PHM-Exch> Farewell to the World Social Forum?

[Claudio Schuftan]

 Oct 3 2019

*By Roberto Savio**

* Opening reflections for the September 2019 GTN forum *

* 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. Rightwing 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.
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