1. a warning case on 3rd December 2007 2. perspective and interest 3. two aborted forums in 2007: up-beat and down-beating for grassroots’ empowerment 4. a new cult of personality within the international phraseology of forum proceedings 5. pre-manufacturing consent – the academic simulation of political involvement 6. Buzgalin, a NeoRussian success story: controlling import, promoting consumption and crippling production 7. resources of resistance
For comments, contributions and critique please write to the author of these lines under: Martin Kraemer Liehn Varshavskoe Shosse d. 72, 2 – 41 RUS-117556 Moscou Russian Federation
1. a warning case on 3rd December 2007
What happened on 3rd of December to the vital Russian-Ukrainean Social movements in Moscow is hopefully just a warning case. If not, the show-down of the Moscow meeting at the posh club “Bi-Lingua” yesterday proves that the Forum process in the former Soviet Union is about to be high-jacked by a professorial self-made man.
How can we restitute the power of direct democracy and participatory conversion in our movement?
This text is a passionate call to start careful analysis, draw up strategies for collective intervention and effective solidarity in self-defense against the fast-food of authoritarian and consumerist socialization progressing in the movement of movements.
Within hours, yesterday’s venture, the second aborted effort of an All-Soviet Union Social Forum, saw itself dissolved at the mercy of a single man in command of the day. This leaves the over a hundreds activists with a lot of professionally engineered grassroots’ frustration and a one-and-only, strictly authoritarian solution to it. In the time-frame and the club-setting carefully orchestrated by the funding monopolist Buzgalin, no dissent could be voiced, no co-ordination could be facilitated, and no political initiative could be evolved. There is a plot behind this. According to many participants, this show-down was carefully prepared and provided for. In the end, some dominant voices were able to voice their ready-made opinions, others managed to exchange addresses. Cheers, mates, achievements against all odds! Politically speaking, the whole set-up was designed to avoid bottom-up results. All sections were effectively dominated by Buzgalin clientele. All discussions were put under gun-point of a relentless time-pressure which was mounted in accordance with the premises’ administration by the show master in endless personal interventions. All declarations of the aborted forum were actually carefully pre-manufactured by Buzgalin himself. There was not the slightest window of opportunity for amendments. With this humbling experience, activists were finally dissolved physically in the presence of police and private body-guards, having overshadowed the whole venture from the start. We, the simple attendants of the show were thus sent to pass another total of over a thousand hours in public transport before reaching the places we came from in Russia, Ukraine, Byelorussia an Kasakhstan. If no action is taken now, this will be the model-case to privatize movement funds, monopolize centre-stage and symbolize an “open process” for the third effort to mount a New Social Forum in Eastern Europe envisaged for Kiev in April 2008. It would be nothing short of mischievous to develop curiosity now, by whom and in whose interest this third run-up will be aborted.
2. perspective and interest
I have a subjective interest myself in writing this up. For half a decade now, I have been researching on radical democracy in revolutionary processes in Russia, the Check Republic, Cuba, Spain and China. I happened to become somehow sensitive (some may claim over-sensitive) to the instrumental treatment of popular democratic forms by representative political patriarchs. I have also tried my fists against them, to be sure. After 14 years of political activism in Eastern Europe, extensive traveling and grassroots work between Warsaw and Vladivostok, I know in a certain and surely personally limited way what is at stake if the present model of show master democracy does succeed in capturing the imagination of a new generation ripening for social contest in one of the most brutal fields of accumulation under worldwide Capitalism. I am part of the process I denounce. I was one of a collective preparing the social history workshop at the Siberian Social Forum. We took 3 weeks for preparing in archives and with local activists in the streets of Novosibirsk. For yesterday, the Buzgalin clientele obliged me to contribute to a “round-table discussion on culture”. And I went along with them. As it happened to others in the run-up to the Moscow caricature of a Social forum we witnessed yesterday, our participation was cleverly forced upon us, but not even consulted with us. In a certain sense, we complied once again.
3. two aborted forums in 2007: up-beat and down-beating for grassroots empowerment
Yesterday’s well-orchestrated catastrophe is so much different from what we have achieved in Siberia in summer, that it is worth to take a comparative look at the two. To be sure, both ventures were a failure. Being started and drawing from movement resources with the aim to call for a comprehensive all exSoviet-Union Social Forum, they both resulted in but a down-sized crash rescue version. However, failure as such can be coordinated and experienced in a very differing way.
In Novosibirsk in August, we took 3 days to converge. Conditions were most adverse with constant police pressure, attempted arrests and repeated cancellation of finalized premises hire contracts under pressure from the Russian political police FSB. Nevertheless, the decisive action of all participants managed to keep informed police out of the meetings, change places and make arrangements for surprise locations on the run. In fact, the discussions we had there were the most precious I had this year, including a 4 months involvement with anti-G8 run-up at the Convergence Centre of Rostock. The ex-Soviet Union landscape of anti-capitalist activism is incredibly rich in approaches, ideas and regional competence and working-class to a much larger extend than in the West. In this process of mutual understanding against all odds, everyone just needs many hours just to listen and to tune in to what evolves out of a merger on equal terms. Consequently, on the third day in Novosibirsk, we were ready for a rare climax in grassroots’ democracy and witnessed a most effective combination of forces. Within a day, some 20 regional initiatives were able to present their visions of future co-operation reflecting their own experiences of the past months and years.
Nothing of that sort was envisaged for the Moscow venture in November.
4. a new cult of personality within the international phraseology of forum proceedings
In the notoriously posh Bi-lingua club on the 3rd of December, there was just a corridor of 8 hours, with activists traveling an average of more than 20 hours to the site and back. Half of the time to converge was lost with a personality show presentation with others’ speaking constantly interrupted by Buzgalin for smooth entertainment politics. Buzgalin is notoriously famous for having mounted the most boring session of the London Social Forum in 2004 when he took the role of moderator, main speaker, translator and commentator in one person. The clientele he had hand-picked according to personal favors and loyalty to be bussed to this event through the whole of Europe obviously had no other role than to mount applause for his one-man-show. But yesterday, this was not London and its SWP-UK machinations. This was Moscow and for me and many of my friends, this was definitely enough now we have seen of this patriarch. Parallel to the microphone transmission, the organizers under Buzgalin command mixed club music, dissolving the peak of concentration of activists just arrived from places as far as 4000 km apart into a general buzzle and its intrinsic disrespect to people talking with non-dominant voices. All the time, police in uniform was in the room.
With the morning gone, the crowd was pushed out of the room by body-guards dressed in black. The Forum was then decided to split up in so-called working-sections. The section me and others were complied to take part in against our will, was to deal with culture. Without hesitation, without asking names or backgrounds of the people in the invited panel or the many very young participants, the Buzgalin attaché Bulavkina took the lead with an ill-prepared warming-up of old opinions which have been published repeatedly by the Buzgalin organ “Alternativy”. Squeezed into the corners of a commercial book-shop with possible eye-contact only to the master of the section, the remarkably curious audience was literally smashed with front instructions academic style, abounding in citations and names drawing the focus of attention on the glorious past of Russian classics. After 90 minutes, this show, calling for controversial cheer-leaders but not for genuine participation, was officially ended and consequently split up in personal exchanges of previous opinions. Interestingly enough, the Buzgalin clientele once more as 2006 in St. Petersburg succeeded in integrating the half-hearted collaboration of Anarchist frontman Tupikin for the specific show of high-brow Western talk transponded into Russian language. However, in St. Petersburg 2006 there was a whole evening, at least for people who were prepared to resign from anti-G8 street action (Tupikin was not, cheers colleague) to discuss the genuine hot issues of culture in post-Soviet Capitalism: class-related access to education, the political economics of counter-culture, strategies for empowerment. The conversion which was achieved by bottom-up initiative in Piter 2006 was painfully absent in Moscow yesterday.
5. pre-manufacturing consent – the academic simulation of political involvement
Working groups were then dissolved, others were just called into existence while the majority of Ukrainian participants was only to arrive in a Buzgalin-sponsored but hopelessly delayed bus. As with the Russian delegation in Athens on the European Social Forum 2006, the Buzgalin-trick to deprive part of the delegation of the previously promised resources, this bus had begun selection and differentiation of participants according to Buzgalin favors in Ukraine already. On 2nd of December 2007, unorthodox activists were bluntly denied access to the vehicle, though they had been assured of a place beforehand. Due to their spontaneity, they arrived even earlier on self-financed train tickets. Whenever this vital issue was put on the agenda in Moscow the day later, Buzgalin intervened personally, cutting spoke of the tricked, a Ukrainean woman short to prevent the spectators of his show to judge by themselves on the basis of multiple-source information.
The thus assembled mass was then pressed to discuss “Left politics” with an average of less than 15 seconds for each participant. As the Buzgalin colleague who was designed to refer the outcome put it with honest desperation, there was not even the place for a discussion, let alone for understanding what others meant.
6. Buzgalin, a NeoRussian success story: controlling import, promoting consumption and crippling production
The really baffling experience of this day is that there was no sense of an accident happening with Buzgalin and his entourage. This was business as usual, the ideal formula to simulate politics and found … an academic circle of adoration for the man who wants to present “The post-Soviet Left” to all potential sponsors in the west after his former counter-part Kagerliski has made his Kremlin-stance too obvious an cannot show himself any more in the assemblies of Social movements. Only God can help those who need heroes, ie. in fact nobody. Buzgalin is a boring hero, academically of dubious qualifications and not prepared to accept other approaches than academic ones in channeling the movement. But why does the social movement of Russia and Ukraine (with Kazakhstan and Byelorussia only present in hand-picked delegations) need and accept channeling at all? What makes people need a hero at all? Obviously, the movement has changed under the pressure of neo-capitalist dictatorship within the last years. You can loose your free public place of study or your chance for a career as a public servant if you make yourself seen in the process of Social Forums. This does not happen as a rule, but cases multiply, especially in the run-up to the forthcoming subsequent election-fraud. In Novisibirsk you could even be arrested right out of the assembly, if the activists had not been vigilant. Physical aggression against trade union and anti-atomic activists in the Forum process has reached unprecedented heights this year in Russia. This makes activists think twice before taking a high profile. People join the Social opposition with a more conscientious and a more professional approach than in the Eltsin era. Being an activist is increasingly becoming a career on its own. This is a chance and a danger. All the fulminate heights and bitter set-backs of revolutionary achievements in Soviet history are linked with the phenomenon of professional revolutionaries. As many possible positions, a reformist stance representing a key note of Social Forums in Western Europe and the US has hardly any voice in the Russian process. But verbal radicalism bears a danger which goes further than reformism. With class-consciousness and a revolutionary approach reaching Buzgalin-managed consensus, the whole enterprise could really remain what Buzgalin sets it out to be: an academic operetta. That would in the end fall below the doubtful achievements of reformist approaches in Western Forums. The political trajectory of the main sponsor of yeasterdays Moscow venture, Ilja Ponamarov, illustrates this worst case option. In 2006, the Regional governor rightly expecting to received honours on driving into the last full-size social forum with her limousine under police escort in a city under siege of the G8. That day, we saw Ilja approach her with acuriously humble, uncertain, almost begging voice and plea for a personal meeting of him with Putin. He did not his meeting as far as we know. Putin was busy to conclude the atomic waste deal for Sibiria with his G8 colleagues at that moment. But in 2007, Ilja is actually fully integrated in the Putin machination of election fraud for 2nd of December with a personal political playground granted to him in the Novosibirsk branch of the Kremlin party for a “Just Russia”. Of course, the Kremlin candidate Mister Ponamarov is against reformism. And, Ilja, many thanks for that sausage and the US-ketchup you sponsored for us yesterday.
In a certain way, Buzgalin prolongs Ilja’s mission with Ilja’s money in the remaining movement. He does so with the backing of western activists and western funds (one of them bears the name of the person politically responsible for the murdering of Rosa Luxemburg: Friedrich Ebert). A father figure like Buzgalin is badly needed by a west which has preserved its cold-war lack of knowledge and interest in live behind the iron curtain during the last 2 decades pauperization and destitution under the plot and to the benefit of western multinationals and their G8. But sadly enough, Buzgalin is equally needed by Russian activists who still feel to have too precarious a material position to engage themselves full-heartedly in a more participatory and less instrumental co-ordination process for the movement of social movements. Buzgalin is the product of modern colonialism in the world-wide crisis of Social Forums – a small element within the overall crisis of Late Capitalism. He will continue to fight for his autocracy with smooth and smart phrases in the lamp-light on the stage and with the sharp knives we know from behind the curtain. And furthermore, everyone who wants to replace him can prove worse.
But there is no way to social emancipation if we do not emancipate from the fatherly gesture of depriving us of our own facilities to combine and decide collectively.
7. resources of resistance ?
Yes, I am not at all astonished. You have consumed 6 chapters and you were prepared to have the 7th delivered accordingly. But resources of resistance is you, you and you! Resources of resistance is to stand up, combine forces and mount a well-coordinated counter-offensive against the rise of all sorts of pashas and paternalists in Russian-Ukrainian-Byelorussian life, inside and outside the movement. Buzgalin is indeed very powerful in a subjective sense. But to expropriate his resources is just a first step. Of course, after having raised my voice in spoken (3rd Dec.) and in written (4th Dec.) I will be co-opted into yet another elect circle around Buzgalin to participate in his reign and co-manage the movement. I will not go there. I will instead strive to remain a humble and nonetheless rebellious part of those forces that put an end to movement management and start to move. That is all I can tell you now about my part. But it does actually make no sense if you do not put forward your vision, your access to resources and your commitment. So, the 7th part of this text can really only be compiled when your reaction starts to come in. My dream is to write it collectively and thus submerge again into the movement. This movement, I have never ceased to love with all my forces and all its contradictions since Chiapas and Seattle. No end in sight!
«Мир — хижинам, война — дворцам»! http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%91%D1%8E%D1%85%D0%BD%D0%B5%D1%80%2C_%D0%93%D0%B5%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B3