ABSTRACT
Since Seattle 1999, the GJM has succeeded in mobilizing many and diverse people in national and transnational events. In fact, diversity is much emphasized in the rhetoric of the movement. As stated in a document produced by the first World Social Forums (WSF): ‘we are . . . social forces from around the world (that) have gathered here at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre. Unions and NGOs, movements and organizations, intellectuals and artists’ (World Social Movements 2001: par. 1), and ‘women and men, farmers, workers, unemployed, professionals, students, blacks and indigenous peoples, coming from the South and from the North’ (ibid.: par. 3). The heterogeneity of the movement was also underlined by the document produced by the second WSF, stating not only that ‘we are diverse – women and men, adults and youth, indigenous peoples, rural and urban, workers and unemployed, homeless, the elderly, students, migrants, professionals, peoples of every creed, colour and sexual orientation’, but also that ‘the expression of this diversity is our strength and the basis of our unity’ (World Social Movements 2002, par. 2). Indeed, some activists claim that the goal of social inclusion has been achieved in the GJM mobilization. According to one of them, the movement
Put together different generations . . . and this is the great novelty and the great richness because it puts together men and women, who are from 20 to 60 years old, who discuss together against the old leftist parties’ logic that separated the men from the women, the young from the old.
