| Jan 29 2008 |
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| More Thoughts than Action on Action Day |
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Alejandro Kirk
Unlike the massive gatherings of past years, the World Social Forum’s “Global Day of Action” Saturday did not fill avenues around the world nor did it make headlines on any major progressive media outlet, let alone the mainstream.
Yet, to Cándido Grzybowski of Brazil, one of the most influential leaders of the movement, the initiative was successful because people in 72 countries of the world were once again able to “reestablish citizenry”.
Walden Bello, a sociologist and activist from the Philippines, said Monday: “The Global Day of Action was something new, so I am not surprised that the mobilisations were not that big. But it was still impressive that they were carried out in scores of cities at a time that there was no immediate emergency, like responding to another invasion, on the agenda”.
“There were some really big successes, like the big mobilization in Mexico City. Let's examine our experiences in this first Global Day of Action and learn from them. Practice will make perfect,” he added, interviewed by e-mail.
With "tens of thousands" participating around the country, Brazil, the WSF’s birthplace in 2001, became once again its core. In Rio de Janeiro the Day of Action coincided with -and somehow competed against- the city’s world famous Carnival.
With the sole exceptions of Mexico, however, no other local Action Day rivaled Brazil’s numbers. From Italy, with activists devastated by the fall of their center-left Government and the prospect of a triumphal comeback of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, to Atlanta in the United States, only the most committed showed up to state that “Another World is Possible”, the WSF’s central motto.
Paradoxically, the human-rights crisis in Gaza prompted Palestinian non-governmental groups to shy away from staging a Day of Action, weary that political factions manipulate their initiatives.
Weak in numbers, the Day of Action was competing for media room against an extraordinarily “newsy” day”: Barack Obama’s victory at the Democratic primary in South Carolina, the massive flight of besieged Palestinians from Gaza, lethal repression in Kenya, the death of former Indonesian dictator Suharto, the arrest of Jérôme Kerviel, the French “rogue trader” who made a bank lose seven billion euros and is now credited with saving the world from recession.
The question many in the WSF are asking themselves is whether headlines make a difference, for if it did, the WSF would be by now doomed. News agendas are not neutral and creating a new one might well be a central subject for the countries of the South.
The WSF has been so far unable to repeat the astounding public relations successes of 2002 and 2003 when the world’s top media sent their correspondents to Porto Alegre to find out was this “rival” to the World Economic Forum in Davos was about.
Most analysts explain such impact as the result of the WSF’s novelty and its unexpected huge number of participants. Most now maintain that the current scarce media attention is due to factors ranging from deliberate censorship to the lack of “attractions,” by way of celebrities and intellectual stars that the Forum’s International Committee decided not to promote.
Celebrities such as rock start Bono now prefer to attend Davos, where they think they can influence the powers that-be than associate themselves with a loose event where they are deliberately kept within the crowd.
Commercial media stay far away from the WSF’s thoughtful debates on a battery of development issues, and show up only when “anti-globalisation” demonstrators angrily throw stones to McDonald’s outlets and battle riot police.
Underlying this issue is the WSF’s excruciating internal debate about itself. Born rather as an intellectual exercise to contest Davos’ arrogance with alternative proposals to the 1990’s “end-of-history” ideology, it became a global politica |
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terraviva radio |
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q&a |
 'Militarism and Paranoia will strike WSF'
"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," says Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos. |
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 Taking stands is vital for 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, Executive Director of Focus on the Global South. |
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 Davos has lost its arrogance
The WSF didn’t produce the progressive wave in Latin America by itself; nevertheless, it would be difficult to imagine it without (the presence of) the WSF, says Cândido Grzybowski, director of iBase (Brazil) and member of the WSF's International Committee. |
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 We Now Need Accomplishments
"We will need legs of a marathon runner to lay the foundation of true democracy", says Anuradha Mittal, social activist and Head of the Oakland Institute in California. |
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news from the WSF |
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IPS World Service |
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voices |
 Native Peoples and the World Social Forum
For the indigenous peoples, the Forum provide a platform for the traditional knowledge and diverse characteristics of each region, as people raise their voices in support of justice and rights, writes T. Marcos Terena (Brazil),member of the Xané indigenous group and president of the ITC Inter-tribal Committee |
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 Labour Still has to Catch Up with the WSF
Whilst new union strategies, new labour movements, and even new spaces for a new kind of international labour struggle are developing, labour does not yet have the impact on the WSF that is necessary, writes Peter Waterman, a longtime commentator on labour and social movement internationalism. |
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 A vibrating US Social Forum
Over 15 planned actions are currently confirmed across the United States. The seeds of many of these actions have grown in the soil that was fertilized in Atlanta last June, when the first-ever US Social Forum was held, writes journalist Norman Stockwell from Madison, Wisconsin |
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 The Forum at the Crossroads
By Walden Bello, Executive Director of Focus on the Global South, professor of sociology and public administration at the University of the Philippines |
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