World Social Forum
versus American Empire

Nothing characterises our experience of life more honestly and comprehensively than our experience of suffering, our own suffering and that of others. The history of humankind, at least for the period of time for which we have written records, has been a history of suffering. Our history books tell another story. They tell of military victories and conquests, of great civilisations and amazing discoveries and inventions. What they hide or gloss over is the horrific human suffering that accompanied all these events.

The underlying suffering of so many millions of people is regarded as of no historical significance. The great pyramids of Egypt were built upon the suffering of slaves who died by the thousands. The New World of the Americas was built upon genocide, the wiping out of native American peoples, and the humiliation and agony of African slaves, who were forced to row their very confined prison boats across the Atlantic, dropping dead like flies along the way… However, what I want to draw attention to as one of the signs of our times is the way in which, in the midst of the most intolerable suffering, we have been moving forward to overcome some of it and hopefully in the future much more of it.

Structural Change
Suffering in the past was made worse by a deep sense of helplessness and powerlessness. It seemed that nothing could be done about it. There was no way out. A measure of relief might come from a caring family or a benevolent dictator, but no real change was possible. We have begun to move away from this kind of inhumanity in several ways. One of the most important is our recent history of structural change, or, more specifically, the emergence of the real possibility of changing the structures of power and domination that cause so much suffering in the world.

In the past, feelings of powerlessness and helplessness were based on the assumption that the oppressive structures of societies, cultures, and religions could not be changed. Then came the great revolutions: the French Revolution, the American Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the numerous revolutions against colonialism and imperialism. These revolutions may not have been very successful. But the revolutions did enable us to discover that structures of power can be changed.

What has developed since then, hesitatingly and not without problems, is the possibility of democratic structures and a belief in human rights. And this has opened the way for the great new phenomenon that we call the struggle for social justice. This struggle has notched up some remarkable gains over the last two hundred years. One of its first great achievements was the abolition of slavery. New laws made it illegal to buy and sell human beings as pieces of property. Decolonisation too was based upon the conviction that the structures of power could be changed. Colonised peoples struggled for independence and liberation from the great colonising empires of Spain, Portugal, and Britain, among others.

New Voices
The most important result of these and many other liberation struggles has been a breakthrough of new voices onto the scene: the voices of women, black people, indigenous people, workers, peasants, the poor, the untouchables, and even children. In the past, these voices were totally suppressed. The suffering of these people could be heard, if at all, only in the voices of their humanitarian sympathisers. Humanitarian voices have played an important, but limited, role in the struggle against injustice. I am thinking of advocacy groups, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), civil society groups, Churches, and other faith-based groups. However, the organisation that has contributed most toward humanitarian relief, the protection of human rights, and the securing of international agreements is no doubt the United Nations. Founded in 1945 to secure peace and cooperation between its member states, the United Nations has often been the voice and the defender of the voiceless.

Now the voice of the voiceless is growing louder each day outside of the United Nations. It is still a muted voice. It still has very little place in the corridors of power and in the mass media, but the gains have been significant. The voice of the voiceless can now be heard in a growing number of people’s movements, in publications and international gatherings, and in liberation theologies of various kinds. In the meantime, the major structures of power continue to re-structure themselves from day to day.

The Empire
The overarching inequality today is between the rich and the poor. The structures of power that dominate the human world are making the rich richer and the poor poorer. Billions of people are being marginalized and excluded, because there is no place for them in the economy. They are neither producers nor consumers. They are nobodies. This new form of colonisation and imperialism is often called ‘globalisation’. Worldwide diffusion as such is not a problem. Everything depends upon what it is that is being diffused or globalised. The globalisation of a deadly disease would constitute a serious problem, but the globalisation of an effective vaccine would be good news.
The globalisation that many people are protesting about today is the globalisation of a particular economic culture, neo-liberal capitalism, a thoroughly materialistic worldview based on the principle of the survival of the fittest, a culture that destroys other cultures and indigenous wisdom, making the rich richer and the poor poorer around the world.

Those who analyse and study the structures of power in the world today are in no doubt about the dominance of the mighty American Empire with its weapons of mass destruction, its armies spread out around the globe (745 bases in 120 countries), its attempts at controlling and dominating every country in the world, its arrogant effort to impose its will upon the whole human world and, through its space programmes, on the entire universe. In the final analysis, the globalisation we are up against is the globalisation of the American Empire. There are people who imagine that the American Empire will last forever. No empire has ever been able to do that, although I suppose they all thought they were invincible.

The Empire has become so overconfident, so arrogantly sure of its own righteousness, so blind, so un-diplomatic, and so busy with ‘overkill’ that it is unwittingly generating its own opposition, thereby ensuring its own demise. Not only has the American Empire given rise to militant Muslim formations and to suicide bombers and other forms of terrorism, but also its war on Iraq has created the strongest and largest anti-war peace movement in human history. The anti-Vietnam War peace movement was small and insignificant in comparison. The new peace movement is universal and is destined to become a powerful pressure group.

The World Social Forum
Still more powerful and effective is the sudden recognition on the part of almost all involved in struggles for justice in the world today that they are struggling against the same structures of power. Movements and organisations struggling for economic justice, human rights, oppressed minorities, women’s rights, and children’s rights as well as environmentalists, religious activists, and many others have been coming together on the streets to protest against neo-liberal globalisation.

The World Social Forum (WSF) is an initiative that came from outside of the United Nations. It includes many of the same movements and organisations that had marched on the streets, but more important, it brings together a large number of people’s movements, women’s movements, movements of indigenous people and peasant farmers, trade unions, movements against global warming, and AIDS organisations. It is the voice of the silent majority themselves.

The WSF is not a new international organisation. It has no ideology or unifying political theory. It is a Forum for airing views and experiences, and for listening to one another. The unity of the WSF is not forced, but all who gather under its banner see themselves as part of the struggle against the economic and military globalisation of the Empire. What is finding a voice in the WSF is the globalisation of resistance to the Empire. ‘Another World Is Possible’ is the motto it adopted in 2002.

In reading the political and economic signs of our times, what we notice most of all today is this globalisation from below. We have noted the globalisation of the anti-war and peace movements and the globalisation of compassion for all victims. In the World Social Forum we see the globalisation of the struggle for justice. It is impossible to predict how and when the American Empire will come to an end, but perhaps in the not too distant future the international groundswell of resistance in the name of peace, compassion, and justice will undermine and dismantle the structures of power and domination.

(From Albert Nolan’s latest book : Jesus Today. A Spirituality of Radical Freedom, ISBN 978-1-57075-672-6, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York, 2006, 240 pp.)