ONE NO, MANY YESES

In 1857, Frederick Douglass, ex-slave and abolitionist, wrote: ' If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favour freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without ploughing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters…Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will'. Two generations on, Mahatmi Gandhi echoed this point when he said: ' First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they attack you. Then you win'. This roller coaster of a book is about the emerging movement that is challenging the legitimacy of our existing global institutions. Paul Kingsnorth travelled the world, talking to groups of local activists and taking part in various events surrounding world trade talks. The opening quotation gets to the heart of the issue: reform or revolution?

There are well-rehearsed arguments on both sides. Reform is a cop-out, revolution is too extreme and unrealistic. And yet, when it comes to the raw dynamics of power, some degree of struggle and confrontation (even if non-violent) is inevitable. Kingsnorth shows how the era of globalisation has led to growing inequality both between and within nations. Moreover, the American dream of happiness through consumption is a mirage, a charade orchestrated by a diminishing number of media companies who in any event do not report the real news. The One No of the title is No to a continuation of present trends, while the many Yeses represent the diversity of alternatives to the existing monoculture intent on opening up new markets. One of the structural problems is that this monoculture is backed by the leading financial institutions such as the IMF, World Bank and WTO. The movement is characterised as 'anti-capitalist' and 'anti-globalisation' when in fact it stands for democracy, diversity, equity and environmental health. This is the underlying agenda of the World Social Forum, which puts people before economics.

At the end of his book, Kingsnorth asks what is to be done? He comes down unashamedly on the side of revolution, backing up Douglass when he says that 'power is never given, it is always taken'. It is possible to enumerate some of the principles and values that drive the movement, such as those mentioned in the previous paragraph, to which one might add autonomy, local participation, redistribution of wealth and power, decentralisation and an economy that is a subset of ecology. Perhaps decentralisation is the key word in that, politically, it implies the other key principles of participation, democracy and local autonomy. Uniquely, the WSF is not about transferring power between elites, as has happened in the past, but about overcoming the exclusion, division and dependency endemic in the current systems.

Kingsnorth proposes a number of measures or goals for the movement: abolition of the WTO, IMF and World Bank, regulation of global capital movements, reprogramming corporations currently designed to concentrate on growth and profits, recreate the UN and rethink the Commons to overcome the tendency to privatise and commodify. Is this a realistic possibility? Well, we know that turkeys do not vote for Christmas so the only hope is 'a worldwide popular movement with mass support and growing numbers'. This in turn means vision, courage and political will. So it becomes a question at both an individual and collective level. As the WSF maintains, 'another world is possible' but 'we the people' are the only ones who can help make it happen. It is the ultimate test for democracy since the health of the planet as well as that of its inhabitants is at stake. One can make a start by following up the web action stations at the back of the book.