The Crisis in the World Social Forum

The international crisis was one of the main issues discussed on the World Social Forum. On the last day, I was in charge of delivering a lecture about it, together with the Venezuelan economist Eduardo Lander, in a seminar fostered by Transform. The search for alternatives to capitalism was paramount in this forum, attended also by Olivier Besancenot . The Party of the European Left met the Porto Alegre Forum, in order to find common routes.

The identification cards on each of the forum's participants allowed me to identify at least fifteen different nationalities amongst those present on the debate on the international crisis and perspectives for solving it, fostered by Transform: 60 people, most of them young (from South Korea, Vietnam. India, Nepal, USA, Brazil, Venezuela, Finland, Greece, France, Germany, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Italy) crammed the tiny room and more than half had to sit on the floor.

Eduardo Lander opened the debate claiming that we are current living the end of neoliberalism, which was the outcome of USA's political and military hegemony and led to an exploration of resources that left the planet close to its limits. Following this approach, the collapse of capitalism might be the collapse of life itself; this being so, it is of uttermost importance to bring about new means of controlling what we know about the use of such resources: economic and technological solutions that hold on to current paradigms and ideas of development and consumption will only make the crisis worse. The time has come to build a new society, one which refuses to approach economic issues disregarding its social and cultural consequences.

On my lecture, I put forward the current situation as a crisis of overproduction of the capitalist system, whose main features are a tendency to decrease the weight of wages in the global income, which lead to an expansion in credit for consumption and over-indebtedness of the families. This process run parallel to the liberalization of the financial markets and the privatization of pension funds, harboring the speculative processes that lead to the current crisis. On the other hand, the free movement of capital made it easy to transfer productive investments to places where wages protection is rather poor, making way for global job insecurity.

Lander's contribution and my suggestions for alternatives (public investment, full employment and housing policies, demercantilization of public services and the development of a solidary economy and cooperativism networks) gave rise to an interesting debate, with lots of different contributions, which is only natural, given the wide range of national situations familiar to those in the audience.

The international crisis and the anti-capitalist struggle had been the motto of Olivier Besancenot's lecture, two days before, at the Sister Dorothy Tent (Sister Dorothy was an activist for the peoples of Amazonia, and was murdered). The leader of the new French Anti-Capitalist Party explained that he intends to unite different political organizations in order to find alternatives to neoliberalisn, and Heloisa Helena, from the PSOL, who organized the event, reminded that the current crisis is not occasional but an unavoidable outcome of capitalist growth.

On Saturday night, the night before the end of the forum, a meeting between delegates from the Party of the European Left and the S. Paulo Forum, which brings together left wing political organizations from the American continent, took place in an hotel in Belém. At this meeting it was pointed out how urgent it is to find common routes to fight the crisis, and some primary areas for common work were defined: they include new development models, support for the Palestinian cause, and emigration issues, which are expected to raise in importance as the crisis deepens, leading the way for right wing populism.