NEWS & LETTERS, July-August 2010
N&L at the U.S. Social Forum
Detroit--The second U.S. Social Forum (USSF) drew over 10,000 participants, mostly young activists against capitalist globalization, to Detroit June 22-26. People chose from over 1,000 workshops and 50 Peoples' Movement Assemblies, continuous cultural programming, tours of Detroit focused on the city's labor and abolitionist history, environmental justice, urban agriculture, and actions ranging from a march for "clean air and good jobs" to one commemorating the civil rights march led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1963.
The openness of so many young activists energized dialogue and discussion in workshops and at literature tables.
A major achievement of the Forum was the coalescence of "excluded workers"--recent immigrants, domestic workers, farmworkers, cab drivers, and others not covered by the labor protections won by industrial workers in the 1930s. It was spearheaded by the National Domestic Workers' Alliance which had emerged from the USSF in Atlanta in 2007. Noteworthy were the 30+ "Detroit Highlighted" workshops by Detroit organizations whose presence told everyone, loud and clear, that another Detroit is here and now and moving forward.
It was striking that so many youth wanted to find out about Left ideas and Marxism. People from Detroit were looking to see if the USSF was something that could help their city. Many who stopped by our literature table wanted to find out about Marxist-Humanism and Raya Dunayevskaya.
An example of the innovations at some of the workshops was a great one on environmental justice, done by teenagers from the Bay Area--one Latino, one Black, and one Chinese all from different groups, chaired by a 13-year-old who pointed out: "I'm the youngest facilitator in the whole Social Forum." Thousands of people were brought together, including white middle-class Leftists, excluded workers, young anarchists and counter-cultural types. And though they were all excited to be at the same place, one could feel that the barriers were still there. They are there, but not together. This is a problem the Left has yet to solve.
The Social Forum developed from the anti-globalization movements against capitalism and has been a "lens to help us see the world that we do want." As the Social Forum movement emerged against the globalization of capitalism, it opposes the hierarchical hegemonic power structure of world capitalism, and has bent over backwards not to congeal into a similar structure. But building a new human society is extremely complex and requires what Marx called: "human power, which is its own end." We will have to concretize that concept in a new society.
--Marxist-Humanist participants
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Workers' rights are human rights
This USSF workshop, facilitated by Jaribu Hill of the Mississippi Workers' Center For Human Rights, brought together excluded workers from across the country. Excluded workers are those like domestic and farm workers, who are not covered by OSHA although they work with harsh cleaning and pesticide chemicals, hazardous to health.
The participants included domestic workers in New York, who shared a story of winning a court battle against abusive employers by publicly shaming them with well-supported picket lines, as well as the Coalition of Immokalee Workers from Florida, who described their ongoing battle against tomato growers who still practice outright slavery.
Workers from Mississippi catfish processing plants described how their employers are using the current economic crisis to take back human rights won by workers there over the last decades. And organizers from New Orleans told of the continuing effects of neglect in post-Katrina devastation.
The sharing of stories is a reflection of the solidarity that is happening already and is an effort to strengthen that solidarity among all workers. The workshop ended with an exchange of the promise to "be there" for the next stage of the struggle in all these areas.
--Urszula Wislanka
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