Bamako Appeal

I was checking out what went down with the "alter-globalists" over at the World Social Forum (which I still want to get to some day) and found this interesting manifesto on a site called Choike.org, "a portal on Southern civil societies". Bamako is an African place where some anti-capitalists met prior to the forum itself and they came up with this:

"Neo-liberal policies aim to impose as the sole method of socialization the force of the market, whose destructive impact on the majority of human beings no longer needs to be demonstrated. The world we want conceives sociability as the principle product of a democratization without boundaries. In this framework, in which the market has a place but not the predominant place, economy and finance should be put at the service of a societal program; they should not be subordinated to the imperatives of dominant capital that favor the private interests of a tiny majority."

This language about "markets" is a bit opaque and (as people who read this blog know) I have philosphical issues with this social-democratic approach to reform. One can always HOPE that merchants and owners and entreprenuers would operate in the market with social goals in mind but what controls can realistically be enforced to keep exploitation and profiteering at bay? Without overtly authoritarian systems? Im willing to bend a little here in order to make gains but somebody explain how this proposal or the Bolivarian Revolution or Sweden ,for that matter, doesn't fall back into class conflict and liberal privitization? It goes on to seemingly disavow any committment to the profit system or bourgeois democracy:

"The struggle for democracy must also be linked to the struggle to eradicate poverty and all forms of exclusion. Indeed, to solve these problems, the people must become wielders of power. That implies waging a struggle against the logic of capitalist profit and erecting in its place, in whatever areas that can be won, a different, humanist logic of solidarity. It is no longer enough to just assert the need for an alternative society; it is necessary to propose popular initiatives which are alternatives to capitalism and which aim to break the logic of commerce and the relations that this dynamic imposes. But this also involves organizing struggles that cannot be reduced to simple economic demands, as necessary as these are, and which put forward an alternative social project, including real levels of authority and democracy, going beyond the current forms of parliamentary representative democracy and its elections. We must struggle for a new type of democracy, coming from below, for those on the lowest levels of society,..."

Altogether an encouraging proposal and a great starting point for discussion. Check it out.