I went to the World Social Forum in Caracas in 2006 and it was great: rife with tremendous energy, panels on anarchism and Zionism and post-capitalist social organization, on food supply and ecological agriculture and militarism and financial architecture, on Latin American integration and South-South links. It was really nice talk. The World Social Fora were really nice places for leftist networking, in sunny climes, and for forging solidarity with Latin Americans, the advance guard of the alter-globalization movement. And then the WSF process seemed to be petering out. It could have become a New International. Or it could be a really effervescent discussion forum. It seemed to be turning into the latter. Well, Chavez seems to have snapped a bit:
I assume responsibility before the world. I think it is time to convene the Fifth International, and I dare to make the call, which I think is a necessity. I dare to request that we create my proposal...This socialist encounter should be of the genuine left, willing to fight against imperialism and capitalism.
Leftist parties from Ecuador, El Salvador, Colombia, Bolivia, and Nicaragua have signed on to the project. Chavez made the announcement at the PSUV conference, where there were 55 left parties from 39 countries. This was a long time coming--much of the contemporary Western left is so suffused with anarchism that it is chary of this sort of centralization, and probably, the inevitable attempts by vanguardist Trotskyists to take over the proceedings. But it's the right call, and should put to rest the silly contentions that we can ignore state power in the process of societal transformation. Not a chance. This doesn't mean that Chavez or the Chavistas are unaware that the Venezuelan state is still a bourgeois state, shot-through with the clotted, corrupted remnants of the ancien régime. They said precisely that at the conference. Dismantling that state? That's still the challenge, over 10 years in, confronting the Venezuelan government, and one PSUV congress, isn't going to change it, nor is an epochal rupture. It remains to be seen what will.
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<img src=“http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/46799000/jpg/_46799106_-9.jpg”>
You may want to look at this: http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/4944
and in the case of the caracas event, this: http://marccooper.com/the-not-so-good-the-bad-and...
Hi
Don’t know if the last post was accepted, apologies if I’m double posting. We have raised the need for a fifth international for several years now, and raised it at the WSF and the European SF, with the perspective of transforming them into a new international. This has not happened, the revolutionary workers movement has dithered and the result is that its been left up to populists like Chavez to make the call. Its now a question of struggle whether this call instigates a process of debate and organisation between forces committed to revolutionary change over how to form a new international, or whether Chavez and his “allies” hijack the project and it becomes an obstacle revolution, an instrument in the service of the Venezuelan state and its bourgeois allies. The project of building a fifth international has the potential to win significant sections of workers around the world to it, the question is whether it becomes a real tool for revolution internationally, or a tool for propping up bourgeois states like Venezuela.
http://www.fifthinternational.org/content/venezue...
Given my contest, I have to moderate comments (I let everything through except expletive-filled rants). I knew that there was internal discussion at the WSFs of the prospect of turning them into a 5th International. I suppose it’s still possible, but seems unlikely. I do disagree on your characterization of Chavez–I think the situation is more complicated than you make it out to be, it’s not simple populism, there was a real rupture in consciousness in 1989, and Chavez is running a bourgeois state but I think there’s a situation of dual power in which Chavez is a strategic ally of the working-class, in many cases, and it’s mistake to just deride “Chavez and his ‘allies.’” After all, hard-left chavistas, anarchist in spirit, support Chavez. Who are we to judge from afar?
Hi
We always had a perspective of trying to turn the WSF into a new international, and were much derided for this. Chavez call is welcome, but also a sign that the revolutionaries in the workers movement have dithered too long and so it has fallen to populists like Chavez to make the call for a Fifth International. Now it is a question of struggle over how a new international will be formed, whether it will be a revolutionary and based on the working-class or populist and bound to figures like Chavez and the Venezuelan state.
http://www.fifthinternational.org/content/venezue...