“I think we'll still be living in capitalism by October,” says Redmond O'Neill, a senior adviser to the Mayor of London. Another delegate disagrees, shouting “Pessimist!” Everyone laughs.
Bringing the European Social Forum (ESF) to London was never going to be an easy option. The Thatcher legacy, continued by Tony Blair, has made London one of the most thoroughly marketised, privatised and expensive cities in Europe . But when the ESF itself started to mirror these tendencies, many activists suspected something was up. Babels ( www.babels.org ), the international network of volunteer interpreters, used the occasion of a meeting where Ken Livingstone was scheduled to speak (he did not turn up) to deliver a statement accusing the Greater London Authority (GLA) of following “classical neo-liberal practices of organisation, management and service delivery… with the result that the Forum has been entirely dependent on the state.” Others, such as Anne Scargill and the network of women in mining or ex-mining areas in the UK , didn't even get that far: “No way could we afford the fees, transport and accommodation.”
How did this situation come about? One explanation is that this is an unfortunate side-effect of entering the heartland of neoliberalism. T here are several grains of truth in this claim that the London Forum posed new challenges, although the situation was by no means unique. The WSF in Mumbai, for example, faced an even more hostile political climate in confronting local and national right-wing administrations that were both strongly implicated in the stirring up of communalist racism and violence.
The Mumbai response was to reduce costs by experimenting with alternative technologies, such as the Nomad interpretation system (based on free software), and cheap, environmentally-friendly building materials. Scarcity produced innovation. But this is not always the case, as any good anti-capitalist will tell you. A lack of financial means can also result in alienation and the consolidation of power in the hands of the few.
Money bought power at the ESF in London , but it was only the political culture and institutional context that really made this possible. That this ESF was dominated by left parties and the local state was nothing new. The background involvement of political parties, for example, has been a feature of virtually all social forums and an important factor in mediating the relationship with local government. The difference in London , if anything, was not the dominance of organised Left parties but their relative weakness. This meant that the London ESF offered a real opportunity to break the mould of past forums and become the ‘civil society' initiative it has often promised to be. The fact that this did not happen shows, if anything, the role that parties play for the forum in its current form. The task of organising a forum is still primarily addressed at local and national levels, where political parties remain an important vehicle for articulating political demands and organising collective activities. In the absence of strong Left parties in the UK , the GLA took on this role by proxy.
The involvement of the state was also nothing new. When the city of Florence hosted the first ESF in 2002, it donated the massive Fortezza da Basso for the event. State involvement was even more widespread during the Paris ESF in 2003, which relied on large donations from all levels of government ranging from local municipalities to the President's office. The difference in London was not the extent of state support – which was considerably down on previous years – but the price extracted for it. The GLA established its own parallel organising structures and used its funding to exert an unprecedented level of political control. This led to a lack of creativity, with practical tasks outsourced or dealt with bureaucratically. In particular, the Mayor of London's office pursued a managerialist approach that is quite at odds with the participatory ethos of the forum.
The permeation of market values was clearly visible at the Forum itself, where d iscussions on fair trade and the campaign to boycott Coke sat uneasily alongside the corporate food outlets selling Coca-Cola. But the real ‘innovations' lay behind the scenes. The GLA, having rested control of the budget-making process, kept this under tight wraps and assumed virtually the entire responsibility for the financial aspect of the forum. It brought with it the benefits of professional financial experience, but even this turned out to be doubled edged.
Unlearning how to count
In the conclusion to his well-known article on ‘the essence of neoliberalism', the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu states baldly that “the public interest will never emerge, even at the cost of a few mathematical errors, from the vision of accountants.”
This is, in part, because there are several things that conventional financial statistics are not very good at counting, such as environmental impacts or the value of voluntary labour. Yet these costs were certainly apparent at the ESF in London : there was not even a trace of recycling facilities, let alone the aspiration to reach Zero Waste (this is perhaps unsurprising, given that Ken Livingstone's London Plan also rejected this goal).
The Forum's reliance on voluntary labour was also largely instrumental with volunteers, on the whole, denied any decision-making capacity and distrusted for all but menial tasks. This despite the fact that the greatest material resources received by the Forum were given in kind: the financial value of Babels' contribution alone would amount to more than ½ million pounds.
In addition, counting on the basis of financial inputs and outputs doesn't give a sense of the wider value of initiatives taken at the Forum. Projects such as Nomad, which could have archived the event (allowing, amongst other things, its speeches to be replayed for educational purposes) were ditched, as were most other initiatives that moved in the direction of long-term benefit for the social forum as a process rather than event. Such decisions were ultimately a consequence of how the GLA constructed its budget and allocated money. In particular, ticket revenues were left to bear a high proportion of the overall costs, which meant an increasing susceptibility to market pressures.
Solidarity Economy initiatives
For many participants, the solution to some of these problems is to adopt the practices of the social or solidarity economy, which encompasses alternative modes of production and distribution of goods. To start with, this means that the organisers of the forum need to realise that the practical construction of the forum can be as political as the contents of its speeches. The recent Uruguay Social Forum, for example, was a showcase for fairly traded and co-operatively produced goods – inspired, in part, by the explosive growth of bartering networks in neighbouring Argentina following its economic collapse in late 2001. The Intercontinental Youth Camp at the 2003 World Social Forum went even further, accommodating more than 20,000 people in a tented city with its own internal currency (the ‘Sol'), which acted as an incentive to participate in the camp's own solidarity economy and purchase its organic produce rather than choosing the nearby commercial outlets.
These initiatives are not incidental to the social forum process. They speak as eloquently as the rhetorical turns on the forum's main stages about alternatives to market-driven globalisation, with its tendency to destroy local production and bio-diversity as it spreads inequality around the world. Making the social forums into a laboratory for alternative economic practices will not result in the overthrow of capitalism, for sure. But it would at least be a step in the right direction if the forums were to prefigure, in the here and now, the kind of ‘other world' that they hope to bring about.
Oscar Reyes