Day Two in Bangalore, India we shared InterPlay at Vimochana Forum for Women’s Rights, a center working towards gendered justice and reaffirming the ethic of the feminine. The center is dedicated to making violence against women unthinkable. I went with InterPlayers Francoise from India, and Cassie and Trish Delaney from Australia. In the open, clean courtyard my eye rested on a metal bowl of red marigolds afloat in water. On the walls were beautiful African masks, spirit ancestors, and in the conference room library a poster with words from a Native American chief.

We sat and had coffee. One of the founders, just back from New York, shared the history of the center that started in 1979. I recalled that that was the year I married, started seminary, and met Phil.

She told of how the women’s movement in India arose from fighting against the outright violence against women. I thought of my dream of a memorial for victims of domestic violence and my own journey to renounce violence.

She spoke of women murdered, burned, of suicides and the work of the women’s courts. Then, the workshop participants started arriving. One group from a village took three bus rides to get there. Translation made teaching slow but meaningful. There were giggles as women encountered InterPlay’s practices and we began connecting, connecting, connecting. I taught the five essential freedoms: to move, have our voice, connect, do nothing, and tell our story and the five elemental movements of healthy interaction: to lead, follow, blend, change, and reconnect. At the end the women who traveled the farthest encircled us with their spontaneous dancing and we spontaneously followed them in movement, laughter and spirit.

One young woman, 17 years old, took us to her heart. She would have easily become a friend had there been opportunity. I’ll never forget seeing her stand before the poster of the Native American chief with Trish asking about each word and its meaning as she wrote it down, words that spoke of refusing to speak of God if doing so created violence, oppression, and division. Observing Trish’s gratitude I took it in as a deep meditation on the cross cultural support, wisdom, and friendship that can be sparked in such brief moments. Once again I realized, it is not only what InterPlay does in the moment, it is what results from InterPlay that is so profound- the spontaneous life, healing, and humanity. InterPlay offers sneaky-deep, homeopathic, social medicine with surprisingly powerful outcomes… stuff that our greatest spiritual teachers want for us.

Adrienne Rich said, “Violence is the failure to connect.” This is how InterPlay serves as peace-making. Anytime we make ease-filled, rich connections and foster chances for people to notice, share and celebrate the most everyday truths, we strengthen the underlying web that fosters harmony, innovation, and resource sharing. We learn things about each other we never knew. We bond. Violence becomes less and less desirable. Peace rises up in families, non-profits, organizations, on the street when this happens regularly.

For many such simple practices like InterPlay takes tremendous courage. We have good reasons to fear being open, direct, and full of life. That is why the practice of InterPlay in community is so useful. Giving people regular chances to rediscover on a body level that it might be OK to “come out” and play, work, be, and create with others is an increasing need in a world of anonymous, virtual, and isolating practices. Amazingly, those with the least to lose-the hopeless, the sick, the homeless, and the imprisoned are often quickest to respond to InterPlay. Courage to live is something they already practice every day.

InterPlay is offering elegant simple tools to more and more people all around the world. In India we shared InterPlay with paraplegics, elders, women with extreme depression, people with multiple sclerosis, teen women just out of prison, village people, school children, and leaders of NGO’s and corporations. There were so many open doors thanks to Prashant and our friends Bobby and Sampoorna.

Masankho Banda taught InterPlay in Frankfurt. Phil taught in Sydney and Adelaide Australia, and Nadia taught InterPlay in Brazil at the World Social Forum. Friends in Thailand, Japan, Zimbabwe, Hong Kong, Montana, and France ask if InterPlay is happening where they are… Together we are making a difference. Stay tuned.

InterPlay in the news:

Drumming Up Energy by Vishakha Avachat

Let your inner child have a free run: InterPlay Helps Participants Reach A Higher Plane Through Spontaneity And Intuitionby Joeanna Rebello

Clergy merge body, mind, soul in class by Yonat Shimron

Meditation – The Dance of Life by Life Positive

Dealing With Rape by Sanaya Chavda

Find these stories and more on the InterPlay Hot News page!

From Nadia in Brazil:

The InterPlay experience at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
I would like to share my experience leading InterPlay – art, multiculturalism, social change and cultures of peace at the World Social Forum in Brazil on January 27 and 29. The first day was at Faculdade QI College in Porto Alegre with 25 teachers, 2 computer technicians, a visual artist and  2 musicians – percussion and guitar. We had a wonderful experience, a very playful morning and in about 2 minutes all people were already feeling free to play. The second day I lead a multigenerational and multicultural group at the World Social Forum Youth Camp in Nova Hamburgo connecting people from Uruguai, Brazil and Argentina with mother earth and a lot of fun in the middle of the mud! It´s amazing how InterPlay simple forms can lead people to connect easily. As a performer with extensive training for more than 20 years, I recognize that simple forms, clear comands and incremental steps are very important to encourage people to let go the barriers and simply play. I am very happy to be part of this International community of people engaged in transformation through art. It´s a blessing to get to know people like Masankho Banda who came to Brazil and opened people´s heart with his wisdom using InterPlay forms. I understand now that whatever you do, it is always about leading people connecting heart to heart. The responsibility of starting InterPlay in Brazil is certainly something that I am aware of. I will always do my best to respect the work that has already been built by so many people and specially Cynthia and Phil my gratitude for your effort and dedication over so many years. InterPlay in Brazil is growing step by step and with this I am also growing because my main motivation is self development and the happiness of having more and more people also into a path of love, integrity and hope of a better world. Read some news from the World Social Forum official website
Sincerily,
Nadia Thalji

Na manhã de quinta-feira, o Ministro da Justiça, Tarso Genro, visitou o Acampamento da Juventude do Fórum Social Mundial e apresentou o painel “A juventude construindo uma cultura de paz e cidadania na segurança”. Tarso disse uma frase que resume tudo: “os jovens precisam redescobrir as utopias”.

Há mais de 20 anos vivemos uma época sem utopias. A queda do Muro de Berlim fez com que o “socialismo real” revelasse de fato a sua “realidade”: embora houvesse mais solidariedade entre as pessoas, vivia-se sob o domínio de regimes autoritários e burocráticos. E que, no caso do Leste Europeu, nem sequer eram resultados de revoluções, e sim, imposição da União Soviética após a Segunda Guerra Mundial.

As utopias se fizeram presentes na Revolução de 1956 (esmagada por Moscou) na Hungria e na Primavera de Praga de 1968 (igualmente esmagada pelos soviéticos) na Tchecoslováquia. Seus líderes, Imre Nagy e Alexander Dubcek respectivamente, eram comunistas. Mas que desejavam um outro tipo de socialismo: queriam, nas palavras de Eduardo Galeano sobre os revolucionários húngaros, “democracia em vez de burocracia”. Inclusive, na resistência contra a invasão soviética em 1968, os tchecoslovacos invocaram até mesmo o grande líder da Revolução Russa, Lenin.

Com a queda do Muro de Berlim, houve um abandono das utopias pela juventude, fruto da grande difusão da absurda ideia de que se havia alcançado “o fim da história”, com a “vitória” do capitalismo e do neoliberalismo – ou seja, que não fazia mais sentido querer um mundo melhor, “ele é assim, sempre será e ponto final” (afinal, o Estado mínimo é o máximo!), e qualquer tentativa de mudá-lo resultaria em novos “socialismos reais”. Claro que ainda há jovens – e também pessoas mais velhas – que acreditam ser possível mudar o mundo para melhor. Mas a maioria quer mesmo é “se dar bem na vida”, e só.

E se antes o comunismo era a grande utopia, hoje o sonho é um outro “ismo”, o consumismo. Compre mais, mais, mais e mais, e seja feliz. Tudo assim, individualmente. Não se acredita em nada, não se luta contra nada, a não ser por si mesmo.

É uma luta solitária, daí o aumento dos casos de depressão e também do sentimento de nostalgia por parte dos mais velhos nos países que foram “socialistas reais”: havia um maior sentimento de solidariedade, de coletividade entre as pessoas – até, inclusive, para se lutar contra um governo opressor. Hoje em dia, a maioria apenas procura “se adaptar”, sem pensar nem refletir.

Quem sabe um dia essas pessoas acabem refletindo sobre o mal que fazem ao planeta com o consumismo desenfreado. Pena que aí será tarde demais.

A thesis presented to the
Political Science Department at Bryn Mawr College

by Virginia (Dina) Rubey
Monday, April 27, 2009
Advisor: Professor Michael H. Allen
Second Reader: Professor Deborah Harrold

Through a Freireian lens, emancipation is understood as an entity that is sovereign and for itself. In this framework, the broadest possibilities for liberation can be best nurtured through dialogical processes that promote republican democracy and participatory economic systems. The analysis of forces that mold Nicaraguan political economic life in the post-Cold War era suggests that the most promising vehicles for emancipatory political economic developments in politically and economically dependent nations are local grassroots cooperative organizations that promote popular egalitarian deliberation and exchange. Similarly not-for-profit cooperative transnational models and international agreements may aid the realization of goals that are outlined by egalitarian grassroots deliberation, though the emancipatory nature of such larger structures are strained by the weights of bureaucracy, globally institutionalized power imbalances, and coexisting vested interests.

Leftists are pouring into town to rail against freewheeling capitalism during the World Social Forum, gleefully cheering the humbling of bankers and business titans by the global economic meltdown.

The 10-year-old conference is the left’s counter to the World Economic Forum at Davos.

Source:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100126/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/lt_brazil_social_forum

Leftists are pouring into town to rail against freewheeling capitalism during the World Social Forum, gleefully cheering the humbling of bankers and business titans by the global economic meltdown.

The 10-year-old conference is the left’s counter to the World Economic Forum at Davos.

Source:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100126/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/lt_brazil_social_forum

Fabiana Frayssinet-IPS, 01/22/10

The birthplace of the World Social Forum (WSF), conceived as an alternative to international meetings pursuing free-market economics, Brazil is on its way to becoming a major economic power, analysts say. The question is, what kind of model will it adopt to avoid the behaviour it has previously criticised?

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is apt to reiterate that Brazil has its own model – one that works – in his speeches at home and abroad. But it is up to his ministers to express it in the shape of programmes and goals, including Tourism Minister Luiz Barretto.

Read more…

By Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 22, 2010 (IPS) – The birthplace of the World Social Forum (WSF), conceived as an alternative to international meetings pursuing free-market economics, Brazil is on its way to becoming a major economic power, analysts say. The question is, what kind of model will it adopt to avoid the behaviour it has previously criticised?

President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is apt to reiterate that Brazil has its own model – one that works – in his speeches at home and abroad. But it is up to his ministers to express it in the shape of programmes and goals, including Tourism Minister Luiz Barretto.

“Brazil is likely to become the world’s fifth largest economy by 2016,” said the minister at the launch of a strategic plan for tourism for the next 10 years.

“Brazil’s present excellent economic condition, as the last economy to enter and the first to recover from the (global financial) crisis, definitively ensures the country will have great importance on the international scene in the next decade,” he said.

Francisco Barone, an economist with the Getulio Vargas Foundation, produced statistics to verify this prediction. One measure of a country’s potential economic growth is its gross domestic product (GDP).

“According to its GDP, Brazil is one of the top 10 economies in the world,” said the economist. And its prospects for further growth mean it will become one of the leaders among the BRIC countries – Brazil, Russia, India and China, all fast-growing developing economies – within five years, he predicted.

Barone attributes these prospects to Brazil’s huge internal market. With a population of 190 million, most of what is produced is consumed domestically.

Brazil has other advantages, too, such as its enormous energy matrix – boosted by new oil reserves recently discovered by state oil giant Petrobrás – and its industrial diversity, economic stability and export sales, ranging from agricultural commodities to airplanes manufactured by Embraer, a state firm.

Cándido Grzybowski, the head of the Brazilian Institute for Social and Economic Analyses (IBASE), which has participated in the organisation of the WSF since its inception, said, quoting the WSF slogan, that just as “Another World is Possible,” so too another kind of world power is possible.

In an interview with IPS before the 10th WSF, which opens Jan. 25-29 in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, Grzybowski said he would like Brazil to model itself as a “world power” that first and foremost corrects shortcomings in its own society, like its appalling social inequality.

Barone said Brazil has made some progress on this issue, highlighted in official statistics from the Institute of Applied Economic Research (IPEA), which reported that 19.5 million people were lifted out of poverty between 2003 and 2008, and the incomes of the poorest 10 percent of the population grew faster than those of the richest 10 percent, “indicating a reduction in social inequality in the country.”

But there is still much more to be done, said Barone. The scourge of hunger has not yet been overcome: 15 million people still live with food insecurity.

“To become an economic power, social inequality must be reduced,” for humanitarian reasons but also pragmatic ones, Barone said. “When millions of socially excluded people become consumers, there will be more demand for national products, and industry will produce more and will take on workers, creating a virtuous cycle of growth.”

Grzybowski mentioned other problems arising from Brazil’s epic inequality, such as “the right to fair distribution of common goods in this wealthy land.”

In Brazil “it is considered normal to have estates of 3,000, 200,000 or 500,000 hectares.” The owners of huge estates “are less than one percent of all landowners, but they have enormous powers of veto in Congress,” he said.

“Something is wrong with this world power,” he reflected.

The head of IBASE – one of the organisations on the WSF International Committee – is seeking another kind of world power, one that “does not reproduce the imperialist model,” so often criticised at the forum, which is being held in decentralised fashion this year in at least 27 regions worldwide.

Grzybowski would like to see Brazil become a “positive” world power, with a “balanced” international agenda, for instance in the case of Petrobrás’ expansion into neighbouring countries like Bolivia, or Brazilian negotiations with Paraguay over the Itaipú hydroelectric station, shared by the two countries.

In his view, Brazil’s “attitude of respect towards those (smaller) countries” needs to be further reinforced, recognising that “the relationship (with them) is completely asymmetrical.”

“We cannot simply go on treating them like the rest of the world has always done, using the power of our dominant position. We have to turn that relationship upside down,” he said, adding that he fears his country might start to “take advantage of the poverty of others.”

“I would like to see a Brazil that is motivated by solidarity; not a Brazil that competes for membership of exclusive clubs like G8 or G20, but a country that promotes equality between peoples,” and that accepts “that it administers a great natural heritage, and therefore has a responsibility to the planet as a whole,” Grzybowski said.

He said he also wanted his country to take a more “radical stance on human rights.”

“We cannot just go all over the place, making trade agreements to capture markets while ignoring systematic human rights violations in the countries we do business with,” he said, referring to African countries ruled by dictators, with which Brasilia has negotiated agreements.

Grzybowski said he is concerned, for instance, “about what China is doing in Africa,” and hopes that Brazil will not adopt the model of this other emerging power. “China is making the most of underdevelopment to serve its so-called national interest,” he said.

“Is that really a model we want to follow?” he asked.

In his view, the WSF could also contribute to an alternative model of power by promoting, through its social organisations, a “progressive, democratic and egalitarian agenda based on social justice.”

“An agenda that redefines the model of development, an agenda that connects social justice with environmental justice, can only emerge from civil society,” Grzybowski said.

US Social Forum
Here’s some information on our goals, what we believe as the National Planning Committee that is supporting the Forum, and ways to find out more about the foundation of the Forum as a process!

2010 USSF Goals:

Our goals for the 2010 US Social Forum in Detroit, MI, June 22-26, are: Create a space for social movement convergence and strategic discussion

Advance social movements agenda for action and transformation

Build stronger relationships and collaboration between movements

Deepen our commitment to international solidarity and common struggle

Strengthen local capacity to improve social conditions, organizing and movement building in Detroit

A Word on the Forum

The US Social Forum is more than a conference, more than a networking bonanza, more than a reaction to war and repression. The USSF will provide space to build relationships, learn from each other’s experiences, share our analysis of the problems our communities face, and bring renewed insight and inspiration. It will help develop leadership and develop consciousness, vision, and strategy needed to realize another world.

The USSF sends a message to other people’s movements around the world that there is an active movement in the US opposing US Policies at home and abroad.

We must declare what we want our world to look like and begin planning the path to get there. A global movement is rising. The USSF is our opportunity to demonstrate to the world Another World is Possible!

People world-wide know that another world is needed. The Social Forum movement believes that is possible. At the US Social Forum people from all over the country gather to think about what kind of world is needed and how we can get there.

The US Social Forum is a very special kind of gathering: one that has never taken place in this country up to now. It isn’t a conference with an agenda and a program of events; it’s a gathering whose participants produce our own agenda and our own programs.

The mere process of planning, thinking, talking and preliminary organizing will move you, the people you’re working with and the rest of us forward. The moment you think of an idea, you are already participating in the Social Forum.

Where will the USSF take place?
We will be headquartered in downtown Detroit at Cobo Hall and Hart Plaza. We will also host events at the Wayne County Community College District Downtown Campus and Wayne State University.

What We Believe

We, the organizers of the first United States Social Forum:

- Believe that there is a strategic need to unite the struggles of oppressed communities and peoples within the United States (particularly Black, Latino, Arab, Asian/ Pacific-Islander and Indigenous communities) to the struggles of oppressed nations in the Third World.

- Believe the USSF should place the highest priority on groups that are actually doing grassroots organizing with working class people of color, who are training organizers, building long-term structures of resistance, and who can work well with other groups, seeing their participation in USSF as building the whole, not just their part of it.

- Believe the USSF must be a place where the voices of those who are most marginalized and oppressed from Indigenous communities can be heard–a place that will recognize Indigenous peoples, their issues and struggles.

- Believe the USSF must create space for the full and equal participation of undocumented migrants and their communities.

- Believe the USSF should link US-based youth organizers, activists, and cultural workers to the struggles of their brothers and sisters abroad, drawing common connections and exploring the deeper meanings of solidarity.

- Believe the USSF is important because we must have a clear and unified approach at dealing with social justice issues, and meaningful positions on global issues.

- Believe that a USSF sends a message to other people’s movements around the world that there is an active movement in the United States opposing U.S. policies at home and abroad.

- Believe that the USSF will help build national networks that will be better able to collaborate with international networks and movements.

- We believe the USSF is more than an event. It is an ongoing process to contribute to strengthening the entire movement, bringing together the various sectors and issues that work for global justice.

Please take the time to read the World Social Forum’s Charter of Principles to learn more about the foundations of this process!

Celebrating its tenth year of existence, the World Social Forum (WSF), will take place in 2010 in a decentralized manner, with at least 27 regional, national and local events throughout the world over the next period (see agenda on the WSF official website).

Opening this process, the regional event “Greater Porto Alegre 10 Years Social Forum” which is going to happen from January 25th to 29th in the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, will have over 500 decentralized activities in the cities of Porto Alegre, Gravataí, Canoas, São Leopoldo, Novo Hamburgo and Sapiranga.

Given the importance of the date and the event itself, the presence of some heads of state is waited (Lula, Evo Morales, Mojica and Fernando Lugo), as well as several ministers and prominent politicians (Dilma Rouseff, Marina Silva, Heloisa Helena and Ciro Gomes) which have already expressed their interest in accepting invitations to activities during the event.

Seminar discusses 10 years of World Social Forum

One of the core activities of the Greater Porto Alegre Social Forum is the International Seminar “10 Years Later: Challenges and proposals for another possible world” which will feature more than 70 intellectuals and social leaders around the world – many of whom have integrated the process of creation and construction of the World Social Forum (WSF) in the last ten years. See list of participants (in Portuguese).

The seminar, held in the city of Porto Alegre, aims to examine the new challenges of alter-globalist civil society and to design future directions to be followed by the WSF. It also aims to provide a more systematic reflection on what has been done thus far, mistakes and successes, and the WSF institutional dynamics, becoming thus a moment of strategic thinking addressed to the activists most involved in the process. The activities will take place in the Legislative Assembly, in the Usina do Gasômetro and in the Armazéns do Porto, always in the morning

Program of the Seminar “10 years later: challenges and proposals for another possible world”

1st day, January 25 – World Social Forum – Examining the last 10 years

2nd day, January 26 – World conjuncture today
Table 1: Environmental Conjuncture
Table 2: Economic Conjuncture
Table 3: Political Conjuncture
Table 4: Social Conjuncture

3rd day, January 27 – Elements of a new agenda I
Table 1: Common Goods
Table 2: Common Goods
Table 3: Economy and Gratuity
Table 4: Good Life

4th day, January 28 - Elements of a new agenda II
Table 1: State Organization and political power
Table 2: Rights and Collective Responsibilities
Table 3: New World Order
Table 4: How to Construct Political Hegemony

5th day, January 29 - Systematizing big issues and contributing to the World Social Forum process

TOWARDS DAKAR 2011: the multiplicity of forums
Pan-Amazonic Forum
Americas Social Forum
African Social Forum
Maghreb Social Forum
Stateless Peoples Forum
Palestine Forum
European Social Forum
United States Social Forum
Crisis of Civilization Forum

Registration for the Greater Porto Alegre 10 years Social Forum

The registration of participants can be made on the website http://www.fsm10.org. The registration fee is R$20,00 and it covers the material that will be provided in the accreditation.

Registration for press coverage must be made on the same page. The press center for communication professionals is located at the Legislative Assembly.

The registration of activities is closed.

Press:
- São Paulo: seminariofsm10@gmail.com, phone: (11) 9853-9950 – (Verena Glass)
- Porto Alegre: fsm2010comunicacao@gmail.com, phone: (51) 3433.1233 / (51) 9317.0862 – (Luciana Borba)

More information:
“Greater Porto Alegre 10 Years Social Forum” official website:
Seminar “10 years later” official blog:http://seminario10anosdepois.wordpress.com/

By Mario Osava
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan 24, 2010 (IPS) – The World Social Forum (WSF) is only “a tool” and must not be confused with the global movement for another world, says Chico Whitaker, one of the founders of this meeting which is celebrating its tenth year with a seminar to assess its track record Jan. 25-29, in its southern Brazilian place of origin, Porto Alegre.

It is a mechanism, “an instrument to unite people. The Forum will not change the world; it is up to society to do that, through a multifaceted global justice movement,” added Whitaker, who rejects the label “movement of movements” for the WSF because it sounds too directive, like a political party.

Whitaker, an architect by training, has taken upon himself the mission of explaining the nature of the Forum and defending its Charter of Principles, written in 2002. For over five decades he has been a dedicated activist for social justice, and he represents the Catholic Church’s Justice and Peace Commission on the WSF International Council.

In 2005 he wrote a book titled “O desafio do Fórum Social Mundial: um modo de ver” (The Challenge of the World Social Forum: a way of seeing), in which he expounded the principles and process of the international gathering of civil society, its development, its horizontal networking, and the “temptations” to revert to political pathways that have already shown their ineffectiveness and perversity.

The WSF’s wider vocation, to open new ways and build unity in the movement for another world that embraces such a diversity of activists, is poorly understood, Whitaker told IPS. The tensions that exist within the Forum and its International Council themselves are caused largely by groups that defend the old ways.

Whitaker’s assessment of these past 10 years is that, without being a direct player, the WSF has contributed to many advances, by promoting connections between movements. It deserves a share of the credit for the demise of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), promoted by the United States, as well as for the rise in indigenous consciousness in Latin America, which in Bolivia led to the election of President Evo Morales, the country’s first indigenous president.

Thinking in the United States has changed since the advent of the WSF, and this will be reflected in the second national Forum, to be held in July in Detroit, a symbol of the country’s way of life. And the WSF has also accelerated development of a “solidarity economy,” Whitaker said.

Changing the world is the WSF’s goal, without dictating “perfectly finished models, or a single strategy” as a fait accompli, while demanding changes “at all levels, including personal change,” he said.

In his view, the series of multiple WSF meetings has allowed the spread of “a better understanding of this long process, which is more complex than was ever imagined.”

The global financial crisis of the last two years, which originated in the United States, has opened new frontiers for analysis and political education of young people, by providing new examples to illustrate the tragedies of capitalism, he said.

Without indicating a particular model of the society of the future, and with no intention of taking state power to promote changes, the WSF has a vague and ingenuous motto, “Another world is possible.” In traditional terms, this hardly holds out promise of a long-lasting movement.

Yet the annual international meetings of the WSF have mobilised multitudes of people, and national, local and issue-based initiatives have multiplied on every continent, establishing plural dialogue as a mechanism to foment movements and ideas. This year, 27 decentralised forums have been planned, with no central event.

There was a big increase in the number of young people attending the 2009 WSF in the northern Brazilian city of Belém, the eastern gateway to the Amazon. Out of the 150,000 participants, 64 percent were under 34 years old, and 81 percent were university students or graduates, according to a survey carried out by the Brazilian Institute for Social and Economic Analyses (IBASE).

But over the 10 years there has also been increasing dissatisfaction among political activists possessing their own projects, utopias, movements or parties. In the light of the lack of concrete resolutions and action programmes, many complain that the WSF process has failed or run out of steam.

However, the founders of the WSF, especially those from Brazil, are reluctant to change it in that direction because they feel it would appropriate the role of the social organisations and become a political agent, like a party or a movement, negating the very nature of the Forum and its Charter of Principles with contradictory goals and strategies.

The disgruntled activists are critical, for example, of the Bahia Thematic Social Forum, to be held Jan. 29-31 in Salvador, the capital of the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia, accusing it of being a government-led initiative rather than a civil society event.

This meeting, which is being supported by the national government of leftwing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and the Bahia state government, will seek to promote dialogue between governments and society in Africa and Latin America, as well as reflecting and sharing experiences on issues arising from the powerful Afro-Brazilian influence in this state, such as culture and religion.

One of the main debating topics will be the development of the “new economy,” based primarily on “intangible” goods like knowledge, which “do not compete” with each other, and “do not deplete stocks when they are used,” but instead foster cooperation, said Ladislau Dowbor, an economics professor at the Catholic University of São Paulo who helped organise the programme of debates in Bahia.

For example, companies using cutting-edge technology to manufacture robots decided to set up a network to share knowledge, using open software, because they realised that “cooperation is more profitable” than sheltering their products behind patents, the economist said.

Nowadays “three-quarters of a product’s value is not physical, like raw materials and labour costs, but is derived from knowledge.” The social sector also has enormous weight in the economy, for example, health services in the United States account for 17 percent of GDP, he added.

All these developments are opening up spaces for cooperation and solidarity, Dowbor concluded.

(END)

“Another world is possible; Another United States is Necessary.” Those words describe the goals of the 2010 United States Social Forum (USSF). An expected 20,000 to 30,000 thousand individuals and groups will converge on Detroit June 22 through 26 for the USSF, with main events held in downtown Detroit at Cobo Hall and Hart Plaza. It will also host events at the Wayne County Community College District Downtown Campus and Wayne State University. What is the USSF? According to its Web site,

The US Social Forum is more than a conference, more than a networking bonanza, more than a reaction to war and repression. The USSF will provide space to build relationships, learn from each other’s experiences, share our analysis of the problems our communities face, and bring renewed insight and inspiration. It will help develop leadership and develop consciousness, vision, and strategy needed to realize another world . . . The US Social Forum is a very special kind of gathering: one that has never taken place in this country up to now. It isn’t a conference with an agenda and a program of events; it’s a gathering whose participants produce our own agenda and our own programs.

To date, 900 activists involved in planning the USSF have developed the following list of themes:

• Capitalism in crisis/economic alternatives
• Climate justice
• Indigenous sovereignty
• Displacement/(im)migration
• Democracy
• Understanding right-wing opposition
• Building left/progressive movements
• Community-based strategies
• Labor
• Media justice/communications
• Transformative justice/healing

• Anti-war/militarization/criminalization
  International solidarity and responsibility
• Detroit and the rust belt

The USSF is an outgrowth of the annual World Social Forum, first held in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2001. Every year since, this forum has worked to develop just alternatives to the neoliberal policies and globalization that continue to plunge poor countries into debt and millions into poverty while feeding the war machine and destroying the environment.

Registration for USSF opens January 20. Organizations that want to take a more active role can join the National Planning Committee or People’s Movement Assembly. They can also propose workshops for the program along a range of themes (and cross-cutting threads). Individuals can join one of the USSF’s working groups, the USSF Writer’s Workshop or build regional and local committees. Watch GRIID Indy News for continuing updates.

Another world is possible!

(For the 10^th Anniversary of the anti-WTO action in Seattle, we thought this article does a great job of taking the lessons from that historic action and offering up ideas for future movement building. This piece is by Stephanie Guilloud and first appeared in the newsletter of Project South.)

For five days in 1999, 80,000 people from Seattle and from all over the country stopped the World Trade Organization from meeting. Despite extreme police and state violence, students, organizers, workers, and community members participated in a public uprising using direct actions, marches, rallies, and mass convergences. Longshoremen shut down every port on the West Coast. Global actions of solidarity happened from India to Italy. Trade ministers, heads of state, and corporate hosts were forced to abandon their agenda and declare the Millenium Ministerial a complete failure. We said we would shut it down, and we did.

“The fact is that the Social Forum and Peoples Movement Assembly process actually started in Seattle.  The Social Forum took off from the experience of the ‘Battle of Seattle’ when the Brazilian organizing committee formed in 2000 and held the first World Social Forum in 2001. Ten years later, we come back to where this started. What has been accomplished in the last 10 years? How have our social movements developed to build the power towards real social systemic change in the US? How do we map the new forces and what is the power of the social movement assembly?” 

- Ruben Solis, Southwest Workers Union,

participant in the Seattle shutdown, and one of the founders of the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance 

As one of the founders and leaders of the Direct Action Network and a resident of Olympia, Washington, I offer personal and political reflections on the WTO shutdown as a major turning point in my life as an organizer and in our lives working to build movements in the US. As an organizer with the US Social Forum process and a co-lead to develop the People’s Movement Assembly, I carry these lessons with me on a daily basis. I offer these stories with humility and a sense of responsibility. When I refer to “we” in this brief article, I refer to my community of young people in their early twenties, living in Seattle, Olympia, Portland, and the Bay Area, who, with many others, mobilized, organized, and implemented the direct action strategies we had planned for months. 

1)   Know your history: Seattle was a turning point

Seattle was a historic turning point in our movements for racial, economic and gender justice for a few reasons. On a global scale, the demonstrations and effective shutdown of the World Trade Organization’s ministerial was historic because of our position and location in the US. Seattle did not mark the beginning of a movement, it marked the beginning of a significant connection between the US and the rest of the world. Global movements had and have been challenging and confronting financial institutions and their systemic effects for decades. The demonstrations – the five days of direct action, the massive and violent state response, and the subsequent alliances – accomplished a few major shifts in historic directions. The demonstrations exposed to the US public the tangible affects of globalization on regular people’s lives. The effectiveness of the actions and stalling of the meetings allowed for delegates from the global South to challenge the policies and procedures of the WTO. And for the first time in history, the decision-making rounds of a global financial institution collapsed.  

Seattle also opened a door on a new era for movement in the US. The strengths and weaknesses of our organizing efforts served as a spark for new work, new alliances, new conversations, and a new generational drive. It opened the possibility for a generation of people to understand action, movement, and strategy as effective. It also offered an opportunity to see the strengths of innovation and mass organizing, as well as the weaknesses of underdeveloped leadership and lack of connection to long-term transformative practices. 

2)   Claim your victories and evaluate your mistakes.

How we organize to win is still a critical question today. Winning is different in any moment given the political context as well as the will and abilities of the people involved. We made a widespread call to Shut Down the WTO without total confidence that we could or would achieve that goal. The call was a way to declare a politic beyond reforming the WTO and towards complete transformation of the economic and social systems in motion. On the first day, we succeeded at exactly what we had said we would do. Shutting down a major financial institution with tens of thousands of people and well-coordinated non-violent action was a victory.

Claiming victory is essential to tactical decisions on the ground as well as understanding the political significance after the fact. After the success of the first day, we re-convened the Spokescouncil easily. We had planned for the possibility of mass numbers being in jail, but I am proud that we saw and rose to the opportunity of victory and understood it as an ongoing process. The next few days demanded different sets of tactics to incorporate the constant influx of new people who had not necessarily gone through the preparations that led up to the November 30^th action.

That’s a taste of movement building – How do you move consistently through multiple reactions from the state and opposing forces while constantly mobilizing and expanding your base? How do you shift and re-adjust when met with the possibility of victory? And significantly (because it was lacking on a mass scale following the demonstrations) how do you expand the momentum of victory with strategic, intentional plans to continue what you started? And finally, how do you evaluate the mis-steps and mistakes after such a significant and widespread experience? How do you receive and understand criticism as well as accolade without losing momentum or integrity?

3)   Make your enemy known: Mass demonstrations are not spontaneous

Globalization and neoliberalism were not common terms or centers of public debate. The WTO was relatively unknown at the time. Its meetings were secret, the levers of decision making and the connections between nation-states and corporate leaders were blurry and deliberately non-transparent. We believed everyone had a stake in refusing to let them meet quietly, especially in our town. We knew that any major action would not be spontaneous – it would need massive buy-in and involvement from many sectors of the community.

There had been a successful campaign to pass an ordinance banning the MAI (Mulitlateral Agreement on Investment) in Olympia, and we knew there was a hook into our community on the issues of corporate control and local power. We studied the mechanisms of the WTO in order to describe it and educate about its relationship to our work, our food, our health, our governance, and our economies. I facilitated countless popular education-style workshops in classes, at unions, in prisons, and in the community. A team of us produced the broadsheet that went out that summer to over 25,000 people engaged in environmental, labor, peace, and social justice work. The articles exposed the WTO as an illegitimate and undemocratic institution, and we called for a Shut Down on November 30, 1999. 

One of the most significant accomplishments of our organizing was that people knew the enemy – they knew the details, the characteristics, the impact, and the context of the WTO. We worked to make that happen. We studied and applied tactics and strategies from the Spanish Civil War and the anti-nuclear movement. We invented new tactics and strategies based on our knowledge of the terrain. It was a planned, locally-led massive demonstration with global consequence.

4)   They came out of the bars: Infrastructure and preparation allows for spontaneous action

On the first day of the demonstrations, there were a few different kinds of folks on the street. There were the organized labor marchers, prepared and routed. There were the Direct Action Network folks who had been preparing for months, organized into affinity groups and clusters with clear, coordinated instructions to hold particular intersections in various formations. And there were folks in Seattle who walked off their shifts and linked elbows in front of glass doors and irate WTO delegates. On the third day of the demonstrations, after two days of cloudy tear gas on Capitol Hill and rubber bullets flying, the confused media reports, and a lot of traumatized people who were either arrested or hurt – the people living in Seattle were the irate ones. We had more people who wanted to get involved, and they hadn’t gone through the trainings.

My affinity group was tasked on the second night of the protests with leading a march the next day on King County Jail where about 600 of our folks were being held and doing jail solidarity. We moved thousands of people from Pike Place Market with the plan to split the march and surround the jail. We were still successfully operating with tactics of surprise. There had been no police or city negotiations for any days past the first. No routes, no advance warning. (And remember that ten years ago there were no cell phones, no tweets and texts, and very little email.) We did it again – Surrounded the jail with 2000 people, made our demands, and got the lawyers in. But the real victory was the mass of people who was not prepared, was not experienced with actions, direct or otherwise, and who completely trusted our leadership and moved collectively.

In order for that trust to emerge, we created a culture. We prepared as best we could, and a culture emerged spontaneously in the moment as well. The way we used call and response was like poetry. We had to make the words meaningful and precise. And it worked – at that time and in that place. The experience, sometimes frustrating and frightening, still moves me to believe in people’s power and creativity.

5)   Surprise only works once: Evolve our tactics and strategies

We cannot afford to dismiss the significance and influence of different tactics, strategies, and convergences in different historical moments. We also cannot rely on old models of organizing, simply because they have worked in the past. Mass demonstrations and protest rallies cannot be our default response to all injustice. Two major lessons surface. Surprising the cops in Seattle put us at an advantage at every turn. By the nature of our movements being extremely out-militarized, we are not in a position to repeat the same strategies with the same success. We will have to be smarter, one (or more) steps ahead of the turn, and completely in command of whatever local terrain we occupy.

Another major lesson from post-Seattle demonstrations was that convergence at the expense of local organizing is not effective. The local leadership and knowledge made the demonstrations in Seattle effective. We learn similar lessons in the US Social Forum process. The Forum would be in danger of becoming a big conference if power building in multiple locations (including local, regional, national, and global relationships) is not inherent to the organizing and operational process. What has been powerful in my experience in working in the South and organizing the US Social Forum, a convergence process led by people of color in community-based organizations from multiple sectors, is that we understand that strategic convergence is still extremely necessary and valuable. That the model was developed and refined in the global South through the World Social Forum is critical to its relevance and success. The convergence in Seattle ten years ago was important, but we’re not always coming together to target an oppressive institution or body. We are also coming together to increase the breadth and width of community-led power bases. New tactics and strategies will rise from that convergence.

6)   It’s not about a leader. It is about leadership. 

There are two major things you learn about inside of an affinity group: 1) Play your position and 2) trust everyone else to play theirs. There is no other option. If you’re locked down to 50 other people, you cannot also get water for everyone or communicate your coordinates. There are distinct and necessary roles. The group process of building trust and skills together over time allows for everyone to play their roles to the utmost efficiency. We were spokespeople, facilitators, planners, logisticians, tacticians, jail support, communication points, and when the time came to make hard decisions about how to move within and through the police violence, while still maintaining our effectiveness in blocking our coordinates, we made them by consensus. With 200 people. You can’t ever tell me, consensus doesn’t work or it takes too long – you’re just not doing it right.

We built that same model to scale for the Spokescouncil, and as with many of the lessons from this moment, there is a lot to learn and expand from being able to convene hundreds of people that represent thousands and make tactical decisions. These models are not about a single leader nor the absence of leaders. Leadership is critical to the functionality and direction of these spaces. The collective nature of leadership is not easy, we are not trained to work like that, and we must be intentional and deliberate about our principles as we practice them at higher and higher stakes. Leadership in this case looked like incredibly well-developed plans and structures by multiple people in different positions, while at the same time allowing everyone on the streets to claim and feel true victory in their bodies. What can we learn and share, about this model, and what needs to be further developed?

7)   Strategy, please: Action-hopping is not movement building

Most of the demonstrations that followed the Seattle demonstrations over the next two years in the US (specifically the actions around the IMF, World Bank, and political party conventions) did not have the intention, timeline, or local mobilization and support that would allow for 10,000 people to do direct action while having the support and solidarity of upwards of 60-70,000 people in the labor and progressive movements. Though there were different levels of success and effectiveness in different convergences over the next few years, we played to many of our weaknesses rather than move from our strengths and unique positions. 

There were opportunities to build with broader, more grounded global movements who felt connected to what we did in Seattle. Part of what’s necessary to do this work effectively is knowing the landscape – literally and politically. In order to organize for global justice in our communities, we need to understand that the forms and functions of international financial institutions and groups change and shift to meet new economic conditions. The exclusive club of primarily colonial powers, the G8 just became the G20. How are we shifting and changing to meet new conditions? How are we building in our communities in ways that are rooted to the local conditions and responding to broad systemic realities?

   Leadership development, thank you.

Where there were intergenerational relationships there was strength. Where we relied on only ourselves as isolated young people, we stumbled. The impediments were age-old internal and external barriers to serious, strategic organizing. Most of us were young (I was 22) and having participated at the helm of the protests, we held this depth of experience but struggled with what all new leadership struggles with – clear political direction, strategy development, and organizing skills. The generational turning point here cannot be dismissed. I was hired and trained by a seasoned organizer and strategist, and he challenged me, supported me, and connected what was happening to a broader, historical context. That daily training I received laid the foundations for me to develop my skills as an organizer for long-term work. Others in my community also had relationships with key mentors and advisors, but there was not a movement infrastructure for that leadership to enter, learn, and build on the momentum after the demonstrations. I am still wildly cognizant of that immense and specific need on a large scale, and I strive to carve out space and time to give and receive what I can to people who are battling on the frontlines of our communities.

9)   Guilt slowed us down: Solidarity is action

Elizabeth Martinez’s article “Where was the Color in Seattle?” sparked debate following the demonstrations about race, leadership, and global justice. Though there were great points to discuss, the debate it sparked is not as relevant as the larger context of how white supremacy and racism manifests in our social movements. The Seattle demonstrations did not represent “white movements” but it did reflect many dynamics – old and painful dynamics around leadership, race, culture, and styles, as well as some new dynamics about the nature of massive convergences from a local base with national reach. The debate and challenge around the roles of white people in leadership was happening within the organizing bodies. We challenged racism where we saw it, we attempted to advance our communities’ understanding and skill through trainings and workshops, and ultimately the affinity group I was working with in Olympia made a decision to resign from the Direct Action Network if we did not examine our broader positions as a leadership body and our roles within that context. 

One outcome of the dialogue at that time was a culture embedded in identity rather than experience. This culture had already begun plaguing this new generation but has since ballooned. The critique for critique’s sake nature of anti-oppression work showed a lack of development as well as real misunderstandings of history and race in the US. Instead of emerging from this historical moment to build deeper connections to local and global struggles, young white activists questioned their right to act. Confronting white supremacy is not an existential activity. The lesson here for our US movements is about understanding how to challenge the dynamics of privilege and oppression while also building large, wide, and deep movements that are led by and rooted in the experiences of people who know injustice and exploitation – currently and historically.

10)  Know your vision:  Learn lessons in order to move forward.

The lessons of that time are with me in my everyday organizing work. I moved back South (I’m from Houston and live in Atlanta now) in 2003 to work with Project South and practice movement building in Southern grassroots communities. After Seattle, I knew I needed more development around strategy, history, and developing long-term organized formations to build instead of react. Project South was one of the primary anchors for the first-ever US Social Forum in 2007, and for me the Forum was a continuation of the momentum we built in Seattle. In an exciting shift and in less than ten years after the demonstrations, the Forum represented more vision, more leadership from frontline communities, and more strategic connection to global struggles. 

From that process and within the context of global dialogues about coordinated actions, we are building the People’s Movement Assembly as an organizing process to prepare for the Forum, to make decisions at the Forum, and to advance new directions after the Forum. We are pulling on all these lessons from 10 years ago to facilitate Movement Assemblies – mass convergence, collective decision-making, political clarity, shared leadership, and trust that we will move forward together. What will we build over the next ten years in order to shift, evolve, and grow our movements to win?

Stephanie Guilloud graduated from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington in 1999. She was hired that week by history professor and organizer Dan Leahy to organize a conference called Trade, Labor, and the Environment: Analyzing the World Trade Organization. She co-founded the Direct Action Network with other organizers from California, Oregon, and Washington. Her affinity group was made up of queer and trans folks from Olympia and called itself the Small Town Sleazy Cowboys (and Lady) Puppet Rodeo Association. They built a cluster of over 200 people to shut down multiple intersections on the first day, led the action for over 2000 people to shut down King County Jail on the third day, and continued mobilizing actions until the end of the fifth day. Stephanie edited and produced ‘Voices from the WTO,’ an anthology of first-hand accounts from the demonstrations and is a contributor to The Battle of the Story of the Battle of Seattle, a short anthology released for the tenth anniversary looking at how that watershed event has been misrepresented and reproducing the original 1999 Shut Down broadsheet. 

www.projectsouth.org

Stephanie@projectsouth.org

POLITICS, POETICS AND POPULAR EDUCATION IN BRAZILIAN CINEMA, 1962-1979

‘Stronger are the powers of the people’: politics, poetics and popular education in Brazilian cinema, 1962-1979

December 4 (6.30pm – 10pm) 
December 5th and 6th (2pm to 10pm)

At No-w-here, First Floor, 316-318 Bethnal Green Road, London, E2 OAG

Full programme and further information: http://www.no-w-here.org.uk/index.php?cat=1&subCat=docdetail&&id=212

The late 1950s and early 1960s were a period of intense social and economic transformation in Brazil. It was also a period of political upheaval, curbed by the 1964 military coup, and one in which the relations between politics, poetics and popular education, the role of the cultural producer, the vanguard-popular-mass culture nexus, were absolutely central to the cultural and political debate.

‘Stronger are the powers of the people’, a programme of films and debates curated and presented by Brazilian philosopher, artist and political activist Rodrigo Nunes, uses Brazilian films from 1962 to 1979 as ‘monuments’ whose animating forces can be put again into play to understand how the problems posed by the period are expressed in the aesthetic and political choices of filmmakers.

In particular, it examines one of the most neglected experiences of that time – the Popular Culture Centres (CPCs) – as a central node of the practical and theoretical articulation of those debates. With this, the programme addresses them not only in their historical situatedness, but above all in relation to those problems that animate artistic and political practice in the present, when so much is made of the intersections between politics, art, and pedagogy, and there is a growing interest in recovering past experiences of this convergence – above all, from the 1960s, and increasingly, from peripheral countries such as Brazil. What can the problems of those years teach us regarding what we are or would like to be doing today? How can the proposals emerging in this field then – Paulo Freire’s pedagogy, Liberation Theology, Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed,tropicalismo, Helio Oiticica’s, Lygia Clark’s and Lygia Pape’s researches, cinema novo – resonate with us today?

The programme includes the rare collective work Five Times Favela, the only CPC-produced film, and the first film for many of that generation’s directors; Glauber Rocha’s internationally acclaimed Land in Anguish and Antonio das Mortes; Ruy Guerra’s The Guns and its sequel, The Fall; and Leon Hirszman’s ABC of the Strike.

Rodrigo Nunes has a PhD in philosophy from Goldsmiths College, University of London, where he prepared a thesis on immanence and philosophy in Foucault and Deleuze with a grant from CAPES – Brazilian government. As an organiser, popular educator and artist, he has been involved in many political initiatives in Latin America and Europe, including the organisation of the first three editions of the World Social Forum. He is a member of the editorial collective of Turbulence (http://www.turbulence.org.uk). His work, as writer and translator, has appeared in such publications as ephemera, Mute, Transform, and he has forthcoming papers in Radical Philosophy and Third Text.

This project is supported by Raven Row, the Brazilian embassy in London, and No.w.here.

Films

Cinco vezes favela (Five times favela), various authors, 1962: The only film the Popular Culture Centre (CPC) brought to completion, it comprises five episodes directed by Miguel Borges, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, Caca Diegues, Marcos Farias and Leon Hirszman, and was responsible for a split between the CPC and the cinema novo group. Some of the key figures in the CPC reportedly considered the film both a commercial and a political flop, and filmmakers such as Diegues and Arnaldo Jabor (though not Hirszman) left after decrying a narrow, instrumental conception of the relation between aesthetics and politics. With a cast including many of Augusto Boal’s colleagues from Teatro de Arena (and, most notably, CPC founder Oduvaldo Viana Filho), it captures a group of young filmmakers grappling with the same problems – how to create a form adequate to the specificity of Brazilian content? How to do so in a way that reaches beyond a middle-class audience, and plays a role in the transformation of Brazilian society from below? What is popular culture, and how must the artist deal with it? – while working through a host of influences, from Russian revolutionary cinema to neo-realism. Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s Couro de gato (Catgut) was included in a list of the 100 best shorts of all times selected by the Clermont-Ferrand Festival.

Os Fuzis (The guns), Ruy Guerra, 1964: One of the greatest achievements of the first crop of cinema novo – alongside Nelson Pereira dos Santos’ Vidas secas (Barren lives) and Glauber Rocha’s Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (Black God White Devil) (1964) –, it showcases many of the period’s defining traits: the rural Northeastern setting, the use of location, natural light and non-professional actors. At the same time, in its plot about the existential and moral crises undergone by a group of soldiers sent to a small town to stop the starving victims of the draught from attacking a food warehouse, it provides in arguably the clearest way the keys to reading some of the political limitations of cinema novo at this stage. It won the Silver Bear at the Berlin Festival.

Terra em transe (Land in anguish), Glauber Rocha, 1967: Part roman à clef about the Joao Goulart government and the 1964 military coup, part schematic description of the dynamics of the post-colonial world, part baroque allegory about the destiny of Latin America, part gauntlet thrown at the right and left of post- coup Brazil: one of Rocha’s most celebrated films, it finds the effects of his ‘epic-didactic’ cinema all the more effective because its target is much clearer. A whole generation at a crossroads appears in the vacillations of the main character, his multiple allegiances to social transformation and to his own class, to aesthetics and to politics, to utopia, the heat of the struggle, and his professional situation as a hired pen; the choice for armed struggle, which the film suggests in ambiguous fashion, was already brewing as it was produced. Nominated to the Palme d’Or at Cannes, best film at the Havana Film Festival.

O Dragão da Maldade contra o Santo Guerreiro (Antônio das Mortes), Glauber Rocha, 1969: Rocha’s first international co-production, first film in colour, and first using direct sound. He would often refer to it as ‘my western’, but, despite some nods at John Ford and Howard Hawks, it is clear that the oeuvre in question here is above all his own. Like a revision of his two earlier films that relaunches its questions, but also seems to run out of answers, it already points towards some of the procedures (such as the long, semi-improvised takes) that would characterise his work in the exile that immediately follows it. The plot finds Antônio das Mortes, the gunman hired by landowners to kill cangaceiros (highwaymen), brought out of retirement for one last job which, once executed, causes him to question the side on which he has fought over the years. Won best director and a nomination to the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

A Queda (The Fall), Ruy Guerra, 1976: An accident at a construction site, resulting in one death, sets one worker off on a struggle for justice that exposes the mechanisms of exploitation and the class relations of a country that had undergone one decade of fast-paced ‘conservative modernisation’ at the hands of the military. As a sort of sequel to the classic The Guns (1964), following the fate of those characters as they move from enforcers of exploitation to exploited, it offers more than a snapshot of the period: the correspondent time lapses in fiction and reality capture the passage of a chunk of Brazilian history between the two films, and, therefore, also the transformations in cinematographic approaches to the social and political between the two moments. Equally daring in content and form, and in the originality of the adequacy of one to the other, it won the Silver Bear at Berlin.

ABC da greve (ABC of the strike), Leon Hirszman, 1979-91: While preparing the cinema version of groundbreaking 1957 Teatro de Arena play Eles não usam black tie on location in the ABC (the auto industry belt around São Paulo), Hirszman has the opportunity to document the most powerful strikes in over a decade of Brazilian history. The latter would become a catalyst and a convergence point for the opposition to the military regime, intellectuals, artists, returning exiles, eventually leading to the creation of the Worker’s Party – whose biggest leader, Lula, was the president of the metalworkers union who led the strikes. Running into problems with the regime’s censorship because of the material, Hirszman dies in 1987 leaving the film unfinished until 1991, when his two daughters and son eventually release a final cut. The narration and text are provided by Ferreira Gullar, poet, who was president of the CPC at the time of the military coup.

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

MySpace Profile: http://www.myspace.com/glennrikowski

The Ockress: http://www.theockress.com

Have had to change glasses for the second home-exam of the week. Off with the pragmatic and rather fixed glasses of law, on with the idealistic and theoretical ones for cosmopolitanism and civil society.

So is civil society good or bad? Mary Kaldor argues in her book Global Civil Society (2008) that the term has to be re-conceptualized and understood in a more global perspective than it has been before. Now I only have to stretch this statement out to a full page and do this with a few more books, write a vs. text on Kant and Peter Singer and analyze World Social Forum as an expression of a global civil society. Wonderful.

Might I add that after a week of sickness….yes I’m still sick and it’s not looking much better. Was told for the hundreth time to get my H1N1 flu shot, by my mother. And yes I will before I go to the Netherlands.

Articolo e scatti di Michele Vollaro, da Diyarbakir

Libertà, democrazia, uso comune delle risorse naturale: parole che in tanti paesi occidentali potrebbero anche sembrare retoriche, ma che a Diyarbakir hanno un significato ben concreto. Nella principale città del Kurdistan turco si conclude oggi il Mesopotamia Social Forum, un incontro organizzato da decine di organizzazioni sociali e politiche della regione, in vista del prossimo Forum Sociale Europeo che si terrà a Istanbul nel giugno del prossimo anno, per porre al centro dell’attenzione i problemi a cui è sottoposto il popolo curdo. A poche decine di metri dalla stazione ferroviaria, nel parco comunale Sümer Park, i ragazzi del Congresso della gioventù patriottica democratica (Ydgm), l’organizzazione giovanile del partito filo-curdo Dtp, hanno allestito un campeggio internazionale per ospitare i circa 300 attivisti venuti da numerosi paesi europei. “Non chiediamo la secessione dalla Turchia – spiega prima di partecipare a un seminario sulla frammentazione dei popoli in Medio Oriente Mehmet, studente presso la locale università – ma che vengano riconosciuti i nostri diritti culturali e sociali: non siamo trattati come cittadini allo stesso livello dei turchi”.
L’obiettivo, che per il momento rappresenta più un’utopia, di gran parte dei curdi e delle delegazioni venute da Iran, Iran e Siria per il vertice è costruire le basi di una confederazione che riunisca i popoli della Mesopotamia, una forma statale capace di superare il concetto di nazionalismo, imposto insieme ad altri valori e ideologie estranee alla cultura mediorientale dai paesi occidentali. In Mesopotamia, ripetono in tanti, sono nate la scrittura e con essa la storia dell’uomo, l’agricoltura grazie alla presenza dei fiumi Tigri ed Eufrate, le tre principali religioni monoteiste: per lungo tempo, questa terra è stata il centro del mondo. Finché l’Europa non ha preso il sopravvento ed è cominciata la rivoluzione industriale, quando i paesi europei hanno dovuto cercare in tutto il pianeta le risorse necessarie per far funzionare le nuove fabbriche e preservare la supremazia economica. A completare questo processo, la prima guerra mondiale, al termine della quale le potenze vincitrici imposero la dissoluzione dell’impero ottomano e la nascita in Medio Oriente degli stati-nazione, un concetto completamente alieno a questa terra. La storia dei curdi, come quella dei palestinesi che a Diyarbakir sono gli ospiti d’onore del Forum, è emblematica delle conseguenze dell’imperialismo occidentale. “Grazie al popolo curdo, perché ha aperto la strada della lotta contro il militarismo e il colonialismo, che potranno essere sconfitti solo a partire da questa terra”, dice in inglese Raffaella Bolini in rappresentanza del World Social Forum durante l’inaugurazione dell’incontro. La prima rivendicazione degli organizzatori del vertice è la fine dell’oppressione cominciata all’atto della fondazione della Repubblica turca, quando per costruire da zero una nuova identità nazionale fu vietato l’insegnamento della lingua curda, furono cambiati i nomi dei luoghi (e così l’antica Amida, in curdo Amed, fondata dagli Aramei nel XIII secolo a.C., divenne Diyarbakir), fu fatta tabula rasa di una tradizione e di una cultura con secoli di storia. Ma tra i tendoni montati nel Sümer Park e i padiglioni di un’ex fabbrica di mattoni riadattata a centro pubblico per lo svolgimento di corsi tecnici e professionali, i temi di discussione sono stati numerosissimi. Sei sale in cui sono stati svolti almeno tre seminari al giorno ognuna, seguiti dai partecipanti stranieri grazie a un servizio di traduzione simultanea. La colonizzazione del Medio Oriente, l’anti-militarismo, la questione delle donne in società tradizionalmente patriarcali, le alternative di gestione comunale realizzate dal basso, i diritti dei lavoratori in paesi sconvolti da guerre e repressione statale, la necessità di un sistema d’istruzione che non riproduca i soliti rapporti di potere sono solo alcuni degli argomenti affrontati. Ma è probabilmente il tema della gestione delle risorse naturali e della costruzione di nuove dighe nella regione, ciò che più interessa da vicino chi vive in Kurdistan.
In Turchia, a partire dal 1954 sono state costruite un centinaio di dighe: secondo Işikhan Güler, membro della Camera degli ingegneri elettrici, la realizzazione di queste infrastrutture risponde da un lato a un discorso geo-strategico per il controllo del territorio e rappresenta dall’altro l’attestazione dell’avvenuta privatizzazione dell’acqua, che non può più essere liberamente usata dalle comunità che vivono lungo i fiumi. “Spesso – spiega Güler – queste dighe sono costruite ingannando la popolazione locale, a cui viene promessa l’elettrificazione della regione e raccontato che i nuovi bacini non causeranno allagamenti. In realtà, accade l’esatto contrario: le dighe non sono provviste di centrali idroelettriche e i nuovi bacini allagano vaste zone del territorio al solo scopo di bloccare l’afflusso d’acqua verso altre regioni e spingere così le popolazioni a emigrare altrove: il modo più drastico per ottenere il controllo politico del territorio”. Inserita nel Grande progetto anatolico (Gap), che prevede la costruzione di 18 nuove dighe nella parte meridionale dell’Anatolia, la seconda barriera di Ilisu sul fiume Tigri è l’infrastruttura che suscita i timori più grandi. Il governo turco, nonostante tutte le società europee che contribuivano a finanziare il progetto (tra cui l’italiana Unicredit) siano uscite dal consorzio, ha infatti cominciato ugualmente a erigere la nuova diga, che nei prossimi tre anni dovrebbe sommergere una superficie pari a due milioni di chilometri quadrati, causando tra l’altro la perdita di un importante sito archeologico come la città di Hasankeyf, risalente al periodo dell’impero sassanide. “L’acqua, simbolo di vita, e il suo uso da parte dell’uomo devono contribuire a costruire legami tra i popoli, non diventare una merce da cui trarre profitti – afferma Ipek Taşli della campagna per fermare la diga di Ilisu – Nel nostro paese, la questione dell’acqua viene usata strategicamente dall’esercito turco e dai ricchi capitalisti per impedire qualsiasi genere di opposizione sociale e politica: il problema, che ancora non è stato compreso, è che continuando a giocare in questo modo con la natura non ci rendiamo conto che dovremmo sopportare conseguenze inimmaginabili, per il nostro futuro e del pianeta tutto”.

World Social Forum
The World Social Forum’s 10-year anniversary celebrations will start in the city where everything began: Porto Alegre. The capital of the state of Rio Grande do Sul along with its metropolitan area are going to hold the Greater Porto Alegre 10 years Social Forum, from January the 25th until the 29th 2010. But this will only be the first of several events already scheduled for next year, as the 2010 WSF will have a decentralized and permanent format, with events to be held across the world sharing the global crisis as a common theme.

For more information: click here

Among the already programmed activities for the Greater Porto Alegre event, there will be a 10 years World Social Forum Seminar, organized by the Support Group to the World Social Forum. This event will gather guests from several parts of the world in debates on evaluations and perspectives of the WSF process. Aimed at social networks and movements’ leaderships, delegates of the forums’ organizing committees and intellectuals which identify themselves with the space, this activity intends to contribute to the definition of the course to be taken by the process. It is going to be a space of reflection, not only on the past experiences of the WSF, but mainly on its future.

Since its birth in 2001, in opposition to the World Economic Forum held annually in Davos, Switzerland, the World Social Forum was constituted as an important initiative of mobilization and articulation of the global civil society. From then on it has maintained a central role against “single thought”, keeping dialog with the incipient anti-globalization movement and offering a rich space for sharing experiences, drawing up campaigns and for debates on alternatives to social problems at global level.

Through these 10 years, the WSF stopped being ju mauricruz @ camp.org.br st an event and became a global process. Apart from the world meetings, which since 2004 (Mumbai, India) reached other countries and continents, there are several local, national and thematic events that are today part of the process. As first event of the celebration of its first decade, the Greater Porto Alegre 10 years Social Forum will fulfill an important role of stimulating and boosting the 2010 WSF across the world.

The event is being organized by civil society organizations of Rio Grande do Sul, with support of local governments of the seven cities hosting activities (Porto Alegre, Canoas, Sapucaia do Sul, São Leopoldo, Novo Hamburgo, Campo Bom and Sapirange).

For more information: mauricruz @ camp.org.b

Dis-investment in Israel is the rage now; (September 12, 2009)

            The world community is no longer taking the UN seriously for applying the appropriate pressures on Israel; it is no longer taking the EU and the USA Administration seriously for exercising on Israel applicable human rights laws. Israel has been repeatedly flaunting the laws concerning human rights and the rights of the Palestinians under occupation.  Even the investigation of the atrocities that the Palestinians in Gaza suffered during the invasion from December 2008 to January 2009 is doublful that it will follow the due judicial procedures.

            The international communities of organizations, associations, and even truly democratic States are appealing to boycotting, dis-investing, and sanctioning (BDS) Israel so that it starts respecting international laws.

            Four years ago there were campaigns of boycott and dis-investments to pressure Israel to refrain from resuming building the Wall of Shame that the International Court of Justice has ruled illigal. This campaign has begun in July 2005 and is gaining fresh impetus after the genocidal war in Gaza where more than half the 1,600 victims were civilians and childrens. The entire infrastructure in Gaza was destroyed, including all the UN facilities.

            Powerful political figures and Nobel laureate for peace such as Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and Jimmy Carter have considered that the practices of Israel are a reminder of the aparthide system in South Africa. The BDS campaign against Israel was relaunched during the World Social Forum in Belem (Brazil) on March 30.  The campaign is inciting the consumers not to purchase products made or grown in Israel, especially when proven that these industries are located in the occupied Palestinian West Bank.  The campaign is actively meeting with large surface owners and managers to disseminate information and intelligence as to the prohibited products.

            The Peace Cycle association is pressuring the EU to suspend the cooperation accord for tariff exemptions between Israel and the EU because Israel has failed respecting human rights and the democratic principles that was signed in 1995 and applied since 2000.  This campaign has forced 20% of Israeli exporters to lower their price because they lost substantial share of markets in Jordany, Britain, and the Scandinavian States.

            Cultural, academic, sport, and diplomatic boycotts of Israel have been recurring very often. For example, the musician Roger Waters, the authors Eduardo Galeano, Naomi Klein, Arundhati Roy, and the film makers Ken Loach and Jean-Luc Godard.

            Hertz refused to be associated to a promotional campaign by El Al airline; Sweden refrained from joining an international air maneuvers because Israel was participating. In Belgium, operation “Dexia out of Israel” lead 14 comunities to pressure this French-Belgium bank to stop financing Israeli collectivities located in Palestinian territories.

            The French transport companies of Alstom and Veolia are having hard time securing contracts from Scandinavian States and Britain for cooperating in transport businesses with Israel.  Other enterprises did not wait to be condemned and dis-invested in Israel; for example, Heineken re-located its affiliate Tempo Drinks from the West Bank; the same was done by the Swedish company Assa Abloy specializing in electro-mechanic security systems.

            Many States are accepting to prosecute judicial cases in human rights natures because Israel justice system has not proven to taking seriously these allegations cases.  The USA has been pressuring Spain, Belgium, and France to desist from prosecuting former Israeli Generals, officers, and ministers who committed mass killings against the Palestinians. For example, Dan Halutz, Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, Moshe Yaalon, Doron Almog, Giora Eiland, Michael Herzog, and Abraham Dichter have to get special permission from the Israeli cabimet of Minister to travel abroad for fear of being detained by European court of justices.

            Zionism is an ideology of the colonial and racist period; if the people of Israel want to continue adhering to that ideology then they will realize that it is bad business.

Dear Friend(s)

Karnataka Sex Workers Union invites you to the

Releasing of the report

Trade Union Protections for Sex Workers

By Com. Ashim Roy (General Secretary, New Trade Union Initiative)

On 9^th September 2009, Wednesday, at 4PM

At Ashirwad, 30 St. Marks Road, Opposite State Bank of India, Bangalore

Trade Union Leaders, Human Rights Activists and Sexworker Leaders will address the meeting after the report release.

This report, Trade Union Protections for Sex Workers, shares insights from a meeting held from January 30 to February 1, 2009, in Belém, Brazil, in conjunction with the World Social Forum. The meeting brought together trade unions, sex workers, and other activists who believe that workers in the sex sector deserve basic labour rights, including the right to organize and bargain collectively, to be free of discrimination and to be free from forced labor. The participants came from Bolivia, Brazil, Germany, India, Mexico, Nigeria, South Africa, the United States. Critical issues addressed during the meeting included:

- The links between trafficking, migration and sex work.

- How a trade union analysis of sex work might help address problems such as poor working conditions, or sex worker health and safety concerns – issues that most states and NGOs do not typically care about, since they treat sex workers as either victims or criminals.

- How to shape a common agenda with trade unions, when many do not automatically come from the understanding that “sex work is work.”

- Strategies for organizing within mainstream labour movements, and the ways in which alliances with a union movement could help sex workers combat stigma and police violence, and lobby for legal change.

Karnataka Sex Workers Union (KSWU) is a trade union of sexworkers (women, men and transgender) in Karnataka. KSWU strives to get sexwork recognised as dignified labour, demands labour rights that are guaranteed to all other workers and campaigns for the decriminalisation of sexwork. KSWU defends the rights of sexworkers and resists violence, oppression and exploitation by the police, goondas, government agencies and others. KSWU advocate for fair working conditions and social entitlements and full social security.

For more information, contact: 97310 18694, 99455 25411

In Solidarity

Geetha

General Secretary

Karnataka Sex Workers Union

by Mzonke Poni, Khayelitsha Struggles, 14 April 2009

Another World is Possible: Reflections and Criticisms on the World Social Forum, 2009, in Belem, Brazil

The Road to Brazil

My long trip started on the 20th January 2009 when I travelled from Cape Town to Durban by bus. I spent 26 hours on a City to City bus, moving from Cape Town via PE, East London and Umtata and then to Durban. As much as it was a long journey I must say it I really enjoyed it. I think it was nice touring my own country, getting the opportunity to be exposed to different corners of South Africa from Cities and Townships to Rural areas where the poorest of the poor are located as a result of the past.

As the bus goes from one City to the other you get to know the reality of the country and all the divisions of our society are displayed. You just see the difference between those who have and those who do not have. The gap between the poor and the rich is displayed very clearly.

While you are driving around Cities you see that there is everything from shopping malls, universities, schools, clinics, police stations, electricity, adequate public toilets, banks and beautiful (and expensive) houses.

But once you are more than 30 kilometres away from the Cities you will see poorly built houses made out of mud. They are close to the mountains and with few access roads and with no electricity, water taps or proper roads. When reaching theses areas you get to see the reality of life in our country and to witness the fact that divisions of the past are still dominant in South Africa. The minority still continue enjoying the freedom while freedom still remains a dream for the majority.

I arrived at Durban on the 21st January 2009 at around 20:45. When getting inside the town you go ‘wow’. It’s amazing and very beautiful with lot more high buildings than Cape Town. Of course it’s less friendly than Cape Town. It is also more complicated than Cape Town as well. But the challenges are still the same. It’s not amazing at all to find that the poor are also packed just outside the City in shack settlements which are very dense and which have no access roads at all. As a result people in these shack settlements have been the victims of fires each and every year. Life in Durban’s informal settlements is very frustrating because mostly they are outside the town and the are no recreational facilities nearby the people – no libraries around, no clinics around, no police stations around, nothing around at all.

When getting inside the area you will see the same people that you will see when leaving the area. It is very difficult to get to know people apart from people that are living at the area. Cape Town is a very busy busy place from townships to cities, from informal settlements to formal settlements and people are using areas just to pass from one area to the other, you don’t need to go out of the area or to town if you want to mix or interact with different people. I think this form of interaction opens up people’s minds through sharing of ideas and getting to know other people at the personal level. It gives you social satisfactions because you don’t have limited choices in terms of choosing who you want to socialize with. I think this aspect of life also needs to be recognized as a right not as privilege, as a freedom of socializing with all walks of life with out limitations that are being imposed by geographic locations, socio-economic circumstances and all the political divisions that separate people.

29th January 2009: The way to Brazil

Early on this morning I was little bit nervous, of course. But I was also overwhelmed by the opportunity to leave the country for the first time. But I was not sure of what to expect and I said ‘thanks God’ because I was not traveling alone. I was with my comrade from Durban – the deputy President of Abahlali baseMjondolo – Lindela ‘Mashumi’ Figlan.

I was also very curious to see which Cities and Countries we would pass while flying to Brazil and I thought this might expose me to just being able to see other African Countries. But to my surprise from Johannesburg we just crossed the deserts of Botswana and Mozambique and then after that we went straight to the sea. So I just decided to make use of entertainment facilities of the flight till we reached Sao Paulo in Brazil.

The arrival

It was amazing because we left the country just past ten in the morning and I was told that this is one of the longest routes to fly. But to my surprise we arrived at Brazil the same day at around past 4 in the afternoon.

When landing at Sao Paulo it was amazing for the first time to see such a wide city which is also very dense and immediately my mind made a connection with the work of Paulo Freire and I just said ‘wow this is what inspired Freire’s work and methodologies on popular education’. I also made connections between South African housing practices and international practices, and it become clear to me why Lindiwe Sisulu, the Minister for Housing, is very frustrated with the delays and challenges that are facing her flagship project of N2 Gateway Housing Project in Cape Town. She wants to comply with ‘international standards’, by ‘clearing slums’ that are at next to highways, airports, and along all major routes, by forcefully relocating people that are living at these areas to human dumping grounds outside cities. She doesn’t care what the City looks like to the poor who live there every day. She cares what it looks like to people who fly in to visit.

Language

Just after landing we encountered problems with communication. It became very difficult for us to interact with local people, or even to ask for directions and etc. On our arrival at Sao Paulo the first thing we wanted to do was to buy privatized water as we were instructed by our travelling clinics not to drink unbottled water. At the airport there were lots of stalls selling food, drinks, snacks and etc, so we went to ask how much bottled water cost 500ml, hey! As we asked in English everybody was laughing at us and speaking a language that we didn’t understand. The only thing we could do was to lift up our shoulders, open our hands, smile and say ‘we don’t know’. When they spoke again we’d show them water through the glass, nod our hands and give them US dollars. And again they’ll say something that we didn’t understand until we decided to leave them and go to the other stall. And the same thing happened! On the third stall they gave us a hand signal saying that we must wait while they tried to find someone who understands a little bit of English. It was then explained to us that they don’t trade with US dollars and that we first change our dollars to Brazilian currency. But at that time all the foreign exchange places were closed, so we had to continue with our trip till to Belem, without interacting with local people. At the internal flights the situation was the same.

Guys that were coming from Mozambique were quite comfortable in Brazil. They just felt at home, interacting freely and it was very difficult for them to fill us in because they also couldn’t understand English. As a result of that they decided to distance themselves from us. After they distanced themselves Lindela said ‘Qabane, we should not worry. 2010 is coming and people from all these countries will be in South Africa. I can see now that people are more friendly to people that they were colonized with or by. When 2010 is in South Africa it will be our turn to be more friendly to Britain and all the people colonized by Britain.’

The 30th of January or Day One in Brazil at the Hotel

We woke up just after 7 early in the morning and we had a breakfast at the hotel. We had the opportunity to meet activist of the MST that were coming from Sao Paolo. Lucky some of them could speak little bit of English and they made our stay there at the hotel a little bit easier because we could interact with other people through their assistance through translation. With the help of the MST comrades we were able to share the struggles of the Abahlali baseMjondolo movement of South Africa with other activist from throughout the globe.

It was a pleasant experience to share a hotel with comrades from around the world. We were very pleased that managed to build relationships with people from Palestine, which enable us to understand the feelings and the frustrations of the people of Gaza and the conditions caused by Israeli apartheid.

It was very good also to share a room with comrades from MST. That enabled me to develop a better understanding of MST as a social movement in Brazil’s context and to be able to translate that into the South African context of organizing. It was good to understand the social movement perspective on a global level. I thought this sharing of experiences of movements involved in a mass based resistance was only to Latin America. But to my surprise 5 days later I met with other activists that are coming from Zambia, Southern Africa and they also confirmed the same practices of resistance that are dominant in Latin America are as relevant and dominant in Zambia.

During Lunch Time

On day one at the hotel nothing was clear and also we were not clear with the system of Brazil. So during the lunch we went to the kitchen for lunch as my comrade was dying out of hunger and we were told that it’s only breakfast that is included in our hotel bill and that we were responsible for our own lunch and supper. At this time we were still having dollars not Brazilian money and so we couldn’t trade at all. We decided to take a walk through the streets of Brazil and we went to the park, at the park there were these long trees of mango and there was a guy taking them off the tree using a long pole with an open cap to catch the mangos from the tree. When we passed him he said something in Portuguese and I replied ‘we don’t know’. He said ‘mango’ and I said yes and he gave us a mango which was yellow, sweet, cool and delicious. We were so happy that he gave us the other one. When we left we said thank you and he wanted money. I showed him by hands that we don’t have money and he laughed and said ok. We then left him with, at least, something in our stomachs.

The Weather

The weather was very, very hot. But although it was very hot there was no sun. It was amazing, because all of a sudden it would rain very hard but that would not last long, and people would just go crazy in the rain, really enjoying it. They’ll be wet and within a few hours they’ll dry out as if they were never wet. During the first day of the February, which was the following day, one of our friends from South Africa tried it and the next day she was sick and had to be taken to the hospital, and then from hospital to the private doctor.

The weather was the same till we came back to South Africa and I had to buy an Umbrella. In Belem in March you need to carry your umbrella wherever you go if you are scared of the rain. This is what I was doing because I knew very well that it will be very, very cheap to get flu – you’ll not even have to pay anything – but when wanting to cure it will be very expensive.

The Economy

Wow, it was an awful experience to see the poor participating in the economy. It was awful because it is just the opposite of what South African government is doing to us in South Africa for 2010. In Belem people participate freely but at home the government is evicting poor people who are selling at corners of different streets, especially those that are selling at centre of towns where there will be major events for 2010.

At Brazil the hotels only provide bed and breakfast. The guests are responsible for their own lunch and supper which is available at the stalls just outside the hotel – not at registered restaurants just an ordinary stall. That would never be allowed in South Africa.

People just come up with just their food to sell and chairs. People are doing this freely and are not being intimidated by the police or big businesses or by anyone. The worst part of it is people are free to sell alcohol without the licenses that only benefit reach people.

I think South Africa needs to learn a lot from Brazil in terms of practices because both countries are third world developing countries. What we have to learn goes beyond the economic practices. It is clear that the health infrastructure of Brazil is far better than in South Africa. Their housing approach is also better. It was amazing to see shacks within the city in Brazil, something that South African government would have been very emotional about. Lastly their transport system is also much better. I was amazed by the bicycles which are being used as means of transport by poor people, others were even using them to transport people locally to earn something for themselves.

From the First Day of the World Social Forum

The first day of World Social Forum was on the 1st of February, just after our second day in Belem. It started with a march. It was anticipated that more than 150 000 people participated in the march, which started after noon just next to the Amazon river, where people and different cultures met. It was very overwhelming to get an opportunity to see all the different cultures that exist in Brazil. Brazil it’s more or less the same as South Africa in terms of this – it is also a rainbow nation.

As much as it was an overwhelming experience to participate in the World Social Forum it was not impressive at all. Because the first day of the forum set the tone for the whole of the forum, and it was clear that the forum would be dominated by NGO’s/Academics and by Latin America.

Other people that were not coming from Latin America were unconsciously excluded from the forum, as there were no interpreters at the forum at all, and it was very difficult for people who were coming from outside Latin America to follow speeches or activities that were taking place in the forum from day one of the forum. It was made clear that it was not the responsibility of the organizers to organize interpreters for people, it was people’s responsibility to organize their own interpreters and it was very difficult for us to get that as there was no prior arrangements made. This was a pity. In our struggles in South Africa we have many different languages but our movements always take responsibility for organizing translation – especially for visitors. Of course the NGOs in South Africa want to do everything in English but not the movements.

I must say that in certain cases we were quite lucky as there was people that didn’t mind to translate for us, but that also limited our freedom to chose to participate in the programs that were relevant to the struggles of Abahlali and to South African context. We had to stick most of the time with people who were willing to translate for us and we had to change our program completely and to adjust ourselves to their programs irrespective of their relevance to our struggles or to the South African context.

As much as people were doing their best to accommodate us, it was not at all easy for us. In fact it wasn’t easy for the people helping us either because most of the time people that were willing to accommodate us were not coming from Latin America and they also had challenges in terms of translations as they couldn’t translate for us properly. It was very difficult for us to participate at most of the sessions that we have attended because of language limitations.

We also participated at the march of MST during the day of the address from four presidents from Latin America where Chavez spoke. But we had the same problem with translation again. You could see that people were quite excited about Chavez’s intervention. In his speech s speech he disclosed that Barack Obama had came out to him and said he is problematic and that he does not like him. Chavez also emphasized that the other world is not just possible but it is necessary.

As much as people were very impress by his speech myself I was not impressed at all by the practices that I had seen – the practices of dictatorship, dominance and general top down approaches. I thought that this was a radical space and that, therefore, the event would create space for activists to debate issues and engage with the four presidents that were present. I had thought that people would be able to influence each other directly. But instead it was business as usual. It was just another rally for big men to speak to little people, it was just another opportunity for the presidents to run another talk show and then leave. It was no different to how our politicians behave at home. This is one of the reasons why we have refused to vote for them any more.

In my view this technique whereby big men lecture the people in stadiums is politically based. It the technique that is being used by the politicians when they want to get or remain in power by demonstrating to people their abilities so that people can believe in them as their leaders. They want to look as if they are relevant people for particular positions and so they do this pretence of engaging with people but in reality they are not engaging with people. A real engagement with the people, well, that should be a two way process in which certain problems are being identified through dialogue and reflections and alternative solutions are being explored collectively. It can not be a one way process.

Even the process that is being favoured by the majority of people is very problematic. This is the process where people engaging with politicians by asking questions or stating problems and politicians are given an opportunity to respond. But in fact this process is very manipulative and undemocratic. The politicians they use it in a manner where people will feel that they have be listened to at and their frustrations have been heard.

But the problem with this process is that there’s nothing that is equal. The politicians have got the power and the people do not have it. Those with the power, the politicians, are being viewed as those that know everything. That is why people are told to ask questions and not to make statements, or come up with alternatives. They are viewed as empty vessels. This approach is similar to what Freire calls the banking approach.

In our movements we insist that everyone is equal and we work on that basis. We think together. Everyone discusses and debates together. We never have one person on a stage taking questions. If there are too many people for everyone to participate in a discussion then we just break up into groups and work it like that. This is a democratic approach. If Chavez or any other president came to Abahlali he (or she) would be welcome to participate in the discussions that we are having but as one comrade amongst other comrades. Really, I think that this is a better approach.

Summary

The World Social Forum was a success, due to the fact that many people participated in it and because local people supported it. It also created opportunities to expose the consciousness of local people (Brazilians) to the reality of market based and global based financial policies, which disadvantage the working class people.

But as much as the Forum was a success there was still a difference, a big difference between those who have and those who does not have. This difference remained a serious problem at the Forum due to the fact that people who managed to participate at the event, especially those that were coming from outside Latin America were mostly people that were coming from NGOs. Only very people come from grass roots movements. The Forum says that ‘another world is possible’ but it itself is not another world. In most cases oppressed people are denied the opportunity to be part of an influential global process like this. So the forum becomes a space for an NGO elite to debate and discuss on behalf of the poor and not a space for poor people’s struggles to debate and discuss for themselves.

New ways of incorporating genuine activists and genuine movements need to be created, to ensure that the struggle of the working class is taken forward by the working class. If we do not address the power imbalance in terms of controlling resources for international mobilization the middle class people and academics who associate themselves with the working class people in terms of ideas will remain as the main forces that drives and control the struggle of the poor. The poor will remain marginalized and making noise at different corners of the streets while NGOs and academics travel the world to speak for them.

And we all know that most poor people’s movements have rejected those NGOs that want to be their bosses. For this we have been called criminals. If the NGOs and academics are serious about equality, about making another world a reality, they should stay at home and sponsor the movements in their countries to elect their own representatives to go to the forum.

Conclusion

It was a good thing for ABM to send activists to participate at the WSF. We found that we had to represent not only our ten thousand members, not only South Africa but even the entire Africa. Our presence gave us opportunity to interact with representatives from other African countries and we had opportunity to consolidate solidarity with our brothers and sisters who were recently victimized by South Africans and labelled as foreigners and kwere-kweres. As a movement this was very important for us.

Our presence also created opportunity for us to build concrete relationships with some of influential Latin American grassroots based movements who are well known through Latin America and world wide. We became especially close to MST. This will give us future opportunities to interact more with these movements and to exchange ideas and build more solidarity world wide. Hopefully one day we will be able to create a situation where grassroots movements from around the world can meet each other regularly and directly – a movement forum and not an NGO forum.

As much as we couldn’t come up with programs for the Forum in advance we were able, through our activeness during our stay at Belem, to manage to show our presence at the Forum. We were recognized by many NGO’s/Academics and progressive donors and by the media as well. We were quoted in some local and national news papers and we even participated in a documentary which will be screened in Latin and North America. All this is good. Our attendance at the Forum was very much worth while. But we must still say that because ‘another world is necessary’ therefore it follows that ‘another Forum is necessary.’

By: Mzonke Poni
ABM Western Cape Chairperson

Take your pick of world social ills: militarization, deforestation, corporatization of agriculture, racism, HIV-AIDS, government corruption,  chemical saturation, global warming, third-world debt, the Israel-Palestine conflict, the American-Iraq war, GMO’s, privatization of water, etc.  You’ll find it being analyzed and addressed by one or more of the thousands of groups and individuals at the World Social Forum in Nairobi.

This is the 7th annual World Social Forum and the first time it has been held in Africa.  The WSF is a social space for organizations and individuals form all over the world who conceive of and are acting towards a more just, a more peaceful and a more sustainable world
and against what they see as a world dominated by the rich and powerful and unjust economic policies that harm the most disadvantaged, mainly characterized by the World Bank, the IMF, WTO, militaries, corrupt governments, and the excessive corporate power driving many of these policies.  Most here see the WSF as a network of people striving for grassroots change and democracy.  I attended the Midwest Forum in June 2006 in Wisconsin which led me to consider going to the WSF in the first place.  Europe, Canada, the United States and Latin America hold there own regional forums.

My experience here over the past week has been mixed.  I have been alternately impressed and disappointed, overwhelmed, and inspired.  Overwhelmed because of all the horrible, unnecessary, unjust things occurring everywhere in the world.  It seems the same stories of displacement, oppression, health problems, war, etc. are ubiquitous.  But I am also inspired because there are over 50,000 amazing people here trying to learn more and do something about it and you know that that is just a small fraction of the people around the world who also conceive of another possible world.

But many contradictions abound.  For example, how is it that the WSF that prides itself on its independence from governments and business ends up with sponsorship by CELTEL a leading communications corporation here in East Africa?  How is it that the leading food vendor is a hotel chain owned by a leading government minister?  And that this vendor is selling food at high prices, out of reach of many of the poor the WSF claims to address and who also need to eat.  How is it that the cheaper vendors were situated outside the main gate with no clear marking that they even existed?  How is it that a forum that defends the poor sets fees out of reach of many of those same poor?  How is it that a forum that hosts many groups working on environmental issues and sustainable alternatives doesn’t provide local, organic food to help the area farmers and the land or even have trash-bins, let alone recycling?  Finally, how is it that a forum dedicated to organizing for a better world was so poorly organized itself.  To list a few subpar aspects: the venue at Moi Sports Complex outside of Nairobi was less than ideal, there was little public information, registration was a mess, there was scant media exposure, and several of sessions that I and others attended simply were not taking place and most others started late or were changed without any message as to where it had been moved.  Those that were attended were often very difficult to hear because of competing sessions or noise from outside or failed sound systems.

One could knit pick about a lot of things, but all said and done it was an amazing eye-opening and edifying experience.  Apart from taking in a lot of information and learning about peoples’ stories from around the world, I was deeply inspired.  First, it is rare to see so many diverse people come together in one place working for a more just world.  People came from all corners of the globe: Asia, Africa, South America, North America, Europe.   You look around the room during a session on nonviolent conflict resolution or food sovereignty and you see African Catholic nuns, white European progressives, Middle Eastern Muslims, small scale farmers from Ethiopia and Thailand, Latin American NGO reps, and Hindus.  Race, gender, religion, sexual orientation fall by the way side to tackle the tough issues.  Moments like that give you hope in humanity.  And after my dose of some of humanity’s darkest sides at Auschwitz and Guatemala I needed that boost.

I attended sessions on food sovereignty, a session on the proposed Mexican-American border fence and the Israel Wall, a session on women farmers from all around the world, water privatization, free trade agreements between the EU and Africa, grassroots democracy initiatives, microcredit programs, and many other issues.  The best moments were experiencing several of my heroes:   Two of them are Vandana Shiva and Wangari Matthai.  These women are extraordinary and we should be learning about them in schools the world over.  As far as I am concerned they are the some of the most powerful voices of the present and future.  Vandana Shiva is an Indian scientist and grassroots activist working for sustainable agriculture in India and now the world over.  Sharp, articulate, passionate, powerful…the sort of women we should be learning about in school.

I also attended a session with 3 women Nobel Laureates.  They are three of perhaps twelve recipients in the entire history of the Nobel Prize that have been women.  A few of them joined together to form the Nobel Women’s Initiative.  They have been working on justice and peace issues their entire lives but with the recognition that the Nobel Prize affords them felt compelled to work together to raise even more awareness.

Shirin Ebadi was one of the first female judges in Iran.  Now she is lawyer and professor.  She shared how when she won the Nobel Prize, there wasn’t even a news story in her home country of Iran.  The next day there was a small blurb.  She is a thorn in the side of the regime and religious conservatives because she is a lawyer who fights for democracy and defends the civil rights of women, children, and political dissidents.  In particular she and Jody Williams are deeply concerned about their two countries going to war (The U.S. attacking Iran).

Jody Williams was perhaps the most eloquent and passionate. She is most famous for her work in establishing the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL).  Wangari Maathai was the third.  As I mentioned, she has been a hero of mine for a couple of years but I haven’t had the chance to learn a lot about her and her movement until I came here.  She is the founder of the Green Belt Movement in Kenya, established to help village women and stop deforestation and land grabbing by developers and corrupt Kenyan politicians.  Over the last 30 years she has helped in the planting of tens of millions of trees all over Kenya and inspired campaigns all around the world.  I read her amazing memoir called Unbowed (highly recommend it) when I arrived so I was excited when I found out she was going to be at the Forum.  She was the first woman to receive a doctoral degree in all of East Africa.  Now she is a member of parliament and minister for the environment.

It was fitting that my last session was facilitated by a man from my home state. He heads of the Agribusiness Accountability Initiative based in Des Moines, Iowa.  Small world.  The AAI is a network of NGO’s working towards sustainability and against the centralization of the entire chain of food–from see–to spoon in the hands of large corporations.  Not only was it one the best and most informative sessions I attended, it even started on time!

I am so glad I attended the Forum.  The energy and ideas were contagious and inspiring.  Don’t ever lament that there are no Martin Luther King Jrs. or Gandhis in the world–there are plenty and many of them were at the forum working for another possible world.

Another Friday night is upon us. I am quite pleased to say that I have been receiving quite a few submissions for guest commentaries. I can’t tell you how happy that makes me. Not only does it mean that I get a night off of researching and writing (for the most part). It also means that more and more of you reading this blog are getting involved and researching the things you are passionate about. And there is nothing I could want more from this endeavor than to spur the thought process and engage people’s brains again. Many of you have discussed the fact that you were apathetic for a long time and now find that getting the brain active again is a great feeling. I see the increase in submissions as proof this is happening!

Tonight’s submission comes to us from long time reader “Life of Illusion”. LOI has been reading the blog since way back in the first month or two. He is a frequent member of the conversations, as you all know, and he is passionate about getting this country back on track. He started researching this article a week or two ago and began submitting pieces of it at the beginning of this week. I was impressed with the amount of research he was doing to back up his position. 

As I am apt to say for every guest commentary, the commentary below is not mine. My publishing it is not a show of agreement or disagreement with the opinions and comments of the guest commentator. So with no further delay, this week’s guest commentary:

Life of Illusion – “One Giant Move to the Left”

In thinking about the “March Towards Socialism” that we have been discussing recently, I began to wonder how the left has managed to be so successful in its movement. How can a country like the USA, in less than 100 years, move so far away from the founding principles of liberty and freedom that it would be literally unrecognizable to the founders? In researching, it became clear that this was not a “grass roots” movement. It was a calculated movement, with three major players in swaying public opinion: The media, the education system, and subversive groups working together towards the common goal.

The Media

The first newspaper published in America was Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick, and was suppressed in 1690 after only one issue. It featured an article suggesting the king of France had shared the bed of his son’s wife. This was followed 14 years later by the Boston News Letter, and some years later, by a competing paper, The Boston Gazette. 

The New England Courant, published by James Franklin, Ben’s older brother, was the first real colonial “newspaper”. There were 84 papers printing by the 1770’s, and most were anti-royalty because of the Stamp Act and its tax on paper. By 1800, there were 234 papers, and  each tended to be partisan: Federalist or Republican. The duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr was fueled by controversy in newspapers.

Andrew Jackson started his own newspaper, funneled government printing work to it, and forced his Washington competition out of business. William Hearst and Joesph Pulitzer had competing firms, which brought us the “Yellow Journalism” phrase.  Hearst may have directly hastened the onset of the Spanish-Cuban-American War. In 1897, in his papers, he “demanded we go to war”.  In 1898, he sent a cable to photographer Frederic Remington stating, “you furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war”. Hearst also played a major role in the ” Marihuana Tax Act” of 1937, which effectively outlawed all hemp in the US.

The Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918 by Progressive President Woodrow Wilson had a dramatic effect on the media. A 1941 book by James Mock, Censorship in 1917, noted most newspapers “showed no antipathy toward the act” and “far from opposing the measure, the leading papers seemed to actually lead the movement on behalf of its speedy enactment”. In the book The Great Influenza, by John M. Barry, it is claimed that the reason that there is so little information available about the 1918 influenza pandemic is newspapers felt reporting the event might harm morale of civilians and troops during the war. The media reported, “There is no need to worry, there is no epidemic”.

It is easy to see that the media has had a substantial impact on the United States.  Would there have been a revolution without newspapers pressing the issue? Would we have a Constitution or be a nation without the Federalist Papers, which were really written as op-ed pieces to show the citizenry the proper ways forward for the government? Could the Civil War have been avoided? 

Education System

Chomsky

Have you ever heard of Noam Chomsky? A New Yorker profile has identified him as “one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century”.  Chomsky is one of the ten most quoted sources in humanities, ranking just behind Plato and Freud. He spoke to two thousand listeners on Oct. 18, 2001, at MIT, which was also broadcast on C-SPAN and the Internet. He told them that America is the “greatest terrorist state” and was planning a “silent genocide” against the people of Afghanistan. While this gained little attention here, there is a worldwide audience eager to hear such views spoken from America’s most prominent universities.

Howard Zinn was a neighbor of Matt Damon, cowriter and star of Good Will Hunting, and was invoked as a “genius” in that film. His book, A Peoples History of the United States, has over one million copies sold. He portrays America as a corrupt group of white men exploiting and oppressing Indians and other minorities, begining with Columbus’s “genocide” on Native Americans.The author of some 20 books, Zinn is Professor Emeritus in the Political Science Department at Boston University.

Hobsbawm

Eric Hobsbawm is one of the most honored professional historians in the universities of Europe and America. In his 1995 book, The Age of Extremes, he examines the inherent evil of capitalist democracies and the humanitarian promise of the socialist future. In his autobiography he states, “To this day I notice myself treating the memory and tradition of the USSR with an indulgence and tenderness”. These are his feelings toward a regime that enslaved and slaughtered tens of millions! He is a Marxist and was a long-standing member of the now defunct Communist Party of Great Britain and the associated Communist Party Historians Group. He was a visiting professor at Stanford in the 1960s. In 1970, he was appointed professor and in 1978 he became a Fellow of the British Academy. He retired in 1982 but stayed as visiting professor at The New School for Social Research in Manhattan until 1997. He is currently President of Birkbeck, University of London and Professor Emeritus in The New School for Social Research in the Political Science department.

Gerda Lerner, a University of Wisconsin history professor, left the Communist party in 1956, after Khrushchev revealed the crimes of Stalin to the world.  She has continued her radical career for three generations, condemning western democracies and promoting the progressive cause. Lerner became increasingly involved in progressive causes and joined the Communist Party USA in 1946, though she did not publicly acknowledge her membership until 1982. Lerner has played a key role in the development of women’s history curricula at Long Island University (1965-1967), at Sarah Lawrence College (1968-79), and Columbia University. She is a visiting scholar at Duke University. Quite a bit of influence on the education system in the US for a member of the Communist Party.

And this is to say nothing of the extreme left professors that we see in the news every day now. Today’s students are being hit with barrage after barrage assaulting capitalism, conservatism, and christianity. 

For decades, the left lost on the political field, but they seem to have turned the tide and appear to be winning the battle, by instead waging their war in the classrooms and textbooks provided for impressionable young Americans. The point here is  that while I see so many things happening to our country that seem to defy reason, there must be an explanation. Why would the progressives want to expand welfare? They’ve seen the same numbers that we have, showing that people who were forced off welfare by Clinton raised their income level. What can be the logic in reversing that?

Progressives think capitalism is inherently wrong, that it will deny most people a fair share of what they are due in life. The extreme left has sided with oppressive regimes  such as North Vietnam, Cuba and the USSR.  Despite millions exterminated under the rule of these oppressive regimes, the left has defended their actions as a step along the path to full equity for all people. Moderate progressives do not view those failures as relevant. Just because these attempts failed, does not change the progressive belief that capitalism is unworkable, and must be replaced with a socialist system that has yet to be designed. Nihilism is the will to destroy without a concept of what will be done next.

I believe in God. My belief can be explained with some logic, but ultimately cannot be proven and, therefore, is based on faith. The reason for these actions by the leaders of the left is not guided by logic, but by a faith based belief system. Nancy Pelosi believes she is saving the world. Logic will have no more effect on her than it would an Islamic jihad member. In this way, battling the extreme left is a wasted proposition.

Subversive Groups in the United States

My family drives Fords. I think its a decent company. One skeleton in their closet, however, is The Ford Foundation, which was started by Henry and Edsel Ford, but has not been connected to the company or his heirs for more than thirty years. In fiscal year 2007, it reported assets of $13.7 billion and approved $530 million in grants for projects that focused on “strengthening democratic values, community and economic development, education, media, arts and culture, and human rights.” The Foundation has done some great things, PBS and Sesame Street, for example, were projects they helped create.

However, The Ford Foundation also gave the World Social Forum $500,000 for their 2004 event. That doesn’t sound bad, right?  The World Social Forum met in January 2001, with about 10,000 radicals from 120 countries, including the Brazilian Workers Party, the pro-Castro presidents of Brazil and Venezuela, and Columbia’s terrorist organization, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia. The second year had 100,000 attending. In 2003, of the five hundred American delegates, several were selected to their international council, including a representative from Ralph Nader’s Public Citizen organization, Linda Chavez-Thompson, executive vice president of the AFL-CIO, and Medea Benjamin of Global Exchange

The Ford Foundation funded the American nongovernmental delegation (NGO’s) to the UN World Conference Against Racism, etc. in Durban, South Africa on Sept. 1, 2001. Fidel Castro and others railed against ONLY the US and Israel as racist, imperialist predators, and demanded reparations from America for Africans enslaved 200 years ago (it should be noted that Cuba imported more slaves than the entire America). Colin Powell left with the US delegation in protest. Fifty American NGO’s called on the UN to hold the US accountable for the intractable and persistent problem of discrimination. According to the UN, The American Civil Liberties Union, the National Lawyers Guide (Communist front org.),the Center for Constitutional Rights (pro-Crastro), Jesse Jackson and the NAACP, only America and Israel are racist.

The Ford Foundation has changed its grant policies, requiring reciepiants to renounce promoting terrorism, violence and such. Pinky swear?

Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) was the main organization first protesting the war in Iraq. ANSWER characterizes itself as anti-imperialist, and its steering committee consists of socialists, civil rights advocates, and left-wing or progressive organizations from the Muslim, Arab, Palestinian, Filipino, Haitian, and Latin American communities. This was a front for the Worker’s World Party (supports North Korea) and the International Action Center, formed by US Attorney Ramsey Clark, who has enjoyed representing Communist North Vietnam and North Korea, and Iran under the ayatollah’s, as well as Saddam Hussein’s regime. Many of ANSWER’s leaders were members of Workers World Party at the time of ANSWER’s founding, and are current members of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, a public member of ANSWER’s Steering Committee.

Code Pink at their Finest!

Not In Our Name is a front created by the Revolutionary Communist Party, which supports China.  Realizing their radical position could discredit them, they sought to change their image, and adopted the name Coalition United for Peace and Justice. It had the support of the national Council of Churches and the American Communist Party. Also created were Win Without War and Code Pink. Code Pink is a wholly owned subsidery of Medea Benjamin’s Global Exchange.  They generated (by their own inflated count) a half million protesters in NY and San Francisco, and 10 million worldwide.  The Occupation Watch Center in Baghdad was formed by Code Pink and United for Peace, and has supplied a great deal of propaganda against America’s efforts to set up a stable government.  The media knew all this, but only reported what fit their agenda. 

So do my words come together in any coherent sense?  To me it all ties together. I do not believe in a big conspiracy aimed at taking over our country. But I do believe we have communist front organizations that, after the cold war and the fall of the USSR, have stayed active in undermining our freedoms and promoting a socialist agenda. They have willingly partnered with Islamic organizations with similar goals. I think other foreign nations have contributed to or formed groups whose goal is a weaker America. For example, the global warming movement will have far more economic than environmental impact.

They have placed advocates with agendas in our education system, and have produced a media that seem brainwashed. In 1992, 89% of a survey of DC based reporters voted for Bill Clinton, seven percent for Bush, Two percent for Ross Perot. That Obama won with massive media support is not a surprise. The only surprise is that the media failed so miserably in the Gore and Kerry campaigns. It is vital that we have a reliable, informative news source that reports without bias. Glenn Beck, referencing the sheer number of Freedom of Information requests being filed by Fox News, said,  ”we’re trying, but there is just so much”. 

I think G.A. wrote about apathy being the death of America.  Too true sir, the masses will only accept information when it’s convenient and pleasantly packaged, so that they may sit in their easy chair and sip their beer. We want political change, a return to values in Washington. I fear that will only come after the media finds the will to regain their values and principles. 

The pen is, after all, mightier than the sword.

So there you have Life of Illusion’s piece on the influence that helped push our country to the edge of the socialist/fascist cliff. I guess the question now is do we have the ability to regain our balance and not plunge headfirst into the ravine? 

LOI wished to acknowledge that a large part of this article is written using information from the book, “Unholy Alliance, Radical Islam and the American Left”, by David Horowitz.

Introducción a la Globalidad

Juan Chamero, de la Universidad Caece , Buenos Aires, Argentina, Abril 25 del 2009

Fuente: Madboxpc.com, difundido por Wikipedia

Una acepción moderna de este término podría ser la definida por William J Holstein en el artículo The American Multinational, Unbowed, publicado por el New York Times el 29 de Junio del 2008:

“describirla como un neologismo no funciona, simplemente describe tendencias que has estado manifestándose desde hace décadas bajo nombres similares. La Globalización es el proceso de transformación de fenómenos locales o regionales en globales. Podría también ser descripta como un proceso bajo el cual la gente está unificada en una sociedad común. También puede ser vista como un largo proceso de siglos que acompaña la expansión humana y sus civilizaciones ocupando el planeta y que se ha acelerado dramáticamente en las últimas cinco décadas.

Al respecto, la historia nos enseña que existieron formas de globalización durante El Imperio Romano, El Imperio Persa y La Dinastía Han, cuando el “Camino de la Seda” que arrancaba en China alcanzada las fronteras del Imperio Persa continuando su marcha hacia El Imperio Romano.”

A partir de la Segunda Guerra Mundial la Globalización se ha visto como el resultado de la planificación política de las fuerzas dominantes para romper las barreras que impedían el libre juego del comercio, “supuestamente” para mejorar el bienestar de los pueblos, instrumentar una obligada interdependencia y así despejar el camino hacia una “Gran Paz”. Sello de esta tendencia fue la Conferencia de Breton Woods de Julio 1944.

La Maquila y los “Sweatshops”: No obstante, la Globalización como acción ha generado una significativa reacción internacional –Movimientos anti Globalización- originada fundamentalmente por el no cumplimiento de esos ideales. Efectivamente a partir de ese momento creció la asimetría y la desigualdad entre ricos y pobres y paralelamente creció a niveles impensados la degradación del Medio Ambiente. Un ejemplo de estos efectos son las “maquilas” o “sweatshops” (palabra inglesa equivalente a maquila y que podría traducirse como “plantas de sudaderas”, con doble sentido). Según el sitio Web Global Exchange las maquilas son ampliamente usadas, en particular por las corporaciones de artículos deportivos tales como Nike. En estas plantas ubicadas en países pobres la gente acepta trabajar por muy bajas pagas y contraviniendo legislaciones internacionales y locales con la complicidad de las clases gobernantes locales. Estas maquilas se montan y desmontan con facilidad en busca de “paraísos fiscales” y “paraísos laborales” creando nuevas formas de explotación y esclavismo. Al respecto el premio nobel de economía Joseph Stiglitz y Andrew Charlton escribieron en “Fair Trade for All”:

“El Movimiento anti Globalización se origina como oposición a los aspectos negativos percibidos de La Globalización. Quizás el término “anti Globalización” no sea el adecuado pues representa a un amplio espectro de temas e intereses y mucha gente involucrada en el mismo mantiene estrechos lazos interculturales y asiste y ayuda a refugiados, y a iniciativas ambientales globales.”

Algunos miembros de este movimiento prefieren describirse a si mismos en formas más especificas, a saber: Movimiento Justicia Global, Movimiento anti Globalización Corporativa, Movimiento de Movimientos (Italia) o La Otra Globalización (Francia), la Contra Globalización y otros conceptos diferenciadores similares.

Hacia una métrica justa del bienestar: Las críticas a la marcha de un proceso de crecimiento que podríamos considerar “natural” residen en la naturaleza egoísta del ser humano. Este egoísmo es el que impulsa la asimetría de bienestar en todas las áreas de la actividad humana. En lo concreto las críticas se centran en los siguientes aspectos:

• Daños, muchos de ellos no reversibles, a nuestra Biosfera;

• Elevado “costo humano” en términos de pobreza, desigualdad, mezcla racial impuesta, injusticia y erosión de culturas nativas;

Técnicamente la controversia se centra a su vez en la métrica para medir la felicidad de los pueblos, tales como el Producto Bruto Interno (GDP) y proponiendo otras formas más humanas de medirlo tales como las expuestas en el Índice del Planeta Feliz (Happy Planet Index), creado por la Fundación para La Nueva Economía (New Economics Foundation). Según este estudio, de no mediar cambios radicales en la distribución de la riqueza, nos estaríamos acercando peligrosamente a la desintegración social, a la caída de la democracia, a un irreversible deterioro general del Medio Ambiente que favorecerá la propagación de enfermedades y plagas, ir camino a una pobreza generalizada extrema y a la alienación individual y colectiva.

Noam Chomsky dice al respecto:

“Nadie en su sano juicio puede oponerse a La Globalización, es decir, a la integración internacional. Seguramente ni la izquierda ni los movimientos obreros, justamente fundados en el principio de la Solidaridad Internacional. La Globalización “bien entendida” debe ser la respuesta natural para atender las necesidades de la gente y no solo al servicio de sistemas y poderes privados.

Esto es simplemente propaganda vulgar, como el término “anti Soviético” usado por los represores para referirse a los disidentes. Y no solo es vulgar sino idiota. Tomemos por ejemplo el Foro Social Mundial (World Social Forum) denominado anti Globalización por el sistema de propaganda. Este foro es un paradigma de una Globalización “bien entendida” donde gente de todas partes del mundo se juntan y de todos los rincones del pensamiento, excepto un muy reducido grupúsculo de elites privilegiadas que compiten con el foro bajo la denominación de “pro. Globalización”. Un observador mirando esta farsa desde Marte colapsaría de la risa.”

Paradojas gráficas de la Globalización tal_como_se_muestra hoy

Globalización: el proceso de explotar económicamente a los países pobres conectándolos en forma asimétrica y forzada a las economías dominantes y forzando sus dependencias a la maquinaria capitalista occidental.

Anti Globalización: Movimientos de base para oponerse a esas fuerzas de “mala Globalización” y a sus efectos dañinos y para proponer sistemas más justos de distribución de la riqueza.

Vista nocturna del Distrito Pudong de Shanghai, China. Wikipedia

Activistas en protesta ante las políticas del Banco Mundial en Washington, DC

Cartel de protestas contra el Reunión del G8 en Heiligendamm, 2007.

Nota de la Editorial del Blog:

En las siguientes semanas iremos tratando los siguientes temas de éste fenómeno inacabado que es la globalidad. Nuestro temario sería:

• Rol de los grandes capitales y de los pequeños en la Globalidad

• Posibilidades del Factor Trabajo y su armonización con el Factor Capital

• Posibilidades de humanización del Factor Capital en la Globalidad

• Rol de los Pequeños y Medianos Emprendimientos

• Rol de la artesanía y de las Comunidades Virtuales

• Nuevas formas monetarias emergentes

• Futuro de los Mercados Electrónicos

Tags: Wiliiam J Holstein, globalización, globalidad, camino de la seda, maquila, sweatshops, Gran Paz, Breton Woods, Global Exchange, paraísos fiscales, paraísos laborales, Nike, Joseph Stiglitz, Andrew Charlton, fair trade for all, anti globalización, movimientos anti globalización, la otra globalización, movimiento de movimientos, métrica del bienestar, biosfera, Planeta Feliz, Happy Planet Index, Noam Chomsky, Foro Social Mundial, World Social Forum, pro Globalización, mala globalización, buena globalización, Distrito Pudong, Shanghai, movilización por una Justicia Global, G8, Heiligendamm, formas monetarias emergentes, movimiento justicia global, contra globalización,