Comment this input#3?

INPUT#3   Would the Wsf be a Movement or an Space?

Abstract #119675

At the end of last year, during the electoral campaign in Brazil that led to the sad situation we are living here now, I wrote a long text about the WSF’s future, to be published in a collective book of Globalizations, of Finland, by Routledge,.

In this text I tried to identify the divergences existing about the WSF as it was conceived by the WSF Organizing Committee in its first edition in 2001, and why this Committee decided to give to the WSF the character of an space and not a movement, this decision leading to a growing interest of people in the WSF all over the world. This first edition had 20.000 participants and not only 2.000 as expected by us, till the ones of Porto Alegre in 2005 and Belem in 2009, each one with 150.000 participants.

I tried to show in the text that this Organizing Committee decision was not a previous theoretical one but a result of a process of discussion on the special exigencies of creating a new tool of the planetary civil society as a political actor facing capitalism as an economic and cultural regime.

The text presents propositions on the WSF future considering the still absolute necessity of as many as possible open critical spaces - at all levels as well

as on specific themes - where to reflect on the action in course and to inspire and create conditions to launch as many and diverse as possible civil society and parties new actions and movements, to face the the capitalism monster that Is menacing more and more the continuity of life in our planet. Spaces and movements are both necessary, as reflection and action must coexist, linked to each other, in the struggle for change.

Group: RC10 Participation, Organizational Democracy and Self-Management, RC26 Sociotechnics, Sociological Practice

Session Selection: The Future of the World Social Forum

Keywords:

 World Social Forum future, capitalism, civil society and space 

Chico World Social Forum, Brazil