Greetings,

During the International Committee of the WSF in Salvador de Bahia last October, various comrades came together around the idea of an investigation that would facilitate further reflections on social movements. Globally, the question is this: faced with the growing power of globalized capitalism, the increasing war against human beings and life on the planet and undermining of democracy, what can we done to strengthen our struggles, to make our resistance more efficient and to construct the “other” possible worlds that we have envisioned over the last years?

You all know that the neoliberal system is dominating more and more our world, our brains and our hearts. Citizen participation is taken hostage by a representative democracy that closes the door to any meaningful change and promotes conservative and xenophobic ideas. All of this leads to further inequality, wars and the destruction of the planet. Our resistance are strong and multiple (in the streets, through our pressures on the political actors, in the parliaments, etc), however, they failed to weaken domination. When we succeed to elect people who are on our side, they do not know or they cannot change the economic models, the modes of life and production, the relation with nature. The rapidly slip into the logic and into the arms of the dominant system based on individualism, consumerism, so-called economic growth, etc.

What we are thinking in the first phase is an investigation bringing concerned individuals to contribute 500 words (more or less) on a few questions that would be collected and then offered to discussion, particularly in some forthcoming occasions like a seminar that will be organized in April in Casablanca by our friends from the Forum marocain des alternatives sud) Morocco) and FTDS (Tunisia) and later during the World Social Forum in Montreal in August.

We are therefore proposing you to participate. Perhaps, you can start with these questions:

What is to be done in terms of strategies, as citizens and as social movements (the only real actors that can really change things) to make this ‘another world’ possible?
What is the role in this context of instruments such as the WSF process? How can the WSF fulfill a constructive role?

For sure, these questions are only suggestions and you can share any other lives of thinking that can integrate and nourish the discussion!

Please send your comments and ideas to Pierre Beaudet (pbeaudet@uottawa.ca) who will compile them and make them accessible.

Thanks for your attention.

Hedili Aberrahman (Tunisia)
Moema Miranda (Brazil)
Gina Vargas (Peru)
Gustave Massiah (France)
Chico Whitaker (Brazil)
Hamouda Soubhi (Morocco)
Kamal Lahbib (Morocco)
Pierre Beaudet (Quebec)