To prove their opposition to the endemic and tactical "failures" of the WSF, some groups from the Marxist-Leninist stream of the Indian Left are organising two alternative programmes in Mumbai on the same dates as the WSF. The city will now witness three anti-globalisation meetings. Each aimed at one goal, each proposing a purer way to arrive at it. Under the umbrella of Mumbai Resistance (MR), 21 organisations have united to fight against globalisation. To its credit, MR has even managed to attract some luminaries—Arundhati Roy for one—from the WSF to their alternative platform. Apart from Arundhati, historian Shirin Ratnagar, academics Tripta Vahi and Manoranjan Mohanty, activists Gautam Navlakha and writer-ideologue Varavara Rao will address various discussions on the MR platform.
The trade union iftu and its allies are planning the two-day-long 'People Against Imperialism' programme to "expose" the WSF. The dividing lines are getting sharper by the day, the rhetoric progressively more vicious.
MR's Darshan Pal explains the need for an alternative forum to the WSF. Says he: "The big ngos, who directly take money from corporations and governments promoting capitalism, are cheerleaders of this great game. How can they promote and fight globalisation at the same time? The purpose of the WSF is now limited to ensuring that the popular upsurge like the one that we saw in Seattle (in '99) does not become a mass movement against globalisation."
Both the MR and the IFTU-led platform argue the WSF is limiting the progression of popular dissent against globalisation into a world-wide movement. "The WSF keeps all forces of change out of the forum. Their charter is opposed to people with a 'reductionist' view of economy and history. Marxists are the ones who reduce everything to class struggle, they say. So let's keep the 'reductionists' out. People who believe in armed struggle, like the Zapatistas in Mexico, the Colombian Marxist guerrillas can also keep out. Let's keep everything nice and pleasant. The intellectuals can feel good talking about change and the capitalists will be happy because they have succeeded in not letting the discontent go out of hand," says a member of the MR organising committee.
The detractors say participants in the WSF can't decide on any sort of collective plan—no resolution can be passed in the WSF even by vote. This reduces it to a mere talking shop, a jamboree that doesn't permit participants to chalk out a future agenda.
Patkar responds by saying it's healthy to question the working of the WSF, but boycotting it is not a positive step. She told Outlook: "They have issues with who is funding the WSF, why does it not have a common future agenda and what is its stand on violence. I too had questions about the funding of the WSF and I've got my answers. About the common future agenda, I don't think it is either feasible or desirous.How can there be just one way of fighting globalisation? As far as violence is concerned, I myself am opposed to it. But that doesn't stop me from sharing the platform with people who believe in violent struggle."
What hurts the WSF organisers most is the accusation that institutions like the Ford Foundation and Oxfam have poured money into it so that any talk about "changing the system" can be neatly excised. "It's a baseless charge. Our accounting is transparent. We've refused close to a million dollars from these organisations," says JNU professor Kamal Mitra Chenoy, a member of the WSF programme committee. He's dismayed by some of the Left groups' decision to boycott the WSF.
The MR versus WSF is also a demonstration of the rivalry within the international Left in general and the Indian Left in particular. MR, for instance, is a platform where the People's War reportedly figures quite prominently. As for the WSF, the three mainstream Indian communist parties—the CPI, the CPI(M) and the CPI(ML)-Liberation—are absolutely with it. The next one week, therefore, will make a public exhibit of the divide within the Left to find the "most genuine" way to struggle—even as capitalists enfold the remotest parts of the world within the market's arena.