World Social Forum – possible perspectives

ABSTRACT

In the first part of this essay, I reflect on the divergences of opinion that have always existed in the process of the World Social Forum. This first part was written before the elections in Brazil last autumn. Since then Jair Bolsonaro has been installed as president of Brazil and the divergences I discuss in that first part have cooled down, at least in Brazil. Nevertheless, it remains important to record those divergences when we try to take further our debate about the future of the WSF process, as I do here as well, in the second part of my essay.

KEYWORDS:

• Divergences of opinion
• exclusion
• open space

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The text of this article was originally written in Portuguese. The English translation has been revised and edited by Thomas Wallgren. The final version has been checked and approved by the author on 2nd May 2019.

2 This figure also explains why there has been more than one proposal to reconstruct the IC according to new criteria. The debate about the reform of the IC is important. In this text, I will give the background to the debate but not deal with the various proposals for discontinuing and reconstituting the IC, nor with the various stages of the history of its search for identity and function in the WSF process, for example, when it substantially changed its mode of functioning at its 2004 meeting in Miami, or when at the IC meeting in Copenhagen the IC assumed the task of completing the Charter of Principles in order to overcome doubts in relation with the understanding of its content and to go into more detail about the IC task of facilitation, formulating some guidelines. The treatment of these issues would lengthen the present text too much and divert it from its objective of indicating the genesis of the options regarding the character of the WSF. But for a careful analysis of the WSF and IC, it would undoubtedly be worth researching all the material for reflection on the WSF and on the IC that has appeared in articles written by members of the IC and in comments on the IC mailing list.

3 It is useful to remember that the organizers of a mobilization against the war in Iraq, scheduled for 2003, asked twice for a call for this mobilization from the WSF or from the WSF International Council (in January 2002 and in January 2003). The IC decided on both occasions not to make the call as the Open Space nature of the WSF was already consolidated in the guidelines of the WSF, making it clear that neither the WSF nor the IC could operate as a political actor alongside of social movements. The force of those organizing the mobilization, even when the WSF as such was not leading it, was fully demonstrated in the largest demonstration for peace in world history, when on 15th February 2003, 15 million people went to the streets in 600 cities in 60 countries.

4 The same concern about the Social Movements Assemblies as producers of a single final document to speak for the entity WSF, was reflected also when the so called Porto Alegre Consensus text was presented in the 2005 Forum to international journalists in a room of a large hotel in Porto Alegre. The statement, written in direct opposition to the Washington Consensus, which since 1989 had guided the actions of the capitalist system governments and companies, was signed by 19 internationally renowned personalities. It listed 12 goals as a programme of action to which all 150,000 participants of this F5M could converge. In practice, it was impossible to verify whether all 150,000 participants would agree to adopt the ‘consensus’ and hence it was only offered as a proposal, to be accepted and used by anyone who so wished.

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Chico Whitaker

Chico Whitaker, Brazilian catholic social-justice advocate and architect, worked in urban research and planning until the military putsch in his country in 1964, then in pastoral planning in the church. In 1966 he was exiled with all his family. He worked in France in various organizations and as advisor for UNESCO, and in Chile as researcher in the CEPAL until Pinochet's putsch. Returning to France he worked in the coordination of the ‘International Study Days for a Society Overcoming Domination’. In Brazil from 1982, Whitaker has co-founded the ‘Plenaries for Popular Participation’, which led to the presentation of 122 amendments to the Brazilian Constitution, with 12 million signatures, and movements against electoral corruption. In 2001 he co-founded the World Social Forum, being its International Council Member. In 2006, Whitaker received in Sweden the Alternative Nobel Prize from the Right Livelihood Award Foundation. He is the author of one book and many articles about the World Social Forum.