[WSF-Discuss] The Financial Crisis between Belem and Davos

[CACIM]

 <http://www.aawsat.com/>The Financial Crisis between Belem and Davos
*Sunday 01 February 2009*
*By Sayyed Wild Abah*

@ http://www.aawsat.com/english/news.asp?section=2&id=15581

January 27, 2009, saw the opening of the World Social Forum in the Brazilian
city of Belem, which coincided with the annual meeting in Davos held by the
World Economic Forum that brings together superpowers and institutions that
play an important role in the global economy.

It is obvious that these two events this year will focus on the global
economic crisis that has devastated the international economy and continues
to demand radical, practical solutions in order to avoid anything worse than
what we have already witnessed.
If the goal of the capitalist forum is to solve the dilemma of the
separation of financial liquidity from the real production economy by
instituting regulatory mechanisms (since this separation is the reason for
the current crisis), then the Social Forum, which is also known as the Forum
of Porto Alegre, believes that the current crisis is objective proof of the
failure of global capitalism, and the growing need for a social alternative
that the organisation calls for through its slogan: 'Another world is
possible.'

If the capitalist academics and experts today exert prompt efforts to save
the capitalist model in the same way that [John Maynard] Keynes and others
did in the 1930s, which is reflected in the flood of diagnostic and business
literature that has emerged these days, then the alternative
anti-globalization trend is still fragile and an ambiguous theoretical
discourse. Therefore, it is difficult to talk about harmony or a dynamic,
ideological alternative.

It is well known that this trend began modestly in the early 1980s in two
ways: an ecological version by environmental groups in Europe and America,
and a social formula by groups calling for the cancellation of debts that
burden the poor countries of the South. This trend strengthened in the 1990s
and led its greatest demonstration in the American city of Seattle in 1999.
The trend for an alternative to globalization is split into four main groups
which are:

1 - Traditional Socialist and Communist organizations, which have sharply
declined in terms of representatives in the political field, just as its
original ideology has collapsed and found a new framework in the
anti-neoliberalism discourse for mobilization and communication with social
movements outside the framework of control.

2 - Environmental organizations whose discourse has developed in recent
years to be more than just a stand against industrial pollution and into a
radical critique of the capitalist development model, which is based on
accumulation, growth, and the intensification of production, considering it
a project for the destruction of nature, and the control of humanity, and
the reduction of man to a consumer with no control over his own destiny.

3 - National trends dedicated to sovereignty and national identity against
the dynamics of globalization that threaten national entities and cultures
for the basis of economic viability and the necessities and requirements of
global trade.

4 - Trends protecting local cultures and ways of life that are threatened by
extinction. These have a strong presence in Latin America.

Even though this activity has not crystallized an agreed, regular
theoretical discourse, it feeds off numerous channels; for example, Italian
philosopher Antonio Negri, who sought to renew the communist model through
contemporary ideological apparatus in relation to the challenges of
globalisation. He believed that that this presented a new opportunity to
eliminate capitalism, which does not have a core or vital sphere and no
longer relies upon a dominant social class. American linguist Noam Chomsky
criticised cultural and media hegemony and its role in formulating awareness
and creating opinion, and the contributions of the post-colonial school of
sociology in criticism of Western models of development as an expression of
constrained cultural centralism, not perceptions and opinions of a global
objective, (this is why this school has a strong presence in India, Africa
and Latin America).

It might be valid to link the new socialist models that have emerged in
South America, most notably Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in
Bolivia, to the alternative globalisation movement to which they say they
belong. However, it is too early to know if these experiences of radical
populism reflect a qualitative shift within Latin America or whether they
represent one of the manifestations of the crises of transition, from
totalitarian military regimes to stable, pluralistic democracies, which
these countries are experiencing.
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