The European Social Forum meets in Paris this week (12-16 November) after a year of remarkable successes for in expanding the movement against global capitalism and imperialist war.
Directly stemming from the first ESF in Florence last November, 20 million marched against the impending Iraq war on 15 February. The largest demonstrations many cities had ever seen brought together youth from schools, colleges and factories, trade unionists, and the immigrant populations.
This movement has been proved right by events since the conquest and occupation of Iraq. The bragging imperialists, Bush and Rumsfeld, Blair and Hoon, have been thrown onto the defensive, their popularity sinking as the casualties rise.
Then, from May to July, a wave of workers’ struggles broke over Europe. In Germany and Austria, Spain and Portugal, workers took strike action and marched against the European Union’s concerted attack on pension rights, working conditions and welfare. After Genoa, in 2001, the Italian workers linked up with anti-capitalist and anti-war activists in local social forums. Now the idea is spreading to other countries. Since the Larzac assembly, these popular bodies are now spreading across France, where rank and file railworkers, postal workers and teachers are forming co-ordinations – cross-union strike committees.
Even in conservative Britain, where for years the trade unions have been hobbled and restricted by the most draconian anti-union laws in the EU, rank and file postal workers have won a wildcat strike re-introducing long-banished traditions of solidarity and initiative – illegal secondary picketing, prevention of strike breaking, in short, militant self-organisation from below.
It is vital to continue to coordinate the struggle again the warmongers. We need to turn the mass antiwar mobilisations into ones demanding the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of the occupying forces. We must warn of the threat of ethnic cleansing hanging over the Palestinian people if they refuse to surrender to the mass murderer Ariel Sharon. International mobilisations against Bush, Blair and Sharon still need to be red letter days in the calendar of action drawn up in Paris, and actively built for.
The long term project of the European corporations and the imperialist states of the European Union to create an imperialist superstate to rival the USA as well as to act as a fortress against those asylum seekers and “economic migrants” fleeing the wars and material misery engendered by global capitalism and imperialist war: these we have to fight as hard as we fought Bush and Blair.
A new task faces the ESF that stems directly from the inspiring union battles of the spring and early summer. These battles are already resuming. We need a concerted Europe-wide counterattack against the EU leaders and their attacks on our social gains and democratic rights.
Doubtless the trade union leaders will attack this as “interfering in the autonomy of their organisations". Nonsense. We are talking about a call, not a command. It should be addressed to the union leaders for sure. But it should also be addressed to the rank and file of the unions, to the young French teachers and railworkers who came out in force against Chirac and Raffarin in June, to the young Italian metal workers of FIOM who have defied Berlusconi and Fini, to the English wildcat strikers in the post. We should not recognise the right of the union bureaucrats to veto their members’ participation.
In Paris the meeting of the Assembly of Social Movements and Actors is the only forum which can plan and call for action. This body came into existence precisely to escape from the straight-jacket on decision making that the Porto Alegre Principles impose on the ESF as a whole. But even this has no transparent, open and democratic way for people to submit resolutions to it. Nor has it a procedure for debating them (i.e. taking speeches against as well as for). In Florence the ASM was a huge enthusiastic rally. The speakers list had been fixed by tortuous negotiations in advance. The only purpose was to endorse the anti-war call worked out behind the scenes by the “big hitters".
In the Forum we need to ensure the maximum participation of rank and file trade unionists, members of youth organisations and political parties, as well as the broad layers of non-party activists from the mass anti-war and anti-capitalist mobilisations. With these forces we can stop any takeover by the reformist bureaucrats. But to do so means to name them and shame them, to fight them openly and call on everyone to do so. To do so only in private meetings, or in oblique references, will not do.
This year the ESF Co-ordination must discuss proposals to create an annual democratic decision making assembly. It should call on unions, parties, social forums, etc. to send delegates to such an assembly. It should explicitly call for and encourage the formation of local and national social forums which can give the rank and file activists of the movement a major voice and a large number of representatives in the European Assembly.
Next years assembly should be not merely democratically representative but a body capable of decisive action on a number of different issues. The democratic deficit and the privileging of academic-utopian lectures must be ended or the ESF will collapse under its own weight like an obese dinosaur.
That is why the members of the League for the Fifth International and the socialist youth organisation, World Revolution, will be arguing in Paris for measures to strengthen the workers’ resistance and open the road to power.
We need:
• a one-day European General Strike in early 2004, to assemble our forces for a united resistance to the EU states’ attack on our living standards and futures. This can and should be used to launch an all -out Europe-wide struggle to force governments and the institutions of the EU to end these attacks, and pose a workers’, an anti-capitalist, solution to the so-called crisis of social spending
• social forums in every town and city, based on delegates from every workplace, every estate, every campaigning initiative and working class political organisation, to co-ordinate the struggle from below and prevent the trade union bureaucracy from holding back our struggle or trading away our interests
• the formation of mass youth international, controlled organisationally and politically entirely by young people themselves, to unite their struggles and prevent their energy being co-opted and dissipated by official politicians
• fighting to build a new, Fifth International, a world party of social revolution, armed with a programme for social revolution to place power in the hands of democratic councils of working people, poor farmers, the unemployed and the youth.