User:Book/BlogEntry: 2007 May 27 08:26:43 EAT
From KLAMediaWiki
Yesterday, which was a rainy Saturday in Southeastern Finland, I started building a collection of "evaluations" of the Seventh World Social Forum, Nairobi, January 2007. Why? Because I wanted to "evaluate" the event myself and thus needed to read what others have thought and said. Another obvious reason is that wsflibrary.org should have such "evaluations" and make them available to its visitors and readers. A third reason, connected with the first one, i my feeling that the process of the social forum has reached a crossroads. As can be seen from the results of my efforts sofar - presented in the table of contents below - one of the "evaluators", Walden Bello, has also given this title to his contribution.
| Sally Burch & Irene León | VII Foro Social Mundial: entre desafíos presentes y miradas al futuro / The 7th World Social Forum: Facing Current Challenges and Future Perspectives |
| Onyango Oloo | Critical Reflections on WSF Nairobi 2007 |
| Gus Massiah | Après Nairobi, un nouveau cycle pour les forums sociaux mondiaux / After Nairobi, A New Round Of World Social Forums |
| Collective contribution | Collective contribution to the debates within the International Council (IC) of the World Social Forum to take place at Berlin from May 29th to 31st 2007 |
| Walden Bello | The Forum at the Crossroads |
| Chico Whitaker | Las encrucijadas no siempre cierran caminos (Reflexión en continuidad a la de Walden Bello) |
Comments on the evaluations
One of the evaluation criteria is whether one thinks that the form of the social forum represents a historical novelty of universal and lasting importance, or just one more movement on the surface of the ocean.
The concept of the 'open space' is of course not new in itself. What might be a new thing, however, is this form of global meeting and process, both face-to-face (e.g. at the WSF in Nairobi) and by means of telecommunications (e.g. the internet), which strives to become world society.
Walden Bello is in doubt about the durability of the WSF. He suggests that the WSF might already be at the end of its life-cycle: "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?", Bello writes.
What those "new modes of global organization and resistance" would be like, Walden Bello does not tell. Nor does he highlight the presumed choices of the WSF from here onwards. He does, however, mention in passing, that "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." Does Walden Bello mean that the WSF must finally "take stand" on these issues, or perish? - The sheer opposition between "ideas" and "actions" can never be the real choice. We just need both.
The response to Bello by Chico Whitaker is in Spanish, which I can only read with some difficulty. I interpret the title of the response, Las encrucijadas no siempre cierran caminos, to mean: "Crossroads do not always block the passage". Chico Whitaker certainly supports and defends the form of the social forum as an open space, which does not in itself "take stands" even on the most pressing issues of the day or even of the present historical period (cf. Iraq, Palestine, WTO). Thus he essentially says that the social forum must live on in its present form. Pointing to the growing number of local social forums", Whitaker estimates that the process is still in a dynamic phase. The problem, according t him, has to do with the (insufficient) communication between the social forum and the rest of the world via the mass media. How to eliminate this problematic lack of communication? Chico Whitaker affirms that communication is a duty of every participant, and not only the task of a special Communications commission. Very true, but not very clarifying.
I especially appreciate the analysis by Sally Burch and Irene Leon. Take, for instance their observation: "The principal thematic innovation of the Forum in Nairobi, is without a doubt its thorough exploration of the issue of HIV-AIDS highlighting various socio-economic problems related to tackling this affliction, from which about 39.5 million people in the world are suffering, of which two thirds are in Sub-Saharan Africa." For me this is, again, a reminder of the dimensions of the world social forum. Neither Walden or Chico mentioned this thematic innovation, which for Sally and Irene was principal! Nor would I have even known about it if I had not read their evaluation.
The analysis by Burch and Leon is perhaps the most balanced and comprehensive of the evaluations selected, although it seems to be the first to have been published (in February). Onyango Oloo's self-critical reflections, on the other hand, are the most interesting document of how the Nairobi WSF was organized and why it came to be like it was. It remains to be seen whether Oloo, who returned from a long exile in Canada in order to become the co-ordinator of the Kenya Social Forum and one of the main organizers of the WSF event in Nairobi (although he was ultimately to be completely marginalized from the later function), will be able to continue his existence as a leading social activist in his homeland.
Gus Massiah has written a constructive piece of evaluation with the right attitude: "The alter-globalization movement has grown considerably in strength in very little time, in less than ten years. Yet, it has not won. It would have been surprising to have won so soon, especially as it is not such a simple thing to define what would be meant by "winning". The alter-globalization movement is a long-term movement with long-term goals. It is a movement that evolves according to the changing situations." Furthermore: "in opposition to the organization of societies and of the world through global-market adjustments and the supremacy of the global capital market, we propose organizing societies and the world according to the principle of universal access to human rights. This principle has already altered the nature of the movements, whose convergence is alter-globalization's principal characteristic; each of these movements has evolved by incorporating the priority given to universal access to human rights." This emphazis on the opposition human rights vs. Neo-liberalism is not very original, but it is generous and it works, because human rights are sustainable while Neo-liberalism is not.
The "collective contribution" expresses, in my view, a somewhat imbalanced evaluation of the Nairobi WSF. Critique is much wanted and needed, but the achievements that can be build upon should also be spelled out. The collective, however, puts the finger on two crucial points. Firstly, "A change is certainly necessary at the level of the International Secretariat" (unfortunately, it does not say more precisely what change). Secondly, "We support the necessity of adopting a set of rules in order to avoid the serious mistakes of the 7th WSF repeating itself." In short, the administration and "the rules" of the WSF are out of date.
Not one of the evaluators mentions the pilot project of the East African librarians or the need to forge a lasting alliance between the social forum and the library. This means that we are still at the very beginning of our task.
Anyway, one evaluation of a WSF cannot be enough. We need several evaluations and they will necessarily not only be different and contradicting each other, but also bring news and open new perspectives to each other.
