We cannot evaluate the recent London ESF without frame it within the story of the process that led to its production. This is the story of the contrast between two broad camps that have emerged in the course of the process itself. On one hand, those coming from many networks and organisations to make the ESF a temporary space-time common that would prefigure alternative practices and multiple non-exploitative doings in a "global city" like London. On the other, those whose efforts followed the Socialist Worker Party and Socialist Action lines, the mentalities of union bureaucracies and the directives of Ken Livingstone's office to monopolize and centralize the event. This became to be known as the struggle between “horizontals” and “verticals”.
Perhaps this distinction caused some confusion, since the definition of “horizontality” or “verticality” did not identify a specific group, organisation or network, nor a specific ideology or world view of politics and political events. Often, one could identify "horizontals" in "vertical" organisations and "verticals" in "horizontal" networks. However, we can understand the contrast described by the terminology in terms of modes of doing predicated on opposite organising principles. One, based on participatory, open and inclusive democracy, in which participants through their iterative relational practices reached consensus on both means to be employed and ends to be achieved and were willing to engage in the continuous learning process necessary for these practices. The other in which democracy was identified with a rigid vertical structure within which ends are defined by the few, and the means are seen purely as instrumental to those ends. For “horizontals” the means embody values as much as the ends (whether we use free or corporate software, whether information is posted freely or under coordinating committee control, whether working groups emerge from the ground up or “allowed” by a coordinating committee). Indeed because of this, the shape of ends emerges from negotiations of means. For the “verticals” it was just about “getting the job done”, that is, their concept of “job” and final outcome.
I think that the contrast between these substantially different ways of doing, these modes of producing events, is highly “educational” for all of us, and we can evaluate the final outcome in these terms. By focussing on process and the totality of our movements, what can we say about the ESF held in London last November? Ambiguous result. On the one hand, it has represented a clear step forward for our movement. This not only because 25,000 people have attended and all large events like these encourage encounters between people across networks. Also and especially because a section of the movement has overcome its insularity at events like these and, working with organizing principles based on horizontality, inclusiveness and participation, has broadened substantially the programme of and participation in self-managed and autonomous zones. About 5000 people, many of whom where wearing the bracelet of the “official” event, have been estimated to have participated in the broad range of activities of the autonomous zones, and defined future action programmes on crucial themes such as precarity, migration and communication rights.
On the other hand, there is also a sense in which the process of the ESF in London has not been a way forward for our movement, but a serious set back. The degree of subcontracting of the various processes of the “official” events, culminating with the hiring of an “event management” company, the environmental unawareness of its practices, the vertical control freakery that has dominated all moments of its production, suspicious of all productive networks from the movement that did not match the “way of doing” template of union bureaucracies and socialist parties, the contractual “terms and conditions” email sent to anyone purchasing tickets, the petty self-promoting splashing of UK union names on the walls of meeting rooms instead of reaching out to symbols that belong to all movements across the globe, not to mention the bullying, the trade unions’ and Greater London Authority’s financial blackmails and the monopolization of platforms such as the final rally, are just an indication that in terms of these practices, we have a long way to go to make another world possible. In the effort to “build” the movement, to “outreach” to people who have not yet heard about the horrors of the world, the organizers have forgotten that a process of radical social transformation takes much more than an increasing number of people laid down as “building bricks”. This relational incompetence is a heavy political liability in our movement, and cannot be justified by the ends of “educating” more people or outreaching into the mainstream union organizations, as Alex Callinicos argues in a recent posting to the ESF-UK email list. We cannot overcome this by choosing between the false polarity posed on us by those who portray the Social Forum as a space or as a movement of movements. We move beyond the impasse if we understand it to be both. Because to be radically transformative, the movement of movements must strive to set a limit to the voraciousness of capital, to be its true insurmountable barrier, and at the same time to constitute new social relations, new modes of producing and doing, including producing politics. The practice of this articulation is what constitutes an open space. Without this articulation and the efforts necessary for it, our collective political subjectivity as a transformative force is, simply, lost.
Massimo De Angelis