Globalism

Trump used the campaign slogan “make America great again.” The problem is very simple. Neither he nor any other president – be it Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or for that matter Ronald Reagan – can do very much about the advanced decline of the erstwhile hegemonic power.

The World Social Forum (WSF) has met regularly since its first meeting in Porto Alegre in 2001. And just as regularly, there have been analysts who have announced its demise as a relevant expression of the Global Left. And nonetheless, somehow, it continues to matter in the struggle for global justice.

This is the question people left of center have been asking for some time now. In different ways, it is being posed in Latin America, in much of Europe, in Arab and Islamic countries, in southern Africa, and in northeast Asia. The question is all the more dramatic because, in so many of these countries, this follows a period when there were significant shifts leftward.

In the years to come, there may be upturns that seem to indicate that the capitalist system is functioning again. Even the level of employment in the system as a whole, the key measure of the state of the system, may rise. But such a rise cannot last long because the global situation is too chaotic.

The ongoing global economic crisis, which is rooted in corporate-driven globalization and financial liberalization, has driven the last nail into the ideology of neoliberalism. But things were very different over two decades ago.

As refugees take the Olympic stage, the wars that sent them running for their lives continue apace.