Those who have the opportunity to also work with their hands and not only their heads know that each working tool that human beings have invented has its specific purpose. That is why an axe is used to chop wood and a shovel is used for digging the soil. Use them for other purposes would lead to bad results. The land will be wrongly worked with an axe, which will end up losing its sharp edge. And trying to cut wood with a shovel would only lead to the risk of breaking its neck.
These images appear in my mind when I hear from those who would like the Social Forum to give us clear and precise instructions about what to do to change the world.
We cannot expect from a tool for struggle like the Social Forum, working for civil society, to start to perform as a political actor. If those gathered in the Social Forum decided it should tell them how to organise and participate in new activities and campaigns, they would destroy the Social Forum as a meeting space of mutual recognition, inter-learning, overcoming barriers and prejudices among ourselves.
The WSF is a space to facilitate exchanges in order to build a new political culture, to be aware that we should change ourselves in order to overcome the limits of our action, to be conscious of the logic of networks which overcomes pyramidal organizations, the exchange of information and analysis on the reality that we want to change and the challenges that confront us, the opening of horizons, the discovery of similarities and possibilities for new action and articulations, considering horizontal relationships between us and respect for our diversity and autonomy.
To the contrary, our efforts to change the world that we live within the forum will be useless if after meet we return to our organizations to follow the same path, without trying to deepen the relationships that we began to build, around the similar convergences discovered, in order to organize concrete actions and increase our chances of “chopping wood” – with the urgency that proves necessary.
Similarly, the Forums would shrink if it stopped attracting new partners to its encounters – geographically, ideologically or by domain. They would become boring and uninteresting, always bringing together the same people, around the same subjects and the same experiences. If the Forums did not experience expansion, they would not achieve the goal of “digging the soil” and would die, sweetly and sadly. And, definitely, they would not achieve what we need the most and which is the source of our strength: to unite, while respecting the diversity and autonomy of each, the enormous amount of actions and initiatives taking place around the world, but which are often separated from each other, dispersed, motivated by competition and not by collaboration.
If we think about the future of the SF, there are two lines of action to be developed: one is to expand and consolidate more the process, without limit, the other is to organize and clarify proposals and actions that have arisen during the Forums.
The first line of action is part of the role assumed by the organizations who promote the Forum. The second is a task for all the organizations willing to join together to realize new actions and campaigns.
The Charter of Principles provides guidelines for how to ensure successful expansion of the Social Forums, in such a way that the creation of spaces is not compromised by internal power struggles taking the place of horizontal links of experimentation with new forms of political practice, and so that no one feels manipulated by others.
The second line of action is the logical continuation of the Charter and will use new forms of encounter still to be invented, for example, specific thematic seminars, joining, in a way that respects individual diversity and autonomy, those willing to collaborate efficiently in proposals. These seminars, part of the WSF, will not be Forums in themselves, but the concrete realization of its goals – those that see the WSF as an incubator of new social movements and actions inscribed in a new political culture.
Translated by Sara Martins