The Unites States Social Forum (USSF) is taking place this week in Philadelphia and San Jose, in collaboration with other sites throughout North America.
The U.S. Social Forum has grown out of the World Social Forum, which was first organized in 2001 by NGOs, leftist political parties and social movements in Brazil.
The World Social Forum created an opportunity to form a counter-gathering to the World Economic Forum, in which state and corporate leaders charted a future of ongoing neoliberal reforms like privatization, deregulation and free trade agreements.
Born out of the desire to advance alternatives to neoliberal globalization and to instead globalize resistance movements, for the last 14 years hundreds of regional social forums have been organized all over the world under the banner of “another world is possible.”
I remember attending the first U.S. Social Forum, which was held in Atlanta in 2007. It felt like a reawakening of the global justice movements which had seemingly gone dormant after police repression and questions of effectiveness led many organizers to abandon the summit protests that had until that point defined the movement.
The 2007 Social Forum created an incredible opportunity to redefine a progressive, from-below movement in the United States by connecting organizations focused on protest-oriented resistance work, community based projects for survival and the work taking place to build alternative models for transforming the economy, politics and the way that we organize and relate to another.
Over 15,000 people attended the 2007 Social Forum, a central theme of which was the recent mass displacement that resulted from Hurricane Katrina. While labor unions and non-governmental organizations participated in the first USSF, unlike many of the previous World Social Forums, a diverse and decentralized network of workers centers, community organizations and grassroots groups led the charge in the struggle for another United States and another world.
The traditional hierarchical institutions of the left played a marginal role. Instead, the diverse and unified voices from below came together to critique the growing “non-profit industrial complex” and to reject electoral politics as the only route for social change and transformation.
While participation in the 2010 Social Forum in Detroit swelled to 20,000, the only space that could accommodate such a large group was an enormous convention center in Detroit’s relatively empty downtown. Building on Detroit’s legacy of strong labor organizing and as a city that was built and then bankrupted by capitalism, the 2010 Social Forum viscerally engaged with the idea of creating a new world in the ruins of the old. Labor history walking tours and organized trips to community based urban gardens offered an opportunity to leave the air-conditioned conference space and see how ideas were being put into action, and how some pieces of another world already exist within the broken world that we are trying to change.
In addition to workshops, the 2010 U.S. Social Forum incorporated spaces called People’s Movement Assemblies (PMAs) where organizations and individuals join in an open forum to strategize solutions to problems and make proposals for coordinated action and concrete campaigns.
The 2015 U.S. Social Forum is the first to be organized in a polycentric way. In addition to the two main sites of Philadelphia and San Jose, there will be Peoples Movement Assemblies in Jackson, Mississippi, Tiajuana, Mexico and throughout North America. Utilizing the internet and other technology, groups in these different locations will be able to connect through video conferences and a live-stream feed on the U.S. Social Forum’s web page. The polycentric model is designed to build broader leadership, create more decentralized hubs for social justice organizing, and facilitate participation for people in different regions of the country.
In the age of austerity and economic crisis, community organizations often lack the resources to create spaces for dialogue and debate. German Parodi of Disabled in Action in Pennsylvania joined in organizing the U.S. Social Forum because he saw it as an opportunity to connect the struggle for the rights of people with disabilities with issues of hunger and immigration:
“We all are being oppressed and we know that, but that leaves many of us fighting for scraps. We are very fractioned and we are working on different issues but the Social Forum brings us all together.”
Parodi has joined Cheri Honkala from the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign (PPEHRC) as co-chair of the Philly USSF.
PPEHRC fights for economic human rights as spelled out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; these include the right to housing, healthcare, education, food and a living wage. PPEHRC emerged through the leadership of the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, anti-poverty pioneers who moved homeless families into abandoned houses in Philadelphia in the 1990s while actively building a racially diverse organization led by poor people.
The Philly U.S. Social Forum will mostly be held in Kensington, a neighborhood with one of the highest rates of poverty in the United States and where KWRU and PPEHRC have been organizing for decades. In Philly, Disabled in Action and PPEHRC are the local “anchor organizations” that planned the logistics and are hosting outside groups coming to attend the USSF. This model was created to avoid the potentially destructive dynamic created when national NGOs swoop in to plan a convergence without considering the long term impacts of that event on the host city.
Edgardo Gonzales from the Defensores de Puerto Rico said that he will be participating in the Philly U.S. Social Forum to “bring attention to the crisis in Puerto Rico due to all these years of colonial rule by the United States.” In addition to the core issues of housing, immigration and disability rights, dozens of workshops and PMAs are being organized around topics like climate change, mass incarceration, police violence, access to clean water, education and healthcare.
The overarching goals of the U.S. Social Forum are to build a movement of diverse groups and individuals; to share a concrete vision for a more just economy, a working democracy, and a flourishing ecology; and to strategize and plan next steps.
Because the concerns of poor people and social justice movements are often ignored by politicians, USSF organizers are working toward the creation of a people’s platform leading up to the 2016 election.
Despite this outcome overemphasizing the 2016 Presidential elections, the process of building a collective platform will help us to better understand the current political moment, and therefore the ways in which can successfully navigate toward another possible world.
Cory Fischer-Hoffman is a media-maker, scholar and organizer based in Philadelphia. She attended the 2007 US Social Forum as an organizer with the Student Farmworker Alliance (SFA), the 2010 USSF as the Campaign director for the Prometheus Radio Project, and she will be organizing a workshop at the 2015 Philly USSF on long-haul solidarity with Venezuelan social movements.
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