Over the last few weeks i've been sending out emails hoping to help jump start the process of organizing indymedia for the fourth World Social Forum in Mumbai, India. So far the going's been a little rough. Indymedia in India has never been very well organized. Hopefully we can use the WSF as a building block to build a stronger south asian indymedia network.
While reading up on the WSF i've come across the widely spammed Mumbai Resistance 2004 website / group. It's a Maoist coalition of groups who seem to be organizing a counter forum to the WSF. Peter Waterman has written an article for open democracy looking in to the group and it's ideological base. A great irony is that the Maoists have reposted articles by anarchists and autonomists critiquing the WSF, groups they normally would never touch with a 10 foot pole. Michael Hardt looks back at the World Social Forums in Porto Alegre, and Teivo Teivainen asks World Social Forum: what should it be when it grows up?
Posted by rabble at November 18, 2003 03:51 PMUnited Front work takes people who really believe in and work at strategic coalitions for revolution, act in a principaled way with other activists, recognize differences, actually read, promote alot of other group's theory and politics, but don't sell out. Maoists are really good at this...Seen it over and over...Don't know what your previous interactions are.
Posted by: for whom and at November 19, 2003 06:17 AMYes, well, hi folks! I am still waiting for a reply to my polemic on MR2004. Though not holding my breath...
Quite true that MR has been publishing items by anarchos and radical democrats who might not care to be associated with it. This is where high moral maoist principle gives was to low maoist opportunism. Or is it more than this?
Rumour has it - rumour always has it where transparency lacks - that MR 2004 and WSF 2004 have been bargaining to kind of make place for each other so they don't publicly conflict in Mumbai.
That's fine. It means the Maoists and others of the Apocalyptical Simplistic Left are learning to behave in the dialogical manner required of the WSF and the global justice and solidarity movement.
One day they may even come to fit the description that your correspondent 'for whom and' fancifully proposes for them.
I am curious about the basis upon which he comes to his characterisation.
PW
Posted by: peter waterman at November 30, 2003 10:29 AMActually trying to post a comment to your Oct. 22 post on WSF logistics...kept getting an error message.
I found a bus map site for Mumbai, but it doesn't seem to have the New School of Engineering marked as a stop anywhere (and it's not searchable by stop!)
http://www.bestundertaking.com/TRANS_ROUTE.HTM
No one should be blamed for writing off Peter’s anti-MR piece as the rants of an addicted seminar-popper petulantly protecting his annual rave – without implying that WSF’s a party or even any majority of its participants are seminar junkies. I had to scour out Peter’s more laboured analytical efforts from other places to think otherwise.
It’s also possible to fall into the pit of trying to detect Goebbelsian intent in the way he’s ‘found’ keywords of his choice to totem the ‘other’ and then proceeded to swing wildly. Keywords may be computer friendly, but, without reference to content and context, cannot be the basis for serious debate. Further Peter’s sourcing seems dubious. A word find on the only MR document (Introducing MR-2004) at the time of his writing (8th November, 2003) could not pick up two of his six words. The contextual link to forum that he’s claimed was also not locatable in the case of a couple of the other words. Anyway since the keyword method of debate itself is hardly fruitful, let’s not get bogged down in either denying the keywords or attributing motives to their choice. I would, after glancing at Peter’s other work, prefer to just say, “No short cuts here, Peter”.
Therefore request number one to Comrade Peter: “Let’s hear your objections based on the documents of MR. They’re available, you’ve probably read them and it’s only logical to expect that any objection to MR should at least relate to them.”
As for Maoism being variously Manichean, mechanical, archaic, etc. the case must rest on something more than vocal assertion or an arbitrary stringing of words – which he quaintly calls binaries. Unless he intends to only play to some believer home-crowd. Even then I would think that tawdry sleight of hand shouldn’t get too far. Most concerned persons have too much at stake to play cheerleader while Peter goes about his act of finding things “easy to recognise, and satirise”.
He seems to have forgotten a little thing – WSF has had to move to the Asian continent, and specifically the South Asian sub-continent. I don’t know enough to comment on the relevance of this part of the globe to a world social forum’s plans. But most who keep touch with events and movements here would recognise the contemporary relevance and pervading presence of Maoism among movements in these parts. At least it needs something more than some so-called binaries to shoo it away.
Peter, if you’re marketing yourself among “those committed to the WSF process” then there’s some homework to do on the road to Mumbai. In case you don’t know, even quite a few of the leading lights at WSF-India Organising Committee are committee members of parties with Maoism or Mao Thought printed into their constitutions. A still larger number have spent their best years calling themselves Naxalites. And if you manage to reach down a few rungs of the NGO ladder, Maoist sympathiser and hardcore abound. Try your luck, keep to the corners at WSF, out of eyesight and earshot of the NGO bosses, and you may even manage a fruitful exchange with the volunteer at the bookstall, registration desk or canteen table. But you need be better equipped than a few shabby glances at a couple of Karat’s pieces.
So request number two to Comrade Peter: “Brush up on Maoism and try to figure out why it is a material force for a few hundred million on this sub-continent. And while you’re at it be a little less fundamentalist in your beliefs – after all reality could even teach you and your pet concepts a thing or two. Also a more open-minded Peter could always teach us some more than just a thing or two. And open minds have the potential to join hands.”
Which leads to the main point of any WSF/MR exercise – actually the main point for activists in the movement against imperialist globalisation and war (or if Peter would insist on saying ‘global justice and solidarity movement’, so be it). This concerns the what and how of strengthening the movement and moving ahead with it. Most activists, at least in our parts, would say that this principally entails unifying with all the consistently struggling forces within it; which means building united front/s against the principal aggressors and the perpetrators of the imperialist globalisation process and their sundry lackeys. Since MR is blatant in its intent on this score, Comrade Peter could do well to at least outline his objections or his alternative schema. That’s request number three. This is of course assuming that he subscribes to an activist philosophy not only interested in the interpreting but also in the changing of things. And if debate has to continue let’s make that the main focus.
And while doing this let’s definitely identify enemies and friends. Most activists see reality that way and I don’t think that the virtual reality of the Net has abolished the need to do so – despite Peter’s relegating such analysis to the age of ‘national-industrial-colonial capitalism’ (another quaint uncertain phrase). Hereticising such identification of friend and foe as Manichean dualism/binarism is hardly the stuff of any monism or even any post modern pluralism. Rather refusing to do so could carry the smell of some simple opportunism.
As for other points strewn through Peter’s piece:-
§ On NGOs he’s best advised to grab a reliable translator and mingle with the lower level NGO employees who will be present in their thousands at the WSF and try to discuss out his concepts with them – of course out of range of the NGO bosses.
§ On CPP and CPM there could be a lot said, but that would divert from the main issue/s.
And Peter, if you intend to reply, hold the snide swipe at the imam and save us the Gospel metaphor. They’re more than mildly irritating in these crusading times.
An activist from South Asia
Well, I am delighted that 'South Asian Activist' has written an extensive response to my critique of the international Maoist challenge to the World Social Forum 2004, to be held in Mumbai.
I also appreciate the information in his response, concerning the presence of Maoists within as well as outside the WSF2004 project.
I take this to indicate that such Maoists 1) recognise the attraction and legitimacy of this new space, and 2) that they have not only agreed to but actually endorsed the Charter of the Forum which excludes militarist groups.
I have been further made aware of negotiations between the WSF organisers in Mumbai and the Mumbai Resistance project. It seems, in other words, that there is an attempt to make room for each other - which I welcome.
The only problem here is that, as with so many other crucial Forum discussions and decisions, this one has taken place outside the public sphere - so that one has to depend upon personal contacts and rumours.
Perhaps I should have made clear or clearer that my concern is not so much with Maoists or Maoism (implicated with the Tienanmen Massacre, the terrorist Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) in Peru, and the murder of ex-CPP members in the Philippines), as with the continuation of the 'Old Politics' within and around the WSF more generally. This Old Politics includes all practices questioned or challenged by the Charter.
The Charter and the various Forums either explicitly or implicitly call for a New Politics that demonstrates a 'preferential option'address for social movements and a radically-democratised civil society, transparency, accountability, accessibility, dialogue, etc.
The Old Politics, Maoist or not, is indeed heavily marked by thinking in terms of binary oppositions, one virtuous, one vicious. This applies as much to liberal and social-democrats as to Leninists, Maoists and others. Reducing the world to one 'primary contradiction', whether this be Democracy v. Totalitarianism, or Imperialism v. Nationalism and/or Revolution, does, indeed, represent a mechanical thinking, more appropriate to the age of the railway than that of the computer. A complex, globalised and informatised capitalism requires, for effective opposition and transformation, a dialectical thinking and a dialogical process. It requires, in other words, recognising the contradictory nature of both 'imperialism' and 'nationalism/revolution'. It was precisely the failure of counter-hegemonic forces to surpass such reductions and simplifications that has led to their self-isolation and impotence. That India may have millions of Maoists no more justifies it in my eyes than the India also has millions of Hindu fundamentalists! It is, indeed, the reproduction on the authoritarian, militarist, dogmatic Left of the logic of religious/communal/ patriarchal fundamentalists that puts this kind of Left in quetion!
This is why what I call the Global Justice and Solidarity Movement has arisen - based on new mass experiences, new thinking and new strategies (Zapatistas, Seattle, IndyMedia, the WSF itself). Parts of the Old Left (which includes the international trade union movement) are recognising this, joining in, or responding (as does MR2004) to this new force. I am just concerned that they not reduce it to the sterile counter-hegemonic politics of the past.
As for conference hopping and marketing myself:
1. I have just turned down the possibility for a paid trip to Mumbai, suggesting, instead, that any such funding be channelled toward young people from the new movements from Latin America and Eastern Europe. I will be following WSF4 online.
2. Marketing? Sure! In so far as I have contributed to the editing of a new collection, produced in India, by an Indian-Colombian-British team, giving space to Indian Maoism, which we hope to have out at the Forum. See:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GloSoDia/files/%21%21%21%20FORUMS%20OF%20THE%20FUTURE%21%21%21/
and click 'WSF Book Ad...'.
As for my own alternatives to Manichean thinking and Old Politiking, such can be found either within that forthcoming book, or on the website of TheCommoner, at
http://www.commoner.org.uk/
I am aware, here, of avoiding many of the criticisms made by my interlocuteur. I can accept many of them. It was a polemical piece and limited by this mode. I thought it might be more interesting for South Asian Activist and others to respond to the matters of principle that seem to divide us.
Peter Waterman
Posted by: peter waterman at December 20, 2003 09:52 AMHello
Posted by: politics at February 19, 2004 04:48 AM