Movements of Movements
WSM discuss

Gustave Massiah
17-05-2021

Dear friends of Movements of Movements

Jai asked me to react and participate in the Movements of Movements discussion on the WSM-Discuss list. Given all that Jai brings to us, I am happy to contribute. My answer is quite long because thinking about WSM-Discuss leads to many fundamental questions for me.

I carefully follow the postings on the WSM-Discuss list. Sometimes I find that there are really a lot of mails; but I also recognise their interest, the diversity and the relevance of the topics addressed. It is a mailing list that does not refuse debates but does not let them overwhelm it. I appreciate the facilitation and management of the list and the attentive care of Jai, our indefatigable engaged intellectual globe-trotter. 

I will organize my remarks around two key contributions of the list: the reinvention of internationalism and alterglobalism, and the basic approach that starts from the social movements and returns to them.

Reinventing internationalism and alterglobalism

WSM-Discuss has emerged as a mailing list and discussion forum that resolutely participates in the construction of an international, alterglobalist and internationalist, radical left. To a question that is by nature global, a pandemic, the responses have been mainly national and state-based, questioning the relationship between the local, the national, the large geo-cultural regions and the global.

This crisis is very profound and cuts across all dimensions.The social crisis has not stopped deepening since the financial crisis of 2008 and the upheaval of labour relations accentuated by digital technology and teleworking during the pandemic.  The awareness of the ecological crisis has deepened with the pandemic. The political crisis is confronted with the question of democracy. This crisis of the international system also reveals a geopolitical crisis, that of the loss of resilience of the dominant poles, the United States and Europe. It also reveals the weakness of the United Nations, paralysed by a Security Council without perspective and without legitimacy. What I appreciate about the WSM-Discuss list is that it is open to all dimensions of the crisis, and what is specific about it is that it gives voice to different cultural approaches in ideological debates.

The alterglobalist movement is confronted with this situation and has tried in the first instance to respond by strengthening international networks through virtual exchanges. Several international networks seek to strengthen internationalist and alterglobalist links. The reconstruction of an international space is now being carried out through a number of lists. Several of them are present on the WSM-Discuss list through their facilitators. I will mention for example Global Tapestry and Global Dialog; ESSF; Amandla; Global University for Sustainability; Focus on the Global South; Democracy Now; Peace and democracy. And it is a pleasure to meet and read Patrick Bond, Asish Kothari, John Holloway, Ariel Saleh and many others.

The tapestry of living international networks through their lists and sites is one of the challenges of alter-globalist reconstruction. This is an objective that we have been working towards through the intercoll website, www.intercoll.net

I have appreciated the attention given by WSM-Discuss, by Jai and Gina, to the attempts to rebuild the WSF initiated by a group of International Council members. In being open to all attempts at renewal without neglecting a critical approach to the WSF. This attempt showed the importance of the new international networks that showed their interest in working together without abandoning their specific approaches.

Starting from and returning to social movements

What WSM-Discuss brings to alterglobalism is in its self-definition through Movements of Movements. Social movements are the basis of alterglobalism. It is by starting from their capacity to redefine strategies of intervention that we can reinvent the next stage. From this point of view I identify in WSM-Discuss a particular attention to what the movements bring and to their evolution.

I feel in harmony with WSM-Discuss on the identification of emancipatory movements: workers' movements, peasants' movements, women's rights movements; movements against racism and discrimination; indigenous peoples' movements; ecologist movements. WSM-Discuss uses situations to broaden and deepen. This is the case, for example, with the Indian peasant movement. In another area, Wsm-Discuss is probably one of the most open and attentive lists for indigenous peoples.

Together, these movements form the core of the social bloc that is antagonistic to capitalism and is capable of overcoming it. The debate remains open on the restructuring of class bases and forms of class struggle. The central contradiction today between the proletariat characterised by precariousness and the dominant bourgeoisie in the alliance between shareholders and managers. We must also take into account the changes in the middle classes and the petty bourgeoisie as a result of the expansion of education reinforced by the digital revolution.

The situation challenges the social movements and WSM-Discuss is attentive to it. Mobilizations and struggles were very strong before the pandemic crisis and they continue. In 2019, there were massive, sometimes insurrectionary movements in 47 countries. And this combatativity has not disappeared as shown by the two global movements that have continued to demonstrate: the women's rights movement with MeToo and the anti-racist movement with the George Floyd, Adama and other committees. The conditions of the economic and social movement on jobs and incomes will depend on the shock strategy that the ruling classes prepare to respond to the consequences of the pandemic crisis.

Social movements are confronted with the challenge of redefining their strategies in relation to the upsurge of racist and xenophobic security ideologies and their political implications, such as Trump, Bolsonaro, Orban, Modi, Dutertre and others who are already here or in ambush. The rise of extreme right-wing or even fascist ideologies can be interpreted as a reaction to new ideas (feminism, indigenous peoples, anti-racism, decoloniality, questioning of colonial history and slavery, intersectionality, etc.). Social and ideological contradictions are at their highest. 

The debate is about the nature of the movements with a particular attention to their diversity. And the discussion is about the associative movement and its contradictions with a particular attention to the ongeisation of the movements with the relation to the States, the philantropic capitalism, the merchandising, the managerization. No movement is protected by nature from these deviations? There is no way out by differentiating between social movements and NGOs, as this trend concerns all movements and all associations.

The associative movement is confronted with the question of political parties. WSM- Discuss is attentive to the political form of movements and the difficult relationship between the movement form and the party form. The debate runs through the alterglobalization movement between open space and action space. In fact, since the beginning of the WSFs, the debate has been about a broad space of alliances or a new international, including with the political parties and the states. The problem is that we need both, the question is how to articulate them.

jai often insist on the different aspects of power. The question of power raises the question of democracy. It is relevant today with austerity and securitarianism, which have become major issues. I am reminded of a reflection by Gramcsi in the Diaries of Prison: "socialism does not necessarily lead to democracy, democracy can lead to socialism". This is an area that movements need to reinvent. It also raises the question of the specificity of struggles in relation to the convergence of struggles. I remember the debate of Jai with Ashish on Black live matters or All live matters which remains open.

The question of power also raises the question of political organisations and the redefinition of the left. In the two very interesting articles he devoted to the presentation and criticism of Thomas Piketty's book (Capitalism and Ideology), Walden Bello recalls Piketty's intuition: the ruling classes are divided between the Brahmin left and the merchant right. WSM Discuss, which is very attentive to the question of castes, could deepen this accomplished rupture between the popular classes and the left, which uses knowledge as a weapon to access and confiscate power.

The debate on political strategy has become very important with the issue of progressive governments. We have seen this with the cases of Ecuador and Bolivia. How to take into account ecological and social issues and the question of indigenous peoples. WSM-Discuss was one of the most important places for this debate.  This question overlaps with the one raised by Gilbert Achcar who deals with the question of campism in the Middle East in his articles on what anti-imperialism we want.

In fact, at the level of strategy, we have several questions that overlap. The question of the relationship to the state. We return to Marx's debate at the time of the Paris Commune on the declination of the state. Wallerstein summarised the question very well when he questioned the strategic equation: build a party, conquer the state, change society. This was the strategy of the bourgeoisie, re-adopted by the Second and Third Internationals. But a party built to conquer the state becomes a party-state before it has been achieved; and the state is not the only way to built society.  

The second question is that of the progressive government programme, without getting into the discussion of a transitional programme. From this point of view, I am very interested in the proposals of Alexandria Octavio Cortez and Bernie Sanders. I don't have many illusions about Biden, but how DSA (Demcratic Socialist of America), which is only a small group, managed to impose, in a situation, left-wing proposals. And I appreciated that WSM-Discuss echoed the debates on the "internationalist green new deal" proposal that has made a difference in the US by providing a political outlet that builds on the fundamental Black Live Matters movement.

Here, dear friends, are some of the reflections that are generated by the movements of movements and WSM-Discuss list; they contribute to my reflections and take them forward

With my kind regards
In solidarity

Gustave Massiah