The Left, the Movements: making behavior political

The 4th European Forum has just passed in Athens. Its been a fascinating process: Florence – Paris – London – Athens. It reads like a perfume bottle. I agree with most of the points Benyik Matyas raises in respect of the Forum’s “idiosyncracies”, but I’d like to make a bit more effort to contextualise them, at the same time making no excuse for the “bad practice” that epitomisies “engagement” in the Porto Alegre Process, at least in my own experience, both locally and at the European level.

Secondly, I won’t directly answer the questions 1,2,3, as I find them rather leading, but will deal the issues they raise in a wider way.

A little bit of history

First a little bit of history: the forum is better understood if we place it in context. The intro refers to the Porto Alegre-based World Social Forum as a “cradle”, a very nurturing image, and so it was. However, I prefer to think of the WSF as the “bölcsi”.This could end up being a long story, but basically, at the end of the last century, there was one big bang that captured peoples imaginations: the idea of cooperation and resistance, symbolised by the diverse involvement in the massive demos against the World Trade Organisation in Seattle, 1999. The Turtles and the Teamsters that protested together became symbolic for the cross fertilisation between movements that had identified a common enemy: the neo-liberal policies and the unaccountable power of the WTO. Add to this the well-reported police brutality as police directed tear gas into the face of sitting protestors, and the “cause” became empassioned. The idea of Global Social Justice was born.

This too had predecessors: many point to the online resistance against the MAI – put simply, a licence for corporations to do whatever they liked and get away with it. After united opposition, the MAI got dumped, an “early victory” for international action that pointed to just how much we could achieve with determination and cooperation. There are many other dimensions to this story, that show where we come from and how far we are going. Resistance to the MAI was preceded by the inspirational “Zapatistak” – the indians of the Chiapas, Mexico, who declared their resistance to the NAFTA in 1994, realising that compliance with the economic realities of Mexico signing up, was basically cultural and existential annihilation for themselves: nothing else to do, a quiet revolution, with solidarity through the internet, was the only rational response. Again in Latin America, the Bolivian resistance against water privatisation is part of this history. This process was so thorough that a water-bucket in your garden became an impediment to a water multinational’s ability to honestly make profits, and was hence an illegal distortion of the market. Resistance was bloody, but the movements won, recently upping the stakes for the global social movements: one leader of the resistance to privatisation, Morales, has just become Bolivia’s President. People are watching with curiosity...

Over the last 10 years the people involved in these movements have helped us to re-understand the world and our interconnectedness. Their identities are diverse. The turtles symbolised the greens, the Teamsters “organised labour” (not necessarily the trade unions), the Zapatistas the autonomes and the indigenous, the MAI resistance the NGOs, and the resistance to privatisation the local communities. It is in recognising a need for a collective dialogue between these and many other different elements, where the forum comes in, creating a massive think tank of global experience...

I guess most people have taken part in a közgyúlés. Take 20 people from an average tarsashaz, and they will have a relatively homogenous financial, social, cultural background. And, at least in my experience, these discussions prove to be a trying and frustrating couple of hours, even if you like your neighbours... Now try to do this with 9, 20, 60, or then 100 thousand people... this is what the WSF tried to do, with the numbers of participants growing like this year by year. A massive show of strength, of creativity, of proactivity, and – importantly – efforts to recreate a world that was fair, and, put simply, one we can leave to our children. This is a pretty wide agenda. It has some basic rules: no parties, no violence, and an opposition to the dominant economic trend - neo-liberal economics – and the institutions and corporations pushing this, a kind of wild capitalism.

And this is what was passed onto Europe: the WSF “regionalised” and “continentalised”. The dialogue needed to reflect regional realities too, in alternate years, coming back to the WSF every second year. There is a European Social Forum, there is an African Social Forum, an Asian and a Social Forum of the Americas.

The European reality

Europe, to put it politely, has its problems. Unlike the WSF, deeper engagement is tailing off, and broader participation is not spiralling. There is a lot of frustration with the fapados organising practices, the infighting, the lack of transparency (to put it mildly) and the outright manipulation of the process (to put it bluntly). As Matyas said, this all came to a head in London, where the libertarian socialist – feminist – anarchist tradition continued its historical role and stood up to the “excesses” of the centralist, authoritarian left, this time in the guise of the British Socialist Workers Party, in a rather uncomfortable alliance (aparently with them as underdog) with Ken Livingston’s GLC, who footed the bill for the Forum.

No one (except the above mentioned SWP and cronies) is proud of what happened in London, but if we want to be benign, we can point to this as a “hard lesson” for parts of the left which may encourage them to mature, something that is in all our interests.

However, bitching aside, this is part of the European reality. It wont go away, but thankfully, it is only a part of the picture. There is a learning process, and, these really are hard lessons for a left that has at the base of its ideology a historical role to “know better than everyone else” (cadre) and lead the workers to the Promised Land (life after proletarian revolution).

The involvement of political parties

And this is where the question of parties comes in. They are there, and they have been since the beginning. The PT (Workers Party) in Brazil has some involvement in the WSForum, and, while it supposedly has no agenda shaping power, it benefits massively from just being seen there. For many this isn’t a problem: the PT is a party “of the movements” that took the agendas of the social, feminist, ecologist, peasant and gay movements into the Brazilian Parlaiment. It has a certain “dynamic” with social movements, that many point to as positive, conducts desperately needed experiments in new types of democracy that are bringing results, if not the massive changes people had hoped for: the “participatory budgets”, for example, are allowing local people to identify their local development needs: sewerage, water supply, schools are taking precident over shopping malls and extra car lanes.

In Europe, many key Forum organisers are “wearing two hats”, one party and one movement, ngo, movement, union or research institute... The parties of the European Left systematically support the Forum and are clear about the need to coordinate their own work towards that of the social movements. There are varying attitudes to this – in light of the basic charter of the Forum – malpractice. Some are totally against the involvement of parties, seeing them as unable to seperate their need to increase their influence, and their channelling of movement energies towards their own power seeking agenda as irreconcilable with the Forum’s broader purposes. Some parties regard the movements as a fertile pot from which to gather new members, sell more papers, and underpin the power of their own leadership. The forum for them is about consolidating themselves, not a common process. Some regard the presence of parties as part of the European Reality, and we dont really have a choice to include them or not: the European left has a century of parlaimentarianism behind it, splinters of splinter parties are a pretty regular formation, and the 100 varieties of hard to centre left are a constant presence in the “struggles” in every Western country (and often the death of them too).

And lastly some regard the parties as an aid to the movement: the resources they command through the control of town or district councils have provided much needed infrastructure and funding for each of the Forums, including the “solidarity accommodation” in schools and community halls, provided free for the Hungarian and other CEE delegations.

This question reached crisis point at the London ESF, which saw the worst practices imaginable, with the SWP (“hats” include Stop the War Coalition, Globalise Resistance, and now the Campaign against Climate Change) opportunistically obstructing all efforts to build broader organisational unity with the radical environmental-feminist-labour-justice-faith and other autonomous and community movements who were till then still present in the Forum process. This wasn’t “just” bad play, this was their politics: they saw the involvement of what they couldnt control as polgari, and weakening the overall movement.

A culture of respect and cooperation

Why is this important? The question of behavior and tactics stemming from political and organisational culture run as deep as actual political convictions and positions, regardless of left, right, green, anarchist, civil – ngo, citizen movement or any other labels or brands that help us place ourselves upon the spectrum of “those doing things”. We can talk about stopping wars from Afghanistan to Iran, resisting the militarisation of Europe, opposing the Bolkensein Directive, demanding GMOs be banned, limiting Climate Change, but we cannot effectively work together to achieve these things until we have a culture of respect and cooperation. This is why “process” is so important, and why in the aftermath of the Athens ESF organisations and individuals are baying for the blood of the SWP, whose “organisational culture” is becoming more and more obstructive, and causing growing resentment.

However, this is in many respect a fait accompli: the ESF process is choosy: it accepts some bad practice, but not all bad practice. If the SWP falls outside the tolerable for those parts of the left which have been able to develop some level of cooperation, there are other practices which long ago alienated the radical greens and the libertarian left, namely the control of the forum by small elites and the rigid and unimaginative (boring) organisational practices that allow the few to maintain a monopoly. This is why the forum is becoming more homogenous. It is losing its diversity as it is losing relevence as an open and integrative space.

Good practices at the 4th ESF

In spite of all this, the 4th European Social Forum in Athens was a success, particularly as Matyas said, in terms of logistics, cultural interventions, participation, and general good humour – the organisations cooperating inside the Greek Social Forum did a great job, and smiled at the same time (many, I’ve read are now ill from exhaustion). The space was well organised, the solidarity fund worked on the basis of trust (unlike one earlier year where we were ’investigated’ by some unknown little leadership faction, to check out our funding background...), the seminars were well attended, and there was substantial attention paid to movement strategy, taking us beyond the issues. Another point of encouragement is the continued and growing presence of networks adding strength to and drawing from the Forum process. These networks have the potential to become the backbone of the forum, providing structures for continued involvement, analysis, campaign focus and joint days of action, practicalities welcome in the ideological hotch potch, that do not enforce any common agenda on the Forum, but add to it.

And the bottom line: the forum remains to be the best space at the European level where you can really network. This is the only space that attempts to be integrative, cross issue, and importantly, a space of many types of resistance. In Athens Amnesty could find a space there to campaign against small arms, the Global Eco-Village Network pronounced it is creating a new world, and, once you decode the mass of red flags and other symbols, you see the little communist factions could find space to parade in front of the ’less educated’ comrades. Its not as efficient as it could be, it is difficult to summarise its effectiveness( although its component parts are ), it is ecologically unsound (try convincing delegates to take the train across europe...), but it sends a very important message to the wider movement, to the citizens of Europe who understand, feel on their own skin how much we need to make deep changes, and to those who are ideologically in opposition to us, or in positions of influence. We are many, and we are learning to work together. We can become a counterweight to the logic of war, profit, ecological destruction and social alienation. We can, and by our very existence, we are changing the world. This may sound a lot to claim, but imagine a world without dissenting voices... the forum is a space for amplifying some of these voices.

At some point we have to get down to the nitty gritty of the local level. This forum worked for the Greeks. The Greek Communist Party, centralised and stalinist, did not want to be involved. Its membership, however, did turn up, and were faced with a space on the Greek left that they did not control, hopefully challenging their political beliefs. The forces within the Greek Social Forum mobilised activists far outside their own organisations, hopefully further politicising a whole new generation towards involvement in integrative, tolerant movements. The majority of forces cooperated, in spite of their political differences (and party political differences). The organisers hope this will be the start of a new political culture in Greece.

In Hungary

This leads to the really local question, the question of Hungary. The forum process has not worked here and has run into problems in other CEE countries too. However, when you demistify the talk of “process” and get rid of the label “Forum”, and consider the need for a common dialogue for alternative building, strategising and the collective resistance which the forum aims to create, these practices are clearly good common sense. It is good movement practice, and with or without the Forum label, we do it instinctively as we know we have to.

“We”, the “Civilek”, continually build new alliances outside our everyday cooperations, create common statements, make actions, conduct lobbying. We demonstrate when we need to. We achieve many “small victories”, win many small battles, including the much cited one for hearts and minds…Think of the campaigns around Paks, of Zengo, of the Bekejelek, the Critical Masses, the Fair Trade movement, the urban development issues, to name but a few...

Is this going to change the world? In one swoop, no. But it is changing the world for the better in many small ways: many small revolutions of everyday life will, I believe, in the future add up to a current for greater, more fundamental change, as the “alternative” of continuing on this current trajectory becomes ever more clearly unsustainable. Learning to work together is one of the most important steps towards this.

In this wide process of social change there are a lot of tremendously commited people doing tremendously commited work. No person or organisation is synonymous with the term ’social movements’ in Hungary, which is a healthy situation, and I feel Matyas’s division of the social movements into three currents is rather selfcongratulatory and belterjes, and probably caused a lot of confusion, as few people would recognise the names mentioned, and few have heard of the Alapitvany. In response to “how we do things”: this is not a liberal platitude, but all organisations do things differently, which is what makes them able to communicate with different types of people, at different levels of “political literacy”, with different levels of involvement and commitment. Hence, some of us will continue to prefer “banzáj” (festivities) such as the colourful, lively and provokative Oko and the Globfeszts we organised last year, and enjoy the “togetherness” of the Forum-feeling, which in spite of its problems, energises us. We will continue to cooperate with a wide range of tendencies, according to how our strategies and analysis convince us this is necessary. This includes reformist forces, such as the Seattle to Brussels Network, where ATTAC is also present, as well as more radical, “self-organised” groups, if they want us to, as generally the greens, and definately the Védegylet itself, are actually self-organised. We will continue to hold the issue of the environment as central and, while a mystery to fundamental marxists and those who restrict themselves to the dominant political tendencies of the last century, our environmentalism allows us a deeper analysis of human liberation not only from wage labour, but also from ecologically unsustainable excesses such as consumerism, and homogenisation. Given the social, ecological and democratic crisis we face, we need this intellectual freedom from orthodoxies and flexibility to think beyond ideologies, without denying any of them. We will hopefully be able to do this while either appreciating or constructively appraising or criticising the work of other organisations that do things differently, not falling into the destructive, counteractive trap of believing ’we know best’.

The last question raised by the editor proves interesting: will the social movements in Hungary be as divided as the society? I think so, yes, to some extent, but hopefully only to the optimum point where our divisions serve to create a useful debate, but our common sense tells us when to appreciate that the issues we deal with and the changes we want to see are bigger than our differences. However, this organisational or tactical unity needs to be underpinned by a culture of respectful dialogue and cooperational ’norms’, regardless of ideologies. To go back to the question of the Forum, at local or European level, this is something that some, but not all, have learned to understand.

Tracey Wheatley, with a lot of help from a lot of other people.