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Planetize the Movement!
Our movements need to coalesce to make the present moment of populism and hegemonic decline an advantageous one for a Great Transition—this time toward a global socialist-feminist democracy built through the synergy of a new international and revitalized World Social Forum.
May 05, 2020
In the wake of the global financial crisis more than a decade ago, it became clear that the world needed a new economic system. Change did not come about, however. As another global economic crisis starts snowballing, we need to make sure that this doesn't happen again.
The great socialist, communist, and liberation movements of the past may not have accomplished all that they could have or intended to, but they were very effective providing education and culture for the poor and imparting the legacy of equality, economic justice, and women's advancement.
To offer a viable alternative to financialization and runaway "shareholderism," movements need to stand for workplace democracy and shared management, and for long-term rational and people-oriented planning over short-term profit. Although breaking up huge corporations should be the goal, taxing them adequately and using the revenue for societal needs and rights, not for continued militarism, can steer society in the right direction in the interim.
At the same time, we also need to think bigger. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that socialist and communist experiments all ended in failure, I believe that there is a lot we can learn from them. Indeed, this "failure literature" lacks balance and historical accuracy. The great socialist, communist, and liberation movements of the past may not have accomplished all that they could have or intended to, but they were very effective providing education and culture for the poor and imparting the legacy of equality, economic justice, and women's advancement. The Communist movement had its shortcomings, but it promoted women's equality and racial equality, supported numerous liberation movements and checked capitalist and imperialist expansion.
In contrast, our recent movements have failed even in the short run. They may have changed the subject--certainly, OWS highlighted the problem of income inequalities and helped reintroduce capitalism and its flaws into the national conversation in the US--but they could not compel a change of the system itself, much less dislodge its major actors and beneficiaries. Unlike the progressive movements of the late nineteenth century and much of the twentieth century that gave us socialism and social democracy, an end to British colonialism, Third World development, and the demise of authoritarianism in southern Europe, the movements of the twenty-first century have not been able to make headway in structural or systemic terms. Instead, the collapse of world communism--celebrated across the globe--actually generated new crises and chaos.
One response to the crisis has been the new municipalism, which aims to implement localized democratic practices and people-oriented resource allocation. In one promising example, the administration of the Communist mayor of Santiago, Chile, has created a "people's pharmacy," offered cheap eye-care and glasses, increased public housing, and embraced leftist approaches to community safety, among other progressive people-oriented initiatives.8 But localism is not enough, as many of our problems are global in nature. The recklessness of the financial sector has had ripple effects across borders; the obsession with economic growth and capital accumulation has generated a massive, global environmental crisis. That brilliant experiment in radical democratic feminist municipalism--Rojava in northern Syria--was overturned in October 2019 by a brutal Turkish invasion facilitated by the Trump administration. Thus, we must heed Dr. King's message to "take the nonviolent movement international" and to planetize it.
The Global Left and its infrastructure remain fragmented and disconnected, except for periodic mass rallies against the most egregious actions of global capitalism and imperial states. But it wasn't always so. Once, vibrant Internationals were organized to guide and promote a worldwide movement. The influential First International, initially called the International Workingmen's Association, was formed in 1864, but contention between the anarchist and socialist wings led to its demise in the late 1870s. Its successor, the Second International, had great success, but fractured in the run-up to World War I. The Third International formed after the Russian revolution to unite socialist and communist groups from across Europe and Asia, but later, under Stalin, became corrupted into the highly centralized Comintern.
Both the successes and the failures of these Internationals offer vital lessons: a powerful worldwide movement could be premised on both a global political organization with a strategy for change and the strength of plural and diverse movements that call the status quo into question. To move forward, we need to look back at the old Internationals and, at the same time, not give up on the World Social Forum. The crises and injustices of our times call for both a coordinated "united front" and a loosely aligned "popular front."
Some say the language of the past--socialism, communism, planning--is outmoded and unlikely to resonate. And yet, many young people embrace the term socialism; in the US, they rallied around Bernie Sanders's call for "democratic socialism," and in the UK, they coalesced around the Labour Party's left-wing faction, Momentum, and its leader, Jeremy Corbyn. In Tunisia, where young people are losing hope in capitalist democracy because of high unemployment and other economic difficulties, the left-wing student union UGET and the many young supporters of the Front Populaire call for planning and a strong welfare state. Around the world, women have come together around a more inclusive, transformative vision of feminism, which some call "feminism for the 99%." The "left nationalism" of Scotland, Northern Ireland, and the Kurds is also part of the new Global Left and could help constitute a global movement against capitalism, militarism, and oligarchic states.
The world's injustices, as well as new possibilities for alliance, have inspired calls for coordinated forms of organizing. The late Egyptian Marxist economist Samir Amin, for instance, called for a Fifth International. But to balance the complementary needs of global coordination and plural autonomy, two Internationals may be needed, one that remains horizontally based--the movement of movements--and the other vertically organized, drawing inspiration and lessons from the old Internationals.
What might this mean in practical, strategic terms? To start, we should revitalize the World Social Forum. It encompasses diverse grievances, identities, and interests; it remains the site for dialogic discussion and the cultivation of solidarity across movements, and it has resisted the authoritarian impulses and practices of capital and the state. It can remain an open space for dialogue among place-based and identity-expressive movements. Building up the Global Left and helping advance a Great Transition, however, requires a global political organization to do the necessary cross-movement "translation" work and deliver a plan for structural change at national, regional, and global levels. Accomplishing this will be an arduous task, but we can't afford to wait.
This planetized formation would encompass progressive parties, anti-neoliberal unions, and anti-war movements across the globe.
Whether it is called the Fifth International, the United Front, the Progressive International, or the World Party, such an organization would be vertically organized, along the lines of the earlier Internationals but with the involvement of anti-imperialist feminist groups such as Code Pink, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, Marche Mondiale des Femmes, and the new Feminist Foreign Policy Project. This planetized formation would encompass progressive parties, anti-neoliberal unions, and anti-war movements across the globe. It would practice democratic decision-making and offer a clear vision and mission of an alternative system of production, social reproduction, trade, and international relations. It would revive the 2011 Arab Spring call, "The people want the fall of the regime," and create a powerful message demanding a re-enactment of what occurred in 1989/1990, but in reverse: "The people want the fall of the ruling capitalist elites."
Such a plan calls for a renewed emphasis on the working class, expansively defined and represented. Unions could organize the unorganized, carry out the necessary political education work among their members, and create broad coalitions with progressive political parties and unions across borders. It is worth noting that unions of teachers and nurses have been taking to the streets and making demands in Morocco, Iran, Iraq, Tunisia, Chile, and France, as well as in the US. Such parallel developments are ripe for cross-fertilization and coordination.
We should take the best from the past--planning, coordinating, internationalism, and action--and move forward with a common agenda for systemic transformation. To move forward with an International, veterans of past, more centralized movements and organizations might take the lead in organizing an initial meeting, to convene in a country that has felt the devastating effects of neoliberalism, such as Argentina or Greece. Another venue could be Tunisia--now the only genuinely democratic country in the Middle East/North Africa region. Our movements need to coalesce to make the present moment of populism and hegemonic decline an advantageous one for a Great Transition--this time toward a global socialist-feminist democracy built through the synergy of a new International and a revitalized WSF.
Originally published on www.greattransition.org as part of the Planetize the Movement! roundtable.
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Farewell to the World Social Forum?
Citizens have become more aware of the need for change than they were when we first met in Porto Alegre many years ago.
Nov 03, 2019
The following remarks were delivered as part of a recent panel discussion on the World Social Forum hosted by the Great Transition Initiative (GTI), a project of the Tellus Institute.
Looking Back
The first World Social Forum in 2001 ushered in the new century with a bold affirmation: "Another world is possible." That gathering in Porto Alegre, Brazil, stood as an alternative and a challenge to the World Economic Forum, held at the same time an ocean away in the snowy Alps of Davos, Switzerland. A venue for power elites to set the course of world development, the WEF was then, and remains now, the symbol for global finance, unchecked capitalism, and the control of politics by multinational corporations.
The WSF, by contrast, was created as an arena for the grassroots to gain a voice. The idea emerged from a 1999 visit to Paris by two Brazilian activists, Oded Grajew, who was working on corporate social responsibility, and Chico Whitaker, the executive secretary of the Commission of Justice and Peace, an initiative of the Brazilian Catholic Church. Incensed by the ubiquitous, uncritical news coverage of Davos, they met with Bernard Cassen, editor of Le Monde Diplomatique, who encouraged them to organize a counter-Davos in the Global South. With support from the government of Rio Grande do Sul, a committee of eight Brazilian organizations launched the first WSF. The expectation was that about 3,000 people attend (the same as Davos), but instead 20,000 activists from around the world came to Porto Alegre to organize and share their visions for six days.
WSF annual meetings enjoyed great success, invariably drawing close to 100,000 participants (even as high as 150,000 in 2005). Eventually, the meetings moved out of Latin America, first to Mumbai in 2004, where 20,000 Dalits participated, then to Caracas, Nairobi, Dakar, Tunis, and Montreal. Along the way, two other streams--Regional Social Forums and Thematic Social Forums--were created to complement the annual central gathering, and local Forums were held in many countries. Cumulatively, the WSF has brought together millions of people willing to pay their travel and lodging costs to share their experiences and collective dreams for a better world.
The WSF's Charter of Principles, drafted by the organizing committee of the first Forum and adopted at the event itself, reflected these dreams. The Charter presents a vision of deeply interconnected civil society groups collaborating to create new alternatives to neoliberal capitalism rooted in "human rights, the practices of real democracy, participatory democracy, peaceful relations, in equality and solidarity, among people, ethnicities, genders and peoples."
Yet, the "how" of realizing any vision was hamstrung from the start. The Charter's first principle describes the WSF as an "open meeting place," which, as interpreted by the Brazilian founders, precluded it from taking stances on pressing world crises. This resistance to collective political action relegated the WSF to a self-referential place of debate, rather than a body capable of taking real action in the international arena.
It didn't have to be this way. Indeed, the 2002 European Social Forum called for mass protest against the looming US invasion of Iraq, and the subsequent 2003 Forum played a major role in organizing the day of action the following month with 15 million protesters in the streets of 800 cities on all continents--the largest demonstration in history at the time. However, the WSF's core organizers, who were not interested in this path, held sway, a phenomenon inextricable from the democratic deficit that has always dogged the Forum.
Indeed, the WSF has never had a democratically elected leadership. After the first gathering, the Brazilian host committee convened a meeting in Sao Paolo to discuss how best to carry the WSF forward. They invited numerous international organizations, and on the second day of the meeting appointed us all as the International Council. Several important organizations, not interested in this meeting, were left off the council, and those who did attend were predominately from Europe and the Americas. In the ensuing years, efforts to change the composition created as many problems as they solved. Many organizations wanted to be represented on the Council, but due to vague criteria for evaluating their representativeness and strength, the Council soon became a long list of names (most inactive), with the roster of participants changing with every Council meeting. Despite repeated requests from participating organizations, the Brazilian founders have refused to revisit the Charter, defending it as an immutable text rather than a document of a particular historical moment.
At a Crossroads
The future of the WSF remains uncertain. Out of a misguided fear of division, the Brazilian founders have thwarted efforts to allow the WSF to issue political declarations, establish spokespeople, and reevaluate the principle of horizontality, which eschews representative decision-making structures, as the basis for governance. Perhaps most significantly, they have resisted calls to transcend the WSF's original mission as a venue for discussion and become a space for organizing. With WSF spokespeople forbidden, the media stopped coming, since they had no interlocutors. Even broad declarations that would not cause schism, like condemnation of wars or appeals for climate action, have been prohibited. As a result, the WSF has become akin to a personal growth retreat where participants come away with renewed individual strength, but without any impact on the world.
Because of its inability to adapt, and thereby act, the WSF has lost an opportunity to influence how the public understands the crises the world faces, a vacuum that has been filled by the resurgent right-wing. In 2001, globalization's critics emerged mainly on the left, pointing out how market-driven globalization runs roughshod over workers and the environment. Since then, as the WSF has floundered and social democratic parties have bought into the governing neoliberal consensus, the right has managed to capitalize on the broad and growing hostility to globalization, rooted especially in the feeling of being left behind experienced by working-class people. Prior to the US financial crisis of 2008 and the European sovereign bond crisis of 2009, the National Front in France was the only established right-wing party in the West. Since then, with a decade of economic chaos and brutal austerity, right-wing parties have blossomed everywhere.
The unsettling rise of the anti-globalization right has scrambled many political assumptions and alliances. At the start of the WSF, our enemies were the international financial institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Now, these institutions support reducing income inequality and increasing public investment. The World Trade Organization, the infamous target of massive protests in 1999, was our enemy as well, for skewing the rules of global trade toward multinational corporations; now, US president Donald Trump is trying to dismantle it for having any rules at all. We criticized the European Commission for its free market commitment, and lack of social action: now we have to defend the idea of a United Europe against nationalism, xenophobia, and populism. These forces have upended and transformed global political dynamics. Those fighting globalization and multilateralism, using our diagnosis, are now the right-wing forces.
Looking Ahead
Is there, then, a future for the World Social Forum? Logistically, the outlook is not good. Right-wing Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, an ally of authoritarian strongmen around the world, has announced that he will forbid any support for the Forum, putting its future at grave risk. Holding a forum of such size requires significant financial support, and a government at least willing to grant visas to participants from across the globe. The vibrant Brazilian civil society groups of 2001 are now struggling for survival.
Indeed, right-wing governments around the world attack global civil society as a competitor or an enemy. In Italy, Interior Minister Matteo Salvini has been pushing to eliminate the tax status of nonprofits. Like Salvini in Italy, Trump in the US, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Narendra Modi in India, and Shinzo Abe in Japan, among others, are unwilling to hear the voice of civil society. Their escalating assault on civil society might spell the formal end of the World Social Forum, although the WSF's refusal to evolve with the times left the organization vulnerable to such assaults.
If the World Social Forum does fade away as an actor on the global stage, we can take many valuable lessons from its history as we mount new initiatives for a "movement of movements." First, we need to support civil society unity. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, the Portuguese anthropologist and a leading participant in the WSF, stresses the importance of "translation" between movement streams. Women's organizations focus on patriarchy, indigenous organizations on colonial exploitation, human rights organizations on justice, and environmental organizations on sustainability. Building mutual understanding, trust, and a basis for collective work requires a process of translation and interpretation of different priorities, embedding them in a holistic framework.
Any initiative to build transnational movement coordination must address this challenge. While it is easier to build a mass action against a common enemy, nurturing a common movement culture requires a process of sustained dialogue. The WSF was instrumental in creating awareness of the need for a holistic approach to fight, under the same rubric, climate change, unchecked finance, social injustice, and ecological degradation. Building on that experience with how the issues intersect is critical to a viable global movement. The WSF has made possible alliances among the social movements, which got their legitimacy by fighting the system, and the myriad NGOs, which got theirs from the agenda of the United Nations. This is certainly a significant historical contribution, enabling the next phase in the evolution of global civil society.
Second, we need to balance movement horizontalism and organizational structure. For the vast majority of participants in cutting-edge progressive movements over the past half-century, the notion of a political party, or any such organization, has been linked to oppressive power, corruption, and lack of legitimacy. This suspicion of organization, reflected in the core ideology of the WSF, has contributed to its lack of action.
This tendency to reject verticality out of fear of its association with oppression poses a major challenge to the formation of a global movement: those who would be, in principle, its largest constituency will question overarching organizational structures. Based on historical experience, they fear the generation of unhealthy structures of power, the corruption of ideals, and the lack of real participation. Nevertheless, coordination is essential for a diverse global movement to develop sufficient coherence. The task is to find legitimate forms of collective organization that balance the tension between the commitments to both unity and pluralism.
Third, a global movement effort must navigate a new media landscape. The Internet has changed the character of political participation. Space has shrunk, and time has become fluid and compressed. Social media has become more important than conventional media. Indeed, it was essential, for example, to the election of Bolsonaro in Brazil and Salvini in Italy, as well as Brexit in the UK. US newspapers have a daily run of 62 million copies (ten million from quality papers like the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Washington Post), while Trump tweets to as many followers. Contemporary communications technology, while used to sow confusion and abuse by the right, must be central to transnational mobilization campaigns fostering awareness and solidarity.
Political apathy among potential allies remains as great a challenge as the right-wing surge. This is not a new phenomenon. The triumphant pronouncements of the end of ideology and history three decades ago helped mute explicit debate on the long-term vision for society. Instead, the technocrats of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the US Treasury foisted the Washington Consensus on the rest of the world: financial deregulation, trade liberalization, privatization, and fiscal austerity. The benefits of globalization would lift all boats; curb nonproductive social costs; privatize health and more; and globalize trade, finance, and industry. Center-left parties across the West resigned themselves to this brave new world. "Third Way" leaders like British Prime Minister Tony Blair argued that since corporate globalization was inevitable, progressives could, at best, give it a human face. In the absence of a real alternative to the dominant paradigm, the left lost its constituency. The wreckage left behind by neoliberal governments has become the engine for the populist and xenophobic forces from across the globe.
Looking ahead, to build a viable political formation for a Great Transition, we must find a banner under which people can rally. Climate action has increasingly served this function, with the youthfulness of the climate movement a reason for hope. The climate strike movement, led by Swedish student Greta Thunberg, has engaged tens of thousands of students worldwide and shown that the fight for a better world is on. These new young activists, many of whom have probably never heard of the WSF, do not pretend to come with a pre-made platform; they simply ask the system to listen to scientists. The lack of a full vision allows them to avoid many of the WSF's problems, yet still underscore how the system has exhausted its viability in the face of spiraling crises.
Millions of people across the globe are engaged at the grassroots level, hundreds of times more than related to the WSF. The great challenge is to connect with those working to change the present dire trends, making clear that we are not part of the same elite structures and, indeed, share the same enemy. The historic preconditions undergird the possibility of such a project, our visions of another world give it a direction, and the growing restlessness of countless ordinary people is a hopeful harbinger.
Can we find the modes of communication and alliance to galvanize the global movement and propel it forward? I do not see much value in a coalition of organizations and militants who meet merely to discuss among themselves. Collective action is necessary for counterbalancing the decline of democracy, increasing civic participation, and keeping values and visions at the forefront. In the WSF, the debate about moving in this direction has been going for quite some time, but has repeatedly run up against the intransigence of the founders.
It would be a mistake to lose the WSF's impressive history and convening authority. But we need to recreate it in order to reflect the present barbarized. Will we be able to reform WSF, and if this is not possible, create an alternative? Citizens have become more aware of the need for change than they were when we first met in Porto Alegre many years ago. But they are also more divided, some taking the reactionary path of following authoritarian leaders, some the progressive path of social justice, participation, transparency, and cooperation. As the conventional system destabilizes and loses legitimacy, giving life to a revamped WSF--or creating a new platform--might be easier than the challenge of launching the process eighteen years ago. Still, realizing the next phase will take new leaders, wide participation, and recognition of the need for new structures. In these times, this is a tall order.
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Is It Time for Universal Basic Income?
Universal basic income is not a new idea. It was way back in 1795 that Thomas Paine, an American revolutionary, first talked about the citizen's dividend. The idea was to pay all US citizens a regular payment as compensation for "loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property".
This ground breaking idea lay fairly dormant for a hundred years until the beginning of the 20th Century. Since then the idea has come in and out of fashion in three times, each time getting closer to becoming a political reality.
Aug 17, 2016
Universal basic income is not a new idea. It was way back in 1795 that Thomas Paine, an American revolutionary, first talked about the citizen's dividend. The idea was to pay all US citizens a regular payment as compensation for "loss of his or her natural inheritance, by the introduction of the system of landed property".
This ground breaking idea lay fairly dormant for a hundred years until the beginning of the 20th Century. Since then the idea has come in and out of fashion in three times, each time getting closer to becoming a political reality.
In the early 1900s a broad selection of philosophers, writers, politicians and social movements began writing about and pushing for the idea. It grabbed the attention of many but failed to become a full movement, losing momentum when the welfare state was introduced.
The second wave emerged in the USA in the 60s as the focus of the social movements of the day turned from civil to welfare rights culminating in 1972 Presidential election when candidates of the day backed the idea. Although it did not become a political reality due to disagreements in how the idea should be implemented, it paved the way for a number of social policies such as food stamps still present in the USA today.
Given this history it should be no surprise that universal basic income has re-emerged as a political idea as a central theme at this year's World Social Forum which took place last week in Canada. In today's climate of austerity and widening inequality with welfare state systems under attack, social movements are turning their attention towards ways of doing things differently.
The World Social Forum was hyped for the idea. Universal basic income was talked about as something that could liberate people from the 'bull shit jobs' that have meant that we spend all our time working on things that we don't believe in. With the universal basic income we give people the opportunity to have a genuine choice about the work that they want to do in their communities. If you just stop for a second to think about all of the things that you'd want to be involved in if you just had the time and brain space, I'm sure you'd come up with a hundred.
At the same time it has the potential for cutting down on the wasted resources currently used up in trying to figure out whom to pay which welfare payments, and redistribute the skewed sharing of productivity gains that we've seen since the 1970s. In the UK, 40% of the gains of quantitative easing in the UK have gone to the wealthiest 5% of households. If the amount paid as a universal basic income, was large enough that everybody was given a sum sufficient for sustaining themselves; then you could satisfy all of these things at the same time.
There are plenty of examples of where countries have been trialling the universal basic income with success. In 2008-2009 Namibia experimented with the world-wide first Basic Income Grant pilot project in Otjivero - Omitara and found that the project led to reduction in poverty, increase in economic activity and improvements in health. A similar series of trials in India produced similar results.
For the UK the universal basic income could be just the campaign to fight back against austerity. In a survey last year 37% of people in the UK stated that they worked in a "bull-shit job", showing just how relevant this issue is.
The idea has already been gaining in popularity. In the last election the Green Party ran with the universal basic income as a central part of their manifesto, and this year John McDonnell stated that the Labour party are considering including universal basic income as part of their economic policies.
With so much attention on the universal basic income, the question for social movements is what kind of universal basic income do we want to see? If we do not push for a version of this policy that genuinely re-distributes to lessen inequality and provide a genuine improvement in living standards for those from low-income backgrounds then we risk it being used as a tool to further undermine the welfare state. There is a risk that this idea could be co-opted as a Neoliberal project, if it is financed by the destruction of a welfare state. We must advocate for a full universal basic income, which is financed through stopping corporate tax avoidance and supplements the welfare state.
Has the time for universal basic income come? Three years ago, universal basic income had barely been heard about in Switzerland. In June 23% of the people voted in support of it and now they're upping their campaign to make sure next time there's a vote it goes through.
The race to be the first country to fully adopt universal basic income is now on. Together we could transform this utopian idea into a real political alternative.
With its radical potential for shaking up the UK and possibility of kick starting a transformative global movement, what role should Global Justice Now activists take in this exciting movement? Let us know what you think in the comments below.
If you want to know more about the universal basic income check out this and this.
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'Travesty of Democracy' as Canada's Closed Borders Mar Opening of World Social Forum
Annual summit of leftist movements aims to "build a sustainable and inclusive world," but the West's closed-border policies stand in the way
Aug 09, 2016
This year's World Social Forum (WSF), which is being held in Montreal this week, is off to a rocky start as hundreds of international activists were denied entry due to Canada's restrictive visa policies.
Aminata Traore, who is one of the candidates to replace United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, was among those barred from attending. Traore, an anti-globalization activist and a former minister of tourism and culture in Mali, called Canada's closed-border policy a "dreadful lesson in democracy."
This year marks the first time the annual summit, which aims to bring together civil society, organizations, and social movements who want to build a sustainable and inclusive world, is being held in North America and in a G7 nation.
"It is precisely these countries that are supposedly there to give lessons to our democracies," Traore said. "In reality, the West is more and more afraid of debates on ideas ... We are bearers of ideas, not bombs."
The conference's co-coordinator Raphael Canet said hundreds of invitees had their visa applications rejected by the Canadian government, the majority of whom are from Africa and Latin America. Organizers are concerned that attendance could suffer at an event that has drawn hundreds of thousands of people in years past. So far, 15,000 people have registered for the event.
"If there are less people, it's probably unfortunately going to be the Canadian government that will... suffer a little bit," said co-organizer Carminda MacLorin, "because it taints Canada's reputation of openness and hospitality that is always put forward."
Canadian author and activist Naomi Klein, who will be taking part in a series of workshops and panels at the summit discussing the Leap Manifesto, took to Twitter to lambast Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for the policies that limit international visitors and speakers.
Shameful, @JustinTrudeau: "Candidate for top UN post among those denied visa to World Social Forum" in Montreal. https://t.co/j6TXVSsYvE
-- Naomi Klein (@NaomiAKlein) August 9, 2016
In addition to Klein, there are more than 80 scheduled speakers, including Bolivian Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera and French philosopher Edgar Morin.
The 12th gathering, which is being held August 9-14, is focused on putting forth "concrete alternatives to the neoliberal economic model and to policies based on the exploitation of human beings and nature," with one of the key issues this year being nuclear disarmament.
Gordon Edwards, who heads the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility and who is attending the conference this week, told Radio Canada International that the world has "turned a corner" with major powers, including the United States, spending "huge amounts of money in reconstituting and in fact modernizing the nuclear arsenals," which he said, "does not bode well for the planet."
The forum's emphasis on disarmament, Edwards said, "seems to be question of urgency because we're turning a corner here and it's a very dangerous corner. Instead of getting safer and safer we're heading towards a world where it's getting more and more dangerous." Notably, the WSF kicks off the same day as the 71st anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki.
On Monday, a delegation of Elders from the nearby Mohawk community of Kahnawake gave a talk about how "out of kilter" the world has become, in light of nuclear dangers and the potential for total destruction.
Yet, as Canadian journalist Nick Fillmore wrote in Dissident Voice on Monday, some of the original ideologues behind the summit are concerned over the direction it is headed.
According to Fillmore:
Some participants complain about the increase in attendance by Non-governmental organizations, which tend to be more or less comfortable operating within the capitalist environment. Meanwhile, participation by indigenous groups, which are usually more radical, has decreased.
The nature of the WFS event in developing countries over the years has been for large numbers of participants from the continent where the event is held to attend. However, with this get together in the North, Southern participation is expected to be down considerably.
Meanwhile, others want to summit to move beyond discussion into political action, to counter the prevailing systems of capitalism, militarism, and globalization.
Fillmore quotes Pierre Beaudet, founder of Quebec NGO Alternatives, who said Monday that there is a "a recognized necessity for [WSF affiliated] movements to seize with both hands some major issues...At this moment, the Forum could open up the self-organized convergences and go further than just producing a mixture of ideas which has characterized it thus far."
Moving into the political arena, another point of controversy between the WSF and its host country is the event's support for the international Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian rights. Canada, a key ally of Israel, reportedly withdrew the government logo from the list of event partners after two Liberal MPs voiced displeasure with a session about how Islamic extremists are "in the service of world Zionism-capitalism."
The panel has since been cancelled, but organizers stand by "non-apartheid," including Israel's apartheid of Palestinians, as being one of the key commitments of the WSF.
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Global Justice Movements Converge on Revolutionary Ground
Apr 06, 2015
Collective adrenaline ran high as the World Social Forum opened on March 24 in Tunis. It had not yet been five years since a peaceful revolution brought a dictatorship long backed by Western political superpowers to its knees and ignited the fire of the Arab Spring that burns to this day. And it had not yet been a week since shooters stormed the Bardo Museum, killing 22, and retesting the resolve of a delicately budding democracy.
Tens of thousands of delegates from across the globe converged in Tunis not only to show support for Tunisian sovereignty, but also to share their own local struggles and solutions while advocating change in the face of interlinked systemic injustices. The opening march easily demonstrated the diversity of the constituency--bands of Tunisian students in perfect stride with Latin American labor organizers and Sub-Saharan African small-scale food producers, knit together by the unraveling food, climate, energy, and financial crises.
Amidst this vibrant mix of social actors, it was no coincidence that Via Campesina, the world's largest--and arguably best organized--movement showed up in full force with a delegation from five continents. "It is on us to do something," said Elizabeth Mpofu, the Zimbabwean farmer and organizational powerhouse who leads Via Campesina's 250+ million peasant, pastoralist, fisher and indigenous members. "We know we are poor, but we are also very intelligent, and we know what we want," she added.
Via Campesina has shown repeated political sophistication in articulating exactly what it wants as a movement, especially in direct confrontation to the present tetrad crisis. In 1996, the movement spotlighted the term "food sovereignty", challenging corporate control of agriculture and putting access to food precisely where it belongs--in the hands of rural peasant producers. Although it remained in relative obscurity in its nascent days, the concept of food sovereignty has now entered a wide variety of transnational, as well as national and local, policy spaces.
Representatives from and allies of Via Campesina have always been careful to connect hunger and power in the global food system to governance of natural resources, principally land and water. A variety of mainstream development trends threaten smallholder land tenure, from special economic zones to extractive industries to monocrop agricultural production for export. Critics point to these large-scale resource transactions as land grabs contributing to a global land rush that dispossesses marginalized people from their territories en masse.
"In Mali, we have seen a frontal attack on our land," said Massa Kone, a leader from the Malian Convergence Against Land Grabbing (CMAT), a growing alliance that includes prominent Via Campesina member organizations. Kone explained that in his native West African agro-pastoralist country par excellence, 87 percent of the population is engaged in food production. Land grabs for big agriculture routinely menace that livelihood, where the insolvent Malian government offers land leases of up to 99 years and other alluring incentives to multinational corporations.
But CMAT is fighting back. "We have forced the government to listen to us, and we are now regarded as a key actor on all land issues in Mali," said Kone. "Our convergence is leading toward a new land law with peasants leading that process," he elaborated excitedly.
In fact, CMAT is part of a broader alliance of African social movements that penned the Dakar Declaration Against Land and Water Grabbing at the October 2014 African Social Forum in Senegal. That statement, firmly denouncing corporate and state takeovers of land and water, opened the way for an urgently needed global convergence of struggles--one that would subsequently be debated at the World Social Forum.
Delivering on that promise, Via Campesina and a cluster of its strategic allies organized a three-day global convergence of land and water struggles in Tunis--providing firsthand accounts of resource rights violations across multiple geographical spaces, and introducing tools ranging from grassroots organizing practices to international governance and human rights mechanisms to address those interrelated land and water grievances. It also offered a vital space from where to strategize on how to build unity and coordinated action in the face of adversity.
This participatory and organic process culminated in a new declaration that underscores the urgency of land and water grabs as well as community pledges for action and specific policy asks. Perhaps even more importantly, in the early stages of broadening the convergence, authors of the Dakar declaration brought the initiative to Tunis as an invitation to global allies to debate and add to the ideas and claims outlined in the original document--and in so doing, build the power needed to stop land and water grabs.
Adding to the energy in Tunis, strong political connections were also forged between varied convergences--including, but not limited to, the land and water process. Seasoned activists organized a climate convergence to accentuate the disproportionate approaches to the climate crisis that sideline marginalized communities in the Global South while wealthy governments and corporations accelerate their pollution. Additionally, delegations to Tunis coordinated a global convergence of resistances to corporate power that featured a series of campaign strategy workshops to build alternatives to free trade, squarely placing people and the planet before profits. Via Campesina co-convened each of these processes.
A new resolve emanated across these spaces with a final convergence of convergences, where activist organizers from the land and water, climate, and resistance to corporate power meetings were able to identify systemic faults underpinning the food, climate, energy, and financial crises. It also opened windows for concerted action in relevant global political gatherings such as the upcoming COP 21 in Paris. "In order to maintain order in this world, we need these conversations," reflected Carlos Marentes, a Via Campesina leader and farmworkers' organizer from the U.S.-Mexico border.
As the World Social Forum closed on March 28 with yet another march through downtown Tunis, many voiced one of its founding slogans: another world is possible. And echoing the spirit of the revolution that rocked the small North African nation not so long ago, frontline activists showed determination in building their own future--however trying that process might be.
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Challenging the Power of the One Percent
Apr 03, 2015
When you are faced with the task of moving an object but find it is too heavy to lift, what is your immediate and most natural response? You ask someone to help you lift it. And it makes all the difference.
And so in the face of unprecedented economic, ecological and human rights crises, we should not hunker down in our silos, but rather join together and use our collective power to overcome the challenges.
The recent World Social Forum (WSF) in Tunis, showed that 'Another World Is Possible' if we work collectively to address the structural causes of inequality.
It is for this reason that the Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID) has pledged to work together with ActionAid, Civicus, Greenpeace and Oxfam.
The gathering of approximately 70,000 activists in Tunis, the various workshops held on alternate economic models - including an AWID-led session on 'Feminist Imaginations for a Just Economy' - the protests against shrinking spaces for dissent and the calls for social justice are critical in a world where the economic, ecological and human rights crises are interconnected and getting worse.
This is the power of the World Social Forum (WSF). This 13th edition, held for the second time in Tunisia's capital, Tunis, is a reminder, and a call to action that it is people power that will change the world.
Changing the world, especially where women's rights and gender justice is concerned, means recognising and bringing visibility to the interrelatedness of issues.
While in the past 20 years there have been notable achievements for women's rights and gender justice, there is still so much more to be done.
At the centre of the current global crisis is massive economic inequality that has become the global status quo. Some 1.2 billion impoverished people account for only one percent of world consumption while the million richest consume 72 percent.
The levels of consumption in the global North cannot be sustained on this planet by its peoples or the Earth itself. They are disappearing whole ecosystems and displacing people and communities.
The challenges are not only increasing, but also deepening. Many women and girls, trans and intersex people continue to experience multiple and intersecting forms of discrimination and vulnerability throughout their lives.
These include the disproportionate impact of poverty, religious fundamentalisms and violence on women, growing criminal networks and the increasing power of transnational corporations over lands and territories, deepening conflicts and militarisation, widespread gender-based violence, and environmental destruction.
Women have been caretakers of the environment and food producers for centuries, and are now at the forefront of its defense against habitat destruction and resource extraction by corporations.
Violence against women who defend the earth occurs with impunity, at precisely the moment when 'women and girls' are also receiving the attention of various corporate philanthropic actors as drivers for development.
Government and institutional commitments to address inequalities for the most part have been weak. And while people's mobilisation and active citizenship are crucial, in all regions of the world the more people mobilise to defend their rights, the more the civic and political space is being closed off by decision-making elites.
This year's Political Declaration from the United Nations' 59th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW59) is just the latest example.
Twenty years after the Beijing Declaration - the most progressive 'blueprint' for women's rights of its time and the result of 30,000 activists from around the globe putting pressure on 189 participating government representatives - women's rights and feminist groups were shut out of the CSW 'negotiations' with the result that the Declaration is weak and does not go far enough towards the kind of transformative change necessary to truly achieve the promises made in Beijing.
The forces of justice, freedom and equity are being relentlessly pushed back. There is an urgent need to strengthen our collective voices and power, to further expand our shared analyses and build interconnected agendas for action.
The WSF contributes to doing just that. At this year's WSF, there was a diversity of feminist activists in attendance and the systemic causes of global inequalities were addressed in intersectional ways linking new relationships to land, and land use to patriarchy, food sovereignty, decolonisation and corporate power.
These connections make the struggle seem huge but also make possible solidarity between movements.
As a global network of feminist and women's rights activists, organisations and movements, AWID has been working for over 30 years to transform dominant structures of power and decision-making and advance human rights, gender justice and environmental sustainability. In all that we do, collaboration is at the core.
I strongly believe that we cannot achieve meaningful transformation unless we join together in all of our diversity. So for AWID, joining with the struggles for environmental sustainability, just economies and human rights, is another step in a long trajectory of working with and for other movements.
Together we can take bolder steps, push each other further, and draw upon our combined knowledge and collective power to amplify our voices. Working together is the only way to reverse inequality, and to achieve a just and sustainable world.
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The Gates Foundation vs. the World Social Forum: A Tale of Two Meetings
This week the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and USAID hosted a meeting in London with big agribusinesses to discuss strategies to increase corporate control over seeds in Africa. The location of the meeting was secret. So was the agenda. Attendance was strictly invite-only and nobody who even came close to representing African small farmers was invited.
Mar 27, 2015
This week the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and USAID hosted a meeting in London with big agribusinesses to discuss strategies to increase corporate control over seeds in Africa. The location of the meeting was secret. So was the agenda. Attendance was strictly invite-only and nobody who even came close to representing African small farmers was invited.
Meanwhile farmers and food sovereignty activists met at the World Social Forum in Tunis, Tunisia to discuss their solutions to the problems of our food system. These two meetings represent not just two different types of meeting - a closed, secretive meeting of the powerful versus an open, democratic meeting of grassroots activists - but also two radically different paths for the future of our food. One is based on corporate control and would generate vast profits for a small elite; the second is centred on sustainable, democratic, local food production.
"There is powerful evidence that organic farming practices and local seeds used by small-holder farmers are able to produce more food on less land and with less water than industrial agriculture."
As often was the case in colonial times the corporate agenda in Africa is today often disguised as paternalistic benevolence. Friendly-sounding projects such as the Alliance for the Green Revolution in Africa, backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the DfID-supported New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition promise to eliminate hunger by creating the conditions that will bring new corporate technologies and more big business investment to African agriculture.
On the face of it that all sounds very good. So why this level of secrecy for the meetings about the projects? Samwel Messiak, a Tanzanian food campaigner I met in Tunis tells a very different story of the corporate agenda for Africa's food. He told me that in Tanzania the New Alliance has helped corporations "buy" land off local communities without their consent and without paying them compensation for their lost land.
This is because the corporate agenda of AGRA and the New Alliance threaten to move control of land and seeds into corporate hands. The push for corporate engagement in Africa's agriculture also has a strong focus on producing cash crops for consumption in richer parts of the world (a practice started in colonial times) which if anything provides less food for people living locally. It seems strange that a supposedly charitable organisation such as the Gates Foundation is involved in this agenda; it seems they have swallowed the idea that only the market can provide for our needs.
Democratic food
In a very different setting from the corporate meeting in London, an alternative vision for our food is forming. In a packed room at the World Social Forum in Tunis, farmers and food sovereignty campaigners discussed a radically different food system.
Farmers and campaigners from across the world shared examples of how agriculture can provide livelihoods for farmers, food for local communities and can be a central part of women's liberation as women are taking a leading part in food production in most places. There is powerful evidence that organic farming practices and local seeds used by small-holder farmers are able to produce more food on less land and with less water than industrial agriculture.
Agribusinesses are putting small-scale farmer under pressure everywhere. But representatives from places like Chile, Senegal, Bangladesh and Italy told the meeting how farmers are showing how local communities can take back control of their food systems to provide healthy and affordable food. It was inspiring to experience how unified farmers and campaigners from different places are in their fight for democratic control of our food. As we chanted at the end of the meeting: "The people united will never be defeated".
In 2015 it shouldn't be a radical notion to want to move beyond colonialism and make sure farmers can keep control of the resources needed to grow food to feed their communities. So it is more important than ever that we stand with small farmers across the world to defend their right control their own land and their own seeds and our right to healthy local food.
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Another World Is Possible, Without the 1%
Mar 24, 2015
Activists from around the world will defy the terrorists to attend the World Social Forum in Tunis on March 25, determined to make the occasion a beacon for free speech, justice and equality. I am proud to join the leaders of Greenpeace, ActionAid, Civicus and the Association for Women's Rights in Development (AWID) in highlighting the urgent need to tackle the vested interests of the 1 percent, in order to build a better world for all of humanity.
If you are in the top 1 percent of the global wealth stakes, our economic system works exceptionally well. Since the financial crisis in 2008, most of the wealth created in the world has ended up in your bank accounts. By next year, you could own more wealth than the rest of the world put together.
This is not just a global phenomenon. The growing gap between rich and poor is a reality for seven out of ten people on the planet. Last week the World Bank calculated that ten Africans own more wealth than half the continent. Statistics like these are actually a cold shower on people's natural, positive aspirations to improve their lot - they're telling us the 99 percent won't get there, or anywhere close.
Wealth is used to entrench inequality, not to trickle down and solve it. Our research shows how pharmaceutical and financial lobbyists spend hundreds of millions of dollars to influence government legislation in their industries' favour, saving them billions of dollars, for instance by securing the banks' huge state bailouts. Across the world, we see that great money doesn't only buy a nice car or a better education or healthcare. It can buy power: impunity from justice; an election; a pliant media; favourable laws. With the privatisation of our universities it can even buy the world of ideas.
There will be no victory in the fight against poverty unless this trend of worsening inequality is reversed. This is recognised by figures as diverse as the Managing Director of the IMF and the Pope. But we cannot win it under the current broken economic system.
This is a system that sees a world possessed of huge wealth nevertheless leaving the vast majority of humanity behind with virtually nothing at all. One where women are systematically exploited; at the current rate of progress it will take 75 years before women are paid the same as men, never mind that women's unpaid care work continues to remain invisible. And it is a system that is leading us to runaway climate change.
Yet the 1 percent are quick to tell us that there is no real alternative. Sadly, they say, nothing is ever perfect and of course there will be winners and losers (and typically, by implication, talented winners and feckless losers). But that we should be grateful - it's the best we can hope for.
What an appalling failure of imagination. What a shocking lack of faith in human invention, ingenuity and spirit. I am sure of two things. One is that another world is possible; the second that it cannot be imagined or created by the 1% - it is up to us.
I believe we can build a human economy where people are the bottom line. We need a world where people do not have to live in fear of the economic repercussions of getting sick, or losing their home or job. Where every child gets to fulfil their potential. Where corporations pay their fair share of taxes and work for the good of the majority, not just their shareholders. Where the planet is preserved and sustained for our children and their children's children.
This is not an impossible dream, it is a practical possibility, well within our reach. To get there we need to organise. We need to harness the boundless energy and creativity of our youth. We are many, they are few.
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World's Richest One Percent Undermine Fight Against Economic Inequalities
'We cannot rely on technological fixes. We cannot rely on the market. And we cannot rely on the global elites. We need to help strengthen the power of the people to challenge the people with power.'
Mar 19, 2015
UNITED NATIONS - The growing economic inequalities between rich and poor - and the lopsided concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the world's one percent - are undermining international efforts to fight global poverty, environmental degradation and social injustice, according to a civil society alliance.
Comprising ActionAid, Greenpeace, Oxfam and Civicus, the group of widely-known non-governmental organisations (NGO) and global charities warn about the widening gap and imbalance of power between the world's richest and the rest of the population, which they say, is "warping the rules and policies that affect society, creating a vicious circle of ever growing and harmful undue influence."
" Inequality is about more than economics and growth - it is now at such high levels that we risk a return to the oligarchy of the gilded age. " -- Ben Phillips of ActionAidThe group identifies a list of key concerns - including tax avoidance, wealth inequality and lack of access to healthcare - as being unduly influenced by the world's wealthiest one percent.
In a statement released Thursday, on the eve of the World Social Forum (WSF) scheduled to take place in Tunis Mar. 24-28, the group argues the concentration of wealth and power is now a critical and binding factor that must be challenged "if we are to create lasting solutions to poverty and climate change."
The statement - signed by the chief executives of the four organisations - says: "We cannot rely on technological fixes. We cannot rely on the market. And we cannot rely on the global elites. We need to help strengthen the power of the people to challenge the people with power."
"Securing a just and sustainable world means challenging the power of the one percent," the group says.
The signatories include Adriano Campolina of ActionAid, Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah of Civicus, Kumi Naidoo of Greenpeace and Winnie Byanyima of Oxfam.
Asked about the impact of economic inequalities on the implementation of the U.N.'s highly touted Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), Ben Phillips, campaigns and policy director at ActionAid International, told IPS economic inequalities have meant that in many countries progress on poverty reduction has been much slower than it would have been if growth had been more equal.
For example, he said, Zambia has moved from being a poor country (officially) to being (officially) middle income. Yet during that time the absolute number of poor people has increased.
India's persistently high child malnutrition rate and South Africa's persistently high mortality rate are functions of an insufficient focus on inequality, he added.
Papua New Guinea has the highest growth in the world this year and won't meet any MDG, because the proceeds of growth are so unequally shared, he pointed out.
Speaking on behalf of the civil society alliance, Phillips said inequality has also been the great blind spot of the MDGs - even when countries have met the MDGs they have often done so in a way that has left behind the poorest people - so goals like reducing maternal and infant mortality have been met in several countries in ways that have left those at the bottom of the pile with little or no improvement.
The four signatories say: "We will work together with others to tackle the root causes of inequality. We will press governments to tackle tax dodging, ensure progressive taxes, provide universal free public health and education services, support workers' bargaining power, and narrow the gap between rich and poor. We will together champion international cooperation to avoid a race to the bottom."
The statement also says that global efforts to end poverty and marginalisation, advance women's rights, defend the environment, protect human rights, and promote fair and dignified employment are all being undermined as a consequence of the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few.
"Decisions are being shaped in the narrow interests of the richest, at the expense of the people as a whole," it says.
"The economic, ecological and human rights crises we face are intertwined and reinforcing. The influence of the one percent has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished," the group warns.
"Faced with this challenge, we need to go beyond tinkering, and address the structural causes of inequality: we cannot rely on technological fixes - there is no app for this; we cannot rely on the market - unchecked it will worsen inequality and climate change; and we cannot rely on the global elites - left alone they will continue to reinforce the structures and approaches that have led to where we are".
People's mobilisation and active citizenship are crucial to change the power inequalities that are leading to worsening rights violations and inequality, the group says.
However, in all regions of the world, the more people mobilise to defend their rights, the more the civic and political space is being curtailed by repressive action defending the privileged.
"We therefore pledge to work together locally, nationally and internationally, alongside others, to uphold and defend universal human rights and protect civil society space. A more equal society that values everyone depends on citizens holding the powerful to account."
Phillips told IPS even the U.N.'s proposed Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), to be approved at a summit meeting of world leaders in September, will not be achievable if economic inequalities continue.
As leading economist Andy Sumner has demonstrated, "we find in our number-crunching that poverty can only be ended if inequality falls." Additionally, healthy, liveable societies depend on government action to limit inequality.
It is also a question of voice, and power. In the words of Harry Belafonte, a Hollywood celebrity and political activist: "The concentration of money in the hands of a small group is the most dangerous thing that happened to civilization."
Or as Jeff Sachs, a widely respected development expert and professor at Columbia University, has noted: "Corporations write the rules, pay the politicians, sometimes illegally and sometimes, via what is called legal, which is financing their campaigns or massive lobbying. This has got completely out of control and is leading to the breakdown of modern democracy."
Phillips said tackling inequality is core to progress on tackling poverty - both because extreme and growing economic inequality will undermine poverty reduction and because the warping of power towards the one percent is shifting the focus of governments away from their citizens and towards corporations.
"Inequality is about more than economics and growth - it is now at such high levels that we risk a return to the oligarchy of the gilded age. We need to shift power away from the one percent and towards the rest of society, to prevent all decisions being made in the narrow interests of a privileged few," he declared.
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The World Social Forum: Building Alternative Forms of Globalization
Feb 02, 2015
The greatest progressive innovation of our century -- to this point -- has been the World Social Forum (WSF). In the book Another World is Possible: popular alternatives to globalization at the World Social Forum, William Fisher and I first contended that the World Social Forum represented the beginning of building a new left and a new global civilization, grounded by a desire for participatory, radical democracy. There have been a number of insightful interpretations of the World Social Forum process: it embodies resistance to globalization, it represents the latest struggle against imperialism, it manifests the power of identity, it is an insurgency against patriarchy and other forms of hierarchical discrimination, and it represents the "movement of the multitude." The interpretation that we offered did not exclude any of the others but included them all within a common framework: the "alternative globalization" and "global justice" movements at the World Social Forum share a common call for a radical, participatory, democratic process to be integrated into all major economic, environmental, cultural and political decisions. The movements have been too diverse to fully develop -- yet -- a common substantive notion of the good but instead affirm a shared procedural vision of emancipation.
The WSF was founded by three long-time activists: Oded Grajew, the coordinator of the Brazilian Business Association for Citizenship (CIVES), Francisco Whitaker of the Brazilian Justice and Peace Commission (CBJP), and Bernard Cassen, the director of the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions (ATTAC, France). It began as an annual event where various progressive social movements, writers and individuals -- but not political parties -- could meet to propose, discuss and mutually construct alternatives to neoliberal globalization. The Forum was imagined as an "Open Space," that is, it aspired to create an ideal speech situation in which participants could dialogue without being inhibited by the systemic pressures posed by political bureaucratization and economic commodification. Activists enter the space to rationally, deliberatively and empathetically discuss their diverse solutions to the challenges posed by the current neoliberal form of globalization.
The first World Social Forum took place in 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil and since then the Forum process has undergone numerous innovations: expanding to include local, national and continental fora; deregionalizing the site of the WSF away from Brazil, shifting towards a self-organizing structure with a more open thematic consultation process, decentralizing the site via the polycentric Forum of 2006 (Bamako, Caracas and Karachi), bringing the event to Africa in 2007 and 2011, hosting the Forum in the Amazon in 2009, and holding the gathering in Tunisia, the heart of the Arab Spring, in 2013. World Social Forum 2015, to be held this coming March, will again be hosted by activists in Tunisia. The expansion, deregionalization and decentralization have helped address one of the key problems faced by the event's organizers: attempting to ensure genuinely global, and low-income, participation at the Forum. Anyone who has attended the WSF is inevitably struck by the preponderance of university-educated participants and -- when the Forum does not take place in an African country -- the lack of African representation. While the Forum is in principle open to all, in practice those who are privileged by education, income and geography tend to be disproportionately represented at the Forum. The WSF's innovations have helped address the problem of representation without completely solving it. The principle of creating a universally available public space in which all can voluntarily come together to discuss freedom is admirable but inevitably riven by the contradictions of the system that movements wish to transform. None of this diminishes one of the Forum's greatest successes, however: its popularity. The attendance numbers are stunning. Many events have had over 100,000 participants, a testament to the Forum's broad appeal, the talent of its organizers, and the significance of the public's desire for an alternative to the current neoliberal form of globalization.
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