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WORLD SOCIAL FORUM: More Words than Action

Analysis by Alejandro Kirk* - TerraViva/IPS

SANTIAGO, Jan 29 2008 (IPS) - Unlike the massive gatherings of past years, the World Social Forum’s "Global Day of Action" Saturday did not fill avenues around the world, nor did it make headlines in any major progressive media outlet, let alone mainstream ones.

Yet, to Cándido Grzybowski of Brazil, one of the most influential leaders of the movement, the initiative was successful because people in 72 countries were once again able to "reassert their citizenry".

Walden Bello, a sociologist and activist from the Philippines, said Monday that "The Global Day of Action was something new, so I am not surprised that the mobilisations were not that big. But it was still impressive that they were carried out in scores of cities at a time that there was no immediate emergency, like responding to another invasion, on the agenda."

"There were some really big successes, like the big mobilisation in Mexico City. Let&#39s examine our experiences on this first Global Day of Action and learn from them. Practice will make perfect," he added in an email interview.

With "tens of thousands" people participating around the country, Brazil, the WSF’s birthplace in 2001, became once again its core. In Rio de Janeiro, the Day of Action coincided with – and to some extent competed against – the city’s world famous Carnival.

With the sole exception of Mexico, however, no other local Day of Action rivalled Brazil’s numbers. From Italy, where activists were devastated by the fall of the centre-left government of Romano Prodi and the prospect of a triumphal comeback of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, to the U.S. city of Atlanta, Georgia, only the most committed showed up to state that "Another World Is Possible", the WSF’s motto.

Paradoxically, the human rights crisis in Gaza prompted Palestinian non-governmental organisations to shy away from staging a Day of Action, wary that political factions would manipulate their initiatives.

Weak in numbers, the Day of Action was competing for media space on an extraordinarily "newsy" weekend: Senator Barack Obama’s victory at the Democratic primary in South Carolina, the massive flight of besieged Palestinians from Gaza, the lethal ethnic violence in Kenya, the death of former Indonesian dictator Suharto, and the arrest of Jérôme Kerviel, a "rogue trader" who made one of France’s biggest banks, the Société Générale, lose seven billion euros and is now credited with saving the world from recession.

The question many in the WSF are asking themselves is whether headlines make a difference, for if they do, the WSF would be doomed by now. News agendas are not neutral and creating a new one might well be a central theme for the countries of the developing South.

The WSF has so far been unable to repeat the astounding public relations successes of 2002 and 2003, when the world’s top media sent their correspondents to Porto Alegre to find out what this "rival" to the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland was all about.

Most analysts explain that earlier impact as the result of the WSF’s novelty factor and its unexpectedly huge number of participants, and say that the current scarce media attention is due to elements ranging from deliberate censorship to the lack of "attractions," by way of celebrities and intellectual "stars" – an approach that the Forum’s International Committee decided not to promote.

Celebrities like rock star Bono now prefer to attend Davos, where they think they can influence the powers that-be, instead of associating themselves with a loose event where they are deliberately kept within the crowd.

The commercial media stay far away from the WSF’s thoughtful debates on a battery of development issues, and only show up when "anti-globalisation" demonstrators angrily throw stones at McDonald’s outlets and battle riot police.

Underlying this issue is the WSF’s excruciating internal debate about itself. Born rather as an intellectual exercise to contest Davos’ arrogance with alternative proposals to the 1990s "end-of-history" ideology, it became a global political phenomenon whose direction nobody seems able to foresee, let alone direct.

Walden Bello is the most radical advocate of a total overhaul of the WSF, complete with a strategy and a stand on each one of the world’s main challenges.

For mobilisations to succeed, "there should have been common resonant slogans and demands, like demanding withdrawal of the U.S. and Coalition forces from Iraq, respect for the rights of immigrants, opposition to the Doha Round (of global trade talks), and an end to Zionist oppression of the Palestinian people," Bello said.

"Refusing to take stands on the grounds that these will drive away some people is a sure way of ultimately making a movement irrelevant," he argued.

Nevertheless, economist Pedro Stédile, one of the WSF’s founders and the main ideologist of Brazil’s influential Landless Workers Movement, sees such proposals as an "illusion."

"The WSF is a space for debate, exchange and reflection. It would be an illusion, and idealistic, to believe that it would be possible to adopt more practical resolutions or ideologically united platforms. This could disperse energies and leave us locked in mere ideological (internal) struggles," he said.

"Our bet is for the WSF to be a fair of ideas," Stédile told the IPS news agency.

For Anuradha Mittal, an Indian activist and head of the Oakland Institute in the United States, "the past WSF gave us hope for another world and now it has to show how that other world can be accomplished."

"To keep political parties and leaders accountable to the people is a valuable role that can be played by social movements. Social movements ensure the legitimacy, spirituality and values of political action. This does not require social movements to turn into political parties," she said in an interview.

This spiritual aspect is not to be underestimated. In 2001, when the WSF emerged, the global political scene seemed static, solidly glued by the neoliberal, market-oriented ideology born from the ruins of the East-West confrontation of the 20th century.

Since that first edition, eight new Latin American governments have been elected on platforms similar to the WSF’s principles, and although they have pursued different strategies to end poverty and build sustainable and equitable economies, they all coincide in the need to unite against the U.S. grip on the region. In 2005, at an Organisation of American States (OAS) assembly, they managed to defeat the U.S.-led initiative to establish a continent-wide free trade area.

Grzybowski says: "I’m absolutely sure that the birth of the WSF in Porto Alegre was related to the preceding conditions throughout the region: a region that rebels against neoliberal policies, that is committed to a process of democratisation, and which has experienced a left-wing wave in the wake of military dictatorships. The WSF didn’t produce that wave by itself; nevertheless, it would be difficult to imagine such a sizeable and dynamic wave without the WSF."

Next year, in January, the WSF will meet at a central gathering again, this time in Belem, in northeastern Brazil – in the same country, but miles and perhaps ages away from the heavily-industrialised and sophisticated Brazilian south.

With evaluations still to come, the movement will most likely conclude that any "Day of Action", with or without a global political strategy, needs a watchword – rather than celebrities – to raise awareness and prompt mobilisation.