The European Social forum 2004 involved around 1,500 diverse groups (and many individuals) from 100 different countries, and encompassed a wide range of perspectives and methodologies. It has no leader, subscribes to no single manifesto, and is run by volunteers. One might reasonably expect the forum to descend into an incoherent cacophony of voices, speaking at cross-purposes and achieving very little.

In fact, the opposite is true: the social forum miraculously works. I never felt isolated while at the Forum; there were plentiful opportunities for debate and learning from teachers from an amazing variety of backgrounds and places. I chose from a plethora of over three hundred seminars and workshops on issues ranging from sustainability to the corporate takeover of the media; from human rights to artistic self-management. I heard speakers including Indian environmentalists, British journalists, Brazilian Hip-hop artists and French intellectuals debate these issues. Sometimes I even ventured to give my own point of view. Volunteers simultaneously translated each session into five different languages.

However, to me, it was outside the seminars that the forum really came into its own. By sheer effort of will people overcame the linguistic, cultural and political barriers that separated them and came together to share ideas, plans and email addresses, creating networks to help build their dreams. Irruptions of spontaneous joyful play were frequent, particularly at night, and the sounds of myriad forms of music and songs in many languages reverberated around the tents and halls of the forum. I was reminded of Gustav Landauer’s assertion that, ‘The state is not something that can be destroyed by a revolution but is a condition, a certain relationship between human beings, a mode of human behaviour. We destroy it by behaving differently, by contracting other relationships’.

The origins of this inspiring mass voluntary mobilisation lie in recent developments in political consciousness. People are becoming increasingly disillusioned with a party politics which offers them minimal involvement and few solutions. Parliament has little control over the crucial economic decision-making that is taking place in Brussels, the White House and the boardrooms of multinationals. Moreover, the government is unresponsive to public opinion concerning issues that it has control over, such as our involvement in the Iraq war.

A new politics is evident in the phenomenon of the social forum: activists are no longer seeking to merely criticise the status quo, or to put new political parties in the place of the current ones. Rather, they are aiming to find their own solutions to social, environmental and economic problems that they see in the world, and to create a more participatory political forum in which anyone can have a voice.

The first World Social Forum took place in Porto Alegre, Brazil in January 2001. It was conceived of as an alternative gathering to the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, and attracted 100,000 people from around the world. Porto Alegre led to the first European Social Forum in Florence in 2002, which served as a mobilisation for Genoa’s G8 protests. The network created by the social forums co-ordinated international anti-war protests on 15th February this year, and helped to disrupt the WTO talks in Cancun.

However, it is widely acknowledged that the WSF must be careful to continue imagining new political forms, and not to ape the gargantuan, centralised nature of the institutions that it criticises. Therefore, many local social forums have taken place since 2001, and many emphasise that the forums’ strength lies in the smaller and more local social movements and actions that make them up.

Similarly, the forum has been careful to adopt no set of principles or demands. It has been criticised for putting forward no single model for a new economy or political system. Yet such criticisms miss the point: in the Forums, a discursive space has been opened up in which people can conceive and put into practice many new models, with the advice and assistance of other groups. The movement’s strength is precisely the plurality of interpretations and meanings which it contains and the bridges which it builds between them. Perhaps in this context dialogue is more useful and creative than competition between views or consensus on one view.

The next European Social Forum, to be held in London next November, is supported by Ken Livingstone. The Mayor’s backing raises hopes of dialogue with politicians, but also fears that the movement might be co-opted and therefore become powerless.
I think that in order to prevent this, the Forums continue to find new ways to be the change that they want to see in society. Many speakers gave their views about how this might be done during the Forum. I sympathised most with those who spoke of transforming the space of the forum so it becomes that of an autonomous, sustainable community engaged in direct action and practical workshops. The brilliance of the forum is that it is potentially large enough to facilitate many views of how it might evolve, including mine – it is only restricted by the limits of our imaginations.

Websites

www.fse-esf.org
www.movementoftheimagination.org