The Boston Social Forum

As the U.S. faces the erosion of the public sector, and of civil rights and civil liberites, and the left remains fragmented, the Boston Social Forum offers an opportunity to envision another world and strategize about how to build it.

THE BOSTON SOCIAL FORUM
by Sean Donahue

The “structural adjustment” programs that big
corporations, wealthy governments, and international
lenders imposed on Latin America, Africa, and much of
Asia in the 1980’s and 1990’s are now being applied
back home in the U.S. In order to reduce the deficit
while still funding the largest military machine the
world has seen, the federal government has slashed
funding for housing, education, health care, and
environmental protection. State governments have
followed suit, putting increasing pressure on
counties, cities, and towns to privatize everything
from prisons to public hospitals to municipal water
systems. The wave of privatization has resulted in
the loss of union jobs, higher fees for vital
services, and a lack of accountability for how public
money is spent and basic needs are met. Non-profits
are left scrambling to try to meet the needs of people
who used to depend on government programs that have
now been scaled back or eliminated, and find
themselves competing for the same grants and appealing
to the same donors to help them through each new
crisis.

Meanwhile, progressive social movements in this
country find themselves fragmented and lacking a
vision for the future. Daily struggles against new
wars, new funding cuts, new court rulings, and new
arrests leave activists unable to develop a coherent
response to the broad assault on the public sector,
civil liberties, civil rights, and international law
(not to mention people, movements, and countries that
oppose the corporate agenda.)

In response to this crisis, over fifty labor,
environmental, peace, human rights, civil rights,
neighborhood, and women’s groups came to organize the
Boston Social Forum, which will bring thousands of
activists from throughout New England and around the
world together at the University of Massachusetts in
Boston from July 23-25 to share their ideas and
experiences, build new networks and alliances, and
articulate an alternative vision for our collective
future. Modeled on the World Social Forum, which has
brought tens of thousands of activists from social
movements around the world together in Porto Allegre,
Brazil, and Mumbai, India, together to share their
strategies, analysis, and proposals, the Boston
Social Forum will be the first major social forum in
North America.

Prominent writers, activists, musicians, and social
critics like Angela Davis, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, Billy
Bragg, Winona LaDuke, Jim Hightower, Hassan
Barghouthi, Harry Belafonte, and Medea Benjamin will
help to set the tone for the weekend by sharing their
own stories and songs and visions. But the most
important conversations will take place between people
from radically different walks of life finding common
ground. Where else will a union organizer from Rome, a
single mother holding down three jobs in Detroit, the
only out lesbian from a high school in rural Utah, an
organic farmer from Maine, a college student who spent
the winter working for Howard Dean in Iowa and New
Hampshire, a South African poet, a seventeen year old
rapper, a homeless Vietnam veteran, a campesino woman
tortured by the Colombian Army, and an Ivy League
economics professor sit down together to explore the
links between the struggles they all face and then
spend the night dancing to hip-hop and Afro-Cuban
jazz?

Ours will be an open-ended process – we will not be
hammering out a manifesto, adopting a platform, or
issuing a five-year plan. We are uniting around common
questions rather than ideology: What kind of future do
we want for Boston? For our region? For our nation?
For the world? What is our vision of a better society?
As Suren Moodliar of the North American Alliance for
Fair Employment says, “We don’t have the answers but
we know who does.” Those answers will emerge from
conversations between people from different
communities, different social movements, and
dramatically different walks of life.

The Boston Social Forum won’t be just a conference
about reclaiming democracy, it will be an experiment
in democracy, a place where everyone has a voice,
living proof that “Another World is Possible.”

Sean Donahue directs the Corporations and Militarism
Project of the Massachusetts Anti-Corporate
Clearinghouse (http://www.stopcorporatecontrol.org.)
For more information on the Boston Social Forum go to
http://www.bostonsocialforum.org.