WSF necessary Shifts

Paul Nicholson and Josu Egireun* take up the debate on the future of the WSF post Mumbai. They argue for deepening the role of the forum in the anti-globalisation struggle while preserving its plural character.

The World Social Forum emerged as a result of the mobilisations against neoliberal globalisation. Four years later, both the WSF development and the coordination of struggles and movements have put on the table the need for reflection on the WSF itself and its relation to the social movements. The debate on the Forum is part of a more general reflection on how to generate alternatives and strategy against the neoliberal model, and to make the WSF a useful tool to advance the coordination among movements and struggles to oppose neoliberalism and war.

These two sides of the equation are inseparable: the WSF only makes sense and has a future in the sense that it feeds back the struggles against neoliberal globalisation. This it does through a mix of Conferences, seminars, panels, and other more deliberative ones such as the self organised Social Movements Assembly, which has been a reference mark in the struggle against neoliberal globalisation in the past years.

There are many questions that the four years experiences of the WSF raise; however our intention is not to make a detailed assessment, but to focus on what we consider the main three points towards the future of the WSF: the ones that refer to the WSF structure, how regularly it meets and the role of the International Council, which is the permanent structure between forums.

How the WSF is structured

The open character of Mumbai facilitates the integration of many social movements, feeds social mobilisation and makes clear that the WSF globalisation is not only possible but also necessary. Mumbai has also showed that there are movements that oppose neoliberalism but do not feel comfortable with the working and acting procedures of the WSF.

But the four years experience also makes clear that the structure of the WSF presents some deficiencies and needs some shifts:

• There haven’t been many advances further than a critique of neoliberalism. The elaboration of alternatives has been absent, not understood as an intellectual exercise of experts, but rather, as a process of reflection and contrast built from the dynamics of the social movements struggles. In this sense, the Conferences, seminars or debate panels, would have to combine both the reflection on the more actual issues or non-approached aspects of reality (such as the caste system this year) from Forum to Forum, such as the confrontation on strategies and alternatives of the movements.

If we do not want the WSF to exhaust in a repetitive formula, it’s necessary that its activity be linked to the real dynamics of the social movements and social struggles.

1. The extension, since a couple of years, of the WSF to the Regional, Continental and Thematic Forums, in a tendency to ramify to the local scales, exposes the problem of how to coordinate a working dynamics between the distinct Forums. The criteria of annual Forums results in an overwhelming and unbearable amount of work to those local social movements (right when the role of the Forums is to facilitate their development), and can only be satisfactory to those who live of, for and to the Forums.

2. A more participatory Forum, that is capable of integrating new problems and issues, demands a previous work of articulation and elaboration that cannot be accomplished in the present yearly meeting of the Forum.

• Second, the notion that the conferences should be the space for the presentation of personalities needs to be corrected, they should instead be dominated by the social sectors most affected by the system.

• Lastly, the relation of the WSF to political parties has been a field in which theory has not been consistent with reality. Therefore, whereas the “Charter of Principles” excludes explicitly the participation of political parties, the presence of the PT, of institutional or government employees and, also, heads of state… and a media overexposed projection, have been realities within the WSF. It’s clear that it’s no longer possible to keep living this contradiction and that it’s necessary to coordinate a space of the political parties and institutions in the framework of the WSF.

Frequency of the WSF

How often the WSF takes place and where is another of the key points towards its future. Until now, it has been taking place every year, and despite the fact that in the beginning the conclusion was that the Forum would “circulate” throughout the planet, the reality is that the Forum seems to be “attached” to Porto Alegre. Nevertheless, the Mumbai experience has contributed to the future of the WSF: contact with other realities, inclusion of social movements, new dynamics; also, new problems (Mumbai Resistance, The II People’s Movements Encounter…), etc. and to this end it points out the path to follow.

But besides this debate around where to host the WSF, there, is the debate of how frequently it should be held. To this end, we’d like to point out that:

3. Lastly, moving the Forum to different continents and countries takes a lot of time. This cannot be done on an annual basis.

For all these reasons we consider that the WSF should be celebrated every 3 years. It would allow us to approach the Forums objectives better prepared, it would avoid having to attend too many forums of different levels and would allow for an integrated agenda of Forums, from the WSF to the Forums in each country.

The WSF International Council

The International Council must not be converted into a private space of those who constitute it at the moment. It is time to create spaces of democratic participation, both in the reflection on the future of the Forum and in the decision making process on the issues that affect it. The social movements, who constitute the spine of the Forum, except for some networks and some very concrete social movements (Via Campesina, World March of Women, CUT) are marginalised in these processes of refletion and decision-making.

It’s not a matter of questioning the representativity of those who constitute the Council, but to coordinate a participatory process in the definition of criterias to the WSF procedures (periodicity, country, form, structure…), and to integrate in its structure the assemblies and organising committees of those Forums that have been constituted during the past years, to integrate these experiences in the building of the WSF. In any case it seems obvious the members of Organising Committees should be integrated into the IC. Note that this situation has not been accepted regarding the Indian Committee, after the success of Mumbai.

To conclude

We are all conscious that the more the Forum consolidates itself, the risks of institutionalisation and instrumentalisation rise. That’s why the evolution and the future of the WSF, its role in the struggle against neoliberal globalisation, its relation to the social movements and their role in its development have to be a permanet preocupation amongst us, while avoiding the temptation to change its open and plural character.

There are many aspects of this four years experience that deserve a more specific approach and many others that refer to its future that would demand more time and space to be approched.

In this contribution we wanted to focus on those three points that seem to us the most central to the immediate future.

But our attention can not be focused only in the future of the Forum, because the Social Movements Assembly that occurs during it has built and builds a central reference not only to those who attend the Forums, but also to the push forward in the struggles and in the development of new initiatives. And, to a large extent, one of the WSF sources of legitimacy is found in the fact that the agreements reached during this assembly have served to show the utility of the Forum as a framework to develop in practice the confrontation to neoliberalism, from a perspective of radical proposals and the flexibility at the time of building alliances.

There is no dout that the reiforcement of the assembly, the steps that we’ll undertake in the building of the social movements, international network and the correspondence of our agreements in the global level to the local and regional spaces, are the best guarantee to maintain the Forum on a good road. To the extent that its development has as reference the social struggles and the issues that the movements bring into it, the Forum will not be at risk of atrophy. But it’s also clear that it’s opening to an umbrella of more broad and diverse social forces will, at the same time, be a source of contradictions and tensions.

Paul Nicholson and Josu Egireun* are activists in the international network of social movements. This is a shortened version of their article, which circulated on the MovSoc list. The full document is available from: movsoc@uol.com.br