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From "Beyond civil society: By Emir Sader Full document available at newleftreview.net A Brazilian view of the World Social Forum, in its regional and international context. How the landscape of the world’s Left has changed, and whether the ideologies of non-governmental organization and civil society are capable of resisting what they criticize. The new is always hard to grasp, especially when it emerges within a landscape transformed from that in which the previous events occurred. The picture presented by the Social Forums would be incomprehensible within the frameworks that have characterized earlier attempts at international co-ordination—that of the Internationals, for example, or the Third World-dominated Non-Aligned Movement. The world of work intrinsic to the First International, in particular—where solidarity was premised on the universalized exploitation of labour—has been transformed. Not industrial workers but farmers' unions, from peripheral or semi-peripheral countries, have a significant presence at the Forums. They are held in the Third World, and a large fraction of the participants are from the South, but the movement's largest demonstrations since Seattle have been in countries of the core—Genoa, Barcelona—where the young subproletariat has played a central role. Comparisons with the Internationals, the Bandung Conference or Woodstock—the media's favourite—can thus fail to capture the historical specificity of the Forums, and the very different set of elements that are combining here to construct a new subjectivity in the fight for a post-neoliberal order. It was the mass working-class movements of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries that provided the basis for the Internationals, throwing up Socialist and Communist parties, trade unions, workers' representatives in parliament and manifold forms of cultural expression. Politically, the scenario is now quite different. The long-established parties of the European Left were largely absent from the first Forum, and had only a minimal presence at the second. The reasons for this lie both in the ideological crisis caused by social democracy's conversion to neoliberalism and in the declining weight, or real implantation, of these currents. Labour-movement concerns were raised instead by the new trade unions of the semi-periphery—South Africa, Korea, Brazil. If common motifs can be traced between the Forum and the First International—the insurgent, pluralist, libertarian, highly ideologized character of the mobilizations; social heterogeneity; internationalism; opposition to a liberal free-trade order—it is impossible to grasp the meaning of the new forms without an examination of the historical rupture that divides them, For what splits the two asunder is the defeat and disappearance of all that once constituted 'actually existing socialism', and the transformation this has wrought upon the Left. From the moment of the Bolshevik revolution—and especially since the Second World War—the world stage was polarized by the socialist/ capitalist opposition, determining relatively fixed ideological and political reference points. While the Left proclaimed a struggle between the two systems, the Western superpowers called for a battle of 'democracy' against 'totalitarianism'. This was the determining contradiction of the epoch. With the fall of the USSR and the 'socialist bloc', capitalism was once again sole ruler of the world scene. The remaining post-capitalist countries reinvented themselves. China opted for a form of market economy—as in all likelihood will Vietnam. Cuba sought to defend the basic gains of the previous period rather than advance towards socialism. The radical shift in the balance of forces reverberated through the social and political movements. With growing unemployment in Europe, unions were thrown onto the defensive, mounting at best a partial resistance to 'flexibilization' while rapidly losing members. In the increasingly informal and heterogeneous world of labour that was emerging, traditional methods of organizing had ever less effect. Parties had to confront the universalization of neoliberal policies. European social democracy adapted to this at the very moment when, for the first time, the Centre-Left was in power in nearly every EU state; the Communist parties of the region shrivelled, or vanished altogether. A similar scenario was enacted in Eastern Europe, where former Communist parties took up a radicalized neoliberallism or local versions of the Third Way. The magnitude of this defeat for the Left—its depth and reach—has not been sufficiently evaluated. Its principal component is the victory of liberalism, on both the economic and political planes. Economically, the expansion of the financial sphere, deregulation and the market-led annulment of social benefits have dissolved the foundations of the welfare state. Commercialization has absorbed and penetrated the field of social relations, daily practice and consciousness, becoming the lodestone of ideological life. The corporation now plays a leading role in determining economic processes, to the detriment of social forces—unions, parties—premised on more associative forms of life and opposed to the unlimited extension of the market. Politically, with the displacement of the 'capitalism/socialism' binary by that of 'democracy/totalitarianism', liberalism conquered hitherto undreamt-of areas of the Left. Neoliberal economics and representative democracy were embraced as the definitive form of politics by huge swathes of the traditional Left. Parallel to this, 'imperialism' as current historical reality disappeared from the political lexicon, enabling the US to impose its international hegemony, as the model of both 'democracy' and economic success—its deregulated 'Anglo-Saxon' system triumphantly counterposed to the remnants of the European welfare state. Economic progress was identified with free capital flows; levels of deregulation became the measure of potential growth. The process took 'globalization' as its logo, to underline its distinction from 'backward' national models, asserting the international movement of capital as the only possible paradigm. The combination of these elements has resulted in a deep and wide-ranging hegemony, consolidated at the ideological and cultural level, unlike any that capitalism has previously enjoyed. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Japan—despite its cultural distinctiveness—embraced the basic assumptions of Western capitalism, adapting the system to the national context. In the last two decades China, undefeated in war, has taken on the same priorities, transforming its social habits, customs and values at a pace previously unseen in Eastern culture. In Western Europe social democracy has become the main mouthpiece of neoliberalism. In Latin America, traditional populist tendencies—always characterized by a real or rhetorical nationalism—have played the same role, here opting for extreme variants of neoliberalism, with the PRI in Mexico and Menem in Argentina as the prime examples. With the disappearance of socialism from the current historical horizon—and with it, all discussion of capitalism as a historically determined social system—the Left was disarmed in face of the conservative counter-offensive launched by Reagan and Thatcher, and continued by Clinton and Blair. It has abandoned strategic programmes for the construction of a new type of society and turned to defending the rights of the oppressed, or to creating local and sectoral sites of resistance. The proliferation of alternative municipal governments and NGOs are the best examples of this. The project of building an alternative to capitalism was abandoned in favour of resistance from within—opposition to neoliberalism rather than to the overall system. 'Anti-totalitarianism' now mutated into an antagonism towards any overarching analysis—any attempt to see historical processes as a whole. These would inevitably result in reductive programmes with the state as their monolithic agent. Pluralist democracy demanded more 'complex' diagnoses, irreducible to the 'economism' attributed to (actually existing) Marxism, and would therefore renounce 'grand narratives'. It was in this context that local and sectoral forms of resistance—ecological, feminist, ethnic, human rights, municipal democracy—combined to form the movement that, together with union organizations and anti-WTO groups, would surface so explosively in Seattle in November 1999. If they represent an advance, in creating new spaces in which opposition forces can come together, many of them also implicitly renounce any attempt to construct an alternative society—as if our indefinite confinement within the limits of capitalism and liberal democracy was accepted as fact. |