The Boston Social Forum - 5 Years On

On the weekend of July 23-25, 2004 over 5,000 progressives from across the region, nation and world gathered at UMass Boston for the Boston Social Forum - three days of discussion, debate and cultural events staged right before the 2004 Democratic National Convention, which also took place in our fair city. Modeled on the World Social Forum process begun in Brazil in 2001, the aim of the event was to encourage "progressive organizations of all kinds to showcase their best analysis of the present, and their best ideas for the future, across the breadth of human knowledge — politics, economics, science and technology, culture and faith — in the context of corporate globalization." Five years have passed since that inspiring, exciting and sometimes frustrating pageant of left ideas, and I thought it would be a useful exercise to reflect on it a bit this week. Which seems appropriate enough, as I was the BSF's architect and lead organizer.

Rather than review the particulars, I will recommend the reading audience to the Wikipedia entry on the BSF for more information. Suffice to say, it was a very large event for a group of underfunded non-profits to pull off. It took 20 months of organizing work by over 150 activists to bring an idea I had on the subway traveling over the Longfellow Bridge on Boston's Charles River on November 12, 2002 to fruition. It ultimately involved over 550 discrete workshops, plenary sessions, convocations, concerts, art events, films and comedy shows. Over 300 progressive organizations and labor unions were involved in making it happen. My friends and I raised over a quarter of a million dollars to pay for it all. Primarily from individual BSF registrations.

It was, to be sure, a huge job. But, for myself - the very real economic consequences that I (and a number of the core BSF organizers) suffered to make it happen taken as granted - it was worth every minute of the effort I put into it. At the time it occurred, the BSF was a fairly well-covered footnote to the DNC proceedings. No major political upheaval happened. Nor was any expected. Our primary purpose in organizing the event had almost nothing to do with that Democratic Party confab. Despite some minor criticism the BSF received from a few fellow progressives that we were somehow part of an attempt to dampen protest efforts at the DNC. Which did turn out to be rather small, but for reasons that had nothing to do with the BSF. As it happens, it was my belief that while the DNC was eminently worthy of mass protest. But I felt the large amount of work it would take to get a sufficiently large demonstration of, say, a million people off the ground to have an effect on the Dems would be wasted unless the American left is capable of saying what it wants. And what we want to replace the existing political economic order with.

I saw no evidence of any grouping of forces on the left that was capable of doing that at the time. And I still don't. It is, after all, usually a decades-long project to build a social movement (or movements) capable of changing a nation (let along changing the world). And the moment of signal societal change usually arrives when least expected historically. So the reason to do the BSF was not to stage any kind of ersatz premature rebellion, but to help lay the groundwork for real political change by affording attendees the much-needed luxury of taking the long view of human affairs. To say that building a decent society that honors human rights together with political and economic democracy requires a social movement that can really speak to the issues of the day in a holistic rather than piecemeal fashion - and offer workable alternative to the status quo. Alternatives tested in the crucible of real experience.

We're nowhere near that kind of movement yet - though perhaps a bit closer than we were five years ago. But were are in a place where we can stand up and say that we are the American left, here's what we believe, here's what we're trying to work out, here's roughly where we want to go. We're not the Democrats - although our numbers include many people on the left of that party (who were very much in evidence at the BSF, by design). We're not cranks without coherent thoughts - although we certainly have our cranks (who were also more or less in evidence at the BSF, as expected). We're real people from real communities. Here we are. Take a look at us. Check out our ideas. If you agree with some of them, join us and help us improve things.

So that's part of what we did at the forum. We stood up the American left in the public eye - as part of a global process of similar forums (started not in the so-called "first world" but in the long-suffering global south) - and said "here we are." A surprisingly radical thing to do in the desultory election year of 2004.

The other big thing we did at the BSF was to encourage all the legions of single-issue groups in and around the American left to get outside their usual limited political framework by putting them in a situation where they'd be tempted to meet and greet their opposite numbers in many other organizing sectors - some likewise single-issue, some with a broader outlook.

We did this to say "hey, this whole single-issue thing is not working!" Any victories we might win in one or another area pale in comparison to the global crisis created by the economic and political devastation caused by run-away capitalism combined with the accelerating collapse of the environment. It was my belief, and that of those many people that joined with me to work on the BSF, that we needed to create social space where the big ticket items could be discussed and put into perspective - the better to then move forward and organize broad popular fronts that could ultimately win significant political economic battles at all levels.

In recent OMB editorials, I have repeatedly warned single-issue progressive organizers of the danger of narrowing their vision down to discrete "winnable" fights that often serve simply to placate nascent movements for political and economic change before they really get up a head of steam. Not that winning such fights is always a bad thing. But my sentiments were bred in the years leading up to the BSF, and led directly to my thinking that the forum was an important thing to do. If for no other reason than to help the American left remember its roots in bold broad movements like the abolitionists or early trade unionists or the populists or the socialists - or the civil rights, feminist and gay liberation movements of more recent times. Movements that claimed large numbers of adherents at their height and truly made life better for themselves and their descendants. That is, better for all of us. Whatever their faults, and their sometimes short shelf-lives, such movements have done more good for more people than anything the last 3 decades of progressive activism has managed to do.

Of course, we had other critics within another group of progressive organizations that thought that it was pointless to stage social forums at all since they don't have the kinds of "measurable outcomes" that foundations and public policy wonks are so fond of waxing rhapsodic over. To which we responded (mostly in one-on-one conversations), "all your 'measurable outcomes' have not amount to a whole lot of social change." Far better to encourage progressives to let loose and network strategically across artificial turf boundaries for 3 days - and to let ourselves dream the dream of an ascendant left. A militant left. A successful left. Rather than turn the social forum into just another left conference where participants can come in and out having only talked to people like themselves, working on the same issues as they are, and all agreeing that the key to success is to continue doing exactly the kind of single-issue work they were already doing.

Although there was indeed some of that kind of networking at the BSF. We certainly thought it was important to let issue specialists run their own event tracks (35 of them) at the forum, and view the event as a good way to do some solid sectoral strategizing. But as has been mentioned, we designed the BSF to kind of force people from the different sectors to run into each other. And we fielded a couple of dozen of (mostly) broad thinking left luminaries from various political camps to hold forth in our large daily convocations. As another way to help attendees put the magnitude of the left project in perspective.

Yet there were real outcomes from the BSF. Even though not a single plank of the kind of (oft-satirized) "10 point platform" typical of many left conferences was ever composed at the gathering to my knowledge. The event itself did make a strong public statement that there is an U.S. left, that it is separate from (though sometimes overlapping) the Democratic Party, that it has many good ideas, and that it is worthy of the support of millions of Americans. The regional anti-war movement got a nice boost from its heavy participation in the forum, as did the more militant sector of the regional immigrant movement. All kinds of friendships and inter-organizational relationships across boundaries of race, sex, class, gender and age were formed at the BSF that have had far-reaching positive consequences in a number of activist sectors - although it is clearly tricky to quantify such gains.

Naturally, the success of the BSF also played a positive role in spreading the World Social Forum process to the U.S. Although larger organizations and institutions in several cities were already in the process of organizing what became the U.S. Social Forum by the time we started working on the BSF, they took a fairly long while to get under way - and there were times when it was an open question whether a U.S. forum would happen anytime soon.

The BSF - as both a local and a regional forum within the World Social Forum process - had strong national participation because we intentionally staged the event right before the DNC. With a large turnout and good outcome overall, we demonstrated that the U.S. was fertile ground for the social forum process. Which was important because there were leaders in the WSF process that felt that the U.S. left was incapable of oragnizing mass events like social forums. We believe we proved them wrong. We also advised a number of smaller social forums in the U.S. and Canada in the year following the BSF and did our part to help them succeed. Further rooting the social forum process in North America in advance of the ultimately successful 15,000 person 2007 U.S. Social Forum in Atlanta. BSF organizers then grounded the social forum process in the Northeast by organizing large multi-organization delegations to subsequent WSFs and to the USSF.

But there are two key institutions on the regional left that trace their foundation directly to the BSF. Fellow lead BSF organizers Suren Moodliar and Kim Foltz of Mass. Global Action (the non-profit, formerly known as the Campaign on Contingent Work, that I ran before and a year after the BSF) created the very successful encuentro 5 movement space on the 5th floor of the UNITEHERE union building in Boston's Chinatown that we had run the BSF organizing operation from. Now housing 11 diverse progressive non-profits and community organizations, e5 has become a major left movement-building center for the Boston area. Numerous networks and coalitions on a host of issues have found a home base there. Many of the larger political actions in the region in the last 3 years have been organized there. And e5 has played a significant role in fostering connections to social justice movements around the globe - hosting an ongoing stream of dignitaries from some of the most storied and successful left organizations from over a dozen countries.

As to the other institution that formed as a result of the BSF? Well you're looking at it now. That's right, Open Media Boston is a direct outgrowth of the Boston Social Forum. Before, during and after the BSF process, it became evident to me that the American left really needs strong metropolitan news outlets if we have any hope of winning hearts and minds over to our political, economic, social and cultural ideas. Given that the major media was already having economic trouble back in 2004, it also seemed possible that we could start news outlets that were not just fairly small "niche publications," but could actually compete with the mainstream media - in the way that left news publications in many other countries have managed to do.

Succeeding in such an enterprise would require staff that really knew the lay of the land in the Boston area left, and had a good handle on major sectoral issues. Well, inasmuch as I am a Boston native, and had already been in the Boston area left since the mid-80s, I had a good base from which to build. But talking - and developing stronger relationships - with over 100 local community organizations and unions in the run up to the BSF made it really possible to think about creating a publication to serve their media needs while helping to build a broader regional left in the bargain.

So on July 7, 2007 - while on summer break from the rather weak graduate program that I had made the mistake of enrolling in the previous year - I came up with the idea for Open Media Boston. We launched on March 20, 2008. And now 16 months later we're a growing weekly news publication with over 15,000 regular viewers.

But enough about OMB. I would not bother talking about an event like BSF if I didn't have a good reason. And here it is ... I think people on the American left need to spend more time purposefully thinking about the kind of future we want and how we intend to get there. I think the social forum process is one excellent way to do that, and that Americans should join in future social forums and similar efforts whenever they can. I further think that people need to spend additional time figuring out ways to build a progressive social movement that can really take the high ground in "all areas of human endeavor" - as I wrote half a decade ago. And I think that we have to seize that high ground as soon as possible. Within 20 years of this writing if not before. I'm not an alarmist, but our planet's ecological clock is clearly ticking. If a movement that backs full human democracy, liberty and equality is not in power soon in the U.S. and across the world, I truly fear for the future of humanity.

And actually, precisely because of the success of processes like the World Social Forum, the democratic left has won power in many countries in recent years. Countries with much tougher economic conditions than we face in the U.S. even now, and in some cases just emerging from decades of dictatorship.

If they can do it, we can do it. And we need to do it, and do it soon. Or the fate of the human race may not be a rosy one.

That's seems enough food for thought for now. Thanks as always for checking out Open Media Boston.

And finally, since I haven't said it publicly in some time, thanks to everyone that made the Boston Social Forum a reality. We done good. And that really does give me a great deal of hope.

Jason Pramas is Editor/Publisher of Open Media Boston