[Antiracism] Planning a W. Mass. Social Forum - May 12th at ARISE

[Rene and Susan Theberge]

What: Building a W. Mass. Social Forum - Potluck!
When: Friday May 12, 5:30-8:00
Where: Arise for Social Justice, 94 Rifle Street, Springfield

"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  
(ie. 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. If you are interested in the idea of  
having a Social Forum in W. Massachusetts please join us.

Background information follows about Social Forums and the WMA  
process to date.

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&id_menu=

For more information, contact:
Emily Kawano: 413.545.0743
Susan Theberge: 413.253.2161
Carlos Fontes: 413.259.1762
Jo Comerford: 413.695.6059



******

WESTERN MASSACHUSETTS SOCIAL FORUM
BACKGROUND INFORMATION

WHAT IS A SOCIAL FORUM?

In 2001, the first World Social Forum (WSF) was held in Porto Alegre,  
Brazil and was attended by around 15,000 people from around the  
world. Every year the WSF has drawn together more and more people. In  
2005, around 155,000 people attended the WSF. http:// 
www.forumsocialmundial.org

The World Social Forum has become the largest and most important  
gathering of social movements in the world, united in their  
opposition to neoliberalism (for definition, see below) and united in  
the belief that ‘Another World Is Possible’  one grounded in social  
and economic justice and sustainability.

Social Forums are open spaces for learning, networking, discussion,  
exchange, celebration, visioning, strategizing and mobilization.

Social Forums are also a process of movement building, not just  
series of meetings.

Social Forums are meant to be independent of political parties,  
although political parties have played an important role in  
supporting the social forum process.

For more details on the principles, see the WSF Charter of Principles  
below.

WHY A WESTERN MASS. SOCIAL FORUM?

To link local struggles and organizing with the larger global justice  
movement. To learn from and contribute to struggles around the world.

To build a more powerful and unified movement for social and economic  
justice and sustainability in W. Mass.

To advance discussion, debate, understanding, common interests and  
strategies for change.

To celebrate and create/experience a bit of our vision of the future  
through a culture of solidarity.

To build awareness and mobilization for the first U.S. Social Forum,  
June 27-July 1, 2007 in Atlanta. http://www.ussf2007.org/home.html

The WSF has inspired many regional and thematic social forums  
throughout the world, from Europe to Africa, Asia, Africa and Pan- 
America, to more localized social forums such as Boston and New York.

WHAT DOES A SOCIAL FORUM LOOK LIKE?

A combination of talks, roundtables, workshops and cultural events.

Most of these are self-organized by the organizations or individuals  
facilitating the event. Some events, such as the plenary events  
(attended by everyone), are organized by a program committee.

A rich mix of social and cultural exchange. Social Forum participants  
describe the experience as inspiring, rejuvenating, exhilarating, re- 
affirming, eye-opening.

WHERE ARE WE IN THE ORGANIZING PROCESS?

We are in the very early stages of the process of building a Western  
Mass. Social Forum.  Groups involved so far include: W. Mass  
Indymedia, AFSC, Arise for Social Justice, Casa Latina, Sage, Jobs  
with Justice, Center for Popular Economics, Interfaith Coalition,  
GROW, Military Recruitment Education Network, and the Youth Program  
of Community Action.

After three meetings in which we discussed the concept of the Social  
Forum and various strategies to move the process forward, we decided  
that we needed to reach out to the various areas of the Western Mass.

We are also open to the participation from groups with whom we may  
have a natural geographic affinity that might come from Brattleboro  
or even Hartford. But our focus is W. Mass.

At our next meeting/picnic on May 12, we would like to have  
representatives from these different areas at the table so that we  
can start discussing the theme, strategies and next steps in the  
organization. Our idea is connect with organizations in each region  
that would than organize themselves in that region and send some  
people to be part of the Organizing Steering Committee for the Forum.

We are currently thinking about early spring 2007. Exact date and  
venue to be decided. It may seem too far away to think about, but we  
should take this as an opportunity for movement building, not simply  
as planning an event.

WHAT IS NEOLIBERALISM?

Neoliberalism is the economic model that currently rules the  
capitalist world. It emerged in the 1980s with Reagan and continued  
to be promoted through the Clinton, Bush I and Bush II  
administrations. Put crudely, its slogan would be, “markets good,  
state bad.”

Neoliberals argue that when markets are ‘free’ from meddling by the  
state it’s good for business, which is good for the economy and good  
for the people. So neoliberal policies aim to ‘liberate’ markets by  
removing controls on trade, corporate investment and international  
finance.

At the same time neoliberals want to roll back the state, resulting  
in weaker environmental or worker safety regulations, privatization  
of schools and water services, and cutbacks in social welfare programs.

Neoliberals have been waging a war on the public good  our public  
institutions, our environment, our social solidarity, our sense that  
we should take care of one another. More and more, markets rule our  
lives and everything is valued in terms of price and profit.

Major players

The U.S. is at the forefront in the push for neoliberalism. Major  
players also include other industrialized nations and international  
institutions such as the IMF (International Monetary Fund), the World  
Bank and the WTO (World Trade Organization). These governments and  
institutions are heavily influenced by global corporations who are  
interested in shaping policies and institutions to maximize their  
profits.

Winners and Losers

Neoliberalism is marked by growing inequality, as wealth, labor and  
resources from the majority of the world’s peoples are transferred to  
global corporations and the super-rich. On a global level, the 2003  
Human Development Report found that 54 countries experienced a fall  
in income over the last ten years. At the same time, between 1983 and  
1999, the profits of the Top 200 corporations grew by 362.4%. In  
2003, total sales of Wal-Mart, BP (formerly British Petroleum), and  
ExxonMobil was greater than the combined economies of the world’s  
poorest 118 countries, with total population of over 800 million  
people. There is a dangerous trend of concentration of corporate  
power in many key industries: media, healthcare, energy,  
agribusiness, retailers, and so on.

“Free” trade agreements have led to loss of livelihoods for small  
producers who can’t compete with transnational corporations or  
agribusiness. Throughout the world, states engage in a ‘race to the  
bottom’ as they compete for foreign investment by promising low  
wages, low taxes, no unions, weak regulations, and subsidies.

The constant attack on the state has led to: lower taxes which have  
mostly benefited the rich; cutbacks in social programs; privatization  
of schools, social services, and water; and weaker environmental and  
consumer protection.

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 Humanking 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  
paarticipants 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 Organizating  
Committee, approved with modifications by the World Social Forum  
International Council on June 10, 2001.




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