In the run in to the European Social Forum rumours are rife that the organisers will use their enormous material clout to ensure that the forum does not lead to any radical actions. The leaders of ATTAC France, their close allies in the CGT union bureaucracy and the reformist Parti Communiste Français (PCF) dominate the organising committee. Sharp conflicts with the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (LCR) are widely reported.
The “leadership” of Attac has certainly not been earned on the battlefields of the anti-capitalist, class struggles of the past three years. So what is Attac and who are its leaders?
Attac is an acronym meaning “Association for the Taxation of financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens.") It was founded in June 1998 by the editors of Le Monde Diplomatique , an independent monthly supplement to the prestigious Paris evening paper. Its central figure was Bernard Cassen, an academic and journalist.
Attac is the centre of the right wing and reformist attempts to politically tame and organisationally hobble the anti-capitalist movement. Bernard Cassen initiated the Porto Alegre principles – which have to be signed all participants -formally banning the participation of parties and forbidding the taking of decisions or issuing of statements by the world or regional social forums.
In fact this ban hurts only militant anti-capitalist parties, those fighting on the streets and on the picket lines. The big reformist parties like the Workers Party of Brazil and the PCF will be represented through their councillors, MPs and presidents.
Attac’s reformism is also shown by its own internal life, which is nearly as undemocratic and impenetrable as the neoliberal institutions it is fighting. For its members, local meetings consist of brief discussions of stalls, followed by long educational presentations about details of the international economy. But the top spokespersons like Susan George and Bernard Cassen are not elected.
ATTAC, as is well known, has made a fetish of the Tobin Tax – a small percentage tax on all international financial transactions, which will then be used for social welfare spending at home and development aid abroad. Its defect – apart from its insignificance as an attack on capital (0.5% per transaction) – is its utopianism – only the most powerful states, the G8 and the USA specifically, could impose and collect it – and its reactionary character- it envisages a reform of the world financial system, not its expropriation.
The Attac leaders reject the term anti-globalisation to describe the movement and even more so the term anti-capitalist. Instead Cassen and Co have come up with the horrible neologism “altermondialisation"- alternative globalisation. This indicates that they wish to give globalised corporate capitalism a human face- to “fix it not nix it".
Bernard Cassen makes no bones about his national reformism. At the Attac countersummit in Geneva in June, he stated:
"The framework of our struggle remains national…The national level is appropriate… One can still make some progress on a national level – even if less than before."
Cassen – with the arrogance typical of the intellectual caste – loftily sweeps aside the idea of even discussing the strategic alternative “reform or revolution":
"The debate which has occupied us, and particularly myself, for decades, between reform and revolution, is, frankly, completely uninteresting… I believe it has become a purely rhetorical exercise, which has little value as far as action is concerned. What is important is where the social forces are going, whether they have only just started in motion or whether they are accelerating."
He went on:
"One should not measure the radicalisation of society from the numbers participating in demonstrations. That would be a great error. It is good when many participate in demonstrations. But this is not decisive. Look what happened in Spain: three to four million demonstrated against war, against Aznar, and afterwards Aznar barely lost ground in the elections. He did not collapse. So take heed! The demonstrations are not everything. What counts are the voters.”
In fact Cassen has spent the last year, since the Florence ESF bemoaning the influence of Rifondazione Comunista and the far left there, the antiwar character of the huge million strong demonstration at its close. In an interview given recently – acting according to the interviewer “like a football referee, blowing for off-sides, and distortions of the principles of the social forums” – he said of Florence.
"The movement does not need pilots. An attentive reading of the list of the Italian speakers “ enabled him to detect that “the members, or those close to Rifondazione Comunista, took the lion’s share, giving [Florence] a tonality definitely less pluralist than Porto Alegre".
Never mind the massive presence of the leaders of the Brazilian PT at Porto Alegre and the hysteria for Lula, Cassen claims that this hardly mattered since “they never interfered either in the planning of the programme, or in the choice of the speakers, as I am rather well placed to testify.”
Indeed, the honorary president of Attac clearly sees non-interference with his decisions as the test of democracy and pluralism. None of the reports of the two events by ordinary participants suggested that Porto Alegre was more democratic than Florence. Quite the opposite.
Cassen hails the greater involvement of the unions in the movement, obviously meaning their bureaucracy.
Attac has recently turned even further to the right with the appointment of PCF economist Jacques Nikonoff as its President. Nikonoff’s appointment (not election) followed a long period of in-fighting within the leading body, but was not allowed to be voted upon by the membership.
After the massive rally at Larzac during the summer, when in a minor incident some anarcho-syndicalists from the CNT trashed a Socialist Party stand, Nikonoff unleashed his ire against the entire far left. He has made a series of attacks both in the press and at the Attac summer school, using terms that are redolent of 1930s Stalinism. He accuses the far left and the neo-liberal right of having a common interest.
"Instead of gathering together, extremism divides. The verbosity, violence, gesticulations, sectarianism which mark the tradition of the extreme left would announce the defeat of the movement if the latter were to yield to it. The neo-liberals always prefer the extreme left, because they know that it never gained anything and that it never will. The altermondialist movement must resolutely prefer the diversity which makes its richness and its strength."
He turns the old accusations – justifiably made against the PCF – of “recuperation” (i.e. of trying to take over a movement) against the left. He says that the left has its place “as long as, like everyone else, it abides by the democratic rules of the movement". He then goes on to call for a bureaucratisation of the anti-globalisation movement by erecting “firebreak systems that can prevent the groupuscules who are trying to manipulate things behind the scenes".
Nikonoff has also criticised the various radical mass actions that took place in the spring/summer (e.g. confrontations with police at the end of the demo against the pensions reform, the trashing of Medef headquarters and even the threat by teachers to strike as the exams were about to be taken.
Let us hope that in Paris – as in Florence – a massive participation by French rank and file trade unionists and youth brings to nothing the efforts of the leaders of Attac to make it an impotent talkfest for reformist bigwigs like Cassen and Nikonoff themselves.
We need to show the bourgeois journalists, the municipal councillors, the NGO officials and trade union bureaucrats who cluster round the banner of Attac that if they think they can buy the anticapitalist movement, they have another think coming… Our movement is not for sale!