“Another U.S. is necessary”

SHERRY WOLF argues that the U.S. Social Forum was a step forward for the Left

THE FIRST-ever U.S. Social Forum (USSF), which met in Atlanta June 27–July1, represented a step forward for the American broad Left. According to organizers, more than 10,000 registered to attend some portion of the nearly 1,000 workshops and panels ranging from antiwar and pro-labor to environmental and criminal justice issues. It was quite possibly the largest, and certainly most multiracial, gathering of progressive forces in the United States in decades.

The forum provided a rare opportunity for grassroots activists, members of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), organized socialists, trade unionists, anarchists, and others to meet, discuss strategies for organizing, and debate politics in a comradely atmosphere. As with previous regional, European, and World Social Forums, the theme: “Another world is possible,” was echoed in Atlanta, adding: “Another U.S. is necessary.”

It is difficult to effectively summarize a gathering of thousands, spread out over multiple meeting sites, and dispersed throughout hundreds of workshops and panels. But it was impossible for a leftist not to feel encouraged by the throngs of people—disproportionately under thirty and at least half people of color—debating politics everywhere you turned and flocking to literature tables to learn about various movements and talk about ideas. In a country where polls and local initiatives point to a growing radicalization, yet the organized forces of the Left remain quite weak, the USSF helped give expression to the hunger for politics and activism and allowed radicals to develop links with each other.

A highlight of the USSF was the broad participation of immigrant rights activists from all over the country who exchanged lessons from their fights against reactionary legislation and raids on immigrant workplaces and communities. From the evening plenary on “Immigrant rights” to an excellent packed session organized by the ISR’s publisher, the Center for Economic Research and Social Change (CERSC) on “Between raids and reform: What next for immigrant rights,” it became clear that rapid response networks to confront the crackdown are forming from Migra Watch in Watsonville, California, to the Emergency Response Network in Chicago.

One of the glaring weaknesses of the forum, however, was the dominance of identity politics—that is, the notion that only those directly affected by a particular oppression have a stake in challenging that oppression. While plenaries and workshops emphasized the need for oppressed groups to come together in struggle, for example at sessions such as “Building a Black-Brown alliance,” it was nowhere apparent on what basis, other than moral, oppressed and exploited groups could unite. The idea that the exploitation and oppression experienced by all working-class people, including white straight men, could become a basis for developing solidarity across race and gender lines was left unexplored, if not rejected.

The politics of identity have been dominant in the American Left since the rise of gay and AIDS activism in the late 1980s. Yet the opening for alternative—including Marxist—conceptions of how the oppressed can unite was evident not only in the overwhelming response to socialist literature at the USSF, but in informal discussions, for example, with organizers at the Smithfield meatpacking plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina. There, large numbers of Black workers previously hostile to Latino immigrant co-workers have been won over to unionizing and taking job actions in solidarity with their Brown brothers and sisters after seeing the results of the raids and deportations on workers’ lives and their own work environment.

The organizers, chief among them Project South, paid meticulous attention to placing Black, Brown, indigenous, gay, and women’s voices at the front of the room. And it is indisputable that organizers were successful at bringing people of color, including large numbers of Black Katrina victims and community activists from the South, to the event. However, all too many workshop sessions evaded political analysis of the crises facing ordinary people by having participants simply introduce themselves and talk a bit about where they’re from and why they attended. Discussions of peoples’ experiences and a cataloguing of injustices often replaced any attempt at theorizing how and why there is hunger, racism, and growing inequality in the United States. This approach frustrated efforts at coming to grips with the systematic nature of these problems and how to orient activists toward strategies for struggle and organizing most likely to succeed.

One ethnic identity notably absent from the podium was Palestinians. For example, during the plenary session on U.S. imperialism, one speaker, an Jewish Israeli member of MADRE, equated the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas with George Bush, and received applause. This prompted Palestinian activists to demand a speaker the following evening who rebutted this preposterous equation of an imperialist power and an oppressed people’s resistance.

On the same antiwar panel, Judith LeBlanc, a member of the Communist Party and leading spokesperson for United for Peace and Justice, held up the Democratic “Out of Iraq Caucus” in the House of Representatives as the champion of the antiwar movement. Despite the fact that many of the caucus’s members recently voted to extend war funding, LeBlanc insisted: “Who has been the first of the strongest voices opposing the war in Congress? It’s women and women of color—Lynn Woolsey, Barbara Lee, Maxine Waters. They’re fighting for us now, so we have to fight for every candidate, from dogcatcher to the White House, to take a stand.”

While disgust with the Democrats in the aftermath of their May war-funding vote ran high among forum participants, few speakers were as candid as LeBlanc about where to place the focus of organizing efforts as we head toward the 2008 presidential elections. In the absence of a genuine electoral alternative being pushed for by movement organizers—or any real assessment of the endemic bankruptcy of the Democratic Party—it is easy to see how today’s disgruntlement with the Democrats could be turned into support for those same candidates down the road.

The social forum movement began in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001 as a political counterweight to the gathering of wealthy power brokers in Davos, Switzerland. Its future has been debated in recent years by activists questioning its usefulness and the dominance of NGOs in past social forums. Dennis Brutus, South African anti-apartheid activist and veteran of the World Social Forum movement, said on a CERSC-sponsored antiwar panel that the U.S. Social Forum had been “important in two ways. First, if it puts forward a radical message of systemic change, it can prove to the people of the world that they have allies in the U.S. that they can struggle shoulder to shoulder with. Second, the USSF also, through its radical message, can possibly reinvigorate the World Social Forum itself, which has lost its radicalism and sense of purpose. So the forum offers tremendous hope, not only for the U.S. but the world movement against corporate power.”

While it remains unclear how Atlanta may impact the trajectory of the global social forum movement, it certainly gave a boost to leftists organizing in the heart of world imperialism.

Sherry Wolf is a member of the ISR editorial board.