Brasil

international | anti-capitalism | news report Thursday September 30, 2004 14:33 by Jim Monaghan

Alternatives to Bourgeois budgets

"The Porto Alegre Alternative" launched in London, Amsterdam

The new IIRE Notebook for Study and Research, The Porto Alegre Alternative: Direct Democracy in Action, is out and being launched in October at the third European Social Forum (ESF) in London as well as at the IIRE in Amsterdam. Co-author João Machado, professor of economics at the University of São Paulo, will be in London for the ESF on 14-17 October. Among his other activities he will speak at a seminar on Brazil; for details of the time and location please consult the ESF website, http://www.fse-esf.org. Pluto Press, co-publisher with the IIRE of The Porto Alegre Alternative, will have a stall at the ESF, so those who are interested will be able to drop by, take a look at the book, and buy it if they like!

In Amsterdam Professor Machado will speak at a book launching at the IIRE on Sunday, 17 October at 8 pm, and take part in a discussion chaired by Latin America specialist Willem Bos. A second part of the evening is tentatively planned on various experiments with the participatory budget that are being carried out in cities in the Netherlands; Eisse Kalk of Stichting Agora has volunteered to interview speakers from the various Dutch cities who may be attending. For those who like to head into a discussion fortified by food, dinner will be served at 6.30 pm in the IIRE dining hall, prepared for early arrivals for a seminar on debt and international law beginning the next day, organized by the Belgian Committee for the Cancellation of the Third World Debt. Dinner reservations must be made by 10 October - email us - and a ¤ 5.00 contribution will be asked.

As we announced earlier, Brazilian socialists André Passos Cordeiro, Ubiratan de Souza, Pepe Vargas, Raul Pont and João Machado describe in The Porto Alegre Alternative how Porto Alegre's participatory budget was born, how it works, how it developed in interaction with popular movements and spread with local Workers' Party (PT) victories, and how it has staked out new ground in promising a radically democratic alternative in the interests of the poor to top-down political and economic decision-making. They argue that the 'Porto Alegre' model does offer an alternative to capitalist politics as usual, but that Brazilian President Luis Ignacio da Silva ('Lula') unfortunately does not seem to have learned its lessons. As editor Iain Bruce writes, the participatory budget's linkage of socialism and direct democracy takes up 'an inescapable task for those seeking to restate the case for socialism in the twenty-first century, in an idiom that makes sense to the new generations coming to politics after Seattle and the immense movement against war in Iraq'.