14.04.2004

ESF democracy vital

The preparations for the London European Social Forum continue despite bureaucratic hitches, writes Tina Becker

Only six months to go before the European Social Forum comes to London. Up to 50,000 people are expected in the capital from October 14-17, hopefully to be greeted with an inspiring programme, affordable charges, lots of cultural events and, of course, smooth organisation.

Well, we are not quite there yet. Money is still in rather short supply, with London Unison’s donation of £50,000 being the only ‘real’ financial subsidy so far. There is talk about other contributions, including from the GLA, regional and local trade union branches and NGOs. However, the ESF company structure, which was supposed to clear the financial blockage by sorting out the issue of ‘legal liability’, has still not materialised and various sets of lawyers have been working on it for several weeks. A working group charged with finding accommodation for the tens of thousands of visitors has only just met for the first time. Another group on ‘venues’ has just began to book meeting halls in Bloomsbury (our “overflow location”) - not an easy task in view of the shortage of money.

If one is to believe the main organisers (around the Socialist Workers Party and the Greater London Assembly), the reason for our slow progress is that we have “wasted months discussing organisational structures”, as Redmond O’Neill, who officially represents mayor Ken Livingstone at our meetings, recently put it. Comrade O’Neill, a leading member of the shadowy sect Socialist Action, has done his best to keep democracy out of the process. For months, the ‘official bidders’ around the SWP and GLA rejected all calls for meetings to be held in public. Instead, they put together the bid in private and refused access to interested organisations not to their liking.

Groups like the CPGB actually had to fight in order to get involved and we even had to gatecrash some meetings. Not surprisingly, many people tried to reverse this undemocratic process - by putting forward proposals for transparent structures. Rather than “wasting time”, our insistence opened the way for the - admittedly limited - democracy that we enjoy today: meetings are now open to everybody, minutes are taken and published on the temporary ESF website and even the exclusion of CPGB members from meetings of the coordinating committee has stopped. This latter victory was mainly down to our European comrades insisting at the March 6-7 ESF assembly in London that it was “unacceptable” to enshrine the right to exclude people from meetings in our official ESF statement.

However, control-freakery has not been beaten yet. It is the main reason why we are so behind in our preparations. It is difficult to believe, but again a hard fight was needed to set up certain much needed working groups, which are only now starting to emerge. For example, for months Redmond O’Neill and the SWP rejected the establishment of a body that would facilitate communication between ESF groups, set up email lists and liaise with the private company that will design our website. Because comrade O’Neill refused to allow anybody but a GLA employee access to the officially advertised email address (“we cannot decentralise such an important task”), incoming emails were not answered for over four weeks. We had to fight to establish correspondence as a standing item of the coordinating committee’s agenda (since then, the item has fallen off it most weeks).

The vital programme working group gathers every two weeks - for a maximum of 90 minutes. Calls to increase either the frequency or the time of those meetings have been rejected by the SWP-Socialist Action majority. This has led to the predictable outcome where items fall off the agenda over and over again and decisions are then made either outside the meetings or have to be rushed through without proper discussion - because “we are running out of time”.

Debates or rallies?

The group has finally started to put together a proposal on the themes for the plenary sessions and how to select the speakers for these. Plenary sessions are the only centrally organised meetings during the ESF and are therefore top of the programme hierarchy. Seminars and workshops, on the other hand, are organised by groups from across Europe themselves.

For a few months, proposals made by comrades from the CPGB, Dave Timms from the World Development Movement and others on how to put together plenaries, seminars and workshops were ignored by the SWP-SA majority and pushed off the agenda. However, at the latest pinched meeting of the programme group, Socialist Action member Anne Kane (who officially represents the group Abortion Rights) put forward similar proposals to ours. Unfortunately, her paper does not benefit from our previous very fruitful discussions - like all other Socialist Action members, Anne shunned the working group for months, only getting involved at the beginning of February. Since then though, a minimum of 10 SA members attend the meetings, always arguing for exactly the same points - like a bunch of clones. The SWP (also in pretty heavy attendance) immediately accepted her paper as the main discussion document and it has become the only item on the agenda since.

In the discussions, CPGB comrades stressed the need for these plenary sessions to be more than mere rallies, where speaker after speaker repeats similar points (this is what often happened in Paris and Florence). Instead, we should utilise these meetings to organise real debates around the big, living issues that concern the left across Europe - recognising debate and discussion as positive, not something to be ashamed of.

Quite a lot of people disagree - amongst them our friends from the SWP. Not known as a big fan of debate, Alex Callinicos rejected the idea of selecting speakers so as to make sure that they would represent different opinions across the European left. “Plenary sessions are the public face of the ESF. They set the tone of the whole event. They need to be an advertisement for our views” - and naturally, in the SWP’s methodology, open debates are not a good advertisement. They are seen as a divisive nuisance, rather than as a method to arrive at a common view and perhaps common action.

However, at the meeting of the bigger organising committee on April 13, the comrades changed their mind and surprisingly supported my proposal - which was all that was needed to declare a ‘consensus’. Our definition for a plenary session will now include the formulation, “Themes in the plenary sessions will introduce the broad issues that bring us together in the ESF. Speakers should reflect a broad range of views. Where possible, debates should be encouraged.”

This is a great step forward in making sure our ESF will actually be an interesting event that can surpass the first ESFs in Florence and Paris. A little throwback, however, occurred at the end of the coordinating committee: Milena Buyum (National Assembly against Racism) proposed that none of the very obvious disagreements that exist amongst us should be raised at the ESF assembly in Istanbul: “We have to present our proposals in a very united way. We all have a duty to put disagreements aside”. When some people, including myself, showed our dissent, she snapped: “You don’t have to shake your head, Tina. These are the official proposals, whether you like them or not.”

The comrades can just about stomach disagreement and debate when they are organised on a proper platform - but in our meetings? Never!

Europe ‘not important’

Anne Kane’s paper also makes some suggestions for titles for the plenary sessions. It argues that there should be no more than 10 plenaries - and then goes on to list 14 topics, including ‘Trade unions in the global economy’, ‘A sustainable planet’, ‘Public services - resistance to privatisation’, ‘For equal rights’ and so on. All worthy causes, but hardly exciting stuff. These are to serve not just as titles for the plenary sessions, but as programmatic threads for the rest of the ESF programme.

More disturbing, however, was what was missing from comrade Kane’s list of themes. At first I thought the lack of any theme to do with the European Union or its constitution was an oversight. However, the responses to my proposal to include such a theme served as a real eye-opener on the state of the British left.

“Well, we have got ‘Euro-fascism’ and ‘World and European responses to the new American imperialism’. I really don’t see why we need another meeting on Europe”, said Milena Buyum. Her Socialist Action comrade, Anne Kane, added: “The EU and its constitution is just not a big issue. Why should we have a whole plenary session on it?”

Comrades from the SWP were not much better: “We will probably have to have a plenary on the EU constitution, as I can imagine that our European friends will insist on it. It is probably unavoidable,” mused Alex Callinicos. Someone else thought we would have to go along with it - otherwise we would look “isolationist”.

It is not ‘isolationism’ the British left is suffering from - it is economism: questions of democracy and how we are ruled are seen as a diversion from the ‘real issues’: trade unions, the NHS, public services, etc, important as these are. Debates on the state, our rulers or the monarchy are “boring” and “not important”. Is it “boring” that the proposed EU constitution will stipulate that postal services across Europe have to be privatised? Is it “not important” that the free market must be given access to all spheres of society? Is it of no consequence that the European ruling classes are moving towards a super-state with its own army?

Meeting the next day, the coordinating committee was not any keener on the issue. “It just doesn’t make for a very exciting meeting,” said Jane Fisher from Friends of Ireland (and Socialist Action). “Think of something exciting,” I was told by Sarah Colborne (Palestine Solidarity Campaign and SA). As exciting as ‘Anti-war and for peace’ or ‘For equal rights’, I presume.

However, all proposals have to be ratified by the April 16-18 European assembly which meets in Istanbul. I expect our European comrades will have something to say on the importance of the EU and its new constitution.

More work needed

Although I am confident the third ESF can be a big success, at the moment we are far behind in our preparations. We have already missed the deadline we set ourselves to begin the application process for seminars and workshops. From April 2, groups should have been able to put forward their suggestions. However, because we are never able to get through the agenda at our meetings, we have not yet decided the actual mechanism for proposing a seminar: The comrades from the SWP, for example, have argued that any proposal would have to be presented by a minimum of “three groups from across Europe”.

Seminars will of course have to be merged. Last year, for example, over 1,000 proposals were made - but there was only room for 300. However, we should approach this question from a different angle: Would it not actually be a good thing if organisations from across Europe, who might have never heard of each other, find that they share similar ideas or campaigning priorities? We should encourage organisations to voluntarily come together - and possibly form Europe-wide networks in the process. Surely, this is the main function of the ESF in any case. We must get our own act together if we are serious about building an alternative to the bosses’ European Union.

To demand in effect that only groups that have already established European connections can propose seminars is entirely counterproductive. It favours the ‘big players’ - the big trade unions and sects like the SWP, which has its very own International Socialist Tendency. How exciting would a seminar be that brings together the Turkish, Polish and Scottish section of the IST?