Abstract

A Social Occasion

The article looks at the 2004 Boston Social Forum, a gathering of political activists that took place at the same time as the Democratic National Convention. When organizers were planning the Boston Social Forum, they envisioned a gathering that would counter the Democratic National Convention in every way. Whereas the DNC would be a tightly scripted and essentially private affair (locals refer to the convention's site, the FleetCenter, as the Fleece Center), the BSF would be open and democratic, a three-day festival of ideas held on the campus of UMass Boston, the city's only truly public university. But if the BSF bore little resemblance to the official Democratic gathering just five miles away, neither did it look much like Boston--a majority nonwhite city--or even UMass Boston, often the first step for working-class and immigrant students in search of a toehold in the middle class. There was little sign of the exciting new alliance between African-Americans and Latinos that is beginning to reshape local politics, and save for SEIU, which brought leaders as well as members, the only union presence belonged to the police, hundreds of whom were using the campus as a staging ground for the DNC. The event was a far cry from the vision behind the first such gathering in Brazil, in 2001, which sought to create not a political lonely-hearts club but a summit of powerful and emerging social movements that could serve as a counterweight to the World Economic Forum in Davos. Any such event in the United States faces a monumental challenge in that our social movements, by contrast, are small and struggling.