The African National Congress this week agreed to join a civil society march against poverty and joblessness at the World Summit on Sustainable Development — while putting the boot into aspects of the anti-globalisation movement. It makes the point that the global civil society lobby is a “contested terrain”.
In a party paper presented to the summit’s Global Civil Society Forum, which is staging the march, the ANC highlights the need for a developmental state and describes the government as a “powerful weapon in the hands of the poor and oppressed”.
But in the same paper it slams tendencies in “working class movements” to promote “protectionism” rather than “internationalism”.
Commentators said this reflected the contradiction in the ANC’s general position — calling for a strong developmental state while pushing for privatisation of state assets.
In an apparent reference to the government the paper also asks how the anti-globalisation movement will position itself in relation to “progressive, democratic and popular forces in state power, as is the case in many developing countries”.
It questions whether the United Nations system and conferences such as the World Summit are the “enemy” of the progressive movement.
The paper also suggested nervousness about the possibility of disruptive demonstrations at the summit — and that the ANC’s participation in the civil society march may be strategic.
The ANC paper questions whether the “Northern anti-globalisation” movement is “necessarily progressive” as anti-globalisation sentiment in European societies contains “fascist anti-immigration forces”.
It also criticises the tendency to conflate the anti-globalisation movement with NGOs.
While the growth of the NGO movement is an important part of the emergence of a global civil society, it says, NGO activists cannot be a substitute for a “genuinely popular mass organisation founded on a democratic and progressive basis”.
In a reference to the violent protests at previous summits, the ANC says: “We are convinced that neo-anarchism is not the answer to neo-liberalism … we know well from our own struggle that mindless violence is the province of at best the naive, and at worst of the agent provocateur.”