Berichte
Weltsozialforum 2009: Es ist Zeit das WSF in die USA zu bringen
(in englischer Sprache - Roh-Übersetzung ins Deutsche siehe Link am Textende)
(by Thomas Ponniah)
Over the last few weeks I had the opportunity to attend the
Inauguration of the 44th President of the United States and to
participate in the World Social Forum hosted in Belém, Brazil . The
Inaugural was attended by 1.8 million citizens, which included a
notably large percentage of African-Americans, from all over the
country. The World Social Forum had over 133 000 participants from
around the world with a substantial number of Pan-Amazonic social
movements. In both cases I witnessed a mobilized, dynamic civil sphere
aspiring to a new, better society. The key to achieving another world
is to bring these spheres together.
The Inauguration
I landed at Baltimore's Thurgood Marshall airport on January 19th -
Martin Luther King Day - a national holiday celebrated throughout most
of the United States. Surprisingly the U.S. Transport Security
Administration had set up a small exhibit in the airport on the Civil
Rights Movement. I sat down and watched an hour of videos chronicling
the activism of one of the U.S.'s most inspirational social
mobilizations. It was stirring to see the different sides of the
movement: the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Poor People's Campaign, and
of course the dazzling, timeless speech at the Washington monument.
King's message was eternal because it restated in a new language, as
every generation does, the essence of the progressive vision.
The night before the Inauguration I was asked to speak at a dinner
party hosted by Andrew Miller - an environmentalist who was also going
to the Amazon for WSF 2009. The topic of my discussion was the
proposals for an alternative globalization proposed at the Forum.
However I could not help but bring up the fact of King's birthday and
its relation to the event that we would all see the next day. From a
young age, my father - James Ponniah, who lived in the U.S. when King
was assassinated - had raised me on a perpetual stream of stories
about the 1960's: King, Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy, and Angela Davis
were names that I regularly heard. He, like many who supported Obama,
interpreted this recent U.S. election as the political, though not
economic, culmination of the Civil Rights movement.
On Inauguration Day, the streets were inundated with people and -
being the U.S. - products. There were King and Obama posters,
t-shirts, berets, buttons, superhero dolls ("an action figure that you
can trust") and even air fresheners. While critical of consumerism one
could not help but be caught up in the collective effervescence. The
person who best understood the rapture was of course the rock star
himself. Obama's address, though not comparable to his earlier,
innovative campaign speeches on religion and race, emphasized
accountability: the U.S. public had to take responsibility for the
failure of the past and the promise of the future. It was a speech
that touched on the most heroic side of the country's tradition,
calling for social change that was grounded in the ideals once noted
by Alexis de Tocqueville. The French writer had written that what
distinguished U.S. democracy was its public participation . Obama's
speech was an appeal for public engagement, responsibility and vision.
Now momentous events in the U.S. are not only embodied by a surfeit of
new consumer goods but also by the approval of the country's
aristocracy. In contrast to most countries, and centuries, the U.S.'
nobility are not economic elites but instead popular cultural ones.
That evening the Obamas attended ten inaugural balls. The first, the
Neighborhood Ball, was attended by Hollywood actors and pop stars such
as Shakira, Jay-Z, Faith Hill, and Beyonc. The latter sung the Etta
James classic "At Last" - a popular tune usually played at weddings
across the country. The song was an opportunity for the Obamas to have
their "first dance" as the First Couple. At the end of her performance
the singer was asked by the ABC reporter what this event meant to her.
She replied, "It's probably the most important day of my life? He
makes me want to be smarter, he makes me want to be more involved".
Her response echoed the sentiments that I had seen and heard all day
in Washington - whether I was speaking with progressives over dinner,
on the subways, or at the Washington monument. The Inauguration of
Obama represented the possibility for a broad-based renewal of the
U.S. public sphere.
WSF 2009
A week later I flew to the Brazilian Amazon to attend the 2009 edition
of the World Social Forum (WSF). The Forum first emerged in 2001 out
of a cycle of protest oriented around the latest form of globalization - most famously in the massive protests in Seattle against the World
Trade Organization. The first Forum was held simultaneous to the World
Economic Forum annually held in Davos, Switzerland. The WSF's goals
were to have a meeting place where activists from around the planet
could propose alternatives to "neoliberal" or free market
globalization. The Forums have been held in different parts of the
world such as India, Venezuela, Mali, Pakistan, and Kenya, but
primarily in the home of its founding movements - Brazil. The Forums
have regularly hosted tens of thousands of participants attending
workshops, seminars, panels, and artistic events. The popular slogan
of the Forum "Another World is Possible" has become our generation's
way of stating "I Have a Dream".
The choice to hold the Forum in the Amazon was a political decision.
At no other point in history has the global public been more aware of
the danger posed to the environment by the instrumental rationality of
the modern system. The first day of workshops was dedicated to
Pan-Amazonic movements. Social movements of all varieties converged on
this event with one key idea running through all of them: the current
model of civilization was in crisis because it had severed itself from
Life . The choice of the Amazon as the site for the Forum was to
highlight what many indigenous movements had been saying for decades:
our actions are damaging the Earth, nature-society relations and
ourselves. The future of humanity, they argued, now depends on an
entirely new conceptual, practical and expressive relationship with
Nature and each other. Perhaps nothing symbolized this sentiment
better than the beautiful, checkered rainbow flag, the Wiphala, seen
throughout the indigenous tent.
Curiously, an equally arresting group of political actors, holding the
necessary, though not sufficient, solution to the above, stood just
outside the Forum. On January 29th the leaders of Ecuador, Paraguay,
Bolivia, and Venezuela held a "dialogue" with social movements and
later that evening Presidents Morales, Chavez, Correa, Lugo, joined by
Lula, spoke at an ecstatic event organized by the Brazilian Workers'
Party at the Hangar - an old airplane building that has been converted
into a state of the art auditorium. Both the first and second events
were electrifying occasions with rapt, chanting crowds. While
political leaders are not invited into the Forum, the WSF has
regularly had politicians, usually Chavez, come and speak outside the
grounds, highlighting their fidelity to the content - though not
always the process being espoused. The first event ended with the
Presidents all singing the haunting: "Hasta Siempre". The song became
all the more poignant when Aleida Guevara, the daughter of the
twentieth century's most famous revolutionary, came onto the stage and
sang with the leaders.
The enthusiastic reception of the leaders, and the fact that one of
the main groups that invited them, IBASE (Instituto Brasileiro de
Analises Sociais e Economicas), was one of the original members of the
Brazilian Organizing Committee of the WSF, represents a growing
understanding that social movements have to engage with state actors.
Social Movements and the State
The Forum arose in 2001 in a context in which social movements were
strong but progressive state actors were weak. Immanuel Wallerstein
has noted that the 1990s marked the breakdown of three prominent
leftist projects: in the First World the welfare state was
substantially undermined, in the Second World Soviet Communism fell,
and in the Third World national liberation projects were met with
increasing disillusionment . Corresponding to the exhaustion of these
state projects, there was an acceleration of dispersed single-issue
movements often oriented around the politics of identity such as
gender, race, and sexuality. The Forum emerged in this context with an
Open Space concept, that is, a mechanism that would allow various
movements to identify themselves as having similar interests without
necessarily agreeing on one collective program. Since then we have
seen the beginnings of an "inter-movement dialogue" across various
sets of social actors. The Open Space has acted as a global
communication infrastructure opening up the possibility for what Samir
Amin has called a "convergence of difference" oriented around global
justice coalitions, such as the World March of Women, that are
organized across ideology, region and scale. Along with the
articulation of an overarching common identity of difference and the
creation of new networks, the Forum's other great achievement has been
to give global social movements an opportunity to debate radically
democratic alternatives to the modern system .
The present context however is very different from that of the Forum's
emergence in 2001. Today, progressive state actors are not weak. The
rise of the left in Latin America, and the election of the potentially
most progressive U.S. presidency in thirty years, all point to the
possibility of more humane state policies. As well, the differences
amongst social movements seem much less pronounced. Years of dialogue,
information sharing and collective mobilization via the Social Forum
process has produced new hybrid movements as opposed to the single
issue mobilizations of the past thirty years. In the context of new
innovative political formations, it is not surprising that World
Social Forum actors are arranging discussions with political parties
just outside the perimeter of the Forum.
Social movements have the capacity to mobilize protest, such as the
worldwide mobilization against the war on Iraq on February 15, 2003,
to a far greater degree than political parties. However political
actors, such as the Spanish Socialist government have the power to
actually stop their involvement in the war, as they did when they were
first elected in 2004. Social movements of the left need not abandon
state power. The state is a crucial instrument for advancing the goals
of progressives. Conservative social movements, even libertarians,
have always understood state power as a powerful tool for their goals.
They have never misunderstood the importance of using all the devices
at one's disposal when attempting to advance a social project.
Progressives should learn from this. While the state should not be
embraced with any hopes of romance, it should be recognized, as King
and Guevara understood, for the resources it can provide.
The WSF and the USA
The Forum is often depicted as a space that does not produce one
common social project. Its most critical supporters often disparage
this Open Space methodology as ineffective. They contend that the
plurality of proposals, minus a unified program, leads to a
carnivalesque atmosphere that is ultimately more of a cultural
experience, a global Woodstock, rather than a political event . The
debate on the WSF is often framed as "space versus actor" with the
former position most strongly advocated by one of the Forum's founding
parents: Chico Whitaker, and the latter position famously promoted by
another member of the International Council - Walden Bello. However,
there may be a third way to view this debate. Rather than see the
conflict as one between "space" and "actor" it may be more productive
to recognize the Forum as an arena where the space is the political
actor.
The selection of venue - whether Porto Alegre, Mumbai, Caracas,
Bamako, Karachi, Nairobi or the Amazon - has always been a political
choice. The sites were chosen as strategic arenas that would have
beneficial effects to local and global social movements. Today the
International Council must make a decision about the location of the
next World Social Forum. Normally the Council has chosen a place
located in the Global South. This has been politically astute: events
in the North, rarely include the views of most of the planet. Holding
the Forum in Africa, Asia and Latin America, has allowed, as
Boaventura de Sousa Santos has noted, for the emergence of the
diversity of movements, practices and epistemologies of the South .
However the historical context has changed. It is time to for social
movements to dialogue with state actors, and above all, to engage the
public sphere of the most prominent state in the world. It is time for
movements that want to change the world to come to the USA.
The election of Obama has opened up the potential for a democratic
renewal of the United States. The social movements, especially the
past civil rights organizations and the current anti-war ones, that
gave birth to Obama want a more just, diverse, and sustainable United
States. They represent the best side of the U.S. experiment. It would
be a great boon to these mobilizations, and because of the country's
position in the global system, to all movements around the planet if
the World Social Forum came to the United States in 2011.
There are of course numerous obstacles to this proposal. The Forum has
been dedicated to developing collective mobilizations in the Global
South hence the need for it to continue to be deployed in Africa, Asia
and Latin America. As well there will be legal difficulties
specifically in terms of getting visas for all of the social movements
that would like to participate in the Forum. However, all of us who
note these various objections and obstacles should not forget the
central reason for the creation of the WSF: to create another, better
world. In the context of a globally resurgent progressive movement,
and a U.S. population hungry for alternatives, it is time for the
World Social Forum to be held in the United States.
--------------------------------------------
Thomas Ponniah is the co-editor of the first book of alternatives from
the World Social Forum: Another World is Possible. He is also a member
of the Network Institute for Global Democratization, one of the
founding organizations of the World Social Forum's International
Council, and he is also a Lecturer on Social Studies at Harvard
University.
--
Dr. Thomas Ponniah
Lecturer on Social Studies
Harvard University
www.ThomasPonniah.com
Address:
Committee on Degree in Social Studies
Harvard University
59 Shepard St
Cambridge, MA
02138
Tel: 617-864-3429
Email: Thomas.Ponniah@gmail.com
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