The seed sprouts: Another historic moment in the U.S. South
Published in the July/August 2007 issue of The Gainesville Iguana
by Barb Howe
A platoon of young men and women dressed in desert Army fatigues moved silently through a hotel lobby in downtown Atlanta last week. Despite the din of hundreds of socializing convention-goers, the troops remained silent and focused. Arms positioned to mimic M-16s, members of Iraq Veterans Against the War swept the luxury hotel as if patrolling a Baghdad neighborhood. The performance was a powerful visual intended to announce an anti-war strategizing session about to start in Ballroom B of the Westin Hotel. Meanwhile, at the Civic Center, only a ten minute walk away, people gingerly stepped over hundreds of empty shoes which led the way to a photo exhibit called Dreams and Nightmares: Life and Death in Occupied Iraq.
Welcome to the newest manifestation of the global justice movement. Social Forums have been presented as an answer to the international convergences of global financial institutions usually called Economic Forums. As the latter meet to plot out the next steps of the globalization of neoliberal economic policies, the former meet to plot out the next stages in the growing opposition. There have been seven World Social Forums and many more regional ones. The first ever US Social Forum (USSF) was held in Atlanta this summer. The location was appropriately symbolic of another people’s movement that triumphed despite deep institutional apathy and in spite of powerful forces arrayed against it. For five days, this historic southern city pulsated with the energy of ten thousand people who, in the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr. and others who struggled for justice and dignity in the U.S. South, came together to strategize, network and build the connections for a new kind of globalization in the 21st century.
The Forum was an historic occasion, not only because this was the first of the Social Forums to be held in this country, but because it marked a small but significant shift in the focus of the movement, embodied in the slogan “for another world to be possible, another U.S. is necessary”. Recognizing that those of us in this country have a unique role to play in working alongside the rest of the world to create a more just kind of globalization, the focus was squarely on what we can do from within the “belly of the beast”. How can we use our position within the most powerful country in the world to transform the hegemony that causes so much harm to others?
Revolutionary not only in content but in form, the USSF, perhaps more so than any previous Social Forum, practiced “horizontalism”, passing over the giants of the non-profit world and the big names of the Progressive Left and focusing instead on recruiting smaller grassroots groups made up of women and people of color. The result is a smarter, more dynamic movement led primarily by people who are not white men (in other words, by people who have the most direct, lived experience of oppressive regimes and are most hurt by them). There was no single iconic figure who stood out. The USSF was ordinary people working together to do extraordinary things.
The organizers of the event also went to a lot of effort to make the forum language accessible. Language access volunteers made sure written materials, including the official schedule of events and workshop descriptions were available in both Spanish and English, and simultaneous interpretation (including sign language) was provided at most events.
What was most remarkable about the USSF however, was how this phenomena has truly become a “movement of movements”. Organizers and participants both put a lot of emphasis on making the connections between issues that we are usually taught to believe are separate and unrelated: from ending the illegal occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan to abolishing absurd ideas such as the corporate privatization of water; from supporting unions in their efforts to organize workers in the U.S. South to advocating for immigrants’ rights and opposing the construction of a wall on the U.S. Mexico border. There were over 1,000 workshops over three days of the forum; to even try to summarize them would be fruitless and would miss the point: neoliberal economic globalization involves an immense variety of issues around the world but they are all connected to the goal of powerful corporations, international institutions and individuals to create a worldwide economic system that benefits a minority by the blood, sweat and tears of the majority.
The USSF demonstrated that what we are witnessing is the emergence of an organic, diverse, multi-faceted but unified resistance to the globalization of capitalism. This is a movement that is stronger for its diversity, harder to control for its horizontalism, smarter for its inclusiveness, and faster and more dynamic for its organic pluralism. That makes it extremely powerful and that’s what will make it successful. As neoliberal economic globalization has spread around the world so has this movement to oppose it. Marx explained that capitalism contains within itself the seeds of its own destruction. That seed is now sprouting and taking root. The convergence in Atlanta this past week demonstrated this.
