[DEBATE] : EPW, India on WSF Caracas

[peter waterman]

      EPW Letter from america April 1, 2006













      Beyond the World Social Forum

      There is the increasing belief that transnational exchanges between
grassroot social movements will come to play a crucial role in generating
social change in the Americas. However, social movements that seek a greater
role within the newly established leftist governments in South America may
find that the World Social Forum offers too limited a space for such
exchanges to occur.

      Sujatha Fernandes









http://www.epw.org.in/showArticles.php?root=2006&leaf=04&filename=9899&filet
ype=html

Recently, regional social forums have been organised in Caracas, Venezuela
(January 24-29, 2006), Bamako, Mali (January 19-23, 2006) and Karachi,
Pakistan (March 24-29, 2006). The regional forums have their origin in the
World Social Forum (WSF), a meeting of social movement leaders and activists
from around the world that promotes the exchange of ideas and strategies for
social justice. The WSF emerged partly as an alternative to the World
Economic Forum, and the first WSF was held in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2001.

After three consecutive years in Porto Alegre, the WSF was held in Mumbai in
2004. Following several years of a safe haven in the leftist environs of
Porto Alegre, supported by a progressive mayor with innovative budgeting
policies, the move to Mumbai was seen as risky. Some were worried that the
forum would be more open to corruption and manipulation by politicians, or
other groups hostile to the aims of the forum. Others, critical of the
influence of governments and large non-governmental organisations (NGOs),
organised a parallel event known as Mumbai resistance.

For the forum held in Caracas, hopes were high among participants. Leftist
leader Hugo Chávez has been moving ahead with his “Bolivarian revolution”,
an ambitious anti-neoliberal movement for radical redistribution and
regional integration. Chávez came to power in Venezuela in 1998 with
promises to use the oil wealth of the country to combat rising poverty, and
during his time in office he has made significant progress. The election of
indigenous leader Evo Morales in Bolivia also comes amid a spate of election
victories secured by leftist and social movement leaders across the region.
After decades of harsh neoliberal economic policy, the tide finally seems to
be turning and activists, advocacy groups and academics who descended on
Caracas in January expected to be a part of the vibrant debates and
discussions that are animating these changes in the Americas.

The Chávez government had a strong presence in the social forum in Caracas,
and there were many panels on anti-imperialism, strategies for fighting
neoliberalism, and similar themes addressed in previous forums. But the
Caracas forum for the most part was boycotted by popular social movement
leaders and organisations within Venezuela who have been at the base of
Chávez’s Bolivarian revolution. While official government programmes and
top-down initiatives were given space within the programme, many experiences
of community organising from poor “barrios” or urban shantytowns such as La
Vega, San Agustin, Caricuao, Petare, and others were not included. Panels
about community media, an important and growing movement within Venezuela,
were organised by the National Commission of Telecommunications (CONATEL),
an official regulatory agency for broadcast services. CONATEL has a tense
relationship with community media activists and hence activists boycotted
these panels. It was ironic that while a large, regional conference
addressing social justice issues was being held in Caracas, many local
activists most connected with social justice movements in the barrios for
several decades did not participate.

Moreover, the alternative forum, that in previous forums had provided an
important space for critique and discussion, was held in a middle class
suburb by artists and intellectuals with no organic links to social
movements in the poor barrios. Important panels such as one by the
Zapatistas from southern Mexico were not given a space within the forum and
were forced to organise and advertise their own events on the margins of the
forum. The Zapatista movement of indigenous activists in the southern
Mexican state of Chiapas gained momentum in 1994, following the signing by
the Mexican government of a free trade agreement, North America Free Trade
Agreement, popularly known as NAFTA. The Zapatistas have since been
successful in putting questions of agrarian reform and indigenous rights on
the agenda.

The experience of the Caracas forum showed the problems that beset attempts
to organise transnationally from below, and the difficulty of achieving true
moments of transnational exchange and solidarities. The problem lay not only
in the strong presence of the Chávez government in the event, but also in
the nature of the World Social Forum itself, in which advocacy and NGO
logics have often come to predominate over the needs and demands of social
movements themselves.

New Questions

Nevertheless, the forum did bring up questions among social movements about
the nature and role of transnational organising in the region, even if other
spaces may need to emerge to facilitate this. There was a great deal of
vibrancy and debate in a tent erected by Venezuelan community media
activists: there were several workshops held on issues of communication in
Latin America and technical exchange between activists from North and South
America. These activists together with indigenous groups helped organise a
march on one day of the forum to protest coal mining in the state of Zulia.
Another group of activists from the community organisation Coordinadora
Simón Bolívar also organised a parallel event in their barrio 23 de Enero.
This event actually brought some people away from the official sites in the
middle class suburbs, the university, and large halls, to the barrios, which
forms the main site for organising political work.

There were also small moments in the forum that gave a glimpse of what kind
of work true transnational exchange could do to build social movements in
the Americas. At one panel organised by the Bolivians, there was a
discussion about the role of Evo Morales’ party, Movimiento al Socialismo
(Movement towards Socialism, MAS). One person in the audience asked the
panelists about the role of “Evo’s party” in the post-election scenario. The
Bolivians responded adamantly that MAS was not “Evo’s party”, and that it
was not a party – it was a movement that belonged to the people and not the
government. This was a declaration that came as a surprise to some of the
Venezuelans in the room, many of whom have become accustomed to thinking of
Chavista parties such as Movimiento Quinta Republica (Fifth Republic
Movement, MVR) as “Chávez’s party”. There was a real sense of ownership by
the Bolivians over the MAS, which is not felt at all by most social movement
activists in Venezuela towards the MVR. While Chávez continues to hold a
great deal of support, particularly among social movements and people in the
barrios, the MVR has been largely discredited. In discussions after the
panel, some of the Venezuelans present were very interested to know more
about MAS, and the Bolivian experience of creating a movement that had mass
support.

At the panel organised by the Zapatistas in a tent on the fringes of the
forum, there was another interesting exchange. When the formal presentation
finished, Venezuelans began to get up and make interventions about how the
Zapatistas need to address the question of state power and the need for them
to take state power like the Venezuelans have. The Zapatista activist
responded courteously, explaining that Venezuela and Mexico have distinct
histories and that the strategy of the Zapatistas has been to build power
from below, by creating autonomous, self-sustaining communities. They said
that they could learn from the Venezuelan experience in how to build broader
national alliances. But given the large number of indigenous nations in
Mexico, one person cannot speak for so many nations, said the Zapatista
activist. Even if Manuel Lopez Obrador, the leftist Mexican mayor, were to
be elected in the next elections, the activist noted, that Obrador could
still not represent all of these diverse indigenous groups.

Given the highly vertical notion of state power that often underlies
conceptions of the Bolivarian revolution, the discussion with the Zapatistas
was helpful in raising alternative views about social movements building and
taking power from below. Chávez’s discourse about a Bolivarian revolution
across the Americas has tended to operate in a nationalistic manner, with
the idea of Chávez and Venezuela at the helm of continent-wide changes. The
Zapatistas pointed out the need to take local history seriously, implying
that continent-wide alliances should be built from the ground up and not
simply from the position of state power.

There is no question that transnational exchanges are going to play a
crucial role in bolstering social movements as part of the processes of
social change taking place across the Americas. Sharing the experiences of
grassroot political learning can provide important resources for those who
want a greater role for social movements in new leftist governments against
those who seek to build and solidify bureaucratic power within state
institutions. The World Social Forum may prove to be too limited as a space
within which these exchanges can take place. But we can take heart from the
knowledge that transnational exchanges are a real possibility. Freddy
Mendoza, an important community leader from the Caracas parish of La Vega
who is working towards the re-election of Chávez in the upcoming November
2006 elections, has as a campaigning slogan a Zapatista phrase: “We are
willing to coexist with a state that serves but does not order, a plural
state not a totalitarian state, a state at the service of the social and not
of capital, a state that understands that it cannot substitute the
self-determination of the people or civil society.”

Email: sujathaf at princeton.edu



PUBLICATIONS 2005:
Waterman Symposium, Labour+Social Movements, ‘Labor History’ 46:2;
Ocho ensayos acerca del internacionalismo
http://democraciaglobal.org/index.php?fp_verpub=true&idpub=34;
The Liberation of Time from Work
http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=05/03/24/170247;
Communication, Culture, WSF
http://www.nigd.org/docs/MakingTheRoadWhilstWalkingPeterWaterman;
Movements+Global Governance
http://www.nigd.org/docs/AntiglobalistMovementGhent2005PeterWaterman;
Civil Society: Defining, Disputing,
http://www.nigd.org/docs/GlobalCivilSocietyPeterWatermanNovember2005;
Trade Unions, NGOs+Global Social Justice
http://www.nu.ac.za/ccs/default.asp?3,28,11,1260.