The Brazilian desire to mark, in Porto Alegre, ten years of the World Social Forum in 2010, when there will have been ten anti-Davos Januarys, helped inspire the format that the process will have this year. Beginning in the capital of Rio Grande do Sul, with an event taking political stock of the WSF at the turn of the decade, it will be followed by a trail of Forums, event after event, on the way to Africa.
Another way of looking at it is that the first 10 years of the WSF, which was conceived in 2001, will conclude with a birthday party in January 2011 in the city of Dakar, where the next global edition of the Forum will be held. This event will be the realization in Senegal of the African desire again to organize a WSF on the continent.
From one event to another, the WSF will take the longest journey in its history. The diversity of encounters already scheduled around the world in this period was not conceived in order to celebrate, but to participate in a historic edition of the Forum in movement, bringing together the contributions of distinct processes and cultures towards a future that contains solutions to the various crises which are currently converging: the financial crisis, the environmental crisis, the energy crisis, the food crisis, the crisis of models of social organisation – or even a single civilizational crisis.
This agenda is capable of connecting, in one year, activities across America with events in the Middle East, interspersed with others in Europe, in Asia or in Africa, demonstrating that the World Social Forum has truly ‘globalized’ in these ten years and continues to expand. Since the Forum left Porto Alegre for Mumbai in 2004, there have been editions in Caracas, Bamako and Karachi (as part of the 2006 polycentric edition), in addition to Nairobi in 2007. There was a Global Day of Action in 2008 and a global edition in Belém, in the Amazon, in 2009.
If global events mark the continuity of the WSF process, it is the continental, national and local forums that signal its expansion and diversity. Before Mumbai, Asia held its first continental forum in Hyderabad. Before Nairobi there was Bamako and the regional social forums in Africa. Before Belém in 2009, the Pan-Amazon social forums.
For members of the Brazilian Group of Reflection and Support for the WSF Process, formed by activists involved in the Forum since the beginning, the WSF has, wherever it has gone, incorporated new themes and reflections without losing its pluralism, and managed to construct, in a collaborative manner, a political agenda which is “vigorous, innovative and indispensable in order to confront the civilizational dilemmas of the world we live in”.
GLOBALIZED AND DIVERSE
When the WSF emerged, campaigning for Another Possible World, it attracted inspirational ideas against what was called ‘single thought’. United voices arose against patents while Africa was plagued by AIDS. Its participants embraced the struggles for land and access to the commons of humanity, and the world armed itself in the competition for trade in water and oil. The Forum made visible humble experiences of solidarity economy in times dominated by the dictatorship of global finance. It defended the free movement of people imprisoned by borders which are at the same time completely open to the free transit of goods.
The ‘single thought’ that the WSF helped disrupt was reproduced in all the hegemonic structures of domination, but particularly in those charged with promoting and controlling neoliberal globalization: the World Economic Forum in Davos, the meetings of the WTO, the encounters of the G8. It epitomized the white, patriarchal, imperialist, sexist, racist, homophobic and warmongering culture which oriented and guided dominant power relations.
The WSF was, by contrast, an unprecedented call to humanity in all its diversity – cultural, geographical, ethnic, gender-related – to debate its future together, from a perspective of a horizontally mobilized global civil society, broad enough to encompass peoples and communities, social and popular movements, organizations and networks. This already is Another Possible World: diverse and mobilized by the task of rebuilding.
What would be discussed in the following years, and has continued being discussed up until today, is the role of the Forum itself in this rebuilding; whether it should or should not be anything more than a space of encounter and articulation between experiences and proposals for a better world. The WSF has remained this. How to interact with governments and parties that identify with the objectives of the WSF is another theme which still instigates debate. But its utopian affirmation that another world is possible has never been questioned, despite the turmoil surrounding the Forum during these ten years.
A CRUELLER WORLD
The last decade frustrated the short-term chances of bringing down, with ideas and collective pacts of resistance, the totems of globalization, which were the main focus of the emerging alterglobalization movement that managed to shake the WTO in 1999. The terror interrupted the dreams of creative change. Less than a year after the birth of the WSF, the Twin Towers were toppled by terrorist action, and the attacks of September 11 provided new gloss to the arguments used to support the control of the world with weapons, Western supremacy and the economic power of transnational corporations.
Senseless wars and xenophobia in all forms were supported by the propagation of fear and made the WSF into a mirror of resistance to the state terrorism used against the terror. A call made at the Forum by the Assembly of Social Movements brought millions to the streets against the Iraq war in March 2003. The WSF stood strong, challenging Davos, the WTO, the G8. But the enemy, ignoring all boundaries, was fiercer still.
The WSF has also been a sounding board for the realization that the planet’s natural resources were dwindling at the same speed as the global warming already underway. Tsunamis, hurricanes, melting ice caps, acidifying oceans – the shock and catastrophic scale of this competed with the hopes of young activists who went out on the streets and met in the forums in order to change to world. They inherited almost impossible yet compelling missions: stopping the consumerism that has become a ‘way of life’ in the West, changing the energy matrix that globalization relies upon, altering the relationship between human beings and the planet, everyday life and the concept of good living. One of the motives behind the decision to hold the 2009 WSF in the Amazon, in Belém, Pará, was to facilitate direct contact between its participants and the voices of the people of the rainforest, who have many lessons to teach about Good Living but can do very little on their own to stop the devastation of their habitat.
This set of crises, coupled with the eruption of the global financial crisis which has exposed the limits of the current economic model, is what underpins the plural agenda that the WSF today puts forward.
THE POWER OF THE STREETS AND OF COMMUNICATION
The WSF has been particularly important for Brazil and for Latin America, because it was born here and has contributed, with proposals, mobilizations and networks of resistance, to the transformation of political life in the region. Its history has witnessed important victories of society against the kind of politics imposed by economic interests and elites on the continent. So it was with the arrival of Lula and his re-election, with the renewal of the Hugo Chavez government in Venezuela after the coup, and the election victory of the coca farmer Evo Morales in Bolivia. Gradually the region has experienced a change in its constellation of forces and its governments, to the point at which leadership coups are no longer recognized, as was the case recently in Honduras.
Even though governments are not part of the WSF, which has preserved its autonomy as a space of civil society, all of these events mobilized its members into the streets and campaigns, and resonated within the Brazilian editions of the Forum. There have also been victories by new forms of communication embraced by forum activists, media and movements against the hegemony of mass communications media, which were active in all these moments defending the interests of the economic and political power that controls them. Much of the resistance against these apparatuses has been through community radios as well as through the use of accessible communications tools such as the Internet and audiovisual tools for collective and shared media production, practices which have been part of the WSF since its first edition.
If communication between people has been facilitated in the last decade by access to new technologies, in the Social Forum, and particularly in Latin America, collaborative processes have been transformed by tools that have deliberately been designed to be shared, as exercises in political and social resistance.
AN OPEN AGENDA FOR 2010
Improving the WSF as an open space of encounter and articulation of alternatives, whether in a geographical or virtual territory, can be the task of the decade to come. Because of this some forums will be focused on specific aspects of the global crises and need to connect, through shared communication practices, to other forums, other themes, other reflections.
For example, in Detroit the second United States Social Forum will debate non-capitalist solutions to the economic crises, from the point of view of those who never benefited from the wealth accumulated by the empire even though they live within it. This regional forum was initiated in Atlanta in 2008, after the disaster of Hurricane Katrina and the abandonment of its victims to their own devices, victims of a country that is not equally concerned to rescue all its citizens.
In Palestine, another example, the World Forum of Education will debate the education of generations who have grown up surrounded by wars and walls and who have on their hands the task of constructing a world free of invasions and occupations. It will be a novel event, especially because the intention is to bring the free, rebellious and open space of the WSF inside the fences erected and controlled by Israel. The boldness of today is the product of previous efforts to expand the Forum in the Arab world.
In Brazil only there will be at least three forums in 2010, with different purposes. In Porto Alegre and surrounding cities the event will be especially guided by the debate about the history and perspectives of the forum process. In Salvador, in Bahia, the city with the largest black population in Brazil, participants want to debate the process towards Dakar from the point of view of their identity as part of the African diaspora. And in Santarem, Para, organizations, communities and movements from Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela, Surinam, Guyana, French Guyana and Brazil will address proposals to protect natural resources, territories and traditional cultures during their fifth Pan-Amazon Social Forum.
Expanding regional processes, there will be forums organized in continents where annual editions have already become tradition. The European Social Forum, which has previously passed through Italy, France, London, Greece and Sweden, is going to Turkey; the Social Forum of the Americas, which has already spanned Equador, Venezuela and Guatemala, now moves on to Paraguay.
The agenda on the road to Africa remains open, including bold proposals such as that of holding a forum about the civilizational crisis, and other more fragile ones like that of the Indians and Pakistanis who want to organize a forum in Nepal.
Rita Freire is a journalist and represents Ciranda International of Independent Information in the Communications Commission of the International Council of the World Social Forum
Translated by: Hilde Stephansen