It is true that the current economic and political system was not killed by the World Social Forum’s activism. It committed suicide.
The world financial crisis is everywhere in the Forum, from side discussions to entire sessions to Lula’s decision not to attend the World Economic Forum principally not to cause a possible damage to his image by associating himself to part of those responsible for this global situation.
Yesterday a session dedicated to public finances and the financial crisis was discussing possible scenarios but the main point was that world citizens know how the Government is protecting the banks, they just don’t know how it is protecting the people.
The leader of Brazil’s landless workers, Pedro Stedile, during a session with the Latin American Presidents reinforced the need for structural changes and not cosmetic solutions to the current status quo. ‘A new paradigm is necessary, we need to build a system that allows for real articulation between the capital and the social movements’.
The Forum, through its different voices, is legitimizing stronger state intervention in the economy and applauding ideas of state control over banks and important economic sectors. But the Forum, from its initial design, is not supposed to be a singular voice but an open space for all the movements and organizations. It is not supposed to generate any single document that speaks on behalf of its participants. It does not want to become a political tool.
But, Boaventura de Sousa Santos has, for this year, a different view: ‘I have always defended that the decision of being a neutral space is the correct one, but that it shouldn’t be executed in a dogmatic fashion. The historical moment we are currently going through is so crucial, that if the world can’t see a solid position from the World Social Forum about it, it becomes easy to foresee that the WSF has a serious risk of becoming irrelevant’.
This blog posting is a re-post from:
