./english/161.txt:15:Each presents us with new problems, new lessons to be learnt and prompts particular
./english/161.txt:110:history we have to escape from before we can learn our own lessons. (After all, if
./english/192.txt:53:5. It is, in any case, the future about which we need to be thinking. The next ESF will be in Athens in the spring of 2006. What political lessons does the experience of London offer? The most important is that, as the Italian comrades pointed out after Florence, the great strengths of the movement are radicality and diversity. We have managed the near-miracle of developing a movement that embraces an extraordinarily wide social and political range but that has mounted a challenge to capitalist imperialism as a system. This was very evident in London: as at Florence, many of the largest and most dynamic meetings were dominated by the politics of the radical left.
./english/199.txt:33:Unfortunately, rather than accept the basic legitimacy of direct action to make publicly visible contradictions and disagreements within the forum process, some ESF organizers have chosen instead to denounce the recent actions as undemocratic and, even more alarming, racist. Their discourse sounds eerily like past statements from James Wolfensohn, George Bush, or Tony Blair. Why do they support direct action only when directed against others? On the other hand, it is unfortunate that activists chose an anti-Racist workshop to make their demands heard on Saturday night, although this has more to do with the fact that Ken Livingstone was speaking than anything else. There is simply no justification for the arrests on Saturday night or Sunday, and even less for the subsequent campaign of delegitimation. Yet all is not lost. There is still plenty of time for ESF organizers to react more constructively, and begin to incorporate the lessons learned leading up the next forum in Athens . On the other side, before the inevitable calls for abandoning the forum come again, we might wait and see, recognizing that the politics of autonomous space allow us to remain true to our own values, forms, and practices, while tactically intervening within the official forum to move out from our radical ghettos and simultaneously spark constructive change.
./english/201.txt:91:The difference was stark, and it was one which contained within it a telling lesson about the whole event. For this social forum was a showcase for the dual nature of this movement . On one side there is the old left, barren of ideas, wilting in numbers and influence and drawing all its lessons from the past. In the absence of mass support it is forced to turn to underhand tactics to maintain its influence.
./english/238.txt:73:At the same time, in an organising process lasting just under 12 months, problems develop cumulatively and become institutionalised before anyone has noticed or developed the means to challenge them. Babels cannot shy away from its own responsibility in this regard. Through its inseparable development alongside the ESF, the majority of nationalities and languages of Babels interpreters, translators and coordinators also belong to the same Western Europe elite. This means that however much we criticise the ESF organisers' insular outlook, the way Babels has evolved inevitably acts to some extent as a reinforcing mechanism of bias. More seriously, while Babels may dislike being treated as a service provider, it has so far done little other than follow the market model imposed on it by the ESF organisers. This implies the urgent need for all of Babels volunteers, be they interpreters, translators or coordinators, to stand back from the ESF process and once again engage in a deep process of collective self-reflection and self-criticism in order to learn the lessons of London .
./english/246.txt:29:Needless to say, what was pointed out in subsequent evaluations is that the cultural side of the WSF/Youth Camp was once again restricted to the stages and concerts. Of course, that had not been the intention, but it is evident that, in a situation were people hardly know their way around, the only spaces that need no divulgation – because they pretty much divulge themselves – are the stages, and that is where people are bound to go; once more, culture had been ‘a bit on the side’, ‘the icing on the cake’. However, I believe those attempts, however failed they may have been, are still defensible in what they had set out to do, and even the failures themselves pose certain lessons and challenges which I will try to summarise below.
./english/282.txt:10:No one could sensibly argue that academic work - and journalism - is of no use to movements. When studies of the inequality of income and wealth distribution appear, for example, we often use them to strengthen our case. We gain usable technical knowledge from ecologists about the workings of pollution, and from geneticists about the dangers of GM foods. The knowledge we have of movements in the past - with which we sometimes identity, and from which we sometimes draw practical 'lessons' - is mostly derived from the work of academic historians. Journalists and academics provide vital information about movements in other countries. Anthropologists - and SF writers! - help us build vision of different ways our species has lived, might live.
./english/282.txt:73:Second, movement intellectuals produce another kind of essentially practical idea: the strategic and tactical proposal. This is a complex proposition which links together a reading of the nature of the present situation (including its relevant history) with an action plan (including a risk-assessment etc) for the movement in the immediate future. It speaks to a 'we' with which the movement intellectual claims an immediate identification. That 'we' may be a formally defined 'movement' or 'party', or may be framed as 'ordinary people,' 'workers,' 'the Catholic community', 'Blacks', etc. Such propositions take a typical form: Given the overall situation, and our purposes and resources within it, this is how we should act. The argumentation for such proposals may indeed include a whole raft of what Lofland terms 'generic propositions' of different kinds: lessons drawn from previous movement experiences as well as pieces of folk wisdom and moral homily (e.g., 'when the going gets tough only the tough keep going'). The strategic proposal seeks to grasp a sufficient account of the totality of a current situation, in order to guide action, rather than to capture a single aspect of the situation in a form where it can be compared with similar aspects in different situations. Its persuasive force depends on its capacity to combine an explanatory account of the complexities and contradictions of the recent past and present with a proposal for active intervention in the immediate future. So generic propositions are useful, but only as more or less casual supports for practical arguments. (8), (9)
./english/331.txt:182:I had intended to teach a sequence of lessons as laid out in the table below. Unfortunately, due to several circumstantial factors I was unable to teach the whole unit before the end of my school placement. In accordance with the model I have described, the first two lessons were primarily focused on teaching key terms and concepts rather than discussion of issues.
./english/331.txt:183:Although in theory I should have had four lessons to deliver the unit of work, in practice I had half this time:
./english/331.txt:211:This was unfortunate! I recognise that in practice this will happen in teaching, although normally a teacher would not be leaving in the middle of a term. Generally I would have more time in which to plan and adapt the sequence of intended lessons to account for unforeseen circumstances and ensure smooth progression within and between topics.
./english/331.txt:218:The year 11 class I taught was mixed ability. Anecdotally I could see a gender difference in approaches to the content of lessons – the girls tended to make value judgements on the nature of information presented; the boys were less likely to; however this is likely to be confounded by prior and average attainment levels.
./english/331.txt:219:The department’s assessment policy created difficulty in making any objective judgement on this: pupils are recorded simply as having met the lesson objective or not, with an occasional higher level assigned for exceptional work. Almost without exception pupils achieved the objectives for the first three lessons. While I would hypothesise the majority of the class to be capable of simple abstract reasoning and application of ethical principles to the issues, I was unable to test the hypothesis.
./english/359.txt:78:Without attention, layering of participants’ material circumstances abets as well even less warranted differences -- due to gender, race, class, place of origin, and fame -- in how people are regarded in general, in the media attention they are accorded, and in the visibility and promotion they receive. Often attention afforded rises in nearly inverse proportion to the activism people do, to the extent they are anti-hierarchical in their own lives, and to the lessons and insights they have to offer and to share with other people at the WSF's events. It isn't surprising that in the youth camp there is sharing and equity dwarfing what prevails in the hotels. So while it would probably be impossible to do without the hotels, it is the logic and culture at the hotels that needs examination. Of course we need presentations, sometimes even to very large audiences, but it ought to be possible to reduce or even eliminate relative passivity and subordination of those who come to the WSF mainly to listen, and of those who present but have less known names.
./english/360.txt:78:Without attention, layering of participants material circumstances abets as well even less warranted differences -- due to gender, race, class, place of origin, and fame -- in how people are regarded in general, in the media attention they are accorded, and in the visibility and promotion they receive. Often attention afforded rises in nearly inverse proportion to the activism people do, to the extent they are anti-hierarchical in their own lives, and to the lessons and insights they have to offer and to share with other people at the WSF's events. It isn't surprising that in the youth camp there is sharing and equity dwarfing what prevails in the hotels. So while it would probably be impossible to do without the hotels, it is the logic and culture at the hotels that needs examination. Of course we need presentations, sometimes even to very large audiences, but it ought to be possible to reduce or even eliminate relative passivity and subordination of those who come to the WSF mainly to listen, and of those who present but have less known names.
./english/363.txt:155:This should be least of a problem for those movements with a sense of movement history (Barker 2001), and most of a problem for those movements which fetishise their own historically peculiar modus operandi as a universally valid method (which, apparently, other people were too stupid to hit upon). In fact, however, the relationships are not that linear. To mention one particularly important point: long-standing activists in movements with a developed self-consciousness have often "learned" that various things are impossible. In "downtimes" this can be developed to the point where in practice the whole spectrum of actually-existing movement activity is ruled out of order as insignificant, defeated in advance, and in general futile. It is not to deny that a sense of history is useful, handled properly, to note that there are sometimes advantages to not knowing that certain things are impossible, to not knowing that "we can't do that", and to not having learned the apparent "lessons" of defeat.
./english/363.txt:160:One way of expressing this is in terms of "thinking defensively" and "thinking holistically". To survive the downtime, we need to learn to think defensively. We are conscious of the effort involved in sustaining movement activity and participation, of the limits of our own potential effectiveness, and of the potential mistakes that we can make. All of this can very easily turn us - and I include myself in this - into arch-conservatives of movement practice: schoolmasters who demand absolute submission to our own hard-won lessons before we will even deign to consider worthy of our attention new kinds of popular activity.
./english/367.txt:93:An ideological think tank connected to some Maoist groups in India has come out with a publication asserting that the WSF is a creation of imperialism. In a nutshell, the following is a summary of the points made by the publication entitled “The Economics and Politics of the World Social Forum: Lessons for the Struggle against ‘Globalization’” by the Research Unit for Political Economy (RUPE):
./english/387.txt:45:The new peasant movements have been deeply influenced by the social doctrines of the Church. At one of the plenary sessions, Fray Beto, the Brazilian Catholic theologian, asked the delegates how many had been influenced by religious teachings: over 90 percent raised their hands. Popular religiosity, the fusion of biblical lessons, and religious values has had a direct effect in stimulating the new generation of peasant leaders, along with Marxism, traditional communitarian values, and modern feminist and nationalist ideas. The organizational discipline, personal integrity, and moral commitment that infuses much of the movement comes from their earlier religious background, even as many of the militants have taken their distance from the conservative Church hierarchy and the Vatican.
./english/392.txt:352:successful − and that draw critical lessons for the long and hard struggle that
./english/392.txt:378:objective of his work is to draw out lessons and issues that can strengthen civil politics more generally.
./english/394.txt:8:The story of the WSF’s Charter of Principles raises important lessons for any initiative such as the World
./english/403.txt:95:One of the great lessons that the Zapatistas have learned within their communities and which they have shared first with other Mexicans and then with the world is the fundamental importance of listening. Of listening, and understanding, before you speak.
./english/403.txt:119:Cleaver, H. (1998) ‘The Zapatistas and the International Circulation of Struggle: Lessons Suggested and Problems Raised’, http://www.eco.utexas.edu/faculty/Cleaver/lessons.html, accessed 26 July 2001.
./english/470.txt:67:Without attention, layering of participants’ material circumstances abets as well even less warranted differences -- due to gender, race, class, place of origin, and fame -- in how people are regarded in general, in the media attention they are accorded, and in the visibility and promotion they receive. Often attention afforded rises in nearly inverse proportion to the activism people do, to the extent they are anti-hierarchical in their own lives, and to the lessons and insights they have to offer and to share with other people at the WSF's events. It isn't surprising that in the youth camp there is sharing and equity dwarfing what prevails in the hotels. So while it would probably be impossible to do without the hotels, it is the logic and culture at the hotels that needs examination. Of course we need presentations, sometimes even to very large audiences, but it ought to be possible to reduce or even eliminate relative passivity and subordination of those who come to the WSF mainly to listen, and of those who present but have less known names.
./english/519.txt:48:The global movement in which the Forum’s existence is based on has brought to us three important lessons: it demonstrates the efficiency of network-like organization to articulate current struggles (which opposes itself to pyramidal structures, which are conservative and bureaucratic); the revalue of internationalism within the left; and valuing pluralism within social and political composition of any emancipation project without establishing hierarchy among its components. The Forum-like format (open-space, self-organized, structured in network and non-decision making) copes with these challenges and must be defended against any kind of past “international directions” nostalgia.
./english/571.txt:99:Desai, Rajani X (2003) The Economics and Politics of the World Social Forum: Lessons for the Struggle against 'Globalisation'. New Delhi: Aspects of India’s Economy.
./english/579.txt:16:In addition, a conscious effort was made (with uneven success) to promote more thorough reflection on the relationship between political parties and social movements, on discussing alternatives to neoliberal globalization, and on the role of the nation-state and nationalism in an era when many are calling for new structures of global governance. The extent to which various activist groups were able to utilize Mumbai WSF to enhance international coordination, networking and planning for common actions clearly varied, and the results of their endeavours will only become evident in the future. What hopes and lessons for India and globally does WSF 2004 carry? Before addressing this crucial question, there is another shorter term question that needs a direct answer. What has been, or is likely to be, the political impact of Mumbai WSF on the current Indian political scene?
./english/579.txt:46:III - The WSF: Hopes and Lessons
./english/579.txt:56:Rather than maintain the hectic pace of a WSF every year which drains the time and energy of too many activists away from their basic areas of implantation and concern, it would be much better after the 5th WSF in Porto Alegre next year to schedule WSFs for every second or even third year. This would allow for holding more forums at intermediate (city, provincial, national and regional) levels. The time has surely also come to take a breather and synthesise the experiences and lessons of the major local, national, continental and global forums that have so far been held.(10) The one great lacuna in the Social Forum project is the failure to extend it to North America, particularly the US. Even at the WSFs, American participation has always been disproportionately much smaller than the size and importance of the progressive sectors of American society has warranted. This insularity must be broken.
./english/580.txt:39:The programme group was also required to draw lessons from the functioning of the Programme Committee of the ASF. While, during the ASF, we had set up thematic groups, these groups did not function optimally. As a result a bulk of the work was done centrally. The question was, is there a way to have a more decentralised manner of functioning or do we assume that this would be too difficult to attempt? Experience at the ASF also showed that programme and mobilisation often went hand in hand, i.e. the groups that got mobilised to attend the ASF were largely those who also showed interest in organising events at the ASF. The question arose as to how we could build on this experience. The ASF experience was important in this regard, because – at least in India – mobilisation efforts centred much more crucially than in the WSF on looking at the Social Forum as a process and not an event. As a result most states (provinces) in the country had their own social forum processes and some state level event preceded the Asian Forum. We will return to this aspect in slightly more detail later.
./english/587.txt:1:Lessons from Mumbai
./english/595.txt:6:That being said, several lessons stand out, among which are the following :
./english/611.txt:40:What about this as a possibility? The Social Forum process, at every level, is about information exchange. One big improvement would be if the information exchanged, especially that which is highlighted and emphasized in the most major and best promoted sessions, swung more toward issues of vision, strategy, and practical lessons from what people are doing, and away from descriptions of oppression and analyses of oppressions all too familiar systemic roots. But even this reorienting of focus, as positive as it would be, would still leave us with a gigantic apparatus being used only to talk, dance, sing, and otherwise experience one anothers views and styles, and to do so only for a few days each year. Cant the WSF apparatus do something that is more sustained, without pulling apart inwardly?
./english/611.txt:62:I suspect that many other problems of the forums - such as having the same speakers repeatedly, overemphasizing analyses of ills and underemphasizing reports and lessons of activism and ideas for vision and strategy, unbalanced gender and geographic representation, and financial difficulties for attendees made bitter by bonuses for the notables, might evaporate were this kind of dynamism and exemplary participation developed. I also suspect many new innovations and exciting elaborations would percolate upward from the people who daily engage in the activities that make the forum possible. This would all be hard to do, of course. But at some point, dont we have to move from talking about people having a real say to people in fact having a real say?
./english/654.txt:1:Lessons from Porto Alegre