forum. Its under-appreciated powers raised our hopes and drew us into debating its direction. We hope many others will join in. While this debate is only starting it already belongs to all of us.

NOTES

This paper came from a trip we took in January 2006 to Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela to visit solidarity economy initiatives. This version was written to advance the Workshop “Another World is Necessary,” July 19-26, 2006. Its companion is “ Venezuela’s Experiment in Cooperativization.” Both are on the Center for Global Justice website. So is “The Bamako Appeal,” discussed below.

George Monbiot in session “Strategies toward global democratization. What after unilateralism?” organized by the Network Institute for Global Democratization at the 2004 World Social Forum in Mumbai, India, http://www.yachana.org/reports/wsf4/unilateralism.html, Cf. also NIGD at http://www.nigd.org/globalparties/about

This slogan is not universally loved. Signs at the European forum had noted “Another Slogan is Possible.” But it has stuck -- enduring as movement emblem since the first WSF in January, 2001.

Participatory budgeting also reveals government’s power to strengthen civil society without favor, as Len Krimerman has noted. Grassroots Economic Organizing Newsletter #56, Spring 2003, www.geo.coop

Unfortunately, some defenders of public goods assimilate social property to individual private property. See Anatole Anton, Milton Fisk, & Nancy Holmstrom (eds.) Not for Sale : In Defense of Public Goods ( Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000). A cognate error is made when defenders of markets assimilate social property to public or government property. Cf. Robert Nozick.

Douthwaite, Richard, Short Circuit: Strengthening Local Economies for Security in an Unstable World. Dartington, U.K.: Green Books, 1996.

Gianpaolo Baiocchi, “ The Citizens of Porto Alegre, In which Marco borrows bus fare and enters politics” in The Boston Review,
http://www.bostonreview.net/BR31.2/baiocchi.html For how to apply participatory budgeting policies see the Radically Democratize Democracy (DRD) site
www.budget-participatif.org, a global network in over 18 countries.

“Interview with Oded Grajew,” In Motion Magazine, December 19, 2004, http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/global/ogwsf_int.html

For WSF history and sociology: Teivo Teivainen, “World Social Forum: what should it be when it grows up?” Open Democracywww.opendemocracy.net

Some rough synonyms: social economy, popular economy, peoples’ economy.

We list many solidarity economy organizations on p. 8 below.

12 Venezuela’s Ministry is the first in Latin America. Brazil’s National Secretariat for the Solidarity-based Economy in its Ministry of Work and Employment (SENAES), and Colombia’s Superintendent of the Solidarity Economy in its Ministerio de Hacienda y Credito Publico, have similar missions.

Ignacio Ramonet, “Never Give Up on the Other World,” Le Monde Diplomatique, January, 2006, quoted in Jack Hammond, cf. note below.

Remarks on TV show “Democracy Now,” Ingmar Lee report in “Reflections On Karachi World Social Forum,” 28 March 2006, www.Countercurrents.org

Jack Hammond, “The Possible World and the Actual State: The World Social Forum in Caracas,” Latin American Perspectives, Issue 148, Vol. 33, No. 3, May 2006, pp. 122-131.

See our essay, “ Venezuela’s Experiment in Cooperativization.” Dollars and Sense, forthcoming, Summer, 2006.

Nation March 6, p. 20.

Hammond, op cit

[Another group opposed to The Use-state-power-to-change-the-world Option but less fixed on internal WSF principles, are advocates of a revolutionary strategy that emphasizes contruction of alternatives autonomously by the oppressed themselves, without using state power. REVIEW BRIEFLY THE HERRAMIENTAS DEBATE HERE WITH ZAPATISTA CHANGE THE WORLD WITHOUT TAKING POWER ALTERNATIVE.]

Nation, March 6, 2006.

“2006 World Social Forum meets in three centres” unsigned article dated 10 February 2006 on website of the League for the Fifth International http://www.fifthinternational.org

The 3rd International founded in 1919, was dissolved in 1943. Moscow-based union of Eastern European Communist Parties, the Cominform, founded by Stalin, was equivalent to an international. Members were bound to each other by the imperative to defend the USSR at all costs as “the country of socialism.”

Astonished at the scale, a New York Times writer said: “there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.” Patrick E. Tyler, “Threats and Responses: News Analysis; A New Power in the Streets,” New York Times, February 17, 2003.

Hammond, op cit.

Immanuel Wallerstein, “ Cancun: The Collapse of the Neo-Liberal Offensive,” Commentary No. 122, Oct. 1, 2003, http://fbc.binghamton.edu/commentr.htm

“Imposition” meaning: on penalty of frozen credit. Cf. Mark Engler, “Latin America Unchained,” 16 March 2006, www.tompaine.com and www.DemocracyUprising.com

Buenos Aires welcomed the Latin American Social Forum before Kirchner’s defiance. Still, let us also note, all of Argentina’s debt to the IMF was paid off.

Ivan Briscoe, November 4, 2005, “The Summit of the Americas’ free-trade farewell,” www.opendemocracy.net/

Mark Engler op cit. Cf. also: James Petras, “Is Latin America Really Turning Left?” in Counter Punch, reprinted June 3, 2006 on www.venezuelanalysis.com

By Steve Schifferes, “What stymied the Hong Kong talks?,” BBC News, Sunday, 18 December 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4540704.stm It is tempting to speculate whether the threat of being cast into deeper odium by “the other superpower” (world public opinion), may have helped protect the Chavez government to date against overt U.S. attack on the model of Chile in 1973 (see our ”Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution and the Solidarity Economy”).

CUT is Brazil’s largest trade union federation. Cf. Humberto Márquez, “World Social Forum: It All Boils Down to Politics,” February 1, 2006, www.venezuelanalysis.com

Raúl Zibechi, “El Otro Mundo es el ‘Adentro’ de los Movimientos,” Volver atrás, 26-07-2004 .

Hilary Wainwright, “The Emerging New Euroleft” Nation April 10 p. 20-24.

Ibid.

Humberto Márquez, op cit.

Cf. Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatistas, Zapatista Encuentro: Documents from the First intercontinental Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism (La Realidad, Mexico: Seven Stories Press, 1998); Gustavo Esteva, “A Report on the Second Intercontinental Encuentro,” in Auroras of the Zapatistas (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2001).

We argue below that the solidarity economy movement has come up with many alternative economic institutions. For arguments for alternative models see David Schweickart’s “economic democracy” advanced in Against Capitalism and After Capitalism and Albert & Hahnel’s “participatory economics” as developed in their book:…..

As in solidarity networks in agrarian societies. Marcel Fafchamps, “Solidarity Networks in Preindustrial Societies: Rational Peasants with a Moral Economy,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Oct., 1992) , pp. 147-174; and James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistance in Southeast Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).

Opposing only “sweatshops” wrongly assumes profit is itself acceptable. In fact capitalists systematically benefit disproportionately from the labor contract. This workaday exploitation is morally worsened by the fact that to live workers are compelled to sell their labor and are hence exploited against their will.

So-called secondary boycotts are controversial: those against sellers who do not directly affect one.

Quoted by John Pilger, “The Other, Man-made Tsunami,” New Statesman, January 6, 2005.

See our “Cooperativizatoin as Alternative to Globalizing Capitalism,” Grassroots Economic Organizing website, www.geo.coop

Schweickart, David, After Capitalism ( Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002); Albert, Michael and Hahnel, Robin, Looking Forward: Participatory Economics for the Twenty-First Century (Boston: South End, 1991). We doubt the authors of each of these books would approve the use we make of them. Still, we find this sequencing of their models affords a complete and plausible way to imagine a human future, using our best intellectual tools.

Goldmann, Lucien and Serge Mallet, "Débat sur l'autogestion." Le Nouvel Observateur, July 6, 1968. Reprinted Autogestion, No. 7, Dec. 1968.

See our essay on the GEO website.

Published by Pluto Press in London in 2002. The debate that Holloway’s book provoked was most thoroughly developed in 2003 in Spanish on the pages of Herramientas, an Argentine Marxist journal. This June 2006, however, an English language review of Trotskyist critiques of Holloway, together with a debate transcript featuring him, are in the pamphlet “Change the World without taking power…or…Take Power to change the world?” published by International Institute for Research and Education (IIRE) www.iire.org Most useful is “A Debate between John Holloway and Alex Callinicos that took place at the 2005 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre.

See our “ Venezuela’s Experiment in Cooperativization.”

program

index of 2006 workshop papers

To leave comments on this paper: click here.

To read comments already contributed: click here.