Amid the ruins of Detroit: Social Forum draws thousands
2010Cristobal Cavazos 2010-07Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 10 →
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10 Socialist Action july 2010 and LISA LUINENBURG DETROIT—Amid the wreckage of a city that has lost hundreds of thousands of jobs and residents over the past 30 years, the second United States Social Forum (USSF) landed here with 15,000 grassroots activists, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), and trade-union organizers. The conference began June 22 for nearly one week of workshops, cultural events, and planning sessions.
Detroit was a “conscious choice” for organizers. In the words of organizer Karlos Gauna Schmieder of Detroit’s Center for Media Justice, “It’s a microcosm of the world economy and a center of resistance to foreclosures and joblessness.” This once powerful automobile industry center, dubbed the “Motor City,” seemed an ideal location for a forum whose expressed goal is “Another World is Possible: Another U.S. is Necessary.” Devastated by a decline in total employment of over 440,000 jobs in the past three decades, Detroit is certainly in need of “another U.S.”
With scenes reminiscent of postWorld War II Eastern Europe (deserted stores and supermarkets, neighborhoods of boarded-up houses, and factories and skyscrapers crumbling to dust), it is evident that Detroit too has been bombed—by capitalism. The banks and money lenders, the multi-national corporations, Wall Street gamblers, along with hired-pimp politicians and other opportunistic operatives have all taken turns raping this city before skipping town.
With this dramatic backdrop, the U.S. Social Forum advertised itself as “a moment of reflection“ and “a space to come up with the people’s solutions to the economic and ecological crisis.” It placed a special emphasis on the “strategic need to unite the struggles of oppressed communities within the United States to the struggles of oppressed nations in the Third World.“ The event was an offshoot of the World Social Forum, which first assembled NGOs, trade-unions, and grassroots organizations—along with support from the Chavez government of Venezuela— in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001. While both events have operated under the “another world is possible” mantra, the U.S. Social Forum certainly has many issues to tackle in a nation facing severe economic crisis and ecological destruction. Participants were seeking not only an opportunity to air their local grievances but a coherent plan of action against the U.S. imperialist wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, against the economic crisis, against an oil spill ravishing the coast of Louisiana, and against the passage in Arizona of SB1070—one of the most racist policies implemented in decades.
The main conveners of the forum were the United Auto Workers, the Eastern Michigan Environmental Action Council, Michigan Welfare Rights, Centro Obrero, and Southeast Michigan Jobs with Justice. Other panelists and participants included major contributions from immigrant rights organizations, feminist collectives, LGBT groups, indigenous and other people of color formations, third world movements, reproductive justice alliances, etc.
Included were over 1000 workshops and 50 people’s movement assemblies in barely a five-day span. A sampling of the diversity of the workshops features themes as varied as: “Theater of the Oppressed,” “Why Rural America Matters for Prison Abolition,” “Amazing Grace: AIDS and the Oppression of Girls,” “Using Hip-Hop to Promote Higher Education,” “Venezuela 101,” “Islamophopia,” “The UAW and Toyota,” and “Photography as a Tool for Political Transformation,” among countless others.
The larger Peoples Movement Assemblies included titles themes such as “Justice in Palestine,” “Food Sovereignty,” “Calling All Street Youth!” and “Peoples Charter with Corporate America: Defining an Agenda to Check Corporate Power.”
At the workshop “Dialogue with Activists from the Haitian Popular Movement,” activists from the Haitian Action Committee (HAC) spoke on the humanitarian and economic crisis facing the Caribbean nation. The HAC—a collaboration of Haitian grassroots community activists, U.S. intellectuals, and African American religious leaders—emphasized the role of the United States in destabilizing this nation through both direct military intervention and neo-colonialist economic and trade policy. The earthquake this past year has only further atrophied Haiti’s development, while the United States has taken advantage of the situation to further dominate the country.
In another workshop, entitled “Palestine: Evolution of the Movement of Liberation,” activists from Al-Awda New York along with three Palestinian children, guests from Gaza, analyzed the movement for liberation of the Palestinian people. The children’s testimony was especially touching as they recalled checkpoints, guns pointed at them on the way to school, and their hunger for freedom. The workshop spurred a lively and at times strident discussion on what activists can do to promote the liberation of the Palestinian people in order to, in the words of one event attendee, “prevent this discussion from still taking place 30 years from now.”
Finally, veterans of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW) put on an what can only be described as a soulful and intellectual tempest of a workshop, titled “Detroit Highlighted: The History of Labor in Detroit.” The LRBW was the culmination of growing militancy among Black workers, especially those around the Dodge Main assembly plant in the 1950s and ’60s, that was consummated in a series of wildcat