Ferocious debates were held on the role of Islam in this renewed society, the liberation of women and sexuality, imperialism and trade unionism – not to mention debates which got completely out of hand on Western Sahara and Syria. At any point on any day, half a dozen impromptu demonstrations were held on a variety of subjects, mostly to the sound of revolutionary hip hop.

The forum was plastered with pictures of anti-imperialist ‘heroes’, some more savoury than others. Pride of place was taken by Chokri Belaid, the left-wing opposition leader assassinated only weeks before the forum was held. Belaid pulled together a range of parties and factions into the Popular Front and gave many activists here hope in a radical future government.

The fundamentalist Islamic Salafist group also made an appearance to argue their case against the secular radicals. Among the more unusual stalls were those of the Iranian government, Brazilian oil company Petrobras and USAID (the latter left rather quickly after a demonstration against them).

In the youth space – constructed of tents previously donated by the UN – three stages played host to a range a music, from electronic Arabic folk to three self-conscious looking teenagers playing alternative rock covers (with pretty good guitar work).

Alive with ideas

For all of Tunis’ laid back, French ambience – a world away from the noise, pollution and confusion of Cairo – Tunisia’s youth are alive with ideas, and don’t fit neatly into any expectations you might have of them.

For debt activists, Tunisia has particular interest, owing to its national assembly’s decision to audit the debts run up under dictator Ben Ali. This is a direct challenge to France and the IMF, eager to make new loans to the government to allow it to repay and recycle the odious debt of the past, and use these new loans to impose economic conditions on Tunisia. An IMF package is believed to be in the final stages of being discussed – a debt audit provides the first step in a very different direction.

The politics of the potential audit are made all the more exciting by the offer of help from Ecuador, the country which held the first official debt audit in the world and used the audit to declare its debt illegitimate and secure a multi-billion dollar write-off. Ecuador’s government has recently declared another audit, of its investment treaties which often act as ‘corporate rights’ charters, preventing the government interfering in the profit-making of transnational corporations in order to protect peoples’ rights.

For Tunisia to follow some of Ecuador’s policies would be a real nail in the coffin of neoliberal economics. It would also be a blow to the French government, already smarting at Tunisia’s refusal to allow its airspace to be used for the French war in Mali. But nothing is certain here. Many activists express real frustration that things have not moved faster.

Rethinking and updating

By contrast with the Tunisian energy, the ‘non-Tunisian’ World Social Forum (the bit of the event where many European, Latin American and Asian activists spent much of their time) felt bland and well past its sell by date. Geographically somewhat separated from the area where most Magreb issues were discussed (a problem created by the organisers), the space was more like a giant policy seminar than the vibrant coming together of activists and groups intended.

The World Social Forum was initiated in 2001, an expression of the anti-globalisation movement – which brought unaccountable institutions of global ‘government’ like the IMF and WTO into the mainstream of protest – as a way of bringing people together to forge new alliances and strategies for change.

Today, too many sessions are dominated by the same speakers who have been making the same speeches for 15 years, with little progress made on reaching out to new movements and building comprehensive alternatives, despite a constant refrain that ‘we need to better connect up’ our issues and organisations. Even within the international section, language and national groups often stuck together. One astonishing meeting looking at the European Central Bank was dominated by German activists who didn’t even mention the crisis in Greece.

The World Social Forum was formed long before the movements of the Indignados or Occupy, with their focus on participative decision-making and ‘taking politics to public spaces’. Probably the best aspect of this WSF was the handing over of an outside space to a group of international activists from Occupy and the Indignados, working with local groups, as the Global Squares Movement.

Starting off as a European hub, the space became more and more Tunisian, eventually moving to the centre of town where an assembly of thousands of people came together, the vast majority of contributions being in Arabic.

During the lifetime of the World Social Forum, very significant victories have been won by the networks formed and nurtured here. The World Trade Organisation and the Free Trade Area of the Americas were stopped in their tracks. Food sovereignty and a ban on genetic modification are now enshrined in many countries constitutions. The right to water and the rights of peasants are now recognised by the UN.

Yet despite these victories, we face a mountain of injustice, with crises of the environment, of the economy, of militarism and war, in many ways worse than they were 15 years ago. As new revolutions bring a new generation of activists into the global justice movement, the WSF needs a major rethink to equip it for these challenges. More focus on participation, on planning, on open spaces, on genuine learning rather than regurgitating truisms. At a national level there needs to be a better way of ensuring new activists can come and take control of the forum – a limit on how often any one individual can attend would make an interesting guideline.

Activists should look forward to the continuing of the revolution in Tunisia and the start of the revolution in the World Social Forum.

Across Latin America social movements are starting to reclaim their societies and economies from the grips of Western control. Radical experiments in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela, for instance, have fostered participatory budgets, alternative development banks, trade based on redistribution from rich to poor. Poverty and inequality have plummeted as a result.

By contrast the harsh poverty of Guatemala seems a world away. In the rural highlands, the indigenous Maya form the majority of the population. Faced with racism and even violence, close to 75 per cent of them are impoverished. While elsewhere in Latin America, poverty has fallen by 12.5 per cent in the last 10 years, in Guatemala it has increased despite strong economic growth rates.

The problem is that Guatemala is enmeshed in a form of so-called ‘development’ that has ensured its economy remains locked in economic dependence on the West, especially the United States, whatever the cost to its people. And that cost has been mind-boggling, with Guatemala being turned, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, into something akin to a real life horror film.

To mark International Human Rights Day Jubilee Debt Campaign has launched a report analysing the extent to which Western-backed institutions like the World Bank supported one of the worst regimes of the twentieth century here. Even by the standards of international lending, it makes for sobering reading.

A century of fruit and domination

In the early part of the twentieth century, the US-based United Fruit Company treated Guatemala as corporate fiefdom, controlling the main port, railways, postal and telegraph systems.

In the 1940s Guatemala embarked on the only genuine development programme the country has ever seen – tens years of democracy which began to extend healthcare, education and social security across the country. When that programme involved taxing United Fruit, which several members of the Eisenhower Administration were closely connected to, and expropriating its unused land the CIA launched a coup.

The coup, documented in Stephen Schlesinger’s must-read ‘Bitter Fruit’, ushered in decades of repressive government, swiftly undoing the progressive reforms. Che Guevara, living in Guatemala at the time, based much of his future strategy on the inability of Arbenz’s government to stand up to US aggression. Many Guatemalans learned a similar lesson and a series of guerrilla armies arose in the face of state repression, and developed close links with the impoverished rural dwellers.

In the late 1970s state terror turned into genocide. Trade unions, social movements and opposition parties were systematically targeted. The leader of the trade union centre (CNT), two of the most prominent social democratic leaders, and the head of the university students association were assassinated.

Meanwhile, in the countryside, the state initiated all-out war against the Mayan population. The ‘scorched earth’ policies of the brutal dictator Rios Montt in 1982 were part of this effort. Whole villages were massacred in what has been described as a ‘grisly holocaust’.

Supporting the terror

The US government gave generous support to Guatemala from 1954 onwards, but as things started intensify in the 1970s, more arms-length institutional lenders like the World Bank started to move in.

It seems incredible that institutions committed to ‘development’ would support regimes who were literally wiping out sections of the population, but then they’ve always had a very different take on what exactly development is.

In the early 1970s Guatemala’s debt was relatively stable, reaching $120million in 1974. Thereafter, debt increased rapidly – by at least $100million a year in 1978, 1979 and 1980, and then over $250million a year in 1981 and 1982 at the very height of the terror. By 1985 the country’s debt had reached $2.2billion – an increase of over $2billion in 10 years.

The majority of this debt came from public ‘banks’ like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and Inter-American Development Bank. The proportion of money coming from these public institutions rose to over 70 per cent from 1977 until 1980. By the time the peace agreement was signed in 1997, Guatemala was repaying these institutions nearly $130million a year.

One particular project stands out above others: the Chixoy Dam. Supported by the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank from 1978, the dam was built close to Rio Negro in the highlands, an area particularly targeted by the terror campaign. The creation of the dam entailed the flooding of lands to build a reservoir which in turn meant many communities would have to be evicted.

Campaign groups such as International Rivers have detailed the way that local opposition was met with ever fiercer repression from the armed forces. Then, on 12 February 1982, around 70 community members were murdered in the first of four massacres. In coming weeks more than 400 of their women and children were massacred because of their opposition to the dam.

For the survivors the ordeal didn’t end there, as soldiers returned to Rio Negro, burning homes and possessions, killing animals and destroying crops. Barbara Rose Johnston of the Center for Political Ecology records that: ‘Survivors were hunted in the surrounding hills, and forcibly resettled at gunpoint…While resettlement villages were eventually built, the original development plans were discarded and a militarized guarded compound was built in its place.’

Certainly the banks were essential to the project going ahead, but did they understand what they were funding? Campaign group Rights Action says: ‘not to have known at the time about the violence and repression at Rio Negro would have required an extraordinary and sustained dedication to ignorance on the part of World Bank officials.’

The Bank did nothing to stop the project once the atrocities started. In fact, they supported a second project in 1986, making no mention of the massacre.

The Chixoy survivors have led a brave campaign for reparations – despite being repeatedly harassed and criminalised, even after the ‘war’ was brought to an end. There is widespread acceptance – even by the banks – that reparations should be paid. But nothing has been forthcoming.

More ‘development’ for Guatemala

Guatemala remains beset by violence. Assassinations of political activists, journalists and labour leaders continue. Poverty is highly concentrated among indigenous communities. And Guatemala continues to play its vital role in the global economy – as an exporter of fruit and increasingly of metals.

Today Guatemala is in the middle of a new wave of ‘development’. The opening of mines and the building of dams is adding to Guatemala’s growth rate, but doing less than nothing for communities who live on the land where the projects are being built.

A staggering amount of extraction is planned in Guatemala in coming years. In 2007, the government approved 370 mining licences, with 300 more waiting. The Ministry of Energy and Mines says mining revenues have soared from $9 million in 2004 to $522 million in 2010.

In 2004, the International Finance Corporation, a branch of the World Bank, gave $45 million to Goldcorp for work on the Marlin Gold Mine. After activists protested the mining operations, 1 person was killed by security forces and many more injured. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has called on the government to suspend operations at the mine on the basis of complaints about serious pollution.

The mines need dams to provide them with power. The Xalala Dam is being constructed on the Chixoy River, downstream from the existing Chixoy Dam. Local activists are convinced that the project will benefit the mining projects, while local communities will suffer. International Rivers claims that the Xalala Dam would displace more than 2,000 people and impact the livelihoods of 14,000 people.

Local communities are fighting back. Across the north of the country it is impossible to miss the opposition to mining. One tactic regularly used is community referenda – a way of re-engaging local communities in struggles. Of the 58 held since 2005, not one has come out in favour of mining. A 2007 referendum organised on Xalala saw 90 per cent of people reject the dam. Not that the government is listening.

This resistance shouldn’t be under-estimated in a country devastated by of violence. Nor should the importance of the opening of the trial of former dictator Rios Montt, for genocide and crimes against humanity, after years of immunity while he remained in Congress.

Unfortunately the governments and institutions that stood behind Montt (Regan called him ‘a man of great personal integrity and commitment’ who ‘wants to improve the quality of life for all Guatemalans’) have not been brought to trial for their role in the terror.

Justice for Guatemala today means supporting those communities still fighting for reparations – and those fighting against the mining projects and dams which have promised so much for the people of the country, and deliver only further impoverishment. It also means fighting the notion that the development banks have ‘changed’ or that what happened in Guatemala was an aberration. Certainly it was extreme, but it flows out of a vision of development which seems Orwellian in its perversity. Their development is not our development.

To take action and find out about more organisations supporting the fight for justice in Guatemala go to: Jubilee Debt Campaign.

On 15 October 1987 a revolution was brought to an abrupt and bloody end by the murder of Thomas Sankara, President of the newly named state of Burkina Faso. In the years following Sankara’s assassination, by his once trusted friend Blaise Compaoré who runs Burkina Faso to this day, his revolution was overturned and the country became just another African fiefdom of the International Monetary Fund. But for a brief period of 4 years, Burkina Faso shone brightly, a stunning example of what can be achieved even in one of the world’s most impoverished countries.

Sankara was a junior officer in the army of Upper Volta, a former French colony which was run as a source of cheap labour for neighbouring Cote d’Ivoire to benefit a tiny ruling class and their patrons in Paris. As a student in Madagascar, Sankara had been radicalised by waves of demonstrations and strikes taking place. In 1981, he was appointed to the military government in Upper Volta, but his outspoken support for the liberation of ordinary people in his country and outside eventually led to his arrest. In August 1983, a successful coup led by his friend Blaise Compaoré, brought him to power at the age of only 33.

Sankara saw his government as part of a wider process of the liberation of his people. Immediately he called for mobilisations and committees to defend the revolution. These committees became the cornerstone of popular participation in power. Political parties on the other hand were dissolved, seen by Sankara as representatives of the forces of the old regime. In 1984, Sankara renamed the country Burkina Faso (land of people of integrity).

Sankara purged corruption from the government, slashing ministerial salaries and adopting a simpler approach to life. Journalist Paula Akugizibwe says Sankara “rode a bicycle to work before he upgraded, at his Cabinet’s insistence, to a Renault 5 – one of the cheapest cars available in Burkina Faso at the time. He lived in a small brick house and wore only cotton that was produced, weaved and sewn in Burkina Faso.”

In fact the adoption of local clothes and local foods was central to Sankara’s economic strategy to break the country from the domination of the West. He famously said:

“’Where is imperialism?” Look at your plates when you eat. These imported grains of rice, corn, and millet – that is imperialism.”

His solution was to grow food – “Let us consume only what we ourselves control!” The results were incredible: self-sufficiency in 4 years. Former UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Jean Ziegler says that a combination of massive land distribution, fertiliser and irrigation saw agricultural productivity boom; “hunger was a thing of the past”.

Similar gains were made in health, with the immunisation of millions of children, and education in a country which had had over 90% illiteracy. Basic infrastructure was built to connect the country. Resources were nationalised, local industry was supported. Millions of trees were planted in an attempt to stop desertification. All of this involved a huge mobilisation of Burkina Faso’s people, who began to build their country with their own hands, something Sankara saw as essential.

There have been few revolutionary leaders who have placed such emphasis on women’s liberation as Sankara. He saw the emancipation of women as vital to breaking the hold of the feudal system on the country. This included recruiting women into all professions, including the military and the government. It entailed ending the pressure on women to marry. And it meant involving women centrally in the grassroots revolutionary mobilisation. “We do not talk of women’s emancipation as an act of charity or out of a surge of human compassion. It is a basic necessity for the revolution to triumph.” He saw the struggle of Burkina Faso’s women as “part of the worldwide struggle of all women”.

Sankara was more than a visionary national leader – perhaps of most interest to us today is the way he used international conferences as platforms to demand leaders stand up against the deep structural injustices faced by countries like Burkina Faso. In the mid 1980s, that meant speaking out on the question of debt.

Sankara used a conference of the Organisation of African Unity in 1987 to persuade fellow African leaders to repudiate their debts. He told delegates: “Debt is a cleverly managed reconquest of Africa. It is a reconquest that turns each one of us into a financial slave.” Seeing these same leaders go off one-by-one to Western governments to get a slight restructuring of their debt, he urged common, public action that would free all of Africa from domination. “If Burkina Faso alone were to refuse to pay the debt, I wouldn’t be at the next conference.” Unfortunately, he wasn’t to be.

Of course not everything Sankara tried worked. Most controversially was his response to a teachers strike, when he sacked thousands of teachers, replacing them with an army of citizens teachers who were often completely unqualified. Sankara’s system of revolutionary courts were abused by those with personal grievances. He banned trade unions as well as political parties.

Some of these measures, combined with break-neck social transformation, provided space for his enemies. Sankara was assassinated in a coup carried out by Blaise Compaoré. It seems clear there was outside support, including of French stooge President Félix Houphouët-Boigny of Cote d’Ivoire. Sankara’s revolution was rolled back by his one time associate, and Burkina Faso became another African country whose economy becomes synonymous with poverty and helplessness.

Today Sankara is not well known outside Africa – his character and ideas simply don’t fit with the notion of Africa which has been constructed in the West over the last 30 years. It would be difficult to find a less corrupt, self-serving leader than Thomas Sankara anywhere in the world. But neither does he fit the image charities like to portray of the ‘deserving poor’ in Africa. Sankara was clear on the role of Western aid, just as he was clear on the role of debt in controlling Africa:

“The root of the disease was political. The treatment could only be political. Of course, we encourage aid that aids us in doing away with aid. But in general, welfare and aid policies have only ended up disorganizing us, subjugating us, and robbing us of a sense of responsibility for our own economic, political, and cultural affairs. We chose to risk new paths to achieve greater well-being.”

The improvement in the lives of Burkina Faso’s people was astounding as a result of Sankara’s policies, yet he wouldn’t be surprised to learn that these policies have been systematically undermined by Western governments and agencies claiming to want exactly these improvements themselves.

Perhaps today, Sankara’s words are most relevant to our own crisis in Europe. They are echoed by those in Greece, Portugal, Spain and Ireland who have heard little of him:

“Those who led us into debt were gambling, as if they were in a casino.. there is talk of a crisis. No. They gambled. They lost… We cannot repay the debt because we have nothing to pay it with. We cannot repay the debt because it is not our responsibility.”

Thomas Sankara had great belief in people – not just the people of Burkina Faso or Africa, but people across the world. He believed change must be creative, nonconformist – indeed containing “a certain amount of madness”. He believed radical change would only come when people were convinced and active, not passive and conquered. And he believed the solution is political – not one of charity. Surely Sankara has never been more relevant to our quest for justice in Europe and the world.

Jubilee Debt Campaign are asking people to join them in remembering Thomas Sankara. Tweet about Sankara using #thomassankara.

Samir Amin’s ideas were formed in the heady ferment of 1950s and ’60s when pan-Africanists like Kwamah Nkrumah ran Ghana and Juliuys Nyrere Tanzania, when General Nasser was transforming the Middle East from Amin’s native Egypt and liberation movements thrived from South Africa to Algeria.

Africa looked very different before the International Monetary Fund destroyed what progress had been made towards emancipation and LiveAid created a popular conception of a continent of famine and fecklessness. Yet through these times, Amin’s ideas have continued to shine out, denouncing the inhumanity of contemporary capitalism and empire, but also harshly critiquing movements from political Islam to Eurocentric Marxism and its marginalisation of the truly dispossessed.

Global power

Amin believes that the world capitalism – a rule of oligopolies based in the rich world – maintains its rule through five monopolies – control of technology, access to natural resources, finance, global media, and the means of mass destruction. Only by overturning these monopolies can real progress be made.

This raises particular challenges for those of us who are activists in the North because any change we promote must challenge the privileges of the North vis-à-vis the South. Our internationalism cannot be expressed through a type of humanitarian approach to the global South – that countries in the South need our ‘help to develop’. For Amin, any form of international work must be based on an explicitly anti-imperialist perspective. Anything else will fail to challenge structure of power – those monopolies which really keep the powerful powerful.

Along with colleagues like Andre Gunder Frank, Amin see the world divided into the ‘centre’ and the ‘peripheries’. The role of peripheries, those countries we call the global South, is to supply the centres – specifically the ‘Triad’ of North America, Western Europe and Japan – with the means of developing without being able to develop themselves. Most obviously, the exploitation of Africa’s minerals on terms of trade starkly favourable to the centre will never allow African liberation, only continual exploitation.

This flies in the face of so much ‘development thinking’ which would have you believe that Africa’s problems come from not being properly integrated into the global economy which has grown up over the last 40 years. Amin believes in fact Africa’s problem stem from it being too integrated but in ‘the wrong way’.

In fact, as long as the monopolies of control are intact, countries of the centre have had few problems globalising production since the 1970s. Sweatshop labour now takes place across the periphery but it hasn’t challenged the power of those in the North because of their control of finance, natural resources, the military and so on. In fact, it has enhanced their power by reducing wages and destroying a manufacturing sector that had become a power base for unionised workers.

So there is no point whatever in asking countries of the centre to concede better trading relationships to the peripheries. Amin is also concerned at environmental activism which too often becomes a debate about how countries of the centre manage their control of the world’s resources, rather than challenging that control. It is vital that Northern activists challenge the means through which the ruling class in their own society exerts control over the rest of the world.

De-linking

Of course, this is not just a project for activists in the North – far from it. The theory for which Amin is most famous that of ‘de-linking’.

De-linking means countries of the periphery withdrawing from their exploitative integration in the global economy. In a sense it is de-globalisation, but it is not a form of economic isolation – something which African socialist leaders too readily fell into. Rather it means not engaging in economic relationships from a point of weakness.

Amin argues that Southern countries should develop their economy through various forms of state intervention, control of money flowing in an out of their financial sectors and promoting trading with other Southern countries. Countries must nationalise financial sectors, strongly regulate natural resources, ‘de-link’ internal prices from the world market, and free themselves from control by international institutions like the World Trade Organisation. Whatever problems come with nationalised industries, it is the only possible basis for a genuinely socially controlled economy going forward.

After 30 years of being told that their problems would be solved by exporting more, privatising their natural resources and liberalising their financial sectors, many developing countries would today do well to heed Amin’s advice. Instead, too many countries have bought into a de-politicised narrative which posits ideologically loaded terms like ‘good governance’, ‘poverty’ and ‘civil society’ carefully disguising questions as to how poverty happened, what interests governance serves, or the legitimacy of organisations claiming to speak on behalf of the dispossessed.

Amin does not believes that the ‘rise’ of China, India and other emerging economies has in any way broken the power of the oligopolies, in fact that power has only become more concentrated. But there have been important changes. Imperialist powers have realised competition between themselves is not helpful and have created a sort of collective imperialism which is expressed through institutions like the WTO and IMF.

Capitalism, ‘a parenthesis in history’

Capitalism is experiencing a profound long-term crisis to which Amin believes it has no solution short of political barbarism. He describes this form of capitalism as ‘senile’.

This crisis is characterised by an increased dependence on finance, which means less and less money is being made from productive activities, and more from simple ‘rent’. It is a far more direct means of stealing wealth from the majority of the world. The accompanying form of politics means that democracy has been reduced to a farce in which people are spectators in an elite drama – that is when they’re not fulfilling their proper role of consuming.

Capitalism necessarily requires an ongoing process of dispossession so that it can accumulate and continue to expand. Capitalism could not have developed without the European conquest of the world – the availability so many ‘spare’ resources was vital. The safety value for many of those dispossessed from European land was the ‘new world’ which allowed mass emigration – though of course others died in droves, witness the Irish potato famine.

So as much as many of the dispossessed might aspire to the lives of those in advanced capitalist countries, it is simply not possible. Nor can traditional Marxists be correct when they say capitalism is a necessary stage on the path to socialism – a view which Amin describes as ‘Eurocentric’.

Industry cannot incorporate more than a small fraction of humanity, but it does require the resources that that humanity depends upon. So the only way that capitalism can move forward is through the creation of a ‘slum planet’ – a sort of ‘apartheid at the world level’. Amin sees the dispossession of the peasantry across the peripheral countries will become the central issue of the twenty-first century.

This is one reason why Amin see the role of the peasantry in the South – almost half of humanity after all – as key to determining the future. The strength of movements around food sovereignty, against land grabbing and supporting the rights of indigenous peoples, give support to this theory. But for Amin, agriculture is not merely a big opportunity, the existence of the peasantry presents capitalism with an insurmountable challenge.

Amin believes the road to socialism depends on reversing this trend of dispossession meaning, at national and regional levels, protecting local agricultural production, ensuring countries’ have food sovereignty and de-linking internal prices from world commodity markets. This would stop the dispossession of peasants and their exodus into the towns.

Only this revolution in the way the land is seen, treated and access can lay the basis for a new society. This also means ditching the idea of ‘growth’ as it is spoken about today and by which all world economies are judged, which really benefits only a minority of the world population. The rest of humanity is “abandoned to stagnation, if not pauperisation”.

The long road to socialism

Perhaps this makes Samir Amin sounds rather idealistic in his approach, but this is far from true. Amin explicitly rejects the idea of a ‘24 hour revolution’ – a single insurrectionary act which ushers in a period of socialism. Indeed he accepts there may well be a need to use private, even international capital, in order to diversify Southern economies. The important thing is control. For this reason Amin also refuses to use the phrase “socialism of the 21st century” focussing on the need for “the long route of the transition to socialism”.

But that’s not to say there have not been significant victories. Interestingly, Amin is less interested in developments in Latin America, which he believes contain risks of repeating the mistakes of many national liberation movements on the 1950s and 60s in becoming a form of “popular statism”.

Amin is more interested in Nepal as an possible future model to look towards. He also sees the Chinese revolution as an incredibly significant event in directly challenging the basis of capitalism and in the struggle for democratic socialism, most especially in its “abolition of the private property of land” and the formation of powerful communes and collectives.

Amin’s somewhat romantic view of the Chinese revolution is certainly challenging to Western sensibilities, but his underlying view that the formation of democracy must go beyond a narrow political project, and that peasants – and especially women – through collective organisations, might be better placed than Western individualists to define a really progressive vision of democracy needs to be properly taken on board by activists.

Enlightenment

Perhaps Amin’s central thesis is somewhat obvious, but it’s often forgotten – that a true revolution must be based on those who are being dispossessed and impoverished. But he goes further in undermining the assumption that any thinking emerging from the South will lack enlightenment, or that a lack of enlightenment should be excused.

He believes the Enlightenment was humanity’s first step towards democracy, liberating us from the idea that God created our activity. He has caused controversy in his utter rejection of political Islam. This ideology, embedded for example in Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, obscures the real nature of society, including by playing into the idea that the world consists of different cultural groups which conflict with each other, an idea which helps the centre control the peripheries.

Amin’s view is that organisations like the Muslim Brotherhood, with their cultural and economic conservatism, are actually viewed positively by the US and other imperialist governments. And he doesn’t limit his critique to Islam either, launching similar criticism on political Hinduism practiced by the BJP in India and Political Buddhism, expressed through the Dalai Lama.

Creative Marxism

Samir Amin decribes himself as a ‘creative Marxist’ – “to begin from Marx but not to end with him or with Lenin or Mao” – which incorporates all manner of critical ways of thinking even ones “which were wrongly considered to be ‘alien’ by the dogmas of the historical Marxism of the past.”

These views are surely more relevant today than when Amin started writing. A creative Marxism takes proper account of the perspective and aspirations of the truly dispossessed in the world, break out of historical dogmas and rejects attempts to stick together a broken model, but equally sees the impossibility of overthrowing this model tomorrow. Fortunately Amin seems more prolific than ever – and well worth the read.

The economic crisis has led activists in countries such as Greece and Ireland to look to developing countries for models of how to fight an all-powerful, self-serving financial system that forces ordinary people to pay the price for its failures. From Dublin to Harare, the call for ‘debt audits’ is being taken up as a vital first step towards educating and mobilising people against an unjust financial system that benefits the few at the expense of the many.

Here, Nick Dearden introduces the history and significance of the campaign for debt audits, then Alan Cibils from Argentina, Maria Lucia Fattorelli from Brazil and Andy Storey from Ireland discuss their own experiences of debt audits and debt defaults, and examine the lessons for economic justice activists.

The first wave of the banking crisis is over. Banks successfully passed their losses onto the public and their profits are once again ‘healthy’. They are now looking to governments to repeat the same trick for them. Greece, Ireland and Portugal are suffering ‘structural adjustment’ policies so that public money keeps flowing to the institutions whose behaviour created the global economic crisis.
Across Europe, and particularly in Greece, people are fighting back – but not simply over the question of ‘who picks up the tab’. They are engaged in a struggle for democracy in its true sense, for an economic system based on a radically different set of values. And they are using models developed by social movements in Southern countries to begin the necessary process of education and empowerment.
Answering tyranny with knowledge
One idea that has fuelled the imagination of activists in Greece and Ireland is for a ‘debt audit’, to throw open their countries’ finances to public examination and analysis. A launch conference was attended by hundreds of people in Athens in May and has united a good portion of the notoriously fractured Greek left. The call has subsequently been taken up by activists in Ireland, with further interest in Spain, Portugal and even the UK.
Sofia Sakorafa is a dissident Greek MP, a former member of the Greek government who quit her party after refusing to sign up to the first ‘bailout’ package in 2010. She believes ‘the answer to tyranny, oppression, violence and abuse is knowledge’ – that public understanding of how the crisis came about, what Greeks are paying and to whom, will help to convince people of the moral bankruptcy of the current financial system and re-ignite a sense of ownership over their economy.
Sakorafa is clear that this is a battle for different values: ‘Beyond speculating market games, there are more valuable concepts. There are people, there is history, there is culture, there is decency.’ The crisis will not be solved by the odd piece of legislation but by a transformation of how individuals and communities relate to power.
The history of the debt audit
The idea of debt audits arose from Southern campaigners with decades of experience in fighting against the capture of their societies by Northern financial interests. After all, the problems of Europe today are a repetition of an old story. Controlling the financial system at national and international levels was a key concern of John Maynard Keynes after he observed the impact of the ‘rule of the banks’ in the Great Depression in the 1930s. Keynes believed in policies that would encourage the ‘euthanasia of the rentier’ through government intervention and control of finance.
As that system of control broke down in the 1970s, the world economy has experienced crisis upon crisis, from the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s to the currency collapse in Indonesia and Thailand in 1997 and Argentina’s economic crisis in the early 2000s. For the financial institutions based in the North, debt has provided a means of extending the control of the financial sector. People have responded to each instance of crisis by fighting back – usually not with specific policy proposals for a softer form of financial control, but by calls for repudiation of their country’s debts and kicking out those international institutions imposing austerity.
On one level the argument for a debt audit is simply a call for transparency. If these debts are ‘ours’ then the least we can expect is to know what we are paying. But their impact goes much deeper. In the words of Irish activist Andy Storey, an audit can ‘remove the mask of financial power which pulls the strings over our economy and therefore our society’. It is particularly important in a country that has been through dictatorial rule, in unveiling how international lenders propped up the illegitimate regime. But even in European societies, it digs deep into the connections between power and finance, unveiling how and in whose interests an economy works.
Most debt audits have been done on a shoestring budget, using what information can be gleaned from freedom of information and other research. The Brazilian Citizen Debt Audit was the first such initiative in 2001. In 2006, President Correa made Ecuador the first country to hold an official audit, declaring ‘my only debt is to the people’. Despite the presidential backing, the audit was a mammoth task, which encountered constant resistance from civil servants unwilling to disclose the secrets of former regimes.
In 2008, the audit commission reported that debt had done ‘incalculable damage’ to Ecuador’s society. It uncovered numerous illegal, useless and extortionate loans that had bled the country of resources. Correa essentially defaulted on the most dubious of this debt – a set of bonds. Even the Economist called Correa ‘incorruptible’ when public spending rose as a consequence.
Activists, however, wanted him to go much further in repudiating debts. This is one of the problems of state-sponsorship of such mobilisation processes, which has also led to disappointment among activists in Argentina and Brazil as promises have not translated into broader economic transformation. Smaller official audits have been initiated, but not carried through, in Argentina and the Philippines, with more promised in Nepal and Bolivia.
Meanwhile, activists in Zimbabwe are working on an audit to show the role that lending from the IMF and World Bank, as well as Northern governments, played in the creation of crisis in that country. Once Zimbabwe is judged to have transited Mugabe’s regime, the country faces a barrage of new IMF loans with accompanying control of the economy. The debt audit is a first step to challenging this control.
Some look on debt audits as ‘reformist’ – surely the truly radical answer is for a country to simply stop paying its debts? Actually it’s not so simple. A default is not automatically progressive – look at those of Mugabe in Zimbabwe or al-Bashir in Sudan. Repudiation and default might be the best option, politically and economically, but it is not without pain. A country’s population will need to proactively take on the hardships and isolation it is likely to experience. A thorough understanding is an essential prerequisite.
People can’t be led to support a default in the mistaken belief that ‘everything will return to normal’. Things may get worse. As 28-year-old Icelander Thorgerdun Ásgeirsdóttir said after he voted to turn down the British and Dutch terms for repaying his country’s debt, ‘I know this will probably hurt us internationally, but it is worth taking a stance.’
Such an understanding is also necessary if a default is to become a genuine first step towards wider change. Argentina pulled off one of the biggest defaults in history in 2001, after years of following faulty IMF advice. Economically it worked – the economy began recovering quickly. But many activists lament the failure of the Argentinian government to build on this by creating a different form of economic development. In spite of rapid growth, poverty remains at 30 per cent, inequality is high and the majority continue to suffer from a debt-led form of ‘development’.
Audits in Europe
Clearly debt in Europe has many differences from debt in the global South. Little European debt today was run up by dictatorial regimes, and the payment of that debt will not lead to the levels of hardship experienced by truly impoverished countries. But issues of wealth and power redistribution, of who controls our society and who foots the bill for that accumulation of power, are the same everywhere.
What does the Greek audit hope to uncover? Greek academic and activist Costas Lapavitsas has said he is not certain that the bulk of Greek public debt is legal, ‘given especially that it has been contracted in direct contravention of EU treaties which state that public debt must not exceed 60 per cent of GDP’ – something the creditors were fully aware of. Some Greek debt was massaged by Goldman Sachs to hide the true extent of Greece’s liabilities. According to Lapavitsas, the bailout package itself was not contracted in accordance with normal parliamentary oversight.
We in Europe are living in a society in which financial interests have captured our governments, control our economies and eat into every aspect of our lives. They have even captured our very notion of democracy – overruling the fact that true democracy cannot really exist in a society of vastly growing wealth differentials, where bankers pull all the strings. Struggles for political democracy cannot hope to succeed separate from struggles for economic democracy. Debt audits are means of seeing democracy in a more holistic way. Their adoption could help pave the way for a genuine break with the failed economic policies of the past.
More information: Jubilee Debt Campaign www.jubileedebtcampaign.org.uk
Campaign for the Abolition of Third World Debt (French and English) www.cadtm.org

Life after default

Alan B Cibils looks at some lessons from Argentina on dealing with debt default
The current crisis in the eurozone periphery has many of the same ingredients that led to the Argentine debacle of 2001–2002: repeated bailouts making already unsustainable debt loads even more unsustainable, the IMF’s mistaken prescriptions for spending reductions, and financial market intransigence. So it may be helpful to look at the lessons from Argentina’s debt crisis – and eventual default in 2001 – to see what worked and what should be avoided.
Default is a viable option
Argentina’s experience shows that defaulting was not the disaster many predicted. Indeed, the default stopped the economy’s four-year free fall and helped put an end to unviable exchange rate and monetary policies, freeing up resources for more socially productive uses. Whether Argentina then made the best use of these resources is debatable. However, it is unquestionable that default was the correct and most efficient option given the circumstances.
The IMF does not possess the know‑how or the theoretical framework to deal with financial crises
The IMF’s ‘one size fits all’ approach to economic policy and crisis resolution has failed repeatedly and catastrophically around the world, as it is failing in Greece, Portugal, Ireland and Spain. IMF-promoted public spending cuts only deepen the recession, as any introductory macroeconomics student knows. Asian and Latin American nations have learned this lesson well. Their massive foreign reserve accumulation serves as insurance against ever having to follow IMF advice again. While reserve accumulation can be costly, it is less costly than following the IMF’s advice.
Default should be approached holistically and not exclusively as a financial issue
Ideally, the opportunity of debt restructuring will be used to perform a thorough debt audit and establish what portion, if any, of accumulated debt society should have to pay. Despite well-documented irregularities and fraud, which greatly contributed to debt build‑up, Argentine officials chose not to perform a debt audit, therefore legitimising the corrupt dealings of the military dictatorship and the Menem and De la Rúa administrations. Indeed, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner stated in 2010 that there is ‘no such thing as illegitimate debt’, thwarting efforts by activists and opposition politicians to conduct a much-needed debt audit.
Debt restructuring should not be geared to pleasing financial markets
For a debt-restructuring process to result in a sustainable debt load, it must be based on an economy that grows thanks to strong internal markets. For this to take place, it is fundamental to have productive investment and an equitable distribution of income. This is the opposite of ‘Washington consensus’ (neoliberal economic) prescriptions.
Recovering the ability to conduct independent exchange rate and monetary policies is key to economic recovery
In the Argentinean case, replacing the fixed exchange rate regime with a more flexible arrangement and regaining control over the national currency resulted in six years of record economic growth. The current European rules, designed according to orthodox economic prescriptions, allow no room for the expansionary policies needed in a recession. If these rules persist, there will be no option but to exit the arrangement and return to a national, sovereign currency.
The good news is that there is life after default. Indeed, life emerges after default. However, it is crucial to break with neoliberal economic constraints if sustainability and a better distribution of the fruits of society’s efforts are the objectives.
Alan B Cibils is chair of the political economy department at the Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento in Buenos Aires

Lifting the lid on the loan sharks

Nick Dearden interviews Brazilian activist Maria Lucia Fattorelli about debt audits in Brazil and Ecuador
What progress have you made with debt audits?
Since 1988 the Brazilian constitution has included an obligation to hold an official debt audit, but it has never been carried out. In 2000 we organised a popular plebiscite and more than six million people voted to stop paying the debt until the audit was held. We took matters into our own hands and set up Citizen Debt Audit, which aims to conduct research, educate, mobilise and examine legal arguments.
In 2009 we achieved the creation of an official commission for investigation of the debt. We were also invited to take part in Ecuador’s debt audit commissioned by President Correa in 2007.
What did the citizen audit and parliamentarian investigation find in Brazil?
The parliamentary commission found that the international ‘debt system’ continuously generates new debt to pay previous debts. New debt is always much bigger, despite the huge servicing payments. Our research proved that the main component of Brazil’s large debt has been high interest rates, which means that it hasn’t represented a real benefit to the country.
The government transformed Brazil’s ‘external’ debt into ‘internal’ debt, but it is still owed mainly to foreign banks. It is growing fast and the repayments accounted for 45 per cent of the national budget in 2010. That’s why, despite being the seventh largest world economy, Brazil still has more than half of its population living in poverty.
Despite its severe diagnosis, the commission didn’t recommend a full debt audit. However, eight parliamentarians joined with activists to present an alternative report, which went much further in exposing the illegal and detrimental impact of Brazil’s debts – even finding that some clauses in the debt contracts breached the constitution.
What did the audit find in Ecuador?
The audit exposed the manifold problems of Ecuador’s debt history. In particular, much of the debt was run up by a small group of large international banks aggressively pushing debts onto Ecuador in the 1970s, then restructuring those debts in the 1980s, under pressure from a cartel of creditors comprising the largest banks, the IMF and Northern governments. Debts that were worth very little were restructured at their full value, with abusive interest rates and illegal terms.
The proof of so many illegalities allowed President Correa to suspend interest payments and then agree to pay only 30 per cent of the face value of its ‘bond debt’. It demonstrated that a country can suspend payments and achieve positive results when backed by a properly documented audit report.
How were the results used by government and civil society groups?
In Ecuador civil society is well organised and the audit has led activists into campaigns for greater economic justice – pushing for new financial architecture such as the Bank of the South, control of capital flows and popular tribunals to adjudicate on economic justice and ecological debt.
In Brazil, the government has not taken advantage of the investigations and continues to ignore the call for a debt audit partly because the electoral campaigns of the major candidates are funded by financiers and partly because of the power of financial markets to blackmail governments.
The campaign against debt became more difficult after Lula became president. For 20 years he had opposed the debt but as president he retained the privileges of the ‘debt system’. In fact, things became even worse after Brazil repaid its IMF debt in 2005. Most people took this to be the end of the matter, when in fact it was a very small part – only 2 per cent – of Brazil’s debt.
Besides, our debt simply changed hands. To pay off this debt in advance to the IMF, Brazil took on new and more expensive debt. While IMF interest was 4 per cent, the new debt bonds carried interest of 7.5–12 per cent for external bonds and 19 per cent for domestic bonds. Once again this damaged the country to the great profit of creditors.
It seems that there is a big risk that the state can co-opt the auditing process. How can these lessons be built on in future audits, especially in Europe?
The only remedy I see to prevent it is to empower civil society. That’s why it is so important to start right away on a citizens’ audit, involving as many organisations as possible – because debt problems affect the lives of everyone. As people begin to understand the ‘debt system’ and the results of the audit, it is more difficult for governments to co-opt the process.
Very similar means to those now being employed in Europe have been used to create ‘public debt’ in Latin America since the 1970s. The experiences of debt audits in Ecuador and Brazil have proved that in the last 40 years this kind of debt in bonds has been used as a mechanism to transfer public resources into the private financial sector.
Everywhere public finances have been usurped. We can’t keep paying illegal debt with our jobs and our lives.
Maria Lucia Fattorelli was a member of Ecuador’s debt audit commission, an advisor to the commission of public debt in Brazil and coordinator of Citizen Debt Audit.

The tiger that didn’t roar

Ireland has undergone one of the largest fiscal adjustments in the rich world since the start of the economic crisis, with e20 billion in tax increases and spending cuts. But the public response has been muted. Andy Storey reports
On Easter Monday 2011, the Irish justice and human rights group Action from Ireland (Afri) launched a satirical version of the 1916 proclamation of Irish independence at Arbour Hill cemetery in Dublin, where the leaders of the Easter Rising are buried. Actor and writer Donal O’Kelly read out the new proclamation on behalf of the bondholders to whom Irish people’s money has been pledged through the 2008 bank guarantee that obliged the Irish government to pick up the tab for the losses of Irish banks:
‘We declare the right of senior bondholders to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible . . . The senior bondholders are entitled to, and hereby claim, the allegiance of every Irishman and Irishwoman.’
The proclamation was signed by ‘financial speculators unknown to you’ and O’Kelly’s wearing of a face mask symbolised the shadowy, opaque nature of the creditors to whose upkeep Ireland’s future has been mortgaged.
Remarkably, there has been limited public outrage in Ireland over this scandalous socialisation of private debt. This is despite the fact that more than €20 billion of ‘fiscal adjustment’ (tax increases and spending cuts) has taken place since the crisis broke. In the words of the Irish economist Karl Whelan, this is ‘the equivalent of . . . €4,600 per person . . . the largest budgetary adjustments seen anywhere in the advanced economic world in modern times’. There will be an estimated €6 billion in further spending cuts and tax increases in 2011, and an annual average of approximately €3 billion for each of the next three years.
Unemployment is in excess of 14 per cent (446,800 people), with more than two fifths of it long term in nature. Emigration is estimated at some 60,000 per annum. And the economy, not surprisingly, is mired in recession, with investment down from more than €48 billion in each of 2006 and 2007 to a little over €18 billion in 2010. Capital, as Irish sociologist Kieran Allen puts it, has gone on strike.
So why are the people not out on the streets in revolt? A key role has been played by the absence of leadership from most of the trade unions, whose long history of cooperation and dialogue with the government has blunted whatever appetite for struggle they once possessed. A hegemonic media insists that ‘there is no alternative’, amidst fear generated by the threat of unemployment and even homelessness – one in five households suffers from ‘negative equity’ (their house is worth less than the mortgage). Moreover, many people vested their hopes in the February 2011 election, when the government that oversaw the crisis was ousted, only for its successor to pursue exactly the same policies of debt repayment and austerity.
How then can the necessary outrage be generated? One contribution would be to lift the mask behind which the financial speculators are hiding and to unveil the reality of their scams and predations. The central point is to untangle the web of secrecy around the debt and work out who lent what to whom, when and for what purpose. There is an expectation that at least some of the debt would be found to be ‘illegitimate’ and could, therefore, be repudiated.
Afri and some other organisations (the Debt and Development Coalition Ireland and the trade union Unite) have launched a debt audit in Ireland. A small team of independent academics – with expertise in economics, finance and related disciplines – is trawling through the books to see if they can answer various questions. The most basic is: to whom is the bank debt (for which the state has assumed responsibility) owed?
We already have our suspicions. One estimate is that a 50 per cent write-down on the debt of the EU peripheral states would wipe out €850 billion of capital in German and French banks alone. To stop that happening, money is being channelled from European taxpayers and the European Central Bank through Ireland, Portugal and Greece to the financial institutions of Germany, France and elsewhere. This is the logic of the so‑called bailouts.
Andy Storey is a lecturer in the school of politics and international relations, University College Dublin. For more information on Afri’s work on the Irish debt audit, see: www.afri.ie

Organised by an unprecedented cross-section of Greek civil society, the international event launched the call for Greece (and now Ireland) to open their debts to the people of those countries for a public discussion as to how just and legitimate those debts really are. Campaigners from Brazil, Peru, the Philippines, Morocco and Argentina told Greek activists to ‘stand on their shoulders’ and not go through 30 years of devastating recession at the behest of international institutions like the International Monetary Fund.

The burgeoning European movement in opposition to debt repayments and austerity is making concrete links with groups from the global south, and it expresses a confidence and rationalism a million miles away from the governments of Greece and Ireland, which have followed policies which are punishing ordinary people in order to repay reckless bankers.

It is simply not possible that the policies being inflicted on Greece, Ireland and now Portugal will reduce the debt burden of those countries – the very opposite will happen, as was seen from Zambia in the 1980s to Argentina at the beginning of the last decade. Similar policies to those being inflicted on Europe saw Zambia’s debt-to-GDP ratio double in the 1980s as the economy shrank. Argentina defaulted on its massive debts in 2001, after a 3-year recession brought about by IMF policies. Like Ireland today Argentina was told it had partied too hard, even though the debt had been run up by a disastrous set of privatisations and a currency peg foisted on the country by the same IMF.  Its economy started recovering within a month of the default.

So why are these policies still being pursued? Almost every commentator has known from day one that the ‘bailout’ packages would not make the debts of Greece or Ireland sustainable. But delegates at last weekend’s conference were clear – that isn’t the point. The point is to recover as much of investors’ money as possible, however liable those investors were for the crisis, and transfer liability to society.

Even if Greece and Ireland need additional bailout money or restructuring through some sort of bonds – the same measures imposed on Latin America in the 1980s which created mountains of debt so big that those countries are still suffering the fall-out – the private investors will have been paid out. The argument becomes one between German and Greek populations as to who will foot the biggest portion of the bill, creating a dangerous nationalism already very evident.

European Commissioner for Economic Affairs Olli Rehn has continually told governments that these matters are best kept in the dark – public discussion is strongly discouraged. Those actually paying the price of austerity disagree, and campaigners in Greece and Ireland say the first step in   any kind of just solution must be a debt audit – modelled on those carried out in developing countries like Ecuador.

A debt audit would provide people of Europe with the knowledge on which to base truly democratic decisions. As Sofia Sakorafa, the Greek MP who refused to sign the bailout terms and walked out of the governing party PASOK, put it at the conference ‘the answer to tyranny, oppression, violence and abuse is knowledge’. Andy Storey from Irish group Afri echoed this, saying the purpose of an audit is to ‘remove the mask of the financial system which controls our economy’.

The results of an audit can be rapid and concrete. Maria Lucia Fattorelli from Brazil is a veteran of debt audits, and helped Ecuadorian groups conduct an audit endorsed by President Correa in 2008. The Economist called Correa ‘incorruptible’ when public spending rose, after his successful default on bonds following the audit. Taking action now could mean saving European countries from the three decades of stunted development experienced by Latin American countries.

But the activists gathered this weekend believed that a debt audit can be the start of something even more fundamental, a new way of thinking about economics. As Sakorafa put it, an audit is the start of regaining values and vision to show ‘beyond speculating market games, there are more valuable concepts; there are people, there is history, there is culture, there is decency’.

Such a rejuvenation of political vision is vital if the crisis is not to cause impoverishment and spur inter-European hostility. On Sunday Irish economist Morgan Kelly said his country was heading for bankruptcy. A secret meeting of European leaders on Friday night came to the same conclusion about Greece, a country we are told is losing 1,000 jobs a day and where the suicide rate has doubled. Portugal’s €78 billion ‘bailout’ package, which is dependent on a freeze in civil service pay and pensions and reduced compensation to laid off workers, and cuts unemployment benefits at exactly the time unemployment figures are reaching record levels, will have a similar impact. Everywhere emigrants are streaming out of these countries in search of better prospects.

No amount of compensation will repair the damage these policies will wreak on society – as delegates across the developing world testified too. There is no reason for Europe to wait 30 years to learn this lesson. A European and international movement must make up for the poverty of our leader’s vision. Such a movement feels like it may have been born in Athens.

Read a new report and join the campaign at www.jubileedebtcampaign.org.uk/dodgydeals

Neither Iceland not Portugal will have it easy in the years ahead. But there is a world of difference between the refusal of the people of Iceland ‘to pay for failed banks’ in the words of their President, and the pain being imposed on Portugal from the outside. The European Central Bank’s head Jean-Claude Trichet has made it perfectly clear that the negotiations on Portugal’s future are ‘certainly not for public’ debate.

Iceland’s people have not made a knee-jerk reaction. They are well aware that refusal to pay is the less easy short-term route to take. An impending court case by the UK and the Netherlands, the negative reaction of credit markets and the threatened block to their EU membership will all take a toll.

But for the people of Iceland the orthodoxy as to how countries are supposed to deal with debt is not simply economically flawed, it is deeply unjust, unfairly distributing power and wealth within and between societies. 28-year-old voter Thorgerdun Ásgeirsdóttir said: ‘I know this will probably hurt us internationally, but it is worth taking a stance.’

If the people of a country which truly bought into free market ideology, deregulated capital markets and cheap lending can refuse to pay for the crimes of the banks, then those that did less well from the decades of financial boom can be expected to feel even more impassioned.

In Greece such anger is starting to turn into a constructive challenge to the power of finance. A debt audit commission has been called for by hundreds of academics, politicians and activists. Such a commission would throw open Greece’s debts for public examination – directly confronting the way that the IMF and European Union work behind closed doors to force their often disastrous medicine on member countries.

As Greek activists have said, ‘the people who are called upon to bear the costs of EU programmes have a democratic right to receive full information on public debt. An Audit Commission can begin to redress this deficiency.’

Their resolve is currently being bolstered by a website phenomena – a short viral film called debtocracy (government by debt) – sweeping Greece’s online population and convincing them they have been taken for a ride. Early next month activists from across Europe and the developing world will gather in Athens to put together a programme which will challenge the IMF’s policies in Greece.

Portugal’s deal is just beginning to be hammered out. As in Greece and Ireland, a ‘bail-out’ package will primarily benefit Western European banks, with €216 billion of outstanding loans to Portugal, while ordinary people endure a programme of deep spending cuts, reduced workers’ rights and widespread privatisation. The head of Portugal’s Banco Carregosa told the FT: ‘It’s not an exaggeration to call it shock therapy.’

The comparisons with developing world countries are obvious and the mistakes there are already being repeated. Time and again banks were bailed out and the poorest people in the world were pushed even deeper into poverty. Today countries from Sierra Leone to Jamaica are racking up ever more debts, once again, to weather the banker’s storm.

This is why a line must be drawn in Europe. Pouring more debt on top of Portugal’s woes will do nothing to resuscitate the economy. Portugal’s debt is totally unsustainable – largely the result of reckless private lending over the last decade. Those responsible are being bailed out, those that aren’t are suffering the pain. This is what Iceland has refused to do.

The people of Iceland have stood up for their sovereignty. Their future looks considerably brighter than those of Ireland or Portugal. The people of Greece are just beginning their struggle. The outcomes will have a monumental impact on the fight against poverty and inequality across the world.

There is one word that I’ve heard to sum up this year’s Word Social Forum again and again: chaos. Just days before the WSF started the University which is hosting the event got a new director, who decided that classes would not be postponed for the Forum, leaving it over 400 rooms down.

The daily programmes were therefore pretty meaningless, even when they did eventually go online a couple of hours after the first session had started, because no-one knew which of the hastily constructed tents the session they were looking for might be in. Participants were rather like a very multicultural group of squatters on the dusty, windswept wasteland of Dakar University grounds.

All too often this meant that participants stuck together with their own group of friends or colleagues, unable to branch out into anything else for fear of another wasted two hours. For the truly new activists, unconnected to an organisation, the experience was intensely frustrating.

Not that the event wasn’t enjoyable, as activists were forced to use their self-organising skills simply to make sure their sessions happened at all. Palestinian activists had commissioned their own tent to be built right outside the main library which became a very visible hub for their activities, attracting large groups of students from the University to come and learn the basics of a struggle they knew little about. The forum had something of a festival feel from the fantastic food tents to the street sellers to the grotty toilets.

The location was also appropriate. My hotel window overlooked Goree Island, the point of departure for tens of thousands of Africans shipped into slavery in the New World. This slavery was the basis for the industrial revolution and the economic rise of the global North, as well as being at the heart of the serious under-development which is still so sharply felt across Africa today.

Despite this, and while the fault for the chaos of the forum can clearly not all be laid at the feet of the organisers, the experience has forced a more urgent questioning as to whether the WSF is still worthwhile. Set up as an expression of the rapidly burgeoning ‘anti-globalisation’ movement in 2001, the WSF faces a very different world, and caters to a different movement.
It seems there will be changes to the Forum next year. Some on the unwieldy International Council which organises the Forum are arguing for it to be less frequent, others that the WSF should cease to exist altogether and more focus be given to the regional and issue-based social forums.

But we need to be careful not to throw out what is truly amazing about the WSF. Struggles against tyranny in Egypt and Tunisia have formed a backdrop to this Forum, showing us what is possible, the vital role of solidarity that the WSF can play a role in creating. The thousands of people marching in Dakar as the Forum opened reminds us that the purpose of holding such an event here is the injection of energy it can give to struggles in the regions in which the WSF is held. One activist told us that the point is not how many meetings we go to, but the effect of the preparation of the WSF on the size and unity of the movement in its host country. It didn’t ease our frustration at the time, but is clearly an important consideration.

I leave the WSF convinced of why I work on debt. Seeing 2,000 activists dancing to a famous Senegalese hip-hop band singing about debt in an assembly festooned with the banners of the Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt, is a pretty powerful reminder of just how central this struggle remains in Africa, even if it doesn’t always feel that important in London.

None of this can be compromised, even if reform is necessary. The World Social Forum is an intensely frustrating, unwieldy and chaotic process. But perhaps that’s the nature of our movement.

Nick Dearden is director of the Jubilee Debt Campaign.