./english/40.txt:14:Out were big plenaries with endless lists of celebrity speakers; in were focused seminars involving networks whose roots were first put down in the previous forums in Florence or Paris and are now coming to maturity. Out were corporate sponsorship and high price entrance fees; in were solidarity funds, low entrance fees and thorough international organising work, enabling over 1,000 activists from Turkey and 3,000 from eastern Europe to participate..
./english/44.txt:48:The network has decided to hold a meeting towards the end of 2006 in Paris to discuss an initial meeting concerning this Charter of Principles for another Europe, to continue and to build on this process in order to provide a common tool showing that alternatives to neo-liberalism do indeed exist.
./english/54.txt:23:easier than in Paris (2003) and London (2004). Concerts on the Friday and
./english/54.txt:206:Twenty million responded to this call. Yet in Paris a year later - despite
./english/54.txt:238:paralysis, which the ESF/ASM has found itself in since Paris (2004). Many
./english/147.txt:82:The movement for the rights of immigrants began in Paris. During the 1990s, hundreds of immigrants without papers—the Sans Papiers—started one of the most exciting rebellions. This rebellion detonated a movement.
./english/147.txt:84:Led by charismatic speakers, they occupied two Paris churches. Soon after that, they formulated a model of resistance and struggle that has spread through Europe. In Germany, the initiative “no one is illegal” was decisively influenced by the events in Paris.
./english/150.txt:10:Euromarch has developed into a network of activists who are organised under the auspices of a pan-European secretariat based in Paris with liaison committees operating in countries throughout the continent. Policy is debated and demands are formulated at open »Assizes« which are held at approximately 6 monthly intervals. Regular coordination meetings are held at national and pan-European levels and these have tended to focus on declarations and organisational matters for the protest activities which have surrounded the EU summits in Amsterdam, Luxemburg (November 1997), Cardiff (June 1998), Vienna (December 1998) and in Cologne (June 1999).
./english/176.txt:2:Exploring the role of the internet in the ‘movement for alternative globalization’: The case of the Paris 2003 European Social Forum
./english/176.txt:10:This paper attempts to explore the role of the internet in the processes of organization and mobilization of the ‘movement for alternative globalization’, which is often characterized as an ‘internet-based movement’. It reports the findings of a survey undertaken in the Paris 2003 European Social Forum (ESF), which asked 257 respondents about the contexts that mobilized them to participate in the ESF (political/voluntary organizations, friends/relatives, workplace/university, news media), as well as the modes and methods of c72
./english/176.txt:11:Exploring the role of the internet in the ‘movement for alternative globalization’: The case of the Paris 2003 European Social Forum
./english/176.txt:17:This paper attempts to explore the role of the internet in the processes of organization and mobilization of the ‘movement for alternative globalization’, which is often characterized as an ‘internet-based movement’. It reports the findings of a survey undertaken in the Paris 2003 European Social Forum (ESF), which asked 257 respondents about the contexts that mobilized them to participate in the ESF (political/voluntary organizations, friends/relatives, workplace/university, news media), as well as the modes and methods of communication that were used in each context. The findings question the claims about the internet-based character of this movement, as face-to-face contact seems to be the predominant mode of communication. The survey also challenges the much discussed potential of the internet to mobilize politically indifferent or marginalized individuals, as a comparison between users and non-users of the internet revealed that users tended to be mobilized for the ESF through political or voluntary organizations.
./english/176.txt:24:above claims by investigating the use of the internet in the mobilization for the Paris 2003 European Social Forum (ESF), one of the most important events for the European part of the ‘movement for alternative globalization’. The results derive from a survey undertaken in the Paris 2003 ESF, which asked 257 respondents about the contexts that mobilized them to participate in the European Social Forum (political/voluntary organizations, friends/relatives, workplace/university, news media), as well as the means and methods of communication that were used in each context. This paper aims to present and interpret some of the preliminary results and situate them amongst the wider context of studies in social movements and communication. On a more general note, this study is part of wider effort to restore communication analysis in its rightful place within social movement theory, which even though implicitly or explicitly recognizes the importance of contacts and interactions for the identity, ideology and organization of social movements, has thus far failed to incorporate a more detailed study of communication within its research framework.
./english/176.txt:48:Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 2(1) 80Apart from the boundaries between public and private, mass and personal, I would argue that further inquiries into the role of the internet in social movement activity should also question the clear-cut distinctions between the offline and the online, the ‘virtual’ and the ‘real’. Such distinctions were a defining characteristic of early internet studies, which tended to conceive the internet as a space or a ‘new frontier’, as a virtual world which ‘actually removes heavy users from the exigencies of everyday life’ (Ibid, 15). This distinction is partly reflected in current theorizing concerning the role of the internet in social movement activity. For instance, in a recent article about social networks and movement participation, Diani proposes that further studies should examine ‘whether “virtual,” computer-mediated ties may replace “real” in the generation not only of practical opportunities, but of the shared understandings and – most important – the mutual trust, which have consistently been identified as important facilitators of collective action’ (2004, 352). This shows a concern over the substitution of ‘real’ ties with computer-mediated ones, echoing earlier criticisms of the internet as a virtual domain which has the power to replace the real one. However, this type of theorizing fails to acknowledge ‘the continuities between the offline and the online’, necessary in order to ‘understand and explain how the new potentials are actually used’ (Slater 2002, 542-543). In that respect, it is worth considering ‘virtuality’ or ‘reality’ not as the inherent properties of a specific medium but as the result of its social uses by people. As Slater notes, ‘[i]t is the making of the distinction that needs studying, rather than assuming that it exists and then studying its consequences’ (Ibid, 543). Furthermore, it is worth bearing in mind that the creation and maintenance of social relationships takes place through multiple communication media. For instance, a recent study of the social use of the internet by college students discovered that ‘the more people with whom students communicated using the internet, the more they communicated with face-to-face and on the telephone’ (Baym et al. 2004, 316). Therefore, the internet may reinforce rather than replace other forms of communication in the maintenance of social relationships. In the case of social movement ties and participation, these findings suggest that the distinction between ‘virtual’ and ‘real’ ties may indeed be misleading, as ties are constituted through various media. This should divert the focus of current research from the distinction and comparison between these different media and orient it towards their interplay and complex articulation. The survey Against this backdrop and as part of my PhD fieldwork, I undertook a survey of participants in the Paris 2003 European Social Forum exploring the mechanisms Kavada, Exploring the role of the internet… 81of mobilization for the ESF, as well as the
./english/176.txt:50: The event I decided to focus on, the European Social Forum, constitutes one of the most significant annual events for the European part of the ‘movement for alternative globalization’. Inspired by the World Social Forum, the first ESF was organized in Florence in (2002) The second one, which took place in Paris in November 2003, comprised several hundreds of seminars, workshops and plenary meetings spanning three days and reportedly attracting 40,000 participants. The main function of the ESF is to act as a space that brings different actors, organizations and individuals together to discuss the state of the world, to network and to form useful relationships. In other words, it is an event which helps this movement to define itself and what it is for, to attract new participants and also to identify, loosely and informally, its ‘membership’.
./english/176.txt:52: I distributed 280 questionnaires in the venues where the Paris ESF was taking place and received 257 questionnaires on the spot. The questionnaire was fairly simple, asking respondents about their demographic characteristics, their media use, as well as their methods of mobilization. For reasons already mentioned, it was not possible to obtain a representative or even random sample. The Paris ESF was taking place in four different locations across Paris, so its participants were dispersed in the various venues. What is more, the registration database of the Paris 2003 ESF, containing some information about the participants who
./english/176.txt:53:Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 2(1) 82registered individually (and not as part of an organization) for the ESF was not made publicly available by the organizers after the event. It is thus very difficult to know whether the sample examined in this study is representative of the population who attended the 2003 Paris ESF. Survey Results The sample The sample consisted of 257 respondents, with women accounting for 46% and men 54% of the sample. Respondents were also predominantly young as 64.5% of the sample was 30 or less than 30 years old. Table 1 presents in more detail the valid percents for each age category. Table 1. Age less than 20 14.8% 21-30 49.6% 31-40 13.7% 41-50 9.0% 51-60 5.9% over 60 7.0% The majority of respondents were also fairly educated as 32.3% of the sample was university graduates. However, 17.1% was high school graduates, while 5.2% had not finished high school and 0.8% had not had a high school education. These figures can be explained by the young age of the sample (14.8% was less than 20 years old), which implies that some the respondents may not have had the opportunity to finish high school and attend university. Table 2. Education None 0.8% High school incomplete 5.2% High school graduate 17.1% Business, technical, school after high school 4.0% Some university, but no 3 or 4 year degree 17.1% University Graduate 32.3% Masters graduate 16.7% PhD degree 6.0% Don't know 0.8% Kavada, Exploring the role of the internet… 83In terms of profession, an
./english/176.txt:88:Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 2(1) 84Mobilization Contexts and Modes of Communication The survey further asked respondents about the contexts that mobilized them to participate in the Paris 2003 European Social Forum. ‘Mobilization’ was defined in terms of obtaining information about the ESF and organizing attendance. The questionnaire distinguished between four mobilization contexts, political or voluntary organizations, friends or relatives, the workplace or the university, and the news media. Distinguishing between different contexts was considered necessary for reasons of analytical clarity, even though it tends to disregard the possible overlaps between the various contexts. For instance, one can be friends with people who belong in the same organization, or be mobilized through a political organization with a university branch. The survey also included some questions about the means of communication that were used in each mobilization context. For instance, did the communication with the political or voluntary organization take place through the telephone, an email list, face-to-face, or the organization’s website? Did respondents talk to friends or relatives face-to-face, on the phone, or via email? The respondents could select one or more means of communication, helping us gain a first insight into the range of media used in each context. An initial breakdown of results showed that 74.2% of the respondents were mobilized by a political or voluntary organization, 65.2% through friends or relatives, 34.1% through the workplace or the university and 36.1% through the news media. Out of the 190 respondents who were mobilized through a political or voluntary organization, 61.6% communicated with the organization face-to-face, 51.1% through email lists and 34.2% through the organization’s website. Table 5 also shows that 18.9% were contacted through mailings, 20% through leaflets and 27.4% through posters. Table 5. Mobilized through political/voluntary organizations Face-to-face 61.6% Email list(s) 51.1% Website 34.2% Mailings 18.9% Leaflets 20.0% Posters 27.4% Kavada, Exploring the role of the internet… 85Face-to-face contact was also the main
./english/176.txt:110:Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 2(1) 86Associations between communication methods What becomes apparent from this initial breakdown of results is that in each mobilization context respondents used a wide range of communication methods sin order to mobilize for the Paris 2003 European Social Forum. This raises interesting questions about the relationships between these different communication methods. Is face-to-face communication in one context associated with face-to-face contact in another? Is the use of the email negatively associated with face-to-face communication or the use of other media? In order to examine this interplay, I checked for statistically significant associations between the different communication methods used both within and across the various mobilization contexts.2 The crosstabulations produced only weak associations between the different communication media; some of them were hardly surprising, whereas others were quite unexpected and, therefore, interpreted with caution. Within the political or voluntary organizations’ mobilization context, a weak association was discovered between respondents using email lists and respondents getting information from the website of the organization. In addition, a stronger relationship was recorded between respondents being informed through leaflets and through posters. As for respondents mobilized by friends or relatives, a weak association was found between the use of email and use of the telephone. In addition, respondents using email to communicate with friends or relatives also used email to communicate with the workplace/university in order to mobilize for the European Social Forum. Furthermore, within the workplace/university mobilization context weak associations were recorded among almost all of the means of communication. In that respect, face-to-face contact is related with the use of email, the telephone as well as leaflets/posters. Apart from face-to-face communication, the use of email is also related with the use of the telephone and the web. Finally, the use of the web is also associated with the use of the telephone, as well as with leaflets/posters. Therefore, the workplace/university seems to constitute a much denser communicative universe than the contexts of friends and relatives or political and voluntary organizations. A possible interpretation of these results points to the nature of the workplace/university as a site of mobilization. In that respect, the workplace/university constitutes a prime location of daily face-to-face contact as, contrary to other contexts, it is a setting where individuals spend a significant part of their day. This may explain why face-to-face contact is by far the main mode of communication used by the respondents mobilized through this context. What is more, the need to perform certain work-related tasks daily, as well as the availability of communication media and resources, may indicate that work Kavada, Exploring the role of the internet… 87or university colleagues are regularly in
./english/176.txt:124:Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 2(1) 90Discussion of Results and Conclusions What the preceding analysis effectively demonstrated is that within every mobilization context a wide range of media and modes of communication have been used in order to bolster participation in the Paris 2003 European Social Forum. This raises interesting questions about the relationship between the different modes of communication, their interplay and articulation. Thus, instead of making simplistic distinctions and comparisons between these different modes, it is worth examining in greater detail their relationships and the ways in which one influences another. The existence of statistically significant associations between different types of communication both within and across different mobilization contexts constitutes a useful starting point. The inspection of possible associations revealed some expected and some counter-intuitive results. For instance, the fact that respondents mobilized through the email lists of political or voluntary organizations were also mobilized through the organization’s website is hardly surprising. The same can be said for the relationship between the use of email in the workplace/university and the use of email to communicate with friends and relatives. However, the finding that mobilization through news websites has a weak association only with newspapers is quite unexpected, as one would anticipate that this type of mobilization would relate to mobilization through at least one internet application (email, email lists, and especially websites) in any of the other three mobilization contexts (political/voluntary organizations, friends/relatives, workplace/university). This analysis further revealed that within the workplace/university mobilization context the use of one mode of communication is associated, albeit weakly, with nearly every other mode. Therefore, the workplace/university seems to be a very tight communicative realm, contrary to other contexts such as political or voluntary organizations and friends or relatives. As it was already mentioned, this can be attributed to the nature of the workplace/university as a mobilization context which constitutes a prime location of face-to-face contact as it is a site where individuals spend a significant part of their day. In addition, the use and availability of different communication media, necessary for the accomplishment of work- or study-related tasks, may also facilitate other activities, such as mobilizing for the European Social Forum. This effectively shows that the interplay between different means and modes of communication may be affected by the mobilization context where their use is located or with which they are associated. Kavada, Exploring the role of the internet… 91The initial breakdown of results further
./english/192.txt:4:1. The third European Social Forum in London (14-17 October 2004) provided further evidence - if more were needed - of the vitality of the altermondialiste movement. It also confirmed - after Porto Alegre and Paris, Mumbai and Florence - that the social forum remains an astonishingly dynamic and successful political form. The success of the London ESF can demonstrated in various dimensions:
./english/192.txt:27:The ESF in London was smaller than its predecessors in Florence and Paris, which each attracted around 50,000 people. This is hardly surprising: the altermondialiste movement first began to take shape in Europe with the formation of ATTAC in France in 1998; since Genoa the movement has been strongest in Italy. In Britain there has been a very strong anti-war movement, but only a widespread, but diffuse anti-globalization consciousness.
./english/192.txt:39:3. These disagreements spilled over into several attempts at disruption. Overall these incidents had very little impact on the ESF. The vast bulk of events went on completely unaffected by them, and most participants in the Forum and the final demonstration and concert didn't see them. But both because they received some attention in the media and on the net, and because this is the first time that an ESF has been successfully disrupted (an attempt to attack a Socialist Party representative in Paris was foiled by security guards), these attacks are worth discussing.
./english/192.txt:44:Every effort was made to accommodate them: for example, the London ESF provided an Autonomous Space along the lines of those organized in Florence and Paris. As agreed at the European Preparatory Assembly, all meetings of the UK Organizing and Coordinating Committees were open. But many of those associated with the autonomists expressed hostility to the experience of the Social Forums as mass events and therefore to the participation of the unions and the NGOs. To have given way here would have led to an ESF in London dramatically smaller than any of its predecessors and confined to a self-selecting circle of the already converted.
./english/192.txt:49:The pattern has been the same with the ESF. Florence received support from the regional government. In addition to help from the municipalities of Paris, St Denis, Bobigny and Ivry, the Paris ESF received €1 million from the office of the right-wing Prime Minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin. No one criticized the French comrades for this, presumably because we all understood that a mass Social Forum needs money and money means compromises. In the case of London this money was provided by a mayor who, despite his mistaken decision to rejoin the Labour Party, has consistently supported the anti-war movement. Why are different standards applied to London than to the other Social Forums?
./english/194.txt:6:Our positive judgment, obviously, does not hide the difficulties that did agitate this Forum. An organization that was not up to the standard of the event, a certain rigidity, gave rise to small disputes that were strongly emphasised in some circles and that Haidi Giuliani, interviewed by our newspaper, defines as «a lot of noise over nothing» In the sense that the essence of the event does not change: the movement still centres around the search for one's political space and, with this strong tool in hand, equips itself with the means by which to launch its own initiative. Then there are the contradictions: for example, speakers in the assemblies are always male, white and fifty-year olds - a thing that provokes unease in young people and women; trade unions are sometimes committed and sometimes not; the inclusion [or otherwise] of a variety of experiences is not always exemplary - and it must be said that the representatives of the Italian movement always know how to say the right words about this, as shown by the handling of the final assembly. All this is a push towards the self-reforming of the Forum: it will be discussed on 18 and 19 December in an assembly in Paris and, presumably, also at the various national levels.
./english/194.txt:12:Secondly there it is a problem of democracy, and of effectiveness, inside the movement itself. The proclamation of the assembly of Paris in December is an awareness of this problem: the people making the decisions are still few and this can create a detachment, a dispersal. The political space designed by the Forum should be followed by many other spaces, thematic, local, transversal, centred on permanent campaigns that allow the different subjects to intervene and to make more decisions.
./english/197.txt:17:I'm also surprised and distressed to note that the programmes of Social Forums tend not to focus on the truly key issue: power. If we're going to have all these plenary sessions, they should at least be geared to providing the audience with fresh insights into what the powerful have in store for us if we're not quick and smart enough to thwart and outwit them. We need to recognise the hard truth that they are much better organised than we are, at both the European and international levels. They've got the European Commission and UNICE (the European employers' union); the whole United States government, the Transatlantic Business Dialogue and the Paris and London Clubs (dealing with public and private Third World debt); the TNC's tax-dodges and mega-mergers; financial market freedom; the WTO and the GATS-you get my drift. What sorts of effective ripostes are we developing in our Social Forums to meet these challenges? Well, yes, we do regularly condemn war, poverty, human rights violations, obscene profits, etc, accompanied by soaring rhetoric. I'm sure that's got our adversaries positively trembling in their hand-made boots...
./english/199.txt:31:Moreover, the 2002 action had a concrete impact. At the International Commission meeting that spring in Barcelona , we learned there were no plans for a VIP room the following year. On our side, many of us in the Movement for Global Resistance in Barcelona realized we could have a positive effect by creatively engaging the forum from the outside. Thus began our part in a series of discussions at the Strasbourg Border Camp, Leiden PGA conference, and elsewhere around creating an autonomous space in Florence with "one foot in, and one foot out." Several different spaces ultimately emerged, including the Hub and projects organized by the Disobedientes and Cobas. Although the Hub in particular was perhaps more outside than inside, and was also widely criticized for its marginality, the autonomous space concept had caught on, and would be reproduced in different guises and to varying degrees at subsequent forums in Porto Alegre , Paris , and Mumbai. The autonomous space model has perhaps come to its fullest fruition this year in London .
./english/200.txt:2:While the short history of the World Social Forum has been connected almost exclusively to Porto Alegre, the European Social Forum was conceived as a "nomadic" event: After Florence and Paris, it fell to London to play host.
./english/205.txt:7:1 — From Paris to London
./english/205.txt:11:The London bid for the ESF was presented in Paris during the second edition as the result of an agreement between the Socialist Worker's Party (SWP) and the Greater London Authority (GLA). It was discussed and approved at a closed meeting, one of those that still abound in Social Fora everywhere – like those that prepare the agenda of the Social Movements' Assemblies. The decision to present London as an alternative was never debated among British movements; in fact, the GLA (and the group behind, a small Labour tendency called Socialist Action, basically composed of advisers to the mayor, Ken Livingstone) had never shown any interest in the process at all, whilst the SWP, by means of its myriad front groups (Globalise Resistance, Stop the War Coalition, Project K etc.), although active in the WSF and the ESF, had made systematic efforts to stop the spontaneous process of organization of Local Social Fora, in places such as London, Manchester, Leeds and Cardiff. The GLA's involvement was a demand made by certain key actors in the European process, such as Attac France, to make sure the event was financially viable. The beginning of the organizing process in December in London came as a surprise to many.
./english/205.txt:62:The path leading from London 2004 to Athens 2006 begins in Paris, in November, with the Preparatory Assembly of evaluation of the process just finished and the beginning of the one to come. It shouldn't be much to expect it to be a burial of the British stage: it is highly unlikely that Socialist Action will remain involved after this, and the SWP will be left alone in the role of justifying the unjustifiable. However, to turn it into a simple condemnation of ‘the British exception' will mean that a significant opportunity to discuss the future of the ESF and the Social Forum process as a whole will be lost.
./english/209.txt:13:Another peculiarity of British politics which has presented a challenge to the organisation of the ESF in London is the democratic weakness of local government. In Florence and Paris it was, after all, the support of left dominated municipalities to the tune of millions of Euros which made the Forum possible. Paradoxically, the weakness of local government in London became a source of undue local authority control of important aspects of the ESF process. The peculiar politics of London and its relation to national politics is another essential part of any guide to the London ESF.
./english/209.txt:19:Getting tied up with the ambitions of local politicians is a risk that Social Forums take when they accept the support of a political authority. No doubt Olivio Dutra , governor of Rio Grande Do Sul and Tarso Genro , mayor of Port Alegre , had their own political agendas in hosting the World Social Forum. The problem with the GLA is not so much Livingstone but the methodology with which his political staff at the GLA carry out his will. They are led by a small group of people from Socialist Action, one of the somewhat conservative factions of the Fourth International. They work according to an explicit managerial philosophy and an interpretation of democracy which is in many ways quite the opposite of the participatory democracy of Porto Alegre . This small group - no more than around 12 - of political managers has disproportionate power because, although Livingstone is formally a member of the Labour Party, he is not under any live democratic party pressure like the mayors of Florence , Paris and Porto Alegre . Democracy is simply the four yearly, electoral relation between himself and the voters of London .
./english/209.txt:31:Another positive factor has been the creative way the ‘horizontals' have reacted to the negative aspects of the process. Instead of walking away they have put extra energy into organising ‘autonomous spaces' ( www.altspaces.net ) which will, de facto, be a welcome part of the diversity the weekends activities. The work of the European Preparatory Assembly has also been exemplary in building on the experience of Florence and Paris to give a lead and sometimes a gentle push to those in London unwilling to work in new ways.
./english/209.txt:35:The ESF as a whole is at a moment of consolidation, moving beyond the euphoria of Florence and Paris . Through the challenges that London presents, the ESF will have become more self aware of the principles which make it so novel and how practically to make then effective. The organisation of the Forum in Greece will present a wholly different set of problems to test and develop those principles once again!
./english/216.txt:8:The fourteen Attac organisations present at the European Attac meeting in Innsbruck December 3-5 would like to make the following contribution to the ongoing discussion as regards the future development of the ESF process, and the European meeting of December 18-19 in Paris.
./english/226.txt:8:• The French organizers of the extraordinary European session in Paris are asked to devise the agenda and the by laws in such a way as to ensure two separate rounds of dialogue for all country delegates, one on the issue of the present state of the ESF process, and the other on future perspectives and needed changes. This should happen before the general debate is started, to enable a general opinion to form on these two issues within the European movement and, at the same time, to prevent country delegations who are stronger in numbers to dominate the rest of the session.
./english/226.txt:12:• In order to facilitate an easier discussion during the Paris session, we are stating here our points of criticism of the ESF process, the perspectives and the needed changes.
./english/226.txt:18:The main problem seems to be the inability or the unwillingness of the groups of the far end of the political spectrum of the movement to seek consensus. In London, to put it simply, the opponents were unions and autonomous groups. Potential mediators, crudely put, took sides of the opponents, Socialist Workers Party, CP Britain, CND and Tobin Tax Initiative, some NGO's held with the unions. Attac, local Social Forums and other NGO's and Anarchist groups held with the Autonomous groups. A lack of willingness to seek consensus had revealed itself earlier and in different contexts. For example, in Paris it proved very difficult to convince the Italian basic unions to agree to a common European day of mobilisation on the 3 April 2004 together with the Europeans Trade Union Association, demonstrating against the dismantling of the welfare state.
./english/229.txt:4:PARIS (DECEMBER 18-19, 2004)
./english/229.txt:8:The following notes, based on a collective debate that took place in Rome on November 8th, aim at disseminating a number of considerations and proposals of change regarding the organization and development process of the European Social Forum, prior to the extraordinary meeting of the European social movements, which will be held in Paris on December 18th and 19th.
./english/229.txt:11:The London Social Forum has already been a matter of debate and its events have already been discussed in great depth and length; the overall conclusion derived from both positive and negative feedback is that there is a necessity to reassess the whole preparatory phase as well as the final one. The list of targets, as defined during the London Social Movement, against war, neo-liberalism and racism cannot be achieved alone by the regular meetings, they need to be incorporated into activities as part of the European networks with the scope of creating an ‘auto-reform’ within the boundaries of the Social Forum. The preparation and the “managing” of the European initiatives - already decided in London - must be brought to common responsibility and, in Paris, we need to define methods, contents and workshops to achieve these goals.
./english/229.txt:31:The introduction of various forces in single countries cannot be delegated only to the structures of the organizing country, whose “grievances” make sometimes the decisional and organizing phase difficult. This appears decisive also in Greece, where important TU, political and social areas are still out of the ESF process, and we have to act so as to have them in the “Athens process”. In this sense, it is important to bring the proposal made in London in again, i.e. to create – and we need to start ritgh now, on the occasion of the Paris meeting - an European delegation of the ESF, which is able to involve the most significant greek components that aren’t included in the ESF, into this process.
./english/229.txt:39:The work group for the meeting of Paris - Italy
./english/232.txt:6:People participating in the UK Local Social Forum Network met in Sheffield on the 4/5th December and found consensus on this document to be brought to the Assembly which is going to be held in Paris the 18/19 Dec 2004.
./english/233.txt:13:· Local social forums had an inadequate part in the official programme. Unlike the Paris ESF, the costs of setting up their networking ‘space' were not covered by the London ESF ticket price or venue-finding arrangements. Local SFs had to make their own arrangements in the `alternative' spaces apart from one seminar at Alexandra Palace
./english/233.txt:39:· The ESF needs to be thought of as a continuing political process. It is time to ask, what have we learnt about political issues and actions (as well as about organising process) through Florence , Paris and London ? What has been achieved politically through the ESF process since 2002 ?
./english/233.txt:49:· Care should be taken not to accept state or local state resources if these come with ‘strings' attached. But pragmatism is needed about accepting state funding; it had worked in Florence and Paris and the idea of never accepting state funding did not find favour with the meeting being reported here.
./english/234.txt:3:ESF contribution to the discussion at the Paris meeting
./english/234.txt:5:The third European Social Forum has shown the necessity of a change in the organizing formula and process of the forum itself. After Paris-Saint Denis, the European global-movement entered into a new phase. We have to report, on one side, the still positive presence of the constitutive elements of its "birth act" - the crisis of the consensus on the war and liberal politics, the tendency towards the coordination of initiatives on an European scale, criticism of the political representation of social struggles – but also, on the other side, that we did not reflect enough on the social composition of the movement and on the motivations of practice.
./english/234.txt:7:In Florence , and partially in Paris/Saint Denis, the movement represented itself as it was, it was a snapshot of the existing. A reach set of aspirations, experiences, differences, crossed by the will to cover new ways for social transformation, in an attempt to anticipate the future. The difficulties met in London and in the several meetings of the European Preparatory Assembly have been determined only partially by the "specificity" of the national organizing committees. In fact, the relationship between the Forum and the national and European social dynamics has entered into a tension. It is no longer sufficient to locate a "public space" in which the different sensibilities, networks, associations, committees and so on, could meet each other and discuss about the possible alternatives to the present world. The "social issue" is moving contradictorily towards the discovery of converging points between a material condition and moments of common initiatives which could be able to make a step ahead with respect to the modalities that we have known in the past.
./english/234.txt:13:Tavolo Migranti dei Social Forum Italiani; Act Up-Paris, France; Amplitude-no one is illegal, Germany
./english/238.txt:7:Abstract: Language and communication needs are at the heart of the Social Forums. The emergence of Babels, the international network of volunteer interpreters and translators, demonstrates that alternatives to market capitalism can and are being actively produced through the ESF process. Unfortunately, like Florence and Paris before it, the London ESF continued to promote and communicate in the languages of the ‘power elite' whilst marginalising all others, with negative consequences for equality of participation. This article describes the Babels story so far before critically reflecting on the 'politics of language' as a contribution to the debate on the future direction of the ESF process. We conclude that in order to make the ESF, and all Social Forums for that matter, genuinely internationalist affairs from now on, trade unions, NGO, social movements, networks and individuals must work hand-in-hand with Babels at the beginning of every process, while Babels must pro-actively fight to put language politics at the heart of the Forum.
./english/238.txt:28:The success of Florence led to the emergence of new Babels coordinations in Germany , UK , and Spain alongside the original French and Italian pioneers. It also prompted more consideration of language issues by the Paris ESF 2003 organisers with Babels given decent office facilities, computers, a longer preparatory process and a relatively large pot of money (£200,000) to coordinate and innovate with. Boosted by Babels' participation in the counter-G-8 conferences in Evian and Annemasse, the Paris ESF was able to draw on over 1000 Babelitos from a volunteer pool four times that number.
./english/238.txt:41:The third and perhaps most important principle of all is Babels commitment to defend and promote “the right of everybody to express themselves in the language of their choice” (Babels charter). For example, for the London ESF Babels insisted that ‘official' and ‘unofficial' language distinctions be abolished after the experiences of Florence and Paris, where the limited language pool of interpreters combined with the inherent bias of the Forum's organisers to make English, French, German, Italian and Spanish the official and thus overwhelmingly dominant languages. As Emmanuelle Rivière a professional interpreter and coordinator with Babels-UK explains, this outcome led to some serious soul-searching within the Babels network as to its own role in the Social Forum:
./english/238.txt:61:To begin with, we must all accept and attempt to address the fact that the ideals of diversity and inclusion within the Porto Alegre Charter still remain largely unrealised in many Social Forums, especially the ESF. Like Florence and Paris before it, the large majority of the 20,000 participants – and interpreters – at this year's London ESF were again mainly white, able-bodied Western Europeans. This failure over three years to significantly expand popular participation of those either living in or originating from Central and Eastern Europe and the global South, not to mention from the disabled and deaf communities, cannot be simply explained away by the systematic refusal of visas (the disgrace of London), problems of disability access or the gargantuan cost of international travel from outside the EU – the ‘politics of language' has also played a central part.
./english/238.txt:65:While it is true that language hierarchisation is a reflection of the continued dominance of West European political movements in the ESF process, the ESF organisers also heavily influenced the ‘demand' for languages through restricting the supply. From an early stage, it was decided that the London ESF would be a much smaller event than those witnessed in Florence and Paris . The main organisers effectively made sure of this by setting very high entry fees and only planning for around 20,000. They also believed that in such circumstances, most of the participants would come from Western Europe and thus began to communicate almost exclusively in English whilst asking Babels to translate important documents for the website into the other main languages. This inevitably acted as a major outreach barrier to the social movements of ‘majority Europe ' and beyond because many people did not believe that their languages would be spoken. This was reinforced by the huge travel costs and the failure of the ESF organisers to put into place an adequate system for helping participants – including interpreters – to receive Visas to enter Britain .
./english/240.txt:13:While the reality in Europe is that the strength of the movements derives from largely self-organised migrants groups with their own set of demands, supported by some of the more internationalist trade unions, the RN imagined the trade unions as being at the forefront of the social movements. Based on this contradiction, the pre-ESF meeting of autonomous migration related groups ignored the existing RN proposal of themes and suggested speakers for seminars and organised an amazingly broad set of interventions both inside and outside the official ESF programme. Just to name a few: workshop on the IOM campaign was organised by Kein Mensch ist illegal; migration as a social movement was discussed by tavolo dei migranti, Kein Mensch is illegal, Act up/ Paris, or Precarity, Migrants and Social Movement brought together speaker from Spain, France, Britain and Italy, and of course in Middlesex where the two days were packed with issues around migration.
./english/240.txt:21:To highlight this exclusion of undocumented migrants, refugees and asylum seekers from participating at the ESF, several collectives such as the Sans Papieres Lille and Paris, the Wombles, the Voice and the Noborder network called for a demonstration on the first day of the ESF in Dover, Calais and Waterloo. Certainly, borders cannot be removed for an ESF-event, but in 2004, the ESF Organising Committee raised additional borders which effectively restricted free movement. Consequently, no delegate of the official ESF participated in this action or expressed solidarity.
./english/241.txt:15:Concerning the Social Forums process specifically, the question is starting to be addressed with the appearance of new actors. Concretely, there now exists an active Social Forum (SF) Memory working group depending on the World Social Forum International Council. This is a global space to coordinate and facilitate the archiving and systematization initiatives of Social Forums and to establish a protocol of memory coming from each forum. A European partner to this process has also emerged in the guise of the European group for systematization and archiving the information, knowledge and communication generated by the European Social Forum (ESF) process. This is a working group depending on the ESF European Preparatory Assembly. There is also the work developed to systematize the contents of debates and seminars at the Paris ESF 2003 and the Florence one. Unfortunately, the London ESF organizational system doesn’t allow us to have many expectations about the documenting of the London ESF by the UK organising committee and the ESF office, as a lack of attention paid to archiving, systematization or participative communication has created difficulties or disrupted several initiatives.
./english/241.txt:40:It is a piece of research explicitly tailored to action for the critical transformation of the current reality. The research pursues the creation of a knowledge that is valued for its practical effectiveness in generating changes, as opposed to an objective and contemplative theoretical knowledge, as in the traditional academic manner; knowledge that generates and maximizes action and whose fruits serve the process of constituting new antagonistic subjectivities through social movement convergence processes. In the sense of practical effectiveness the core of the Guide is to build useful “networking tools” such as a Directory and contact details of the collectives and organisations which have participated to the ESFs of Florence, Paris, London, organized thematically and by region; and a Map of the European networks developed within and around the ESF process. The level of utility is defined by the capacity of the use-builders of the Guide itself to make it grow through the identification of actors with the networking process, of resources for the action, of reflection for social transformation.
./english/241.txt:88:Memory ESF Paris 2003 http://www.fse-esf.org/
./english/245.txt:9:This report seeks to assess some of the achievements and limitations of electronic based communications and media strategies employed for the 2004 ESF in London. It does not comment on the previous ESFs based in Paris and Florence.
./english/245.txt:57:One crucial factor for the ESF should be the involvement of the "Media of the Movements" – i.e. the progressive community media which is based in our constituency. However for the 2004 ESF these were treated as inferior cousins of the mainstream corporate press. There was an assumption that they would just provide coverage anyway. So instead of any campaign to involve them, there was little public encouragement given, until the very last minutes when some telephone calls were made to journalists of all types who attended the Paris ESF to encourage them to come to London. Press passes for the ESF were to be available to 'proper' journalists with National Press Cards, but while assurances had been given to media activists in London that community media would be able to gain press passes and access to the ESF media centre, this was never officially stated via the ESF website. Indeed during the preparatory process the media centre had been treated by many as "non-political" - as a purely practical issue disconnected from any political discourse. Some people even going as far as to ask how we can deal with ‘this problem of IndyMedia people and community media wanting to use the media centre’!
./english/248.txt:17:The involvement of the state was also nothing new. When the city of Florence hosted the first ESF in 2002, it donated the massive Fortezza da Basso for the event. State involvement was even more widespread during the Paris ESF in 2003, which relied on large donations from all levels of government ranging from local municipalities to the President's office. The difference in London was not the extent of state support – which was considerably down on previous years – but the price extracted for it. The GLA established its own parallel organising structures and used its funding to exert an unprecedented level of political control. This led to a lack of creativity, with practical tasks outsourced or dealt with bureaucratically. In particular, the Mayor of London's office pursued a managerialist approach that is quite at odds with the participatory ethos of the forum.
./english/249.txt:9:I have been participating in the preparatory assemblies since Istanbul in March, and have followed it from the sidelines since after Paris . I had a great time at the ESF in London , I achieved some good contacts and I also learned lots. I was with a group of newcomers to the ESF process, young union activists, who went here to learn and to enforce their activities back home. Generally, they went home with useful knowledge thanks to good people who arranged good and useful seminars and workshops. Seen from this perspective, the ESF in London was a success.
./english/249.txt:11:At the same time, it has to be noticed that far fewer people participated in London than in Paris and Florence, and the level of conflict amongst our own ranks seemed to be far, far higher. The first fact can have lots of explanations: the ESF was more expensive, it was in the north, not in the Latin speaking south, some activists may experience ESF-fatigue, but also some might have stayed away because awareness of the problems of this year's event. Seen this way, the ESF can hardly be claimed a tremendous success, though it would also be an exaggeration to say it was a fiasco.
./english/249.txt:15:I have been told from people who participated in the first meetings after Paris , that the “ London bid” was promoted with promises of lots of money to do a great event. Obviously, there was les money to support this year's ESF than the previous years and it wasn't possible to offer free accommodation as was done in Paris . This was not a good start of the process. Before I arrived at the preparatory assembly meeting held in Istanbul in April, I joined the ESF mailing list, expecting to get information on what was to be discussed there. I never received any. Of course this made it impossible for me to discuss the ESF with my people here.
./english/249.txt:21:After the Istanbul assembly no minutes was ever made. Of course this enforces the power of the “inner circle”, making it very, very hard for new organizations or people who are not “nerds” with political meetings to have a say in the process. This was corrected after the Paris working group meeting after strong demands from several people from NGOs from different countries. We even got an agenda for the Brussels meeting.
./english/249.txt:23:Unfortunately the problems with the leadership of the meetings continued. For one thing, we often seemed to use tremendous amounts of time on discussing who was to speak on which plenary, and how to merge which seminar proposals with each other, leaving very little time to discuss other issues such as, for instance, the main slogans for the demonstration. But worse: the chair did not make a great effort to lead the meetings. Thus, everyone talked about what they found important and nobody knew in detail what was being debated. The chair concluded on certain issues and left others unconcluded. I am not saying that this was necessarily a deliberate strategy. But it is clear that the result is that after a meeting, lots of issues are left with only vague conclusions or none at all. Maybe this is one of the explanations for the different opinion on issues like what decision was made on the Iraqi speaker at the Paris meeting. Whether or not, it again leaves lots of power to the inner circle and undermines democracy.
./english/251.txt:16:The European Social Forum was born in 2002 at the World Social Forum (WSF) in Porto Alegre where the decision was taken to set up regional social forums. Originally there were three countries interested in hosting the ESF: Italy, France and Greece. It was decided that Italy would host the ESF in November 2002 and Paris would host it the year after. The semi-official structures that arose out of these two ESFs created three or four loci of decision-making power. First, there is a local committee set up in the city where the ESF will take place. In the UK this was the UK Coordinating Committee (UKCC), which met every Thursday at City Hall. This is where all practical matters involved in organising the event can be discussed and hopefully resolved on a regular basis. Anyone who is involved in political organising or campaigning can be a part of this committee. This committee answers to the national organising committee, which is the second highest decision making body of the ESF. In the UK, this was the UK Organising Committee (UKOC). Meetings of the UKOC were held approximately once a month. In the ESF process, this committee is open to anyone in the country who wishes to be involved. This is in contrast to the WSF process where the membership of the Brazilian Organising Committee (BOC) was originally closed to all except the eight founding member organisations. In the India WSF 2004, the Indian Organising Committee was larger and organisations earned their position on the committee by officially affiliating to the WSF. This more open structure is now being mimicked by the BOC for the WSF in 2005. Despite these differences, wherever the forum takes place, all decision taken locally are expected to be reported to this national organising committee to be approved of and/or amended. Finally, and most importantly, there is the European Preparatory Assembly (EPA), the highest decision making body of the ESF. These meetings are held approximately every other month in various cities across Europe and are open to all who can afford to get to them. These meetings create an opening for people from all over Europe to input into the ESF process, thereby making it a European process and not just a local event.
./english/251.txt:18:There is however another locus of power in the official ESF organising process: the office. For every ESF an office space is obtained (either by paying for it or by donation or a mix of both) and several people are hired to staff the office. In London there were two offices, one for the ESF and one for Babels. In all, nine people were employed full time by the ESF company and many others who were employed by the Greater London Authority (GLA) were working on the ESF in and out of the two offices. In Paris, several people were paid by their organisations or trade unions to work full time for the ESF. In addition to these full time staff there are also many full time and part time volunteers who work in the ESF office unpaid. The office staff is officially there to carry out the decisions taken by the local, national and European meetings.
./english/251.txt:20:These structures are the official macrostructures through which the ESF is meant to be organised. However, after actively having helped organise two ESFs and one WSF, it has rarely been my experience that these structures function entirely as they are meant to. This sometimes results in a gap arising between the official (or formal) and unofficial (or informal) structures of the ESF organising process. Even under ideal circumstances, in the day-to-day practice of organising an ESF there is no one body which has final decision-making power over everything. Nor could or should there be. Regardless of any decision-making structures that are set up, decisions will always be taken through a variety of different groups and people, and through a process of negotiation between these groups and people, be it at a local, national or European level. This has been the case in Italy, Paris and London. Nevertheless, the London ESF 2004 witnessed a stark shift in decision-making power, where it was not only the case that ESF structures were being adjusted for the day-to-day organising requirements (as they have always been to varying degrees), but also that alternative structures were being created.
./english/251.txt:68:While I have seen genuine good will on the part of most people participating in organising the ESF, there is not a commitment by everyone to put the group first or to consensus, despite it being one of the guiding principles of the ESF. And what commitment there is diminishes day by day. In Paris we witnessed a struggle to use consensus decision-making without a very good sense of how it worked, but with a genuine commitment to making it work. Since then, even the way the word ‘consensus’ is treated has shifted greatly. Whereas in Paris ‘consensus’ was used as a powerful word to invoke shared values, in London it was perceived by many of the key organisers as a problematic word used mostly by trouble-makers. If the EPA wants to decide not to use consensus as a decision-making process and to place value instead on another type of meeting or structure, then we should do so, but it must be clear.
./english/259.txt:39:It seems to me that this meeting was indicative of a current zeitgeist and effervescence of the theory:practice:praxis nexus. It is part of a number of new and emerging initiatives – some of which have bubbled up in isolation but which are overlapping, coalescing and re-constituting in novel ways. CSGR is linked in several ways to this activity in the UK context. For example, I was part of a group of six people who registered a Radical Theory Workshop at the November 2003 European Social Forum in Paris - a workshop which attracted an unexpectedly high number of participants. This effort is continuing via an e-list and plans to organise a one-day Radical Theory Forum to coincide with the next European Social Forum, as well as to register possibly more Workshops within the Forum process itself.
./english/261.txt:28:A comparison of action learning and action research
./english/275.txt:148:The development of phenomena such as Indymedia, the Social Forum process, and the current anti-war movement have then supported and developed this remarkable process, for which the nearest genuine points of comparison have to be sought in 1968.
./english/275.txt:150:A second, ‘top-down’ way of approaching the problem is to focus on the social totality. In this perspective, it is in large part the confrontation with the core institutions of global capitalism that has made this communication between movements possible.66 Initially through the processes of neo-liberalism and war, felt throughout the globe in ways which are sufficiently similar to enable a comparison and brought about by sufficiently linked actors to enable an identification of their authors, people in many different social situations have come to experience their lot as untenable and to find themselves in each other.
./english/282.txt:51:The second example also involves the relation of theory and practice. Discussing 'mechanisms and processes', McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly (2001) propose that mechanisms 'concatenate into processes', which represent larger-scale objects for theoretical comparison. As it happens, Lukacs (2000), in his last 'Leninist' text), addresses related issues about theorization of processes. Only his case is, essentially, that processes 'concatenate' into what he terms 'moments of decision.' Lukacs's argument is not, of course, with contemporary American academic theorists, but with two representatives of what might be termed 'Second International Marxism', whose view of the historical process is rather inevitabilistic and 'processual'. The issue between them is how to explain the failure of the 1919 Hungarian revolution, in which the young Lukacs had been a committed participant. His opponents account for the defeat in terms of a set of 'processes' which were somehow beyond human intervention. For Lukacs, however, such general processes do no more than set the parameters, as it were, within which Hungarian communists could and had to work; indeed, these generated a variety of immediate 'moments of decision' when the actions of the Hungarian Communist Party leadership proved decisive.
./english/282.txt:65:By comparison, the kind of knowledge produced by movement intellectuals tends to address different kinds of questions. In the terms of the Theses on Feuerbach, these questions are guided by their active engagement - not only with relation to movements, but also with relation to the social world within which those movements move, and which they seek to transform.
./english/282.txt:129:Klein is herself a syndicated journalist working for the largest Canadian newspaper and reporting on the anti-corporate movement in the US. The core of the material, then, is generated by movement activism. The sections of her book dedicated to suggesting solutions, however, are by far the weakest - and stand out as particularly thin by comparison with the dramatic problems and movements she has documented.
./english/282.txt:137:Finally, Michael Hardt and Toni Negri's Empire marks a particularly complex practical relationship. Negri is orignally a left-wing academic who fell foul of the post-1968 witchhunts of 'terrorist sympathizers' carried out by the Italian state, a process which led hundreds if not thousands of Italians to seek exile abroad (Ruggiero 1999). Negri continued academic work in Paris, but returned to Italy - and jail - a few years ago to highlight the plight of less well-known exiles.
./english/282.txt:165:What was obscured most decisively in this process was the key political issue around which the literature had originally been constructed: the failure of social democracy to bring about revolutionary change in post-war western Europe, and the alignment of orthodox communism with the repression of revolution in Paris just as much as in Prague.
./english/282.txt:169:In the process, the banal but nevertheless significant point that by the 1970s the PCF was increasingly isolated within Marxism was conveniently forgotten. When teaching students, it is of course far easier to say 'Marxists said this, but new social movements theorists (or post-structuralists) said that', providing the illusion of an intellectual debate, than to recognize that what was originally at stake was initially a debate between Marxists over practical questions. For example: did 1968 represent a revolutionary moment in Paris or Prague? was it important to be present in student movements or should all energies should go into factory work? were movements against nuclear power a diversion from real issues or a significant new form of struggle? and did green parties represent a worthwhile strategy for expressing and radicalizing a range of struggles or a means for their co-optation.
./english/293.txt:206:In our drift through the social nursing sector, Carmen explained to us in detail how the lack of acceptable work opportunities in Spain and the demand for this kind of work in other countries is motivating a flow of young nurses who, besides working in their own field, aspire to learn languages and live in other places.[15] The passage through past and present work places –a health center in which she worked as a substitute, an attention center for drug addicts marked by organizational chaos and lack of resources, return to the health center, a training course for social workers of the IMEFE[16] for which one must sign up from one day to the next – gives the sense of the sustained unpredictability within a life which besides employment –interest, security and salary – values other types of questions: the relation with others as something which is never pre-determined and as something which is esteemed in its singularity, or this idea of “the social” as a public good which extends beyond work as socialization, learning, exchange, consciousness raising, and vital context but which, as Carmen insisted when comparing her vision with that of her mother, also a social worker, one must learn to limit, to use to one’s advantage. Carmen formulates the dilemma in this realm of action in her comparison of two interpretive frameworks: one as “working for the people” an attitude Carmen attributes to her mother, and the other “working for the system” a tactic she claims for herself. The distinction is important, demonstrating as it does how life is absorbed by work and work by life. ‘Working for the people’ one loses ones own limits with respect to work and melds one’s energies and one’s emotions in an exercise of continuous and committed sociability which attempts to overlook the mediation, in this case of the State, which exists in a health center, where the privatizing tendency has skyrocketed in recent times and where the incentive system rewards a perverse model of medicalization and neglect.[17] ‘Working for the system’, on the other hand, regulates this exercise of fusion by entering into a relation which emphasizes institutional mediation (though generally not from a critical perspective), supervising the link and embittering it by quitting from it the open, experimental and unlimited character of relation with others. We are also talking about the difference between a strictly medical focus, adjusted to the “viability” of health minimums, and a more social focus which is necessarily interwoven with the habits and histories of each and every one of the persons whom we see during our trip to the Alcobendas health center.
./english/312.txt:26:Second, the internationalisation of the higher education system proceeds relentlessly at the level of the European Union. This process takes place, on the one hand, through the increasing relevance of the European research projects and the emphasis laid on ‘networking’ amongst research centres and university departments at a supra-national level (cf. the periodical Framework Programmes; the Research Training Networks, the European doctorates etc.). Institutional collaboration is established among the abovementioned ‘centres of excellence’, while those that are excluded from these networks are considered as ‘marginal’ or, simply, the ‘Others’. On the other hand, the Europeanisation of the higher education system takes place through a more intense co-operation amongst national governments in the realm of higher education policies (see the inter-governmental conferences held in Paris, Prague and Bologna since 1998 onwards) . This co-operation has had particularly relevant effects on the standardisation of university degrees (i.e. the 3+2 degree and the ‘credit system’). These developments have strongly affected learning mechanisms in European universities, forcing university students to improve their productivity and to conform their personal attitudes and values to an increasingly ‘competitive environment’.
./english/313.txt:57:Concerning the Social Forums process specifically the question start to be faced appearing new subjects. Concretely, there is active the Social Forums (SF) Memory working group depending on the World social forum International committee. A global space to coordinate and facilitate the Social Forums archive and systematize initiatives and to establish a protocol of memory coming from each forum. It had developed a rich process of “consulta”/survey to define the V WSF main themes of the program, exploring on the participant methodologist to the organization of the Forum. And its recent European partner, the European group for systematization and archiving the information, knowledge and communication generated by the European Social Forum (ESF) process, that it is a working group depending on the European ESF assembly. There is also the work developed to systematize the contents of debates and seminars at the Paris ESF 2003 and the Florence one. Unfortunately the London ESF organizational system doesn’t allows to have many expectative on the documenting of the London ESF by the UK organisers committee and the ESF office.
./english/313.txt:78:The Guide core is build useful “networking tools” such as a Directory and addresses of the collectives and organisations which have participated to the ESFs of Florence, Paris, London, organized by ambits of actuation and regions and a Map of the European networks developed within and around the ESF process. The level of utility could be defining as the capacity to grown the identification of actors and resources for the action and reflection for social transformation of the use-builders of the Guide.
./english/313.txt:172:Memory ESF Paris 2003: Rioufol, Veronique., with the collaboration of Nicolas Haeringer and Françoise Feugas. Practical Proceedings for Documenting the ESF 2003.
./english/315.txt:9:After a navigationally-challenging half-hour suburban walk from the main Social Forum spaces of Bobigny, north-east Paris, we eventually found our allocated space for the somewhat grandly titled ‘Radical Theory Workshop’. We – Steffen Böhm (co-editor ephemera: critical dialogues on organisation, University of Essex), Jeremy Gilbert (Signs of the Times, University of East London), Jo Littler (Signs of the Times, Middlesex University), Oscar Reyes (Independent Student Media Project, University of Essex), myself (University of Warwick), Tiziana Terranova (University of East London) – registered the workshop as a response to our shared sense that the ESF in Florence last year, while electric, eclectic and inspiring, was rather low on theoretical content and reflection with regard to contemporary supranational socio-political ‘movement(s)’. Our blurb for the workshop registration process went something like this:
./english/315.txt:61:‘This list was born during the European Social Forum in Paris. The group intends to publish a "Radical Theory Journal" which will be neither academic, nor activist. It will try to create a tension laden and dynamic new form of theory informed by action that arises from, helps to understand and bring benefit to the altermondialiste movements. This list is the working forum for the journal.’
./english/316.txt:11:It is possible to make a 19th-20th century comparison, with the relationship between trade unions or labour parties on the one hand and ‘the labour movement’ on the other. But the labour movement, whilst obviously broader and looser than any particular institution, and having international expression, consisted largely of other, primarily national, institutions (cooperatives, women’s organisations, publications). The WSF is an essentially international event (or an expanding series of such). And, on the other hand, we have an essentially international movement that might not even (yet?) recognise itself as such. So we are confronted with two new social phenomena, of the period of globalisation, that are both international/global, and that have a novel relationship with each other.
./english/316.txt:84:If we compare the last major wave of worldwide protest, symbolised by 1968, we have to recognise that the movements of that period were parallel rather than linked. Despite all the similarities, there appears to have been little direct contact or movement communication between Paris and Prague, between the European protests/uprisings and those of Dakar, Tokyo or Mexico City. Neither participant accounts nor contemporary ones really claim such. (Ali and Watkins 1998, Carr 1998, Erickson 2002, Halliday 1969, Koning 1988:192).
./english/316.txt:88:In so far as the movement was informed by the ‘Situationist International’, of that period, connected with the names of Vaneighem and Debord, this would have been in Paris rather than Prague and because of such provocative new notions as ‘the revolution in everyday life’. A hoped-for ‘Coming of the New International’, was confined to the Third World, marked by a state-oriented ‘thirdworldism’ and truncated even here. (Gerassi 1971, Vague 2000).
./english/316.txt:108:Leaping forward to ‘1968’, we can note the brilliant poster art, often internationalist in spirit, following the Cuban Revolution. As well as that generated by Paris 1968 itself. At the same time, however, the widespread hostility of the new left to ‘capitalist technology’ and the ‘commercial mass media’, was criticised by Enzensberger (1976). He, argued that engagement with the electronic media would allow people to mobilise themselves - to become ‘as free as dancers, as aware as football players, as surprising as guerillas’. From this period on we note the development of community-specific local-to-international radio, of ‘guerilla’ video groups and computer-communication experiments. (Ali and Watkins 1998, Art-For-A-Change website, Suarez 2003, Waterman 1992).
./english/319.txt:11:Florence received support from the regional government and Paris was hugely funded by the right-wing French government and four municipal authorities. As far as I know, that didn’t become an issue. The sheer scale and the infrastructural and organizational requirements of the ESF demand big sponsors (it wasn’t exactly British Aerospace, was it?). It would be much more consistent to denounce outright such gatherings on all those grounds, than to propose completely implausible alternatives.
./english/331.txt:195:Comparison of theory
./english/332.txt:5:The ESF in Athens ended with a huge and militant mobilisation on the streets of the city. It saw the emergence of a left, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist wing – it was much more vibrant and militant than the previous two forums, in London and Paris.
./english/356.txt:5:a local social forum in the place where they live from London, Paris and
./english/358.txt:14:All people can take part in the drafting process by sending amendments and proposals, which will be discussed definitively in Paris on January 13-14, 2007.
./english/358.txt:16:A European Assembly will be held in Paris on February 10/11 2007, at which a final discussion on the Charter will be held if some points remain outstanding (on Saturday afternoon). On Sunday morning, the Assembly will adopt the project of the Charter.
./english/362.txt:117:As a student in Paris, between 1947 and 1956, I was associated with organisations of students from Third World countries. This created a strong link with many youth who later became leaders of national Left movements in Africa and West Asia.
./english/363.txt:9:"Civilisation will win until its enemies learn from it the importance of the machine. The compact must endure until there is a counter-compact. Consider the ways of that form of foolishness which today we call nihilism or anarchy. A few illiterate bandits in a Paris slum defy the world, and in a week they are in jail. Half a dozen crazy Russian intellectuals in Geneva conspire to upset the Romanovs, and are hunted down by the police of Europe. All the Governments and their not very intelligent police forces join hands, and hey, presto! there is an end of the conspirators. For civilisation knows how to use such powers as it has, while the immense potentiality of the unlicensed is dissipated in vapour. Civilisation wins because it is a worldwide league; its enemies fail because they are parochial. But supposing ?" (John Buchan, The power-house (1913): p. 32)
./english/363.txt:223:A second need is communication (see Gillan 2001). There is much concern about "media perception" of the current protests, as if any revolutionary movement had ever had the mainstream media on its side. And yet, despite state control of the broadcast media in May 1968 in Paris, or 1989 in Eastern Europe, people manage, time and time again, to make their choices and take action nevertheless. Again, the alternative and underground media were small prior to the events (see e.g. ID-Archiv 1991, Dagron 2001), but their existence made it relatively easy to "get the word out" - through flyers, posters, small magazines, pirate radios and the like - when the situation changed. A movement which does not develop autonomous means of communication is a movement which expects never to challenge the status quo except in marginal ways (see Cox 1997 for more on this).
./english/365.txt:63:Bennett Communicating Global Activism 17 example, Lichbach and Almeida (2001) note that on the dates of the Battle in Seattle, simultaneous protests were held in at least 82 other cities around the world, including 27 locations in the United States, 40 in other “northern” locations including Seoul, London, Paris, Prague, Brisbane, and Tel Aviv, and 15 in “southern” locations such as New Delhi, Manila, and Mexico City. Not only were these other protests not organized centrally by the Seattle campaign coalition, but information about timing and tactics was transmitted almost entirely through activist networks on the Internet. In addition to extending the global reach of single protest events, Internet campaigns also enable activists to create and update rich calendars of planned demonstrations. Lichbach and Almeida (2001) discovered wide Internet postings and network sites for no fewer than 39 scheduled protests between 1994 and 2001. This suggests that Seattle was just one of many events in a permanent protest campaign organized by different organizations in the global activist network.
./english/365.txt:95:Bennett Communicating Global Activism 27 Till January 2001, no one represented local groups at the administrative council… The structure of the association gives them a total autonomy, which sometimes verges on isolation. Local leaders happen to be in touch with National Attac only through the Internet, while others hardly ever receive news from Paris. The electronic offer is sometimes the only link between local groups and other branches of the association, be it through discussion lists (Attac talk), work lists (Attac local), mailing lists (Grain de Sable or Lignes d’Attac), or electronic secretaries (site on the WTO or current campaigns).....Internet is so seminal to the association life that Local Electronic Correspondants (CEL) have been created, as connected members would “chaperon” non-connected members.
./english/366.txt:30:"You could say that MoveOn has a postmodern organizing model," says Eli Pariser, the organization's 22-year-old campaigns director. "It's opt-in, it's decentralized, you do it from your home." MoveOn makes it easy for people to participate or not with each solicitation--an approach that embraces the permission-based culture of the Internet, and consumer culture itself. "If Nike hadn't already taken it," Pariser says, "our motto would be 'Just Do It.'" MoveOn has set the threshold for involvement so low that it has provoked skepticism among some activists--and jokes on The Daily Show. Nevertheless, this organizing model has allowed MoveOn to play an important role as a campaign aggregator--inviting people in on one issue--say, the war--and then introducing them to additional issues, from Bush's tax plan to the deregulation of media ownership. "We're helping to overcome the single-issue balkanization of the progressive movement," Pariser says.
./english/366.txt:34:A good e-mail list is not something you can buy or borrow. "Every MoveOn member comes to us with the personal endorsement of someone they trust," Pariser says. It is word-of-mouth organizing--in electronic form. E-mail is cheap, fast and easy to use, and it has made mixing the personal and the political more socially acceptable. Casually passing on a high-content message to a social acquaintance feels completely natural in a way handing someone a leaflet at a cocktail party never could.
./english/366.txt:44:According to Pariser, most MoveOn members do not define themselves as activists. Rather, MoveOn is often their first step into political action--and what brings them to take that step is usually an e-mail message. "A lot of 'Take action now' e-mails feel like they were written by a focus-group e-newsletter robot," says Madeline Stanionis, who as a senior consultant for San Francisco-based Donordigital has developed scores of online advocacy campaigns. "MoveOn e-mails feel personal and fresh. They write from their hearts." The e-mails about the global vigil came directly from Pariser. His voice was strong yet level-headed. There were no ideological digressions. He got to the point early and kept it action-oriented. It was easy to trust.
./english/366.txt:46:Pariser says he crafts his messages with an eye toward taking MoveOn members on a journey, by providing a narrative that connects them to an ongoing social movement. As each campaign proceeds, short e-mail updates ("50,000 of you have already signed up...here's a typical response from a schoolteacher in New Mexico...") build excitement and a sense of community. This feedback loop is an example of how the Internet, when well used, can extend the shoulder-to-shoulder solidarity one feels on the street to fellow participants across the nation and around the globe.
./english/369.txt:9:Following earlier conferences in Lisbon, Paris and Brussels, the Conference of the European Anti-Capitalist Left took place for the fourth time this year in Madrid on June 18-19. The organisations present were: the Red Green Alliance (RGA, Denmark), the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP), the Socialist Alliance (SA, England), the Socialist Workers Party (SWP, Britain), La Gauche/Déi Linke (the Left, Luxemburg), the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR, France), the Left Bloc (BdE, Portugal), the Party of Communist Refoundation (PRC, Italy), SolidaritieS (Switzerland), the Party of Solidarity and Freedom (ÖDP, Turkey), the Alternative Space (Espacio Alternativo, Spain), Zutik (Basque Country); and as observers: the Red Current (Corriente Roja, formerly the Plataforma de Izquierda, inside Izquierda Unida, Spain) and the United Left (Izquierda Unida, Spain). The German Communist Party (DKP) attended the meeting without being part of the conference. The Socialist Party (SP, Netherlands), absent this time, had sent a message expressing its interest in the conference and its desire to continue working with it.
./english/369.txt:101:A particularly pernicious development is the recent decision to relaunch the nuclear industry. We from our side must reply by relaunching a full-fledged campaign for the (military and civilian) denuclearisation of Europe. This is just one of the (major) elements of the deterioration of the biosphere, which is being subjected more and more to the dictates of the market. We are in favour of a radical reduction of its global ecological impact (climate change, depletion of natural resources, pollution of the planet, destruction of the biosphere), whose central axis could be the general principle of precaution. The EU's policies, pseudo-progressive by comparison with the US's totally irresponsible policies in this area, are in no way an adequate response to the dangers now threatening the planet.
./english/371.txt:48:Right now we need to struggle against the WSF being hijacked by certain left wing groups in France, Europe, the US or elsewhere. Left-wing groups in Europe are stronger than they are in Africa and they try to dominate. A French man, a leader of a group called ATTAC in Paris tried to control some of the groups from Africa. An American man in a group called Habitat tried to control some groups from the Arab countries.
./english/373.txt:34:The lack of democratic approach and of "transparency" (the term favourite with the "civil society" theoreticians) permeates the institution of a forum, the way it is today, at all levels. An appropriate question can be posed here, which even the members of the so-called International Council have no answer to: Who actually organizes these forums? Reading of the list of organizations participating in the IC is like getting through the woods of names of anonymous non-governmental organizations. The IC, as it seems, is a kind of honoured body that only approves the already brought decisions, agreed on probably somewhere along the Paris-Sao Paolo path, that are brought by the OC. What is the OC? I have no idea. Probably the same people who have established the Orwellian Secretariat for Call of the Social Movements which is to be found somewhere in Sao Paolo. The same is valid for the ESF. I was the witness of the preparatory meetings of the ESF, in which the bureaucratic and old left, owing to the experience they had had in such a kind of political struggle, pushed out without difficulty the grassroots initiatives. Thus we bump into an unusual paradox: those who have made this movement interesting and distinctive and who, in a way, are the most deserving for its success, are not adequately represented in its "institutions", in the forums.
./english/393.txt:3:Comparison of Original April 2001 WSF Charter of Principles
./english/393.txt:8:This Note is a clause-by-clause comparison of the original April 2001 WSF Charter of Principles,
./english/393.txt:36:As will be evident from the following comparison of the two versions, all but three of the Clauses
./english/393.txt:47:Jai Sen, December 2003 – ‘Two Charters of Principles : A Comparison’
./english/393.txt:93:Jai Sen, December 2003 – ‘Two Charters of Principles : A Comparison’
./english/393.txt:137:Jai Sen, December 2003 – ‘Two Charters of Principles : A Comparison’
./english/393.txt:184:Jai Sen, December 2003 – ‘Two Charters of Principles : A Comparison’
./english/393.txt:221:Jai Sen, December 2003 – ‘Two Charters of Principles : A Comparison’
./english/393.txt:262:Jai Sen, December 2003 – ‘Two Charters of Principles : A Comparison’
./english/394.txt:227:best public interest, publish both versions of the Charter in this book and also a comparison that
./english/394.txt:298:11 For a detailed comparison, see Jai Sen, December 2003c – ‘Two Charters of Principles : A Comparison’.
./english/394.txt:299:Comparison of Original April 2001 WSF Charter of Principles with Revised Charter of Principles issued in
./english/399.txt:2:The Effect The S.I. Had On Paris '68 And All That, Through The Angry Brigade And King Mob To The Sex Pistols
./english/399.txt:40:The enterprising Special Branch sergeant found that the word Spectacle was a popular slogan, used by a Paris based group known as Situationists, to describe capitalism, the state, the whole shooting match. Owing as much to the Surrealists and Dada as Marx and Bakunin, the Situationists starting point was that the original working class movement had been crushed, by the Bourgeoisie in the West and by the Bolsheviks in the East; Working class organizations, such as Trade Unions and Leftist political parties had sold out to World Capitalism; And furthermore, capitalism could now appropriate even the most radical ideas and return them safely, in the form of harmless ideologies to be used against the working class which they were supposed to represent.
./english/399.txt:88:Areas For Scandalous Activity; Paris '68 And All That.
./english/399.txt:99:In the mid-60's the French University system was heading for trouble anyway - largely due to overcrowding. The government tried to deal with the crisis by setting up overspill colleges in the provinces and slum-outskirts of Paris. This made matters worse. One of the Paris overspill colleges in particular, Nanterre, situated amidst waste disposal tips and the spanish immigrant ghetto, was almost perfect for intervention. There was already a strong feeling of alienation amongst the students; uprooted from their former teeming cafe lifestyle in the Latin Quarter and dumped in council flat style blocks; separate residential blocks for males and females, no recreational facilities, everything controlled by a faceless centralized bureaucracy in Paris. It was all straight out of Debord's Society of the Spectacle.
./english/399.txt:117:Les Enrages continued to build on this emotional reaction to the authorities repression, until 3 anti-Vietnam War bombings took place in Paris. 5 members of 'The National Committee For Vietnam' were arrested. On March 22nd, as a protest against the arrests, a group of Les Enrages and some anti-Vietnam war demonstrators occupied the administration offices at Nanterre and decided to get a real Movement going. "THE MOVEMENT OF MARCH 22nd" was to have no organization as such, no hierarchy and no hard and fast programme. Obviously it was political, but it did'nt follow one political doctrine. There were anarchists, Marxists, Leninists, Trotskyists, all manner of -ists, and of course, a bit of Situationist in there somewhere.
./english/399.txt:123:Anyway, at Nanterre the threat of The March 22nd Movement and what the Dean described as "a real war psychosis", led to the University being closed down and Red Danny and some others being summoned before a disciplinary tribunal. On May 3rd hundreds of left wing students gathered at the Sorbonne, the originally overcrowded University in Paris, to protest. The Rector of the University became worried, especially when he heard that a group of right-wing students were gathering nearby. He rang the Minister of Education and together they decided to bring in the police, despite what happened at Nanterre.
./english/399.txt:127:The rioting spread throughout the Latin Quarter and at the end of the day 597 people had been arrested and hundreds more injured. The Authorities heavy handling of the situation had provided tens of thousands of young parisians with something concrete to release their pent-up anger/ frustration/ alienation/ resentment on. The cry of 'Liberez nos Camarades!' went up and the students held their ground for a week; during which more and more young people joined their increasingly militant demonstrations. Finally, on May 11th, M. Pompidou withdrew the police from the Latin Quarter and said the case of the arrested students would be reconsidered and the University reopened.
./english/399.txt:129:As news of the Events spread, via TV-footage of the burning barricades and street battles, thousands of young people from, not just France but, all over Europe made for Paris. Many of them from affiliated student groups but also individuals drawn by something relevant to their own situation. Amongst the English contingent were John Barker, Anna Mendelson and Christopher Bott, who would put the ideas they experienced into practice back home and go down in history (as well as literally) as part of "The Stoke Newington Eight" Also, if you believe the story, Malcolm McLaren was given a guided tour of the barricades by his art school buddy Fred Vermorel and returned to put the ideas in practice in a different way.
./english/399.txt:131:"A good time to be free," was how Christopher Bott described it, "Imagination was seizing power" ' The Sorbonne was transformed from an institutionalized bureaucratic conditioning centre to "a Volcano of revolutionary ideas". Everything was up for debate, everything was being challenged. Day and night every lecture hall was packed. Passionate debates on every subject went on continuously. The spirit of Arthur Rimbaud had returned. The Paris Commune had become a reality. Nothing like it had been seen before anywhere.
./english/399.txt:153:But while the Sorbonne became the hip place to be in '68, all the Centre Censier members of the Situationist International, Les Enrages and some others were forming 'The Council For The Maintenance Of The Occupations. Their aim was to set up Worker/Student Action Committees to maintain the many sit-ins and strikes that had spread from Paris to the rest of France.
./english/399.txt:159:De Gaulle formally (and characteristically) called on the Army. On May 28th he made a secret flight to Baden-Baden in West Germany, where General Massu, the Commander of the French troops, was stationed on NATO exercises. The following day he returned to Paris with Massu's assurance that the army was still loyal enough to support him in any confrontation. First he called M. Pompidou and his Cabinet to tell them he was going to dissolve the National Assembly and call an election. Then, at 4:30 that afternoon, he addressed the Nation and basically lied that the Country was threatened by a "communist dictatorship" to rally support for the Republic. Promised to give greater powers to the Prefects of the Provinces and, that if necessary, he would have no hesitation in calling in General Massu and his troops (as if anyone thought he would have anyway). Vive La France!
./english/399.txt:169:Where Paris had succeeded and the most important lesson of May '68 was final proof that the traditional revolutionary groups were now as outmoded, institutionalized and oppressive as the capitalists in power and were just as much slaves of the Spectacular Society. Final proof, that since the halcyon days of Marx, Bakunin and Lenin, they too had been recouperated and indeed become recouperators in their own right. They lost face to thousands of young people when they came out in their true colours, against the anti-hierarchy, self-management notions of the 22nd March Movement. And especially when it was proved, contrary to communist dogma, that self-management does in fact work. Why not let the people decide?
./english/400.txt:31:Arquilla and Ronfeldt (1998b) have argued that the characteristic strategic approach of information warfare, enabled by information-intensive networked organisation, is that of 'swarming' in which small, dispersed and mobile forces come together rapidly to engage with an adversary before rapidly dissolving. The ability to continue swarming attacks by repeatedly dispersing and coalescing as a series of 'sustainable pulses' becomes the key feature of 'swarm networks'. Swarming in social conflict has a long history - Arquilla and Ronfeldt (1989b) illustrate this with the example of Marx's description of workers and peasants confrontation with state authorities on the streets of Paris in 1848 (Marx 1850; 1959: pp. 281-307). More recent reminders of the continuing significance of physical swarming in social conflict can be found in the case of protests against the World Bank and IMF in Seattle (Financial Times, 1999) and Prague (Anderson, 2000).
./english/400.txt:79:Campaign A, the first of the cybercampaigns set the general tone for those that followed. The Web pages carried background information about the campaign and contact details for the company and as third parties such as shareholders, investors and high-profile companies stocking or using tyres made by BFS. Where possible, these included email addresses with the invitation to send protest email messages, with graphic file attachments. Perhaps because of the novelty of the cybercampaign technique, the Web site itself became a 'hook' on which several major media outlets hung high-profile pieces covering both the dispute and trade union use of the Internet (e.g. Financial Times 1996; Arsenault, 1996.). The web pages for Campaign C included detailed briefings and background information about the company (including two 'Stakeholder reports' produced for company AGMs), links to relevant sites, and invitations to send messages of protest to the company, associated companies and governments. A second 'Coalition of Rio Tinto Shareholders' web site was established in 2000, co-sponsored by ICEM aimed particularly at winning support for the proposals submitted to the AGM. As with the earlier campaigns. the Campaign D pages allowed supporters to protest electronically to both the subsidiary involved directly in the dispute and to the parent company, this time including 'e-postcard' images. Images available to be sent to the US subsidiary illustrated the extent of global support while those to the German-based parent emphasised the very different approach to industrial relations apparent in the US, in comparison with that in Germany. The cybercampaign also sought to politicise the campaign by highlighting possible links between German politicians and the parent company, and encouraging email protests to German ministers and the Labor Counsellor at the German Embassy in Washington. This campaign also included more direct contributions from the replaced workers themselves, for example in an audio file containing an introduction to the dispute by the President of the USWA Local involved.
./english/402.txt:64:La Vie/Le Monde. 2003. ‘Porto Alegre 2003: A Citizen’s Planet’, La Vie/Le Monde (Paris), pp. 14-19.
./english/409.txt:74:Despite the moments of open revolt, the World Social Forum ended on as euphoric a note as it began. There was cheering and chanting, the loudest of which came when the organizing committee announced that Porto Alegre would host the forum again next year. The plane from Porto Alegre to São Paulo on January 30 was filled with delegates dressed head-to-toe in conference swag--T-shirts, baseball hats, mugs, bags--all bearing the utopian slogan: Another World Is Possible. Not uncommon, perhaps, after a conference, but it did strike me as noteworthy that a couple sitting in the seats across from me were still wearing their WSF name tags. It was as if they wanted to hang on to that dream world, however imperfect, for as long as they could before splitting up to catch connecting flights to Newark, Paris, Mexico City, absorbed in a hive of scurrying businesspeople, duty-free Gucci bags and CNN stock news.
./english/420.txt:78:domestic security. Yet the burning cars in the banlieues of Paris, the local
./english/476.txt:8:There are three moments of origin in this story. The first was the very successful mass protests at the Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organization in November, 1999. A large group of mostly U.S. protestors - an unlikely coalition of AFL-CIO trade-unionists, environmental activists, and anarchists - succeeded in scuttling the meeting. Two months later, in January, 2000 at Davos, a group of some 50 intellectuals from around the world tried a different tactic, organizing an "anti-Davos at Davos," seeking to get anti-neoliberal arguments a world press. And in February, 2000, two Brazilian leaders of popular movements, Chico Whitaker and Oded Grajew, went to Paris to talk to Bernard Cassen, a journalist and the president of the anti-globalization organization called Attac-France. The two Brazilians suggested to Cassen that they join forces and launch a world meeting that would combine mass protest and intellectual analysis. They convened this in Porto Alegre, Brazil, at the same time as the 2001 meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos. They called this the World Social Forum, and Cassen said the object was to "sink Davos."
./english/477.txt:4:The recent 4th meeting of the World Social Forum (WSF) in Mumbai (India) - Jan. 16-21, 2004 - was a big step forward in the steadily rising strength of the World Social Forum. In five years, it has become a major actor on the world scene. There are three moments of origin in this story. The first was the very successful mass protests at the Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organization in November, 1999. A large group of mostly U.S. protestors - an unlikely coalition of AFL-CIO trade-unionists, environmental activists, and anarchists - succeeded in scuttling the meeting. Two months later, in January, 2000 at Davos, a group of some 50 intellectuals from around the world tried a different tactic, organizing an "anti-Davos at Davos," seeking to get anti-neoliberal arguments a world press. And in February, 2000, two Brazilian leaders of popular movements, Chico Whitaker and Oded Grajew, went to Paris to talk to Bernard Cassen, Director of Le Monde Diplomatique and the president of Attac-France. The two Brazilians suggested to Cassen that they join forces and launch a world meeting that would combine mass protest and intellectual analysis. They convened this in Porto Alegre, Brazil, at the same time as the 2001 meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos. They called this the World Social Forum, and Cassen said the object was to "sink Davos."
./english/565.txt:564:front of government offices. Bigger demonstrations followed in Paris,
./english/571.txt:95:Cassen, Bernard (2003) Tout a commencé a Porto Alegre. Mille forum sociaux! Paris: Mille et une nuits.
./english/576.txt:4:It's not Paris or Tokyo, Beijing or New York. Nor is it São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro. Enthusiastic residents of Porto Alegre, Brazil will tell you that their modest city of 1.5 million people in the country's deep South is "the last bastion of socialism and rock 'n' roll." Indeed, stalls covered with black Iron Maiden t-shirts stand in the public markets, and the municipality long served as a stronghold of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), the Brazilian Workers Party. But today Porto Alegre is best known around the globe, especially among those inclined to hold a critical opinion of capitalism, corporate power, and U.S. military aggression, as the original home of the World Social Forum.
./english/579.txt:75:8. While the official tally of deaths in the 1984 anti-Sikh riots after the assassination of Mrs Gandhi was around 3000 and local Congress party leaders had been behind this, it pales in comparison to what happened in Gujarat. The communal character, context and history surrounding the two cases were very different. Anti-Sikh sentiment was the result of a specific conjuncture marked by the rise of the Khalistan separatist movement. Anti-Muslim sentiment has a much longer history, wider roots and, above all, the existence of a powerful grassroots organisation whose raison d’etre is the cultivation for political purposes of an enduring hatred for Muslims. Anti-Sikh communalism has withered as the Khalistan movement withered. While the leaders most responsible for the 1984 violence have not been punished, the Congress has publicly apologized for what happened and for the role played by its local leaders. The levels of brutality and sadism reached, the scale, geographic extent and duration of communal violence was much greater in the case of Gujarat. The degree and extent of complicity on the part of the apparatuses of the state was also far greater while the negative political implications of Gujarat 2002 were much more profound.
./english/590.txt:22:In fact, in Mumbai many insisted on the need to arrive at concrete proposals for action, beyond the so-called intellectual discussions and debates or the actual “festivity”, a little bit too disengaged in the eyes of good militants and even beyond the demonstrations, which, voicing their demands, had multiplied in the roads on the terrain of the WSF at Mumbai. It is in fact necessary to constantly improve the “method of the WSF”. By the way, this preoccupation about the “method” is growing: on occasion of the 2004 session, a plenary session and a large seminar were dedicated to the innovation of the WSF as such, which represents a great step forward in comparison to the treatment of this topic in 2003, where only a little workshop had discussed it.
./english/590.txt:27:(1) Tout a commencé à Porto Alegre: mille forums sociaux! (Everything began at Porto Alegre : a thousand social forums), Paris: Mille et Une Nuits, 2003.
./english/595.txt:8:1. The Mumbai Forum was above all a popular demonstration for and by the people. In comparison to Porto Alegre, but above all in comparison to the European Social Forums which have mainly mobilised the middle classes. At Mumbai the great majority of the people present were untouchables, peasants, and members of women’s and young people’s organisations. Not only has the Forum become more “global” it is now also more “social”.
./english/605.txt:4:IV World Social Forum (WSF) held in Mumbai, India, from January 16th to January 21st 2004 has proved the vitality of the“WSF-Format”, from the “open space” method that gradually has been built in the three Porto Alegre forums, in the two European Social Forums (Florence and Paris) and in the Asiatic Social Forum (Hyderabad), as well as countless another forums. The Mumbai Forum has renewed and expanded the achieve of the proposal, generating a wave of vitality in the process. But, after three years, there is a general perception that it needs a change in its directions, focusing specially on the articulation of actions capable of having an impact in the balance of world power. This was the focus in the discussion in the International Council (IC), gathered in Mumbai in January 15th, January 22nd and 23rd in order to prepare the process towards V WSF to be held in Porto Alegre, in January 2005.
./english/646.txt:26:In February 2000, Bernard Cassen, chair of Attac and director of Le Monde Diplomatique, met in Paris with Grajew and Francisco Whitaker, of the Brazilian Justice and Peace Commission (CBJP), to discuss the possibility of such a forum. They shared three ideas: it should be held in the south, in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre; it should be called the World Social Forum to target its adversary; and it should coincide with the staging of the WEF to attract global media attention.
./english/658.txt:17:Numbers, I repeat, are not important, but if we are to mention numbers, they should all be included in the estimate. Aside from that, it is evident that basically, this lack of balance is due to economic reasons: plane fare from Delhi to Porto Alegre is about 2,500 US dollars, while a trip from Paris to Porto Alegre costs less than 800 US dollars.
./english/658.txt:36:FPH-Paris