First published on February 7, 2005 at Rebelión
I. The ethical alternative of the Forum
The V World Social Forum (FSM) at Porto Alegre, takes place, in the words of Hugo Chavez, facing the dramatic alternative of ""Union or Death". With these words the President refers to the advance of Bolivarian integration, which he leads, and the advance of the menace of destruction headed by the duo of Uribe-Bush.
The analogy with the Antifascist Congress of Valencia, so fruitlessly invoked during the World Meeting of Intellectuals in Caracas, now presents itself in all its real dimensions for the Social Forum of Porto Alegre. Because the neofascist aggression of Uribe-Bush is real and possibly will separate us within a short time from its opening.
Such a situation presents a double challenge for the Forum and its International Organizing Committee, (IOC). On one had, the warlike danger which Bush-Uribe present, requires an unequivocal declaration of the Forum or of the IOC, and on the other, the visit of Hugo Chavez to the Forum and his public address demand an answer of concrete solidarity.
In political life the ethical possibility of being neutral never exists, because all human praxis is inevitably realized within the media of material and formal ethics. The ethical demands of the praxis vary according to the concrete situations. When the Forum was, .as Ignacio Ramonet wisely defined it, a sort of "Summer School", it did not really matter if it should take the bucolic position of t he Greek Academy, whose flow of beautiful ideas and esthetics maintained themselves over a sea of tears of slavery.
But if the alternative today in Latin America is "Union or Death", then the nice idea of a leftist version of the "Summer Hil" School has lost its r eason for existence. The war threat of Uribe-Bush irremediably converts silence or any abstract elaboration of the V Social Forum around the alternative of "life or death" into an act of de facto complicity with the public enemy number one of the peoples and States of Latin America.
Uribe's War Plan has changed the semi-private character of the Forum into a distinctly public event which, want it or not, can not be escaped. There are no neutral position possible in Latin America in facing the present alternative: neither for political parties, nor for the governments, and much less for the entities of civil society who wave banners of transformation and struggle for the possibility of "a better world".
2. Plurality as an excuse for abstaining from action
The argument historically offered by the organizers for not taking a position on concrete problems has taken various forms, as that, "the Forum does not give recipes for arriving at socialism", that it is not a "partisan forum", that it is a kind of "Summer School", and that it is a question of "a diverse and horizontal open space, made to reflect on globalization and to seek alternatives. It is not the meeting of a political party or trade union organization in which you can issue final declarations."
The argument, that the anti-authoritarian pedagogy and plural nature of the Forum prohibits exercising concrete solidarity is, naturally, false As has been demonstrated by the Brazilian Institute of Economic and Social Analysis, (BIESA), cited by Diego Cevallos in rebelion.org, the plurality of the WSF is more rhetoric than real. As to the geographic plurality, the Institute finds that around 86 percent of the total of participants come from Brazil.
In reference to the social-educative plurality, more than 73 percent of the participants in Forum 2003. were academics or on the way to being academics. aThe Forum is, therefore, in sociographic terms, a forum of social or popular movements, but, primarily, of middle class and small bourgeoisie. Much less is it, certainly, a Forum controlled by popular movements and interests.
Something similar is seen in respect to its political economy. The sources of financing flow, essentially, from the direct and indirect structures of five National States - seconded by the Global State, the Western churches and some private capitals - who finance not only the WSF, but all the respective great regional and global meetings. And the volume of financing necessary for this type of event is great. For example, the European Social Forum of Paris cost around five million Euros.
From the apology for the plurality there remains only the aspect of the ideological plurality of the participants. But, again, the argument is unsustainable. The Forum constitutes, in sociological terms a "reference group", or in terms of a statistician, a "population" or a "universe", which is to say, an ensemble of elements (persons) who have some characteristics or properties in common. What the population of the Forum have in common are the particular banners of the struggle against neoliberalism, militarism, racism, etcetera, and their double conviction that another world is possible and that alternatives must be sought which lead to it.
The audience of the WSF is not, therefore, qualitatively different from that which meets in the forums against FTAA or against the World Monetary Fund, and given that all voting on a proposal would be voluntary, there would not be any impediment from the "plural" character of the Forum to take part against the massacre which Uribe-Bush are commiting daily in Colombia, with an aggravating threat to extend their methods to all Latin America and, in particular, to Ecuador and Venezuela. And if the number of participants were now the main argument to refuse the declaration, there would be a simple remedy, that the International Organizing Committee should make the declaration.
3. What position should be taken in regard to the Forum?
The triple influence exercised over the Forum by liberal social-democratic thought, the religio-pacifist creed, and the political economy of their material existence, conform to a status quo whose framework and immobility would be difficult to break from the tribunes of public criticism, whose efforts in t his direction have been essentially uaseless.
Therefore it is of particular interest to observe the impact of the participation of President Hugo Chavez, who at this moment is the most powerful force which can mobilize Latin America to defeat the barbarity of capital and of the Monroe Doctrine. There are two possible options: a) that the mandarins, flexible as bamboo before the monsoon, may accommodate themselves to this natural force called Chavez, knowing that it will pass relatively rapidly, to afterward return to normalcy or, b) that the changes of the LatinAmerican and World environment will be so drastic that the Summer School wil have to give way to the School of Life, on pain of losing its legitimacy.
That which has been said above can be understood as a premises from which the correct inferences may be taken. But, as all the world knows, it is easy to take uncorrect inferences from correct premises. This, in my judgement, is the case of a group of persons of Rosario, Argentina, who make a severe criticism, but correct in many respects, of the WSF, convoking an Antiimperialist Meeting as Revolutionary Alternative to the World Social'Forum.
"The Meeting intends to constitute itself as an alternative so that sectors of the vanguard have a space where they can discuss and organize to propose concrete struggles for exit from the situation, against the enemies of the people, who are the multinationals, the banks, that is, imperialism, the politicians which serve it, like those of the LatinAmerican "axis" made up of Lula, Kirchner, Chavez, and now Tabare Vazquez."
To organize Vanguard Meetings is necessary, but none of the great LatinAmerican or World Forums or Congresses are that. In the eternal dilemma of the politician and of the intellectual to have to decide between "unity and clarity" - a problem masterfully analyzed by Lenin - the organizers of these forums have prioritized "unity" and discarded, or even, blocked, the intents to create vanguard spaces.
This explains why hardly yet are the intellectuals who are able to meet in these forums and congresses beginning to talk of LatinAmerican unity, when five years ago it was evident it was a matter of the only anti-imperialist way and of sustainable development possible in Latin America. Five years lost in sterile Keynesian repetitions and anti-FTAA arguments of tens of thousands of intellectuals, in place of concentrating those theoretical resources on the construction of ALBA and of the Regional LatinAmerican Power Bloc and its strategic popular horizon, the anti-capitalist civilization or socialism of the XXI Century.
There is, therefore, an undeniable historic responsibility of this liberal, social-democratic and religio-philanthropic intelligentsia which controls the organization of these events, together with the responsibility of the financing entities, in the backwardness of the class struggles and anti-imperialism of Latin America. Nevertheless, it would be a grave error and a suicidal sectarianism to declare war on "Lula, Kirchner, Chavez and now Tabare Vazquez".
The present stage of unifying LatinAmerican democratic developmentalism has all the characteristics of a potential phase of transition toward post-capitalism. Nevertheless, not to understand this potential phase and confront its protagonists as has been proposed from Rosario, means to ally oneself again with the swine of imperialism, like ambassador Spruille Braden, against the supposed "nazifascism" of Peron, or link again with the "ring" (of the oligarchy) boliviana and the Yankee embassy, with General Villaroel in the streetlights of La Paz. It means, in other words, to do the dirty work of George Bush and Alvaro Uribe.
4. Why Isn't the WSF Radical?
The WSF is structurally incapable of giving a radical response to the problems of humanity - radical in the sense of the word, to go to the root of problems - because this radicalness comes from the existential situation of the victims of the system. And the victims of ths system are not to be found in the WSF, but instead, a privileged social strata which has nothing to gain from confronting the system outside of the modus operandi of the Summer School, which the mandarins want to maintain. Walter Benjamin has expressed in his XII Thesis on thePhilosophy of History, why theWSF in its present form can not be radical. Substituting revolutionary confrontation for the system of confidence in the pacific transformation through the electoral, social and trade union system , "Social democracy (German), is content to assign to the working class the role of redeemer of the future generations. And so it cut off the main nerve of t heir strength. In this school (of thought. H.D,), the class unlearned not only hatred but the will to sacrifice. Since both are nourished by the oppressed past and not by the ideal of free descendents."
The " Theses on the Philosophy of History", in many respects inheritors of the "Theases of Feuerbach", possibly would not be very welcome in the Forum, because there is not lacking the mandarin who would discover that they predict hatred and sacrifice, and that, therefore, on the altar of pluralism it is not possible to in solidarity with them, ; as it is not possible to be in solidarity with the fighting people of Colombia,.
The World Social Forum has assumed, in the sense of Benjamin, "the role of redeemed of the future generations" and the ideal of the "free descendents", far from the role of the spartacism of the modern industrial slaves, far from the magnificent and valiant document of nine thousand United States citizens who said to Bush, "Not In Our Name".
In an excellent article in rebelion.org (17.1.2005), Arturo Cruz affirmed that, "it is not enough that in the Forum of Porto Alegre they should condemn with greater or lesser firmness the kidnaping of Granda and the extradition of Trinidad, but that they have to transcend the rhetoric and take a step further; call for the recognition of the Colombian guerilla as a belligerent force."
This is, by all lights, the central demand for international solidarity, against the Bush-Uribe project in Latin America, Plan Colombia. At the same time is a strategic element in the most urgent theoretical task of the moment which consists in organizing a world counteroffensive in the field of ideas, to destroy the Orwellian ideology of the "War Against Terrorism".
Nevertheless, it is evident, that this demand will never be accepted by the Organizing Committee for being "too radical":. Even so, a public pronouncement which denounces Uribe and his project of attacks against the system of the State of LatinAmerican Rights and integration as the greatest danger to the peace of the Great Homeland, would be of enormous help. Pressuring and supporting the governments of Lula, Kirchner, and Tabare Vazquez to confront the neo-colonial terrorist project of Bush-Uribe there would be a concrete support to the LatinAmericanpeoples, in particular the Colombian and Venezuelan.
It will have to be seen if the International Organizing Committee resists the double impact of the Andean events without evolving. But decide what it decides, it must understand clearly that its silence against the dilemma of, "Union or Death", will liquidate it ethically. Because as Bertold Brecht said: "There are times when it is a crime to remain silent, or "talk about butterflies"".
http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=11170
