The MSF has been in existence since 2004 and was recently incorporated as a legal entity in 2007. The organisation is run by a dedicated group of volunteers who form the MSF Organising committee which meet monthly and participate in online discussions. The organising committee is supported by generous volunteers that come together to assist in making the events run smoothly.
Melbourne Social Forum as Event
The MSF is an annual open space event, and a network, for facilitating debate, self-expression and imagination in addressing global issues. In particular for seeking out, articulating and helping to establish more sustainable and just versions of globalisation, through the development and enaction of ocal alternatives.
Melbourne Social Forum as Movement
The Melbourne Social Forum (MSF) inherits it’s origins from the World Social Forum which was initiated in 2001. The World Social Forum is a meta-collaboration between thousands of NGOs, community grassroots groups, and civil society to dialogue, reflect and act in increasingly effective ways toward the acknowledgment that ‘another world is possible’.
Melbourne Social Forum as Process
As we emerge into the 21st century, it is becoming increasingly clear that we as a planet are facing numerous challenges, in the area of ecology, development, human rights, peace, and culture. It has also become increasingly clear that neo-liberal globalisation is only compounding the meta-problems we face, through favouring the short term interests of multi-national corporations and the super rich over the interests of ordinary people, the world’s desperate poor, marginalised, future generations, and the Earth’s ecosystems.
Rationale and message
People support and attend our events for a wide range of reasons. This page documents just some of their views and reasons why people attend and support the Melbourne Social Forum. The statements below were taken from participants at previous MSF events.
World Social Forum Movement
The World Social Forum (WSF) is a global meeting of thinkers, artists, writers, activists, documentarists and organisations, who come together in an ‘open space’ format to discuss the world’s most pressing challenges and inhumanities. The WSF is more specifically a challenge to the mono-logic (and assumed ortho-doxy) of neo-liberal economics, the ‘Washington consensus’ and its handmaidens, the IMF, World Bank and other programs that extend the power of a global corporate elite under the misnomer of ‘development’.The roots of the type of corporatist development being critiqued at the WSF can be traced back to the post-Bretton-Woods world economic order as framed by the allied victors of WWII and, more specifically, 80-s neo-liberalism pushing-through the successive GATT (General Agreement of Trade and Tariffs) ‘accords’ as a way of eliminating trade barriers and of de-nationalising industries and resources. This led to and almost ubiquitous series of protests against the privatisation of resources in former colonial states and / or developing countries. For decades, grassroots movements emerged throughout the ‘South’ to protest World Bank projects that displaced indigenous peoples, IMF structural adjustment programs that undermined public welfare and health systems, and global financial speculation that wrecked havoc on smaller economies, their currencies and stock markets.
In the 90-s, the word globalisation came into vogue, describing a series of interconnecting phenomena surrounding corporate globalisation, information communications technology systems, trans-nationalisation, a global ‘information economy’, ‘economic democracy’ and the like. Much of this literature assumed a neo-liberal and corporatist understanding, that a global free market system was finally bringing the world together in a ‘golden straitjacket’ and would ultimately help to modernise the ‘under-developed’ world. What this literature missed or omitted were the other ‘globalisations’ under way, the globalisation of environmental issues which increasingly cross borders, the globalisation of security concerns, the globalisation of human rights movements against corporate and state crimes, the globalisation of consciousness, which challenges ethnocentric versions of reality and nation-based governance, and the emergence of global civil society.
The nascent anti-globalisation movement which emerged in grass-roots form in the South (although there were increasing signs that the UN-generated World Summits prepared the terrain for these, especially the Copenhagen Social development Summit in 1995 and others), emerged in full bloom in suburban USA in the form of the ‘Battle of Seattle’. By ’99, corporate globalisation was no longer just a threat to indigenous peoples, but was also identified as a threat to the ‘suburban north’, their unions, democracies, ecosystems, and human rights. Thus, a global anti-globalisation movement focused strategically on putting the issue on the map by targeting the major meeting places where neo-liberalism unfolds: the meetings of the World Trade Organisation, the World Economic Forum / Davos, for example, in the hope that the media might cover such protests.
Melbourne Social Forum as Organisation
The MSF has been in existence since 2004 and was recently incorporated as a legal entity in 2007. The organisation is run by a dedicated group of volunteers who form the MSF Organising committee which meet monthly and participate in online discussions. The organising committee is supported by generous volunteers that come together to assist in making the events run smoothly.
Melbourne Social Forum as Event
The MSF is an annual open space event, and a network, for facilitating debate, self-expression and imagination in addressing global issues. In particular for seeking out, articulating and helping to establish more sustainable and just versions of globalisation, through the development and enaction of ocal alternatives.
Melbourne Social Forum as Movement
The Melbourne Social Forum (MSF) inherits it’s origins from the World Social Forum which was initiated in 2001. The World Social Forum is a meta-collaboration between thousands of NGOs, community grassroots groups, and civil society to dialogue, reflect and act in increasingly effective ways toward the acknowledgment that ‘another world is possible’.
Melbourne Social Forum as Process
As we emerge into the 21st century, it is becoming increasingly clear that we as a planet are facing numerous challenges, in the area of ecology, development, human rights, peace, and culture. It has also become increasingly clear that neo-liberal globalisation is only compounding the meta-problems we face, through favouring the short term interests of multi-national corporations and the super rich over the interests of ordinary people, the world’s desperate poor, marginalised, future generations, and the Earth’s ecosystems.
Rationale and message
People support and attend our events for a wide range of reasons. This page documents just some of their views and reasons why people attend and support the Melbourne Social Forum. The statements below were taken from participants at previous MSF events.
World Social Forum Movement
The World Social Forum (WSF) is a global meeting of thinkers, artists, writers, activists, documentarists and organisations, who come together in an ‘open space’ format to discuss the world’s most pressing challenges and inhumanities. The WSF is more specifically a challenge to the mono-logic (and assumed ortho-doxy) of neo-liberal economics, the ‘Washington consensus’ and its handmaidens, the IMF, World Bank and other programs that extend the power of a global corporate elite under the misnomer of ‘development’.The roots of the type of corporatist development being critiqued at the WSF can be traced back to the post-Bretton-Woods world economic order as framed by the allied victors of WWII and, more specifically, 80-s neo-liberalism pushing-through the successive GATT (General Agreement of Trade and Tariffs) ‘accords’ as a way of eliminating trade barriers and of de-nationalising industries and resources. This led to and almost ubiquitous series of protests against the privatisation of resources in former colonial states and / or developing countries. For decades, grassroots movements emerged throughout the ‘South’ to protest World Bank projects that displaced indigenous peoples, IMF structural adjustment programs that undermined public welfare and health systems, and global financial speculation that wrecked havoc on smaller economies, their currencies and stock markets.
In the 90-s, the word globalisation came into vogue, describing a series of interconnecting phenomena surrounding corporate globalisation, information communications technology systems, trans-nationalisation, a global ‘information economy’, ‘economic democracy’ and the like. Much of this literature assumed a neo-liberal and corporatist understanding, that a global free market system was finally bringing the world together in a ‘golden straitjacket’ and would ultimately help to modernise the ‘under-developed’ world. What this literature missed or omitted were the other ‘globalisations’ under way, the globalisation of environmental issues which increasingly cross borders, the globalisation of security concerns, the globalisation of human rights movements against corporate and state crimes, the globalisation of consciousness, which challenges ethnocentric versions of reality and nation-based governance, and the emergence of global civil society.
The nascent anti-globalisation movement which emerged in grass-roots form in the South (although there were increasing signs that the UN-generated World Summits prepared the terrain for these, especially the Copenhagen Social development Summit in 1995 and others), emerged in full bloom in suburban USA in the form of the ‘Battle of Seattle’. By ’99, corporate globalisation was no longer just a threat to indigenous peoples, but was also identified as a threat to the ‘suburban north’, their unions, democracies, ecosystems, and human rights. Thus, a global anti-globalisation movement focused strategically on putting the issue on the map by targeting the major meeting places where neo-liberalism unfolds: the meetings of the World Trade Organisation, the World Economic Forum / Davos, for example, in the hope that the media might cover such protests.