[Antiracism] Western Mass Social Forum-planning meeting Sunday

[Rene and Susan Theberge]

"Another World Is Possible." This is the slogan of the World Social Forum.
Since its first meeting Brazil, in 2001, the World Social Forum has become
the largest gathering of social movements in the world. The Social Forum is
united in its opposition to neoliberalism (i.e. the dominant economic model
that of free market, free trade, minimal government, privatization,
deregulation) and imperialism, and in their commitment to building 'another
world,' grounded in sustainability and social justice.  

 There have been numerous regional social forums throughout the world,
including one in Boston in 2004. 

We would like to invite you to come to an open meeting to explore the idea
of holding a 

Western Mass. Social Forum.

When: Sunday March 12, 4:00-6:00

Where: 2nd Floor conference Room, (look for signs), Potpourri Mall (across
from Stop & Shop), King St., Northampton

If you are interested, please read over the WSF Charter of Principles copied

below. This will give you a good sense of the points of unity, purpose, and

the process of the social forums. 

In solidarity,

 Emily Kawano (Center for Popular Economics), Jo Comerford (Western Mass

AFSC) and Susan Theberge (SAGE)

 

If you are interested, please read over the WSF Charter of Principles copied
below. This will give you a good sense of the points of unity, purpose, and
the process of the social forums. 

 

If you are interested in finding out more about the WSF in general, check
out the website:
http://www.forumsocialmundial.org.br/index.php?cd_language=2
<http://www.forumsocialmundial.org.br/index.php?cd_language=2&id_menu>
&id_menu=

 


Charter of Principles




08.06.2002
World Social Forum Charter of Principles


The committee of Brazilian organizations that conceived of, and organized,
the first World Social Forum, held in Porto Alegre from January 25th to
30th, 2001, after evaluating the results of that Forum and the expectations
it raised, consider it necessary and legitimate to draw up a Charter of
Principles to guide the continued pursuit of that initiative. While the
principles contained in this Charter - to be respected by all those who wish
to take part in the process and to organize new editions of the World Social
Forum - are a consolidation of the decisions that presided over the holding
of the Porto Alegre Forum and ensured its success, they extend the reach of
those decisions and define orientations that flow from their logic.

1. The World Social Forum is an open meeting place for reflective thinking,
democratic debate of ideas, formulation of proposals, free exchange of
experiences and interlinking for effective action, by groups and movements
of civil society that are opposed to neoliberalism and to domination of the
world by capital and any form of imperialism, and are committed to building
a planetary society directed towards fruitful relationships among Humanity
and between it and the Earth.

2. The World Social Forum at Porto Alegre was an event localized in time and
place. From now on, in the certainty proclaimed at Porto Alegre that
"another world is possible", it becomes a permanent process of seeking and
building alternatives, which cannot be reduced to the events supporting it.

3. The World Social Forum is a world process. All the meetings that are held
as part of this process have an international dimension.

4. The alternatives proposed at the World Social Forum stand in opposition
to a process of globalization commanded by the large multinational
corporations and by the governments and international institutions at the
service of those corporations interests, with the complicity of national
governments. They are designed to ensure that globalization in solidarity
will prevail as a new stage in world history. This will respect universal
human rights, and those of all citizens - men and women - of all nations and
the environment and will rest on democratic international systems and
institutions at the service of social justice, equality and the sovereignty
of peoples.

5. The World Social Forum brings together and interlinks only organizations
and movements of civil society from all the countries in the world, but
intends neither to be a body representing world civil society.

6. The meetings of the World Social Forum do not deliberate on behalf of the
World Social Forum as a body. No-one, therefore, will be authorized, on
behalf of any of the editions of the Forum, to express positions claiming to
be those of all its participants. The participants in the Forum shall not be
called on to take decisions as a body, whether by vote or acclamation, on
declarations or proposals for action that would commit all, or the majority,
of them and that propose to be taken as establishing positions of the Forum
as a body. It thus does not constitute a locus of power to be disputed by
the participants in its meetings, nor does it intend to constitute the only
option for interrelation and action by the organizations and movements that
participate in it.

7. Nonetheless, organizations or groups of organizations that participate in
the Forums meetings must be assured the right, during such meetings, to
deliberate on declarations or actions they may decide on, whether singly or
in coordination with other participants. The World Social Forum undertakes
to circulate such decisions widely by the means at its disposal, without
directing, hierarchizing, censuring or restricting them, but as
deliberations of the organizations or groups of organizations that made the
decisions.

8. The World Social Forum is a plural, diversified, non-confessional,
non-governmental and non-party context that, in a decentralized fashion,
interrelates organizations and movements engaged in concrete action at
levels from the local to the international to built another world.

9. The World Social Forum will always be a forum open to pluralism and to
the diversity of activities and ways of engaging of the organizations and
movements that decide to participate in it, as well as the diversity of
genders, ethnicities, cultures, generations and physical capacities,
providing they abide by this Charter of Principles. Neither party
representations nor military organizations shall participate in the Forum.
Government leaders and members of legislatures who accept the commitments of
this Charter may be invited to participate in a personal capacity.

10. The World Social Forum is opposed to all totalitarian and reductionist
views of economy, development and history and to the use of violence as a
means of social control by the State. It upholds respect for Human Rights,
the practices of real democracy, participatory democracy, peaceful
relations, in equality and solidarity, among people, ethnicities, genders
and peoples, and condemns all forms of domination and all subjection of one
person by another.

11. As a forum for debate, the World Social Forum is a movement of ideas
that prompts reflection, and the transparent circulation of the results of
that reflection, on the mechanisms and instruments of domination by capital,
on means and actions to resist and overcome that domination, and on the
alternatives proposed to solve the problems of exclusion and social
inequality that the process of capitalist globalization with its racist,
sexist and environmentally destructive dimensions is creating
internationally and within countries.

12. As a framework for the exchange of experiences, the World Social Forum
encourages understanding and mutual recognition among its participant
organizations and movements, and places special value on the exchange among
them, particularly on all that society is building to centre economic
activity and political action on meeting the needs of people and respecting
nature, in the present and for future generations.

13. As a context for interrelations, the World Social Forum seeks to
strengthen and create new national and international links among
organizations and movements of society, that - in both public and private
life - will increase the capacity for non-violent social resistance to the
process of dehumanization the world is undergoing and to the violence used
by the State, and reinforce the humanizing measures being taken by the
action of these movements and organizations.

14. The World Social Forum is a process that encourages its participant
organizations and movements to situate their actions, from the local level
to the national level and seeking active participation in international
contexts, as issues of planetary citizenship, and to introduce onto the
global agenda the change-inducing practices that they are experimenting in
building a new world in solidarity.

Approved and adopted in São Paulo, on April 9, 2001, by the organizations
that make up the World Social Forum Organizing Committee, approved with
modifications by the World Social Forum International Council on June 10,
2001. 





 

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