USSF 2010 What Did We Accomplish?

US Social Forum: What did we accomplish? How far do we need to go?

by Michael Leon Guerrero

The second United States Social Forum (USSF) last month in Detroit, Michigan was a significant achievement for progressive movements in the U.S. Roughly 18,000 people representing 1,800 organizations attended. Just as its predecessor in Atlanta in 2007, the USSF embodied the rich diversity of ages, races, gender identities and cultures of an authentic peoples movement.

A Renaissance of the Grassroots Organizing Sector?
There are some important outcomes that we can already begin to identify. The USSF process has highlighted an emerging identity of a grassroots organizing sector that has been in motion for generations. These are community and worker organizations that build upon the legacy of the civil rights, anti-war and Third World movements of the 1960s and beyond. They have been engaged in the difficult, essential task of building a social force for progressive change, community by community, workplace by workplace around a basic set of progressive values. They survived the past 3 decades which were defined by Reagonomics, U.S. military expansion, right-wing media and vastly more powerful corporations that have assaulted worker rights and wages, stripped environmental regulations, ravaged  public services and budgets, and commodified almost every living thing on the planet. For a generation they saw their communities get poorer, while the rich got much richer.

Yet these grassroots organizations managed to hold their ground and build strong local institutions and community-based power, developing grassroots leadership within poor and working class communities. They built coalitions, networks and alliances to achieve greater scale and impact, but the sector has still remained largely fragmented and lacking in overall identity. Overcoming these limitations has been one of the biggest contributions of the USSF process over the last 7 years.

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A public version of this commentary will be available soon.