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DETROIT—Amid
the wreckage of a city that has lost hundreds of thousands of jobs and
residents over the past 30 years, the second United States Social Forum
(USSF) landed here with 15,000 grassroots activists, Non-Governmental
Organizations (NGOs), and trade-union organizers. The conference began
June 22 for nearly one week of workshops, cultural events, and planning
sessions.
Detroit was a “conscious choice” for
organizers. In the words of organizer Karlos Gauna Schmieder of
Detroit’s Center for Media Justice, “It’s a microcosm of the world
economy and a center of resistance to foreclosures and joblessness.”
This once powerful automobile industry center, dubbed the “Motor City,”
seemed an ideal location for a forum whose expressed goal is “Another
World is Possible: Another U.S. is Necessary.” Devastated by a decline
in total employment of over 440,000 jobs in the past three decades,
Detroit is certainly in need of “another U.S.”
With scenes reminiscent of post-World
War II Eastern Europe (deserted stores and supermarkets, neighborhoods
of boarded-up houses, and factories and skyscrapers crumbling to dust),
it is evident that Detroit too has been bombed—by capitalism. The banks
and money lenders, the multi-national corporations, Wall Street
gamblers, along with hired-pimp politicians and other opportunistic
operatives have all taken turns raping this city before skipping
town.
With this dramatic backdrop, the U.S.
Social Forum advertised itself as “a moment of reflection“ and “a space
to come up with the people’s solutions to the economic and ecological
crisis.” It placed a special emphasis on the “strategic need to unite
the struggles of oppressed communities within the United States to the
struggles of oppressed nations in the Third World.“
The event was an offshoot of the World
Social Forum, which first assembled NGOs, trade-unions, and grassroots
organizations—along with support from the Chavez government of
Venezuela—in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001. While both events have
operated under the “another world is possible” mantra, the U.S. Social
Forum certainly has many issues to tackle in a nation facing severe
economic crisis and ecological destruction. Participants were seeking
not only an opportunity to air their local grievances but a coherent
plan of action against the U.S. imperialist wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, against the economic crisis, against an oil spill
ravishing the coast of Louisiana, and against the passage in Arizona of
SB1070—one of the most racist policies implemented in decades.
The main conveners of the forum were
the United Auto Workers, the Eastern Michigan Environmental Action
Council, Michigan Welfare Rights, Centro Obrero, and Southeast Michigan
Jobs with Justice. Other panelists and participants included major
contributions from immigrant rights organizations, feminist
collectives, LGBT groups, indigenous and other people of color
formations, third world movements, reproductive justice alliances, etc.
Included were over 1000 workshops and
50 people’s movement assemblies in barely a five-day span. A sampling
of the diversity of the workshops features themes as varied as:
“Theater of the Oppressed,” “Why Rural America Matters for Prison
Abolition,” “Amazing Grace: AIDS and the Oppression of Girls,” “Using
Hip-Hop to Promote Higher Education,” “Venezuela 101,” “Islamophopia,”
“The UAW and Toyota,” and “Photography as a Tool for Political
Transformation,” among countless others.
The larger Peoples Movement Assemblies
included titles themes such as “Justice in Palestine,” “Food
Sovereignty,” “Calling All Street Youth!” and “Peoples Charter with
Corporate America: Defining an Agenda to Check Corporate Power.”
At the workshop “Dialogue with Activists
from the Haitian Popular Movement,” activists from the Haitian Action
Committee (HAC) spoke on the humanitarian and economic crisis facing
the Caribbean nation. The HAC—a collaboration of Haitian grassroots
community activists, U.S. intellectuals, and African American religious
leaders—emphasized the role of the United States in destabilizing this
nation through both direct military intervention and neo-colonialist
economic and trade policy. The earthquake this past year has only
further atrophied Haiti’s development, while the United States has
taken advantage of the situation to further dominate the country.
In another workshop, entitled
“Palestine: Evolution of the Movement of Liberation,” activists from
Al-Awda New York along with three Palestinian children, guests from
Gaza, analyzed the movement for liberation of the Palestinian people.
The children’s testimony was especially touching as they recalled
checkpoints, guns pointed at them on the way to school, and their
hunger for freedom. The workshop spurred a lively and at times strident
discussion on what activists can do to promote the liberation of the
Palestinian people in order to, in the words of one event attendee,
“prevent this discussion from still taking place 30 years from
now.”
Finally, veterans of the League of
Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW) put on an what can only be described
as a soulful and intellectual tempest of a workshop, titled “Detroit
Highlighted: The History of Labor in Detroit.” The LRBW was the
culmination of growing militancy among Black workers, especially those
around the Dodge Main assembly plant in the 1950s and ’60s, that was
consummated in a series of wildcat strikes at Dodge Main calling out
the Chrysler bosses and racist elements in the United Autoworker (UAW)
bureaucracy who routinely failed to defend Black workers.
For close to three hours, the LRBW
explained the entrance en masse of Black workers into Detroit to take
some of the hardest and lowest paying jobs in the automobile industry,
given increased demand for cheap labor during World War II. The LRBW
showed through testimony, video clips, and song that militant united
fronts of Black and white workers in Detroit won some of the highest
wages in the United States for a time.
The USSF was inspired by philosopher
Hannah Arendt’s writings on the importance of the public realm for
civic engagement and collective deliberation. The forum certainly
allowed space for a dynamic assembly to dialogue toward a deeper
understanding of our world.
However, a coherent ideological
superstructure to tie the many movements together was lacking. Stated
event organizer Elena Herrada of Centro Obrero: “I haven’t seen anybody
claiming to really have any answers, just seeing everyone saying ‘yeah,
how about this’ and ‘how about this.’” Identity politics, lifestyle
anarchism, and naïve Third Worldism were much on display at the expense
of class-conscious analysis.
Along with a myriad of liberal NGOs
such as the Sierra Club, Oxfam, and Amnesty International, event donors
from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Ben
and Jerry’s Foundation have little interest in radical change,
preferring a perhaps slightly less brutal form of capitalism.
It might also be noted that USSF
core sponsor UAW came out of the collapse of Detroit with $1.3
billion in assets in 2009 and part ownership of the automobile
industry, while new autoworkers have seen their wages cut in half in
the name of “global competitiveness.” As well, the UAW has supported a
succession of Black Democratic Party mayors since the early 1970s, who
have done little to stem the collapse of the city.
News coverage of the USSF was virtually
non-existent in the bourgeois media while similarly styled but much
smaller right-wing gatherings, such as the recent Tea Party convention,
received abundant coverage. Such realities point to the weakness of the
left in the United States. Lack of working-class ideological cohesion
along with promotion of identity politics are the perfect breeding
ground for the Democratic Party to disorient the movement with its
cynical objectives for continued warfare and corporate plunder.
While problems associated with
capitalism were discussed at the USSF, it is time to look beyond
capitalism and toward an international socialist re-organization of
society and the means of production. It is time to take the dialogue
begun at the USSF much deeper to understand the determinant forces—both
political and social—that are holding us back.
Where they say we have no answers, we
say socialism is the answer!
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