Midwest Social Forum 2006

Almost a thousand community activists, workers, students, educators, and others committed to making a better, more just world possible gathered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in July for the 2006 Midwest Social Forum (MWSF). The MWSF is an annual gathering in the Midwestern United States that provides an open space for exchanging experiences and information, strengthening alliances and networks, and developing effective strategies for progressive social, economic, and political change.

The MWSF began on Thursday, July 6 at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Student Union with four caucuses on the themes of youth, media, water, and immigration. The caucuses were designed to facilitate the building of regional networks, to engage in planning for long-term campaigns and projects, and to allow groups to participate in the forum in a more organized way.

The MWSF featured three plenaries on the immigrant rights movement, the politics of building a multi-racial movement, and fighting brutality, violence and racial oppression in our communities. Each plenary featured about four speakers who shared their ideas and experiences, and helped frame the discussions and debates at the forum.

Three days of sessions ranged across a wide variety of topics representing pressing concerns and interests of activists in the Midwest, including issues of media control, popular education, labor movements, international solidarity, health care, and reproductive rights. Overriding themes, however, were those introduced in the plenaries–immigration and racial justice, with democracy, economic justice and neo-liberalism perhaps being significant subthemes that ran throughout the entire event. Relatively few panels addressed issues of war and peace, and there was only one panel each on Iraq and Iran and none on North Korea. These were significant omissions given the current quagmire in the first and the saber-rattling in the others. It also, however, points to how the MWSF has become grounded in local and more pressing and immediate concerns.

The final session of the forum was dedicated to a series of strategy sessions designed to foster dialogue and collaboration among participating organizations and individuals, with the goal of developing greater strategic coordination of their efforts beyond the forum. It reflects the forum’s commitment not only to reflection but also action.

Each evening of the forum closed with a concert geared toward youth participants that featured hip hop and top Midwestern spoken word artists. Spoken word artists also enlivened many sessions by beginning them with a couple minutes of politically charged verse. A film series also ran concurrently with the forum.

As with other forums, the MWSF closed with a rally and march on Sunday, July 9 for “Social Justice in the Streets and in the Courts” that condemned police brutality in Milwaukee. Forum participants gathered at Milwaukee’s Sherman Park where they listened to speakers and performers denounce systemic abuses, and then marched to the 7th District Police Station.

As social forums become a primary expression of civil society, they gain a growing number of detractors. Significantly, much of this dissent comes from within the movement rather than from a conservative opposition. In Milwaukee, one activist proposed an alternative midwest social forum claiming that the MWSF did not emerge organically out of local community struggles and was disrespectful toward people of color.

As with the Mumbai Resistance 2004 when dissidents moved across the street to attack the fourth edition of the World Social Forum, little of the content of the alternative forum was distinct from the discussions in the main forum. Many of the criticisms were alternatively either largely shared by many organizers and participants, or grew out of misconceptions of how the forums were organized.

In Milwaukee, the charges of white supremacy rang particularly hollow given deep, significant, and dramatic changes in the organization and composition of the forum. The MWSF has its origins in the largely white left Midwest Radical Scholars and Activists Conference that the Havens Center for the Study of Social Structure and Social Change at the University of Wisconsin-Madison founded in 1983. In the late 1990s it was renamed RadFest, and in 2003 organizers added the title Midwest Social Forum. This year it dropped the name RadFest and moved from an isolated retreat setting in Williams Bay, Wisconsin where it has met for the past several years, to the city of Milwaukee in order to make it more accessible and to accommodate its rapid growth.

In the last year, the MWSF moved from a centralized hierarchical organizational model to control of a majority women and people of color organizing committee representing about fifty Midwest-based social justice, grassroots, community, alternative media, and educational organizations and institutions committed to social justice. The committee emphasized geographic inclusiveness and diversity with respect to class, age, sexual orientation, ability, issue focus, and ideological or strategic perspective. Its operating principles included transparency, inclusiveness and diversity, consensus building, and ideological pluralism. There is an expressed openness and a clear process by which new organizations can join the organizing committee and contribute to the strength and diversity of the forum.

In a relatively short period of time, Radfest has become the MWSF as it has embraced a commitment to developing a process that assures the broadest representation possible, especially from marginalized communities that are disproportionately affected by systems of injustice that social forums seek to address. On a small level the MWSF perhaps is still plagued by problems of organization, hierarchy, and transparency that follow the global World Social Forum process which inspired and influenced it. For example, gender imbalances continue to be a problem in the composition of panels, much as in the broader society.

What is significant, however, is a willingness to recognize, engage, and address problems with the forum as well as in broader society to make a better forum, a better midwest, and a better world.

Marc Becker participated in the forum as a member of Community Action on Latin America (CALA) and the Network Institute for Global Democratization (NIGD).