[Antiracism] [Sage] Help to plan W. Mass. Social Forum - May 12th at ARISE

[Rene and Susan Theberge]

Dear Friends, 

 

You are warmly invited to attend a gathering to plan our Western MA Social
Forum.  We need your ideas and energy.  Please join us at ARISE this Friday
evening. We hope to see you there!

 

Susan, for the planning committee

 

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>
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
<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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