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

Thu Sep 26 12:31:53 CEST 2019

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Great Transition Network <gtnetwork at greattransition.org>
Date: Thu, Sep 26, 2019 at 4:04 AM
Subject: Farewell to the WSF? (GTN Discussions)
To: <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>

>From Candido Grzybowski [candido at ibase.br]
----------------------------------------------------------
[EDITOR'S NOTE: The discussion will be ending one week from today --
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 2. I look forward to your comments! -- JC]

I have been involved in the World Social Forum (WSF) process since the
beginning of 2000, when representatives of eight Brazilian social
organizations and movements—later called the Organizing Committee—met to
launch the first in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in late January 2001. As the
director of Ibase, created in the early 1980s by exiles returning to Brazil
after being granted political amnesty, I represented the organization on
the committee.

My relation to the WSF has two phases: (a) deep engagement from 2000 to
2010 and (b) a critical position with gradual withdrawal after that. I draw
from this experience in this contribution to the timely debate that the GTN
provides and that Roberto Savio, a personal friend, provokes. [1]

The WSF was conceived as an open space that would be a kind of battery
recharger of active citizenship, now necessarily of planetary dimension
because of the need to resolve contradictions of capitalism at a global
scale. The WSF has undoubtedly made a fundamental contribution to the
emergence of a worldwide citizen culture, and continues today propelled by
civil society organizations, social movements, and networks from different
parts of the world. In its early years, it helped build collective
political intelligence about the problems, challenges, and possibilities of
the struggles we waged, each in our own way across the Planet. It
underscored our interdependence as we share the same world and the same
challenge to make it another world. For our great diversity of identities
and cultures, our plurality of views and perspectives, the WSF offered us
an open space—a kind of factory for a new political culture—for us to
recognize ourselves as humanity and part of the same and unique shared
planetary system.

The world's cultural, political, and economic context has changed greatly
between 2001 and now. The multiple recent crises are expressions of the
contradictions and limits to which globalized capitalism submits humanity
and the sustainability of life on the planet. “Another possible world”
remains an urgent need. However, as I have argued in the past, we need to
think beyond the WSF, while still allowing the WSF to continue the
inspiring task for which it was founded. WSF meetings nourished the dream
and hope for many around the world and should continue to do so with the
younger generations of today.

*The WSF as inspiration and as limit*

The most obvious contribution of the WSF was as a galvanizing force that
opposed Davos and asserted that "another world is possible." It did this by
appealing to the capacity for transformative action of the multiple and
diverse collective subjects, organized into resisting entities, movements,
networks, coalitions, and alliances to formulate concrete proposals and
fight for their realization. This potential was latent, but the WSF brought
it forth by inviting shared reflection on experiences and knowledge that
develops in diverse practices, while opening possibilities to strengthen
the power of one's own action in each context. The WSF created the
foundations of a new political culture of transformation precisely by
establishing horizontal planetary dialogue as an imperative, without
antagonism, racism, or patriarchalism, dialogue within and between
collective subjects, each recognizing each other as equal subjects.

The WSF did not invent this new political culture, but it was a great
propeller and inducer of it. Due to its open space for diversity and
plurality—as defined in the Charter of Principles—the WSF has become a
reference point for meetings and exchanges, without hierarchies or
priorities. The encounters and debates it engendered, along with its
political pluralitsm, made it a reference point for a new planetary
political culture.

It must be acknowledged that this now political culture was just emerging.
We all brought our mental structures, values, and practices, with all their
contradictions, starting with the simplest: we confuse diversity with each
one doing what they wanted, making collaboration and synthesis difficult,
when such collaboration and synthesis is the raison d'être of the WSF
space. In fact, we were deluded about the size of the task ahead with our
way of thinking and acting freighted by conceptual and political tendencies
that undermined unity. Not least, despite the massive presence of feminist
organizations and movements, tenacious machismo did not give women proper
relevance in dialogues and exchanges. Also, while language and cultural
diversity are heritages to preserve, we could not cope with the problem of
translation, despite the information and communication technologies
available to us.

Despite these problems, a great legacy of the WSF was the rescue and
appreciation of politics as the quintessential arena for building another
world, and citizen action as the necessary transformational force. In a
capitalist world increasingly dominated by large, increasingly privatized,
increasingly commodified, more cynical and violent business public and
politics, the WSF highlighted core ethical principles and values for
thinking about nature, life, the economy, and power.

In summary, I consider three WSF strengths as inspiration: 1) rekindling
hope and and renewing a sense of history as human production, not
metaphysical determination; 2) questioning the determinist assumptions and
antagonisms typical of leftist culture; and 3) valuing the energy of the
diversity of collective subjects. But here come the limits. The WSF's open
space centered on its gatherings, a process of events limited to building
consciousness and will for action, but not in fact acting for another
world. It was just a step, a fundamental beginning, a door opening, a
necessary but insufficient condition of forging the new. For transformative
forces to emerge, in my view, we need to take a path beyond the WSF to new
forms of collective action. The challenges were glimpsed and echoed at the
WSF, but confronting them requires new political and cultural creativity.
Therein lies the dilemma: as a space, the WSF has proven indispensable. But
because of the Forum itself, I felt pushed to initiatives beyond it, to
initiatives from the local to the global level, building the necessary
articulations.

*Elements for an agenda beyond WSF *
Repoliticizing the relationship between the biosphere, power, culture, and
the economy and acting from a planetary and cosmopolitan perspective is the
starting point. As I pointed out above, the WSF has reframed politics and
power, giving them centrality as opposed to market relations and the
economy. In this sense, it pointed to the power of active citizenship. It
did not elaborate and did not, as such, define the fighting agenda or
agendas. The agendas of each individual movement, network, coalition, and
alliance were debated and often updated at WSF events, but the
responsibility for carrying them out rested with the one who adopts them
and cannot be imposed on all Forum participants. The issue of the political
agenda was the crucial point for each participant, as an expression of
their rights and responsibilities as humans and citizens. It is in this
sense that I thought and still think it is a duty of Forum participants to
prioritize the political agenda before and after events. The “beyond the
WSF” I refer to embodies this sense of intervention which takes inspiration
from the WSF only as a moment of reflection and exchange. My priority was
and is to move forward on action agendas, seeking partnerships and
alliances that better address the different situations and contexts in
which I live.

Today, I think that the central issue for confronting capitalism is the
search for alternatives to the “crisis of civilization” rooted in colonial,
racist, patriarchal, Eurocentric, and imperialist rule over peoples and
nature, and the industrial growth, productivism, and consumerism due to
unbridled accumulation. Environmental destruction and social injustice are
intrinsic conditions of capitalism, exacerbated today by globalization at
the service of the great economic and financial conglomerates under the
imperialist militarized guard. The fracturing of the social fabric and the
breaking of the resilience of the biosphere and the common basis for life
itself is reaching irreversibility. To make all life sustainable, it is
essential to tackle injustice on its two sides, both social and
environmental: eco-social injustice. It is no longer possible to limit
oneself to changing social relations of production, heretofore the dominant
ideal of the left. The ideal of industrial society— its productivism and
limitless accumulation, the goods and services it provides, and the style
of consumption and life it generates—is part of the eco-social injustice
that we must confront. The idea of resistance to the commodification of
everything, the commons and life itself, was always well-represented in the
WSF. But this is only part of the story. The whole vision of human
civilization and its relationship to nature needs to be reimagined, from
local to world, reflecting the possibilities and limits of the biosphere
and the cultural, scientific, and technical creativity of each people, in a
spirit of interdependence and planetary solidarity, resilience, and
sustainability.

Accordingly, a key element of the new political culture and social
transformation agenda is to decolonize and liberate our ways of thinking
and acting. In the context of the “crisis of civilization,” we need to
advance a deep shift in power and economic institutions. What condemns many
to poverty, exclusion, and multiple forms of inequality and domination is
not a lack of development, but development itself. Development constantly
reinvents racism, patriarchalism, xenophobia, and intolerance of social and
cultural diversity to dominate and exclude. Today, it is visible in the
territorialization of racism, the fissures between city and countryside and
between agribusiness and social forms of production, and the relations
between peoples and nations. Old patriarchalism is renewed and naturalized
by capitalism, which devalues, but benefits from, an economy of care,
imposing a double workday on women. Publicizing and politicizing this
agenda that emerges from women's struggles is a task of citizenship as a
whole, from local to global.

It is essential to think about the necessary process of cumulative
disruptions. The question that arises is political and ethical at the same
time as the legitimacy of the struggle for change challenges institutional
legality and continuity. The institutional framework that confines us to
nation-states proves to be a necessary but extremely limited arena for the
struggle for "another possible world" or, as I prefer today, "another
possible civilization." We are faced with the unavoidable need to oppose
citizenship and peoples' sovereignty to national states and their monopoly
in the world sphere of power. This implies taking on the existing legal
framework that denies equal rights and destroy the natural foundations of
life. This is fundamental: citizenship is not a gift of states, but a
political condition of being part of humanity. Therefore, the agenda of
rethinking and refounding the state necessarily arises as a political
expression of the power that equal and diverse “citizenships” confer on it.

One more essential element of the agenda: the new architecture of power.
Interdependence between peoples and nations in today's globalized
capitalism is undoubtedly a major problem created by the imperialist
domination of developed countries, particularly the United States. But this
interdependence carries a contradiction that offers a huge possibility for
the future. The WSF itself, as a space for an emerging planetary
citizenship, would not have been possible were it not for the diffuse
awareness that we are part of the same humanity and share the same planet.
Interdependence, however, cannot be theorized and practiced without a
concrete location, where we have the essentials of our lives and
relationships with others and make our exchanges with the biosphere. The
burning questions become: How can we rethink this fundamental place, in
terms of power, culture, and economy, from a planetary citizen perspective?
And how can we rethink world power from a perspective of territorialized
citizenship?

*A possible way of acting beyond the WSF *

Here I want to draw attention to the fundamental need to re-organize our
forces in order to propel the citizen agenda of building another
civilization. Again, the WSF serves as an inspiration, but it lacks the
capacity to undertake the difficult and continuing task of organizing the
collective subjects of citizenship, assessing political opportunities, and
waging the struggle.  It is only in acting that one does the action (it is
by walking that one does the path), but the process begins by agreeing on a
broad agenda. This already points beyond the WSF to the plurality of
citizenship as a possible historical block for constituting and instituting
planetary citizenship of another world. The tricky question is how to build
coalitions of collective subjects with a maximum common denominator (to
counteract the lowest common denominator of certain generic and empty
statements) for the agenda and basis for political action. I speak here of
inter-movement coalitions and active citizenship organizations. The
relative success of existing thematic campaigns and networks of collective
construction of strategic thinking, such as the GTN, is a point of
departure. However, we need differentiated and coordinated actions of a
militant citizenship contesting existing structures and powers in the most
diverse situations. We lack, but need, effective intra-movements networks
and organizations, linking the local with the world embracing strategic
vision of the whole political task. This requires patient work of building
what potentially will be the new collective political subjects, necessarily
plural and diverse, with their own identities and proposals, from local to
global, articulating themselves to have the power to transform the world.

 The crucial issue of action is the political and cultural construction of
counter-hegemonies in concrete local societies and at various levels of
political influence, up to world power structures. How can we do this
without factionalism, as is the tradition of the left? The secret, it seems
to me, lies in building open coalitions, which start by recognizing others
as indispensable, and which depends on honoring and implementing their
agenda. In this way, active consensus can be generated, which is
fundamental in the struggle for a new hegemony. It is crucial to recognize
that, for citizenship, the public space for debate and free circulation of
ideas is always the priority. Communication and public campaigns are thus a
priority arena for the necessary course of action.

Cândido Grzybowski

[1] For more reflections on this issue, see my text, presented at the
10-year Thematic World Social Forum event in Porto Alegre, entitled “Beyond
the World Social Forum (
http://www.ipsnews.net/2010/01/beyond-the-world-social-forum/ ). This was
also the moment when I was most deeply engaged in new initiatives, for
example, the conference at Ibase on new paradigms in 2012, for which I
wrote “Foundations for Biocivilization” (
http://www2.world-governance.org/article796.html ).

*******************************************************************************************

>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
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