I am starting this blog to chronicle my experience at the World Social Forum V in Porto Alegre, Brazil, from the 26 to the 31 of January, 2005.
The World Social Forum was first held as a counter-conference to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where world leaders, billionaires, and CEOs enclose themselves in a fortress every year to try and work out ways to alleviate the pain of poverty for the worldŽs poor, among other important issues they seems to value.
Of course, their goal is to do this while maintiaining the same exploitative capitalist system which lines their pockets with wealth and resources stolen from the same poor people they are purportedly trying to help. The fact is that the system is not broken: it was never designed to alleviate poverty and suffering in the world but to exacerbate it, while concentrating wealth in the hands of a few, the owners. You cannot fix a system that does that. You have to search for a more socially just alternative. ThatŽs the raison dŽetre of the World Social Forum.
The World Social Forum is a meeting of social movements, NGOs, and progressive world leaders and intellectuals whose goal is to debate, arrive at consensus, and provide the means for the organization of the world in an alternative way, a way in which poverty and peace comes before wealth and war.
The WSF cry for the last five years has been "um outro mundo e possivel," another world is possible. With such a diversity of people coming together, with participation open to everyone, again in stark contrast to the Davos meetings, there is little doubt that an alternative is surfacing in the world: one based on a plurality of ideas, perspectives, and possibilities. The alternative is manifested every year at the World Social Forum.
They are not CEOs, bankers, presidents, or prime ministers, meeting at a feeble attempt to whitewash their activities, filthy with greed. They are Quechua speakers from the Andes and indigenous peoples from the Amazon, Dalits and Haitians, Africans and Palestinians; and those from the centres of power, like the United States, Canada, Britain, and Europe, who find themselves aligned in opposition to empire and global capitalist exploitation.
If you follow what I will write over the next week, IŽm sure you will get a feel for what the Social Forum is all about and hopefully get involved with the alternative in your own way, in your own home, and maybe even on your own trip to Porto Alegre for the World Social Forum.
IŽll write a bit about our time spent waiting for the Social Forum at the Acamapamento Intercontinental da Juventude first. After that, IŽll write daily summaries of the debates I went to, and the events that took place. I hope to keep you interested and maybe a little more politically informed, as I am sure to be for the next week!
Mike
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