Joel Federman
A "movement of movements" was born this June in the United States. The first US Social Forum took place from June 27-July 1 in Atlanta, Georgia, a city chosen by organizers for its historical resonance with the US Civil Rights movement. The Forum brought together 10,000 participants from around the country and beyond.
The best way to describe the Social Forum process is if one imagines that thousands of people from around the country separately took upon themselves the assignment of creating one piece of a sustainable, peaceful, just, spiritual and harmonious world order, and then came together to see how their ideas, plans, and projects could be linked together into a larger vision and movement.
The US Forum grew out of the larger World Social Forum process, begun in 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and which has now crystallized into local, regional, and national manifestations all over the world. The purpose of the Forums, as defined in the World Social Forum Charter of Principles, is to be "an open meeting place for reflective thinking, democratic debate of ideas, formulation of proposals, freer exchange of experiences and interlinking for effective action, by groups and movements of civil society that are opposed to neoliberalism (corporate-led globalization)...and are committed to building a planetary society directed towards fruitful relationships among Humankind and between it and the Earth."
The first flexing of the World Social Forum muscle was seen in its use to coordinate the largest international demonstration in the history of the world--primarily aimed at preventing the US invasion of Iraq--which took place in February, 2003.
One of the striking elements of the first US Social Forum was the diversity of its participants. The peace and counter-globalization movements in the United States are often criticized for being too narrowly white and middle class. This was not the case in Atlanta. Blacks, Latinos/Latinas, Native Americans, Asians, indigenous peoples from around the world, new immigrants, and poor and homeless people, were all prominently represented in the gathering, as were labor, LGBTQ people, women, young people, and seniors
The Forums are all about making connections--between people, ideas, problems and solutions, between forms of oppression, and between forms of liberation. To give just one example, the Forum promoted projects for growing and consuming organic food at the local level, which is healthier for those who eat it, displaces fewer local farmers than agribusiness, and reduces the energy costs of transporting food long distances, which in turn eliminates the "need" for bioengineering of crops to preserve shelf and transportation life. The Forums focus beyond protesting grievances to the creation of alternatives. As Nichola Torbett of the Network of Spiritual Progressives pointed out at one of the Peace Caucus sessions, "Martin Luther King, Jr. didn't inspire a movement by declaring, 'I have a complaint.'"
While many of the Atlanta meetings focused on confronting or preventing injustices and exploitation of various kinds, many more involved constructive building of new institutions, practices, infrastructures, and policies that together affirm a broader vision of a sustainable, peaceful, nonviolent, humane, and just world. The innovative responses offered in the nearly 1,000 workshops, panels, caucuses, and plenary sessions to the local-to-global social, political and economic and ecological problems they addressed, was one the Forum's principal strengths. For example, it was not seen as sufficient to merely protest the Bush Administration's conduct of the "war" against "Islamofascism," but instead to also create alternative initiatives such as the Fellowship of Reconciliation's "citizen diplomacy" peacemaking delegations to Iran, which are particularly daring in light of the fact that four Iranian-American US citizens are currently being held without charge by the Iranian government.
The Social Forum process is unlike anything else. It is not a convention or demonstration, though it has elements of both. The Forums bring together different types of people working toward a common goal--people who might not, without the Forums, have opportunity to connect. So, it creates an opportunity for immense cross-fertilization. Just as all the great cities of the world are cross-roads cities, because they allow for an intermingling of cultures that provides opportunities for the intellectual and cultural cross-breeding out of which social innovations are born, so the Social Forums create a cross-roads between people from different movements and places, and so they become places of tremendous social ferment.
The networking between individuals, organizations, cultures and movements that takes place at the Forums gives rise to novel shared understandings among the participants. As Mathew Smucker, of the War Resisters League, suggested in one of the workshops, the Forum allows participants an opportunity to see beyond their own organizations and efforts and begin to "think like a movement." As a result, participants could begin to see and feel, if only in faintest form, the outlines of the "other possible world" that the Forums and the movements they represent are attempting to create. In a world of so much disconnection and despair, this is an enormous source of hope and inspiration. There was an electricity in the air in Atlanta that occurs only when history is being made and people know they are making it.
The first US Social Forum represents a historic advance in the process of building a truly global civil society that, in turn, is a necessary step toward creating an eventual global democracy. That the major corporate media chose to consider this a non-event and give it practically no coverage at all means nothing in terms of the historical importance of what occurred in Atlanta last week. History is commonly made before it is recognized by the mass media, and roots of movements often grow beneath the visible soil before sprouting and becoming recognizable to mainstream society.
"Another world is possible" is not just a slogan. The Social Forum process is helping to create a movement of movements to make that other world become a reality.
Joel Federman is a faculty member at Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center in San Francisco.
