ESF: big push needed to make London forum a success


The London European Social Forum is just three months away.

Workers Power has long championed the ESF. It is a tremendous opportunity to combine the very best methods of struggle, policies and organisational initiatives from across the continent and the world. In an era of globalisation and imperialist war, this internationalism is of vital importance if we are to win even local struggles against privatisation, racism and cuts.

Previous ESFs - in Florence and Paris - drew 50,000 activists to them and had a galvanising effect on labour and progressive politics in the country where they took place. This was inevitable as the bulk of the participants came, naturally, from the host countries.

But there's the rub.

After six months preparation, the ESF has only 67 British affiliates. True, this figure includes eight national trade unions, but there are only a couple of trades councils and a couple of dozen union branches and regions that have signed up to the event. There has been just one handbill produced to publicise the ESF, and the official website is still only hosting "temporary" pages. At this stage last year, the Paris committee had over 1,000 affiliates.

More alarmingly, very few local social forums or mobilising committees yet exist and these are still in a weak, embryonic stage. Globalise Resistance, the Socialist Workers Party's umbrella group for the movement, held its annual conference last month: fewer than 150 attended. In fact everyone knows it is a paint and pasteboard facade of an anti-capitalist movement. There is nothing behind it beyond a dwindling band of SWP activists.

Yes, the SWP promises it will make another of its famous "turns" - towards building for the ESF - after the elections. But we have consistently warned the SWP that you can't simply turn these united fronts on and off like a tap. Disillusion and mistrust set in.

We have campaigned for, and welcome the involvement of the unions, the TUC and the Labour Party - or at least its left wing. The bureaucrats that run these organisations ignored the anti-capitalist movement until very recently. Worse they opposed it and condemned its militant actions. Even Ken Livingstone called on the police to make pre-emptive arrests of May Day protesters in 2001; the cops duly obliged and penned children, pregnant women and diabetics in Oxford Circus for up to eight hours.

Now Ken and co. have changed their tune. Good. But we must insist that these Johnny-come-latelies are not allowed to blunt and dull the cutting edge of our movement. The anti-capitalist movement is a fighting force or it is nothing. It radical, revolutionary wing must not be silenced The ESF must publicise all self-organised events taking place in October, even those - like the Youth Assembly - that the union and Labour chiefs disagree with.

What does all this mean? It means that the ESF will be a political battle zone this year. If the Doug Prentises and Ken Livingstones get their way, it will smooth the path to Gordon Brown's premiership and provide policies to - at best - slow the pace of globalisation. But, if we can rally the forces through local campaigning and political preparation, it can start to build a network of fighting organisations and politically arm it with the ideas that can uproot capitalism itself.