the ESF

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Rattling the bars

A huge gathering in Paris at the weekend showed the young don't reject
politics, just politicians

George Monbiot
Tuesday November 18, 2003
The Guardian

When a few hundred elderly people converge on a seaside town for the
annual conference of the Conservative party, all leave for Britain's
journalists is cancelled. Every stave and quaver of the death rattle of a
moribund movement is recorded and drummed into our ears. But when 51,000
mostly young people converge for a conference on the future of politics,
they are ignored. The European Social Forum, which ended in Paris on
Sunday, generated just one report in the printed editions of the British
mainstream press. Doubtless the papers will inform us again this week that
young people have lost interest in politics.

In one respect it is true. The young in their millions have turned away
from the solipsistic pomposities of parliament, the point-scoring and
willy-waving of men who have spent their lives in quadrangles and who know
as much about the people they govern as George Bush knows of higher
mathematics. The young have not lost interest in politics. Politics, of
the kind represented at Westminster, has lost interest in the young.

One of the reasons why events like last week's conference are not reported
is that they do not exist inside a capsule, so they cannot be easily
encapsulated. The forum was a vast, messy, rambling affair, spread out
over four distant suburbs and some 300 meetings. There was no leader whose
speech could be dissected, no party whose splits could be anatomised, no
single manifesto whose implications could be discussed. It was messy and
rambling because it reflected the messy and rambling realities of the
lives of its participants.

But despite the complexity, it was not difficult to see that something
remarkable is happening in European politics. The delegates were, on the
whole, far better informed about the big issues than most of our MPs and
journalists. While our newspapers can tell you everything you were too
bored to ask about the relationship between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown,
they have nothing to say on the trifling issue of the future of humanity.
But the young people in Paris have worked it out for themselves. They have
become fluent in the complexities of the European constitution, of the
General Agreement on Trade in Services, of the North Atlantic thermohaline
shift.

It was also clear that few people in this movement of the disenfranchised
are content any more simply to document the problems we confront. The
question now is no longer what, or why, or when, but how? How do we
threaten power? How do we recapture the political processes which have
excluded us? We don't yet have all the answers, but 50,000 Europeans have
now joined the search party.

These numbers are staggering, but they are drawn from a bottomless
reservoir of discontent in Europe. Democracy everywhere looks as if it has
been hit by a neutron bomb. Its structures - the parliaments and their
committees, the elections and referendums - remain intact, but the life
within them has died. In hardly any European country is there now a real
choice between the policies of the governing party and those of the main
parliamentary opposition. The big issues - such as the kind of economy we
want and the extent to which the state should provide for its people - are
scarcely debated in parliament; all that is left is the jostling and
posturing.

No one at the European Social Forum seemed to be in much doubt about why
this is happening. The real decisions are being made at the continental or
the global level - in Brussels, the White House, the boardrooms of the
banks and corporations - and handed down to national governments for
implementation. This is why the movement is obsessed with globalisation:
until citizens can seize control of global politics, we cannot regain
control of national politics.

But there are other questions which we seem to have neglected. Our
movement has a tendency to fetishise new forms of participatory democracy,
such as the "consultas" developed by the Zapatistas in Mexico, or the
participatory budgets drawn up in Brazil. These are useful models, but we
must also ask ourselves what we can do to recolonise and revitalise
parliamentary politics. It is not enough, as many advocate, simply to turn
our backs on the system for which our political ancestors lost so much
blood. True democracy surely involves a combination of participation and
representation. Our task is to find the means of rattling the bars of our
enclosed and corrupted parliaments without succumbing to their enclosure
and corruption.

The biggest question of all is the one concerning the c-word. We have
little difficulty in dealing, in theory at least, with the medium-sized
issues: What should be done about the World Bank? How can the anti-union
laws be reversed? But we have scarcely attempted, as a movement, to tackle
the big issue: what should be done about capitalism? Whenever anyone in
Paris announced that capitalism in all its forms should be overthrown,
everyone cheered. But is this really what we want? And, if so, with what
do we hope to replace it? And could that other system be established
without violent repression?

In Paris, some of us tried to tackle this question in a session called
"life after capitalism". By the end of it, I was as unconvinced by my own
answers as I was by everyone else's. While I was speaking, the words died
in my mouth, as it struck me with horrible clarity that as long as
incentives to cheat exist (and they always will) none of our alternatives
could be applied universally without totalitarianism. The only coherent
programme presented in the meeting was the one proposed by the man from
the "League for the Fifth International", who called for the destruction
of the capitalist class and the establishment of a command economy. I
searched the pamphlet he gave me for any recognition of the fact that
something like this had been tried before and hadn't worked out very well,
but without success. (Instead I learned that, come the revolution, the
members of the Fourth International will be the first against the wall, as
they have "obscured the differences" between Marxism and its opponents.)

It seems to me that the questions we urgently need to ask ourselves are
these: is totalitarianism the only means of eliminating capitalism? If so,
and if, as almost all of us profess to do, we abhor totalitarianism, can
we continue to call ourselves anti-capitalists? If there is no humane and
democratic answer to the question of what a world without capitalism would
look like, then should we not abandon the pursuit of unicorns, and
concentrate on capturing and taming the beast whose den we already
inhabit?

But however these questions are resolved, something big has begun which
cannot now be stopped. Parliament and the media may ignore us, but they
will not make us go away. On Thursday, when George Bush is in London, we
will begin to show our strength. But this movement is no longer just about
protest, about ticking off the long list of things we do not like. It is
now engaged in the troublesome and deeply serious task of building a
better world.

www.monbiot.com