A new mode of democracy stalks the globe. Born from the counter-globalist social movements, this form of participatory democracy is drawing together niches of involvement and engagement. The World Social Forum stands at the centre of this democratisation impulse.
Picture: Damian Grenfell
The WSF convened under the slogan: ‘Another world is possible’, but this world could be more accurately described as a world of many worlds. Its democratic process reflected this maxim, which came to be expressed in the ‘Charter of Principles’ drawn-up after the 2001 forum. The WSF Principles define the Forum as:
A space for discussing alternatives, for exchanging experiences and for strengthening alliances … an open meeting place for reflective thinking, democratic debate of ideas, formulation of proposals, free exchange of experiences and inter-linking for effective action, by groups and movements of civil society that are opposed to neo-liberalism and to domination of the world by capital and any form of imperialism, and are committed to building a planetary society centred on the human person.
The Principles define a process that centres on facilitation rather than political posturing, on participation rather than programs. The Forum simply aims to achieve solidarity through dialogue, creating new possibilities through the interaction of visions and alternatives. Principle 8 states:
The WSF is a plural, diversified, non-confessional, non-
governmental and non-party context that, in a decentralized fashion, interrelates organizations and movements engaged in concrete action at levels from the local to the international to build another world.
Picture: Damian Grenfell
These Principles have come to transform the Forum from a simply counter-WEF event into something much more significant. This WSF process is a constant source of debate and change. The Forum reviews its ‘methodology’ each year and, reflecting the extent of controversy over process, the 2002 review ran to seven pages; the 2003 edition was much more cursory at two pages; while the 2003 version is six pages long. During this developing WSF process there have been at least three important issues: the issue of hierarchy in events; the participation of heads of state; and the question of institutionalisation.
One important legacy of the attempt to mirror the WEF was the creation of ‘core’ activities organised by the WSF and ‘non-core’ self-organised activities. From the start, the ‘non-core’ overwhelmed the ‘core’, with 400 self-managed activities; by 2003 there were 1,300 such activities.
Conflicts emerged between ‘core’ and ‘non-core’: as Naomi Klein reported after WSF 3 last year, a contradiction had emerged between a process centred on ‘huge crowds all facing the same direction’ and ‘circles, with small groups of people facing each other’. To paraphrase Klein, while the first serves existing leaders and stifles democracy, the second deepens democracy, creating a situation where ‘we become the leaders we have been looking for’.
Concern at these hierarchies has forced a shift to a flatter structure. In June 2003 the International Council of the WSF made an appeal for WSF 2004 to ‘avoid hierarchies’, stating:
The experience of the last three editions of the WSF has been that though the seminars and workshops are the true reflection of the concept of open space that allows a multiplicity of ideas to be exchanged and explored, there tends to be a hierarchy where these are seen to be the ‘least important’.
Another vexed issue is the focus on ‘civil society’ as a source of transformation, and the related issue of the participation of heads of state. The Workers Party of Brazil played a central role in hosting the Porto Alegre WSF and its leader, Lula, played a prominent role in WSF 1 and 2. Lula became Brazilian President in 2002 and again had a prominent place at the third WSF in 2003. This in itself was controversial, as the methodology for WSF 2 had explicitly stated ‘heads of national executives’ could only attend if they were ‘no longer in office’. The WSF 3 methodology omitted this proviso, allowing Lula to address the Forum, along with others such as Castro and the Vice-President of Vietnam.
More controversial was Lula’s appearance at the WEF immediately after the WSF, where he claimed to be ‘taking the message of Porto Alegre into Davos’. The impact of that intervention is still being felt in the WSF. The WSF International Council stated categorically and unanimously that the WSF should ‘avoid inviting those who are heads of state’, adding that ‘President Lula’s presence in WSF 3 was an aberration and had a lot to do with his being involved from the beginning with the WSF process’.
The underlying issue, though, remains. Civil society perspectives may reproduce the liberal-pluralist division between ‘formal’ politics and non-political society, leaving state power unquestioned. Non-governmental perspectives, sometimes labeled ‘NGOism’, can be self-limiting and potentially complicit with neoliberal assaults on state authority. Such challenges, as Emir Sader argues in a powerful critique of the WSF process that appeared in New Left Review, ‘end at the boundaries of liberal politics’. James Petras pursues a similar line of critique, asserting the need to go beyond the affirmation of ‘civil society’ to an approach that allows the creation of a ‘new state power’ grounded in social movements ‘socialising the means of production and democratising social relations’.
The third issue relates to institutionalisation. This long-running question reflects the fine balance between the WSF as a talking shop — or, as some put it this year, a ‘goodwill party’ — and its role in crystalising democratic dialogue and participation, generating the framework for alternatives.
Picture: Damian Grenfell
One question is the extent to which WSF secretariats and organising groups need to be representative of wider social movements and how they may be accountable to them. Many of the groups are established in an ad hoc way that appears to flout democratic principles. The International Council, for instance, has ten representatives from France, reflecting the central role taken by French NGOs in the WSF process, but only eight representatives from Asia. To rectify this imbalance, the Council’s membership is to be broadened in the coming year.
Equally important have been the debates about whether the WSF should be transformed into a more formal organisation. Frustrations with the WSF process led Znet’s Michaell Albert, for instance, to argue the WSF a ‘venue project’ that has to be supplemented by a more thorough-going international movement of movements, perhaps ‘an anti-capitalist internationale’. Bernard Cassen, from the Paris-based ATTAC, a key early participant in the WSF process, has proposed a more plural ‘organized international civil society’ to promulgate a WSF ‘consensus’ against the neoliberal ‘Washington Consensus’. Others argue for the creation of a WSF-based ‘Network of the World’s Social Movements’. Still others are cautious, anxious to preserve the vitality of network politics, limiting common action to temporary coalition-building.
What is clear, though, is that even in its current form the WSF and the social forum process more generally could take on a much stronger facilitative role. Communication is obviously at a premium, as is the creation of infrastructures for the sharing of resources, drawing together perspectives, strategies and agendas.
While the debates have raged, the WSF and its social forum principles have become a founding-stone for counter-globalist praxis. The social forum model has been highly effective. In terms of sheer numbers, the WSF attracted 15,000 participants in 2001; 70,000 in 2002; and near to 100,000 in 2003. At the time of writing, the Mumbai WSF is opening to an expected 80,000 people. Clearly WSF 4 will be different from its predecessors, but there can be little doubt the process will be renewed and invigorated. Indeed, through its short history and against great odds, the ‘social forum’ process has proved to be remarkably resilient — a resilience that lies in the capacity to meet the demands of the moment.
In particular, the process has offered vitally important planning sessions. Late in 2002, the European Social Forum took a central role in setting the date for a global day of action against the war on Iraq that became the world’s largest-ever political mobilisation. Equally important, the model has been disseminated, creating a ‘social forum’ process across many and varied sites.
A good example of the process in action is the Asian Social Forum (ASF) held in Hyderabad in January 2003. In preparation for the ASF, an ‘Asia-Pacific meeting of social movements’ was convened, which was the first of its kind. This met in Bangkok, producing a statement that spoke of a ‘second moment in the trajectory of the resistance as many anti-neoliberal movements become a critical mass impacting on politics at the national level’. This second ‘moment’ foregrounded the issue of cross-national solidarity, which became a major theme of the ASF itself.
The ASF focused on issues of intra- and cross- national coordination, expressed in its theme ‘Connecting across Asia’. Cross-cultural Asia and Pacific solidarity was a key theme of the invitation to delegates, which asserted ‘Asia’s own diversity and spread invites and demands interaction and connections across the continent’. At Hyderabad, 15,000 participants participated in a week of events that had the unexpected effect of bringing together formerly divided movements. As Walden Bello, from Focus on the Global South, put it, the ASF created ‘a venue where movements and organisations [could] find ways of working together despite their differences’.
Such calls and spaces for solidarity are particularly urgent in the current climate where social movements face an increasingly militaristic and rapacious mode of corporate globalism. Increasingly, the focus has to be on state elites as agents of racism, militarism and imperialism, and on countering the cultural conflicts they create. Thus, the main concerns for the 2004 Mumbai WSF were the general ones of imperialist globalisation, militarism and peace, along with more specific concerns of ‘casteism, racism and other descent-based exclusions and discrimination’ and ‘communalism, religious fanaticism and sectarian violence’. The call from Mumbai was loud and clear — that we are creating the alternatives to a corporate world of domination and fear.
While counter-globalism offers no ready-made, off-the-shelf utopias, there are substantial grounds for believing that politics under corporate globalism is, perhaps more than ever, a politics of transition and transformation. The new modes of political power are dissolving old political divides, but they are also constituting new constituencies and crystalising new modes of dialogue, contestation and mobilisation. We are, more than ever, living with the possibility of paradigmatic change. As Arundhati Roy said at the 2003 WSF, ‘Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing’.
James Goodman teaches at the University of Technology, Sydney, and has been involved in the yearly Sydney Social Forum. He co-convenes the Research Initiatve on International Activism: www.international.activism.uts.edu.au
