Introduction
I. The World Social Forum and the struggle for a new world
The World Social Forum could be said – by its very choice of date[1] – to be an operation in counter-communication[2] against the World Economic Forum. It asserted that the “one truth” thinking of triumphalist capitalism – which brought the lords and masters of the world together in Davos – could be contested by the utopia of “another possible world”.
When launching that operation, its organizers went further: they proposed that opposition to neo-liberalism should move forward to a stage centred more on proposals of its own. They went even further: in organizing the World Social Forum they put into practice a series of political insights drawn from humankind's experimentation over the preceding decades to free itself from domination of all kinds (see Annex 8, “Civil insurgency against the established order”).
That initiative, which attracted social leaders and activist intellectuals as well as grassroots militants from all over the world, helped those insights consolidate and become steadily more precise. Today the World Social Forum performs a series of functions that it alone, with its organizational arrangements can fulfil, giving it special importance on the political stage[3].
Firstly, (a) it is paving the way for a new political actor – civil society – to emerge or consolidate in each country and at the world level; and (b) by the very way the forums are organized and held, it is signalling the way to strengthen civil society: by setting up horizontal relations among the participating organizations, in a process of mutual recognition and learning where they cooperate and interconnect, instead of competing and disputing hegemony.
Secondly, it is leading us to discover that (c) over and beyond simply contesting and resisting and taking power, changing the world requires a range of diversified political action; (d) also – and especially – such action must develop in societies from the inside outwards and from the bottom up, with the participation and creativity of all their members on the basis of their concrete needs; (e) such changes are already under way, and there is no need to wait for complete, ideal models of society[4] to be proposed or imposed from the top down; and (f) no change will be lasting unless it is accompanied by internal change, from the inside out, in each member of society.
Thirdly, the World Social Forum (g) is making room for people to learn political action that respects diversity and pluralism and that struggles not for power as such, but to exercise it as a service, in the certainty that the means we use shape the ends we achieve; (h) is reminding us that a new world cannot be built with the practices of the old world which is to be supplanted, and that it is therefore necessary to build a new political culture.
II. The instrumental nature of the World Social Forum
The foregoing enumeration of the functions taken on by the World Social Forum – or more precisely by the process that it has launched – shows clearly that it is not the Forum that is going to build the “other possible world”. It will not change the world; society will. The Forum plays a entirely intermediary role in the struggle for change. In order for us to achieve that goal, it makes a specific contribution which is different from those expected of other instruments of political action. That difference characterizes it as a means at the service of those instruments.
Accepting the Forum's intermediary and instrumental nature is, in fact, essential to ensuring its continuance. It cannot be expected to be more than it is, nor be required to take on functions that are not its own. Turning it into a major political force capable of standing up to neo-liberalism will require it to abdicate from the functions it now performs, and to cease expanding and setting roots around the world.
That is the perspective from which this book talks about the World Social Forum – as a World Social Forum – and about its role in the broader struggle of which it forms part. It therefore does not offer historical or situational analyses of the strategies of those who today submit the world to their interests, nor analyses of how the capitalist system has evolved, of the conditions for its domination to expand, or the mechanisms it uses to maintain and increase that domination, or its social consequences. Neither does it address forms of resistance and confrontation by those who oppose this system, nor the alternatives that are being formulated. Nor even does it present the content of the multiple proposals discussed at the Forums or the initiatives that are arising out of them.
This book deals solely with the conditions necessary for as many proposals and initiatives towards building the “other possible world” actually to emerge – freely and democratically – by way of the Forums[5].
III. “Learning to unlearn”[6]
This book is loaded with an optimism that may give the impression that the path of the World Social Forum is an easy one. In fact, for it to perform its proper role is a hard, continuous struggle. The political practices used throughout the last century – and to date – in struggles to overcome the rule of capital[7] are kept alive by in people's heads, hearts and sufferings. To call them “old world” practices may even sound disrespectful towards so many people who devoted their lives to thinking and acting, often at the cost of personal sacrifice, in an effort to destroy the capitalist monster – often amid the many painful shadows cast during that very same process of struggle.
In all that is done, it is thus as if, under the table – where ideas are being sketched out on how to organize the World Social Forum or where elbows are rested to listen keenly to other ideas being proposed – an enormous octopus is hiding. Nourished by “old world” practices, its long, strong tentacles are continually reappearing on all sides of the table, trying to pull down anything new we try to create. It seems to be concerned to prevent anything that might weaken it from growing and thriving. Its tentacles re-emerge at every moment, repeating the same manoeuvre a thousand times in new guises.
We have to learn to live with this octopus, while trying to curb its appetite or make it less aggressive. We still have much to understand about all that was said and done – both good and bad – in the long struggle of the past century. But if we lower our guard, or give ground here and there, everything will be pulled under the table, undermining it completely until it collapses and we have to turn back.
I hope the octopus will forgive us if we seem ungrateful, but we are practically forced to cut off its tentacles every time they reappear, just as an umbilical cord inexorably has to be cut. The century ended with an accumulation of frustrations and disappointments, and we are morally obliged to surmount whatever may have caused that failure. If the World Social Forum can contribute to giving greater strength and really change-making effectiveness to political action towards a new world, then we have to defend it permanently from the tentacles of the “old world”[8].
What future will the World Social Forum actually have? In answer to an Indian newspaper that asked me that question in December 2003 I said just the following:
I don't know that the future of the World Social Forum will be. But I would like it to go on expanding around the whole world, to go on awakening more and more consciousnesses, to go on extending the experience of a new political culture, to go on leading to more and more mobilization, concrete initiatives and proposals for changing the world.
Let me round that off with a phrase from Vaclav Havel: “One fact is undeniable: political change is not the cause of society's awakening, but its final consequence” [7].
IV. The content of this book
In writing this book I drew on articles and interviews of mine published over the last five years. During that time, as a member of the World Social Forum Organizing Committee, which later became the Secretariat[9] of its International Council, and as a member of that council, I have participated in organizing all the editions of the World Social Forum and accompanying the organization of other – regional, national and local – Social Forums.
I start out by presenting the World Social Forum's Charter of Principles, which is its overall frame of reference. That Charter – the drafting and meaning of which I talk about in Chapter 1:5 of this book (“The Charter of Principles”; see also Chapter 3:6 “Charter of Principles – doubts and issues”) - indeed constitutes the basic document to which any Forums at any level intending to ally with the World Social Forum proposal must refer. Respect for the letter and spirit of the principles it sets out should ensure the conditions necessary to meet the challenge posed in the title of this book.
Then in Chapter 1 (“The early days”) I organize some historical information about the first steps, starting before the first World Social Forum; and in Chapter 2 (“Basic options for organizing Social Forums”), as the name suggests, the main options that the organizers of Forums have taken in their work. These are the indications that I hope will be useful to anyone willing to organize a Social Forum in line with the way of seeing presented in this book.
In Chapters 3 (“Issues and developments”) and 4 (“Prospects”), and in the footnotes, I give a series of information about concrete situations experienced in the past in the process of organizing Forums, to illustrate the difficulties that arise or the opportunities that open up. These chapters and notes very often revisit issues examined previously in the early chapters. Nonetheless, I felt they might be of interest – especially when they reproduce passages from published interviews – because these situate how issues were addressed in context, as the doubts arose.
In the annexes I transcribe, partly or wholly, as they were published, some of the more significant articles I have written since the process of organizing the Forums began. With the exception of the first of them – “Notes for the debate about the World Social Forum” – which is especially important to grasping the main challenge facing the Forum, these texts are presented in the chronological order in which they were published.
In this edition of this book, published at the end of 2005, I have added a certain number of notes complementing the information on WSF 2005, which was held in Porto Alegre after the first edition was published in Portuguese. As an annex, I have also included an article on WSF 2005 written in the course of this year for the 2005-2006 Yearbook of the London School of Economics, London. This is intended to provide more current information on ongoing discussions about the World Social Forum.
Anyone venturing to read this book can do so simply by starting with the annexes. The articles they reproduce revisit, in various different forms, nearly all the issues addressed in the main text. The choice will depend on the reader's purpose: to use the book as a tool for work (for which purpose the main text may be useful) or to learn about the Forum from what was discussed as it took shape (for which the annexes may possibly be enough).
Whichever the case, the whole book is no more than food for thought about the enormous task of, effectively and urgently, changing the world.
[1]. In 2001, 2002 and 2003, the World Social Forum was held on exactly the same days as the World Economic Forum at Davos. In 2004, in India, it was held a few days earlier so as not to clash with India Day. In 2005, though, it returns to the date of the Davos Forum. Similarly in 2006, when three Forums will be held simultaneously in Venezuela, Mali and Pakistan, these simultaneous Forums will take places on the same dates as Davos.
[2]. In a talk to the Mutirão Nacional de Comunicadores, organized by the Communication Pastoral of the Brazilian Episcopal Conference (Conferência Nacional dos Bispos do Brasil, CNBB), in July 2003, in Salvador, Bahia State, Brazil, I had occasion to state: “Choosing the same date [as Davos] for a Forum centred on the human person and no longer on the market was a communication strategy. By virtue of the number of participants it drew – 100,000 at the last edition – the WSF was a success in communication”.
[3]. The Forums' organizers are aware of their own limitations and the resulting limitations of the instruments they set up. Amit Sen Gupta and Probir Purkayastha, members of the Organizing Committee of the World Social Forum in India, pointed this out clearly in a text written before that forum was held [2]: “It is by no means a perfect process. But, perhaps, if we wait for a perfect process to by handed to us on a platter, we shall wait in vain. Let us work with the process to make it more inclusive, more equipped to confront the challenge posed by imperialist globalisation.”
[4]. These models are what are usually referred to as “political projects”, an issue that particularly journalists always return to, as in the interview I gave to the Brazilian weekly Caros Amigos during the 2003 Forum [3]. Question: “But isn't there a lack of a political project?”. My answer: “Look, journalists always want to know what the concrete proposal is, what the final document is going to be. They don't see that the Forum is a process that leads to other forums around the world, that interlinks networked movements and that goes on growing, as demonstrated by these hundred thousand people who are here today”.
[5]. In 2004, in an interview by the French magazine Clark [4], I was asked: “What concretely would this other world you are proposing be like?” Although simple, my answer had to be long: “It is not hard to imagine this new world that we all want. It will be a world of peace – and therefore free from war and violence; of friendship, collaboration and cooperation among people – and therefore free from any competition that may kill or impair; of respectful relations with nature – and therefore free from activities that prey on or destroy the environment and neglect the planet's future; a world where all those we hold responsible for administering collective assets – politicians – serve those interests and not their own particular interests; a world where everyone – and not just a minority – have enough to eat every day and the means to meet at least their essential needs; a world where our ways of life, and our lives themselves, are neither determined nor manipulated by the interests of money – that instrument of exchange we invented, and that now dominates us; a world free from prejudice, disdain and discrimination by race, religion, culture, gender and so on; a world where people are not dominated by the need to consume and to possess always more and more material goods, but rather where they seek to be better and better people in their dignity and in respect for the dignity of others, surpassing the present concept of wealth and turning to other, less material values; a world where citizens with all their rights are not recast as consumers with different levels of purchasing power; and so on and so on; in short, a world where we can all live without fear, in happiness and in love for one another. That is a total utopia, of course. But actually we do all dream of such a world, knowing that it is practically unattainable. Now, if nonetheless we keep alive the hope of being able at least to move towards such a world, changing structures and behaviour step by step – the sweeping changes having shown themselves to be ineffective – or building pieces or islands of that new world within ourselves or around us, that will already be really good. We will be happier, we will make others around us a little happier too, and gradually we will get closer to that utopia...”.
[6]. I have borrowed this expression “learning to unlearn” from Alain Bertho, who took part in the Europe Social Forum and in local social forums, including one at Saint Denis, in France, where he lives. He used it at a workshop at the Local Social Forum of Bures-sur-Yvette, in France, on 7 February, 2004. It describes well the kind of effort required of anyone joining in this process. In fact, for over a century we have been shaped by a view of politics and ways of acting politically that are now being called thoroughly into question. We have to divest ourselves of old frameworks and habits if we really want to build a new world. We have to learn to unlearn what we have been taught for so long.
[7]. In a text on the World Social Forum for the 2004 Agenda Latino-Americano [5], I reiterated Bertho’s image: “Simply taking part in this kind of encounter already is a political action that re-educates, and helps us unlearn what has been taught us for a whole century – or far more than a century…”. In another article written in 2004 for the book FSE 2003: crônica de um encontro cidadão [6], I was even more explicit: “In the Forums we are invited to re-educate ourselves, in our behaviour and in how we organise our actions, in order to change the world. A new world is not built with the political methods of the world we want to surpass”.
[8]. In political action it is delusion to think you have found the truth. The World Social Forum sets up complex dynamics, which we do not always manage to understand. Even if we are on the right road, however, we have to keep in mind what Vaclav Havel, former president of the Czech Republic, used to say of those who, throughout the long political drama his country underwent, we capable of living “within the truth” and protecting their human dignity. “Naturally it is difficult to know when and by what invisible paths, full of crossroads, this or that truthful act or position acted on the realities, and how the virus of truth expanded progressively and corroded the tissue of that “living within lies” [7].
[9]. The Secretariat of the World Social Forum’s International Council itself became international in 2004, coming to comprise members of the former WSF Brazilian Organising Committee and of the Organising Committee of the World Social Forum held that year in Mumbai, India. As the process has expanded, efforts are underway to encounter a structure that will contemplate that expansion and enable the Council to operate in Commissions.