By Emir Sader on September 28, 2020
In the middle of the 1990s, the height of the emergence of neoliberalism on a global scale, forms of resistance to that model developed. In the United States, Europe, and Latin America, isolated movements, some coordinated, others local or national, followed the cry of Chiapas, of resistance to the neoliberal wave.
This group of movements and forces finally met in 2001 in Porto Alegre for the first World Social Forum (WSF). The southern city of Brazil was chosen, first of all because of the anti-neoliberal mobilizations in several Latin American countries. But the choice fell on Brazil, because it is the headquarters of organizations such as the Workers’ Party, the CUT (Central Unica dos Trabalhadores), the MST (Movement of the Landless), among others. The city of Porto Alegre was chosen as the headquarters, because of the innovative experiences of the participatory budget.
Contrary to the wave of the single thought and the Washington Consensus, at the event the motto “Another world is possible” was defined. Social movements, NGOs, intellectuals, anti-neoliberal militants, among many others, met in a surprising convergence, which would give rise to the organized movement of struggle against the predominant model of capitalism.
Almost 20 years later, how is the struggle against neoliberalism, what has happened with the WSF, and can it still be said that another world is possible?
Many things have happened since then, both in the world and in the struggle for the other possible world. The greatest progress has been made precisely in Latin America, where six governments – in Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia and Ecuador – advanced in overcoming neo-liberalism. And they did so by assimilating proposals from the WSF.
These governments had in common the priority of social policies in the struggle against hunger, misery, social exclusion and inequality. They managed, unlike the rest of the world, to reduce, in the most unequal continent in the world, significantly the inequalities and all other negative features of the societies of these countries.
This happened in such a way that the leaders of those governments – Hugo Chávez, Lula, Néstor and Cristina Kirchner, Pepe Mujica, Evo Morales and Rafael Correa – became the main leaders of the left throughout the world. These governments, moreover, have become fundamental references in the struggle for the other possible world – which has taken the form of the construction of post-neoliberal governments.
What happened in the meantime with the WSF? Suffice it to say that, at the World Social Forum in Belem do Pará in 2009, some of these leaders – Chavez, Lula, Evo Morales, Rafael Correa – had to meet outside the official programming of the WSF, where there was no room for governments that were obviously on the side of the debates of the WSF and the State as organizer of society and corrector of injustices.
This feature is a weakness that the WSF has dragged from its Original Charter: the conception, imported from classical liberalism, of the opposition between civil society and the State, with the disqualification of the latter, as authoritarian, inefficient, historically overcome. It coincides with the views of several NGOs and some intellectuals, such as John Holloway, in his book Changing the World, without Taking Power, as well as those of other European thinkers.
In spite of the fact that these governments represented the most advanced steps done in the struggle against neoliberalism, the WSF has marginalized itself from these processes and isolated itself from todays new generations of militants. How could social policies be implemented if not through the State? How would it be possible to implement policies of sovereignty if not through the State? How could processes of regional integration and South-South exchange be developed if not through national States? The pandemic has once again reminded us of the irreplaceable role of the State. The drama of hundreds of thousands of deaths in countries where it has been resolved to weaken it, as in Brazil and the United States, are a tragic call to this reality.
Instead of updating its Original Charter and opening the space for this new reality on the way, transforming itself into the space for exchange and debate between governments of change and social movements, the WSF has remained frozen and, rather, has isolated civil society. The governments that took important steps in the direction of the construction of the other possible world had no place in a conception that was already overcome by the concrete conditions of struggle against neoliberalism.
At a time when, after the advances of the first decade of the century and the setbacks of the second, and just when the path that the third decade will take is being discussed – especially from Argentina and Mexico and the outcome of the situations in Brazil, Bolivia and Ecuador – it is fundamental to have a space like the WSF both to take stock of the experiences lived, and to discuss the situation of the struggle for another possible world in other regions and to constitute forms of coordination between all the struggles.
A document launched recently points to this, with the proposal of opening the WSF to concrete action, as an actor with an identity, in the struggle for the possible world. It even points to the idea of convening a new WSF in Mexico, as soon as the conditions allow for the displacement and gathering of people.
Only with this opening will it be possible to rescue the WSF and insert it into the contemporary struggles against neoliberalism. Only in this way will we be able to recover the possibility of the construction of another possible world.
Source: Other News, translation, Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau