[P2P-F] Farewell to the WSF? (GTN Discussions)

Fri Sep 6 13:58:30 CEST 2019

have you written anything specific on this, dear Jose, i.e.

On Fri, Sep 6, 2019 at 8:16 AM jose ramos <actionforesight at gmail.com> wrote:

> it's a solid analysis. I came to the same conclusions in my 2010 thesis :(
>
> the evolution of the idea should be for a shared platform for coordinated
> / strategic action.
>
> its really the end of horizontalism as a credible organizing strategy,
> adbusters to occupy failed. WSF did a lot but as this article shows it
> waisted an opportunity.
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, Sep 5, 2019 at 9:08 PM Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> ---------- Forwarded message ---------
>> From: Great Transition Network <gtnetwork at greattransition.org>
>> Date: Wed, Sep 4, 2019 at 10:10 PM
>> Subject: Farewell to the WSF? (GTN Discussions)
>> To: <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>
>>
>>
>> From Roberto Savio [utopia at robertosavio.info]
>> ----------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> *[Per Paul's email, reproduced below, we are kicking off this month's
>> discussion with a response from longtime member of the WSF International
>> Concil Roberto Savio. We look forward to your contributions. -- JC] *
>> *Farewell to the World Social Forum?*
>> Roberto Savio
>> Opening reflections for a GTN forum, 9/3/19
>>
>> *  LOOKING BACK*
>> The first World Social Forum in 2001 ushered in the new century with a
>> bold affirmation: “Another world is possible.” That gathering in Porto
>> Alegre, Brazil, stood as an alternative and a challenge to the World
>> Economic Forum, held at the same time an ocean away in the snowy Alps of
>> Davos, Switzerland. A venue for power elites to set the course of world
>> development, the WEF was then, and remains now, the symbol for global
>> finance, unchecked capitalism, and the control of politics by multinational
>> corporations.
>>
>> The WSF, by contrast, was created as an arena for the grassroots to gain
>> a voice. The idea emerged from a 1999 visit to Paris by two Brazilian
>> activists, Oded Grajew, who was working on corporate social responsibility,
>> and Chico Whitaker, the executive secretary of the Commission of Justice
>> and Peace, an initiative of the Brazilian Catholic Church. Incensed by the
>> ubiquitous, uncritical news coverage of Davos, they met with Bernard
>> Cassen, editor of *Le Monde Diplomatique*, who encouraged them to
>> organize a counter-Davos in the Global South. With support from the
>> government of Rio Grande do Sul, a committee of eight Brazilian
>> organizations launched the first WSF. The expectation was that about 3,000
>> people attend (the same as Davos), but instead 20,000 activists from around
>> the world came to Porto Alegre to organize and share their visions for six
>> days.
>>
>> WSF annual meetings enjoyed great success, invariably drawing close to
>> 100,000 participants (even as high as 150,000 in 2005). Eventually, the
>> meetings moved out of Latin America, first to Mumbai in 2004, where 20,000
>> Dalits participated, then to Caracas, Nairobi, Dakar, Tunis, and Montreal.
>> Along the way, two other streams—Regional Social Forums and Thematic Social
>> Forums—were created to complement the annual central gathering, and local
>> Forums were held in many countries. Cumulatively, the WSF has brought
>> together millions of people willing to pay their travel and lodging costs
>> to share their experiences and collective dreams for a better world.
>>
>> WSF’s Charter of Principles, drafted by the organizing committee of the
>> first Forum and adopted at the event itself, reflected these dreams. The
>> Charter presents a vision of deeply interconnected civil society groups
>> collaborating to create new alternatives to neoliberal capitalism rooted in
>> “human rights, the practices of real democracy, participatory democracy,
>> peaceful relations, in equality and solidarity, among people, ethnicities,
>> genders and peoples.”
>>
>> Yet, the “how” of realizing any vision was hamstrung from the start. The
>> Charter’s first principle describes the WSF as an “open meeting place,”
>> which, as interpreted by the Brazilian founders, precluded it from taking
>> stances on pressing world crises. This resistance to collective political
>> action relegated the WSF to a self-referential place of debate, rather than
>> a body capable of taking real action in the international arena.
>>
>> It didn’t have to be this way. Indeed, the 2002 European Social Forum
>> called for mass protest against the looming US invasion of Iraq, and the
>> subsequent 2003 Forum played a major role in organizing the day of action
>> the following month with 15 million protesters in the streets of 800 cities
>> on all continents—the largest demonstration in history at the time.
>> However, the WSF’s core organizers, who were not interested in this path,
>> held sway, a phenomenon inextricable from the democratic deficit that has
>> always dogged the Forum.
>>
>> Indeed, the WSF has never had a democratically elected leadership. After
>> the first gathering, the Brazilian host committee convened a meeting in Sao
>> Paolo to discuss how best to carry the WSF forward. They invited numerous
>> international organizations, and on the second day of the meeting appointed
>> us all as the International Council. Several important organizations, not
>> interested in this meeting, were left off the council, and those who did
>> attend were predominately from Europe and the Americas. In the ensuing
>> years, efforts to change the composition created as many problems as they
>> solved. Many organizations wanted to be represented on the Council, but due
>> to vague criteria for evaluating their representativeness and strength, the
>> Council soon became a long list of names (most inactive), with the roster
>> of participants changing with every Council meeting. Despite repeated
>> requests from participating organizations, the Brazilian founders have
>> refused to revisit the Charter, defending it as an immutable text rather
>> than a document of a particular historical moment.
>>
>> *AT A CROSSROADS*
>> The future of the WSF remains uncertain. Out of a misguided fear of
>> division, the Brazilian founders have thwarted efforts to allow the WSF to
>> issue political declarations, establish spokespeople, and reevaluate the
>> principle of horizontality, which eschews representative decision-making
>> structures, as the basis for governance. Perhaps most significantly, they
>> have resisted calls to transcend the WSF’s original mission as a venue for
>> discussion and become a space for organizing. With WSF spokespeople
>> forbidden, the media stopped coming, since they had no interlocutors. Even
>> broad declarations that would not cause schism, like condemnation of wars
>> or appeals for climate action, have been prohibited. As a result, the WSF
>> has become akin to a personal growth retreat where participants come away
>> with renewed individual strength, but without any impact on the world.
>>
>> Because of its inability to adapt, and thereby act, the WSF has lost an
>> opportunity to influence how the public understands the crises the world
>> faces, a vacuum that has been filled by the resurgent right-wing. In 2001,
>> globalization’s critics emerged mainly on the left, pointing out how
>> market-driven globalization runs roughshod over workers and the
>> environment. Since then, as the WSF has floundered and social democratic
>> parties have bought into the governing neoliberal consensus, the right has
>> managed to capitalize on the broad and growing hostility to globalization,
>> rooted especially in the feeling of being left behind experienced by
>> working-class people. Prior to the US financial crisis of 2008 and the
>> European sovereign bond crisis of 2009, the National Front in France was
>> the only established right-wing party in the West. Since then, with a
>> decade of economic chaos and brutal austerity, right-wing parties have
>> blossomed everywhere.
>>
>> The unsettling rise of the anti-globalization right has scrambled many
>> political assumptions and alliances. At the start of the WSF, our enemies
>> were the international financial institutions, such as the International
>> Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Now, these institutions support reducing
>> income inequality and increasing public investment. The World Trade
>> Organization, the infamous target of massive protests in 1999, was our
>> enemy as well, for skewing the rules of global trade toward multinational
>> corporations; now, US president Donald Trump is trying to dismantle it for
>> having any rules at all. We criticized the European Commission for its free
>> market commitment, and lack of social action: now we have to defend the
>> idea of a United Europe against nationalism, xenophobia, and populism.
>> These forces have upended and transformed global political dynamics. Those
>> fighting globalization and multilateralism, using our diagnosis, are now
>> the right-wing forces.
>>
>> * LOOKING AHEAD*
>> Is there, then, a future for the World Social Forum? Logistically, the
>> outlook is not good. Right-wing Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, an ally
>> of authoritarian strongmen around the world, has announced that he will
>> forbid any support for the Forum, putting its future at grave risk. Holding
>> a forum of such size requires significant financial support, and a
>> government at least willing to grant visas to participants from across the
>> globe. The vibrant Brazilian civil society groups of 2001 are now
>> struggling for survival.
>>
>> Indeed, right-wing governments around the world attack global civil
>> society as a competitor or an enemy. In Italy, Interior Minister Matteo
>> Salvini has been pushing to eliminate the tax status of nonprofits. Like
>> Salvini in Italy, Trump in the US, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Narendra Modi
>> in India, and Shinzo Abe in Japan, among others, are unwilling to hear the
>> voice of civil society. Their escalating assault on civil society might
>> spell the formal end of the World Social Forum, although the WSF’s refusal
>> to evolve with the times left the organization vulnerable to such assaults.
>>
>> If the World Social Forum does fade away as an actor on the global stage,
>> we can take many valuable lessons from its history as we mount new
>> initiatives for a “movement of movements.” First, we need to support civil
>> society unity. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, the Portuguese anthropologist
>> and a leading participant in the WSF, stresses the importance of
>> “translation” between movement streams. Women’s organizations focus on
>> patriarchy, indigenous organizations on colonial exploitation, human rights
>> organizations on justice, and environmental organizations on
>> sustainability. Building mutual understanding, trust, and a basis for
>> collective work requires a process of translation and interpretation of
>> different priorities, embedding them in a holistic framework.
>>
>> Any initiative to build transnational movement coordination must address
>> this challenge. While it is easier to build a mass action against a common
>> enemy, nurturing a common movement culture requires a process of sustained
>> dialogue. The WSF was instrumental in creating awareness of the need for a
>> holistic approach to fight, under the same rubric, climate change,
>> unchecked finance, social injustice, and ecological degradation. Building
>> on that experience with how the issues intersect is critical to a viable
>> global movement. The WSF has made possible alliances among the social
>> movements, which got their legitimacy by fighting the system, and the
>> myriad NGOs, which got theirs from the agenda of the United Nations. This
>> is certainly a significant historical contribution, enabling the next phase
>> in the evolution of global civil society.
>>
>> Second, we need to balance movement horizontalism and organizational
>> structure. For the vast majority of participants in cutting-edge
>> progressive movements over the past half-century, the notion of a political
>> party, or any such organization, has been linked to oppressive power,
>> corruption, and lack of legitimacy. This suspicion of organization,
>> reflected in the core ideology of the WSF, has contributed to its lack of
>> action.
>>
>> This tendency to reject verticality out of fear of its association with
>> oppression poses a major challenge to the formation of a global movement:
>> those who would be, in principle, its largest constituency will question
>> overarching organizational structures. Based on historical experience, they
>> fear the generation of unhealthy structures of power, the corruption of
>> ideals, and the lack of real participation. Nevertheless, coordination is
>> essential for a diverse global movement to develop sufficient coherence.
>> The task is to find legitimate forms of collective organization that
>> balance the tension between the commitments to both unity and pluralism.
>>
>> Third, a global movement effort must navigate a new media landscape. The
>> Internet has changed the character of political participation. Space has
>> shrunk, and time has become fluid and compressed. Social media has become
>> more important than conventional media. Indeed, it was essential, for
>> example, to the election of Bolsonaro in Brazil and Salvini in Italy, as
>> well as Brexit in the UK. US newspapers have a daily run of 62 million
>> copies (ten million from quality papers like the *Wall Street Journal*, *New
>> York Times*, and *Washington Post*), while Trump tweets to as many
>> followers. Contemporary communications technology, while used to sow
>> confusion and abuse by the right, must be central to transnational
>> mobilization campaigns fostering awareness and solidarity.
>>
>> Political apathy among potential allies remains as great a challenge as
>> the right-wing surge. This is not a new phenomenon. The triumphant
>> pronouncements of the end of ideology and history three decades ago helped
>> mute explicit debate on the long-term vision for society. Instead, the
>> technocrats of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the US
>> Treasury foisted the Washington Consensus on the rest of the world:
>> financial deregulation, trade liberalization, privatization, and fiscal
>> austerity. The benefits of globalization would lift all boats; curb
>> nonproductive social costs; privatize health and more; and globalize trade,
>> finance, and industry. Center-left parties across the West resigned
>> themselves to this brave new world. “Third Way” leaders like British Prime
>> Minister Tony Blair argued that since corporate globalization was
>> inevitable, progressives could, at best, give it a human face. In the
>> absence of a real alternative to the dominant paradigm, the left lost its
>> constituency. The wreckage left behind by neoliberal governments has become
>> the engine for the populist and xenophobic forces from across the globe.
>>
>> Looking ahead, to build a viable political formation for a Great
>> Transition, we must find a banner under which people can rally. Climate
>> action has increasingly served this function, with the youthfulness of the
>> climate movement a reason for hope. The climate strike movement, led by
>> Swedish student Greta Thunberg, has engaged tens of thousands of students
>> worldwide and shown that the fight for a better world is on. These new
>> young activists, many of whom have probably never heard of the WSF, do not
>> pretend to come with a pre-made platform; they simply ask the system to
>> listen to scientists. The lack of a full vision allows them to avoid many
>> of the WSF’s problems, yet still underscore how the system has exhausted
>> its viability in the face of spiraling crises.
>>
>> Millions of people across the globe are engaged at the grassroots level,
>> hundreds of times more than related to the WSF. The great challenge is to
>> connect with those working to change the present dire trends, making clear
>> that we are not part of the same elite structures and, indeed, share the
>> same enemy. The historic preconditions undergird the possibility of such a
>> project, our visions of another world give it a direction, and the growing
>> restlessness of countless ordinary people is a hopeful harbinger.
>>
>> Can we find the modes of communication and alliance to galvanize the
>> global movement and propel it forward? I do not see much value in a
>> coalition of organizations and militants who meet merely to discuss among
>> themselves. Collective action is necessary for counterbalancing the decline
>> of democracy, increasing civic participation, and keeping values and
>> visions at the forefront. In the WSF, the debate about moving in this
>> direction has been going for quite some time, but has repeatedly run up
>> against the intransigence of the founders.
>>
>> It would be a mistake to lose the WSF’s impressive history and convening
>> authority. But we need to recreate it in order to reflect the present
>> barbarized. Will we be able to reform WSF, and if this is not possible,
>> create an alternative? Citizens have become more aware of the need for
>> change than they were when we first met in Porto Alegre many years ago. But
>> they are also more divided, some taking the reactionary path of following
>> authoritarian leaders, some the progressive path of social justice,
>> participation, transparency, and cooperation. As the conventional system
>> destabilizes and loses legitimacy, giving life to a revamped WSF—or
>> creating a new platform—might be easier than the challenge of launching the
>> process eighteen years ago. Still, realizing the next phase will take new
>> leaders, wide participation, and recognition of the need for new
>> structures. In these times, this is a tall order.
>>
>> *********************************************************************
>>
>> Tuesday, September 3, 2019
>>
>> From Paul Raskin [praskin at tellus.org]
>> ------------------------------
>>
>> Dear GTN,
>>
>> Since 2001, the World Social Forum has served as civil society’s answer
>> to the World Economic Forum, the annual powwow in Davos of the masters of
>> the neoliberal universe. Over the years, the WSF has brought together
>> hundreds of thousands of activists to meet, network, and reenergize
>> commitments. It has stood as a tangible expression of the diffuse but
>> vibrant “alter globalization” community, and a source of hope for the
>> emergence of a systemic global movement.
>>
>> At the same time, the WSF has mirrored the movement’s immaturity. Most
>> significantly, the disabling fragmentation within civil society has been
>> reflected in the forest of separate tents that spring up at Forums, each
>> devoted to specific issues and grievances, with little exploration of
>> common visions, positions, and coordination mechanisms. More prosaically,
>> the logistical chaos that has plagued Forums and frustrated attendees
>> symbolizes the underdeveloped organizational capacity of the “movement of
>> movements.”
>>
>> Now, as these deficits take their toll and the times change, the WSF
>> seems to be losing momentum and relevance. So it’s timely to critically
>> reflect on its achievements and whether the WSF, itself, needs a Great
>> Transition.
>>
>> Our September GTN Discussion—*FAREWELL TO THE WORLD SOCIAL FORUM?*—takes
>> up the challenge.
>> (Please organize your comments as responses to one or more of the
>> following topics.)
>>
>> *Looking Back*
>> *What has been the historic significance of the WSF? In what ways has its
>> strategy of providing a neutral gathering space advanced (or curtailed) the
>> “movement of movements”? *
>>
>> *At a Crossroads*
>> *Does the WSF retain its vitality as a beacon of “another world,” or is
>> it losing momentum? Has its unbending commitment to radical pluralism
>> sacrificed movement unity? *
>>
>> *Looking Ahead*
>> *Should the WSF continue to operate as an open space? Seek to reinvent
>> itself as a collective force for political action? Or should attention
>> shift to fresh initiatives for building a coherent global movement?*
>>
>> Roberto Savio, founder of Inter Press Service (IPS) and longtime member
>> of the WSF International Council, opens the debate. His essay can be found
>> here <https://greattransition.org/images/Savio-Farewell-WSF.pdf> . I
>> look forward to your comments, whether brief or extended (but less than
>> 1,200 words).
>>
>> The discussion will go through Wednesday, October 2, when Roberto will
>> have an opportunity to respond. Per usual, we will then create a public GTI
>> Forum that samples a range of perspectives raised in the internal GTN
>> discussion.
>>
>> Over to you,
>> Paul
>> ----------------------------------------------------------
>> Hit reply to post a comment on the GT Network
>> Read all comments (or reply) here
>> <https://greattransition.org/gtn-discussions/farewell-to-the-wsf#3033>
>> Note: Expect a delay between posting and receiving your comment
>> Need help? Email jcohn at tellus.org
>>
>>
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>>
>>
>>

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