by Immanuel Wallerstein

The list of countries with enduring and worsening civil strife is growing. A short while ago, the world media were highlighting Syria. Now they are highlighting Ukraine. Will it be Thailand tomorrow? Who knows? The variety of explanations of the strife and the passion with which they are promoted is very striking.

Our modern world-system is supposed to permit the Establishment elites who hold the reins of power to debate with each other and then come to a “compromise” that they can guarantee. Normally these elites situate themselves in two basic camps – center/right and center/left. There are indeed differences between them, but the result of the
“compromises” has been that the amount of change over time is minimal.

This has operated as a top-down political structure, within each country and geopolitically between countries. The outcome has been an equilibrium slowly moving upward. Most analysts of the current strife tend to assume that the strings are still being pulled by Establishment elites. Each side asserts that the low-level actors of the other side are being manipulated by high-level elites. Everyone seems to assume that, if their side puts enough pressure on the
elites of the other side, these other elites will agree to a “compromise” closer to what their side wants.

This seems to me a fantastic misreading of the realities of our current situation, which is one of extended chaos as a result of the structural crisis of our modern world-system. I do not think that the elites are any longer succeeding in manipulating their low-level followers. I think the low-level followers are defying the elites, doing their own thing, and trying to manipulate the elites. This is indeed something new. It is a bottom-up rather than a top-down politics.

Bottom-up politics is sometimes alluded to when the media speak of “extremists” becoming important actors, but the locution “extremists” misses the point too. When we are amidst bottom-up politics, there are versions of every complexion – from the far right to the far left, but including ones in the center. One can bemoan this, as did
Yeats in one of his oft-quoted lines from The Second Coming:

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

But note that Yeats is attributing the category of “best” to the old elites. Are they really the best? What is indeed true, to cite one of Yeats’s less quoted lines, is that “the falcon cannot hear the falconer.”

How then can we navigate politically in such an environment? It is very confusing analytically. I think however that step one is to cease attributing what is happening to the evil machinations of some Establishment elites. They are no longer in control. They can of course still do great physical harm by imprudent actions. They are by no means paragons of virtue. But those of us who wish to seek a better world to emerge from this chaotic situation have to depend on ourselves, on our own multiple ways of organizing the struggle. We need, in short, less denunciation and more constructive local action.

The wisest lines of Yeats are the last two in the poem:

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

As our existing historical system is in the process of dying, there is a fierce struggle over what kind of new historical system will succeed it. Soon, we may indeed no longer live in a capitalist system, but we could come to live in an even worse system – a “rough beast” seeking to be born? To be sure, this is only one possible collective choice. The alternative choice is a relatively democratic, relatively egalitarian system, also seeking to be born. Which one we
shall see at the end of the struggle is up to us, bottom-up.

Immanuel Wallerstein’s Commentary No. 377, May 15, 2014; originally posted at http://www.binghamton.edu/fbc/commentaries/

by Mika Rönkkö

To start with, take a look at Teuvo Hakkarainen´s First day in parliament so you get an idea:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMMakFNTbB4&feature=youtu.be


Well, the True Finns will chair key Parliamentary committees in the parliament: the Foreign Affairs, Defence, and Administrative committees. This means that in addition to foreign affairs and defence, the party will have a key position in the processing of legislation affecting the police, municipalities, and immigration issues.

The Administrative Committee is to be chaired by outspoken immigration critic Jussi Halla-aho. Helsinki District Court has fined Halla-aho for violating the sanctity of religion (charges of incitement against an ethnic group were dismissed by the court.). Halla-aho has associated Islam with paedophilia in his blog writings. He also wrote for example that robbing passers-by and scrounging on taxpayers’ money might be a national or even a genetic characteristic of a certain people, that “individuals can justifiably be placed in a hierarchy of values according to how the removal of their abilities or skills from the use of the community would weaken the community” and that the notion of equal human worth is a typical proclamation of this age, similar to the notion from previous centuries that the sun orbits the earth, or the doctrine of Papal infallibility, that women have no souls, or that masturbation causes short-sightedness.

The True Finns might even enter the next government, with the National Coalition Party (conservative/liberal) and the Social Democrats, and are seeking similar ministerial posts as in the Parliament commissions.

To be fair, True Finns (39 seats of 200 MPs) are a very diverse crowd, a strange composition of populists, with a considerable part belonging more to the left populists than right, especially on economic policies (this might effect Portugal bailout issues in EU). Most of the True Finns are not as clearly racist as the Swedish Democrats, Danish Peoples Party or the Progress Party in Norway, though they are definitely supporters of a revival of conservative values. Less than a third of them could be associated with the reactionary xenophobic right, calling for stricter controls on immigration, whose main ideologue is the above-mentioned Jussi Halla-aho (A Slavic linguist, his dissertation was on historical nominal morphology of Old Church Slavonic). A Considerable part of the True Finns comprises followers of the Finnish Rural Party, which is seen as the predecessor of the True Finns.  The Finnish Rural Party was a traditional rural populist party advancing a social justice agenda against elites. MEP Timo Soini, a charismatic chair-person and the absolute leader of the True Finns, the only force keeping the party together, is a former Finnish Rural Party political secretary.

Lastly, one has to keep in mind, that in these Parliamentary elections the Left did very well in Helsinki (doubled seats), and is radically changing and growing fast. Left alliance chair Paavo Arhinmäki had most votes in Helsinki district and did clearly beat Jussi Hallo-aho. Nationally the Left alliance lost seats but did not do so badly as expected and got 8.3 % of the votes. The Greens lost nastily (they lost 5 seats, and got 7.2% of votes), certainly due to their neoliberal policies in the government. The Social democrats also lost less than expected, with 19.1% of votes.

In conclusion, (and this has not been recognized by the international media about the Finnish elections), it were the government parties which were the major losers (central and coalition parties + greens). The Real Finns landslide victory is mostly a protest against government (and EU) neoliberal policies – unfortunately, we will now witness very nasty collateral effects in the form of Halla-aho xenophobic crowd.

by Teivo Teivainen, 9 March 2011

Some busy time has passed since the International Council meeting of the World Social Forum, held immediately after the WSF in Dakar in February 2011. One of the key open questions for the future of the process is where to organize the WSF 2013. It was mostly assumed that the process has gotten new energies with the Dakar experience and that there should be a global WSF event in 2013, maintaining the two-year periodicity we have had for a while.

As could be expected, no decision was made on this question during the IC meeting. There were some “candidates”, and even if it is somewhat uncomfortable to talk about the process as if it were a question of choosing the site for Olympic Games, we are now facing a process of proposals and assessments.

The key possible sites that were mentioned were Porto Alegre, Galicia and Montreal. Other places were also mentioned in informal discussions (example included “new Tunisia”, Barcelona, somewhere in East Asia, India, and the United States), but the three seemed the most serious proposals, with some preparatory work behind them. One new thing is that we are now seriously discussing the possibility to organize the WSF somewhere in the global north.

The Expansion Commission of the IC, in which I have been relatively active over the years, was given the task of preparing a report on the question. As I will be visiting Canada a couple of times this Spring, including the International Studies Association meeting next week in Montreal, I was assigned some of the responsibilities for following the Montreal proposal. I have agreed to meet some of the key proponents of the WSF 2013 there (e.g. from the organization Alternatives (http://www.alterinter.org/article2505.html), and also people critical of the proposal (from anarchist/autonomous activism).

For the time being, I do not have any personal position on where the WSF 2013 should be organized. I would be most grateful for all proposals on what kinds of things we should take into account when assessing whether it might be a good idea to organize the WSF 2013 in
Montreal or somewhere else.

This text was originally part of a message to the e-mail list of the Network Institute for Global Democratization on 8 March 2011

by Giuseppe Caruso

Dear all,

Giuseppe

by Immanuel Wallerstein

Feb. 15, 2011

The World Social Forum (WSF) is alive and well. It just met in Dakar, Senegal from Feb. 6-11. By unforeseen coincidence, this was the week of the Egyptian people’s successful dethroning of Hosni Mubarak, which finally succeeded just as the WSF was in its closing session. The WSF spent the week cheering the Egyptians on – and discussing the meaning of the Tunisian/Egyptian revolutions for their program of transformation, for achieving another world that is possible – possible, not certain.

Somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 people  attended the Forum, which is in itself a remarkable number. To hold such an event, the WSF requires strong local social movements (which exist in Senegal) and a government that at least tolerates the holding of the Forum. The Senegalese government of Abdoulaye Wade was ready to “tolerate” the holding of the WSF, although already a few months ago it reneged on its promised financial assistance by three-quarters.

But then came the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings, and the government got cold feet. What if the presence of the WSF inspired a similar uprising in Senegal? The government couldn’t cancel the affair, not with Lula of Brazil, Morales of Bolivia, and numerous African presidents coming. So it did the next best thing.

It tried to sabotage the Forum. It did this by firing the Rector of the principal university where the Forum was being held, four days before the opening, and installing a new Rector, who promptly reversed the decision of the previous Rector to suspend classes during the WSF so that meeting rooms be available.

The result was organizational chaos for at least the first two days. In the end, the new Rector permitted the use of 40 of the more than 170 rooms needed. The organizers imaginatively set up tents across the campus, and the meeting proceeded despite the sabotage.

Was the Senegalese government right to be so frightened of the WSF? The WSF itself debated how relevant it was to popular uprisings in the Arab world and elsewhere, undertaken by people who had probably never heard of the WSF? The answer given by those in attendance reflected the long-standing division in its ranks. There were those who felt that ten years of WSF meetings had contributed significantly to the undermining of the legitimacy of neoliberal globalization, and that the message had seeped down everywhere. And there were those who felt that the uprisings showed that transformational politics lay elsewhere than in the WSF.

I myself found two striking things about the Dakar meeting. The first was that hardly anyone even mentioned the World Economic Forum at Davos.

When the WSF was founded in 2001, it was founded as the anti-Davos. By 2011, Davos seemed so unimportant politically to those present that it was simply ignored.

The second was the degree to which everyone present noted the interconnection of all issues under discussion. In 2001, the WSF was primarily concerned with the negative economic consequences of neoliberalism. But at each meeting thereafter the WSF added other concerns – gender, environment (and particularly climate change), racism, health, the rights of indigenous peoples, labor struggles, human rights, access to water, food and energy availability. And suddenly at Dakar, no matter what was the theme of the session, its connections with the other concerns came to the fore. This it seems to me has been the great achievement of the WSF – to embrace more and more concerns and get everyone to see their intimate interconnections.

There was nonetheless one underlying complaint among those in attendance. People said correctly we all know what we’re against, but we should be laying out more clearly what it is we are for.

This is what we can contribute to the Egyptian revolution and to the others that are going to come everywhere. The problem is that there remains one unresolved difference among those who want another world.

There are those who believe that what the world needs is more development, more modernization, and thereby the possibility of more equal distribution of resources. And there are those who believe that development and modernization are the civilizational curse of capitalism and that we need to rethink the basic cultural premises of a future world, which they call civilizational change.

Those who call for civilizational change do it under various umbrellas. There are the indigenous movements of the Americas (and elsewhere) who say they want a world based on what the Latin Americans call “buen vivir” – essentially a world based on good values, one that requires the slowing down of unlimited economic growth which, they say, the planet is too small to sustain.

If the indigenous movements center their demands around autonomy in order to control land rights in their communities, there are urban movements in other parts of the world who emphasize the ways in which unlimited growth is leading to climate disaster and new pandemics. And there are feminist movements who are underlining the link between the demands for unlimited growth and the maintenance of patriarchy.

This debate about a “civilizational crisis” has great implications for the kind of political action one endorses and the kind of role left parties seeking state power would play in the world transformation under discussion. It will not be easily resolved. But it is the crucial debate of the coming decade. If the left cannot resolve its differences on this key issue, then the collapse of the capitalist world-economy could well lead to a triumph of the world right and the construction of a new world-system worse even than the existing one.

For the moment, all eyes are on the Arab world and the degree to which the heroic efforts of the Egyptian people will transform politics throughout the Arab world. But the tinder for such uprisings exists everywhere, even in the wealthier regions of the world. As of the moment, we are justified in being semi-optimistic.

Prof. Immanuel Wallerstein

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