One No, Many Yeses

by Paul Kingsnorth

  There are six days of this. It’s useful; it’s important, perhaps even vital; it’s sometimes inspiring, often challenging, occasionally exciting. But it can get a bit much. There are only so many talks you can sit through, lecture halls you can visit, corridors you can wander lost down, ideas you can take in. Fortunately, there is more to the Forum than this. Outside the official conference-workshop-lecture circuit there are spaces for just about anything else you could want, many of them more reminiscent of Genoa, Prague or Seattle than a United Nations development conference, and consequently more fun.

  There are marches, naturally – one practically every day, supporting the Palestinians, opposing the IMF, calling for land reform, colouring the streets of the city with flags, banners, drums, laughter, bombast, music and slogans. One of the biggest is held by the international small farmers’ union, Via Campesina, who are here in their thousands, camped out in a local gym with members of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement. Meanwhile, a major focus of alternatives to the alternatives available in the main forum is the ‘Carlo Giuliani Youth Camp’, named after the protester killed in Genoa by the police. The youth camp, which looks, smells and sounds like a Brazilian Glastonbury festival, has hundreds of tents, food stalls, merchandise sellers and its own programme of events. It’s altogether more earthy than the main menu provided inside the venues; videos are shown of the protests at Genoa, workshops on direct action techniques are held, meetings spring up to discuss the ‘sell-out’ that is the ‘reformist’ Forum, and provide alternatives to the alternatives it offers.

  On show here, inevitably, is the classic split, based around the fundamental question that every dissident movement has always suffered from and probably always will: reform or revolution? You’re wasting your time, say the ‘revolutionaries’ to the ‘reformists’, with ill-concealed contempt. Negotiating with governments, tinkering around at the margins, rewriting a treaty here, regulating a corporation there – it’s the system that’s the problem. Capitalism must go! Meaningless cant, say ‘reformists’ – time to grow up. Even if you could ‘overthrow’ ‘the system’ history suggests that your chances of building a better one from scratch are pretty slim. The real issue is building the political will for serious change. ‘Reformists’ often get shirty about being called reformists at all, and refuse to accept that such clear lines have to be drawn in the sand. ‘Revolutionaries’ refuse even to discuss the matter, and instead spend their time in tents plotting the inevitable overthrow of everything. This debate – rarely useful, usually frustrating, often artificial, always systemic and never likely to be resolved – will run and run.

  But it’s not the only internal division on show here. There is another, which may turn out to have more long-term significance. A surreal introduction to it came from the youth camp, where Katharine and I were waiting one morning to meet a friend we’d been trying to find for a couple of days. He arrived late because he’d been arguing with a man selling red T-shirts with pictures of Stalin on them.

  ‘Do you realise,’ he had said, pointing at the merchandise, ‘that this is the greatest mass-murderer of the twentieth century?’

  ‘Don’t blame me,’ said the man. ‘I just sell T-shirts.’

  The T-shirt man had apparently assumed that, since this was a gathering of dissidents, it must be a gathering of socialists and/or communists – probably not an unfair assumption in South America. Stalin being a communist, the T-shirts probably seemed a good bet. Unfortunately, the T-shirt man was not the only one at Porto Alegre to assume that changing the world meant disinterring the worst of the twentieth-century left.

  All week, representatives of what might be called the ‘old left’ have been roaming the campsites and corridors of the World Social Forum. Communists from Greece, socialists from Spain, a ragbag of hard-left parties from all over Latin America and the inevitable gaggle of vocal Trots from Europe. There are workshops on ‘building a socialist world’, a lot of shouting and red flag-waving, pamphlets and lectures explaining that all this talk of autonomy, radical democracy and local control is reformist claptrap, no substitute for a workers’ revolution. All pretty harmless in itself, but representative of a tension that is more important than it might look and which goes to the heart of what this movement is, and wants to be.

  For while there is much common ground, there is also a fundamental difference between this new politics of resistance and the old politics of the revolutionary left. It is the difference that Marcos discovered in the mountains of Chiapas; it is, again, about power and attitudes to it. Traditional hard-left politics is about seizing state power, either through revolution or through electing a ‘workers’ party’. It is about vanguard politics, it is usually anti-democratic and even the working class that it claims to represent is so changed from the days when Marx and Engels wrote their gospels that even some of their modern adherents have trouble defining who’s in and who’s out.

  Radical political movements have long been renowned for dissipating their energies on People’s Front of Judea-type squabbling rather than attacking their common enemies. This movement, at the moment, is rather different. It is so frightened of shattering its often fragile unity, or developing a hierarchy that would enable the more powerful and influential activists to push all the others around, that there is an almost pathological fear of airing differences in public and potentially ‘splitting the movement’. It explains, for example, why it is frowned upon to publicly criticise the Black Bloc even though most people disagree with what they get up to. The old left/new movement division, though, is different; sometimes the battles can get quite vicious.

  In Britain, for example, these arguments focus on that rusty nail in the side of every political activist, the Socialist Workers’ Party, which has developed a reputation for latching itself on to every radical cause around like an embarrassingly flatulent relative at a family wedding. Immediately after Seattle in 1999, forward-thinking SWP members were clear that the new movement they could see developing was in need of ‘direction’ and ‘leadership’ from them. ‘Mass movements don’t get the political representation that they deserve,’ wrote one, in the SWP’s magazine, Socialist Review, ‘unless a minority of activists within the movement seek to create a political leadership, which means a political party . . . The first precondition of influencing future struggles is to be involved in them – deeply, organisationally involved . . . The movement is still under construction and socialists can shape it so long as they are wholeheartedly a part of it.’9

  Quite what this poor movement has done to ‘deserve’ leadership from the SWP is unclear, but some activists are obviously less grateful than they should be. ‘It must be really confusing,’ wrote one, in an open letter to an SWP spokesman who had claimed that a movement of millions was no substitute for mobilising ‘wider class forces’, ‘to wake up in the middle of the first organised and even televised global movement and discover that people in it neither speak your political language nor share your dogmas on how the movement should be, who should “lead” the struggle and on what they should be struggling for . . . How come you people have discovered the global anti-capitalist movement only when it became visible to all? Where were you six, seven or eight years ago when many of us were building that movement?’10

  In some cases, these splits have tipped over into battles between scattered groups of campaigners and the UK’s most visible ‘anti-capitalist’ grouping, Globalise Resistance. Globalise Resistance was set up before Genoa by two members of the SWP, and has since mushroomed into a well-organised, well-funded and increasingly dominant left-wing grouping. One of its founders, Guy Taylor, insists it is ‘constitutionally non-ideological’. Its members, he says, include ‘socialists, anarchists, Christians, environmentalists and many people who wouldn’t give themselves a label’.11 Other activists accuse Globalise Resistance of being a kind of fifth column, designed to sneak a hierarchical, dogmatic left-wing ideology into a movement keen to find new answers.

>   A group of influential anarchists in Brighton responded to this with a pointed pamphlet entitled Monopolise Resistance?. ‘If it was just a matter of the SWP having pointless marches and shouting themselves hoarse inside police pens it wouldn’t be a problem,’ they wrote. ‘They’ve been doing that for years and nobody’s noticed. The problem is that they are actively conning people . . . Globalise Resistance exists mainly to increase the influence of the SWP within the anti-capitalist movement.’ They quote a Globalise Resistance spokesperson overheard in Genoa: ‘Remember, we’re the only people here with an overall strategy for the anti-capitalist movement. So I want five people to go out with membership cards, five to sell papers and five to sell bandanas.’12 (The role of the bandanas in the overall strategy has not yet become clear.)

  Whatever the truth about an organisation which, if not a direct lovechild of the SWP, certainly shares the same poster designer, this battle between new approaches and old has already had negative results. A long-discussed UK Social Forum, for example, has never taken off, partly due to a fear that Globalise Resistance, its socialist allies and their agendas will dominate the event. And these are not parochial squabbles: they are repeated across the world. A movement inspired by Zapatismo and radical democracy that speaks a new language, promotes new ideas and wants no party or vanguard to lead it can never make its peace with dogmatic statists from the Utopian left, convinced that ‘power’ must be ‘seized’ at state level, by them, for ‘the workers’, whether anybody else likes it or not.

  The discussions, debates, arguments and ideas on show at Porto Alegre represent, when looked at in this context, something significantly different. A new attempt at a different type of politics, and one which is slowly crawling out from under the long shadow of the twentieth-century left – packing away the old ideological kitbag and unwrapping new tools. It’s a hard struggle; often the language and the methods are not yet available to describe what is happening. These paths, unlike the six-lane motorways of state socialism or revolutionary communism, have not yet been widely trodden. But the journey that has begun is perhaps more important than many realise.

  The next day, I’m reminded again of this division. Brazil’s Workers’ Party – the PT – are co-organisers of the Forum, and despite promises not to, they are finding it hard to resist using it as a vehicle for electioneering. Later in the year, Brazil faces a presidential election: at the moment, the PT’s candidate, the former metalworker known popularly as ‘Lula’, is ahead in the polls (in November 2002 he will win the election, becoming Brazil’s first elected left-wing president). This morning he has turned up at the Forum to give a speech, surrounded by cheering party apparatchiks. It suits Lula to be seen with this international gathering of forward-thinkers. He is, after all, a politician. In the central hall, the loudspeakers are vibrating to the promises of an inevitable people’s victory, and it’s getting right on my nerves. This wasn’t what I came here for. Judging by the muttering crowds outside, I’m not the only one.

  But then the PT win me over. Not that they need to, since I can’t vote in Brazil. But after a couple of hours in the conference room of the São Rafael Hotel, I have been given a picture of local democracy in action that seems to offer intriguing possibilities for the future. The PT have governed the city of Porto Alegre since 1988 and their tenure has led to real changes. State-wide, the PT have self-consciously kicked back against what they openly call ‘the neoliberal model’; they have suspended privatisations, guaranteed public service provision levels and channelled support into agriculture and micro-enterprises. They are trying to build a system of what they call ‘decentralised social welfare’ through locally based literacy movements, adult education programmes, housing and workers co-ops. Most interestingly though, in Porto Alegre itself, the PT has embarked on an ambitious experiment to hand back some of the running of the city to the people who live there.

  Porto Alegre’s ‘participatory budget’ is trumpeted by the PT as a future for urban democracy, and ‘people’s economics’, and they may be on to something. In the hotel, a summer-skirted woman from the Porto Alegre government is explaining how it works. ‘People’s participation in the city used to be confined to the act of voting every few years,’ she says. ‘Now they decide on how their money is spent in their city, through a democratic process.’ The PT are, of course, keen to trumpet their achievements, but it seems they do have something to trumpet; the people of Porto Alegre control the way their money is spent on their city to a degree that I have not come across anywhere else.

  The woman from the government explains how the process works. In 1989, the PT removed the power to decide on the city’s budget from the usual councillors and technocrats in City Hall and began a process of popular consultation, which has evolved annually to iron out glitches that appeared along the way. Currently, budgetary priorities are divided up by themes – environment, transport, taxation, culture, health, education, etc. – and for each theme there is a regular public conference in each region of the city. Any citizen can participate in these conferences, which debate how much money should be spent on that theme, and how. Each conference then elects a delegate, who puts forward the decisions made by their electors before electing a clutch of budget councillors who put the budget together according to the broad choices made by the citizenry. Finally, after months of being kicked about, touched up and debated, the proposed budget is voted on by the people of the city – only if they approve it will it go ahead.

  It’s a long and complex process, and not without its flaws, but it does give the people of Porto Alegre a significant degree of real control over how their money is spent. According to the PT, the participatory budget has meant changes in the way the city is run, as citizens adjust it to suit their priorities. Since it was introduced, they say, it has been used to pave 25,000 kilometres of roads, provide 96 per cent of homes with clean running water, steadily increase sewage provision, set up family health clinics, work towards eliminating child labour and expand the number of infant schools. The idea, clearly, is that the money is spent on what people want – not what politicians think they want, or want themselves. And it is proving popular – so much so that the model is being extended not only to 500 towns across Rio Grande do Sul, but to other Brazilian cities which the PT controls, including Rio de Janeiro. Other cities across the world are watching it closely – so are plenty of other people at the World Social Forum. It is an example of an alternative approach that can be seen in action, rather than simply envisioned on a stage. And it works.

  The last full day of the Forum has just ended. Tomorrow morning there will be a closing ceremony, and then the crowds will begin to disperse. Tonight, thousands of us are down at the grass arena by the sea again for a closing concert; speakers (the charismatic Lula is at it again), bands from around the world, fireworks, food, drink and a full moon in a black Atlantic sky. Katharine and I and a gang of friends are on the caipirinhas again, sitting on the grass, revelling in the recently announced news that the president of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn, who wanted to come to the Forum and give us all a talk on how neoliberalism is abolishing poverty, has been turned away. They have turned us away with tear-gas and armoured cars so many times; now we turn them away with a polite refusal. We are worrying them, and this time, the agenda and the momentum are ours. It’s a golden moment. While we enjoy it, we are being serenaded, for about the four hundredth time this week, with the official theme song of the World Social Forum. The bouncy, Eurovision-type chorus, in Portuguese, goes ‘Aqui, um outro mundo é possível!’ – ‘Here, another world is possible’. It’s horribly tacky. It’s also catchier than it sounds, and after a few caipirinhas you can’t get it out of your head.

  It’s just over six months since I was in Genoa; it’s just over two years since Seattle, and it seems to me now that something has already ended here in Porto Alegre, and that something else has begun. I have a feeling – and I’ve talked to plenty of other people that have it too, but c
an’t quite explain why – that this movement has reached a turning point: that it has reached the end of the beginning, that somehow, now, it moves into phase two. The ideas and the energy that came out of Porto Alegre were astounding; more than I think I had expected, and more exciting than most of the world seems to realise. This movement has a long way to go, a lot of tensions to resolve, a lot of wrinkles to iron out, questions still to be asked and answered. Where it will end up is anybody’s guess. But it is going somewhere, and it looks like being the right direction.

  As for me, lying on the grass with a drink in my hand – I am watching the fireworks beginning, silhouetting the lighthouse down on the shore with starbursts of red and green and white. And I am thinking: this is a time to be bold. Something is in the air; a tide turning, a paradigm slowly shifting. I don’t know quite what it is, but somehow it seems that we, here in Porto Alegre, hold the future in our hands; that we have wrested it from the delegates over in New York, and claimed it for ourselves. And that now, anything could happen. And somehow, for some reason that, again, I can’t quite explain – somehow, I know that it will, and that it will be something big.

  I’ll drink to that.

  7

  land and freedom

  ‘The most dramatic and far-reaching social change of the second half of this century, and one that cuts us off for ever from the world of the past, is the death of the peasantry.’

  ERIC HOBSBAWM, 1994

  ‘Either Brazil finishes off the sem terra, or the sem terra will finish off Brazil.’

  BRAZILIAN STATE PROSECUTOR, TRYING TWO LANDLESS PEOPLE FOR MURDER, 2000

  The policeman has seen me. I knew he would. He’s seen me and he’s shouting at me to stop walking, to turn around, to come back to the road where he’s standing. He wants to know what I’ve got in my bag, and he wants to know now.