The organisational chaos that engulfed London’s European Social Forum this October is by now legendary. The SWP-SA dominated Coordinating Committee, with its centralist and doctrinaire practices, has a lot to answer for. Laura Sullivan, writing in the weeks before the event, gives a behind the scenes account of the process, laying special emphasis on the role of culture
Tensions and developments coalescing around the cultural elements of London’s European Social Forum this October are emblematic of the power struggles that have blighted the UK-ESF organising process from the start. The emergence of equivalent factions had already occurred at the Paris ESF in the fall of 2003. The UK-ESF saw, on the one side, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the Greater London Authority (GLA) contingent, who lobbied hard and ultimately successfully for London to get the bid for 2004. On the other, members of the London Social Forum1 and other grassroots organisations, who argued that 2005 was a more feasible target date. From the first UK meetings in the winter of 2003, members of the SWP and the more secretive Socialist Action party, firmly ensconced within the offices of the GLA, demonstrated principles and behaviour far removed from the democratic consensus model espoused by the Porto Allegre Charter of Principles of the World Social Forum. At the first organising meeting held at the GLA (directly contravening the Charter’s prohibition of meetings in state institutions), Redmond O’Neill, one of London mayor Ken Livingstone’s right-hand men at the GLA and prime mover within Socialist Action, outraged the grassroots activists in attendance by unilaterally ‘declaring all working groups (e.g., practicalities, programme, accommodation) to be hereby abolished.’
Significantly, after O’Neil’s nullifying announcement, the Culture Working Group (CWG), uniquely continued to meet. A hybrid of independent activist-artists, and a few SWP members, the CWG managed to maintain a civil and productive relationship through the winter months, while in every other area of UK-ESF organising the SWP-SA wreaked havoc, offending everyone, and causing most of the grassroots left to leave the process entirely. I know from personal experience that the way these folks sought to control the meetings and policies was eerily and frustratingly Stalinesque.
From the start, it was clear that the SWP-SA stronghold had visions of an ESF which marginalised cultural and artistic endeavours, particularly those with a more explicit anti-capitalist perspective. This stance reflected the increasingly obvious reformist agenda of these groups, who sought to use the ESF to advance their party platforms and to heighten the profiles of their ‘star’ players – not only the GLA’s Livingstone, who was significantly up for re-election in June 2004, but also the SWP-heavy Respect coalition’s George Galloway, now on the programme as a plenary speaker. This same ethos was evident in O’Neil and company’s repeated refrain equating ‘culture at the ESF’ with a ‘big rally in Trafalgar Square with Ms. Dynamite’. Hostility and disdain for cultural or artistic projects with any substantive content was revealed at a 25 March 2004 meeting of the Coordinating Committee (another SWP-SA formation that in actuality functioned as a ‘central committee’, making all decisions in lieu of the larger, less frequent Organising Committee meetings, where CC decisions would be ‘reported’). Two representatives of the Brazilian-based Mosaico de Livros – Biblioteca Social Mundial (Mosaic of Books – World Social Library) requested time at the upcoming Birmingham OC meeting, but when O’Neill called their project ‘irrelevant’, all at once we were expected to go along with the idea that showing a WSF-sponsored film at an OC meeting was ludicrous. In April 2004, the unilateral control of all cultural production and information continued, with SA insistence that no one outside of the SA-SWP alliance be allowed to participate in the production or design of the official website (which ultimately cost over £40,000). Not surprisingly, when discussions about UK-ESF graphics and logos began, instead of open calls for contributions or invitations for anyone outside of the hallowed circle of power to make suggestions, SWP member Noel Douglas was appointed to create preliminary designs for the logo for the website and ESF publicity.
Meanwhile, another group of artists/activists were gathering to put together events making culture and art central to the ESF. Calling themselves the European Creative Forum (ECF), by early spring of 2004 the group was completely uninterested in participating in the official ESF organising process, while the CWG was still working within the official framework. At the end of March, members of both groups met to discuss their joint participation in the first of the European Creative Forums, planned for the second Saturday of each month from April through to the ESF. In total contrast to the chaos and ill will characterising official ESF meetings dominated by the SA-SWP faction, this planning session saw close to 30 people treating each other with respect and encouragement, bubbling over with energy and creativity. Held at the squatted artists’ warehouse Area 10 in Peckham, London, the first ECF on 10 April 2004 was especially designed to give the CWG a boost. It kicked off with a Creatives Assembly, where 60 artists and activists of all hues gathered to share ideas about collaborative projects to launch in the run-up to or during ESF. Performance artists, shamanic poets, painters, independent film-makers, dj’s, peaceniks, singers, drummers, rappers, new media ‘geeks’, digital artists, actors – the sheer range of interests and talents of the people attending was staggering. A huge success, the April ECF was attended by more than 450 people from all sectors of political, activist, artistic, and grassroots organisations, including people from the local community of Peckham.
Without doubt, the scale and success of the first European Creative Forum hit the SWP-SA’s radar; several SWP members were sent to investigate the second ECF in May. In the Creatives Assembly, they denied what they called ‘false rumours’ of the tensions surrounding the organising meetings. Recognising the blatant lies of these SWPers, no one – including those non-aligned independents, aka ‘horizontals’, who had been fighting for democracy in the organising process for months – was fooled by the SWP’s attempts to do ‘damage control’ and limit the participation of the ECF in the larger ESF itself. Their snide remarks in the breaks at the event, slagging it off as ‘hippy bullshit’, for example, did nothing to boost their credibility.
At a CWG meeting to choose the group who would vet programme proposals involving ‘culture’, SWP members made sure their pet people, such as Douglas, were selected, and specifically insisted that they would ‘only allow one “horizontal” to be on this committee’ of four. This directive was in keeping with all previous behaviour of the SWP-SA faction, in which they attempted to keep ‘horizontals’ out of all working groups and the office staff. Their overall strategy was to control every aspect of the UK-ESF organising process so as to make the event itself a combination of SWP recruitment rally and GLA/Ken Livingstone photo-op. They sought to control both participation and information at all levels. For example, without consensus or consultation of anyone else involved, they held unannounced ‘outreach’ meetings for particular groups, such as ‘women’ or ‘refugees’, and always, again, at the GLA. This proprietary attitude was exemplified by SA member Milena Buyum who, at a gathering of programme working group members at the Birmingham OC meeting, blurted, ‘I’m in charge of the black groups – I don’t want anyone else contacting them or having meetings with them.’ For the SWP and SA, sectors are objectified pieces to be moved around on a chessboard.
ESF graphic material produced by Douglas also reflects the entrenched SWP agenda infiltrating every aspect of the organising process. The logos and leaflets are not only atrociously designed, they are also uncannily and disturbingly reminiscent of SWP/Respect Coalition party graphics with their rainbow colour shemes. The imagery is as visually illiterate as it is politically problematic: on the publicity leaflet’s cover, the unthinking adoption of the colonialist Mercator projection clashes tellingly with the slogan, ‘another world is possible’, an insulting juxtaposition betraying an underlying naivety and conservatism. And the fold-out poster inside features a collage of people marching in protest, the requisite ‘diversity’ of the composite crowd emphatically apparent, waving generic, deliberately unidentifiable multi-coloured flags.
Similarly, the language of the publicity material imports SWP concerns and terminology wholesale, featuring phrases that were shoved down the throats of the horizontally minded participants at programme group meetings throughout the spring. Instead of overtly anti-neoliberal or anti-capitalist slogans, we get ‘for global justice’ and ‘against privatisation’. The more radical and politically substantive language of the original calls for ESF participation has been so watered down or distorted as to completely diverge from the intent of the social forums themselves, as expressed in the Charter of Principles. Criticisms of preceding European and World Social Forums include debates about whether these efforts are inherently reformist and complicit with capital, especially given the heavy involvement of NGOs and state structures, or whether they help move forward anti-capitalist efforts. While subject to these same criticisms, the UK-ESF organising process has been hijacked in an even more vicious and politically reactionary manner.
The status of the cultural and artistic aspects of the ESF is still very troubled. An email in August requested that people check the official website for their cultural proposal – apparently, they’d lost some of the original ones. (Such ineptitude has been pervasive, another by-product of the unfortunate SWP-SA control freakery characterising the organising process.) Now, less than two weeks before the ESF itself, there is still no finalised cultural programme online and the online registration system of the expensively procured website has been plagued with problems. Is it any wonder that now, as the October weekend of the ESF approaches, we are being told that while many proposals for provocative and powerful artistic and cultural events and workshops have been accepted, there is no money to provide the technical or other infrastructure needed to put on most of these events? And given the completely undemocratic history of the UK-ESF organising process, is it surprising that much of the vibrancy of cultural efforts and artistic productions will be channelled into the alternative spaces of the ESF instead of the overpriced, badly organised official event?
LINKS
official UK-ESF site http://www.fse-esf.org/
alternative UK-ESF site http://www.esf2004.net
horizontals’ ‘Call for Democracy’
http://esf2004.net/en/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=6
WSF Charter of Principles http://www.wsfindia.org/charter.php
ECF http://www.europeancreativeforum.org/
Mosaic of Books http://pwweb2.procempa.com.br/pmpa/Mosaico_Livro/
Area 10 http://interoperable.org.uk/area10/Xoops206/html/modules/news/
FOOTNOTES
1 Complementing the World and Regional Social Forums, local chapters such as the London Social Forums meet regularly and organise political events
Laura Sullivan <alchemical44 AT yahoo.co.uk> is a writer, digital artist and counsellor providing emotional support for activists, amongst others
1608 reads | Clusters: M29: The Precarious Issue [February 2005] | | view pdf | Printer-friendly version 
Ok as the named and shamed individual in this awful article let me try and clear a few things up!
I was never 'appointed' the graphic designer for the ESF, I volunteered (it's called self-organisation and it isn't just the property of autonomists), I made two leaflets, one poster and the logo – most of the work was done by the GLA as I moved to working on the cultural programme, some of the work done by the GLA was awful (like the event newspaper) but it wasn't done by me, yes even I part of the evil SWP was stitched up by them over this, shocking hey! No one, and I repeat no one, was stopped from proposing other designs or doing their own posters or whatever, but of course no one else did.
Now I'm sorry that Laura doesn't like my work (you can't please all the people) but she should be aware that what I did was not just my choice but what the organising committee agreed too and wanted. Similarly my not using the Peter's projection of the world is not through ignorance but not having a graphic version to hand in the few nights I had to do the leaflet she picks apart so pedantically.
One thing Laura should know is that the picture (featured in the magazine) is in fact not a collage by me of some touchy-feely type of 'diversity' but an actual photograph from the biggest movement demonstration in Europe for years, the 3 million on the CGIL demonstration against article 18 in Rome. Ironically the only flags I had to change the colour of were to make a few black, so the anarchists were represented as there were none in the photo.
Laura may have had involvement in the independent autonomist cultural network, the European Creative Forum, which she claims was a vibrant alternative to the main cultural activity. I attended the ECF and worked with the organisers for awhile in the Cultural Working Group, it was fine, but we should be honest people making things out of cardboard in a squatted space (to use one example) is not the only form of culture, things are a little more complex than that and 'we' as the Cultural Working Group had a responsibility to the movement not let it be reduced to just that.
Laura also claims she was involved in the Cultural Working Group, this is news to me! Actually around ten of us facilitated a 3-day festival including hundreds of films, theatre, music, art and performance and workshops organised openly through the website and done on a strict first come - first served basis, the diversity of this was incredible from black and asian hip hop artists at Ally Pally, sell out anti-racism gigs at the Coronet, a packed screening of Battle of Algiers with resistance leader Ben Bella at Friends Meeting house, performance art from across Europe, photographic shows from Sebastiao Salgado, Simon Norfolk and the history of struggles in the UK and a host of others, russian drama, various media artists working in Ally Pally, comedy- you name it everything was there, you can view the full itinery (which includes Autonomist events that asked to be in it) on my website here:
http://www.noeldouglas.net/moti/images/jamming/New_Cultural_Programme.pdf
But of course this is a political problem not one of personalities and whilst the 'horizontals' orchestrated a very vocal email and internet campaign it cannot alter the fact that they were the source of the initial problems in that from having no involvement in the process up till London, 'they' decided that because their own groups (the still largely non-existent Social Forums) weren't strong enough and would be 'dominated' by the bigger groups on the left that the ESF shouldn't even come to London but go to Greece, even going as far as coming to the European meetings and trying to make this a reality! They then wonder why people didn't trust them and were hostile to them in the UK process. That is, there was a dishonest attempt by them to equate themselves with the 'movement' ie. because they set up 'social forums' however unrepresentative of the UK's social movements, that they should get privileged access to the European Social Forum. They also are politically mistaken, in equating the process of organising the ESF as the embryo of the new world in waiting, god help us if that were the case! Thankfully it isn't and there are many social and political organisations doing that every day of the week.
The European Social Forum involves much broader forces than the 'anti-capitalist' left, Laura is wrong, for instance to say the slogans for the event were SWP ones, they were the ones agreed by the European process, which would not agree more radical ones at the time because of the various politics in that process, most of which is broadly reformist in nature. We worked hard to make sure that cultural diversity was respected and protected. We wrote to everyone to be part of the cultural work (including Mute), no one was excluded and all of this was done for free in our spare time, unlike some of the 'horizontals' in the process who managed to secure paid work from the UKESF company as Babel translation workers where they accepted a wage three 3000 pounds higher (plus expenses) than all the other paid ESF workers.
Laura is right to point to the problematic way the GLA worked but the point here is that criticisms of bureaucratism, centralism and undemocratic procedure, and violent protests against the involvement of members of reformist political organisations, were not limited to the London ESF. Such criticisms and protests, whether at the Florence, Paris or London Forums, are a reflection both of deficiencies in the way the ESF is organised at a European level and of the compulsive and destructive oppositionalism that afflicts the ultra-left autonomist movement.
Neither the Paris nor the London ESF would have been possible without the commitment of large sums of public money (Paris had all the money upfront, London had none) and the involvement of mass organisations, notably the trade unions. A formal delegate-based structure is therefore a necessity for the preparation of the ESF wherever it is held. Inevitably this provokes hostility from individuals and groups who have little popular support and therefore favour a looser format that would allow them to secure a prominent role for themselves within the organising process. Cynically, they present this demand – for small ultra-left minorities, in this case a handful of PHD students, a few lecturers and a number of autonomists from media groups and NGO's (but crucially not representating their organisations views on this) to wield powers entirely out of proportion to the negligible social forces they represent – as a campaign for democracy. Laura and her comrades simply don't understand the difficulties they caused, not just in nearly frightening off cautious union bureaucrats from supporting it at all, by telling for instance, the deputy general secretary of Unison, the UK's largest union, that he doesn't 'really' represent millions of workers and attacking 'the politics of representation', their behaviour also made it far more difficult to bring together groups that have never worked with each other before and build trust, as we should remember this was a totally new thing for all the groups in the UK and that brought it's own problems and means you need to be strategic about how you behave with people.
Now we find a year later the London Social Forum–co-incidentally one of the groups Laura claimed to be from–meeting at City Hall where they are hosted by the Green party, this from an organisation that decried the use of City Hall, and were totally hostile to any party political intervention in the ESF as this was against the principles of the Social Forum (written by a handful of people in Brazil).
As a revolutionary, I think we need to be more serious about changing the world, Laura's American style psychodrama politics won't do it, nor will staying in the alt-media ghetto surrounded by people that think the same way as you as Mute does. Autonomist poiltics is in a deep crisis,because politics has now come back centre stage with things like general strikes in Europe or near revolutions in South America. Even the darlings of the autonomist movement the Zapatistas recognise this and are changing their strategy with the Other campaign. I'm also intrigued how there's a lot of fire directed at Marxists like myself whose organisations are self-funded and who do movement work for nothing whilst doing other jobs, when Mute is supported and people live off the money from the State through the Arts Council grants.
Having said all this, I know who my enemies really are, it's just a shame Laura doesn't and that I have to waste my time responding to these distortions. We have to find ways to build common struggles, for all it's faults the ESF managed to get unity from a very diverse range of organisations, and at 25,000 people it was the largest political gathering the UK has ever seen and if that moves us one step closer to engaging with the majority in society who we need to reach, then 'another world' may just come true.
http://www.noeldouglas.net