World Social Forum: Where is the Struggle against Capitalism?

[Image from the 2015 World Social Forum in Tunisia. Image by CIDSE - together for global justice/Flickr] [Image from the 2015 World Social Forum in Tunisia. Image by CIDSE - together for global justice/Flickr]

World Social Forum: Where is the Struggle against Capitalism?

By : Henda Chennaoui

The 2015 World Social Forum (WSF) opened its doors for the second consecutive year in Tunisia. Since 2001, this open space represents an alternative to the World Economic Forum at Davos and declares its anti-globalization approach in the fight against capitalism and neoliberalism. At each session, participants and visitors express ideas and personal experiences to make their voices heard and learn how to improve their capacity for self-governance.

This year, participants were quick to voice their criticisms. Disappointed Forum-goers were clearly much greater in number this year than the last. Many including the WSF Steering Committee are perhaps not interested in experimenting with alternative forms of organization. In theory the WSF is committed to facilitating the self-governance of exchanges between movements, ideas, and experiences of all progressive ideologies. Meanwhile, some have observed the gradual development of a hierarchy amongst WSF organizers and that a serious, collective reflection for future editions is more than necessary.

Egyptian writer and political activist Houssein Abdel Rahim has followed the WSF from its inception.

Everything began with the groundwork for the social movements in Brussels. At that time there was a union crisis. So Christophe Aguiton began to connect people with one another and to organize exchanges between activists. The following year, the communist party in Brazil attended the international Communist Manifesto celebration and requested the help of European leftists in the coming elections in Brazil. It was then that organizations decided to go to Porto-Alegre to create the Forum. The Brazilian Communist Party (UPT) won the elections and turned its focus to political power, but the WSF continued to gather each year. All of this to say that nothing changes as easily as one might imagine. The WSF has suffered from political manipulation since its inception.

Abdel Rahima added that in spite of everything, the Forum succeeded in changing the form of the traditional left but not the foundation: 

This carnival of activists is not really participative and democratic as it claims to be. The truth is that it follows the pyramid scheme. Big decisions are monopolized by the governing minority in the image of a capitalist system.

Having participated only two times at the Forum, artist and movie director Khaled Ferjani observed that a sort of general depression hung over this year’s gathering:

The disappointment and depression of Tunisians and Arabs this year is very real. If last year assemblies and workshops were filled with Tunisians who wanted to change the country, this year they are more withdrawn and limited to the forum’s festivities. You see them everywhere dancing, singing, or filling the space with music turned to the highest volume. They are less drawn to political debates. I think it is a direct reaction to the present political situation in Tunisia.

Dodging many pending trials in Sidi Bouzid, activist Safouen Bouaziz took advantage of the event to see his friends and meet new people. Having missed the previous Forum for security reasons, this year was Safouen’s first encounter with the WSF:

I had a totally different idea of what the Forum was. I had imagined it to be more radical and anti-establishment. In reality, there are more reformists than revolutionaries. The festive and almost commercial atmosphere obscures the spirit of protest and rage that we should have in the face of the current global crisis.

In the same way, Dragan Nicevic, leftist from Slovenia, explains that, 

The Forum’s common objective is no longer to change the global system and fight against capitalism but only to denounce the dangers of neoliberalism that drives the world in a chaotic crescendo. I do not think that this is linked only with Tunisia but the world where progressive anti-establishment movements are undergoing a marked decline, with the exception of a few cases such as that of Greece.

This year the Forum drew less participants and visitors than the last. One explanation might have been the inclement weather, or perhaps that this event took place in the same location as the last. Belgian activist Samuel Legros shared his opinion:

I think that a number of participants did not return because they have the impression that we are not really advancing towards a common vision and solid project. Even if the Forum forbids the deliberation of decisive measures or results,* some of us have the need to elaborate a common anti-globalization project. The absence of a concrete result in the fight against neoliberalism creates a real frustration and triggers much criticism and reluctance. I am disappointed to see the Forum transform into some sort of fair where people come to show off their work, remain within their circle of knowledge and interest and leave without the littlest of changes.

Thursday afternoon, dozens of volunteers protested to bring attention to difficult work conditions the experience. One volunteer reported, 

Because it rains every night, we do not have a place to spend the night sheltered from the water that fills the tents. We do not get dinner (one sandwich is served in the middle of the day), and those who go home at night fend for themselves.

Composed of a majority of students and unemployed college graduates, the volunteer corps requires the support that the Steering Committee once offered but has apparently ceased to provide. "And yet, we know that the organization receives an incredible amount of financial backing…" another volunteer added.

Even if criticisms are many, the Forum retains a particular charm for regulars. "If self-criticism is always tolerated in the Forum, all changes remain possible and achievable. Converging different points of view is everyone’s objective and not just that of the Forum," said Carminda, a member of the Canada delegation which is a prospective organizer for the Forum in 2016.

[This article was originally published on Nawaat.]


See the World Social Forum Charter of Principles

Occupy Gezi as Politics of the Body

Since the Gezi resistance started with bloodshed on 31 May, it has had an “anti-depressant” effect, as a friend of mine puts it, as much as it has been nerve-racking. During this period where each day has been prone to new crises and normalcy was completely disrupted, we simultaneously experienced the peaks of ecstasy and the depths of sorrow.

Analyzing such an intense event naturally requires taking some distance. Pending systematization, however, the vivid memory of each day impels one to put on paper multifarious ideas that resonate well with the resistance. Each morning, many bodies with sleep deprived eyes wake up in Istanbul, Ankara, Antakya, Urfa, and Denizli to take to the streets once again, after having quickly checked the latest news in the social media. They are astonished and impressed that they can still walk, run, stand up, and carry provisions for those in the parks. Exhausted bodies rejuvenate with every new threat that the government utters, and with thousands, tens of thousands of others they begin flowing to Taksim, Kızılay, Kuğulu Park, Gündoğdu, Abbasoğlu, and Yeniköy Park carrying home-made gas masks, swimmer goggles, anti-acid solutions, and whistles.

No one does or can govern these bodies. The masses that gather in public spaces are not formed by virtue of transferring tax money into the wallets of partisans. No one provides shuttle buses for them; no one gives them flags, or feeds them with sandwiches. No one assigns them the slogans they shout out during the demonstrations. Bodies that take heart from knowing that they are not alone do not count, or count on, numbers to meet with others in communal or virtual spaces. One standing man suffices for thousands of others to take to the streets. After all, “one” is also a number…

The government, whose tactlessness prompts these resisting and standing bodies to convene again and again every single day, could not have missed the significance of this body politics. These bodies naturally do have a language, even a few languages that are at times congruent and at others incongruent; however, as a whole, they constitute a politics of the body. The rage and dreams that have been embodied in tweets and graffiti since 31 May turn into material realities through the physical existence, visibility, and endurance of the bodies. If history is being rewritten, then its subject is the body.

Four of these bodies lost their lives during this war that the government has waged on society. Thousands of bodies have been beaten up: some lost their eyes, some received irretrievable injuries. Skins were burnt under the water from the cannons, “laced” with chemicals for maximum harm; lungs were choked with tear gas. Pounded arms, legs, and heads got crushed and broken. The long-term effects of the tons of chemicals dumped on bodies are still unknown. What is known, however, is that these chemicals killed hundreds of cats, dogs, and birds, and that they did harm to countless insects, butterflies, and other smaller organisms.

The apparatuses of the state, and the vehicles of death that responded to Gezi’s politics of the body, attempted to imitate the life force that they failed to extort. In response to the huge numbers that filled the parks and squares and astonished everyone without exception, they hoped to gather partisans together in scripted rallies. They began comparing head counts; they calculated representative percentages. When the calculations did not match, they increased the number of police in body armor and helmets and moved them from protest to protest. They built walls of flesh and steel against the wave of resisting flesh. When that did not work, they offered these bodies—which have been in contact with each other physically and virtually through meetings, banners, and tweets—a mise en scène of dialogue, the conditions of which were more or less already determined. They could not even wait for this attempt to yield fruit; two warnings and a command were enough to launch an assault to remove the bodies that produced an alternative sociability from the park, from the space in which physical resistance could be transformed into a life style. They freed the public space of the public. They collected all the banners, pictures, and colors one by one to erase them from social memory. They stripped all the trees, each dedicated to victims of state violence; they appropriated the barricades that were named after tens of people who had undergone physical and psychological torture, and they tore them to tatters. They destroyed the efforts to keep alive the memories of Fikret Encü, who was a victim of Roboski; Metin Göktepe, who was tortured and killed in detention; Dicle Koğacoğlu, who could not take all the sorrow inherent in this society any more; and the Surp Hagop Armenian Cemetery, which was destroyed by Turkish racism.

The only thing that remains is a politics of the body—but the bodies that produce this politics differ from what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life.” They are not “mere” bodies that the arbitrary will of a sovereign can isolate from society, oppress unceremoniously, or push to the margins of the symbolic world. Rather, they evoke what Ernst Bloch calls “the upright man,” the collective Prometheus. Bloch writes:

Nothing is more fortifying than the call to begin from the beginning. It is youthful as long as it is; to it there belongs a young and aspiring class. It is innocent of the bad things that have happened, for it has never had a real opportunity to be guilty. When this happens, justice has the effect of a morning; it opposes itself to that eternal sickness which was handed down before it. Beginning anew is freshness through and through; it is a first if it appears completely ahistorical, and if it seems to lead back to the beginning of history….It carries the image of the pastoral mood, of the shepherd, of the simple and upright man; one can play with it even in the dark.[1]

Gezi is the struggle of disorderly bodies, those who do not have any dispositif other than their own bodies, against the death machines. If the machines are regulatory instances that follow commands and extort public spaces of mobility with force and violence, then the force they face is the resistance of life itself. Life flourishes at the most unexpected moments and places, just like weeds that crack the concrete and spring out of it. No apparatus of the state can succeed in dominating life absolutely.

The state seeks order; it can control only those whom it orders. It cannot cope with the demand of "freedom"; it has to ask questions such as “freedom for whom,” “freedom for what,” or “freedom under what circumstances” in order to tuck freedom into neat boxes. Order draws borders, fixes identities, and defines. It attempts to establish a hierarchy. By telling parents to take their daughters and sons home from the park, it both brands the resisting bodies as "children" and tries to trigger into action the nucleus of society: family. Through its rhetoric of security, it attributes the risks of its own making to the resisting bodies. It hangs its own flag or banner on the bodies that it prefers knocking down rather than protecting. It punishes those who do not obey; it uses punishment as retaliation. It operates through censorship, threats, and propaganda.

Life, on the other hand, is a constant flux. It challenges borders and moves beyond them. It opens up to circulation those spaces that are closed off due to construction; it paints such destructive vehicles as bulldozers pink; it transforms steps into tribunes, pieces of iron into wish trees, and trees destined to be cut down into monuments. It walks on highways and bridges that are closed to pedestrians. It does not like the empty and the sterile; it covers them up with banners, slogans, tents. It leaves its mark on every surface. It disrupts silence at times with pots and pans, and at other times with a tune from a piano. It plays with identities and definitions; it makes them fluid; it renders them indistinguishable. It can make fun of both itself and the established order thanks to its humor. By changing one single letter in a word, it can ridicule the heaviest of symbolisms. When the state apparatus sends a riot-intervention vehicle to pour tear gas on it, life stops to catch its breath for a while and goes right back to resisting. When a body grows tired, it gets replaced by a reinvigorated one. Life turns into thousands of fingers that tweet and take photographs when the state apparatus sends down vehicles of propaganda. It stops its wheelchair to grab the flag that fell on the ground while escaping from tear gas. It apologizes when it steps on someone`s foot while running; it calms down those who panic.

It is obvious that these bodies that fascism wants to militarize will not assume any ideological identity. When they do not drink alcohol, they ridicule conservatism; when they lie under a TOMA, they make fun of liberalism, which claims that life is the most valuable good. Orthodox Marxism cannot decide under which class struggle these "çapulcu" bodies are to be subsumed. As long as they stay in physical contact, as long as they remain as collective Prometheuses, as long as they—have to—continue the resistance, they grow accustomed to each other`s colors, languages, and genders. They disrupt the behavioral rules that ideologies and institutions expect from them. The natural or moral instinct of protection that has been attributed to mothers loses ground when female bodies participate in the resistance alongside their children. The nationalist and the Kurd exchange anti-acid solutions in gas-filled hotel lobbies. The upper-class college kid drinks the water handed over by the kid with an Anonymous mask without needing to ask what neighborhood he’s from. Soccer fans save their curses for the police rather than for their rivals.

What comes out of all this is trust, not chaos. That`s why the bodies multiply with every gush of tear gas, spaces expand with every police attack, and the quality of contact among the bodies increases with every propaganda speech. The life woven together by bodies born in Gezi is so tenacious that the government is right in fearing it. The power of these bodies stems from their capacity to mutualize endurance, rather than vulnerability (as Judith Butler envisioned they would). One would need to look into the extensive interstices of this politics of the body, rather than into macro-level discourses, to begin deciphering it.

NOTES

[1] Ernst Bloch, Natural Right and Human Dignity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 61.

[An earlier version of this article was published on 26 June 2013 on BIA ("Independent Communication Network"). The link to that version can be found here. This article was translated from Turkish by Gülfer Göze.]