[WSF-Discuss] Reply to USSF Contribution: by Jackie Smith

[CACIM]

*ZNet | Activism*

*Reply to USSF Contribution*
  *by Jackie Smith; July 24, 2007

*@ http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=1&ItemID=13365 *

*

Thomas Ponniah wrote in *"The Contribution of the U.S. Social
Forum"<http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=1&ItemID=13330>
*:

"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."



In the Bello-Whitaker debate, I find Whitaker's views more appropriate to
capturing the political significance of the WSF process.  And after
attending the USSF, I'm even more convinced that Whitaker is correct to
argue for the continuation of efforts to create open spaces for consultation
without having to come to agreement on a particular political platform.  The
recent USSF was one of the first times in our country's history that the
diverse people who make up our citizenry could come together to discuss
public policy.  It was a practice in participatory democracy that has not
and would not have taken place without social movements.  The alternatives
the WSF process is creating is the democratic spaces that are both the means
and the end goal of the work of most of the groups participating in them.  By
creating spaces for participatory democracy, the WSF process enables people
to learn skills in doing democracy.  By staging forums that are part of an
ongoing and multi-level process that integrates global, national, and local,
they encourage people to cultivate long-term strategies and to build
relationships.


Many groups at the USSF People's Movement Assembly declared their intention
to organize local social forums and other activities in their home
communities.  This suggests that the key message of the WSF process has been
taken up by people who have only begun to discover what has been happening
in the WSF process these past several years.  Analysts watching the
follow-up to the last World Social Forum in Nairobi report that a similar
phenomena is happening in Africa as a result of the Forum.  The alternatives
generated from the USSF, then, are the autonomous political spaces where
diverse groups of citizens can learn to articulate their own needs and
identities, appreciate and respect differences, while developing a stronger
sense of their common struggle.  If this important work happens, the rest
will follow.



In addition to providing models for participatory democracy, the USSF also
allowed movements around this country to learn from each other's ideas.  Ideas
about economic democracy were provided at the "solidarity economy" tent as
well as in a number of workshops.  Indigenous people's views were
articulated consistently throughout the forum, helping participants better
understand the sense of exclusion and injustice that separates native
communities from the dominant culture.  They also helped demonstrate how
even practices adopted by movement organizers reflect and support the very
structures of industrial capitalism that we claim to be resisting.



In short, by creating open spaces, the WSF process encourages the building
of power by the people who need to play a more central role in making
decisions about how the world will be organized.  It also generates
discussion around a variety of possible alternatives, enabling people to
take new ideas home about how their local political and economic lives could
be different.  By sustaining an ongoing process, in allows people to return
to a supportive space to gain new information and ideas while renewing their
sense of shared purpose and commitment.  This *is* an alternative to what
the dominant society offers.  And it is also transformative.  We are
developing a new way of doing politics, and we are learning new politics by
doing them.  While we may not know where the process will lead, we know what
principles should guide our steps: to paraphrase from the Zapatista slogan,
we live on one world and we must seek ways of creating room for many worlds.



********
*Jackie Smith *is associate professor of sociology and peace studies at the
University of Notre Dame.  She is co-author of *Global Democracy and the
World Social Forums *(Paradigm Publishers) and author of a forthcoming book
on contemporary global justice activism, *Rival Visions, Global Networks:
Social Movements for Global Democracy* (Johns Hopkins University Press,
2008).
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