Sunday afternoon's demo - one hundred thousand people
against the war and liberalism - confirmed what we had written in the
past few days: the European social Forum of London was a success. With
many internal problems, with difficulties, delays and misunderstandings,
but a success none the less, also shown by the twenty five thousand people
attending in the end. How striking, therefore, the enormous lack of media
attention by the Italian press. A lack of curiosity - perhaps due to the
absence of violent clashes and teargas - that should make us reflect on
the present system of media information but that at the same time reveals
a political distance between an "establishment" that is increasingly
entangled in the [alchemy/deception] of the "palace" [government
bureaucracy], and the spirit that moves the young generations. In London
we saw many young people, a lot of desire to participate - not always
fulfilled - a great desire not to throw away the most interesting political
novelty of the first few years of this century. The fact that we did not
find any trace of this in the Italian newspapers, perhaps with some regular
critiques, is a sign of the times.
Our positive judgment, obviously, does not hide the
difficulties that did agitate this Forum. An organization that was not
up to the standard of the event, a certain rigidity, gave rise to small
disputes that were strongly emphasised in some circles and that Haidi
Giuliani, interviewed by our newspaper, defines as «a lot of noise
over nothing» In the sense that the essence of the event does not
change: the movement still centres around the search for one's political
space and, with this strong tool in hand, equips itself with the means
by which to launch its own initiative. Then there are the contradictions:
for example, speakers in the assemblies are always male, white and fifty-year
olds - a thing that provokes unease in young people and women; trade unions
are sometimes committed and sometimes not; the inclusion [or otherwise]
of a variety of experiences is not always exemplary - and it must be said
that the representatives of the Italian movement always know how to say
the right words about this, as shown by the handling of the final assembly.
All this is a push towards the self-reforming of the Forum: it will be
discussed on 18 and 19 December in an assembly in Paris and, presumably,
also at the various national levels.
But, indeed, the substance remains unchanged: this political
space, a gigantic popular university, is still capable of being the engine
of initiatives and mobilizations at the international scale. Especially
important, therefore, is the proclamation of the European Day on 19 March
because it responds to two fundamental requirements: ensuring that the
original path of the movement, the critique of capitalist globalisation,
and its subsequent phase, opposition to the war, are recomposed in a single
vision. Thinking of ourselves, truly, as a European movement, capable
that is to say of giving ourselves one appointment to represent the convergence
of our objectives. Already it had happened in Amsterdam, in 1997, a date
that is counted amongst the premonitory warning signs of the global movement.
If it succeeds again it will be a new occasion.
The problems are not few on the road ahead, but indeed
they are ahead and were not removed. The first one concerns the relations
with European trade-unionism: will be really be able to make the necessary
convergence or will the divisions prevail? The answer is totally in the
hands of the CES [European trade union confederation] that has still not
got an unambiguous position on war and neoliberalism. In London there
was a strong British participation, a significant presence of the Cgil
[Italian trade union confederation], however the convergence [of policies],
as underlined in an article by Frances O'Grady of the British Unions,
is still being built and must not be unidirectional, that is to say from
the movement towards the unions, but also in the opposite direction.
Secondly there it is a problem of democracy, and of
effectiveness, inside the movement itself. The proclamation of the assembly
of Paris in December is an awareness of this problem: the people making
the decisions are still few and this can create a detachment, a dispersal.
The political space designed by the Forum should be followed by many other
spaces, thematic, local, transversal, centred on permanent campaigns that
allow the different subjects to intervene and to make more decisions.
Finally, there it is the political problem. A good editorial
in yesterday's "Guardian" reproaches the British political elite
for their absence from the forum and underlines how from the experience
of the ESF we can expect "the emergence of a genuine new politics
of the European left". The success of the Respect meeting, the presence
of living forces of the alternate left within the Forum, tell us that
this possibility is now there [the writing is on the wall]. And largely
depends precisely on the behaviour of this left itself.
by Salvatore Cannavò
19 October 2004