Having just spent a week with occupiers, indignants, and social movements from across the world, I have been thinking lots about what it means to have a truly ‘global’ movement. I would like to sketch two different outlines of what this may mean based on my experiences as participant in a large social forum on the one hand, and my contrasting experience with a local Occupy group on the other.
The 24th to 29th of January 2012 saw the Thematic Social Forum take place in Porto Alegre, part of the 11 year-old World Social Forum process, which was considered by many to be an integral component to the global justice movement that flourished last decade. Following the explosion of Occupy around the world, they decided to invite a few individuals from the movement to participate in various discussions about the capitalists crisis and social and ecological justice. Whilst I learned from and shared ideas with numerous activists, in particular from the global south, I could not help but feel that the Forum itself was an old model for our contemporary ‘world’ movement.
The Forum process was centred around a series of panels and talks, in which speakers would sit at a table and talk to their audience, before answering questions. I participated in numerous of these, and enjoyed responding to some of the critiques posed about the occupy movement (how can you hope to change the world without taking power being the most common). However, as I left the air-conditioned rooms and rigid chairs of the Forum’s space, and moved into the Occupy camp outside I realised just how limited their process was.
It is not simply the model of panel-audience interaction in an institutionalised setting, but it is the whole concept of pre-determining who should speak and how they must do so. The Forum was set up at a time when the decentralised networked movements, that spanned the global north and south was being celebrated. It was based precisely on the importance of global social movements. However, 11 years on, the whole concept of ‘social movements’ seems to have been reified and transformed into an essential and yet at the same time completely ignored concept in the forum. A list of established trade unions, NGO coalitions and long standing ‘movements’ are called upon to debate the state of the contemporary crisis and the social response. Doing so ignores the wide plethora of activists who are constantly experimenting with responses to crisis, yet do not hold the flag of any specific organisation.
Speaking to Occupy activists in Brazil, it is clear that for every similarity we have a difference. Crucially, however, we are united in our commitment to the process of social change, in which we seek to constantly (re)create open spaces for dialogue and action. Sadly the forum seems to have forgotten this, and perhaps one reason for inviting occupiers was precisely to give it a new breath of life. A global movement for the Forum is based on an unproblematic clustering of external ‘social movements’ that come together for question and answer sessions. A global movement for Occupy however, is to ask what a global movement might mean for us, as individuals and collections of individuals. We do not want to find the answer to this question, for it is question itself that guides us.
A global Occupy movement, if we can call it that, is a patchwork of experiences and imaginations taking place in the minds and actions of individuals and collections of individuals worldwide. It is an open space for direct action that grounds itself in very particular contexts. Constantly (re)territorialising itself in diverse corners of the world, Occupy has taken us beyond the ‘network’ of the World Social Forum and into a truly global movement, full of very real places. The camp in Porto Alegre is one of them, and so is St. Paul’s courtyard in London. These places, which exist as much in our mind as our actions, are at once together and apart, and no panel will ever be able to answer what it is that brings us together. This is why we occupy.
By Sam Halvorsen
