The Last day of sessions at the WSF : the global justice movement
Par Josée Madéïa
The next session is organized by the Network Institute for Global Democratization, and entitled “The Future of the Forum: The WSF process and the Global Justice Movements.”
Here, Walden Bello speaks about the importance of creating a meeting space for the articulation of alternatives, but underlines that we could have been more effective had we taken stands: on the war in Irak, on Palestine, on climate change. So while the WSF needs to be an open space, it can still be partisan, it can still be an activist space. Fighting neo-liberalism was the last war, our new initiatives and our new movement should focus on global social democracy. We need to exercise our radical imagination, he says with a smile. Because of this crisis of the system, this is the moment not for caution, but for action.
Next, Nicolas Haeringer raises the point of our consensus; stressing that this way of interacting with one another and this decision making model allow us to discuss until we know how far we can go together. And to remember that conflicts are a necessary part of any democracy.
Meena Menon of Focus on the Global South, begins by talking about her experience with the WSF in India, saying that the political context in India was such that, with a right wing government in power, there was a general sense that they were losing the battle. As a result, perhaps, alliance building of that scale was never before seen in India. And this, she says, because there was a sense that you could go to the Forum without having to be part of a formal alliance; you didn’t have to agree with other groups. This gave a sense of confidence and of unity. The weakness she identified in this process however, is that there is not yet a focus on alternatives. “We are still in ‘critique mode’, we are not yet in ‘alternative mode’ and it’s becoming more imperative that we get there.”
Michael Hardt begins by saying, point blank, that people invest too much hope in the Forum. They mistake the cause and the effect, he says. Movements become more visible as a result of the Forum, but movements are the cause and the Forum is the effect. The Forum cannot invent a movement out of nothing. He talks about the cycle of our struggle, starting with Chiapas in 1994, Seattle in 1999. This period is characterized by an impressive diversity of groups, of causes and of tactics. Multiplicity. The second period, 2003-2007, focused on war, on Bush, with a very real pressure towards unity of agenda and of organization. The nature of the movement of that cycle was not related to the WSF. In this third period, we return to plurality and multiplicity. With the twin deaths of neoliberalism and unilateralism (in the US), a new space for a new multiplicity opens. And Obama opens terrains for new types of struggle. Hardt ends by stressing that he doesn’t expect alternatives to come from the Forum, but from the movement.
François Houtart speaks about the necessary messiness of the WSF process. He says “Of course the WSF is a mess, is ambiguous, but it exists! Ten years ago, the only forum was Davos, and we of course have to be critical but we also have to recognize the impact of what we’ve accomplished.” He talks about the creation of universal consciousness (“and this is only the beginning!”), the creation of networks and then he gets into the pressing issue of the economic crisis. This crisis is not only financial, he underlines, it is much more profound: there’s the food crisis, the social crisis, the crisis of our model of development, the crisis of civilization. We can’t just blame bankers and start again, we have to propose alternatives, we have to go a step further, to create a network of networks, to come to strategic common objectives (not priorities). We protect the autonomy of NGOs, and this is good, but we need to have links with political issues and political parties. We also have to implement our Charter more radically, he says. “The Forum is not an instrument of action but it can help in our search for alternatives and our search for common strategies.”
Chico Whitaker brought up class issues and WSF attendance. Spoke of the necessity of affirmative action, because being middle class does affect the way we look at the world, the way we organize and, par ricochet, who participates.
(Interventions/Discussions: Africans are absent, we need to rethink the location of the WSF; very middle class; the exclusion of networks (not individuals); politics of accommodation (open spaces and compromises); movements and the WSF: we are co-dependent and co-constructed, for better or worse).
