The Silent Forum

To: Retort
Via: SZ

The crisis in Kenya and the hypocrisy of the WSF
Rafael Uzcátegui
El Libertario
Feb 4 2008

[Rafael Uzcátegui is a member of the collective editorship of the Venezuelan publication, El
Libertario (www.nodo50.org/ellibertario, in Spanish & English). IB]

We can start by illustrating the point with an example. You live in a
disorderly home, in which despite hardship, you try to make things better. A
group of people turn up and say that they'd like to sleep in your house
because they believe that their support will facilitate and encourage better
relationships between the members of your family and that the coexistence of
everyone will result in new forms of relationships in which everyone will
benefit. You receive them as guests, and for a week they reiterate,
incessantly, the pleasure they feel to be with this family, and they speak
until they're blue in the face about the importance of solidarity, ethical
values, communication, etc.etc. In your home everyone is happy, and for a
week there is a respite and an atmosphere that leaves everyone feeling
satisfied. Your guests repeat, for the nth time, that you can count on them
for anything, and that the links needed so that your situation might improve
have already been forged and are in the process of advancing. However a
short time later the situation in your house flares up again and its
inhabitants start to set upon each other, like they haven't done in a long
time. You wait for your new friends to help your family out, and that they
honour the recently established relationship between you. It turn out,
however, that your new 'friends' have forgotten about you and that they are
busy visiting other families just like they did with your family a few
months earlier. Faced with this situation, you feel that the intentions of
your 'friends' were never sincere, that they tricked you, and that they were
really using you for ends that you still don't understand.

This comparison can be applied to the case of the 'Day of Global Action'
called by the WSF for the 26th January, given that they were not able, for
various reasons, to hold the event as they have done since its inception in
Porto Alegre. At the end of January 2007 the 7th WSF was held in Nairobi,
the Kenyan capital, where the organisers tirelessly repeated how happy they
were to hold it for the first time in the African continent. According to
the official discourse of those days, realising the event there would
provide support for the struggles of local organisations, connect with the
problematics of the continent and help build bridges with its progressive
elements. The actual event was, however, quite different, as I related at
the time, as an observer on the ground, in a text that can be read (in
Spanish) at: www.rafaeluzcategui.wordpress.com.

In Nairobi, due to the internal crisis that the event was experiencing, it
was decided that a 'Day of Global Action' would be held on the 26th January
2008, this call out inspired a variety of support and campaigns that would
either start or be realized on this day. But, if you make the effort to
review the hundreds of actions that were realized you would very quickly
notice one thing: hardly any called attention to the crisis of the African
country, a turmoil in which the two months of rioting and conflict has
caused the deaths of more than 700 people. What happened to the good
intentions that were affirmed scarcely a year ago?

The World Social Forum was created, in its moment, as a proposal for the
construction of alternatives born from the coming together of movements that
in 1999 was baptized as the antiglobalization movement. A large sector of
the international left were taken by surprise by the mobilisations that
occurred that year in the US around the WTO convention. Many of the
participants of the actions in Seattle were doing so against globalisation,
multinationals and capitalism, but also against the political forms of the
traditional left which many people pointed to as being partly responsible
for the current situation. One of the reasons for their surprise was that
here was a protest movement from which they were, quite literally excluded.

The antiglobalization movement was perceived by the 'widows of the Berlin
wall' as an opportunity to breathe life into their discourse and recover
legitimacy. In the following years they dedicated themselves, meticulously,
to channelling these rebel waters towards their own decrepit mill. At least
if they couldn't control the conventions and counter-summits, they wouldn't
have the same problems with a conclave such as the WSF. In Porto Alegre, the
methods of the PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores, Lula's ruling party in Brasil)
to assume protagonism of the event left no doubt that the WSF would be an
arena in order to see which leftwing tendency would control proceedings. And
sooner rather than later, this 'other world is possible' was colonized by
the world of the dogmatic and authoritarian parliamentary left. No-one was
surprised that the expensive stalls at Porto Alegre were selling Stalin
t-shirts, or that the 'leftist' governments had the largest exhibits or that
the NGO's with greater economic capacity were the ones that monopolized the
discussion forums. On a micro level, the WSF reproduced all the perversions
that it, in theory, questioned.

During those days in Nairobi, the locals remembered the tribal struggles as
something distant, and tried to take the first steps towards a western style
democracy, that being their point of reference. However, it as if, after the
events at the WSF in Caracas, in which the WSF accentuated the polarization
that fragmented the grassroots movements in Venezuela (see
www.fsa.contrapoder.org.ve/english.htm), the event has been put under a
curse. Thus after the WSF visited Kenya, the African country's sleeping
demons awoke, while the politburo of the new international of progressive
bureaucracy looks the other way.

There are those who participate in the WSF who genuinely want change, but
the crisis that the conclave is experiencing is related to this throng of
functionaries and minor bureaucrats of the left who perceive the event as a
platform to, in their words, "accumulate forces and change their
correlation". They are the same people who demand in loud voices that the
WSF should have a program for assuming power, and that they crave it because
amongst the invited are strongmen and authoritarian prophets of every
variety.

But I can save myself the effort of making all the explications. The silence
of the WSF in the face of the unfolding crisis in Kenya, the most recent
country to have served it as an Amphitryon, says it all.