Francine Mestrum
Other social forums followed, in Porto Alegre, in Mumbai, in Dakar and Nairobi, in Belem and Salvador de Bahia. However, by 2010, the momentum had passed. If more than one hundred thousand people come together to celebrate their diversity without being able to start thinking about common alternatives and strategies, the future is bleak.
It became clear that those who started this brilliant experience in fact did not want a “movement of movements,” they just wanted “movements.” They did not want to fight capitalism, but only its worst neoliberal excesses. They did not want a democracy of opposing voices, but only the unanimity of the powerful at the level of civil society.
Most intellectuals and big organizations who had been so important to the nascent movement left disappointed. For more than ten years, the WSF and its International Council lingered on, fighting and acting as if solutions were sought for. Even when the President of Brazil was impeached or when a well-known activist was shot in Rio de Janeiro, the WSF and its International Council were not able to condemn these facts and make their voices heard. They were slowly dying.
In 2020, an initiative was taken by some surviving members of its International Council (with Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Roberto Savio amongst others) to start a reflection process on how to save and renew it. Once again, all proposals were rejected by those who clearly were afraid of any political positioning. What had been a brilliant idea at its start became the nail in its coffin twenty years later.
In the meantime, the world is changing, with shifting geopolitical relations, wars and conflicts, an even harsher neoliberalism, declining democracies, even more powerful financial markets, growing wealth accumulation and staggering inequalities, open racism, and a worsening climate crisis. The reasons for acting on a global level, since all people are suffering, become clearer by the day.
In the end, a decision was taken at the start of 2023 to create a permanent political assembly, autonomous but as part of the global WSF process: the World Assembly of Struggles and Resistance of the WSF. It should be able to take positions on important political events, to organize meetings with global intellectuals and movements, to reflect on strategies, to organize actions, and to bring together movements working on different but interconnected topics.
One paragraph is enough to state the objectives, but can it work?
Obviously, the first important condition is the dynamics this assembly can create. If enough people become aware of its importance and its potential, a long-term effort can be started to create a global movement.
Secondly, in order to bring movements closer to each other, it is necessary to know each other and to know one’s own fundamental objectives and principles. This means open and honest talks in order to know our differences and to assess the possibilities for common action. The left has always been very fragmented and averse to discussing its often minor and certainly its major differences.
Thirdly, we need an open attitude to start and search for common concerns. This will be the most difficult point for which the rules have to be clearly spelled out. It cannot be about doing away with differences or identities—on the contrary. Nor can it be about limiting the action radius of movements. It should be about finding out which concerns a number of movements share, in spite of their diversity. It requires that movements and their leaders take off their blinders, put their egos in the fridge, and look openly at the world and at other movements.
Finally, this endeavor will require people and resources and lots of patience and time. It is a long-term exercise that should start urgently. If only the WSF had started with it ten or fifteen years ago, the movement of movements might have been a reality today.
A new World Social Forum is now in the making for February 2024 in Kathmandu, Nepal. It can be an excellent opportunity to test these ideas and start to put them into practice.
The idea behind this exercise is the awareness that “another world” cannot be made without changing power relations and tackling the economic system—neoliberal capitalism—that made the world to what it is today, a devastating reality for people, for societies and for nature, that is for all life on this planet.
Whether this needs a “citizens movement” or a “movement of movements” is a matter to be discussed, as well as the degree of centralized organization and direction, bearing in mind the goal is both to improve people’s lives and to build another world. There are not that many historical examples, trade unions being certainly among the most important ones. Many concepts and objectives will need to be examined, not to arrive at one uniform movement or model, but to better apprehend the degree of intersectionality.