Republican News · Thursday 31 January 2002

other world is possible

Irish Social Forum launched

The World Social Forum, whose members included the millions who protested across the world against the Iraq War on 15 February; the hundreds of thousands of people who have tracked and protested at meetings of the G8, World Bank, World Trade Organisation, the IMF, from Seattle to Prague, Davos, Melbourne, to Genoa; the people who in their righteous defiance, may lend hope that a world other than our one dominated by corporate power is possible; the people who the New York Times, after 15 February, recognised as "the other superpower", launched an Irish chapter last weekend in Dublin.

'Superpower', of course, is just what they are not. The World Social Forum, which held its first meeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2001, is a worldwide non-party 'movement of movements' which stands in opposition to globalisation - the privatisation of the globe by corporate interests and complicit national governments.

d its meetings are unlike any others. There is an atmosphere of equality - everyone counts. There is a seriousness of purpose, along with democracy. Individuals, equals, listen to each other. Diversity is the order of the day: no one with boring long party pieces and recruitment drives is let dominate proceedings or distract from a common agenda - to protest the globalisation of our world and to change it.

The spur to launching the Irish Social Forum is the planned summit of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Dublin, in October, which Mary Harney and Peter Sutherland will host. The WEF is a private club of business leaders of the world's thousand biggest multinational corporations. They are coming to Dublin to talk about competitiveness and the 'liberalisation' of state-run services.

This is of particular relevance in Ireland, where the government agenda is exactly that - the liberalisation (privatisation) of Dublin Bus, electricity, post, gas, rail freight, roads and the waste industry. It is an agenda dominated by tax cuts and cutbacks in government spending to support disadvantaged communities and those who are losing their jobs as 'free' capital moves off, in the world the WEF wants to make free to exploit.

As Bill McCamley, worker director in CIE and SIPTU activist, pointed out at the ISF press conference: "It is exactly globalisation, here and now in Dublin, which is pushing the crazy government agenda to privatise Dublin's buses, which are amongst the most cost efficient in Europe."

The ISF has been organising quietly for months. It is genuinely a movement of movements. It involves environmentalist, sustainable development, ecological groups and activists, church groups, women's groups, development and global justice organisations, community development and community arts workers and networks, peace groups, anti-globalisation groups, trade unions, alternative and independent media and supportive academics.

The World Social Forum is a plural, diversified, non-confessional, non-governmental and non-party decentralised forum of debate on means and actions to resist capitalist globalisation with its racist, sexist and environmentally destructive dimensions.

"We are individuals who are grown up, with minds of our own, who don't want to be directed, but want to share ideas and organise the debate and our protests," said one activist at the previous weekend's prior meeting of Grassroots, which held a weekend of activities and discussions drawing over 300 people together to plan broadening the anti-globalisation protest in Dublin in October.

The ISF charter says: "Neither party representations nor military organisations shall participate in the Forum. It upholds respect for Human Rights, and practices real democracy, participatory democracy, peaceful relations in equality and solidarity among people, ethnicities, genders and peoples, and condemns all forms of domination and all subjection of one person by another."

Powerful stuff! New democratic ways - drawn perhaps from Chiapas, Bolivarian circles, community development groups, movements across the world of peoples who have not been heard - until now. Do these movements hold the seeds of change coming out of a last century of terrible defeat of revolutions?

The World Social Forum may not itself effect that change, but indisputably it is aprt of the groundswell for that change to become possible.

www.IrishSocialForum.org