The
by Renee Tanner
The Boston
Social Forum (BSF) was held in
Organizers
of the Boston Social Forum estimated overall attendance at 3,000; in any case,
it was the largest “Social Forum” gathering yet in the
Organized
around the theme “Another World Is Possible,” the BSF drew people not only from
I will first
discuss the scope of the event in more detail, pointing out its positive and
inspiring aspects; then I will take up a very disturbing feature—its apparent
control by supporters of the Democratic Party.
Special Events
There were
at least nine special events organized separately from the workshops in the
major “tracks.” One was a film series, including showings of The Corporation,
Fahrenheit 911, and a documentary about Howard Zinn,
You Can’t Be Neutral On a Moving Train.
Also there was “An Evening with John Sayles,” featuring clips from his new film
Content
In addition
to special events there were almost 600 programs in 30 “tracks” that covered
the following major themes—Active Arts Youth Conference, Anti-Poverty, BSF Film
Series, Climate Change, Corporate Accountability, Criminal Justice/Domestic
Repression, Culture, Democracy, The Economy, Education, Environment,
International Peace Council, Faith, Fund the Dream, Funding Our Movement, Gay
Lesbian Bisexual and Transgender Issues, Global Justice, Health, Immigration,
Israel-Palestine Conference, Lifestyles and Personal Choices, Jobs and the New
England Economy, Localization, Media, Movement Building, Peace, Politics,
Science and Technology, Strategic Nonviolence, Students and Youth, Water,
Women’s Liberation and the Women’s Web/Feminist Agenda. A projected People of
Color Organizers track had been unfortunately eliminated from the final
program.
Art Exhibits and
Performances
Art exhibits
and performances included a Model of the Israeli Wall; a Guerrilla Photo
Exhibit from the Global Justice Ecology Project; the Bread and Roses Heritage
Committee Exhibit—a traveling exhibit, in multicultural format including music
and dance, about the Lawrence, Massachusetts, strike led by the IWW in 1912;
and an exhibit by the Beehive Collective, which creates collaborative
anti-copyright images that can be used for public education. The Beehive
Collective from
Organizations Involved
The press
packet listed over 60 organizations as “involved” in the BSF, although it did
not indicated in what capacity. Most of them participated by organizing
workshops in the different “tracks.” A number of socialist organizations were
involved—including the Independent Socialist Organization (ISO), Freedom Road
Socialist Organization (FRSO), Communist Party USA, and Solidarity—and they
presented various workshops, but no socialist organizations were listed as
sponsors in the media packet other than the Democratic Socialists of America
(DSA). Other “involved” groups included Boston Fair Trade Action Network, the
Ad Hoc Committee to Defend Health Care, ACLU-MA Chapter, AFSC, Asian American
Resource Workshop, Centro Presente, Chinese
Progressive Association, Greater Boston OWL, Health Care without Harm, Italian
American Labor Council, Massachusetts Jobs With Justice, Redstockings,
three different SEIU locals, the Tikkun Community,
United Electrical Workers District 2, University of New Hampshire Animal
Rights, Union of Minority Neighborhoods, Unitarian Universalists
for Just Economic Community, United for Peace and Justice, Women’s International
League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), and Z Magazine.
There were
others too numerous to list, but I will say that in addition to the traditional
groups that one would expect to be included, there were numerous new groups
that represent a broader layer of activism being drawn to the movement. It was
very impressive.
Composition
The crowd
was diverse in the sense of including different cultures and ages with
activists from many generations; however, it was still predominantly white.
This never seems to bother the organizers of such events and similar
activities, including antiwar actions, since the problem is never mentioned or
addressed. But it does raise the question, Why is the Black community not
present in proportional numbers when the social justice movements are getting
together? The UMass/Boston campus sits 20 minutes
from the large Black community of Roxbury; yet the organizers failed to involve
activists from this community in any sizable or meaningful way. Some
representatives were there from the Black and Latino communities, but not in
large numbers. There were not many union representatives either. This failing
deserves serious discussion leading to proposals for changing this state of
affairs if the movement is to progress.
Convocations
Three
convocations, or large assemblies, were held—one on each day of the gathering:
one on Friday evening, one on Saturday morning, and the last one on Sunday
afternoon. There was no final gathering or assembly Sunday afternoon and no
reading of a declaration of principles, as is customary at the end of the World
Social Forums.
This could
be because a reading of the principles of the World Socialist Forum would have
been too embarrassing to organizers who were pressing for support to the
candidacy of Kerry for President, since he is not known to support any of the
WSF principles.
Noticeably
there was no call for demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention
(DNC), which opened the day after the BSF ended. Yet literature about projected
UFPJ actions at the upcoming Republican National Convention in
It was not
surprising that there were no plenary sessions and no votes taken on campaigns.
The BSF explained its reasons for this in its “Answers to Frequently Asked
Questions” (FAQ). It stated that the BSF is not an organization, and therefore
does not make decisions, although the process that the BSF is involved in may
lead to decision-making sometime in the future. Participating organizations,
the statement said, were free to take votes and make decisions, although not in
the name of the BSF. The BSF also stated that its goal is to show there is a
large progressive movement, that it has visionary ideas, and that it allows
activists from many social sectors to gather together to lay the basis for a larger
and more powerful progressive movement over the next few years.
The forum
was organized by volunteers, who built the coalition and coordinated the
meetings. The BSF’s FAQ specifically states that the
BSF excludes political parties, that candidates of parties may participate in
the proceedings as individuals on the same basis as everyone else, and that
candidates may not use the Forum to further their political campaigns.
The majority
of speakers were leading experts in their fields, such as Rae Street from the
British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; Dennis Brutus, South African poet and
antiapartheid crusader; Gyung Lan
Jung, Korean peace activist; Guglielmo Epifani, a leader of the Italian Confederation of Labor;
and other impressive international and national leaders, who addressed the need
to build the movements for social justice. However, the speakers’ list at the
three convocations was stacked with speakers who advocate lesser-evil politics
and did so in the course of their talks. Many convocation speakers on all three
days—from Angela Davis to Jim Hightower—spoke of how important it is to “defeat
Bush at all costs.” While Dennis Kucinich, the darling of the liberals, did not
address the convocations, he was active in the proceedings. It was clear that
Kucinich was there to get people to unite behind the Democratic candidate for
president, and he said so in some of the workshops. It was rumored that
organizers had worked to prevent Nader from speaking.
I Smell a Rat
There were
too many such coincidences pointing to the unavoidable conclusion that this
gathering was a front for the Democratic Party presidential campaign, just like
the giant March for Women’s Lives held in
1. Political candidates and campaigns were officially banned by the
organizers from building their campaigns. However, only certain representatives
of campaigns who were not Democrats actually got excluded from the speakers’
lists. The same kind of thing happened in
2. The timing of the Boston Social Forum on the weekend before the
Democratic Party Convention clearly had the aim of demonstrating that there was
a large and progressive movement. Who was this designed to impress? The
Democratic Party of course. That this was the intent of the organizers was
indicated by the fact that instead of a final gathering and a declaration of
principles the end of the BSF conveniently concluded just before an off-campus
event organized by many of the same BSF leaders. This event was called A
Roundtable Discussion Honoring the Memory of Senator Paul Wellstone. This event
took up the question “What Must the Democratic Party Do To
Live Up to the Progressive Vision of Paul Wellstone?” Give me a break.
This august
event was to include Al Franken, Jim Hightower, Arianna
Huffington, Barbara Ehrenreich,
Frances Fox-Piven, Hon. Barbara Lee, Hon. Major
Owens, Hon. Chuck Turner, and others. I missed this one because, quite frankly,
listening to grown, ostensibly intelligent people still trying to change the
agenda of the Democratic Party was something that I personally could not take
on an empty stomach. I went to dinner as the military and riot police were
preparing for the Democratic National Convention with random searches being
conducted on trains in the city and with fighter jets flying overhead.
While the
“Roundtable” was going on, the Democratic Party leadership was busy at that
very moment putting the finishing touches on the cage they had built in their
minute “Free Speech Zone” for demonstrators. The purpose of this Zone, of
course, was to keep demonstrators away from the DNC, to humiliate and control
them. The attempt was to deny protesters the right to demonstrate at other
locations of their choosing. The “Democrat” leadership wanted to keep dissent
away from the delegates, who were also denied the right to vote, speak, or
participate in any meaningful way in the formation of their own platform.
Throughout the DNC the party leadership was busy keeping delegates with antiwar
messages and banners out of the convention hall and removing delegates with
Kucinich T-shirts on.
While the
city of
To their
credit, the ANSWER antiwar coalition had called for demonstrations at the
convention. The demonstrators, several thousand strong, refused to enter the
cage constructed for them and demonstrated elsewhere—except for one symbolic
demonstration in which 200 protesters entered the cage wearing masks
reminiscent of the Abu Ghraib prisoners and lay down
in the pen. However, this writer cannot remember any speech given at the BSF
calling for support to the demonstrations at the DNC. That was not the agenda.
The Meaning of the
It appears
to me that we are in a stage similar in certain respects to one that the
movement was in at the end of the 1950s before the upsurge of the 1960s. Back
then most of the major social justice movements were dominated and controlled
by the reformists. At that time most radicals had been driven out of the
unions, and the peace movement was dominated by Social Democrats, pacifists,
and remnants of the Communist Party who supported them and their line of
lesser-evil politics. However, things are on a much higher level and broader
scale this time. There is a large anti-imperialist consciousness among wide
layers of activists that did not exist even in the late 1970s. There is a much
deeper distrust and revulsion at the policies of the Democrats, although
thousands of young activists are still led astray by the advocates of Anybody
But Bush (ABB ).
A large
segment of the movement is not buying ABB. They are breaking with the Democrats
to support the Greens or the Nader-Camejo ticket.
During the 1960s and ’70s there were attempts to form third parties, such as
the La Raza Unida Party and
the Freedom Now Party, but those attempts came later and not before a general
upsurge. Those parties were based in the working class in the communities of
color, but these new attempts at independent political action, in my opinion,
could lead to such developments in the future and in the working class as a
whole.
Camejo
Blasts the Democratic Party
A highlight
following closely at the end of the BSF was a talk given by Peter Camejo, who was chosen in June by Ralph Nader
to be his vice-presidential running mate in 2004. Camejo
was brought to the BSF by the International Socialist Organization for a talk
following the last convocation on Sunday afternoon.
About 150
predominantly young people attended this event, where Camejo
blasted the Democrats as only he can and received a standing ovation from the
crowd. I was curious to see how he was conducting his campaign and was
personally glad to see him after 25 years. (We were both in
the Socialist Workers Party in 1976, when Camejo ran
for president on the SWP ticket.) I was gratified to see that he has not
lost his fire, and as a gifted speaker he still stands out as one of the best
propagandists on the left for the politics of independent political action (that
is, a break from the two-party system dominated by the Republican and
Democrats, the twin parties of corporate capitalism in the United States).
Camejo’s talk attacked
international imperialism and corporate control of the
During the
question and answer period, one person in the audience pointed out that Camejo had failed to speak about building the independent
protest movements and focused too much on electoral politics. Camejo is not calling for a Labor Party, but is advocating
building the Green Party, even though the Green Party convention in June denied
its endorsement to the Nader-Camejo campaign. (See
Mike McCallister’s articles about the Green
convention on the Labor Standard web site.) Camejo
said that there needs to be a fight in the Green Party to democratize it, as
they have a system of elections similar to the antidemocratic Electoral College
structure established by the
In the
question period I asked Camejo if he saw the Green
Party as an end in itself or as a vehicle for building a broader mass party
down the road. He answered that I had asked an excellent question and that if
the Green candidates continue to be successful in local elections and social
justice campaigns, it could spur the organization of Latino and Black parties
and many different kinds of independent political action. I tend to agree with
him on this and feel that the Democratic Party is far more attuned to the
potential of these campaigns to break the two-party lock on elections than some
on the left. (The Democrats are currently engaging in numerous legal challenges
to Nader’s ballot status and engaging in dirty
tactics and smear campaigns against his right to run for office.)
The fact
that the Greens have successfully elected over 200 people to office should not
be lost on the fledgling Labor Party. In my opinion, the Labor Party should
take note of the Greens’ electoral successes, which seem impressive to many who
are looking for an alternative to the Democrats.
The Promise of the
Social Forum
The BSF
showed that there is a broad new layer of young activists who now stand on the
shoulders of four generations of activists that have come before them, who will
not buy the lies of the twin parties of war and repression. Among their ranks
are experienced organizers and creative, talented young people who sincerely
believe that “another world is possible” and who are dedicating their lives to
this goal. The halls of the buildings where the sessions were held were filled
with hundreds of literature tables dealing with every conceivable social
dilemma facing humanity and proposing creative and dynamic solutions to
problems ranging from corporate control of the globe to personal lifestyle
freedoms.
When I
walked out of the classrooms into the giant open plaza on the campus I felt I
was walking into a scene just like the Free Speech Movement at
The goal
before revolutionaries is clear. We cannot leave this burgeoning mass movement
to the reformist misleaders, who cannot bring themselves to face facts and
break with the party that is killing the social justice movements. As Peter Camejo said, referring to the Democrats, “We have a
political party that is one of the most effective instruments for the rule of
money over people.”
It is
effective because it continues to send its organizers into the social justice
movements to mislead and derail them from their stated goals. The task before
us is to break the grip of the Democratic Party on the social and labor
movements and unleash the nascent power exhibited at the Social Forum in