Thomas Ponniah wrote in “The Contribution of the U.S. Social Forum”:
“While the Open Space of the Forum has allowed for the creation of new networks it has not yet facilitated visionary projects. There have been great reactive events, such as demonstrations against the WTO negotiations- but there have been few alternatives that have actually been implemented by the global justice movements. That is the great overarching trial that the Forum faces. While the Forum has facilitated the capacity for local, national and global social movement reflection, it has not yet given birth to comparable forms of achievement.”
In the Bello-Whitaker debate, I find Whitaker’s views more appropriate to capturing the political significance of the WSF process. And after attending the USSF, I’m even more convinced that Whitaker is correct to argue for the continuation of efforts to create open spaces for consultation without having to come to agreement on a particular political platform. The recent USSF was one of the first times in our country’s history that the diverse people who make up our citizenry could come together to discuss public policy. It was a practice in participatory democracy that has not and would not have taken place without social movements. The alternatives the WSF process is creating is the democratic spaces that are both the means and the end goal of the work of most of the groups participating in them. By creating spaces for participatory democracy, the WSF process enables people to learn skills in doing democracy. By staging forums that are part of an ongoing and multi-level process that integrates global, national, and local, they encourage people to cultivate long-term strategies and to build relationships.
Many groups at the USSF People’s Movement Assembly declared their intention to organize local social forums and other activities in their home communities. This suggests that the key message of the WSF process has been taken up by people who have only begun to discover what has been happening in the WSF process these past several years. Analysts watching the follow-up to the last World Social Forum in Nairobi report that a similar phenomena is happening in Africa as a result of the Forum. The alternatives generated from the USSF, then, are the autonomous political spaces where diverse groups of citizens can learn to articulate their own needs and identities, appreciate and respect differences, while developing a stronger sense of their common struggle. If this important work happens, the rest will follow.
In addition to providing models for participatory democracy, the USSF also allowed movements around this country to learn from each other’s ideas. Ideas about economic democracy were provided at the “solidarity economy” tent as well as in a number of workshops. Indigenous people’s views were articulated consistently throughout the forum, helping participants better understand the sense of exclusion and injustice that separates native communities from the dominant culture. They also helped demonstrate how even practices adopted by movement organizers reflect and support the very structures of industrial capitalism that we claim to be resisting.
In short, by creating open spaces, the WSF process encourages the building of power by the people who need to play a more central role in making decisions about how the world will be organized. It also generates discussion around a variety of possible alternatives, enabling people to take new ideas home about how their local political and economic lives could be different. By sustaining an ongoing process, in allows people to return to a supportive space to gain new information and ideas while renewing their sense of shared purpose and commitment. This is an alternative to what the dominant society offers. And it is also transformative. We are developing a new way of doing politics, and we are learning new politics by doing them. While we may not know where the process will lead, we know what principles should guide our steps: to paraphrase from the Zapatista slogan, we live on one world and we must seek ways of creating room for many worlds.
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Jackie Smith is associate professor of sociology and peace studies at the University of Notre Dame. She is co-author of Global Democracy and the World Social Forums (Paradigm Publishers) and author of a forthcoming book on contemporary global justice activism, Rival Visions, Global Networks: Social Movements for Global Democracy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
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