politics.guardian.co.uk George Monbiot Tuesday January 28, 2003 The Guardian

Mr Bush and Mr Blair might have a tougher fight than they anticipated. Not from Saddam Hussein perhaps - although it is still not obvious that they can capture and hold Iraq's cities without major losses - but from an anti-war movement that is beginning to look like nothing the world has seen before.

It's not just that people have begun to gather in great numbers even before a shot has been fired. It's not just that they are doing so without the inducement of conscription or any other direct threat to their welfare. It's not just that there have already been meetings or demonstrations in almost every nation on Earth. It's also that the campaign is being coordinated globally with an unprecedented precision. And the people partly responsible for this are the members of a movement which, even within the past few weeks, the mainstream media has pronounced extinct.

Last year, 40,000 members of the global justice movement gathered at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. This year, more than 100,000, from 150 nations, have come - for a meeting! The world has seldom seen such political assemblies since Daniel O'Connell's "monster meetings" in the 1840s.

Far from dying away, our movement has grown bigger than most of us could have guessed. September 11 muffled the protests for a while, but since then they have returned with greater vehemence, everywhere except the US. The last major global demonstration it convened was the rally at the European summit in Barcelona. Some 350,000 activists rose from the dead. They came despite the terrifying response to the marches in June 2001 in Genoa, where the police burst into protesters' dormitories and beat them with truncheons as they lay in their sleeping bags, tortured others in the cells and shot one man dead.

But neither the violent response, nor September 11, nor the indifference of the media have quelled this rising. Ever ready to believe their own story, the newsrooms have interpreted the absence of coverage (by the newsrooms) as an absence of activity. One of our recent discoveries is that we no longer need them. We have our own channels of communication, our own websites and pamphlets and magazines, and those who wish to find us can do so without their help. They can pronounce us dead as often as they like, and we shall, as many times, be resurrected.

The media can be forgiven for expecting us to disappear. In the past, it was hard to sustain global movements of this kind. The socialist international, for example, was famously interrupted by nationalism. When the nations to which the comrades belonged went to war, they forgot their common struggle and took to arms against each other. But now, thanks to the globalisation some members of the movement contest, nationalism is a far weaker force. American citizens are meeting and de bating with Iraqis, even as their countries prepare to go to war. We can no longer be called to heel. Our loyalty is to the principles we defend and to those who share them, irrespective of where they come from.

One of the reasons why the movement appears destined only to grow is that it provides the only major channel through which we can engage with the most critical issues. Climate change, international debt, poverty, the hegemony of the G8 nations, the IMF and the World Bank, the depletion of natural resources, nuclear proliferation and low-level conflict are major themes in the lives of most of the world's people, but minor themes in almost all mainstream political discourse. We are told that the mind-rotting drivel which now fills the pages of the newspapers is a necessary commercial response to the demands of younger readers. This may, to some extent, be true. But here are tens of thousands of young people who have less interest in celebrity culture than George Bush has in Wittgenstein. They have evolved their own scale of values, and re-enfranchised themselves by pursuing what they know to be important. For the great majority of activists - those who live in the poor world - the movement offers the only effective means of reaching people in the richer nations.

We have often been told that the reason we're dead is that we have been overtaken by and subsumed within the anti-war campaign. It would be more accurate to say that the anti-war campaign has, in large part, grown out of the global justice movement. This movement has never recognised a distinction between the power of the rich world's governments and their appointed institutions (the IMF, the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation) to wage economic warfare and the power of the same governments, working through different institutions (the UN security council, Nato) to send in the bombers. Far from competing with our concerns, the impending war has reinforced our determination to tackle the grotesque maldistribution of power which permits a few national governments to assert a global mandate. When the activists leave Porto Alegre tomorrow, they will take home to their 150 nations a new resolve to turn the struggle against the war with Iraq into a contest over the future of the world.

While younger activists are eager to absorb the experience of people like Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Lula, Victor Chavez, Michael Albert and Arundhati Roy, all of whom are speaking in Porto Alegre, our movement is, as yet, more eager than wise, fired by passions we have yet to master. We have yet to understand, despite the police response in Genoa, the mechanical determination of our opponents.

We are still rather too prepared to believe that spectacular marches can change the world. While the splits between the movement's marxists, anarchists and liberals are well-rehearsed, our real division - between the diversalists and the universalists - has, so far, scarcely been explored. Most of the movement believes that the best means of regaining control over political life is through local community action. A smaller faction (to which I belong) believes that this response is insufficient, and that we must seek to create democratically accountable global institutions. The debates have, so far, been muted. But when they emerge, they will be fierce.

For all that, I think most of us have noticed that something has changed, that we are beginning to move on from the playing of games and the staging of parties, that we are coming to develop a more mature analysis, a better grasp of tactics, an understanding of the need for policy. We are, in other words, beginning for the first time to look like a revolutionary movement. We are finding, too, among some of the indebted states of the poor world, a new preparedness to engage with us. In doing so, they speed our maturation: the more we are taken seriously, the more seriously we take ourselves.

Whether we are noticed or not is no longer relevant. We know that, with or without the media's help, we are a gathering force which might one day prove unstoppable.

www.monbiot.com

www.dailytimes.com.pk Walden Bello

Since Seattle, the anti-corporate globalisation movement has attained critical mass globally, in the sense that its ability to mass forces at significant junctures, such as the December 1999 Seattle WTO ministerial and the July 2001 Genoa meeting of theG-8, enabled it to effect international developments and acquire a high ideological and political profile globally

The World Social Forum (WSF), to be held on January 23-28 for the third year in Porto Alegre, Brazil, has become the prime organisational expression of a surging movement against corporate-driven globalisation. Since the events of September 11, 2001, it has also acquired a strong anti-war dimension, and opposition to US plans to launch a war on Iraq is expected to dominate this year’s proceedings.

The Porto Alegre phenomenon has had its share of critics, even among progressives. One prominent American intellectual has characterised it as a gathering mainly of people who want to “reform” globalisation. Another has blasted it as a forum dominated intellectually and politically by Northern political and social movements.

These criticisms have not, however, deterred the WSF from drawing widespread adherence globally. This year, some 100,000 people are expected to show up, up from 75,000 in 2002 and this year’s meeting will be the culmination of an exciting year-long global process. A number of cities, including Buenos Aires and Caracas, have held Porto Alegre-style social forums. It was, however, the regional social forums that were the exciting innovation of the year. The European Social Forum (ESF), held in Florence, Italy, on November 6-9, 2002, drew over 40,000 people, more than three times the expected number. Even more amazing was the ESF-sponsored million-person march on November 9 against the planned US war on Iraq, which took place with not one of the incidents of mass violence that scare mongerers like Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci had predicted.

Equally impressive was the recently concluded Asian Social Forum (ASF) that took place in the historic city of Hyderabad, India, from January 2 to 7, which drew over 14,400 registered participants, mostly from the host country, though there was representation from 41 other countries. Topics included resistance to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), Dalit (outcaste) rights, the threat of fundamentalist movements, women’s empowerment, food sovereignty, big dams, the Palestinian struggle, natural resource theft, and alternative economics.

Former president of India K.R. Narayanan characterised the message of the ASF as a “voice for human rights, against violence, and against imperialism, and it is only right that it has come from India because it was India that sounded the death knell for an empire on which the sun was never supposed to set.”

One of the main reasons the Porto Alegre process is gaining such momentum is precisely that is provides a venue where movements and organisations can find ways of working together despite their differences. While the usual ultra leftist groups remain defiantly outside it, the Porto Alegre process in Brazil, Europe, and India has brought to the forefront the common values and aspirations of a variety of political traditions and tendencies.

The Porto Alegre process may be the main expression of the coming together of a movement that has been wandering for a long time in the wilderness of fragmentation and competition. The pendulum, in other words, may now be swinging to the side of unity, driven by the sense that in an increasingly deadly struggle against unilateralist militarisation and aggressive corporate globalisation, movements have no choice but to hang together or they will hang separately.

There is another development that is equally significant. Since Seattle, the anti-corporate globalisation movement has attained critical mass globally, in the sense that its ability to mass forces at significant junctures, such as the December 1999 Seattle WTO ministerial and the July 2001 Genoa meeting of theG-8, enabled it to effect international developments and acquire a high ideological and political profile globally.

Yet being a global actor did not necessarily translate into being a significant actor at the national level, where traditional elites and parties continued to be in a commanding position.

Over the last year, however, the movement has achieved critical mass at the national level in a number of countries, most of them in Latin America.

Not only has espousal of neoliberal policies been a sure fire path to electoral disaster, but political parties or movements promoting anti-globalisation policies have achieved electoral power in Ecuador and Brazil, joining the Hugo Chavez government in Venezuela at the forefront of the regional anti-neoliberal struggle. Perhaps most inspiring is the case of Luis Inacio da Silva or Lula in Brazil, who won 63 per cent of the presidential vote last October. Lula is the prime figure in the Workers’ Party (PT), and as everyone knows, the Workers’ Party is the main pillar of the WSF.

Not surprisingly, many of those trekking to Porto Alegre this year will be coming with one question uppermost in their mind: What can the victory of Lula and the PT teach us about coming to power in our countries?

Many personalities of the international progressive movement are slated to come to Porto Alegre. By far the most interesting, most popular, most sought after will be Lula, the personification of the new Latin American left. And this year’s meeting will be, in many ways, a celebration of a movement that, by achieving a remarkable measure of political unity amidst diversity, has changed the face of Brazilian politics. —DT-IPS

Walden Bello is professor of sociology and public administration at the University of the Philippines and executive director of the Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South

www.dailytimes.com.pk Walden Bello

Since Seattle, the anti-corporate globalisation movement has attained critical mass globally, in the sense that its ability to mass forces at significant junctures, such as the December 1999 Seattle WTO ministerial and the July 2001 Genoa meeting of theG-8, enabled it to effect international developments and acquire a high ideological and political profile globally

The World Social Forum (WSF), to be held on January 23-28 for the third year in Porto Alegre, Brazil, has become the prime organisational expression of a surging movement against corporate-driven globalisation. Since the events of September 11, 2001, it has also acquired a strong anti-war dimension, and opposition to US plans to launch a war on Iraq is expected to dominate this year’s proceedings.

The Porto Alegre phenomenon has had its share of critics, even among progressives. One prominent American intellectual has characterised it as a gathering mainly of people who want to “reform” globalisation. Another has blasted it as a forum dominated intellectually and politically by Northern political and social movements.

These criticisms have not, however, deterred the WSF from drawing widespread adherence globally. This year, some 100,000 people are expected to show up, up from 75,000 in 2002 and this year’s meeting will be the culmination of an exciting year-long global process. A number of cities, including Buenos Aires and Caracas, have held Porto Alegre-style social forums. It was, however, the regional social forums that were the exciting innovation of the year. The European Social Forum (ESF), held in Florence, Italy, on November 6-9, 2002, drew over 40,000 people, more than three times the expected number. Even more amazing was the ESF-sponsored million-person march on November 9 against the planned US war on Iraq, which took place with not one of the incidents of mass violence that scare mongerers like Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci had predicted.

Equally impressive was the recently concluded Asian Social Forum (ASF) that took place in the historic city of Hyderabad, India, from January 2 to 7, which drew over 14,400 registered participants, mostly from the host country, though there was representation from 41 other countries. Topics included resistance to the World Trade Organisation (WTO), Dalit (outcaste) rights, the threat of fundamentalist movements, women’s empowerment, food sovereignty, big dams, the Palestinian struggle, natural resource theft, and alternative economics.

Former president of India K.R. Narayanan characterised the message of the ASF as a “voice for human rights, against violence, and against imperialism, and it is only right that it has come from India because it was India that sounded the death knell for an empire on which the sun was never supposed to set.”

One of the main reasons the Porto Alegre process is gaining such momentum is precisely that is provides a venue where movements and organisations can find ways of working together despite their differences. While the usual ultra leftist groups remain defiantly outside it, the Porto Alegre process in Brazil, Europe, and India has brought to the forefront the common values and aspirations of a variety of political traditions and tendencies.

The Porto Alegre process may be the main expression of the coming together of a movement that has been wandering for a long time in the wilderness of fragmentation and competition. The pendulum, in other words, may now be swinging to the side of unity, driven by the sense that in an increasingly deadly struggle against unilateralist militarisation and aggressive corporate globalisation, movements have no choice but to hang together or they will hang separately.

There is another development that is equally significant. Since Seattle, the anti-corporate globalisation movement has attained critical mass globally, in the sense that its ability to mass forces at significant junctures, such as the December 1999 Seattle WTO ministerial and the July 2001 Genoa meeting of theG-8, enabled it to effect international developments and acquire a high ideological and political profile globally.

Yet being a global actor did not necessarily translate into being a significant actor at the national level, where traditional elites and parties continued to be in a commanding position.

Over the last year, however, the movement has achieved critical mass at the national level in a number of countries, most of them in Latin America.

Not only has espousal of neoliberal policies been a sure fire path to electoral disaster, but political parties or movements promoting anti-globalisation policies have achieved electoral power in Ecuador and Brazil, joining the Hugo Chavez government in Venezuela at the forefront of the regional anti-neoliberal struggle. Perhaps most inspiring is the case of Luis Inacio da Silva or Lula in Brazil, who won 63 per cent of the presidential vote last October. Lula is the prime figure in the Workers’ Party (PT), and as everyone knows, the Workers’ Party is the main pillar of the WSF.

Not surprisingly, many of those trekking to Porto Alegre this year will be coming with one question uppermost in their mind: What can the victory of Lula and the PT teach us about coming to power in our countries?

Many personalities of the international progressive movement are slated to come to Porto Alegre. By far the most interesting, most popular, most sought after will be Lula, the personification of the new Latin American left. And this year’s meeting will be, in many ways, a celebration of a movement that, by achieving a remarkable measure of political unity amidst diversity, has changed the face of Brazilian politics. —DT-IPS

Walden Bello is professor of sociology and public administration at the University of the Philippines and executive director of the Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South