AUT: Forum vs. Protest

[Thiago Oppermann <difference_3ngine@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Angela also wrote:

³Ok, maybe it's a little bit clear:
Leaving aside the origins of the Social Forum idea
(which is nevertheless constitutive of the whole
problem), the entire premise of the Forums has
been to substitute 'policy development' for
protest, or to explain the demise of the recent
protests (trot-style) according to the absence of
a coherent programme.²


Lack of a coherent programme, and the lack of demands and platforming was
the party socialist complaint about the social forum experiment. That was
the rationale behind the Mumbai Resistance counterforum, and you can see the
results now where they actually had some control over the forum process in
England. So the 'entire premise' of the forum was something that had to be
injected into by people who actually objected to the entire premise of the
forum.

I say this by way of asking you what it is that you think 'policy
development' is. I went to the WSF and I saw none of it whatsoever. There is
a thin veneer of posturing and Petrobras endorsements, but the actual thing
is a chaos of little meetings from which you can roll your own. There was a
teeming multitude of ideas floating about, and none of them were 'developed'
in the course of the forum or proposed as 'policy'. Show me one that was.

The forum was set up to 'stimulate dialogue'. I suppose you can read
"dialogue" as "policy development" and state flatly that it is a means of
coopting 'irrational' 'traveling circuses of anarchists' and so on. Besides,
I still don't understand why you think that it is impossible to talk and
throw bricks at the same time. That's just some weird puritan moralism on
your part (as is very evident in your concern about 'better and worse' in
the other passage I replied to. If we can't have morality, then, well, there
is no choices to be made!)


Thiago



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