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Solidarity Trip to Another World (2 of 6)
17.Jan.04 Alternative spaces -- Across the highway, Mumbai, India
Another gathering -- the Mumbai Resistance, which bills itself as an alternative to the WSF – is also taking place. Some of their main criticisms are that the World Social Forum excludes groups with a more militant approach (the WSF includes non-violence as a part of its charter); that the World Social Forum is a “debating society” with no clear focus and no specific actions; that the World Social Forum has been dominated by large NGOs and trade unions, and is funded by foreign foundations and various governments; and that it promotes “globalization with a human face” instead of a clear rejection of the existing, imperialist system. It states as its goal “a genuine socialist order,” and many of its participating speakers and organizations are described as Marxist or Maoist.
While MR2004 and others may want gatherings like the World Social Forum to organize and start a global revolution all at once, it’s a much larger, longer struggle than that, and the people of the world are not aligned monolithically enough to do that anyway. However, we also recognize the many valid critiques of the World Social Forum, one of which was that the Forum focused more on exchanging information on what was wrong with the world and less on actual strategies and lessons learned. We also recognize that these issues are complex. For a group from the SF Bay Area with the privilege of education (collective, institutional and self-teachings), we focused our energies on attending as many strategy sessions as we could and were disappointed that they wasn’t more space for those type of sessions. We also recognize that in the process of political consciousness, identifying the op/pressing issues is most definitely one of the first steps to take and that there were folks for whom workshops focusing on information gathering were extremely valuable. There have been many other articles and analyses focusing on the shortcomings of the World Social Forum so we will not spend much more time here analyzing them.
One of the main sticking points between the two gatherings is WSF’s commitment to non-violence (ahimsa), whereas MR2004 had a Maoist-revolutionary-armed resistance-militant approach. Militant armed resistance is often a point of contention amongst folks struggling around the world, so in the very least MR2004 was able to call attention to certain perspectives that WSF took out of the equation off the bat. The physical divide (how ever marginal), between MR2004 and WSF stands as a clear symbol of just how crucial it is to try to bridge our differences, so that we may work together; a crucial component of building a real participatory democracy is to be able to have alternative spaces and dialogues.
The majority of participants at MR2004 were also at the WSF, so ‘at the end of the day’, lessons were exchanged through both venues, and alternative perspectives exposed. On both sides, there were people organizing against the system and powers that be. Rather than the highlighted differences, however, we observe the similarities in struggles that the delegates of WSF and MR2004 face -- it seems to be a more productive path to organize TOGETHER rather than attacking each other. Thankfully, most of the delegates seemed eager to do so.
