[Reader-list] Special issue on WSF and interview with Boaventura de Souza Santos

[lalitha kamath]

FYI

Q&A: 'WSF Is As Much a Cultural Struggle As a Political One'
Interview with Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Boaventura de Sousa Santos

COIMBRA, Portugal, Jan 21 (IPS) - The movement against capitalism,
injustice and oppression requires a strong convergence of social
organisations that have fully accepted their differences, said
sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, who predicted serious future
difficulties for World Social Forum (WSF) meetings.

Due to "the rise of militarism and paranoia over security, in future
many activists will be prevented from travelling to other countries by
being denied entry visas, because a new kind of criminalisation of
social protest is under way," he said in an interview with IPS
correspondent Mario de Queiroz.

De Sousa Santos is a professor at the University of Coimbra, in
Portugal. He earned his doctorate in sociology of law at the Yale
University in the U.S., and is a visiting professor at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison.

In his prominent public life he has vigorously defended strong social
and civic movements as essential for participative democracy. He is a
distinguished active participant in the WSF -- founded in 2001 by social
movements and other civil society organisations opposed to the present
direction of globalisation.

IPS: Do you think it was a good idea not to hold an international
meeting of the WSF this year, but to hold local events all over the
world, with the risk that poses in terms of dispersion, loss of identity
and loss of momentum in the coming years?

BOAVENTURA DE SOUSA SANTOS: Every political movement must walk at the
pace of its activists and leaders. In the case of the WSF, what really
counts today is the pace of the organisations and movements that are
part of the International Council (IC).

For years, some organisations have been saying that the energy they
invest in organising and preparing for the WSF prevents them from
working properly on their specific action agendas, and that it would be
preferable to hold a global WSF meeting every two years. This option has
now achieved consensus in the IC.

I see this year's plan as further evidence that the Forum is capable of
experimentation, and so I think it's not a bad idea. It will allow us to
identify and assess another dimension of the WSF which has been little
exercised so far: it's capability to coordinate disparate activities
that are widely dispersed.

I see it above all as an opportunity for new forms of growth and for
reinventing its identity. The important thing to bear in mind is that
the WSF is happening this year, but in a new and extremely decentralised
format. I would personally be satisfied if a decision to hold the WSF
every other year were to arise from the evaluation of this year's Global
Day of Action -- Jan. 26.

I foresee new short-term challenges, and I believe that the Forum, while
maintaining its basic philosophy, may be about to go through deeper changes.

IPS: What changes, for example?

BSS: Coordinating with other trans-national initiatives, and learning
from and with them. I'm thinking of the vast popular education movement,
and "The Other Campaign" by the Mexican Zapatistas (EZLN), both of which
have enormous virtues. The specific case of "The Other Campaign" is a
new way of building counter-hegemony, a new political culture and a new
policy on alliances.

IPS: The IC is divided over whether to carry on as an open forum, or to
formally assume political positions in the name of the WSF, based on
consensus. Some of those who advocate taking positions are concerned
about a certain amount of stagnation and lack of direction if this isn't
done.

BSS: All new political initiatives face two specific difficulties: the
language they use belongs more to the past than to the future, even when
the reverse appears to be true; and its participants are divided between
their past experience and the will to innovate.

The novelty of the WSF is its new way of organising with the goal of
creating a new political culture. That's why I would define the WSF as a
counter- hegemonic form of globalisation rather than as
alter-globalisation -- as implied by its rallying call, "Another world
is possible". It is as much a cultural struggle as a political one, in
which the cultural component has a much slower maturing process than the
political one.

The logic of these two struggles sometimes clash. The idea of the WSF as
a space for meeting and debate leans more towards the cultural
dimension, and that of the WSF as an activist movement tends to
emphasise the political dimension. But the polarisation of these two
ideas is an inheritance of past thinking on the left -- a thinking which
doesn't comprehend that open space is itself a movement -- a space on
the move.

Then again, both sides conceive decision-making processes in a
Eurocentric way -- their idea is that to adopt concrete political action
it is necessary to decide -- and that will never be possible by
consensus. Indigenous peoples decide by consensus, and on that basis are
organising prodigious movements in Latin America. However, is it
possible to imagine the same thing happening in movements and
organisations that have grown up in a Western culture, although they
belong to the global South?

I am in favour of the WSF deciding on political action as long as this
is done by consensus, and in areas where a low degree of conflict can be
expected. The WSF is creating the conditions for politically
confrontational global actions, but I don't believe that the Forum
itself should undertake them, because such actions need to be deeply
rooted locally and nationally and the Forum can't guarantee that.

IPS: Isn't there a problem of representation and even democracy within
the WSF, since social movements made up of millions of activists in many
countries have the same right to speak as local non-governmental
organisations with only a few members?

BSS: The WSF is not a parliament, nor a political party. Our concepts of
representation and democracy are based on organisations. Debates about
this issue would be very useful, as we would then be thinking about new
ways of political organising and legitimacy.

For instance, how would a world parliament or a global political party
function? The historical role of the WSF is to open that debate, and not
to conclude it. The problem with the WSF is that it isn't truly global
in terms of its participants, nor in its themes or its political
orientations. But a future combination of the WSF as a meeting and as a
Global Day of Action might be a promising solution.

IPS: Given the dramatic nature of climate change, might the WSF be
obliged to change its priorities, its central themes?

BSS: Without a doubt. What's important is that the WSF should not deal
with the topic in the style of Al Gore -- that is, as a problem that has
nothing to do with global capitalism, with indigenous and peasant
movements, with the issues of land and water, with discrimination
against women.

Debates about climate change are the new frontier in building counter-
hegemony. They are a way of demonstrating to ordinary citizens that
society as we know it will not survive.

IPS: The impact of the WSF seems to have diminished after the novelty of
the first few meetings. What does it need to exert greater influence on
politics, people's lives and societies?

BSS: The WSF had a major surprise effect which made it very popular, and
well-known even among its adversaries -- hence the initial curiosity of
the big media. The problem is that the surprise effect cannot be
repeated. Once it has run its course, the impact of the Forum is
long-term, and the media lose interest. Besides, it's seen as
potentially dangerous and therefore to be silenced.

But it would be wrong to be demoralised by the silence of the media, or
to think that their silence indicates a loss of importance. On the
contrary, it's the potential importance of the Forum that is the cause
of the silence.

IPS: Studies of the participants' profiles have shown that the WSF is
composed of an intellectual élite, with a majority holding university
degrees and belonging to the middle classes. Doesn't that contradict the
ideals of social inclusion and changing the world?

BSS: Progressive change has rarely come about by actions taken only by
people who are excluded. The great struggles have always resulted from
alliances between more oppressed and less oppressed groups and those
who, without being directly oppressed themselves, acted in solidarity
with the excluded because they felt it was unjust that their wellbeing
should be based on the suffering of the oppressed.

Intellectuals are facilitators in the expression and analysis of
experiences and actions on different scales -- local, national, regional
and global -- which combine different agendas for change, such as those
of indigenous people, women, peasants, human rights and the environment.

***

FOCUS ON TRADE
NUMBER 136, JANUARY 2008
Part 1

** SPECIAL ISSUE ON THE WORLD SOCIAL FORUM **

http://www.focusweb.org/focus-on-trade-number-136-january-2008.html?Itemid=1

Saturday 26 January is the World Social Forum Global Day of Action
(http://www.wsf2008.net/). More than 600 actions and events are being
planned on or close to the day, in every continent; they range from
defening housing rights in Omsk in Siberia and protesting anti-military
bases actions in Aotearoa/New Zealand to dozens of local social forums,
protests, gatherings and celebrations of resistance.

The decision of the WSF international council to call for a day of
action is an experiement and a risk, but it also reflects the sincere
efforts of everyone involved to maintain the innovation and dynamism of
the WSF process.

In this two-part issue of Focus on Trade, we are reflecting on the
future direction of the WSF. In advance, I apologise for the gender-bias
in this issues and would welcome contributions to the debate, especially
from women.

In the Part I, we have republished an article by Walden Bello that
appeared in Focus on Trade #129 in 2007. At that time, Bello's question
that perhaps it was time for the WSF to “pack up its tent” provoked many
reactions and the authors of the following articles – Thomas Ponniah,
Jai Sen and Chico Whitaker -- take this as a reference in their
response. In the final article, IPS – which has always been an active
participants in the WSF – interviews Bello about the future of the WSF.

Part II is a longer reflection by Boaventura de Sousa Santos which
places the WSF phenomenon is a broader historical and theoretcial
context, investigating the significance of the WSF for the global left.

And by the way, it's not only the WSF that is looking for new
strategies: speaking about the World Economic Forum, PepsiCo chief
executive and co-chair of this year's event, Indra Nooyi said that Davos
is “... all potential power, meaning it’s static power. You have to
unleash it.” She went on, “It’s great for discussion, it’s great for
sharing the results of research, but I think we have to move from
discussion to decision.” Does that sound familiar?

Finally, all of us at Focus on the Global South send our greetings and
solidarity to the thousands of activists who have been working towards
the Global Day of Action and we wish you great success.

**************************************************

PART 1:
THE FORUM AT THE CROSSROADS
Walden Bello

THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE US SOCIAL FORUM:
A REPLY TO THE DEBATE ON THE OPEN SPACE
Thomas Ponniah

IS THE WORLD SOCIAL FORUM APPROACHING A POINT OF CRISIS ?
A NOTE TOWARDS A DEBATE ON THE WSF GLOBAL DAY OF ACTION
Jai Sen

ANSWERING CACIM’S CALL FOR AN WSF EVALUATION
Chico Whitaker

IPS INTERVIEWS WALDEN BELLO ABOUT THE FUTURE OF THE WSF.

PART 2:
THE WORLD SOCIAL FORUM AND THE GLOBAL LEFT
Boaventura de Sousa Santos

*************************************************

THE FORUM AT THE CROSSROADS
Walden Bello*

A new stage in the evolution of the global justice movement was reached
with the inauguration of the World Social Forum (WSF) in Porto Alegre,
Brazil, in January 2001.

The WSF was the brainchild of social movements loosely associated with
the Workers’ Party (PT) in Brazil. Strong support for the idea was given
at an early stage by the ATTAC movement in France, key figures of which
were connected with the newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique. In Asia, the
Brazilian proposal, floated in June 2000, received the early
enthusiastic endorsement of, among others, the research and advocacy
institute Focus on the Global South based in Bangkok.

Porto Alegre was meant to be a counterpoint to “Davos,” the annual event
in a resort town in the Swiss Alps where the world’s most powerful
business and political figures congregated annually to spot and assess
the latest trends in global affairs. Indeed, the highlight of the first
WSF was a televised transcontinental debate between George Soros and
other figures in Davos with representatives of social movements gathered
in Porto Alegre.

The world of Davos was contrasted to the world of Porto Alegre, the
world of the global rich with the world of the rest of humanity. It was
this contrast that gave rise to the very resonant theme “Another world
is possible.”

There was another important symbolic dimension: while Seattle was the
site of the first major victory of the transnational anti-corporate
globalization movement -- the collapse amidst massive street protests of
the third ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization -- Porto
Alegre represented the transfer to the South of the center of gravity of
that movement. Proclaimed as an “open space,” the WSF became a magnet
for global networks focused on different issues, from war to
globalization to communalism to racism to gender oppression to
alternatives. Regional versions of the WSF were spun off, the most
important being the European Social Forum and the African Social Forum;
and in scores of cities throughout the world, local social fora were
held and institutionalized.

THE FUNCTIONS OF THE WSF
Since its establishment, the WSF has performed three critical functions
for global civil society:

First, it represents a space -- both physical and temporal -- for this
diverse movement to meet, network, and, quite simply, to feel and affirm
itself.

Second, it is a retreat during which the movement gathers its energies
and charts the directions of its continuing drive to confront and roll
back the processes, institutions, and structures of global capitalism.
Naomi Klein, author of No Logo, underlined this function when she told a
Porto Alegre audience in January 2002 that the need of the moment was
“less civil society and more civil disobedience.”

Third, the WSF provides a site and space for the movement to elaborate,
discuss, and debate the vision, values, and institutions of an
alternative world order built on a real community of interests. The WSF
is, indeed, a macrocosm of so many smaller but equally significant
enterprises carried out throughout the world by millions who have told
the reformists, the cynics, and the “realists” to move aside because,
indeed, another world is possible…and necessary.

DIRECT DEMOCRACY IN ACTION
The WSF and its many offspring are significant not only as sites of
affirmation and debate but also as direct democracy in action. Agenda
and meetings are planned with meticulous attention to democratic
process. Through a combination of periodic face-to-face meetings and
intense email and Internet contact in between, the WSF network was able
to pull off events and arrive at consensus decisions. At times, this
could be very time-consuming and also frustrating, and when you were
part of an organizing effort involving hundreds of organizations, as we
at Focus on the Global South were during the organizing of the 2004 WSF
in Mumbai, it could be very frustrating indeed.

But this was direct democracy, and direct democracy was at its best at
the WSF. One might say, parenthetically, that the direct democratic
experiences of Seattle, Prague, Genoa, and the other big mobilizations
of the decade were institutionalized in the WSF or Porto Alegre process.

The central principle of the organizing approach of the new movement is
that getting to the desired objective is not worth it if the methods
violate democratic process, if democratic goals are reached via
authoritarian means. Perhaps Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatistas best
expressed the organizing bias of the new movements: “The movement has no
future if its future is military. If the EZLN [Zapatistas] perpetuates
itself as an armed military structure, it is headed for failure. Failure
as an alternative set of ideas, an alternative attitude to the world.
The worst that could happen to it apart from that, would be for it to
come to power and install itself there as a revolutionary army.” The WSF
shares this perspective.

What is interesting is that there has hardly been an attempt by any
group or network to “take over” the WSF process. Quite a number of “old
movement” groups participate in the WSF, including old-line “democratic
centralist” parties as well as traditional social democratic parties
affiliated with the Socialist International. Yet none of these has put
much effort into steering the WSF towards more centralized or
hierarchical modes of organizing. At the same time, despite their
suspicion of political parties, the “new movements” never sought to
exclude the parties and their affiliates from playing a significant role
in the Forum. Indeed, the 2004 WSF in Mumbai was organized jointly by an
unlikely coalition of social movements and Marxist Leninist parties, a
set of actors that are not known for harmonious relations on the
domestic front.

Perhaps a compelling reason for the modus vivendi of the old and new
movements was the realization that they needed one another in the
struggle against global capitalism and that the strength of the
fledgling global movement lay in a strategy of decentralized networking
that rested not on the doctrinal belief that one class was destined to
lead the struggle but on the reality of the common marginalization of
practically all subordinate classes, strata, and groups under the reign
of global capital.

WHAT CONSTITUTES “OPEN SPACE”
The WSF has, however, not been exempt from criticism, even from its own
ranks. One in particular appears to have merit. This is the charge that
the WSF as an institution is unanchored in actual global political
struggles, and this is turning it into an annual festival with limited
social impact.

There is, in my view, a not insignificant truth to this. Many of the
founders of the WSF have interpreted the “open space” concept in a
liberal fashion, that is, for the WSF not to explicit endorse any
political position or particular struggle, though its constituent groups
are free to do so.

Others have disagreed, saying the idea of an “open space” should be
interpreted in a partisan fashion, as explicitly promoting some views
over others and as openly taking sides in key global struggles. In this
view, the WSF is under an illusion that it can stand above the fray, and
this will lead to its becoming some sort of neutral forum, where
discussion will increasingly be isolated from action. The energy of
civil society networks derives from their being engaged in political
struggles, say proponents of this perspective. The reason that the WSF
was so exciting in its early years was because of its affective impact:
it provided an opportunity to recreate and reaffirm solidarity against
injustice, against war, and for a world that was not subjected to the
rule of empire and capital. The WSF’s not taking a stand on the Iraq
War, on the Palestine issue, and on the WTO is said to be making it less
relevant and less inspiring to many of the networks it had brought together.

CARACAS VERSUS NAIROBI
This is why the 6th WSF held in Caracas in January 2006 was so bracing
and reinvigorating: it inserted some 50,000 delegates into the storm
center of an ongoing struggle against empire, where they mingled with
militant Venezuelans, mostly the poor, engaged in a process of social
transformation, while observing other Venezuelans, mostly the elite and
middle class, engaged in bitter opposition. Caracas was an exhilarating
reality check.

This is also the reason why the Seventh WSF held in Nairobi was so
disappointing, since its politics was so diluted and big business
interests linked to the Kenyan ruling elite were so brazen in
commercializing it. Even Petrobras, the Brazilian state corporation that
is a leading exploiter of the natural resource wealth of Latin America,
was busy trumpeting itself as a friend of the Forum. There was a strong
sense of going backward rather than forward in Nairobi.

The WSF is at a crossroads. Hugo Chavez captured the essence of the
conjuncture when he warned delegates in January 2006 about the danger of
the WSF becoming simply a forum of ideas with no agenda for action. He
told participants that they had no choice but to address the question of
power: “We must have a strategy of ‘counter-power.’ We, the social
movements and political movements, must be able to move into spaces of
power at the local, national, and regional level.”

Developing a strategy of counter-power or counter-hegemony need not mean
lapsing back into the old hierarchical and centralized modes of
organizing characteristic of the old left. Such a strategy can, in fact,
be best advanced through the multilevel and horizontal networking that
the movements and organizations represented in the WSF have excelled in
advancing their particular struggles. Articulating their struggles in
action will mean forging a common strategy while drawing strength from
and respecting diversity.

After the disappointment that was Nairobi, many long-standing
participants in the Forum are asking themselves: Is the WSF still the
most appropriate vehicle for the new stage in the struggle of the global
justice and peace movement? Or, having fulfilled its historic function
of aggregating and linking the diverse counter-movements spawned by
global capitalism, is it time for the WSF to fold up its tent and give
way to new modes of global organization of resistance and transformation?

* Walden Bello is a senior analyst with Focus on the Global South, the
Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute, and professor of
sociology at the University of the Philippines. Published by Foreign
Policy In Focus (FPIF), a joint project of the International Relations
Center (IRC, online at www.irc-online.org) and the Institute for Policy
Studies (IPS, online at www.ips-dc.org). Copyright © 2007, International
Relations Center. All rights reserved.

*************************************************

THE CONTRIBUTION OF THE US SOCIAL FORUM:
A REPLY TO WHITAKER AND BELLO'S DEBATE ON THE OPEN SPACE
Thomas Ponniah*

The achievements of the US Social Forum experience contribute a great
deal to debates concerning the future of the overall World Social Forum
(WSF) process. In a recent set of interventions Walden Bello and Chico
Whitaker, both representatives on the International Council of the WSF,
disagreed on the future of the Forum. Bello, the Executive Director of
Focus on the Global South, argued that the Forum was now at a
crossroads. While acknowledging that the WSF had given a great deal to
the struggle for global justice, Bello suggested that the Forum's “open
space” methodology, which on principle, refuses to take a collective
stand on issues such as the war on Iraq and the WTO, was now inhibiting
substantial political agency. He argued that there was merit to the
charge that the Forum was becoming “an institution unanchored in actual
global political struggles, and this is turning it into an annual
festival with limited social impact”. The article concluded with the
query: “is it time for the WSF to fold up its tent and give way to new
modes of global organization of resistance and transformation?”

Chico Whitaker, one of the founders of the WSF, and also a member of the
International Council of the World Social Forum, replied to Bello [see
below], arguing that crossroads do not have to close roads. Whitaker
noted that while the Forum's Charter of Principles precluded the
International Council from making statements representing the overall
World Social Forum, the open space methodology left possible the
opportunity for movements to independently build global coalitions that
articulated common manifestos. Therefore, for Whitaker, the WSF's
crossroads were in fact two paths that could co-exist, not as
impediments to each other, but as mutual sources of inspiration. The
open space could continue to allow movements to articulate themselves
and to propose new political projects without needing to speak on behalf
of all participants at the World Social Forum.

In order to thoughtfully assess the two different positions mentioned,
we need to reflect on what are the Social Forum process' actual
achievements. No Forum in recent memory has better expressed the
potential of the process than the recent US Social Forum (USSF). The
USSF demonstrated the accuracy of both Bello and Whitaker's arguments,
affirming the importance of continuing the social forum process but on
much more innovative, decisive, political ground.

The US forum, held from June 27 to July 2, in Atlanta, Georgia, the
birthplace of Martin Luther King Jnr. attracted over 10 000
participants, in over 900 workshops. The slogan of the Forum was
"Another World is Possible. Another US is Necessary." Mirroring yet
amplifying the global process, this national forum made three great
contributions to the US struggle.

DIVERSITY, IDENTITY, AUTONOMY
The US Social Forum created an open space that allowed different
people's movements to come together from around the United States. For
the first time diverse activists from around the country were able to
collectively interact in a non-hierachical, horizontal manner that
emphasized mutual understanding. The open space infrastructure
facilitated the possibility for a variety of movements to meet. If the
space had been dominated by one ideology, for example socialism, or if
it had been dominated by one strategy, for example, statism, then it
would not have attracted so many movements. The open space, as Whitaker
has always contended, allowed for a multitude of ideologies and
strategies to be represented at the Social Forum. This space not only
facilitated dissimilar groups from across the US to connect but it also
enabled movements in Atlanta to connect on novel new terms.

The open space permitted activists to move away from focusing on the
differences between social movements and instead focusing on
commonalities. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s there were numerous
divisions between different sides of the North American Left: such as
socialists, anarchists, ecologists, feminists, anti-racists, queer
activists, and indigenous activists to name a few. Movements did not
want to work with each other or were endlessly frustrated with each
other. The Social Forum created an arena where all of these
organizations felt that they could express their agenda without having
it drowned out by someone else's program. Speakers at plenaries came
from communities that were directly affected by the problem at hand.
Grassroots movements spoke for themselves. Thus the Forum was a common,
self-representative public venue thereby allowing for trust to be built
between movements.

The expression of difference was so pronounced that the USSF appeared to
be more diverse than any of the World Social Forums held in the last
three years. Not since the 2004 World Social Forum in India has a Forum
embodied so much diversity, not only as members of the audience, but
importantly as speakers and facilitators on panels, seminars and
workshops. One could argue that the Forums in India and the United
States simply reflected the demographic heterogeneity of two of the most
multicultural societies on the planet. Few nations in the Global South
have as many religions, cultures, and languages as India. Similarly no
country in the Global North has, in numerical terms, has the cultural
diversity of the United States However this interpretation of the US
Social Forum and the WSF in India is partial. What was remarkable about
both events was not simply that they embodied their countries' cultural
range but that they also demonstrated their economic diversity. Both
Forums were genuinely grassroots events with participants from every
economic class - especially the poor. While other editions of the World
Social Forum have been moving, inspirational events, they have not
substantially represented the impoverished, marginalized, and exploited
members of their countries. The first great contribution of the US
Social Forum process, then, was its capacity to enable the social,
cultural and economic variety of US movements to come together.

The second contribution of the USSF dealt with identity. Following the
open space concept, the US Social Forum has helped articulate common
self-identifications among progressives. What began in Seattle in 1999
as the US wing of the anti-globalization movement has now become a set
of alternative national globalization movements. North American
activists who took part in the USSF process, were able to even more
clearly recognize that diverse forms of dissent such as rallies against
racism, demonstrations against debt, and protests against privatization,
are not separate events but instances of one overarching dynamic: the
demand for global justice. The Social Forum process consolidated
numerous common identities of difference: black/brown, student/labor,
and environmental/social justice alliances. These coalitions are being
built on the desire for another world that is free of the discrimination
evidenced by Hurricane Katrina, of the militarism exhibited by perpetual
war, of the neoliberalism that prevents health care access to over forty
million US citizens, and of the bio-devastation embodied by global
warming. In sum, the Forum facilitated the creation of common, unified
identities that encompass the plethora of movements that aspire to a
world where all life is respected.

Third, the World Social Forum, and now the US Social Forum, has promoted
a revolution in how progressives imagine their opponent and thus
themselves. From its inception the organizers of the World Social Forum
dynamic and thus the USSF process understood that people's movements
have needed a space of articulation that was autonomous of corporations
and political parties. This has been a significant departure from the past.

Historically most progressives have imagined their primary adversary to
be the market. The left has always understood the danger that free
markets, corporations, and capitalism, posed to society. Progressives
have always known that commodification inevitably led to alienation. The
market, in Marcuse's memorable phrase, makes the human one-dimensional.
To restrain commodification, past leftwing movements have called for the
state to regulate the economy. In the first world, social democrats,
such as the New Deal politicians in the United States in the 1930s,
tried to regulate the industry for the benefit of the public. In the
second world, Soviet Communism tried to regulate production, and in the
third world, the national liberation state, for example Cuba, tried to
regulate its economic activity. So the dominant strand of the left has
always thought that the state could regulate the market and thus
liberate the population from exploitation.

The faith in leftist statism was tested numerous times throughout the
twentieth century. It finally broke in the early 1990s with the rollback
of the welfare state in the first world, the dissolution of the Soviet
state in the second world, and the loss of legitimacy of the national
liberation state in the third world. Progressives ever since have been
contending with the loss of belief in the state as the primary
instrument of social liberation.

Learning from history, the proponents of the Social Forum process have
understood that whether the state increased its power over the market or
whether the market increases its power over the state, in both cases
disaffection has inevitably deepened. Both the modes of production and
administration, both capital and the contemporary state, have become
proponents of heteronomy, of estrangement, of immiseration, rather than
public self-governance.

Against this two-headed adversary, the peoples' movements at the USSF
demonstrated the power of self-organized human solidarity. These
movements over and over throughout the Forum called for a participatory
society to develop independently of the market and the state. At this
Forum, US social movements increased their capacity for sovereign,
collective self-reflection. The activists at the USSF collectively
liberated themselves from the mental hegemony of the state and market by
proposing a new imagination: liberation can only be discovered, explored
and expressed by grounding social change in radical new forms of
democracy. Movements can pressure states, sometimes even work with
states, yet retain autonomous from the state. The collective
consolidation of the importance of autonomy was the third great
achievement of the US Social Forum.

THE FUTURE OF THE FORUM PROCESS
The achievements of the USSF lend credence to Chico Whitaker's
consistent principled defense of the Forum. The challenge that remains,
and that Walden Bello has recognized clearly, is that while the Forum
process at the global and local level is facilitating collective
self-reflection – it has not yet produced effective, collective
self-organization. There have been numerous discussions of global social
movement projects, such as the Bamako Appeal and proposals for global
political parties, but there has been no actual implementation. The war
on Iraq continues, climate change has not been halted, worldwide
inequality persists and corporations continue to rule the world. While
the open space of the Forum has allowed for the creation of new networks
it has not yet facilitated visionary projects. There have been great
reactive events, such as demonstrations against the WTO negotiations–
but there have been few alternatives that have actually been implemented
by the global justice movements. That is the great overarching trial
that the Forum faces. While the Forum has facilitated the capacity for
local, national and global social movement reflection, it has not yet
given birth to comparable forms of achievement. The essence of Walden
Bello's argument is correct: the facilitators of the World Social Forum
process must devise more innovative processes that will actually enable
decisive political change.

*Thomas Ponniah is a member of the Network Institute for Global
Democratization - one of the founding organizations of the International
Council of the World Social Forum; a member of Sociologists Without
Borders, and of the WSF Boston Organizing Committee. He is also the
co-editor of the book Another World is Possible: popular alternatives to
globalization at the World Social Forum, and the author of a forthcoming
book on global justice. Contact: Thomas.Ponniah at gmail.com

*************************************************

IS THE WORLD SOCIAL FORUM APPROACHING A POINT OF CRISIS ?
A NOTE TOWARDS A DEBATE ON THE WSF GLOBAL DAY OF ACTION
Jai Sen on behalf of CACIM*

Follow this link for the “open debate”:
http://openspaceforum.net/twiki/tiki-index.php?page=Explorations+In+Open+Spaces

THE PRESENT CONTEXT : A FUNDAMENTALLY NEW EXPERIMENT
The WSF is attempting a fundamentally new experiment for the 2008
edition of its world meeting : In place of what has happened every year
since it was founded in 2001 – a world meeting in a key location of the
South -, and for which it is now so well known, it has this year called
for a Global Day of Action on or around January 26 2008. On this day, or
during the week around it, it has called on all those who are associated
with it to act in favour of global social justice – and thereby, by
everyone acting simultaneously, to make manifest a new kind of world
meeting : Not a ‘real’ world meeting, as the WSF has traditionally been
and been conceived as, but as a worldwide, so-called ‘virtual’ meeting
of energies and ideas that will be generated and radiated by this
simultaneous celebration and efflorescence all across the world.

It is not as if the form of an action like this is totally new; there
have been some somewhat similar actions in history, such as the
worldwide anti-war demonstrations on February 15 2003 involving an
estimated 15 million people, or the call for Earth Day in 1971 and since
then, as one manifestation among others, the dimming and shutting off of
lights across several countries in the world on certain days in the year
as statements of ecological concern for the planet. Similarly, Amnesty
International has been a pioneer since the 1960s in initiating ‘global
actions’ on a range of human rights issues, which in turn have often
been taken up by others; and more recently, awaaz.org has become very
successful in mobilising millions of signatures in support of certain
issues.

But this is, perhaps, the first time even that such a complex,
open-ended experiment is being tried : Where people and organisations in
many parts of the world – since the WSF has attracted people from
perhaps most parts of the world, now – and working in all kinds of
fields, with all their diverse perceptions, are being asked to
simultaneously manifest their concerns – their protests, their hopes,
their alternatives. In a way, as opposed to the somewhat mechanical,
clock-like action of people converging in one place for the different
editions of the World Social Forum that have taken place so far, this
time the organisers of the WSF have called on what can be conceived of
as the cloud, or swarm, of social movement and concern across the world
– what some call ‘the movement of movements’ - to, just for a day,
simultaneously show itself – and thereby fleetingly make the cloud manifest.

The call for this action is an extraordinary statement of organic hope
and optimism in open-ended and emergent action. It is not a directive to
action – which traditional movements issue to their constituents; the
WSF has no power to do this (and thankfully, has not gone in that
direction in taking this decision, even when under pressure to do so).
It is something quite different. One could even say that nothing like
this has ever been tried before; and that what the WSF is attempting is
a fundamental challenge, in the most positive sense, to all existing
notions of how (social and political) ‘movement’ takes place and should
take place, which is – or has mostly been, so far – linear, directed,
clock-like, and therefore (in theory, at least) relatively predictable
and controllable.

Over the life of the Forum since 2001, there have been several proposals
that that Forum needs to be – if it is to be ‘truly effective’ in its
aim of building another world – far more directed, far more ‘clear’, and
far more committed to particular actions and programmes. In this year
itself (2007), there have been several strong articles published that
all, interestingly, conceive and portray the WSF to be at a ‘crossroad’,
and urge all of us to be far ‘clearer’ in the direction we take and in
what we do – and to change the Forum so that it becomes ‘clearer’ in its
actions. One of these articles, authored by a very influential and
persuasive scholar-activist, Walden Bello, also specifically proposes
that it is perhaps time for the Forum to pack up its tent and move on,
and make way for other things to happen.

But note two things here : First, that each of these prescriptions
follows the classical Descartian and Newtonian logic of ‘movement’ –
that the entity (here, the WSF) is moving in a specific direction, has
reached a certain stage or point, and now must make a choice among
classically defined directions and options (“left or right ?”).

But - and second - what has ‘the Forum’ (here, in the shape of its
organisers, the WSF International Council) done, in the face of this
challenge ? It has decided, amazingly (but I believe also, based on its
history, characteristically), to take the boldest gamble of all : To
reject linear, clocklike dynamics entirely – and the choice of this way
or that -, and to instead attempt to manifest itself as a cloud that it
in many ways already is – with its constituents going in all directions,
in apparently random ways ! But where there is, in fact profound order
that makes up the apparent chaos that clouds seem to be – but ‘order’ of
a different kind.

In many ways, this is a brilliant conception. On the one hand, it
directly addresses the longstanding demand of those who have been
proposing and demanding the space for more direct action (such as those
who take part in the Assembly of Social Movements at each Forum), and
not only allows but urges all those want more ‘clear’ actions to go
ahead and do this. (Since there no one ‘meeting’ to be attended, with
its specific and somewhat particular format of workshops, etc, you can
do what you like and whatever you think is politically and strategically
most meaningful.) And on the other hand, it equally validates and
invites quiet reflection in small circles – and everything in between.

In such a call, all such actions are understood to be equally valid, and
to, in their own ways, generate and/or harness and radiate energy and
movement that will light up the planet on that one, single, fateful,
day, as an expression of shared concern, determination, and hope.

But this, in a sense, is what the Forum has always done : Breaking new
ground, constantly putting forward new ideas, new ways of doing things –
and in the course of all this, itself organically learning and emerging
– and, as I have argued elsewhere, emerging more as a cloud than as a clock.

It is not entirely clear (from the statements they have issued, and from
articles that some of them have subsequently written) whether those who
have conceived of this formulation are necessarily aware of this meaning
of their call. But this does not matter; and at one level, this is
precisely the nature of emergent action and of organic emergence – that
those who act are not necessarily individually aware of the nature of
their actions or of the larger pattern that all the various actions add
up to make. Like bees and ants; and like human beings, in all cultures.

But the big question is : Will this gamble work ? And what, even if it
does – in part or in whole -, is the social, political, and strategic
significance and meaning of this action ? How will – how should - we
assess it as well as its possible outcomes, in terms not merely of
numbers or the range and diversity and actions but also of addressing
the profound social, economic, political, and ecological injustice that
rides so rampantly across the world ? For this is what the Forum is all
about, and why it was conceived; and if it does not do this, then…

In other words, is this just one more effete action by elite thinkers
who only talk – or is this real political action ?

THE FUTURE OF THE FORUM
In many senses, all these questions are intimately related to the future
of the Forum. Even as the organisers of the Forum have gone out on such
a limb – for it is a huge gamble – there are deep stirrings within its
body and all around it, about its future; and about, literally, whether
it should even exist.

There is, as already mentioned, the proposal before us all that it is
perhaps time for the Forum to pack up and move on. (Though the essay in
question, by Walden Bello, was perhaps meant not as a final statement
but as a challenge to thought.)

There are also legion thinkers, writers, strategists, and policy makers
who have, all along, questioned the value of this experiment that is
called the World Social Forum. They may be mostly from outside the Forum
but they do have influence.

There are also several today who argue the global social justice
movement, of which the Forum is just one part (even if a very important
part), has now had its day, and is now on a steep decline, imploding as
it goes down. They in turn influence others, as such opinions tend to; a
negative view of things, especially if well-argued, is often very
contagious, sometimes at a subconscious level. But is this so ? Do you
agree – is this your experience, and your understanding ?

There are also many who have taken part in the Forum and who are
profoundly disillusioned by it – by the apparent disorganisation of it
all; by the power struggles that are always taking place; by the
traumatic effects of these power struggles and how all this seems to so
completely contradict the very soul of the Forum; by the exclusions that
are so rampant; by the commercialisation and the conceptual and material
corruption that seems so widely to be there; and by the possibility that
it does not seem to be going anywhere. No one has perhaps yet done a
count of how many people (and maybe also organisations) have dropped out
of the Forum process over these years, but this accounting should also
be done, sometime…

But this dropout is real; and the issue is – what needs to be done, to
address this ? What changes need to be brought about in the body and
spirit of the Forum, in order to reverse this tendency ? And how can we
bring about such changes ?

And then there are the funders who are always, necessarily, waiting in
the wings, trying to sense whether this is where they should be placing
their bets – but where there are now signs that they are dropping out,
one by one. But where – to be blunt – the Forum has been, after all is
said and done, conceived on an assumption of the generosity on the part
of funders to fund not only the ‘central’ Forum (the secretariat, the
committees, etc) but also all the hundreds and thousands of people who
attend Fora across the world – many (though not all) of whom depend on
grants of one kind or another. And if the funders back out, either or
both from backing the central WSF and the participants, then the
experiment that is the WSF as a whole is likely to implode. Unless we
can start thinking of alternatives… But - are there alternatives to the
approach that has been taken to the Forum so far ?

So this action, this call for a Global Day of Action (GDA), is a huge
gamble. Because if it works, then everyone will be back in; but if
doesn’t, or works only in a very limited way, then… the ship is likely
to develop massive leaks.

* Jai Sen is the co-director of CACIM, the India Institute for Critical
Action : Centre In Movement. He has written extensively on the WSF. To
respond go to this discussion, go to
http://openspaceforum.net/twiki/tiki-index.php?page=Explorations+In+Open+Spaces

*************************************************

ANSWERING CACIM’S CALL FOR AN WSF EVALUATION
Chico Whitaker*

We can evaluate the WSF with two different attitudes: wishing that the
WSF disappears (“folding up its tent”) or wishing its continuity. If we
are not convinced of its utility, and consider it a waste of time – some
see it now even as an obstacle to gain efficacy in the struggle to
overcome neoliberalism - we have only to identify what we can profit
from this eight years of experience, and enter directly in a new stage
of struggle. But if we see the WSF process as something helpful, we must
on the contrary identify its virtues and strengths - as well as its
weakness - and think how to reinforce it.

During all the WSF life these two attitudes coexisted. For instance,
many people who never swallowed the WSF Charter of Principles would like
to abandon those principles that render difficult initiatives involving
all WSF participants. On the contrary, others say the Charter must be
respected as a vaccine against the hijacking of the process for specific
objectives, and as a protection for the Social Forums against parties
and governments interferences.

It seems nevertheless that now we are approaching a dangerous situation:
people who are insisting in the idea of the “point of crisis” or
“crossroad” do it at the same time as others are multiplying activities
in the WSF spirit in many parts of the world. That is to say, we are
risking a disconnection between some people who “think” about the WSF
process and others who “do” the WSF process.

I don’t see the first group so joyful. On the other hand, I see the
second ones working with enthusiasm in the roads opened by the WSF
process, overcoming all “crossroads” - specially now, answering to the
call for a Global Day of Action (GDA) on 26 January, as well as
preparing new regional Social Forums in 2008 and the next World Forum in
2009 in the Amazon region.

This risk is especially dangerous because we are going to have an
important WSF International Council (IC) meeting end March in Nigeria.
The main objectives of this IC meeting are to evaluate 2008, re-situate
the WSF process in the present world problems and discuss its next
steps. All this based on an evaluation of the world situation, which is
not necessarily evolving in the sense of overcoming neoliberalism, wars,
and violent confrontations. So, “disconnecting” the IC of the rest of
the WSF dynamics would be disastrous.

Naturally we have to overcome this risk. The way to do it, in my
opinion, is adopting, in the evaluation CACIM proposes - and still more
in the next IC meeting - the same approach we experience in the WSF
decision making process. In our Organisation Committees, as well as in
the International Council and its Commissions and Working Groups, we use
the positive approach of looking for a consensus instead of voting. The
vote to decide collectively is evidently a great conquest of humanity.
But when it is used among social organizations it carries to divisions
and separations, in advantage of the dominant power. Deciding by
consensus pushes everybody not to see the errors of the others - to
point then these errors to the voters - but the truths others are
saying, to arrive to a new truth combining all known truths, in a
constructive general consent, only way to build union.

* * *

Why is it that many people (of our “side”, naturally not among the
neoliberalism partisans) do not “love” the WSF, even though they
participate in it – although not always at ease? I found three major
reasons for that.

The first is the fact that the WSF is a novelty as political initiative.
The two others are misunderstandings: about the WSF objectives and
character and about the necessity of participating in it.

Let me try to explain it better.

ABOUT THE NOVELTY OF THE WSF PROCESS
The WSF is really, in my opinion, a “political invention”, as said my
colleague of the Brazilian WSF Organization Committee, José Corrêa
Leite, in the title of his book written in 2003, before the one I wrote
in 2004/5 also about the WSF.

It was proposed in opposition to the World Economic Forum in Davos, but
it was also deeply different. It was a new kind of Forum, as a place to
assemble people for discussions about specific themes. And it pointed
already to the different world we thought was possible.

In which aspects is the WSF different from the Forums in which we were
used to participate? The main differences were: the organisers were not
events promoters (like for instance in Davos) but social organisations;
no profit was envisaged (the fees of participation were nearly
symbolic); the organisations carrying it out made a general “call to
come” without specific invitations, travel tickets or lodging expenses
paid (some known political leaders were uncomfortable with this); they
did not determine the content of the discussions (only the general
objective that could bring together those “called”); they did not choose
key note speakers and debaters; they opened the Forum space to
self-organised activities of the participants; and last but no least,
they established that the Forum would not have final declarations or
motions.

Many things we see now more clearly were absolutely not defined in our
minds in the beginning of the process. They were in fact only
intuitions. We learned, and we are learning until now, Forum after Forum.

Consequently, all these characteristics were not entirely respected in
the first World Social Forum in 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, except
some especially important ones. As well till now they are not completely
respected in all Forums organised in the WSF process, with the emergence
of Social Forums, which could be regional, national or local. But these
characteristics were and are present in the “facilitators” minds, who
slowly try effectively to consider them in the organisation of Forums.
This happened especially after the formulation of the WSF Charter of
Principles, which defined more precisely the character of the World
Social Forum, from the experience of the first one.

The big problem nevertheless, was the fact that this political invention
did not fit in in any of the existing categories of analysis and
reflection about political action. The WSF was a strange “animal” that
errupted, already with big dimensions, in the sea of our political
initiatives. It was a non pyramidal Forum, situated much more in the
logics of the networks, a new stream that was also appearing in the sea.
This “animal” diminished the self-confidence of many people, who were
used to working with tools of action and analyses built during more than
a century. They would prefer, then, to stay where they were more at ease.

Anyhow at its beginning the WSF was seen with a certain sympathy, as
well as somehow inoffensive, so that could be accepted. Things became
complicated when the Forum launched a new and different world process,
with incidence in political practices. Some people began then to
disqualify it – “it is a Woodstock of the left”, “in the Forums we only
discuss and discuss”.

But why was it necessary to create such unfamiliar and troublesome kind
of Forum?

I would say that we have seen a new political actor rising: the “civil
society”- as citizens organized in social movements and other types of
bodies – which needed a space to express itself.

Later on we saw also that it would be good to feed the “animal”, because
it could help overcome one big difficulty of the left: the fact that it
was recurrently victim of the malediction of the division, weakening
itself, for the pleasure of those who dominate the world.

THE EMERGENCE OF CIVIL SOCIETY AS POLITICAL ACTOR
In fact, the WSF was not created, as many people think, to enter in
competition with political parties or replace their action, or to enter
in competition with the struggle to “conquer” governments. Both types of
political action are necessaries to build the new world. The WSF
intended only to reinforce the so called “civil society” that was
emerging in the world by its own initiative – that is, autonomous from
parties and governments, and not accepting to be only part of their
strategies.

Throughout the work of organizing Forums, we saw also more clearly that
the civil society articulation differs from that of parties and
governments. It can be built only through horizontal networks, without
leaderships and pyramids of responsibilities - overcoming the
limitations of the representative democracy, with its “delegations” of
power and internal struggles for power, typical of parties and
governments logics. That is why we put in the WSF Charter of Principles
that the WSF “does not constitute a locus of power to be disputed by the
participants in its meetings”.

But we saw more clearly, moreover, that the political action of this new
actor is also different to the one of parties and governments. It
unfolds as in the networks - in a big variety of types, rhythms, themes
and levels of action, being developed autonomously by a big variety of
organisations. That is why the WSF Charter refused a specific and unique
WSF “political program”, to be endorsed by the organisations
participating in the Forums. Anyhow, such a common program would be
practically impossible to build, in the Forums or in the organising
instances of the process, considering the number and diversity of
organisations gathered in it.

Naturally, parties, movements or governments can propose strategies to
fight neoliberalism, or a new model of society to be built upon the
ashes of capitalism, or a utopia to mobilize the crowds, rendering more
foreseeable the territory of the unknown post-capitalism. Social Forums
then can be places to discuss these propositions, but not to obtain its
acceptance by all their participants.

In this perspective, I would say that if the WSF International Council
does not resist the temptation of trying to do a WSF “political
program”, it really risks its own death, as it will be in a deep
contradiction with the WSF logics.

THE NEED OF BUILDING UNION
All of us know that building union is important for all political actors
engaged in changing the world – specially left political parties and
movements. But it is still more important for the civil society as
political actor.

The force of the mobilized majorities – workers, electors, consumers,
citizens – can be decisive in the political struggles. Parties and
governments know it and use it in their strategies. But the diversity of
interests inside the civil society may maintain it so fragmented that
its force as an autonomous political actor may not emerge.

Which kind of union would be then suitable for the civil society, to
pressure for the majorities' interests and even build alternatives
independently of parties and governments? Civil society organisations
can support each other but not through tactical or strategic alliances,
under centralized commandments. They only can be united by solidarity
ties, assumed freely.

WSF process was then envisaged as unlimited horizontal networking spaces
at world, regional, national or local levels.

They would create at first occasions for mutual recognizing, overcoming
of prejudices among organisations and identification of convergences.
Then the respect of diversity was seen as essential inside the civil
society, as a practice to be exercised during the Forums and in the
interrelations built in the Forums, pointing already to the future: the
respect of diversity would have to be a fundamental value in the new
world we wish.

In addition, to advance towards the kind of union suitable for civil
society, it was seen as necessary to overcome the poorness of the
representative democracy, and to point towards the empowerment of the
citizens; and, through the respect of their diversity, towards the
development of their initiative and creativity, instead of moulding them
in conformist behaviours.

This process would then create conditions to experience new values
contradicting those which motivate the action inside capitalism, and
which we need to abandon to overcome this system: cooperation instead of
competition, human needs instead of profits, respect for nature instead
of its maximum exploitation, long term perspectives instead of short
term interests, acceptance of differences instead of homogenisation, co-
responsible liberty instead of egoistic individualism, being instead of
having.

These dynamics, lived in the WSF to build the civil society union, in
its diversity and autonomous relations, could reinforce its action as
political actor. And, as for parties and governments genuinely searching
to answer to the human beings, the union is also necessary, this
experimenting would be a positive message coming to them from the WSF
process, pointing to new kinds of alliances.

It must be said that all the intuitions behind the WSF “invention” were
not new in the world. It was not something coming from zero. It was one
of the results of at least 40 years of humankind thinking about
political practices, criticizing authoritarianism and acting
consequently. It appeared explosively in 1968, entered into a process of
maturing with the horizontal networks as a new way to organise actions
and with experiences like the Zapatistas from 1994, and arrived to a
climax in the 1999 Seattle protests.
The success of the process that began with the WSF in 2001 is due, I
think, to the fact that its Charter of Principles announce clearly some
simple conditions to develop these intuitions: the refusal of a final
document of the Forums; the non-existence of leaderships directing the
meetings or of spokespersons; the non-existence of a political programme
of the WSF as a body; the absence of specific invitations to
participate, in order to create an “open space”; the equal importance
given to all activities inside the Forum; the possibility that the
activities be proposed as much as possible not by the organisers but by
the participants themselves; the refusal to accept activities inside the
Forum organised by political parties or governments; the refusal of
government interference, even and specially when they give logistical
support; and the refusal of violence as a means in political action.
The growing dimensions of the Forums is empirical evidence of the wisdom
of these Principles, just as the non-respect of them can create problems
as happened already in some recent occasions.
So, if the WSF cannot change the world, it can create better conditions
for it, through the reinforcement of the civil society as political
actor and through the experimentation of new political practices,
pointing to a new political culture.

The problem then is the delay. This road towards the construction of
civil society union – as well as the new kinds of alliances among
parties -- needs time and involves deep changes of paradigms and
behaviours. That is why the misunderstandings about the WSF process –
that I will analyse now - not only remained but also grow.

WSF - SPACE OR MOVEMENT?
The first misunderstanding that appeared was related to a question: is
the WSF a space or a movement?

This question was already very much discussed and many old and new
arguments for one or another option can be presented. I will not do it
here. The book I wrote about the WSF -- “The WSF challenge” -- considers
mainly this alternative.

These options must in fact be considered in the context of the desire to
change the world, as rapidly as possible, that motivates all WSF process
participants. The Charter of Principles defined the WSF as a space and
not as a movement, and established that it did not intend “to be a body
representing world civil society”. Many people were frustrated and later
“profoundly disillusioned”, as said the CACIM invitation to evaluate the
WSF. They would prefer the WSF as a strong new movement or as a
“movement of movements”. Seeing WSF “calling” capacity to put together
tens of thousands of people of the entire world wishing to overcome the
neoliberalism, they consider that it can be used to mobilize these
people and many others to confront directly the dominant system. As if
we had finally found the organisational issue to overcome the perplexity
produced by the Berlin’s Wall fall. Why not put the WSF meetings at the
service of concrete political actions, to realise as soon as possible
all the changes having strategic priority, or to weaken the system by
exploring its contradictions?

This is the sense of “folding the tent”: abandoning the realisation of
seemingly innocuous world, regional and national meetings for
interchanges, reflections, learning and even articulation of the civil
society organisations and movements, and tentering with all our force in
the terrain of real politics, with the participation of political
parties and even left governments – the really existing ones.

Naturally nothing can impede us to adopt the option of WSF as a
movement. If we think we are already sufficiently strong and united to
be able to change the present tendencies of the world history, we could
consciously end this stage of the WSF history, change in this sense the
Charter of Principles and begin new reflections and alliances.

Myself, I think that we are not so strong and we would be making a bad
choice interrupting the present WSF process. Civil society is still not,
unhappily, so strong a political actor as we would like, while left
parties and governments remain confused.

And left parties and governments seem to remain in the perplexity.

I prefer to consider, as I wrote sometime ago, that both strategies –
creation of spaces and launching movements - can and must coexist. We
can continue in both “roads”.

If this coexistence is accepted, they can reinforce each other. Social
movements and organisations can launch through civil society forums new
autonomous initiatives to overcome neoliberalism. Campaigns and
pressures launched by them can be incorporated in the left parties and
government’s programs of action. New movements and even “movements of
movements” can be created, autonomous of the WSF events, as it happens
already with the one we used to call “altermondialism”. Parties and
governments, as well as movements linked to them, can do what they must
do, as well as support the civil society spaces to build their union.

If the WSF process continuity is ensured, as a tool to articulate civil
society towards action, the challenge will be in the road of the “real
politics”, where still we we still do not see clearly the best direction
to take.

THE “OBLIGATION” TO PARTICIPATE
The second misunderstanding I pointed before was about something like a
“moral obligation” to participate in all the world events of the WSF
process, which the social organisations leaderships seem to feel. The
continuous growing of the dimensions of these events -- 150,000
participants in 2005 in Porto Alegre -- pushed people to think that
their presence was also necessary to affirm the WSF force.

In fact the WSF organisers made a “call to come” to all civil society
organisations which were “opposed to neoliberalism and to domination of
the world by capital and any form of imperialism, and are committed to
building a planetary society directed towards fruitful relationships
among Humankind and between it and the Earth”, as indicated in the WSF
Charter of Principles. As a result, all organisations struggling to
build the “other world possible” were welcome.

In the following Forums this open invitation made more and more people
come, and the “animal” grew more and more. But the participation in
world events, with all its consequences in financing and in preparation
work, came on top of all the obligations of each organisation in its own
struggles. After four years, naturally, many participants were tired
with this supplementary effort. And they began, in the 4th WSF, in
India, to propose the realisation of World Forums only every two or even
three years. This solution was not adopted, as the Forums have also a
symbolic dimension, with its annual rhythm, and their interruption could
lead to a weakening of the process.

But in fact the Forum is now a world level process, and it is this
process that must be as dense as possible, with continuous expansion and
articulations. Its meeting moments do not need to be as big as possible.
The process is more important. If the meetings are big but are not
supported by a growing articulation of the civil society organisations,
their force is artificial. They may even mislead us, giving the false
impression that behind these meetings we have a civil society which is
articulated and dense.

That is why the 2008 WSF format - free activities, in all levels, places
and themes, self organized by WSF participants - seems to be very
interesting, better than the 2006 format, with the polycentric
Bamako-Caracas-Karachi World Social Forum.

I would even say already that the 2008 Global Day of Action (GDA) format
could be used every year from now on, independently but linked to the
unique World Social Forum to be organized each year – such experience
can be done already in 2009, when the World Social Forum will take place
in the Amazon region. I recognize the force of the WSF invention in the
variety of initiatives that are happening all over the world to prepare
the GDA. In many, many countries different organisations are working
together, respecting their diversity, in very creative ways, to appear
together the 26 January 2008. Most of these organisations will never be
able to come to a world or even regional meeting. But they will be
linked in a unique decentralized event in the GDA. This articulation
could be experienced (and deepened) every year, with a growing network
of organisations.

In fact, those who agree with the WSF utility would help it more
efficiently by pushing the expansion of the process (by the
multiplication of social forums and articulations all over the world at
all levels) than coming to every world meeting.

THE APPROACH TO EVALUATE
Overcoming these misunderstandings, we can better analyse our
experiences, and improve the way Social Forums are organized to ensure
its functioning as the simple tool it is, at the service of social
organisations and movements. This is the type of evaluation WSF needs:
from inside it, by those engaged in it, bringing hope to the
discussions, instead of the pessimism that tends to appear when we
analyse it from outside.

To prepare as best as possible the 2009 WSF and the following, we have
to learn from all the World Forums already realized. Many difficulties
could be identified in the last one, in Nairobi, but also in the
previous ones. The “Organising Principles” being discussed in the
International Council try exactly to avoid the repetition of errors, and
to indicate the good way of solving the problems of such huge events. If
this discussion could incorporate also the lessons coming from regional,
national and local Forums it would be great. Jai Sen’s demand to
publicize as much as possible the discussion of these “Organising
Principles” must be welcome. (See above, and
http://www.cacim.net/twiki/tiki-index.php?page=CACIMHome.)

Among the WSF weakness, which we have not yet been able to solve, is,
for instance, how to stimulate and help the Forums participants
translate into new real articulated actions all the discoveries they
make during the events (new questions, new convergences) and to deepen
after the Forums, as intensively as possible, the articulations they
built during them.

In this perspective, we tried in each Forum new tools – such as the
Mural of Propositions in 2005, and in 2007 the use of the fourth Forum
day for the planning of actions. Both did not function as we would like.
Since Nairobi we are also building a permanent tool to facilitate,
through the internet, the interrelation among participants and their
actions and campaigns, at a world level, before and after the Forums.
But we have still to work, to make it easily accessible for everybody.

Civil society articulations are not so easy exactly because the civil
society structure is characterised by its dispersion and diversity. Even
an important participant’s network, that emerged in the first World
Social Forum particularly preoccupied with mobilization - the Social
Movements Assembly – did not find till now the best way to do it. Some
tensions appeared between them and the Forum’s organisers, with
misunderstandings about this Assembly final document, as our Charter of
Principles refuses a WSF final document. But in some regional Forums
they present already very clearly their final declaration as theirs and
not of the Forum as a whole. Anyway, they are still searching for the
way to make their final assemblies a moment to engage their participants
more deeply in the propositions that are presented.

Other difficult questions are related with the results of the WSF
process in helping to change the world effectively.

One question already raised in some evaluations is the difficulty of
many organisations to bring to their internal lives what they
experienced or learned in the Forums. This could happen because some
values lived in the Forums may bring problems to the internal
functioning of the organisations, especially those concerning horizontal
relations.

Another question about results is linked with the changes at the
personal level, in the motivations, behaviours and hopes of each one of
us. In fact one of the discoveries made in the Forums was the direct
relation between personal change and structural changes. To change the
world we need also to change ourselves, internally, towards new values
like those proposed in the Forums. And this is extremely difficult as,
after the five Forum’s days, we are again entirely encircled by the
practices we want to overcome.

Actually the evaluation of these two types of results could be a good
question to be put, at their arrival in the Forums, to the WSF events
participants. They could at least become aware of this preoccupation,
before living their new Forum experience.

But the external result that anguishes more people, leading them to
criticise the WSF, is the effective change of the world. In fact to
consider these results we cannot forget that capitalism made many big
steps to deepen the domination of the world, since the Berlin’s Wall
downfall, which goes much further than military oppression and the
control of economic logics and institutions. It subjugates the minds and
the hearts, in nearly all the world – including among political leaders
supposing fighting against capitalism. The world moves under the rules
of the money and of the capitalistic values. There are many, many people
struggling against neoliberalism and building new frames of life, but,
actually, they still do not make very much difference. And thinking
about the WSF itself, eight years are a very small time in the world
history.

In fact, if we ask if another world is possible, a good minority will
say that it is not necessary and the big majority will say that it is
not possible. Even those now fighting strongly for their rights would
not necessarily be so motivated to change the world in its fundamental
structures. The climate problems are opening the possibility of showing
how these structures and values are in their origin. But we have still
an enormous effort to do, to awake more people. We took seven years to
see a little clearer in the WSF process that communication is perhaps
our most important challenge. We still do not know how to obtain a
significant inversion of perspectives in the world, to give hope to a
more substantial portion of the human beings, so as to arrive to the
critical mass that will enable real changes.

Here we could see, perhaps, another good effect of decentralized
activities like in the GDA, linked to World Social Forums: much more
than only through world meetings poorly covered by the media, people
will hear about the possibility of “another world” and will know that
many people is working to build it.

Another “internal” problem is related with the WSF IC, and the
disconnection we risk between those who “think” the WSF and those who
“do” it, that I have already considered in this text. This disconnection
used to happen in political parties, between the Party leaders and the
militants at the basis, or in the Unions. Paradoxically, it could happen
also in the WSF process, where we don’t have categories such as leaders
and supporters, and separations between those who think and those who do.

But the IC members are delegates of the organisations members of the IC.
They come mostly from the leadership of these organisations - in the
logics of representation and delegation of power, whose poorness we
denounce through the way we organise the Forums. For the “base” of our
process, it is practically impossible to participate in the IC meetings,
as I said already. Are, then, the IC meetings participants those who
“think” the WSF? Or could we begin also to link everybody through the
mechanisms we will experiment in the GDA?

There is also a growing ambiguity about the IC “facilitator” role, and
the decisions it finally takes. The frontier between “facilitation” and
“direction” is not very sharp. The IC cannot decide about the WSF
process participants’ struggles but it decides about how the process
will evolve. This happens with the methodology used in the world events,
for instance, even if the local organisers of each event are free to
decide about it. If there are no impositions, we could say that our way
of working is normal and useful: through the IC Commissions the local
organisers can benefit from the experience of the Forums already
realised. But it can also be felt as direction. The same happens with
the steps of the process. The decision about stimulating a Global Day of
Action in January 2008 was an IC decision. It did not send orders to the
WSF process participants to take initiatives all over the world, and
still less it defined the themes of the activities to be realized. But
if we have an insufficient mobilisation it is possible that it will be
attributed to a lack of direction. Let us see…

These ambiguities could be avoided by the transparency of the IC
publicising its structure, functioning and discussions, seen till now by
many people as something mysterious and even secret, opened only to
people of the “direction” of organisations participating in the WSF. But
we still did not find the way to ensure this transparency.

In conclusion, if we see the WSF with optimism, from inside, as a new
useful and necessary tool that must be preserved and improved -- despite
all these difficulties -- to reinforce civil society and push for a new
political culture, we have a great many positive reflections to do. That
is the approach of any WSF process evaluation and its future that can
help us to really build the possible, necessary and urgent “other
world”. I hope it will be the approach of the participants of the
evaluation CACIM proposes, as well as of the participants of the IC
meeting in Nigeria.

* Chico Whitaker is one of the original memebers of the Brazilian
organising committee which launched the first World Social Forum in
2001. He is an active member of the International Council. Email:
intercom at cidadania.org.br

*************************************************

ALEJANDRO KIRK OF THE INTER PRESS SERVICE, IPS, INTERVIEWS WALDEN BELLO
ABOUT THE FUTURE OF THE WSF.

The WSF as an "open space" idea can either be implemented in a liberal
direction or in a committed, progressive direction, says Walden Bello,
senior analyst of Focus on the Global South.

IPS: How do you see the WSF's World Day of Action. How effective can it be?”

WB: I think the WSF Day of Action is a good idea. It is a first step in
moving the WSF from being simply a forum for discussion to becoming an
arena for action. It will push people into actively taking on issues and
mobilizing for them. Being local actions being undertaken globally, the
many protest activities will also underline the transnational character
of the social movements in the WSF, which is one of their key strengths.

IPS: You have suggested that the WSF turns into a "new form". How do you
see the future and shape of the WSF?

WB: Taking stands on key issues like US aggression in the Middle East,
Zionist oppression of the Palestinian people, and the poverty-creating
neoliberal paradigm is vital to making the WSF vibrant and relevant.
Refusing to take stands on the grounds that these will drive away some
people is a sure way of ultimately making a movement irrelevant. The
movements that advance and grow are those that are not afraid to take
stands on the vital issues of our times. I am not talking about staking
stands on 1001 issues but on the core issues of our times, maybe about
six or seven of them. The WSF as an "open space" idea can either be
implemented in a liberal direction or in a committed, progressive
direction. Being partisan on issues that advance justice, equality, and
democracy should be seen as a virtue, not as a stance to be shunned.

IPS: What is the right balance between political action in the from of
political parties and within the socal movement? How can this have an
impact in Southeast Asia?

WB: Political parties continue to be important vehicles for political
transformation. However, social movements should see parties as one
vehicle for transformation and should use other institutions and
agencies, like unions and NGOs, to push their agenda. The vanguardist or
Leninist party subordinating civil society organizations and movements
to one overriding objective -- seizing political power -- is obsolete
and dysfunctional. Transformation must take place along several fronts,
and the process is just as important as the goal.

Social movements must push for the instititutionalization of mechanisms,
such as national assemblies of social movements, that could serve as a
check on the bureaucracy, parliament, and other political bodies. Civil
society should aggressively serve as a counterweight to both the state
and the private sector. Civil society is a key actor in reinvigorating
the democratic revolution, which has ossified into electoralism in most
countries in the North and South.

IPS: Since the first WSF, Latin America has experienced a spectacular
shift to the left, in different shapes. What has this development to do
with the WSF? Do you think this process will lead to meaningful change
or will it eventually turn righwards?

WB: Well, I think the WSF emerged from a process in Latin America where
social movements were, as in Brazil, shaking up the traditional
institutions of political representation. The Workers' Party in Brazil
was, in its initial stages, an energetic hybrid of political party and
social movement that captured the allegiance and imagination of the
masses. However, a new stage was reached when the Workers' Party became
a serious contender for power. It became "professionalized" and began
attracting middle class elements that were interested only in limited
social transformation. Then, in the last few years, during the Lula
presidency, the state and the ancien regime have captured the Workers'
Party.

At the same time, in Venezuela, a charismatic relationship between a
populist president and the urban poor became the vehicle for change in a
country with weak social movements. Then in Bolivia and Ecuador, we had
social movements with strong roots in the indigenous people achieve
power electorally and begin, unlike in Brazil, a transformation of the
state.

IPS: How do these developments reflect in the WSF?

WB: All of these developments have been reflected in the WSF, where, as
in the continent from which it sprang, there are contending political
tendencies in the ranks of the people. You have trends that are closer
to the People's Party tendency and others that are closer to the
Venezuelan and Bolivian tendency.

What is important though is that the WSF and its associated movements
remain independent of governments and parties and maintain their ability
to criticize governments when they conciliate the US and neoliberalism,
like Brazil under Lula, and lend critical support to governments like
those of Venezuela and Bolivia.

They should be able to express broad support for an initiative like the
Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) while criticizing some of
its more controversial plans like the building of oil and gas pipelines
from Venezuela to Argentina, which would create ecological problems and
destabilize indigenous peoples.

Provided they remain independent of one another, social movements like
the WSF and the new progressive governments can develop a healthy,
positive relationship.

17 January 2008

***
FOCUS ON TRADE
NUMBER 136, JANUARY 2008
Part 2

** SPECIAL ISSUE ON THE WORLD SOCIAL FORUM **
http://www.focusweb.org/focus-on-trade-number-136-january-2008.html?Itemid=1

*******************************************

PART 2:
THE WORLD SOCIAL FORUM AND THE GLOBAL LEFT
Boaventura de Sousa Santos

*************************************************

THE WORLD SOCIAL FORUM AND THE GLOBAL LEFT
Boaventura de Sousa Santos*

Enough has been said about the crisis of the left, and part of what has
been said has worked as self-fulfilling prophecy. The mortal fatigue of
history is the mortal fatigue of the women and men that make it in their
daily lives. The fatigue increases when the habit of thinking that
history is with us, when it is put in question, inclines us to think
that history is irremediably against us. History does not know any
better than we do where it is headed, nor does it use women and men to
fulfil its ends. Which is to say that we cannot trust history more than
we trust ourselves. To be sure, trusting ourselves is not a subjective
act, decontextualized from the world. For the past few decades, the
political and cultural hegemony of neo-liberalism gave rise to a
conception of the world that shows it as being either too well made to
allow for the introduction of any consequent novelty, or too fragmentary
to allow for whatever we do to have consequences capable of making up
for the risks taken in trying to change the status quo.

The last thirty or forty years of the last century may be considered
years of degenerative crisis of the global left thinking and practice.
To be sure, there were crises before, but not only were they not global
— restricted as they were to the Eurocentric world, what nowadays we
call the Global North, and compensated for, from the 1950s on, by the
successful struggles for the liberation of the colonies —they were
mainly experienced as casualties in a history whose trajectory and
rationality suggested that the victory of the left (revolution,
socialism, communism) was certain. This is how the division of the
workers’ movement at the beginning of World War I was experienced, as
well as the defeat of the German revolution (1918-1923), and then
nazism, fascism, franquismo (1939-1975) and salazarismo (1926-1974), the
Moscow processes (1936-1938), the civil war in Greece (1944-1949), and
even the invasion of Hungary (1956). This kind of crisis is well
characterized in the works of Trotsky in exile. Trotsky was very early
on aware of the seriousness of Stalin’s deviations from the revolution,
to the point of refusing to protagonize an opposition, as proposed to
him by Zinoviev and Kamenev in 1926. But he never for one moment doubted
that history went along with the revolution just as the true
revolutionaries went along with history. The author that, to my mind,
most brilliantly portrays the increasingly Sisyphean effort to safeguard
the historical meaning of the revolution before the morasses of the
Moscow processes is Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Humanisme et terreur (1947).

The crises of left thinking and practice of the last thirty or forty
years are of a different kind. On the one hand, they are global, even
though they occur in different countries for specific reasons: the
assassination of Lumumba (1961); the failure of the Che in Bolivia and
his assassination (1966); the May 1968 student movement in Europe and
the Americas and its neutralization; the invasion of Czechoslovakia
(1968); the response of American imperialism to the Cuban revolution;
the assassination of Allende (1973) and the military dictatorships in
Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s; Suharto’s brutal repression of the
left in Indonesia (1965-1967); the degradation or liquidation of the
nationalist, developmentist, and socialist regimes of sub-Saharan Africa
that came out of the independences (1980s); the emergence of a new/old
militant and expansionist right, with Ronald Reagan in the US and
Margaret Thatcher in UK (1980s); the globalization of the most
anti-social form of capitalism, neo-liberalism, imposed by the
Washington Consensus (1989); the plot against Nicaragua (1980s); the
crisis of the Congress Party India and the rise of political Hinduism
(communalism) (1990s); the collapse of the regimes of central and
eastern Europe, symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989); the
conversion of Chinese communism into the most savage kind of capitalism,
market Stalinism (starting with Deng Xiaoping in early 1980s); and
finally, in the 1990s, the parallel rise of political Islam and
political Christianism, both fundamentalist and confrontational.

Furthermore, the crisis of left thinking and practice of the last thirty
or forty years appears to be degenerative: the failures seem to be the
result of history’s mortal exhaustion, whether because history no longer
has meaning or rationality, or because the meaning and rationality of
history finally opted for the permanent consolidation of capitalism, the
latter turned into the literal translation of immutable human nature.
Revolution, socialism, communism, and even reformism seem to be hidden
away in the top drawers of history’s closet, where only collectors of
misfortunes reach. The world is well made, the neo-liberal argument
goes; the future finally has arrived in the present to stay. This
agreement on ends is the uncontested fund of liberalism, on whose basis
it is possible to respect the diversity of opinions about means. Since
means are political only when they are at the service of different ends,
the differences concerning social change are now technical or juridical
and, therefore, can and must be discussed regardless of the cleavage
between left and right.

In the mid-1990s, however, the story of this hegemony started to change.
The other side of this hegemony were the hegemonic practices that for
the past decades have intensified exclusion, oppression, destruction of
the means of subsistence and sustainability of large populations of the
world, leading them to extreme situations where inaction or conformism
would mean death. Such situations convert the contingency of history in
the necessity to change it. These are the moments in which the victims
don’t just cry, they fight back. The actions of resistance into which
these situations were translated, together with the revolution in
information and communication technologies that took place meanwhile,
permitted to make alliances in distant places of the world and
articulate struggles through local/global linkages.

The 1994 Zapatista uprising is an important moment of this construction,
precisely because it targets a tool of neo-liberal globalization, the
North American Free Trade Agreement, and because it aims to articulate
different scales of struggle, from local to national to global, from the
Chiapas mountains to Mexico City to the solidary world, resorting to new
discursive and political strategies, and to the new information and
communication technologies available. In November 1999, the protesters
in Seattle managed to paralyze the World Trade Organization (WTO)
ministerial meeting, and later many other meetings of the World Bank,
International Monetary Fund (IMF), WTO, and G8, were affected by the
protests of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and social movements
intent on denouncing the hypocrisy and destructiveness of the new world
dis-order. In January 2001, the World Social Forum (WSF) met for the
first time in Porto Alegre (Brazil), and many other meetings followed:
global, regional, thematic, national, sub-national, local forums.

Thus was gradually constructed an alternative globalization, alternative
to neo-liberal globalization, a counter-hegemonic globalization, a
globalization from below. The WSF may be said to represent today, in
organizational terms, the most consistent manifestation of
counter-hegemonic globalization. As such, the WSF provides the most
favourable context to inquire to what extent a new left is emerging
through these initiatives — a truly global left, with the capacity to
overcome the degenerative crisis that has been beleaguering the left for
the past forty years.

The WSF is the set of initiatives of transnational exchange among social
movements, NGOs and their practices and knowledges of local, national or
global social struggles carried out in compliance with the Porto Alegre
Charter of Principles against the forms of exclusion and inclusion,
discrimination and equality, universalism and particularism, cultural
imposition and relativism, brought about or made possible by the current
phase of capitalism known as neo-liberal globalization.

The WSF is a new social and political phenomenon. The fact that it does
have antecedents does not diminish its newness, quite the opposite. The
WSF is not an event. Nor is it a mere succession of events, although it
does try to dramatize the formal meetings it promotes. It is not a
scholarly conference, although the contributions of many scholars
converge in it. It is not a party or an international of parties,
although militants and activists of many parties all over the world take
part in it. It is not an NGO or a confederation of NGOs, even though its
conception and organization owes a great deal to NGOs. It is not a
social movement, even though it often designates itself as the movement
of movements. Although it presents itself as an agent of social change,
the WSF rejects the concept of an historical subject and confers no
priority on any specific social actor in this process of social change.
It holds no clearly defined ideology, either in defining what it rejects
or what it asserts. Given that the WSF conceives of itself as a struggle
against neo-liberal globalization, is it a struggle against a given form
of capitalism or against capitalism in general? Given that it sees
itself as a struggle against discrimination, exclusion and oppression,
does the success of its struggle presuppose a post-capitalist,
socialist, anarchist horizon, or, on the contrary, does it presuppose
that no horizon be clearly defined at all? Given that the vast majority
of people taking part in the WSF identify themselves as favouring a
politics of the left, how many definitions of “the left” fit the WSF?
And what about those who refuse to be defined because they believe that
the left-right dichotomy is a north-centric or west-centric
particularism, and look for alternative political definitions? The
social struggles that find expression in the WSF do not adequately fit
either of the ways of social change sanctioned by western modernity:
reform and revolution. Aside from the consensus on non-violence, its
modes of struggle are extremely diverse and appear spread out in a
continuum between the poles of institutionality and insurgency. Even the
concept of non-violence is open to widely disparate interpretations.
Finally, the WSF is not structured according to any of the models of
modern political organization, be they democratic centralism,
representative democracy, or participatory democracy. Nobody represents
it or is allowed to speak in its name, let alone make decisions, even
though it sees itself as a forum that facilitates the decisions of the
movements and organizations that take part in it. (1)

These features are arguably not new, as some of them, at least, are
associated with what is conventionally called “new social movements”.
The truth is, however, that these movements, be they local, national, or
global, are thematic. Themes, while fields of concrete political
confrontation, compel definition – hence polarization – whether
regarding strategies or tactics, organizational forms or forms of
struggle. Themes work, therefore, both as attraction and repulsion. Now,
what is new about the WSF is the fact that it is inclusive, both as
concerns its scale and its thematics. What is new is the whole it
constitutes, not its constitutive parts. The WSF is global in its
harbouring local, national and global movements, and in its being
inter-thematic and even trans-thematic. That is to say, since the
conventional factors of attraction and repulsion do not work as far as
the WSF is concerned, either it develops other strong factors of
attraction and repulsion or does without them, and may even derive its
strength from their non-existence. In other words, if the WSF is
arguably the “movement of movements” it is not one more movement. It is
a different kind of movement.

The problem with new social movements is that, in order to do them
justice, a new social theory and new analytical concepts are called for.
Since neither the one nor the others emerge easily from the inertia of
the disciplines, the risk that they may be undertheorized and
undervalued is considerable. (2) This risk is all the more serious as
the WSF, given its scope and internal diversity, not only challenges
dominant political theories and the various disciplines of the
conventional social sciences, but challenges as well scientific
knowledge as sole producer of social and political rationality. To put
it another way, the WSF raises not only analytical and theoretical
questions, but also epistemological questions. This much is expressed in
the idea, widely shared by WSF participants, that there will be no
global social justice without global cognitive justice. But the
challenge posed by the WSF has one more dimension still. Beyond the
theoretical, analytical and epistemological questions, it raises a new
political issue: it aims to fulfil utopia in a world devoid of utopias.
This utopian will is expressed in the slogan: “another world is
possible.” At stake is less a utopian world than a world that allows for
utopia

In this paper, I will start by analysing the reasons of the success of
the WSF, contrasting them with the failures of the conventional left in
recent decades. I will then try to ask the question of whether this
success is sustainable. Finally, I will identify the challenges that the
WSF process poses to both critical theory and left political activism.

STRONG QUESTIONS AND WEAK ANSWERS
Contrary to Habermas, for whom Western modernity is still an incomplete
project, I have been arguing that our time is witnessing the final
crisis of the hegemony of the socio-cultural paradigm of Western
modernity and that, therefore, it is a time of paradigmatic transition
(3). It is characteristic of a transitional time to be a time of strong
questions and weak responses. Strong questions address not only our
options of individual and collective life but also and mainly the roots
and foundations that have created the horizon of possibilities among
which it is possible to choose. They are, therefore, questions that
arouse a particular kind of perplexity. Weak responses are the ones that
cannot abate this perplexity and may, in fact, increase it. Questions
and responses vary according to culture and world region. However, the
discrepancy between the strength of the questions and the weakness of
the responses seems to be common. It derives from the current variety of
contact zones involving cultures, religions, economies, social and
political systems, and different ways of life, as a result of what we
ordinarily call globalization. The power asymmetries in these contact
zones are as large today, if not larger, as in the colonial period, and
they are more numerous and widespread. The contact experience is always
an experience of limits and borders. In today’s conditions, it is the
contact experience that gives rise to the discrepancy between strong
questions and weak responses.

In my view, one of the reasons of the success of the WSF lies in the
disjuncture between strong questions and weak answers. But before
elaborating on this, a conceptual precision is in order. There are two
types of weak answers. The first type is what I call the weak-strong
answer. Paraphrasing Lucien Goldman, such answer represents the maximum
of possible consciousness of a given epoch. It transforms the perplexity
caused by the strong question into a positive energy and value. Rather
than pretending that the perplexity is pointless or that it can be
eliminated by a simple answer, it transforms the perplexity into a
symptom of underlying complexity. Accordingly, the perplexity becomes
the social experience of a new open field of contradictions in which an
unfinished and unregulated competition among different possibilities
exists. The outcomes of such competition being most uncertain, there is
plenty of room for social and political innovation, once perplexity is
transformed into a capacity to travel without reliable maps. The other
type of weak answer is the weak-weak answer. It represents the minimum
possible consciousness of a given epoch. It discards and stigmatizes the
perplexity as the symptom of a failure to understand that the real
coincides with the possible and to value the fact that hegemonic
solutions are a “natural” o...

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