BY NICK EVERETT
SYDNEY On August 15, 80 people attended an information night at the Tom Mann Theatre to learn more about the upcoming Sydney Social Forum, which will be held on September 21-22 at the University of Technology, Sydney. Two short documentary films about the 2002 World Social Forum held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, were screened and several WSF participants addressed the meeting.
It was announced at the meeting that a ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organisation, part of the WTO negotiation round known as the Doha Development Agenda, will be held in Sydney on November 13 and 14. The next social forum organising meeting will discuss protesting at this meeting.
WSF participants described how inspiring they had found the forum. A highlight for me was the mass demonstrations. Thousands of people in the streets chanted slogans I had never heard before, such as 'viva socialismo', Sholto Macpherson told the launch.
Dick Nichols described how the first WSF in 2001 had planted the flag of defiance against the World Economic Forum and the rule of capital. The second WSF in 2002 had, he argued, started to develop alternatives to corporate globalisation. The third, to be held in January 2003, would focus on strategy: what type of body the WSF is.
The meeting also heard from Pat Ranald, convenor of the Australian Fair Trade and Investment Network (AFTINET), and Don Sutherland, the national education coordinator for the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union, who attended the forum as the representative of the Australian Council of Trade Unions.
Sutherland described the forum as a learning experience for activists worldwide and stressed the increased participation of unions in the second WSF. However, most union federations still did not attend, he explained. Instead they attended the World Economic Forum meeting in New York. Really there were two movements [at the WSF], he said. There was the institutional, formal, European trade union movement, and there was the Latin American union movement, which was more like a social movement.
Sutherland urged activists to learn more about the social forum movement by studying the WSF's charter of principles and by travelling to a future meeting of the WSF.
Organisers of the Sydney Social Forum were optimistic about bringing the WSF spirit to Sydney. Plenary sessions are planned around the themes of: environment, the war on terror, racism and nationalism, activism in Sydney and alternatives to neo-liberal globalisation.
Workshops, film screenings and entertainment are also planned. The event will also discuss the international social forum movement. Continental (European and Asia-Pacific), city and thematic social forums are now beginning to be organised.
To find out more about the Sydney Social Forum, visit <http://www.sydneysocialforum.org> or phone Nick on (02) 9690 1977 or Luke on 0419 135 019.
From Green Left Weekly, August 21, 2002.
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