What politics for the movement against neo-liberal globalisation?

BY DICK NICHOLS

[This is the text of a talk given to the final plenary of the September 22-23 Sydney Social Forum on the topic of alternatives to globalisation.]

Let me begin by asking an unpopular question and give what could well be an unpopular answer to it. The question is: "What politics does our movement, the broad and rising movement against neo-liberal globalisation, need to prevail?"

For many in the movement around the world, certainly at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre or in the 500,000-strong demonstration in Barcelona against the European Union's March summit, this would be a strange, even hostile, question.

For them the new movement is the politics; movement and politics are one and the same thing. And for many, this movement, with its own politics and culture, is a blessed relief from the politics, culture and sometimes manipulative practices of what often gets called "the old left".

That sentiment is certainly very strong among young people in such driving centres of the global movement as Spain. There, for hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, the "old left", irrespective of whether we are talking of right-wing French Socialists, Greens or even revolutionary socialists, all belongs in a big garbage bag marked "politicians".

The sentiment has achieved a certain formalisation, the status of an entrenched value and rule, in the charter of principles of the World Social Forum movement, which forbids direct participation of political parties, and which assigned the Sao Paulo Forum — the network of Latin American left organisations — a sort of "off-Broadway" role at the last World Social Forum in Porto Alegre.

At the same time, however, our movement — like every mass movement that has ever existed — is always having to assess how well it is doing. How close are we to achieving our demands? A Tobin tax on speculative capital flows? Cancellation or radical reduction of the Third World debt? Global food and water security? Elimination of preventable diseases? Reversal of global warming?

Just asking these questions three weeks after the monumental, but entirely predictable, flop of the Johannesburg environmental summit, and three days after the little criminal in the White House released US imperialism's latest "vision statement", dramatises their urgency.

Another world is possible? The Bush doctrine replies loud and clear: "The only world that is possible is the one we'll allow".

Strategic debate

We see an intensifying contradiction between the stormy rise of the movement and the fact that none of its demands are remotely near realisation. Investigate progress on any issue — like the Tobin tax, for example — and you will suffocate in a universe of reports proving its unfeasibility, some NGOs deluding themselves about "hopeful signs of progress" and the reality of stonewalling by capitalist governments, conservative and social-democratic.

Symbolic here was the decision of Lionel Jospin, the former French Socialist Party prime minister, to drop this tax from his platform for the French presidential elections, even though it was Socialist Party policy and even though that party put a lot of effort into identifying with the World Social Forum process by flooding Porto Alegre with its ministers.

Inexorably and inevitably this strategic debate is forcing itself into the foreground of the World Social Forum process itself. If the first World Social Forum was largely an anti-World Economic Forum ("another world is possible") and the second most of all a site for developing initiatives (what would this "other world" look like?) at its third edition, strategy will become one of the forum's central themes.

That means that real life is making the question I started with — what politics for the movement? — the focus of its collective attention. It's a sign of its maturation.

But does this reality mean that the initial phase of the movement — of counter-demonstrations to corporate and international agency summits, of network-building, of the World Social Forum itself — is now outdated? Yes and no.

Obviously we must continue to build on what we have built already. Who would question the need for as big as possible a demonstration at the World Trade Organisation meeting here in November? Such mass mobilisations are indispensable: they are the vital core of the delegitimisation of the neo-liberal agenda of war and austerity.

It is impossible to conceive of the 75-80% opposition in Europe to Bush's impending war against Iraq without this background of rising protest involving hundreds of thousands of "ordinary citizens". Without it, it would have been impossible for the French far left to achieve the 10.4% it won in the first round of the presidential elections.

For socialists — and for the Socialist Alliance — this movement is a precious acquisition, to be strengthened by whatever means are available on the basis of its own democratic foundations.

However, we should simultaneously be clear that all the counter-demonstrations in the world are not going to change the approach of Bush and company. They will make these criminals more unpopular and they will even help force a Social-Democrat German chancellor desperate for re-election to oppose the war on Iraq. In the process they will also make hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people receptive to the alternative politics capable of winning its demands, but they will not create that politics.

Greens

Where will such politics come from? Let's review the pretenders.

We can discard Labor and its overseas counterparts from the outset, even if many within these parties are sympathetic to the movement and in some cases can even force verbal acceptance of its legitimacy on their leaders.

But when real choices have to be taken? I have already mentioned the position of the most "movement-friendly" detachment of global Social Democracy, the French Socialist Party, on the Tobin tax.

Here in Australia, has Labor — as it manoeuvres to insert Australia in the Iraq war on the "right basis" — got anything useful to say about issues like Third World debt and the environmental holocaust? To ask such questions is to answer them.

What about the Greens? Here we're dealing with a political current that has taken on board many of the demands of the movement against neo-liberal globalisation and which advances them in its election campaigns. Not by accident did Canberra exclude Bob Brown from the official Australian delegation to Johannesburg.

The Socialist Alliance always looks to collaborate with the Greens on the many issues on which we agree. For example, in the by-election in Cunningham the Greens will campaign, like the Socialist Alliance, against the impending war on Iraq. We look forward to joining forces in a statement against the war and in challenging pro-war candidates — Labor, independents and the Liberals — to a public debate on the issue.

However, the core shortcoming of the Greens — at their present stage of evolution — is that while they channel mass disillusionment with the system at the level of votes and represent it in parliament, they lack any clear strategic view about how to convert this disillusionment into an active and ongoing anti-systemic movement.

That is, the Greens' good positions don't yet add up to a coherent conception of how to actually win the movement's demands. In fact, within the Greens such a discussion cannot really take place without creating conflict between, for example, those who think sustainability really is possible under capitalism and those who don't.

Noting this reality is not picking on differences for the fun of it. A clear strategy is critical if we are to win the war against the corporate elites. Moreover, the movement against neo-liberal globalisation — which effectively embraces the four founding Green principles (social justice, peace and non-violence, democracy and sustainability) — isn't like previous mass movements. It doesn't have one or two central demands which, if achieved, would remove its reason to exist.

It is an anti-systemic movement and as such requires consistent anti-systemic politics. There is no dodging this fact of life.

Socialist politics

Now the only consistently anti-systemic politics are socialist politics. The only global alternative to neo-liberal capitalist globalisation and its dog-eat-dog values is socialism, which is based on human solidarity and strives for the progressive satisfaction of social need and sustainability through democratic decision -making involving the whole of society.

What are the approaches of socialism that the movement most needs to absorb? They can be summarised as six points:

1. Socialism understands the forces involved in the struggle and has no illusions over how easy it will be to defeat the enemy. The corporate elite and its governments will only give way on any particular issue when they risk losing even more. The key force capable of forcing change from such a powerful enemy is the mobilised strength of masses of people, critically working people — those with the power to bring production for profit to a halt. That's what forced a shorter working week in France, and ended the Vietnam War.

2. Socialist politics isn't primarily focused on parliament — although it certainly treats election campaigning as an important battle front — but on building the movement "out in the streets".

3. Socialism understands that the alternative can only be built on the expansion of democracy and not through technocratic top-down policy change by enlightened elites. It always aims to strengthen the movement through helping to increase the understanding of masses of people of their own power. It says: "We can change the world, the juggernaut isn't all-powerful, we don't have to lead lives of quiet desperation."

4. Socialism understands the alliances, national and international, that have to be built — the solidarity of working people everywhere and support for those who are most oppressed, like indigenous peoples, women (especially women workers), oppressed nations and the Third World as a whole;

5. Socialism counterposes to neo-liberal globalisation not narrow nationalism but the globalisation of solidarity. It stands against right-wing, often racist "anti-globalisation" populism, which continues to contaminate the thinking of some in this country who view themselves as left.

6. As the ongoing struggle against corporate capital unfolds socialism always looks to concretise that "other possible world" for which we are striving. It seeks out and strengthens in the experience of the present all examples and anticipations of how a society based on solidarity, democracy and sustainability will actually work.

So the conclusion is simple enough. Building the alternative to neo-liberal globalisation is a job that, as the Italians say, "walks on two legs". There's movement construction and there's building the most coherent and consistent political voice for the movement — the socialist voice — within it. That's the challenge facing all of us who oppose capitalism, whatever political home we're living in at the moment.

The stronger the consciously anti-capitalist element within the movement, the stronger it will be as a whole. Of course, this won't be the result of the classic techniques of Stalinism (and not only Stalinism) — stacking meetings, setting up front and shell organisations exploiting the language and style of the movement — but of growing real influence for socialism based on strict respect for the autonomy and democracy of the movement itself.

If we strengthen the voice of socialism, if we give it a broader social base in this country, we will be giving the broader movement against neo-liberal globalisation the best of all possible gifts.

[Dick Nichols is one of three national co-convenors of the Socialist Alliance.]

From Green Left Weekly, October 2, 2002.
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