(cross posted at the ACDJ blog)
As many of you will know, I’m on the oganising committee of the Melbourne Social Forum. The web site is finally looking pretty good and well on our way to having a pretty good forum with an increasing number of impressive speakers (I’ll admit to being particularly excited about Val Plumwood attending whose ideas were certainly influential in the founding principles of the Centre - I know Nic is pretty excited about her ideas too).
The one issue that keeps coming up is the issue of providing a unified statement. Now We the People gave everyone a list of key points that the organisers felt were important, then allowed debate on these issues so that some sort of uniform statement was produced. I think that’s a remarkable feat. However, I’m of the opinion that the Social Forum (any social forum for that matter) should not do this. There’s some disagreement about this and I hope the other organisers don’t mind me talking about this (please remember that this is just my opinion, not that of the Forum or ACDJ for that matter).
The social forum is meant to be an open space for activists. It’s a place where activists of all persuasions come together to discuss ideas and campaigns with other activists and then take those ideas and shared experiences back to their own communities or issues they are working on and hopefully do that better. There is also plenty of room for campaign building, collaboration and networking as well. For me, the really exciting part is that there is disagreement within the activist groups and what is important is that they engage each other and not only accommodate a diversity of opinion but harness the creative tension this generates and come out with new ideas that means that both sides are accommodated. This is no easy task and takes some very talented facilitation but hopefully the Social Forum can do that.
So for me, the task is not to try and reach some resolution but to celebrate the fact that a multitude of resolutions come out of the Social Forum. I call this the Cacophony, Terry calls it the Rhizome. For now at least, meta-narratives are dead (and I don’t mean that in some sort of post-modern sense). What the Social Forum creates is many micro-narratives and facilitates an interconnectivity of these narratives. It’s a ‘Movement of Movements’ to quote Klein. I think it leaves us standing on the edge of something very exciting and genuinely new. The meta-narrative is this sort of ultimate democracy which is comprised, not only of a high level of participation, but a multitude of local democracies. This is how you empower communities. This is how you emancipate people. This is ‘deep’ democracy.
