./english/41.txt:26:On Saturday morning, I ran from one seminar to the other: At the seminar “From Marx by way of Poulantzas to Rosa Luxemburg”, there was, although apart from me also Michael Krätke had obtained no radio, and despite our clearly expressed wish, no consecutive translation from the Greek, so that first Krätke and then I had to leave. The seminar on G-8 took its expected course: Scots reported on their protests last year, Boris Kagarlitsky invited activists to Russia, Hugo Braun and Pedram Shayar (Attac) presented the campaign planned for next year on occasion of the G-8 meeting in Heiligendamm. Then to finish off, I still listened in on a seminar on the future of Europe with Elisabeth Gauthier (also from Transform!) who later on the way to the demonstration told me that a speaker from Turkey there had really been involved in acts of violence (following the Charta of Porto Alegre, activists advocating and practising violence are actually not allowed to speak at Social Forums).
./english/41.txt:72:Le samedi matin, je courus d’un séminaire à l’autre : Au séminaire « De Marx par Poulantzas à Rosa Luxemburg », il n’y avait pas, bien que Michael Krätke aussi à part moi n’avait pas obtenu de radio, et en dépit de notre demande clairement exprimée, pas d’interprétation consécutive du Grec, si bien que d’abord Krätke et puis moi étaient forcés de repartir. Le séminaire sur les G-8 prit son cours attendu : des Scots rapportaient de leurs protestations l’année dernière, Boris Kagarlitsky invita des activistes à venir en Russie, Hugo Braun et Pedram Shayar (Attac) présentèrent la campagne envisagée pour l’année prochaine en occasion de la rencontre des G-8 à Heiligendamm, puis à la fin, je écoutai encore un petit bout d’un séminaire sur l’avenir de l’Europe avec Élisabeth Gauthier (aussi de Transform !) qui après, en route à la manifestation, me raconta que l’un des orateurs de ce séminaire, de Turquie, avait réellement été impliqué dans des actes de violence (suivent la Charte de Porto Alegre, des activistes prêchant et pratiquant la violence n’ont à vrai dire pas la permission de parler à des Forums Sociaux).
./english/44.txt:12:We artists against wars are participating for the second time in the European Social Forum. We continue the engagement of artists in the world social movement which began in Florence 2002 after the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre 2001. We are independent of political parties and trade unions.
./english/46.txt:6:While we are facing increasing political intervention by churches and religious fundamentalisms are on the rise in Europe, leading to a dramatic undermining of women's rights and, in spite of the warnings from feminist organizations, such as the World March of Women, towards the organizing committee of the European Social Forum, some of the workshops gave the floor to organizations or speakers who support values contrary to the Porto Alegre Charter and to women's rights. The Women's Assembly of the 4th ESF which met in Athens protests vividly against this situation.
./english/54.txt:51:Also the reactionary Principles of Porto Alegre, which ban the participation
./english/147.txt:76:The first social forum was created before Genoa and was inspired by the spirit of Porto Alegre. There are now 140 social forums in Italy. While the “national” Italian Social Forum has had its spokespeople and hierarchy, local social forums act autonomously and represent a very important site of participation for citizens who have come closer to radical ideas after Genoa. The political map of social forums is complicated and intertwined. There are many who find this form outdated, but they have had impressive results, especially at the local level.
./english/192.txt:4:1. The third European Social Forum in London (14-17 October 2004) provided further evidence - if more were needed - of the vitality of the altermondialiste movement. It also confirmed - after Porto Alegre and Paris, Mumbai and Florence - that the social forum remains an astonishingly dynamic and successful political form. The success of the London ESF can demonstrated in various dimensions:
./english/192.txt:30:Of course, there were weaknesses. No one comes to London for the food, but the food at Alexandra Palace was terrible, and terribly expensive. The experience of the preparatory work on the programme confirms Bernard Cassen's criticism of the first two ESFs that an enormous amount of time and energy is devoted to deciding the subjects of the plenaries and selecting the speakers. It will be interesting to see the experiment at the next World Social Forum at Porto Alegre of dispensing entirely with plenaries and having only self-organized events.
./english/192.txt:48:It is hard to take this seriously. Anyone who has attended the WSF in Porto Alegre will remember the corporate adverts welcoming delegates and the VIP suite at the PUC. The importance of support from local government (and indeed from political parties) is indicated by the proposal that was made to move the forthcoming WSF from Porto Alegre after the PT lost control of the city in November.
./english/197.txt:9:Let me first take the notion of `programme' in the narrow sense of the set of activities that take place during our Social Forums. These forums are high points of the movement year and ought to reflect both our evolution and the best we are capable of. I was heartened to learn that the 2005 World Social Forum in Porto Alegre will dispense with plenary sessions altogether in order to concentrate on seminars and workshops as these have the best chance o `take the movement forward'. I was disappointed, on the other hand, that the 2004 European Social Forum in London still clings to the supposed necessity of plenaries even though there will be fewer than in previous years. Sorting out who gets to speak on what platform on what subject and with whom; how many speakers are allotted to each country and to each organisation; mixing them carefully according to gender, hue, hemispheric origin and I suppose religious profession, sexual orientation, height, weight and God knows what else; requiring each year long and multiple meetings all over Europe-all this has proven, as far as I can tell, a colossal waste of everyone's time and money. Let's get serious, people.
./english/199.txt:29:This isn't the first time an autonomous action has stirred up controversy among the ranks of forum organizers and participants. During the WSF in 2002 in Porto Alegre a large group of international activists from the Intergalactic Laboratory of Disobedience in the youth camp and Brazilian anarchists occupied the VIP room at the Catholic University . Although we clearly articulated that our action was not against the forum, but rather the top-down way it had been organized, Brazilian Organizing Committee members were livid. Luckily, our strategically situated allies were able to calm their nerves, and conflict with the police was avoided. Unfortunately, the same did not happen this time around.
./english/199.txt:31:Moreover, the 2002 action had a concrete impact. At the International Commission meeting that spring in Barcelona , we learned there were no plans for a VIP room the following year. On our side, many of us in the Movement for Global Resistance in Barcelona realized we could have a positive effect by creatively engaging the forum from the outside. Thus began our part in a series of discussions at the Strasbourg Border Camp, Leiden PGA conference, and elsewhere around creating an autonomous space in Florence with "one foot in, and one foot out." Several different spaces ultimately emerged, including the Hub and projects organized by the Disobedientes and Cobas. Although the Hub in particular was perhaps more outside than inside, and was also widely criticized for its marginality, the autonomous space concept had caught on, and would be reproduced in different guises and to varying degrees at subsequent forums in Porto Alegre , Paris , and Mumbai. The autonomous space model has perhaps come to its fullest fruition this year in London .
./english/200.txt:2:While the short history of the World Social Forum has been connected almost exclusively to Porto Alegre, the European Social Forum was conceived as a "nomadic" event: After Florence and Paris, it fell to London to play host.
./english/201.txt:47:In 2003, Susan Richards wrote on openDemocracy about the hard left's attempts to seize the agenda at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Such attempts, she wrote, misunderstood the nature of social forums: they are not “events” to be controlled from the top, but happenings, which gain their strength from below. She was right about that: in London, again, the hard left showed that they had no idea what this was really supposed to be about, and that they weren't particularly interested.
./english/201.txt:69:First, it's always worth reiterating an obvious but overlooked point: it is a wonder that events like this happen at all. The social forum movement began life at Porto Alegre just four years ago. It was a single, tentative event. Nobody knew what would come of it. What has come of it is a mass explosion of forums, all over the world, from international to city level and everything in-between. Every event is – or at least is supposed to be – a positive, forward-looking occasion. Social forums are not about protest – they are about change and how to achieve it. In less than five years, they have become a global phenomenon, and one which testifies better than anything else to a real and growing appetite for significant change amongst many of the world's people.
./english/205.txt:70:Format-wise, this edition shows the possibility of transcending the obvious limits that Fora – so far built around plenaries with the ‘big names', normally resulting in generic analyses and platitudes with no visible impact, or the two-hour seminars and workshops in which any true convergence or common action are unlikely results – so far have shown. Let's take, for instance, the experience of Life Despite Capitalism, in its many interlocked sessions that lasted for a day and a half, or the whole programme (not explicitly organized as such, but effective none the same) around the issue of the precariat, in which there was a sense of build up leading to the Assembly of the Europrecariat. To this day the organizers have asked themselves the questions of how to make Fora less diagnostic and more constructive, without challenging the basic assumptions of the format. The plenaries, for instance, are living dead left-overs from the first WSF in Brazil, which was clearly planned as a one-off talkshop rather than a political ‘process'. The London experience points to yet new ways, although these have always been explored in the ‘periphery' of the Social Forum process (in the Youth Camp in Porto Alegre, in the Argentinean Social Forum etc.), without receiving the proper attention of its key players.
./english/209.txt:19:Getting tied up with the ambitions of local politicians is a risk that Social Forums take when they accept the support of a political authority. No doubt Olivio Dutra , governor of Rio Grande Do Sul and Tarso Genro , mayor of Port Alegre , had their own political agendas in hosting the World Social Forum. The problem with the GLA is not so much Livingstone but the methodology with which his political staff at the GLA carry out his will. They are led by a small group of people from Socialist Action, one of the somewhat conservative factions of the Fourth International. They work according to an explicit managerial philosophy and an interpretation of democracy which is in many ways quite the opposite of the participatory democracy of Porto Alegre . This small group - no more than around 12 - of political managers has disproportionate power because, although Livingstone is formally a member of the Labour Party, he is not under any live democratic party pressure like the mayors of Florence , Paris and Porto Alegre . Democracy is simply the four yearly, electoral relation between himself and the voters of London .
./english/212.txt:10:The first European Social Forums (ESF) set the stage for the construction of the European alterglobalisation movement and successfully centred political debate on neoliberal globalisation. Since the first World Social Forum (WSF) held in Porto Alegre in January 2001, the Social Forums, and the ESF in particular, have become the most visible public expression of the alterglobalisation movement. Basing themselves on the Charter of Porto Alegre, which has become an indispensable reference, the Forums have become quasi-permanent processes of crystallization of new forces and struggles that were previously rather disparate. Prior to the Forums the latter acted in dispersed fashion, promoting alterglobalisation in a precocious albeit strategically unfocused way. Today, critical movements benefit from a wide array of tools of struggle and common objectives. This crystallization has been accompanied by geographic expansion. The first three WSFs in Brazil created the conditions for the incorporation into the alterglobalisation movement of powerful social forces from South America, notably the peasant and indigenous people’s movements. The Bombay WSF in 2004 likewise integrated Indian social movements into the global struggle. The geopolitics of alterglobalisation thus mirrors the process of neoliberal globalisation, though its scope is still less all encompassing. It is to be hoped that the WSF planned for 2007 in Africa will play a similar role to the 2004 WSF in India. The global movement still needs to expand its reach to Eastern Europe, the Middle East and East Asia. China remains outside of this process, for an undetermined period of time. Completing this geopolitical expansion of alterglobalisation will require the promotion and development of Local Social Forums in a number of countries. LSFs are prominent organising tools favouring the embedding of the Forum process. The same can be said of the National Social Forums that have emerged in a number of countries. This process constitutes a major step forward in the struggle against neoliberal globalisation. Nonetheless, its future development depends on moving forward to new stages, thereby avoiding the threat of exhaustion, immobility and lack of creativity. In this respect, self-criticism and criticism are indispensable components of the dynamic of the Forums. We have to be lucid about the state of the process. ATTAC, acting as a movement on an international level, has been committed since its inception to the construction of the Social Forums. As such, it has a double obligation. Firstly, to reflect lucidly and uncompromisingly on the insufficiencies and some of the recently witnessed drifts of the movement. Secondly, to stimulate new thinking and propose new forms of action designed to strengthen and amplify the global movement. The WSF has already undertaken to reinvent its formula in 2005. The success of this reshaping will be judged in January. The same kind of effort must occur on a European level.
./english/218.txt:24:10) We think that it should be useful to consider the improvements tried at Porto Alegre this year where typical day schedule secure a significant time for movement, campaign, action reinforcement and convergence… this for more common and efficient mobilisation later on.
./english/224.txt:11:Nevertheless, after three ESFs, a critical assessment has to be made, particularly in respect of the goals established in the Porto Alegre Charter of Principles: to allow debate and exchange of ideas, to build convergences, to help building alternatives, and to support the various social and citizen mobilisations.
./english/229.txt:21:A new link is emerging between plenary meetings, workshops and theme discussions, that are organized by networks, and there is also a more explicit relationship between the Forum seen as a great “space for learning” and a place of discussion and organization of networks and struggles. The social Forums, inlcuding the first held in Porto Alegre, were born as public spaces for the creation of alternatives: this is a process, of course, but this role must be strongly renewed as the necessary result from the link between the “space for learning” and the “organization of networks, campaigns, struggles”; between social movements and politics; between the experiences and capabilities of activists and intellectuals, who want a different world.
./english/237.txt:15:The worlds of the mega-social forums from Porto Alegre to Florence have broad and pluralistic definitions through the sophistic guidance of a Charter of Principles, developed and set out from the World Social Forum process in 2001. These principles conceive social forums as spaces of “diversified, non-confessional, non-governmental and non-party contexts that, in a decentralised fashion, interrelate organisations and movements engaged in concrete action at levels from the local to the international to build another world.”
./english/238.txt:10:Language is at the heart of the Social Forums. Or at least it should be. The Porto Alegre Charter that continues to shape and guide the ESF process makes clear our collective commitment to “ reflective thinking, democratic debate of ideas, formulation of proposals, free exchange of experiences and interlinking for effective action”. It reminds us that the Forum must always be open to pluralism and “the diversity of genders, ethnicities, cultures, generations and physical capacities, providing they abide by this Charter of Principles.” Breathing life into these worthy principles requires that people have the means to communicate with and understand each other in ways that are egalitarian and democratic. As Susan George writes in her new book ‘Another World is Possible If …', political activists are as guilty as the ruling classes in using language for purposes of power, control and domination:
./english/238.txt:61:To begin with, we must all accept and attempt to address the fact that the ideals of diversity and inclusion within the Porto Alegre Charter still remain largely unrealised in many Social Forums, especially the ESF. Like Florence and Paris before it, the large majority of the 20,000 participants – and interpreters – at this year's London ESF were again mainly white, able-bodied Western Europeans. This failure over three years to significantly expand popular participation of those either living in or originating from Central and Eastern Europe and the global South, not to mention from the disabled and deaf communities, cannot be simply explained away by the systematic refusal of visas (the disgrace of London), problems of disability access or the gargantuan cost of international travel from outside the EU – the ‘politics of language' has also played a central part.
./english/242.txt:24:The NIFT system will be set up in 36 rooms at the WSF 2005 in Porto Alegre : 12 large rooms, 12 medium-sized rooms and 12 small rooms. In Mumbai the NIFT was only installed in large rooms. What became apparent then was that the small rooms, the workshop rooms, also needed a translation transmission system to facilitate exchanges and discussion between people from different parts of the world. Also, the political position of Nomad defends a vision of the Forum as a space of practical exchange and not a spectacular space, a form of music festival, as it seems to have become in its last editions.
./english/242.txt:26:Since Mumbai, Nomad and Babels have defended the position that the setting up and building process of the Forum must be carried out by activists. The activists cannot remain the consumers of alternative speeches in a framework produced by capitalist groups. Activists should apply their vision of “another world” in the setting up of the Forum itself. From this perspective, the extension of the workshop spaces becomes fundamental. The WSF 2005 in Porto Alegre has started a shift towards this perspective. The process of building the Forum has being confined to five working groups (architecture, translation, sustainability, communication and culture) composed of activists who will try to apply the alternative principles of the “other world” we defend in the construction of the Forum itself.
./english/242.txt:28:Nomad participates mainly in the translation group through the setting up of the NIFT. But the Nomad perspective is broader then this issue of translation. We would like to work on other projects during the Forum, such as a project of radio networking, by showing and setting up with Porto Alegre communities some hertzian and web-radios, linking these local radios through the net.
./english/242.txt:56:For example, for the Social Forum at Porto Alegre , we will start by looking for local producers to develop the necessary communications tools for the translation system. However if the only local (geographically) producers that we find operate according to capitalist principles, we will favour foreign alternative producers (local in the ethical sense).
./english/243.txt:11:At the Radical Theory Forum there were not only workshops practicing popular education, there were also workshops on popular education itself: about its underlying ideas, about existing projects like ‘Other Worlds' in the UK on globalisation issues, and about possibilities to connect the different approaches in order to have access to each others tools. Popular education has also been a widely debated topic at other recent activist conferences, such as Life After Capitalism in New York in August 2004, which had its forerunner during the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in 2003. Something is happening here. Why?
./english/243.txt:33:At the WSF 2005 in Porto Alegre a workshop called “Connecting Popular Education worldwide,” on the 29th January, will serve as a meeting place and attempt to coordinate such initiatives from different parts of the world.
./english/246.txt:9:Since the first WSF in Porto Alegre, 2001, Social Fora have aroused great interest from people working in areas we can loosely define as ‘cultural’. There have also been since the beginning many discussions at Social Fora on the role and the present condition of ‘culture’ in our society; as well as cultural programmes that have accompanied the events. If one reads the statements issued by the culture working groups (or their equivalents) in different editions including their different spaces (Youth Camps , autonomous spaces etc.) it is easy to notice one common thread running throughout, quite often stated in similar words: that culture must be at the heart of the event, and must inform it as a whole, both in the discussions and the programme, and the way it is organised – it must not be ‘the icing on the cake’.
./english/246.txt:15:In fact, in the first two editions of the WSF there was very little discussion on how to integrate culture into the process as a whole. The cultural programme was basically arranged by the Culture Bureau of the Rio Grande do Sul state government, aided by the Culture Bureau of the Porto Alegre local authority. It consisted of a few exhibitions and film screenings spread around town (not in the space occupied by the WSF, the main campus of the Catholic University), seminars and pleanries on the subject, and most remarkably the concerts at the Por-do-Sol Amphitheatre, near the Youth Camp, on the bank of Lake Guaiba. In 2002, as a matter of fact, the organisation of the concerts was subcontracted out to an events manager. The Brazilian Organising Committee (BOC) would only have a culture working group after the 2002 edition, when one person was hired to be responsible for the area and organise the group. It worked closely with the Rio Grande do Sul Culture Bureau, which was still in charge of most of the executive decisions – the BOC culture working group, mostly composed by NGOs and a few local authorities, was based in Sao Paulo, therefore having little contact with the reality ‘on the ground’ in Porto Alegre. This group subsisted ‘autonomously’ for a while after the WSF 2003, and became somewhat involved in organising the Brazilian Social Forum. In the run up to Porto Alegre 2005, it was (in theory) subsumed by an international BOC/ International Council methodology working group; however, it has remained exclusively Brazilian and largely unchanged in its composition.
./english/246.txt:17:The Youth Camp, on the other hand, has had a culture working group since 2001, which has been essentially Porto Alegre-based and suffered many changes in its composition, even though a few elements have remained invariable: the hip hop, LGBT and student movements. In 2001, the cultural programme was restricted to a few workshops and a small stage; in 2002, it included street theatre, a large stage, outdoor film screenings, workshops (graffiti, zines etc.) and visits to MST and MTD settlements.
./english/246.txt:21:These ideals were played out in different forms in the main event and the Youth Camp. The former, besides keeping the big concerts at Por-do-Sol and the exhibitions and film screenings (which again took place in other spaces than were most of the activities took place), introduced three new projects: Instantaneous Memory, Street Dialogues, and the Live Museum of Diversity. The first was a space for videomakers who were active at the WSF to log and edit the material they were producing, while at the same time copies of it could be made so as to be stored by the organisation of the event. The Street Dialogues were events that took place in different public spaces in Porto Alegre and tried to engage the local population – which to a great extent did not take part in the WSF – in the debates that were happening, while also tying them to artistic manifestations such as music and street theatre, with the help of the Decentralisation Department of the Porto Alegre Culture Bureau. The Live Museum of Diversity was a space for exhibitions, workshops and collective on-the-spot productions, such as a mural produced by the MST.
./english/246.txt:23:The Youth Camp enlarged its film programme, with a film cycle that went on for ten days in all different formats (digital, VHS, 8mm, 35mm) and had two stages of different sizes, appropriately named ‘Another World’ and ‘Is Possible’ – the latter, in keeping with the collective management proposal of the camp, was supposed to be managed by the musicians themselves, who should only show up to play and discuss and decide the programme. The street theatre, cultural workshops and visits to MST and MTD settlements were also maintained. Besides, the Youth Camp saw the First National Hip Hop Encounter, out of which the Brazilian Organised Hip Hop Movement emerged – and also produced many cultural interventions, such as the graffiti in the warehouses where some of the WSF seminars were taking place. The innovations were in the form of installations, performances and ‘invisible theatre’; a library (set up with the help of the Porto Alegre government Culture Bureau) where the campers could read the latest newspapers from all over the world, and which also provided space for visual arts’ exhibitions, video screenings and a meeting point for story-tellers; the Cultural Barter Fair; the World Social Soiree; and the production of the Flag of the Flags.
./english/247.txt:7:In the first three editions of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, engagement with the environment and sustainability remained at a thematic level. There were, however, some interventions from movements and organizations that tried to call the attention of the participants and organizers to practical actions that this space should have.
./english/247.txt:31:For 2005, the WSF returns to Porto Alegre with the intention to adopt many of the practices developed in the previous editions of the IYC. In order to make this possible, a Sustainability Working Group was formed in the WSF Organizing Committee with the NGOs and movements engaged in this space, such as Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, WWF, FBOMS, Vitae Civilis, the IYC 2005 Organizing Committee (IYC – OC) and several local movements and organizations.
./english/247.txt:33:The Sustainability Working Group developed a solid residues management proposal with the DMLU (City Hall's Department of Urban Cleaning), the Porto Alegre Recycling Units Association for the whole WSF territory. It also initiated an education programme stimulating more sustainable practices in the Forum, such as the use of bicycles or collective transports, the rational use of natural resources, consumption of organic products, etc.
./english/247.txt:41:Once again the Recycling Shed will be built and managed by the workers of the Porto Alegre Recycling Units Association and by the militants of the National Movement of Collectors of Solid Residues. A Paper Recycling Factory will be managed by the organized groups of homeless of the park who created themselves a job by paper recycling, and reusing and reappropriating other materials. A Composting Unit will serve as a demonstrative space for the different methods and forms of composting, managed by the movements and organizations that will be carrying out the composting of produced organic residues during the Camp. Once again, the gray water from the showers will be recycled using different techniques and the use of organic soaps and shampoos will be encouraged.
./english/249.txt:31:Democracy is not only important because everyone wants to have a say in the decision-making. It is also crucial because we all might just be wrong every now and then. That is why debate and democratic deliberation leads to better decisions than power games. Our ideal should be that of Porto Alegre participatory democracy, not that of elitist Blairite England.
./english/250.txt:7:Many changes have been introduced in the preparatory process of the next World Social Forum, which will be held in Porto Alegre from the 26 th to the 31 st of January and will only be composed of self-organized activities
./english/250.txt:29:* Proposals: this project aims at collecting before, during and after the forum texts presenting the proposals of alternatives that organizations will discuss in Porto Alegre. Those proposals will be published online and on proposal walls that will be located in each of the terrains.
./english/251.txt:16:The European Social Forum was born in 2002 at the World Social Forum (WSF) in Porto Alegre where the decision was taken to set up regional social forums. Originally there were three countries interested in hosting the ESF: Italy, France and Greece. It was decided that Italy would host the ESF in November 2002 and Paris would host it the year after. The semi-official structures that arose out of these two ESFs created three or four loci of decision-making power. First, there is a local committee set up in the city where the ESF will take place. In the UK this was the UK Coordinating Committee (UKCC), which met every Thursday at City Hall. This is where all practical matters involved in organising the event can be discussed and hopefully resolved on a regular basis. Anyone who is involved in political organising or campaigning can be a part of this committee. This committee answers to the national organising committee, which is the second highest decision making body of the ESF. In the UK, this was the UK Organising Committee (UKOC). Meetings of the UKOC were held approximately once a month. In the ESF process, this committee is open to anyone in the country who wishes to be involved. This is in contrast to the WSF process where the membership of the Brazilian Organising Committee (BOC) was originally closed to all except the eight founding member organisations. In the India WSF 2004, the Indian Organising Committee was larger and organisations earned their position on the committee by officially affiliating to the WSF. This more open structure is now being mimicked by the BOC for the WSF in 2005. Despite these differences, wherever the forum takes place, all decision taken locally are expected to be reported to this national organising committee to be approved of and/or amended. Finally, and most importantly, there is the European Preparatory Assembly (EPA), the highest decision making body of the ESF. These meetings are held approximately every other month in various cities across Europe and are open to all who can afford to get to them. These meetings create an opening for people from all over Europe to input into the ESF process, thereby making it a European process and not just a local event.
./english/303.txt:30:My own research explores the cultural logic and politics of transnational networking among anti-corporate globalization activists based in Barcelona. I am interested in how transnational networks like Peoples Global Action or the World Social Forum are built and constructed, and how activists generate emotional energy, while physically representing alternative networks through embodied political praxis during mass direct actions. Through militant ethnography I hope to shed light on the concrete processes through which activists can build more effective and sustainable movement networks. My specific project thus involved long-term participant observation with the international working group of the Barcelona-based Movement for Global Resistance (MRG), a broad network involving squatters, Zapatista support activists, anti-debt campaigners, radical ecologists, and other collectives. Between June 2001 and September 2002, I actively participated in action planning and coordination around mobilizations in Barcelona, Genoa, Brussels, Madrid, and Seville, while I had previously taken part in mass actions in Seattle, Los Angeles, and Prague. Moreover, since MRG was a European convener of PGA and many activists were also actively involved in the Social Forum process, I was also able to help organize PGA and WSF-related gatherings in Barcelona, Leiden, and Porto Alegre.
./english/316.txt:61:The WSF has been held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, 2001-3, and is scheduled for Mumbai, India, in 2004. If the earlier-mentioned protest events were frequently marked more by opposition than proposition, the Forums have not only been devoted to counter-proposition over a remarkably wide range of social issues (with a wide range of significant collective actors). They have also demonstrated that what is shaping up is much more than a Northern, or even a Western-hemispheric, internationalism. The Forum process, moreover, has now reached take-off, with national, regional and thematic forums taking place all over the world. Some of these may be unknown to the WSF itself. The WSF has also become both the subject and the site of intense reflection concerning its own significance, nature and future. (Fisher and Ponniah 2002, Transnational Alternatives 2002, Sen 2003, Santos 2003, Whitaker 2002).
./english/331.txt:91:It is anti-global insofar as it rejects the imperialist tendencies of the Trans-National Corporation (TNC) and the global tourist trade, the globalisation of labour and consumer markets, and the use of developing countries as the rich world’s dustbin. But a common aim to combat the human exploitation and environmental degradation that characterise unregulated free-trade ideology is not 'anti-global'. Neither is a movement made possible by the global reach of the internet. Referring to the World Social Forum meetings at Porto Alegre, Noam Chomsky explained:
./english/337.txt:58:• In Athens we saw the confirmation of the high influence and visibility of political parties, which is a clear breach of The Charter of Porto Alegre. Moreover, this situation could - even in the short term - drastically reduce the scope of potential participating groups or individuals, and ultimately prevent the needed extension of the basis for a future ESF. We urgently need to discuss the place of political parties within the process of the Forum. We obviously know that the question of the relationship between social movements and political parties is different from one country to another, from one tradition to another. We also know that a political party can use a social movement as a « showcase ». Nevertheless, we propose to open a calm and constructive discussion on this sensitive point, in order to find adapted solutions for the future, solutions inspired by the principles of the Charter of Porto Alegre.
./english/356.txt:25:* It is important that the chart of Porto Alegre is the reference in our
./english/362.txt:83:I am suggesting - as I said at the WSF in Porto Allegre, at the Egyptian Social Forum in Cairo, and at the ASF - that capitalism has entered a new phase, of a higher level of centralisation of capital. This has laid the basis for the solidarity of capitalist interests at the global level. During Lenin's time, before the First World War, and continuing till about 30 to 40 years ago (I shall not put a date to it), monopoly capital needed a large market that could be accessed as an empire. A capitalist centre or metropolis with a number of colonies or areas of interests was thus the norm. That was the basis on which rivalries among the imperialist powers existed - on the sharing or re-shaping of colonies and the control of the global system. Now it is being said - not only by us, but by the bosses of big business - that in order to be efficient, transnational corporations (TNC) need to access markets on a global scale. They cannot be successful even if they enjoy overwhelming market shares of even the big regional markets such as the European Union or in North America or other parts of the global market. Therefore, the globe is the terrain on which competition among them is fought out.
./english/363.txt:13:All of this connects us to the rest of the world. In terms of our own history, perhaps, only the quiet revolution in community politics, along with the "indifference and unease" (Mills 1970) of the new suburbia, mark any kind of qualitative shift. In other areas, popular action is not doing so well: it's hard to imagine who or what today could mobilise the kinds of numbers that participated in the protests around Wood Quay, Carnsore or CND for a single event (1). But these local shifts exist within a global context which has thrown up something very remarkable: the "new movement" marked by the Zapatistas, Seattle and Porto Alegre, a remarkable development which is not easy to understand or explain. What's going on? Where do we fit into it? And what can we do to help?
./english/363.txt:62:Encuentros, PGA and Porto Alegre: a new world order from below?
./english/363.txt:63:The "new movement", for lack of a better phrase, is experimenting with precisely this problem. The Zapatistas (Ortiz-Perez 2000) and the "encounters" they sponsored, the series of demonstrations from Seattle to Naples, Quebec and beyond, networks like People's Global Action and Via Campesina, and the World Social Forum at Porto Alegre can be understood in this light as attempts to find non-authoritarian ways of working ? which work.
./english/363.txt:112:What it does make for, and what the Anglo world often lacks, is long memories and a sense of what theory is for. Not for nothing was it the German Green Party, with its organisers' roots in the New Left, that galvanised attempts at organisation across Europe in the early 80s; similarly, the Italian contingent seems to have made crucial contributions to the ultimate success of the World Social Forum at Porto Alegre, while playing an important role on the Zapatista march and making effective connections between the "noglobal" protests in Naples, the local alternative scene and the peripheral poor of what is still in some ways a post-colonial city.
./english/364.txt:23:Porto Alegre Social Summit Sets Stage for Counteroffensive against Globalization
./english/364.txt:27:Porto Alegre is not exactly a Third World city. Located in one of Brazil’s more prosperous states, Rio Grande do Sul, and populated by people mainly of European stock, this city of 1.2 million people is First World when it comes to infrastructure and social services. In fact, it ranks near the very top of the country’s "quality of life" index.
./english/364.txt:31:Yet Porto Alegre, site of the World Social Forum (WSF) last year and again this year, has become the byword for the spirit of the burgeoning movement against corporate-driven globalization. Galvanized by the slogan "Another world is possible," some 70,000 people are expected to flock to this coastal city from January 31 to February 4. This figure is nearly six times that for last year.
./english/364.txt:33:Fisherfolk from India, farmers from East Africa, trade unionists from Thailand, indigenous people from Central America will be among those making their way to Porto Alegre. But there will also be a sizable contingent of people from the Northern countries.
./english/364.txt:41:Proposed by a coalition of Brazilian civil society organizations and the Workers Party that controls both Porto Alegre and the state of Rio Grande do Sul, the idea triggered strong international support from organizations such as the French monthly Le Monde Diplomatique and Attac, an influential Europe-wide organization supporting a tax on global financial transactions.
./english/364.txt:57:The centerpiece of this year’s gathering in Porto Alegre are 26 plenary sessions over four days structured around four themes: "the production of wealth and social reproduction," "access to wealth and sustainable development," "civil society and the public arena," and "political power and ethics in the new society."
./english/364.txt:63:The anti-establishment forces gather in Porto Alegre after a tumultuous year. Perhaps the apogee of the anti-globalization movement came during Group of Eight Meeting in Genoa in the third week of July, when some 300,000 people marched in the face of police tear-gas attacks. Shortly after the Genoa clashes, in which one protester was killed by police, there was speculation in the world press that elite gatherings in non-authoritarian countries might no longer be possible in the future.
./english/364.txt:85:As the WSF opens, these twin disasters have brought back with a vengeance the global elite’s pre-September 11 crisis of legitimacy. Porto Alegre provides the perfect site and the perfect moment for the counteroffensive by the forces that believe that "another world is possible."
./english/365.txt:92:Despite these differences in the communication interfaces created to organize the two demonstrations, both web sites offered user features that kept them alive and networked with broader communities of activists beyond those attending the specific demonstrations. For example, the FTAA protest site referred to the A16 site (which was still running), and contained its own extensive calendar of past and future demonstrations. In addition, the Montreal organization prominently featured links on its front page to several current issue campaigns against corporations (e.g., Nike and Monsanto) that needed support. Also posted were news reports from activists who had attended the recently concluded first World Social Forum (WSF) in Porto Alegre, Brazil. These user interfaces extend particular protest events forward in time, and give them broad connection to diverse protest communities in cyberspace. Embedding otherwise dated organization sites in these broader structures of time and space helps their successor organizations form with new networking patterns of their own.
./english/365.txt:134:George, S. (2001) “The Global Citizen’s Movement: A New Actor for a New Politics”. Conference on reshaping globalization. Central European University. Budapest. October. (Posted on the World Social Forum site www.portoalegre2002.org )
./english/367.txt:139:“These policies are underpinned and reinforced by the expansion of the participatory budget from Porto Alegre [the capital of Rio Grande do Sul, where the PT has headed the municipal government since 1989] and the other municipal PT strongholds to the state administration. The process has been surprisingly successful, and is already transforming the relationship between the state and society.
./english/367.txt:143:But the most lasting contribution of the PT project in Rio Grande do Sul may prove to be its reappropriation of democracy as a fundamentally progressive concept. According to Ubiratan de Souza, “The participatory budget combines direct democracy with representative democracy — which is one of humanity’s greatest conquests, and which should be preserved and developed. As we strive to deepen the democracy of human society, representative democracy is necessary, but insufficient. It is more important than ever before that we combine it with a wide variety of forms of direct democracy, where the citizen can not only participate in public administration, but also control the state. The participatory budget in Porto Alegre and the process of implementing a participatory budget at the level of Rio Grande do Sul state are concrete examples of direct democracy.”
./english/371.txt:14:The international media ignored the big event which took place in Porto Alegre in January, when thousands of women and men walked through the streets shouting “another world is possible”. More than a hundred thousand people came to Porto Alegre this year to say why another world is not only possible, but necessary. I live in Egypt, I have travelled in Africa, Asia, Europe, to the two Americas, to Australia, and everywhere I have seen how people are dying of hunger, in wars, in the so-called ‘free market’, under so-called ‘democracy’. The media was occupied with the few who dominate the wealth of the world, who were meeting at the same time in Davos, at the World Economic Forum. This is not a world forum. It is a forum for the few individuals who own the multinationals and the ‘free market’.
./english/371.txt:22:Meanwhile in Porto Alegre’s biggest square, the third World Social Forum was being inaugurated by ‘Lula’ (as they call Brazil’s elected president Luis Inacio Lula da Silva). In his speech, addressed to over 60,000 women and men, he began: “I am going tonight to Davos to tell them about your goals, to carry your message to them.”
./english/371.txt:26:Some women and men in Porto Alegre believe that Lula is the Nasser of Brazil. But others disagree. They still consider him the hero of the left wing groups fighting against globalisation and imperialism. Brazil’s new left is more radical, younger. They describe the old left who dominate the World Social Forum as dogmatic, rigid, undemocratic, linked to the new liberals who are playing a role in isolating the forum from ordinary women and men, from the daily struggle of people.
./english/371.txt:28:Next January the fourth World Social Forum will be held in Hyderabad in India; the following year in Africa. Neither Brazil nor any other country should be allowed to dominate the World Social Forum. It belongs to the world and not to one country. Since it started in 2001 it has been held in Porto Alegre. Why this monopoly? The participants from the Arab countries may one day have a World Social Forum in Palestine, Cairo…or even Baghdad. For the time being this seems to be just a dream. But why should we not have big dreams? In Porto Alegre everybody is dreaming of another world, based on justice and freedom, in which women and men will be equal, in which there will be no wars and no poverty and no pollution of the environment by the capitalists.
./english/371.txt:32:I walk along the Jacui River, under the sun of Porto Alegre. The smell of the air reminds me of my village in the Nile Delta, the waters of the river look the same, and the sun rays are almost the same sun rays. The faces around me are brown, sunburned, like the faces at home in Cairo. I feel at home. I do not know the Portuguese language but I understand the music of words and the beat of drums.
./english/371.txt:40:The World Social Forum is not merely an annual event in Porto Alegre. It has become a global movement, a continuous process to create an open space for free and equal exchange of thoughts and action. In terms of numbers it grew from 25,000 people in the first meeting 2001 to more than 100,000 this year. But it is not just the numbers that count. The Forum has created an alternative to capitalist globalisation. It has created a new hope, a new power which is playing a profound role in helping to free people all over the world from the shackles of despair and false consciousness propagated by the global media. But more thinking is needed to close the gap between what is called political activities and social activities, between women’s groups and socialist groups.
./english/371.txt:46:In Egypt, as in countries all over the world, the traditional left-wing (including the new anti-globalisation groups) tend to exclude women in spite of having learned new ideas from them. The traditional left-wing groups should change their old habits. Most of the people at Porto Alegre were women and youth. But there were old professional political groups there too, and they tended to regress to old habits in order to monopolise and exclude the women and young people.
./english/371.txt:58:We need to stop seeing the forum at Porto Alegre as the only World Social Forum, and regarding the local or thematic ones, as marginal. Self-critical reflection is an essential part of the World Social Forum. Without this it cannot grow, create new ideas and new actions locally or globally. I like the new word “glocal” since the local is inseparable from the global.
./english/371.txt:60:In Porto Alegre I met a few participants from Egypt and other Arab countries. Most came from Europe and the US. However the Palestinian flag dominated the demonstrations, and the protesters against the war in Iraq were visible, though all the other flags were drowned in the red of the flags carried by the Brazilian peasants and workers. The forum in its totality condemned American unilateralism, militarism and lack of global responsibility in spite of its claims as a global superpower. Power without responsibility is a political disease inherited from the patriarchal class system that was born with slavery. This is one of the dichotomies forced on us by religion and philosophy. We must resist this idea of an irrevocable split between a good, divine power and the devil’s responsibility for evil. We must un-mask and strip away the language of George W. Bush the father, son, and holy ghost, and his axis of evil.
./english/373.txt:10:The third social forum in Porto Alegre wasn’t in the least "agora", was a little more like a market, but I am afraid there exists the actual danger of its being transformed into a body of elected representatives – that have been elected by no one. Noam Chomsky has said that creating an "International", based on anti-authoritarian principles, deprived of the historical burden of old antagonisms, would be a welcomed developement of the alter-globalist movement. Does, however, the experience of the third WSF allow us such optimism? Or does it, still, face us with the possibility of establishing a specific "International of the Irresponsible"?
./english/373.txt:18:The traditionalists have comprehended, and they are to be congratulated for it, that there is something really new in the new movement: the proof is the very idea of organizing "forums" – the institution that is "new" although organized in the "old" way – as well as the striving of political parties to transform themselves into networks such as ATTAC. As I have already pointed out, these two directions have mainly formed their identities independently from one another. I do not deem, however, that this difference is necessarily a handicap. On the contrary, I believe that these differences are good for the movement. They feed it with different energies. It is possible to learn a great deal from the reformists. Very often one can learn much more than from the anti-authoritarian sectarians who take pleasure in marginalizing and in a certain "anti-authoritarian narcissism". Problems, however, occur when the "globalise the resistance" becomes "monopolize the resistance". When the balance between the two spirits becomes disturbed. When the dialogue space becomes narrow. The last WSF was a convincing evidence of the dis-equilibrium relating to the recently ended ESF in Florence. Bureaucratisation of the movement and establishing of the forum bureaucracy is becoming more and more obvious. The danger of turning the "globalisation from below" into "globalisation from the middle" is becoming more clearly discernable. The phenomenon of "NGO-isation of the movement" is increasingly present as connected to BINGO politics (Big International Non Governmental Organizations). Do we really want to create a movement that will resemble a cocktail party in the Plaza Hotel lounge in Porto Alegre? Do we want a movement dominated by middle-aged bureaucrats wearing Palestinian scarves, armed with the memories from 1968 (or 1917)? Do we want social forums with invisible organizers?
./english/373.txt:26:Such attempts, so far, have included HUB in Florence, then Intergalactica and Life After Capitalism project in Porto Alegre.
./english/375.txt:2:This debate was organised by Globalise Resistance on 25 January 2003 at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre Brazil in front of about 300 people. The two main speakers spoke for 21 minutes each, and there were then some 22 contributions from the floor – one of the highest degrees of participation at any meeting at the forum.
./english/375.txt:135:I am from Mexico, and Zapatismo ensures that this no longer a theoretical question but a practical one. We are not in Seattle any more but we are in Porto Alegre and on the threshold of a war which may have terrible consequence for humanity as a whole. If we are going to turn this global movement into a movement against the war and if we are asking that it should be led by the working class, we cannot organise it. We need to build the widest movement so that the vast majority of humanity can express its resistance to war. As the Zapatistas have shown we can win a new world.
./english/375.txt:140:It is a misreading of Marx to see it as class trumps raise, class trumps gender, that the working class stands over your raise or your gender. What he is talking about is the question of strategy. Where are the forces that can critically attack the system at its roots. It’s not a value judgement about class being primarily and standing over the other things. It is a question of who can actually shut the system down. This is the vital question for the movement today. We have a world wide movement against capitalism and imperialism We saw it on the streets here in Porto Alegre. It was fantastic. It is important not just to celebrate what is happening in Argentina, we celebrate it, but we know that the hidden fangs of imperialism and capitalism are there trying to get back on top of Argentina. We see what is going on in Venezuela. It is a crucial question: What are the forces, and what fight does there have to be in our cities and our countries to make sure this system does not recover from the blows this movement wants to inflict on it so that we can have a better world.
./english/378.txt:9:Not surprisingly, the main sensation of the European Social Forum was the complete absence of violence. Everything passed off smoothly, peacefully and happily. Otherwise, it could not have happened at all; in Florence, as in Porto Alegre, the radical youth were assembling not in order to wreck some government event, but to hold their own.
./english/382.txt:5:The key word at this year's World Social Forum, which ended Tuesday in Porto Alegre, Brazil, was "big." Big attendance: more than 100,000 delegates in all! Big speeches: more than 15,000 crammed in to see Noam Chomsky! And most of all, big men. Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the newly elected President of Brazil, came to the forum and addressed 75,000 adoring fans. Hugo Chavez, the controversial President of Venezuela, paid a "surprise" visit to announce that his embattled regime was part of the movement.
./english/382.txt:25:Right now, it looks as if Lula has only two choices: abandoning his election promises of wealth redistribution or trying to force them through and ending up in a Chavez-style civil war. But there is another option, one his own Workers Party has tried before, one that made Porto Alegre itself a beacon of a new kind of politics: more democracy. He could simply hand power back to the citizens who elected him, on key issues from payment of the foreign debt, to land reform, to membership in the Free Trade Area of the Americas. There is a host of mechanisms that he could use: referendums, constituents' assemblies, networks of empowered local councils and assemblies. Choosing an alternative economic path would still spark fierce resistance, but his opponents would not have the luxury of being against Lula, as they are against Mr. Chavez, and would, instead, be forced to oppose the repeated and stated will of the majority — to be against democracy itself.
./english/388.txt:2: Under a tree in Porto Alegre: democracy in its most radical sense
./english/388.txt:8:What are the main points of disagreement – and agreement – among the world’s social movements? In the first book in English on the World Social Forum, two American activist/academics talk about the process, the people, and their vision for a future world. Thomas Ponniah and William Fisher spoke to openDemocracy's Solana Larsen under a tree in Porto Alegre.
./english/388.txt:49:TP: Porto Alegre is an amazing city. It is in a country that has one of the highest differentials between rich and poor, yet Porto Alegre exhibits a high level of social redistribution. The core of this egalitarianism lies in its participatory budget, which allows every citizen to collaborate in allocating the city’s resources. It seems logical that a movement seeking democratic alternatives would find Porto Alegre as its initial meeting place.
./english/388.txt:53:WF: No, it’s not. But I think that Thomas is right that for the first three years it was really significant that it was held here. There was a connection between Porto Alegre as a model for an alternative way of doing things that provided an inspiration for the whole forum. It doesn’t mean that the forum can only be held in a place like this, but it will be very different somewhere else. I can’t think of a single place where you’re likely to find a better match between the city and the spirit of the WSF at the moment. So I don’t expect it will relocate for good, but there’s no reason it can’t move about. In the current plans it is expected that the WSF would return periodically, perhaps every other year to Porto Alegre.
./english/388.txt:57:Also, the process of the forum moving around different parts of the Global South is actually playing out the democratic ideal, in the sense that movements are very wary of becoming bureaucratised, centralised, sedimented. So we have to have a forum that is structured in a more fluid manner. It cannot be permanently located in one place or it would just become a new IMF or a Soviet Union. Movements have learned from their history and from their adversary. The forum has to move. Porto Alegre is a great alternative, but so is Kerala in India, or Chiapas in Mexico where movements and governments are also experimenting with new forms of democracy. Porto Alegre was not known four years ago on the global left, and now, hopefully, parts of India will also become known for their alternative forms of governance. So I think it is a good thing. I hope that the forum also moves to Africa sometime in the near future so that we can learn from the innovations of African movements as well.
./english/390.txt:114:Porto Alegre, Brazil
./english/391.txt:10:The "older" and "younger" generations would not have met and combined to form a global civil society if it weren't for Porto Alegre.
./english/391.txt:22:But that is not where India 2004 and Porto Alegre 2005 are leading. Their success will be measured by the number of participants. Is this the path we need to achieve a better world? And when it is said that we have no proposals, that all we do is talk, will we answer that we don't want to be elitist like other Forums? The time has come for us to reflect so our route is broader, but stronger in order to challenge neoliberal globalisation and its mercenaries.
./english/393.txt:53:Social Forum, held in Porto Alegre from January 25th to 30th, 2001, after evaluating the results
./english/393.txt:59:holding of the Porto Alegre Forum and ensured its success, they extend the reach of those
./english/393.txt:63:Forum, held in Porto Alegre from January 25th to 30th, 2001, after evaluating the results of that
./english/393.txt:68:holding of the Porto Alegre Forum and ensured its success, they extend the reach of those decisions
./english/393.txt:85:2. The World Social Forum at Porto Alegre was an event localized in time and place. From now
./english/393.txt:86:on, in the certainty proclaimed at Porto Alegre that “Ano ther world is possible”, it
./english/393.txt:89:2. The World Social Forum at Porto Alegre was an event localized in time and place. From now on, in
./english/393.txt:90:the certainty proclaimed at Porto Alegre that "another world is possible", it becomes a
./english/394.txt:18:in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in January 2001, prepared and issued a Charter of Principles for the initiative
./english/394.txt:196:reportedly been denied access to the Forum in Porto Alegre (or that they have chosen to stay away),
./english/394.txt:288:9 Peter Waterman, 2002 – ‘What’s Left Internationally? Reflections on the 2nd World Social Forum in Porto
./english/395.txt:5:During the third world meeting of the WSF in Porto Alegre in January 2003, a new initiative
./english/395.txt:102:The WSF has grown a great deal over its first three years since Porto Alegre in Brazil in January
./english/395.txt:103:2001. It has moved from being a major annual event each January in Porto Alegre, timed to
./english/395.txt:237:Porto Alegre was an event localised in time and place. From now on, in the certainty proclaimed at
./english/395.txt:238:Porto Alegre that ‘another world is possible,’ it becomes a permanent process of seeking and building
./english/395.txt:242:the IC decided at its meeting in Porto Alegre in January 2002, to give a call for the organisation of
./english/395.txt:506:reputation of being ‘open,’ participants in the WSF meetings held in Porto Alegre have so far been
./english/395.txt:548:‘only’ means that they do not have full privileges, such as (in Porto Alegre) being eligible to have
./english/395.txt:562:By contrast, this division was absent at the Youth Camp at Porto Alegre, where the
./english/395.txt:687:The organisers of the Porto Alegre Forum, the BOC (now called the International
./english/395.txt:700:events, even within three years. In Porto Alegre, there is now a World Youth Forum, a World
./english/395.txt:706:The problem is that since the Porto Alegre Forum is widely seen as having been ‘successful’,
./english/395.txt:709:of Porto Alegre. There is also a good deal of unstated assumption that if a WSF-related meeting is
./english/395.txt:711:be like the Porto Alegre event. And there is therefore also the difficult reality that precisely because
./english/396.txt:2:and Porto Alegre 3 present
./english/398.txt:4:After the euphoria of gathering thousands of people from all corners of the globe at the second WSF at Porto Alegre it was time for activists to reflect hard about the shape and future direction of the entire movement.
./english/401.txt:152:New alliances—particularly with social movements, NGOs, and political parties opposed to neoliberal-inspired policies—have also been pursued at the international level, through participation in demonstrations such as the one in Seattle (at the WTO meeting, in 1999), in Washington (at the IMF meeting, in 2000), and in Quebec (at the FTAA meeting, in 2001); in the constitution of networks, such as the Continental Social Alliance…; and in events such as the World Social Forum…[in Porto Alegre, Brazil, 2001 – PW]…CUT's discourse has been increasingly incorporating the expression “citizen union” to designate (not without internal tensions), in an adverse context, a union practice of a more ["propositional"] character, that takes as its central issues the defense of employment and of social rights, that seeks to expand its action to institutional spaces and have a more direct influence on the formulation and execution of public social policies, that seeks to construct closer links with other organizations and social movements, at local (by focusing on the question of “local government”), national (by discussing a “national project”), and international levels.
./english/402.txt:8:I was somewhat alarmed, at the elite hotel I eventually found myself in at Porto Alegre, by the number of people who looked like me: White, Male, Middle-Aged (hey, I am not yet 70!) and, evidently, Middle-Class. I do not know to what extent this bias applies to the decision-making committees, but it existed visibly on the various platforms and other public events. This does not, of course, mean that women, Africans, Indians, Indigenous Peoples, or the Under-30s are excluded from the Forum, or from that hotel. But the youth were under canvas in the Youth Camp, the Argentinean piqueteros were in the streets, and, it seemed to me, the women were less visible than they had been at WSF2.
./english/402.txt:60:Escobar, Arturo. 2003. ‘Other Worlds Are (already) Possible: Cyber-Internationalism and Post-Capitalist Cultures. Draft Notes for the Cyberspace Panel, Life after Capitalism Programme, World Social Forum, Porto Alegre, January 23-8’. http://www.zmag.org/escobarcyner.htm.
./english/402.txt:64:La Vie/Le Monde. 2003. ‘Porto Alegre 2003: A Citizen’s Planet’, La Vie/Le Monde (Paris), pp. 14-19.
./english/402.txt:68:Raiz. 2002. ‘Foro Social Mundial: Democracia radical: experiencias y propuestas. ¿ Por que el taller ? ( Porto Alegre, 25-26 Enero 2003 ) http://www.iespana.es/movimiento-raiz/.
./english/402.txt:70:Sen, Jai. 2003. ‘The Long March to Another World: Porto Alegre – Hyderabad – Porto Alegre, ‘Two, Three, Many New Social Forums?’, Special Issue, TransnationalAlternativ@s, (Transnational Institute, Amsterdam), No. 0. www.tni.org.tat.
./english/402.txt:72:Waterman, Peter. 2002. ‘Foro Social Mundial, Porto Alegre, 2002: La emancipación del internacionalismo’, Revista Espacios (Flacso, Costa Rica), No. 16, pp. 3-13.
./english/402.txt:76:Waterman, Peter. 2003. ‘From “Decent Work” to “The Liberation of Time from Work”: Some Reflections on Work after Capitalism’. For the Panel on Work, Life after Capitalism Programme, World Social Forum, Porto Alegre, January 23-8, 2003’. http://www.zmag.org/watermanwork.htm
./english/402.txt:78:Waterman, Peter. 2003. ‘Cyberspace after Capitalism: Cyber-Utopianism without Cyber-Illusionism: Paper for the Cyberspace Panel, Life after Capitalism Programme, World Social Forum, Porto Alegre, January 23-8, 2003’. http://www.zmag.org/lac/watermancyber.htm.
./english/405.txt:8:Their authors are connected to the history of the process that started in Porto Alegre. Ignacio Ramonet created the famous sentence: "Another world is possible"; Franois Polet is assistant to Franois Houtart, an important figure on the WSF International Council. The central arguments of both texts is very similar and can be summarised into three essential ideas: a) By unfolding itself, every year, in the form of thousands of activities and hundreds of ideas without hierarchy among themselves, the WSF keeps its participants fragmented and reduces itself to a folkloric parade of ideas and good intentions; b) The way to avoid this huge project losing itself is to make the Forum a great "general assembly of mankind", where actions that have priority are chosen to be adopted by all participants; c) The first step was taken in Porto Alegre, on January 2005, at the Plaza So Raphael Hotel, when nineteen intellectuals announced a manifesto that put forward twelve ideas that alterglobalisation should defend so that it would no longer be "morally victorious but without being effective". And in particular, at the end of his text Ignacio Ramonet suggests that it is only through government actions such as those being taken by Hugo Chavez that it is possible to avoid falling victim to neoliberalism.
./english/408.txt:6:Everyone agrees that the WSF has been the most enormous success. How right it was to move from Porto Alegre! Staying there for a fourth year might have led to a routinized and bureaucratic Forum. And by going to India the WSF has ceased to be a Latin American-European affair. It wasnt just the wealth of Indian movements that made the Bombay WSF such a success - it was the very strong presence from the rest of Asia. Tibetan monks, South Korean socialists, Nepalese Dalits jostled in the dusty cheerful lanes of the WSF site.
./english/408.txt:12:But what light did the Bombay Forum throw on the development of the global movement? First of all, the long-standing debate over the relationship between social movements and political parties was given a different modulation. In Porto Alegre the presence of the Workers Party (PT) was so all-informing that it could be taken for granted (Olivio Dutra, one of the founders of the Brazilian Forum and now Minister of the Cities in Lulas government, represented the PT in Bombay). India has the largest Communist movement in the world - two mass parliamentary parties, the quasi-Maoist Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Communist Party of India (pro-Moscow in the days of the USSR), plus various Marxist-Leninist (M-L) organizations that often lead very large and militant movements in different parts of the country. The WSF couldnt have happened in India without the support of
./english/408.txt:24:Before endorsing this judgement we should consider what results the Assembly has produced. At the first ESF in Florence in November 2002 it issued the call for a day of protest against the war in Iraq on 15 February 2003. At Porto Alegre the following January the anti-war and activists assemblies turned that into a global call. We know the outcome: the biggest day of international protest ever, which led even the New York Times to acknowledge the emergence of a second superpower. Here in Britain the shock waves from the anti-war protests last spring are still sweeping through the official political system, but 15 February has broader implications than that.
./english/409.txt:8:For the past thirty years, a select group of CEOs and world leaders have met during the last week in January on a mountaintop in Switzerland to do what they presumed they were the only ones capable of doing: determine how the global economy should be governed. We were cheering because it was, in fact, the last week of January, and this wasnt the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. It was the first annual World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. And even though we werent CEOs or world leaders, we were still going to spend the week talking about how the global economy should be governed.
./english/409.txt:12:If Seattle was, for many people, the coming-out party of a resistance movement, then, according to Soren Ambrose, policy analyst with 50 Years Is Enough, "Porto Alegre is the coming-out party for the existence of serious thinking about alternatives." The emphasis was on alternatives coming from the countries experiencing most acutely the negative effects of globalization: mass migration of people, widening wealth disparities, weakening political power.
./english/409.txt:14:The particular site was chosen because Brazils Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, the PT) is in power in the city of Porto Alegre, as well as in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. The conference was organized by a network of Brazilian unions and NGOs, but the PT provided state-of-the-art conference facilities at the Catholic University of Porto Alegre and paid the bill for a star-studded roster of speakers. Having a progressive government sponsor was a departure for a group of people accustomed to being met with clouds of pepper spray, border strip searches and no-protest zones. In Porto Alegre, activists were welcomed by friendly police officers and greeters with official banners from the tourism department.
./english/409.txt:21:The result of the gathering was something much more complicated--as much chaos as cohesion, as much division as unity. In Porto Alegre the coalition of forces that often goes under the banner of antiglobalization began collectively to recast itself as a pro-democracy movement. In the process, the movement was also forced to confront the weaknesses of its own internal democracy and to ask difficult questions about how decisions were being made--at the World Social Forum itself and, more important, in the high-stakes planning for the next round of World Trade Organization negotiations and the Summit of the Americas in Quebec City at the end of April.
./english/409.txt:33:One thing that wasnt so big at the World Social Forum was the United States. There were daily protests against Plan Colombia, the "wall of death" between the United States and Mexico, as well as George W. Bushs announcement that the new administration will suspend foreign aid to groups that provide information on abortion. In the workshops and lectures there was much talk of American imperialism, of the tyranny of the English language. Actual US citizens, though, were notably scarce. The AFL-CIO barely had a presence (John Sweeney was at Davos), and there was no one there from the National Organization for Women. Even Noam Chomsky, who said the forum "offers opportunities of unparalleled importance to bring together popular forces," sent only his regrets. Public Citizen had two people in Porto Alegre, but their star, Lori Wallach, was in Davos.
./english/409.txt:38:Last year, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote from Davos, "Every year at the World Economic Forum there is a star or theme that stands out"--the dot-coms, the Asian crisis. Last year according to Friedman, the star of Davos was "Seattle." Porto Alegre had a star as well; it was, without question, "democracy": What happened to it? How do we get it back? And why isnt there more of it within the conference itself?
./english/409.txt:49:In the end, the conference did not speak in one voice; there was no single official statement (though there were dozens of unofficial ones). Instead of sweeping blueprints for political change, there were glimpses of local democratic alternatives. The Landless Peasants Movement took delegates on day trips to reappropriated farmland used for sustainable agriculture. And then there was the living alternative of Porto Alegre itself. The city has become a showcase of participatory democracy studied around the world. In Porto Alegre, democracy isnt a polite matter of casting ballots; its a contact sport, carried out in sprawling town hall meetings. The centerpiece of the Workers Partys platform is something called "the participatory budget," an initiative that gives residents, through a network of neighborhood councils and a shadow city council, a direct say in such decisions as how much of the municipal budget should go to sanitation versus transportation.
./english/409.txt:52:Perhaps by transforming the anticorporate, antiglobalization movement into a pro-democracy movement that defends the rights of local communities to plan and manage their schools, their water and their ecology. In Porto Alegre, the most convincing responses to the international failure of representative democracy seemed to be this radical form of local participatory democracy, in the cities and towns where the abstractions of global rule become day-to-day issues of homelessness, water contamination, exploding prisons and cash-starved schools. Of course, this has to take place within a context of national and international standards and resources. But what seemed to be emerging organically out of the World Social Forum (despite the best efforts of some of the organizers) was not a movement for a single global government but a vision for an increasingly connected international network of very local initiatives, each built on direct democracy.
./english/409.txt:65:But other questions were legitimate and have implications that reach far beyond a one-week conference. How are decisions made in this movement of movements? Who, for instance, decides which "civil society representatives" go behind the barbed wire at Davos--while protesters are held back with water cannons outside? If Porto Alegre was the anti-Davos, why were some of the most visible faces of opposition "dialoguing" in Davos?
./english/409.txt:72:Perhaps the real lesson of Porto Alegre is that democracy and accountability need to be worked out first on more manageable scales--within local communities and coalitions and inside individual organizations. Without this foundation, theres not much hope for a satisfying democratic process when 10,000 activists from wildly different backgrounds are thrown in a room together. What has become clear is that if the one "pro" this disparate coalition can get behind is "pro-democracy," then democracy within the movement must become a high priority. The Porto Alegre Call for Mobilization clearly states that "we challenge the elite and their undemocratic processes, symbolized by the World Economic Forum in Davos." Most delegates agreed that it simply wont do to scream Elitist! from a glass house--or from a glass VIP lounge.
./english/409.txt:74:Despite the moments of open revolt, the World Social Forum ended on as euphoric a note as it began. There was cheering and chanting, the loudest of which came when the organizing committee announced that Porto Alegre would host the forum again next year. The plane from Porto Alegre to São Paulo on January 30 was filled with delegates dressed head-to-toe in conference swag--T-shirts, baseball hats, mugs, bags--all bearing the utopian slogan: Another World Is Possible. Not uncommon, perhaps, after a conference, but it did strike me as noteworthy that a couple sitting in the seats across from me were still wearing their WSF name tags. It was as if they wanted to hang on to that dream world, however imperfect, for as long as they could before splitting up to catch connecting flights to Newark, Paris, Mexico City, absorbed in a hive of scurrying businesspeople, duty-free Gucci bags and CNN stock news.
./english/410.txt:1:A Fiesta of Protest at Porto Alegre
./english/410.txt:4:PORTO ALEGRE: It was founded as the Un-Davos, the Anti-Davos, which would meet simultaneously with the events in Switzerland. And indeed the differences between the settings of the World Economic Forum and the World Social Forum could hardly be more striking: an exclusive ski resort on the one side, and a sun-baked Brazilian industrial town on the other. And whereas Davos hosts about 2200 of the global rich and famous in a cordoned-off village, about 150,000 to 200,000 people assembled in an open tent city near the center of Porto Alegre. However, the open space and diversity that make the anti-Davos gathering attractive may also prevent it from rising above the cacophony as an effective voice of a global civil society.
./english/410.txt:12:During the past four years, this idea of a global civil society mobilizing against "McWorld" has proved to be quite successful in getting public attention. In 2001, the first World Social Forum was organized by grassroots movements such as the French ATTAC and partly sponsored by the Brazilian Workers' Party (PT). Whereas the first event drew a modest number of 12,000 activists, the fourth Forum (in Mumbai, 2004) attracted 80,000 people. This year, the number of participants rose to a staggering 150,000 to 200,000, and featured 2500 events organized by more than 5700 organizations from more than 100 countries. This year, more than 5400 journalists went to Porto Alegre to cover an event that in many countries received more public attention than the parallel meeting in Davos.
./english/410.txt:18:So far, the groups in Porto Alegre may share certain doubts about neo-liberalism and US foreign policy, but they are far from embodying a coherent – or at least compatible – set of political opinions. Except for the difference between radical anti-capitalist groups and more conservative organizations, a seriously contested issue was the question of culture. Many participants echoed the criticism that socialism is yet another Western agenda with a strong disregard for different cultural traditions. In that context, culturalist critics of left-wing groups argued that the world public opinion has increasingly turned to religions and cultural traditions in its disillusionment with Westernization. According to them, the global left remains oblivious to the widespread, rapid growth of religions and cultural identities. Indeed, religious groups with political aspirations – such as the Orthodox church in Russia, certain Hindu movements, and a wide variety of Islamic groups – were hardly represented in Porto Alegre.
./english/410.txt:22:However, if the World Social Forum wants to become a global pressure group, it must narrow down its agenda. Only with a clearly defined program will a much needed dialog between Porto Alegre and Davos be possible. However, formulating such an agenda means excluding a range of alternative options and viewpoints. If the World Social Forum wants to deepen its international impact, it will no longer be able to claim to represent global civil society in toto.
./english/419.txt:9:IG. 6. Some people said Porto Alegre charter is not enough respected. For some people Porto Alegre Charter is impeding us to go ahead
./english/419.txt:55:PG. 3. Make Porto Alegre charter more strictly respected or ….not to use it as an important reference?
./english/471.txt:26:Again, the intrinsic character of the forum itself presents an answer to such inequality of treatment. This enormous popular gathering – even larger and more diverse than its predecessor in Porto Alegre – featured extensive discussions by feminist organisations, and noted intellectuals like Nawal al-Saadawi and the 2003 Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi. These discussions included criticisms of the aggressively patriarchal attitudes that lead to and legitimise crimes against women; and creative feminist analyses of dominant, neo-realist, state-centric concepts of ‘national security’.
./english/472.txt:11:They also join in opposition to the proliferation of free trade agreements through which developed countries subject underdeveloped economies to unfair competition. In the Porto Alegre meetings, the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) was a chief target. What’s more, many fear that the FTAA and other trade agreements cement U.S. economic and political control over the region, exacerbating the ability of IFIs and U.S.-based corporations to exert pressure.
./english/472.txt:13:The Forum held its first three meetings in Porto Alegre, Brazil and the fourth in Mumbai, India. The fifth met in Porto Alegre from January 26 to 31, 2005, as this article went to press. The WSF has been a heady experience for its many participants. Imagine a gathering with tens of thousands of people (100,000 in 2003) successfully communicating across barriers of language, political orientation and issue emphasis. The scene bursts with energy as people who work on particular causes at home—feminism, the environment, indigenous rights, economic justice, human rights, AIDS treatment and prevention and many more—compare notes and strategies. Musicians and other performers entertain in the open air during breaks, and dozens of organizations and publishers promote their projects and publications.
./english/472.txt:21:The WSF is self-limiting; its charter, adopted at the first forum in Porto Alegre, explicitly excludes political parties and forswears taking political positions or proposing actions.4 It is a space, not an actor: it opens its agenda to all the forces wanting to discuss the issues relevant to the struggle for a better world.
./english/472.txt:31:Just as the wef found its home in a luxury ski resort in the Swiss Alps, the WSF’s organizers chose Porto Alegre as an appropriate site for their gathering. Porto Alegre had been a longstanding PT municipal stronghold and a showcase for the PT’s brand of participatory democracy. The most important exemplar of participatory governance in Porto Alegre is the participatory budget process, in which public assemblies decide how to spend each year’s municipal budget. The process of deliberation is also a process of education, through which participants learn to respect one another’s points of view and put the interests of the community above their own parochial interests.
./english/472.txt:33:The PT and the city government spared no effort in showing off the budgeting process to WSF delegates. Under the PT mayor, the city provided major financial and logistical support for the Forum in its first years, as did the PT governor of Rio Grande do Sul, the state of which Porto Alegre is the capital. When the PT lost the gubernatorial election in 2002, however, the state withdrew some resources from the WSF. And the party’s loss of the mayoralty in 2004 further dampened the welcome in 2005.
./english/472.txt:37:The first forum brought 20,000 participants from over 100 countries to Porto Alegre from January 25 to 30, 2001. In the most dramatic incident of the gathering, the MST and José Bové, the French peasant leader and anti-McDonald’s activist, led the occupation of a farm near Porto Alegre owned by the U.S.-based biotech multinational Monsanto. The company was allegedly developing genetically modified seeds on the farm. The takeover made some of the Brazilian NGOs on the Organizing Committee fear they had unleashed a monster they could not control. Consequently, they tried to moderate the tone of the second forum in 2002 to prevent a repeat of incidents like the Monsanto occupation.
./english/472.txt:43:The fourth Forum moved to Mumbai, symbolically staking in Asia the claim to be a genuine world forum. About 80,000 people attended, making it smaller than the previous meeting at Porto Alegre, but larger than the first two, and laying to rest the fears of some that it would be impossible to attract similar numbers from the many cultures and the extreme poverty of South Asia. The atmosphere was festive, following local traditions of including musical and dramatic performance in political demonstrations. The widespread Indian NGO network brought more poor people to the Mumbai Forum than were in evidence at any of the Porto Alegre meetings.
./english/472.txt:45:The same issues discussed at Porto Alegre were also prominent, along with some new ones responding to the local context: casteism, racism (not prominently addressed in the Brazilian meetings, even though half the country’s population is of African descent), work- and descent-based exclusions and discriminations, religious fanaticism and sectarian violence.
./english/472.txt:46:Each forum has attracted parallel events. At Porto Alegre, self-organized world forums of education, trade unions, judges, peasants (Vía Campesina, a worldwide confederation of national peasants’ organizations fighting for land reform) and many more have all met concurrently. At the 2003 WSF, the youth camp, a tent city that sheltered some 25,000 people, had its own loosely organized, anarchic program of activities, though the campers also participated in the main events.
./english/473.txt:18:One group of very influential intellectuals at the forum disagree with him. At the 2005 World Social Forum in Brazil " a group of 19 " - including Frei Betto, Immanuel Wallerstein, Eduardo Galeano, and Tariq Ali - signed a document they called the Porto Alegre Consensus Manifesto and urged others to sign on ( openDemocracy translated it into English, here ). It created intense controversy and an uncomfortable divide between those who agreed with the manifesto and those who didn't. Many also questioned the undemocratic way the document was conceived and proposed.
./english/473.txt:21:But a year later, the Porto Alegre Consensus Manifesto has not been forgotten, and the mere mention of it makes Whitaker huff. "It was an initiative by only a small group of participants at the forum," he said. "Their views do not represent the forum as a whole."
./english/473.txt:23:Alarm bells rang again for Whitaker and his colleagues, when they heard that WSF organisers in Bamako - among them Samir Amin , director of the Third World Forum and a signatory to the original Porto Alegre Consensus document - were planning to use the opening session of the Forum to revive the Bandung initiative , an alliance that brought twenty-nine African and Asian countries together against American and Soviet power-blocs fifty years ago.
./english/473.txt:31:This struggle between governments, parties, and WSF organisers is inevitable. From Porto Alegre to Recife to Caracas, it is impossible to organise a Forum without the support of local government. "They always try to interfere," says Whitaker, adding that it is ultimately up to the local organisers of any event to stand their ground against interference with the programme. "If they don't say no they will be manipulated," he said, "I hope this is not the case of the organisers in Caracas."
./english/474.txt:6:The discussion on moving "from protests to proposals" began last year at the fifth edition of the Forum, in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, where the WSF was first held in 2001.
./english/474.txt:28:A survey carried out by the Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Analysis (IBASE) at last year's Forum in Porto Alegre revealed that 60 percent of the participants considered themselves to be leftist, while 19.8 percent described themselves as centre-left.
./english/476.txt:8:There are three moments of origin in this story. The first was the very successful mass protests at the Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organization in November, 1999. A large group of mostly U.S. protestors - an unlikely coalition of AFL-CIO trade-unionists, environmental activists, and anarchists - succeeded in scuttling the meeting. Two months later, in January, 2000 at Davos, a group of some 50 intellectuals from around the world tried a different tactic, organizing an "anti-Davos at Davos," seeking to get anti-neoliberal arguments a world press. And in February, 2000, two Brazilian leaders of popular movements, Chico Whitaker and Oded Grajew, went to Paris to talk to Bernard Cassen, a journalist and the president of the anti-globalization organization called Attac-France. The two Brazilians suggested to Cassen that they join forces and launch a world meeting that would combine mass protest and intellectual analysis. They convened this in Porto Alegre, Brazil, at the same time as the 2001 meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos. They called this the World Social Forum, and Cassen said the object was to "sink Davos."
./english/476.txt:10:Porto Alegre in 2001 expected some 1500 participants. Some 10,000 came. The bulk of the participants in 2001 were from Latin America, France, and Italy. The basic principles of the WSF were that it was an "open meeting place" for "groups and movements of civil society that are opposed to neoliberalism and to domination of the world by capital and any form of imperialism." Its theme was "another world is possible." It was a "process," not an organization. It would not take positions as such, or make proposals for action, but it might generate such positions and proposals by some or all of those taking part in the WSF. It was "plural, diversified, non-confessional, non-governmental and non-party" and acted in a "decentralized fashion." In short, there was to be no hierarchy or organizational discipline.
./english/476.txt:12:The formula was original and quite different from the historic antisystemic movements, including Communist and other "Internationals." And it caught fire. The second meeting at Porto Alegre attracted 40,000 participants, including now a large group from North America. The third, in 2003, had 70-80,000 participants. Every conceivable kind of movement - reformist and revolutionary, every variety of oppressed or marginalized persons, the Old Left and the New Left, social movements and NGOs, came. So did an increasing number of political figures. The world press paid increasing attention.
./english/476.txt:14:But there were problems. The three biggest ones were: (1) a tension between those who insisted on retaining the formula of an open forum and those who wished to see the WSF become a "movement of movements," perhaps eventually another "International"; (2) an inadequate degree of participation from Asia, Africa, and east-central Europe; (3) debates about the internal structure and the funding of the WSF - how democratic and how independent was it as a structure? All three problems were tested at the Mumbai meeting, the first to be held other than in Porto Alegre.
./english/477.txt:4:The recent 4th meeting of the World Social Forum (WSF) in Mumbai (India) - Jan. 16-21, 2004 - was a big step forward in the steadily rising strength of the World Social Forum. In five years, it has become a major actor on the world scene. There are three moments of origin in this story. The first was the very successful mass protests at the Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organization in November, 1999. A large group of mostly U.S. protestors - an unlikely coalition of AFL-CIO trade-unionists, environmental activists, and anarchists - succeeded in scuttling the meeting. Two months later, in January, 2000 at Davos, a group of some 50 intellectuals from around the world tried a different tactic, organizing an "anti-Davos at Davos," seeking to get anti-neoliberal arguments a world press. And in February, 2000, two Brazilian leaders of popular movements, Chico Whitaker and Oded Grajew, went to Paris to talk to Bernard Cassen, Director of Le Monde Diplomatique and the president of Attac-France. The two Brazilians suggested to Cassen that they join forces and launch a world meeting that would combine mass protest and intellectual analysis. They convened this in Porto Alegre, Brazil, at the same time as the 2001 meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos. They called this the World Social Forum, and Cassen said the object was to "sink Davos."
./english/477.txt:6:Porto Alegre in 2001 expected some 1500 participants. Some 10,000 came. The bulk of the participants in 2001 were from Latin America, France, and Italy. The basic principles of the WSF were that it was an "open meeting place" for "groups and movements of civil society that are opposed to neoliberalism and to domination of the world by capital and any form of imperialism." Its theme was "another world is possible." It was a "process," not an organization. It would not take positions as such, or make proposals for action, but it might generate such positions and proposals by some or all of those taking part in the WSF. It was "plural, diversified, non-confessional, non-governmental and non-party" and acted in a "decentralized fashion." In short, there was to be no hierarchy or organizational discipline.
./english/477.txt:8:The formula was original and quite different from the historic antisystemic movements, including Communist and other Internationals. And it caught fire. The second meeting at Porto Alegre attracted 40,000 participants, including now a large group from North America. The third, in 2003, had 70-80,000 participants. Every conceivable kind of movement, reformist and revolutionary, every variety of oppressed or marginalized persons, the Old Left and the New Left, social movements and NGOs, came. So did an increasing number of political figures. The world press paid increasing attention.
./english/477.txt:10:But there were problems. The three biggest ones were: (1) a tension between those who insisted on retaining the formula of an open forum and those who wished to see the WSF become a "movement of movements," perhaps eventually another "International"; (2) an inadequate degree of participation from Asia, Africa, and east-central Europe; (3) debates about the internal structure and the funding of the WSF - how democratic and how independent was it as a structure? All three problems were tested at the Mumbai meeting, the first to be held other than in Porto Alegre.
./english/477.txt:18:The wish to expand the geographic scope of the WSF was behind the move to Mumbai, and it was a spectacular success. In 2002, according to the chief Indian organizer, not 200 people in India had even heard of the WSF. In 2004, hundreds of organizations, and more than 100,000 Indians alone attended it, coming from every conceivable social group - at least 30,000 dalits (untouchables), adivasi (tribal peoples), and women everywhere. Furthermore, against all of previous Indian political culture, they represented a wide range of political views, working together. The WSF will return to Porto Alegre in 2005 and is planning to go to Africa in 2006.
./english/478.txt:1:What is the Point of Porto Alegre?
./english/500.txt:24:When the WSF was first launched in 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, its activities were largely shaped by the founding WSF organising committee, made up of a string of Brazilian organisations. The event was also given impetus by a range of progressive European NGOs.
./english/500.txt:26:By the third WSF in Porto Alegre, the international council of the WSF, which had grown to more than 100 organisations, planned most of the activities. The 2004 edition was held in Mumbai in India while next year's event will be staged in Nairobi, Kenya.
./english/502.txt:8:Their authors are connected to the history of the process that started in Porto Alegre. Ignacio Ramonet created the famous sentence: "Another world is possible"; François Polet is assistant to François Houtart, an important figure on the WSF International Council. The central arguments of both texts is very similar and can be summarised into three essential ideas: a) By unfolding itself, every year, in the form of thousands of activities and hundreds of ideas without hierarchy among themselves, the WSF keeps its participants fragmented and reduces itself to a folkloric parade of ideas and good intentions; b) The way to avoid this huge project losing itself is to make the Forum a great "general assembly of mankind", where actions that have priority are chosen to be adopted by all participants; c) The first step was taken in Porto Alegre, on January 2005, at the Plaza São Raphael Hotel, when nineteen intellectuals announced a manifesto that put forward twelve ideas that alterglobalisation should defend so that it would no longer be "morally victorious but without being effective". And in particular, at the end of his text Ignacio Ramonet suggests that it is only through government actions such as those being taken by Hugo Chavez that it is possible to avoid falling victim to neoliberalism.
./english/510.txt:8:At the close of the first World Social Forum in January 2001, its organizers circulated a memo in which they proposed to convene World Social Forums every year, at the same date as the Davos Economic Forum. In 2002, a new WSF was held in Porto Alegre, and the holding of other Forums in various places of the world was encouraged. It had become clear that, along with the success of the first edition of the Forum (two persons expected, 20,000 participants!), the process of World Forums had to be continued as an alternative to the one-sided thinking (pensée unique) of the World Economic Forum.
./english/510.txt:14:- a forum governed by rules that renew the traditional practices of collective action. These are the founding rules of the "Porto Alegre generation," appropriate for an era of networks and of recognition of diversity and cross-cutting issues: openness; acceptance of diversity as a value; horizontality in relations between participants; non-directivity and therefore absence of spokesperson, leader, or final declaration. Collected in a Charter of Principles, these choices have now become the fundamental reference for organizing Social Forums.
./english/512.txt:43:It is quite true that as the World Social Forum was being organized, in the early days, certain ambiguities hung over these issues. To this day there are participants who rely on those ambiguities to reinforce their arguments in favour of governments and parties being present and participating directly as such in the Forums. This is because most of the organizers of the early WSFs were members of the PT, and because they took place in a town – Porto Alegre – where the state and municipal governments were held by that party. The doubts grew with the presence of Brazil’s newly elected President, Lula, at a major public rally at the 2003 Forum.
./english/512.txt:65:A the Bamako Forum, there was an attempt to do something similar to the “Manifesto” launched at Porto Alegre in 2005 by 19 leading figures, in an endeavour to bring all the proposals and struggles that emerge at the Forums together around certain main themes. This time, the effort was directed to relaunching the coalition of the “non-aligned” countries of the 1955 Bandung Conference, now that it is commemorating its fiftieth anniversary. An international seminar, held the day before the Bamako Fórum began, featuring leading figures from intellectual circles and the anti-imperialist struggle, sought to present itself as an opening ceremony of the Forum – as a prior orientation for the discussions that would be held there.
./english/519.txt:26:The four WSF editions in Porto Alegre and the Mumbai edition were marked by local political con-ditions, and this was not different in Bamako and Caracas events, whose profiles have reflected each region’s left wing protagonists’ actions. But these particularities were intensified by the global movement’s general situation, which did not provide to local experiences the same counterbalance, as it did before.
./english/519.txt:32:The Caracas Forum was also influenced by the Evo Morales’ electoral victory in Bolivia, which is a result of the indigenous peoples’ long insurrection in that country – and the indigenous issue was a very strong point in the event. Chavez tried to capitalize the Forum taking place in Venezuela – as Lula had done in Porto Alegre, in that case to try to justify the idea of not having an alternative to neo liberalism – strengthening his presence on the continental scene as well as straiten Caracas’ re-lationship with movements from the region. This transformed the way social movements, political parties and government relate to each other in terms of an important matter regarding the Forum and has given a new value to the debate on the state-power issue.
./english/519.txt:38:Since the Forum has been constituted, an expressive sector within the International Council defends that the WSF, or at least the IC, should adopt resolutions which, supported by the legitimacy of the WSF process, would point directions for the movement. On this matter, it has been always dis-cussed that the “brand” WSF should be used to sign under a platform or position concerning a cer-tain theme (remember, for instance, the discussion during an IC meeting that preceded Porto Alegre 2003, whic discussed if this body should adopt a position against the Iraq invasion, a consensus among the participants).
./english/519.txt:57:At the Mumbai Forum, during a panel about the WSF’s future, Sohi Jeon already warned us about the fundamental implications of this: the Forum process must incorporate the big protagonists from popular struggles in regional, national and local levels, which is the only way for us to keep grow-ing and strengthening, which is also the only way of condensing sets of networks that compose the global movement and the WSF process. Our concern regarding this topic was reflected in the last Porto Alegre Forum, in which we adopted the methodology of stimulating the convergence of themes and struggles, increasing initiatives of dialogues and meetings among different actors.
./english/519.txt:59:This year’s polycentric process surely enables an enlargement in the WSF’s horizontal relation with some regional and national processes – in Bamako and Caracas this was clear and we hope that the same occurs in other stages of the process (Karachi, Athens, Bangkok, and for us in Brazil, Recife). We also have to evaluate the methodology’s efficiency within these events and verify if the worries that have guided us in Porto Alegre 2005 are being properly contemplated. But for the 7th WSF in Nairobi, Kenya, in January 2007, we must fundamentally build a participative process for the event‘s preparation, a methodology and a communication process that enables global connections of the processes, which at this moment are relatively dispersed – and this in a bigger qualitative scale than has ever been done in any WSF process’ events. But always keeping in mind that the Forum does not substitute social movements nor any kind of struggle, on the contrary, it is an instrument to assist them.
./english/519.txt:61:Another discussed issue in the WSF since its creation is the relation-ship between the Forum and governments and parties. We went on these problems in Porto Alegre in 2002 when PT and the French social-democracy tried to emphasize their presence in the Forum aiming the electoral dispute and again in 2003 when Lula went to the Gigantinho to justify his trip to Davos the following day. In 2005 the WSF watched Lula’s efforts again trying to make the PT government the best ever and Chavez presenting himself as the most authentic left leadership in the continent. In Mumbai the dispute engaged by an Asian communism sector led to the Mumbai Resis-tance parallel realization. In the European Social Forum process each event had to deal with prob-lems in the relationship with the left parties in the countries that were holding the events — wid-ened in the London edition because of the relationship with the London Authority. We did not build the WSF process separated from the party and government disputes but we have always tried to weaken the impact of these disputes preserving the process authonomy in a way that it would not link the process with any specific project, no matter how worthy it is.
./english/519.txt:83:But the WSF also has a pendent agenda — imposed by the adverse conjuncture and by the correla-tion of forces that became evident after the Iraq invasion — which Porto Alegre 2005 could not an-swer and the VI WSF will not answer for its policentric characteristic: How will the global move-ment retake the initiative, now that Bush’s policies show signs of fragility and that neo liberalism keeps loosing legitimacy? Should we prepare Nairobi 2007 with this question in mind, and put it in the center of its methodology?
./english/519.txt:87:- making the event’s methodology and more suitable to the convergence of struggles, cam-paigns and mobilizations, deepening the experiences from Porto Alegre 2005;
./english/522.txt:6:Europe solidaire sans frontières (ESSF) participated in the World Social Forum in Karachi. The report which follows is not descriptive (number of seminars and so on.), but seeks to share some elements of analysis on this new experience and its significance - taking account of the fact that this was the author’s first visit to Pakistan. The report is, then, “foreign” and does not claim to be based on a real knowledge of the country. It is on the other hand informed by the comparative experience of the preceding forums in Porto Alegre, Europe and India. A more detailed report will be drawn up later.
./english/522.txt:69:The poor are, in society, invisible. On the contrary, the forums should ensure the visibility of the most exploited and oppressed. Since the very beginning in Porto Alegre this has not been self-evident. The gap can be large, inside the forum, between the “street” and the platforms. Since 2001, some progress has been accomplished, but the process is not one-way - there are also regressions.
./english/527.txt:1:The World Social Forum of Porto Alegre: what future?
./english/527.txt:4:2006 is a very special year. The World Social Forum of Porto Alegre turned ‘polycentric’. It means there are three world meetings in three different places: Bamako (Mali) in Africa, Caracas (Venezuela) in Latin America and Karachi (Pakistan) in Asia. A fourth polycentric Forum will take place in Bangkok in October 2006.
./english/527.txt:6:This solution was found in order to end the squabbling about questions on where to meet and how often to meet. Many Brazilians are very keen on Porto Alegre. Mumbai in India in 2004 was a very positive experience and no one knows whether Africa has the logistical and organisational possibilities for such a huge gathering. Nevertheless, the WSF of 2007 will take place in Nairobi, Kenya and in 2008 Brazil is, most probably, once again the place to be.
./english/527.txt:14:The World Social Fora clearly are a formula for success. More than one hundred thousand participants in 2005 in Porto Alegre. Twenty to thirty thousand participants in Bamako in 2006. More than sixty thousand participants in Caracas. In Karachi, the forum had to be postponed because of the earth quake end of 2005. There clearly is a growing demand of such meetings, especially by young people who want more debates and more campaigns. The media however, do not follow. They are more interested in colourful festivals and in violence. They are the ones who are saying and writing that the fora have no future. In Caracas, very little media attention was given to the WSF, and most were dismissing this meeting in ‘Chavez country’.
./english/527.txt:42:Again, many contradictions have to be outlined. The Brazilian president Lula surely was as present in Porto Alegre as Chavez was in Caracas. One could even argue that the two first WSF have contributed to have him elected. And why is money from Chavez a problem, when no questions have been put on funding by Petrobras (Brazilian petroleum corporation) and money has been accepted from the Ford Foundation? Where should the autonomous civil society find the millions of Dollars that the organisation of a world event inevitably costs?
./english/527.txt:68:Of course, movements or groups of movements are free to propose their programmes and alternatives. A group of ‘social movements’ has been doing just that since a couple of years, after each WSF. It is also what 18 men and one woman have done last year in Porto Alegre. They published a ‘Consensus of Porto Alegre’, a short text of two pages and 12 proposals that was supposed to meet the agreement of most participants. Nevertheless, resistance was huge, because it was interpreted as an attempt to force the WSF into a direction it has always refused.
./english/527.txt:76:The authors of the ‘Appeal of Bamako’ are also being blamed for not understanding the dynamics of the forum. They underestimate the importance of democratic processes. Last year’s text, the ‘consensus of Porto Alegre’ certainly was no consensus, but it was a clear and short document. Why has no one tried to organise a debate around it? This could have led to a new document in 2006. Now, movements are asked to sign the ‘Appeal of Bamako’, without any possibility of participation in the drafting of the text and without any possibility to amend it. This clearly is an old-fashioned top-down approach that is difficult to accept. Moreover, in Caracas the text was presented in a seminar by seven gentlemen – not one single woman – and again without any possibility for the audience to discuss it. The WSF deserves better than this hierarchical way of doing.
./english/527.txt:94:Thirdly, the WSF should organise debates on the real relevant issues for ‘another world’. Most seminars in Caracas or Porto Alegre do not directly touch these issues. I think of ecologically sustainable development, pluralism and diversity, global democracy, social justice, global public goods, global taxes, etc. If there are no movements to propose activities on these issues, the WSF can co-manage them. Some topics could even be prepared during the year with a call for written contributions or electronic debates. In that way, the WSF could be an opportunity to present and check the results. It could lead directly to more practical proposals.
./english/534.txt:8:After meeting four of the last five years in Porto Alegre, Brazil, the forum moved this year to a new "polycentric" model of meetings in Mali, Venezuela, and Pakistan. The meetings originally were planned to be held simultaneously, but finally the Mali and Venezuela forums were held sequentially with the one in Pakistan postponed until March.
./english/534.txt:14:The Caracas forum was much more monolingual than previous gatherings. In Porto Alegre, the official languages were the four main colonial languages of the Americas (Portuguese, Spanish, English and French), and anyone who was merely bi-lingual was at a distinct disadvantage. In Caracas, the lingua franca was Spanish; most people from Venezuela and neighbouring Andean countries speak only that language, and expected conversations to be in Spanish. Furthermore, a growing United States participation also introduced a sizeable mono-lingual English audience who increasingly felt alienated in the Spanish environment.
./english/534.txt:26:The one exception, however, was Chavez's personal presence at the forum. As in 2005 in Porto Alegre, Chavez headlined the largest event, although this time, as leader of the host government, WSF regulations permitted and sanctioned his presence. His speech reflected the consolidation and radicalization of the Bolivarian Revolution. Continuing his religious language, Chavez declared that "we are realizing the utopian dream that Christ did not see during his life." He proclaimed that "this century we will bury United States imperialism." Capitalism is destroying the planet, which leaves only two alternatives: socialism or death.
./english/534.txt:36:Although an expression of civil society, the forum could not succeed without external support. While the forum also received state and municipal funding in Porto Alegre, due to the polarizing nature of the Chavez government this collaboration became even more overtly apparent and controversial in Caracas. Some argued that the forum should return to its original vision of providing non-governmental alternatives, while others maintained that governments are not inherently good, nor evil, but value neutral, and that Chavez demonstrates how state structures can be used to advance goals of social justice. Who should be responsible for organising and administering an enormous event continues to be a pressing issue.
./english/535.txt:20:The organizers of the WSF provided some statistical information from last year’s forum in Porto Alegre to help us better understand who participates in the forum and why. They found that 49.8% of the people at the WSF said the reason they attended was for the exchange of experience among the participants. 47.9% attended because they wanted to contribute towards a fairer society. 42.4% came for the democratic debate of ideas and 20.6% came to contribute towards the formulation of alternative proposals to the neoliberal model.
./english/535.txt:24:It is interesting that 10.2% of the participants at the 2005 WSF in Porto Alegre disagree, when asked if they thought the process of globalization means the concentration of wealth makes the rich richer and the poor poorer. 15.4% agreed that globalization means more opportunity for all, rich and poor.
./english/544.txt:10:But this aspect aside, did the WSF achieve its goals? The answer to this question depends on what its goals are perceived to be. When the first WSF was held in Porto Alegre (Brazil) in 2001 it adopted as its logo the slogan “Another world is possible”. The organisation of the WSF, its goals and its working have found many critics. But the underlying idea of striving for an alternative to the neoliberal policies of the market-driven capitalism of the post-Cold War world has never been disputed. The extreme left has attacked it for not going far enough. The extreme right has tried to coopt it to dilute its goals.
./english/548.txt:6:Every year at the end of January, the world’s corporate and government elite gather under tight police security in the Swiss resort town of Davos for the World Economic Forum (WEF) to plot the future of corporate-led globalization. Five years ago, community organizers, trade unionists, young people, academics, and others began to meet in Porto Alegre, Brazil to rethink and recreate globalization so that it would benefit people.
./english/548.txt:8:From these humble beginnings, this alternative annual meeting called the World Social Forum (WSF) has grown into the world’s largest meeting of civil society. Stretching for several kilometers along the open spaces of Porto Alegre’s Guaiba riverfront, from January 26-31 of this year 155,000 participants from 135 countries joined together in 2500 activities in 11 Thematic Terrains under the southern hemisphere’s summer sun.
./english/549.txt:43:Further reforms, as in reforming the existing framework - or transformations, as in setting up something new - would then have to be prioritised following careful analysis on the state of our world. Not surprisingly, during the latest World Social Forum meeting in Porto Alegre in January 2005, 19 members of the International Council of the World Social Forum launched a 'Porto Alegre Manifesto'. The manifesto 'calls for agreement among WSF participants on a clear set of goals for world economic reform', much in line with the reforms and transformations listed above. The 'Porto Alegre Manifesto' was much criticized for the procedures according to which it was presented; all initial signatories are male, there is not much representation from younger of women's groups etc. But interestingly, as I gather, the content has not been much focus of the debate. Have you heard, or perhaps presented yourselves, comments regarding the substance of the Manifesto?
./english/569.txt:5:1. The Fifth World Social Forum, which met in Porto Alegre, Brazil, between 26 and 31 January 2005, demonstrated once again the enormous strength of the global movement that became visible in the struggles of Chiapas, Seattle, and Genoa. 200,000 at the opening demonstration, 155,000 participants involved in 2,500 activities, a wealth of cultural events, the concluding Assembly of the Social Movements that took up the call for a global day of protest against the occupation of Iraq on 19 March - all of these are things to celebrate.
./english/569.txt:9:2. Let's start with the most obvious thing. The famous 'Porto Alegre Charter' - the Charter of Principles of the World Social Forum - is much invoked in controversies within the movement because it bans 'party representations' from participating and forbids social forums to take decisions. The prominence of the parties of the radical left at the European Social Forums in Florence and London was strongly criticized for violating the Charter.
./english/569.txt:13:Two issues are involved here. One is the question of principle. In our view it was a mistake to impose a ban on parties, since political organizations are inextricably intermingled with social movements and articulate different strategies and visions that are a legitimate contribution to the debates that take place in the social forums. In fact, the Porto Alegre Charter has always been circumvented, but the Lula rally has made the resulting hypocrisy absolutely flagrant. It would surely be more honest to amend or scrap this tattered ban. 1
./english/569.txt:21:Lula's intervention in Porto Alegre was part of this project to rebuild support for social-liberal governments by repackaging neo-liberalism as the way to help the world's poor. Responding to this Orwellian enterprise by building mass protests demanding a profound global redistribution of resources, starting with the cancellation of all Third World debt, is becoming a major challenge for our movement, particularly in the lead-up to the Gleneagles summit.
./english/569.txt:25:This had the great advantage, compared to previous forums at Porto Alegre, of physical contiguity (although the walk from one end to the other, particularly in the summer heat of a city in the grips of a drought, was pretty arduous!). But this gain was undercut by the division of the site into 11 distinct 'Thematic Terrains', each devoted to their own political theme: Thus Space A was devoted to Autonomous Thought, B to Defending Diversity, Plurality, and Identities, C to Art and Creation, and so on. The effect was tremendously to fragment the Forum. If you were interested in a particular subject - say, culture or war or human rights - you could easily spend the entire four days in one relatively small area without coming into contact with people interested in different subjects.
./english/569.txt:27:This is, in our view, a potentially disastrous development. One of the great beauties of our movement - and of the forums that have emerged from and helped to sustain it - is the way in which people from all sorts of backgrounds and with the most diverse preoccupations come and mix together, participating in a process of mutual contamination in which we learn and gain confidence from one another. This dynamic was greatly weakened by the thematic fragmentation and vast size of the WSF site in Porto Alegre this year - all the more so because there were no generalizing events to compare with the magical opening ceremony at Mumbai, when 100,000 sat listening to speakers like Arundhati Roy, Chico Whitaker, and Jeremy Corbyn against the velvet backdrop of an Indian night. We know from the experience of the European Social Forum in London that putting together collectively organized plenaries is painstaking work. But it is work that helps to hammer out priorities for the movement, and to give the forum focus and direction.
./english/569.txt:31:4, It would be a mistake to make too much of these weaknesses. The 5th WSF was the occasion for many successes. The Anti-War Assembly, for example, marked a real step forward in cooperation among activists from different parts of the world. An alliance of environmental groups managed to launch a much needed week of action against climate change from Porto Alegre. No doubt other thematic assemblies and networks were able to take initiatives, though the general fragmentation makes it hard to tell. The final Assembly of the Social Movements, though regrettably not publicized in the WSF Programme, did provide a real sense of diverse activists converging together on a common agenda of struggles. And there were, as far as we know, some good debates.
./english/569.txt:35:But the purpose of drawing a balance sheet is surely to offer some guidance for the future. The WSF in India a year ago set a benchmark that others - the organizers of the last ESF in London, as well as of the latest Porto Alegre Forum - have striven to match. For all its strengths, however, the latest WSF doesn't offer a comparable model. In some respects, indeed - in particular the thematic fragmentation that we have described, its example is positively to be avoided.
./english/571.txt:1:The Post-Porto Alegre World Social Forum: An Open Space or a Movement of Movements?
./english/571.txt:11:Movement can emerge, occur or take place only in space. The most interesting attempt to create a global space for critical social movements is the World Social Forum (WSF), organized since 2001 annually in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and in January 2004 in Mumbai, India (2). In the coming years, the main events of the forum will take place in a decentralized form (2006) and in Africa (2007), which will imply new challenges for the process, until now associated strongly with the city of Porto Alegre. Even though the event has in the beginning been organised simultaneously with – and also as a protest against – the World Economic Forum (WEF), in each subsequent gathering there have been fewer attempts to interact with the WEF. The process has caused a considerable amount of enthusiasm, as well as various sceptical comments on its possibilities to facilitate social transformations.
./english/571.txt:17:Some of the main challenges concern Article 6 of the Charter, even if it is seldom explicitly mentioned in the debates. According to the Article, “the meetings of the WSF do not deliberate on behalf of the WSF as a body… The participants in the Forum shall not be called on to take decisions as a body”. In practice, this has meant that the WSF as a body never made a declaration, for example, against the war in Iraq. According to many of its “founding fathers”, such as Chico Whitaker, making a declaration against the war would have been a violation of the Charter of Principles (4). The issue was hotly debated in meetings of the WSF International Council, especially in January 2003 in Porto Alegre, but the decision was not to issue any declaration. The question was not about whether anyone present would not have been opposed to the war, it was about the concept of space that the WSF is supposed to be.
./english/571.txt:21:The WSF 2004 in Mumbai, India, made the social forum process more truly world-wide (5). In fact, Mumbai meant opening up the space of the forum in two distinct ways. Firstly, since most participants tend to come from the region surrounding the venue, the flavour of Mumbai was rather different from Porto Alegre. In the previous three forums, Latin Americans and Europeans dominated the scene, and therefore the move to India was a symbolic opening towards the world as whole. Secondly, this time a significant portion of the participants were dalits, i.e. the casteless people of India, and other marginalized groups. Academic intellectuals and NGOs were in minority, with the exception of the workshops, panels and roundtables in English (simultaneous interpretation facilities were not available to the same extent as in Porto Alegre).
./english/571.txt:23:In 2005, the WSF returned to Porto Alegre. When the International Council of the WSF in January 2003 decided to hold the WSF 2004 in Mumbai, it simultaneously decided that the WSF 2005 would be back in Porto Alegre. In fact, it would probably have been impossible to reach a consensus on India if there had not existed the promise of returning to Brazil. Those who feared that organizing the Forum in India could turn out to be a total failure were thus bought off with the idea that even if Mumbai fails, it would be back to the good old Porto Alegre in the following year. Moving the annual WSF event to another continent included difficult questions about the continuity of the process, including its institutional memory, which the Brazilian Organizing Committee had provided.
./english/571.txt:31:Even if these declarations do not officially claim to represent the WSF as a whole, Chico Whitaker, one of the key initiators of the WSF process, and others have been highly critical of them. Whitaker fears that the media may consider them as semi-official conclusions. This can then lead to political disputes about whose concerns get to be expressed in the declarations. In the 2005 WSF in Porto Alegre, a “manifesto” signed by 19 intellectuals that included Ignacio Ramonet, Immanuel Wallerstein, Samir Amin, Bernard Cassen and (mostly) other “non-young” males, caused similar concerns (6).
./english/571.txt:39:It was not possible to conclude in the Passignano meeting anything definitive on the periodicity of the main WSF events. The WSF International Council decided that the main annual WSF of 2007 will take place somewhere in Africa and it had already earlier been decided that in 2005 the event would return to Porto Alegre. It was, however, not possible to reach consensus on what should be done in 2006. This issue was finally settled in the International Council meeting in January 2005, when it was decided that the WSF 2006 will be held in a decentralized format. One of the decentralized events was fixed by the IC hemispheric council of the Americas to be held in Venezuela. Even if the decision on Venezuela was reached through an apparent consensus, some doubts have been voiced about the limits to the WSF “autonomy” in the context where the government of Hugo Chavez, who also participated in the WSF 2005 in Porto Alegre, has given statements that point to a heavy government involvement in the event.
./english/571.txt:47:There has been concern from the very beginning of the WSF process about the involvement of the Workers’ Party of Brazil. Even if the party has not formed part of the organizing committee or other official organs of the WSF, its presence has been visible in many ways (10). After the party won the federal election of 2002, the Lula government’s economic policies have alienated many of its original supporters. In the WSF 2005, Lula received plenty of criticism both because of his economic policies based on concessions to the IMF, and thereby on neoliberalism, as well as for his decision to travel to the World Economic Forum of Davos directly from Porto Alegre. Lula has tried to take some international steps to counter this criticism. The so-called Lula-Chirac Initiative by the Presidents of Brazil and France, joined also by the Presidents of Chile and Spain, includes proposals for global taxes and other measures in the global fight against poverty. The Report of the Technical Group on Innovative Financing Mechanisms “Action against Hunger and Poverty” (11), and the related summit in New York at the end of September 2004, at the time of the General Assembly meeting, appear to many as the biggest step thus far towards the adoption of new global mechanisms of finance. Perhaps due to the rather neoliberal framing of these proposals, they have not caused a lot of interest at the WSF.
./english/571.txt:71:The World Social Forum is a crucial process of rethinking politics and political possibilities to create “another world”. With Mumbai the WSF process itself became more global and less tied to one particular locality, the city of Porto Alegre in Southern Brazil. Gradually and hesitantly, the structures and procedures of the WSF are becoming more clearly defined and, possibly, democratic. While the WSF acknowledges that it is actually making at least some decisions on behalf of all the participants, it continues, first and foremost, to provide spaces for NGOs and movements.
./english/571.txt:75:The WSF V, back in Porto Alegre in January 2005 and bigger than ever before, has also received an overwhelming amount of positive commentaries, especially by people who were already articulated within the networks that constitute the “planet of Porto Alegre”. For casual observers, the event may have seemed somewhat chaotic. For those more involved in the process it was a good (even if limited) example of the methodology that emphasized constructing processes. The particular WSF events are excellent opportunities to meet and debate, but the emphasis is increasingly in the intellectual and political activities that continue all year round.
./english/571.txt:79:There is also an increased emphasis on applying principles of ecological sustainability and participatory economics into the WSF event itself, even if the participants of the first International Council meeting of 2005 in Porto Alegre had to face a Nestlé coffee machine as their only provider of refreshments. The Porto Alegre event was no longer organized in the lavish Catholic University of Porto Alegre, but in tents constructed through methods that were supposed to reflect the ideals of the WSF Charter of Principles (even if many of the tents were finally rented from private corporations).
./english/571.txt:81:With all the limitations, these changes tell us that there exists a learning process in the World Social Forum and that it is in movement, even if not a movement of a traditional kind. After the WSF V, during the first days of February 2005, there was a melancholic mood in Porto Alegre where activists knew that the forum is unlikely to return to their city during the coming years. In the International Council meeting of January 2005, Roberto Savio from Inter Press Service made a proposal that the WSF should return to Porto Alegre in 2008, but this proposal did not receive much support. The inevitable geographical movements of the WSF events will, however, be important only if they are accompanied with a movement that makes the WSF an increasingly relevant space for radically democratic changes of the world.
./english/571.txt:95:Cassen, Bernard (2003) Tout a commencé a Porto Alegre. Mille forum sociaux! Paris: Mille et une nuits.
./english/571.txt:107:Teivainen, Teivo (2002) ‘World Social Forum and Global Democratization: Learning from Porto Alegre’, Third World Quarterly Vol. 23, No. 4, pp. 621-632.
./english/571.txt:114:Valenzuela, Pep (2002), ‘Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, 31 de enero a 5 de febrero de 2002’, in Manuel Monereo, Miguel Riera and Pep Valenzuela (eds.) Foro Social Mundial/ Porto Alegre 2002. Hacia el partido de oposición. España: El Viejo Topo, pp. 61-73.
./english/574.txt:4:With 155, 000 participants from 135 different countries, the fifth World Social Forum held in a specially constructed site in Porto Alegre’s Marinha Park was bigger than ever, and with a wider geographic spread. Yet the future of the WSF was on trial. Was it becoming its caricature: a kind of political , Hugo Chavez pulling the crowds instead of Mick Jagger?
./english/576.txt:1:The Last Porto Alegre
./english/576.txt:4:It's not Paris or Tokyo, Beijing or New York. Nor is it São Paulo or Rio de Janeiro. Enthusiastic residents of Porto Alegre, Brazil will tell you that their modest city of 1.5 million people in the country's deep South is "the last bastion of socialism and rock 'n' roll." Indeed, stalls covered with black Iron Maiden t-shirts stand in the public markets, and the municipality long served as a stronghold of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), the Brazilian Workers Party. But today Porto Alegre is best known around the globe, especially among those inclined to hold a critical opinion of capitalism, corporate power, and U.S. military aggression, as the original home of the World Social Forum.
./english/576.txt:8:If this year's was not the first World Social Forum, however, there are indications that it will be Porto Alegre's last, at least for the foreseeable future. The famous local progressivism that brought the Forum to Porto Alegre was called into question when an anti-PT mayor, José Fogaça, won election last fall. Recognizing the Forum's multitudes as a major economic boon for the city, Mr. Fogaça toned down his past criticism of the summit as an "ideological Disneyland." Still, other cities are clamoring for their turn to host the event. (While four out of five Forums have been held in Porto Alegre, the 2004 event took place in Mumbai, India). Moreover, these turns are slated to grow more scarce. The unified global gathering is becoming bi-annual; next year organizers will focus on holding forums at the regional level.
./english/576.txt:10:The question of Porto Alegre, then, and of the Forum's fifth anniversary, is what has become of the event that was once synonymous with the city's name? And what is the World Social Forum, alternately regarded as a laboratory of progressive vision and a rapidly ossifying political Woodstock, building toward?
./english/576.txt:14:"I am a political militant," said Brazilian President Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva, clad in a white jacket, as he addressed a stadium full of people during the first day of workshops. "I belong here." Downplaying the roaring PT loyalists, the press would overstate the impact of a small but energetic section of protesters who chastised Lula for continuing to pay Brazil's foreign debt and for failing to buck the economic policies prescribed by the IMF. It is nevertheless true that the President, a former metalworker and union leader who many viewed as a leftist icon when he took office two years ago, had the record of his administration critically scrutinized by a variety of panels throughout the week. As in the past, Lula also visited Davos this year. He went, he said, on a mission to confront wealthy leaders with the same demand of eradicating poverty that he championed in Porto Alegre and to elaborate a "new geography" of politics in which Southern countries would not submit to being considered inferior.
./english/576.txt:17:Even as the two presidents book-ended the Forum, dozens of other speakers led panels taking place simultaneously in tents and warehouse spaces spread over a nearly three mile expanse along the banks of Porto Alegre's Guaiba River. In past years, the Forum was held at the city's Catholic University and large morning plenaries brought together participants to hear featured speakers. This year, all of the events took the form of "self-organized" workshop sessions. Although hailed as a victory for democratic planning, this diminished the sense of common purpose at the summit. It enhanced the feeling that there were many forums, large and small, going on at once.
./english/576.txt:19:"Three years ago everyone was talking about Plan Colombia; two years ago it was Iraq," a friend who has participated in several Porto Alegres said to me. For this year, she identified the right to clean, public water as the Forum's emergent issue. But, with a several-hundred page program listing panels on the challenges of global poverty, trade, war, and debt, as well as on Open Source software, the trafficking of women and girls, and the impact of culture on social change, any attempt to identify a single focus would necessarily be arbitrary.
./english/576.txt:29:"Maybe if I were younger," a veteran activist commented to me, "I could deal with the heat." The late-January summer in Porto Alegre was unrelenting. Brazilians wandering the sweltering expanse of tented workshop areas sported bare chests, Bermuda shorts, and skirts, treating the Forum like a beach. For those less acclimated, a new morning might bring a fresh willingness to believe that the seeds of a new society were being planted in the manifold meetings of the day. But an afternoon of solar radiation had a way of intensifying one's ambivalence about whether it was all worthwhile.
./english/576.txt:38:The ethos of the Forum would seem to favor Galeano's view. The event's charter indicates that it is not a deliberative body; it does not take official positions on behalf of the assembly. Yet Saramago's defense of short-term demands received a standing ovation. And at the end of the week, a group of nineteen high-profile participants, including both of the writers, released a statement dubbed "The Porto Alegre Manifesto." Among its planks, the twelve-point platform called for cancellation of debts, a Tobin tax on international financial transfers, local control of the food supply, and the democratization of international financial institutions. "We're confident that the great majority of the people of the Forum will agree with this proposal," Ignacio Ramonet, editor of Le Monde Diplomatique, told reporters.
./english/576.txt:57:When Linda Sippio, a leader at the Miami Workers Center, visited a once-idle farm near Porto Alegre that had been taken over by the Brazilian Landless Workers' Movement (MST), she saw links to her own people's struggle to hold ground in their rapidly gentrifying Florida neighborhoods. "We're meeting Brazilian groups that are organizing like we are, and we're showing our support," she said. "That helps us both build power."
./english/576.txt:74:The Forum needs to remain unexpected. It is wise for it to move to a bi-annual schedule; the annual event was growing too routine, too familiar. And it was a mistake to return to Porto Alegre. The Forum gained much in its trip to Mumbai, and its forward momentum requires that it continue incorporating greater representation from new parts of the world. The 2007 Forum, which will be held in Africa, holds much promise for this reason.
./english/576.txt:76:The need to move on is not an altogether happy truth. On the last evening of the Forum, I walked along the Guaiba feeling vaguely disappointed by the lecturing I had seen that day. But then I felt a breeze off the river and looked around at the crowds meandering in the dusk. A group in union shirts sat on curb, chatting with vendors selling grilled meat; a capoeira troop sparred on the street; anti-Bush satirists leafleted for their web site; a circle of people outside an indigenous rights tent performed a dance. At that moment, I felt sad to see it all go. Porto Alegre, no doubt, will be sad for it too.
./english/577.txt:4:As we walked through the venue for the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre at the banks of the Guaiba river, on January 23, it all seemed so familiar. The WSF was back in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where it had begun in 2001 and had gained strength in 2002 and 2003, after the interlude in Mumbai in 2004. But Porto Alegre 2005 could well have been Mumbai 2004. The same surging crowds – over 100,000 in number, the same cacophony of myriad voices, the same beating of drums, the same confusion, and the same determination on the faces of people who had come to celebrate protest and resistance. And the same determination with which people debated in over 2000 events, spread over four days, and organised in the sprawling venue of makeshift tents over about 4 kms of a green verge skirting the river.
./english/577.txt:10:The abiding memory that everybody who was in Porto Alegre brought back was a sense of solidarity, the feeling that “we are not alone”. A feeling that the gross injustice that we face across the globe is being confronted by pockets of resistance all over the world. Pockets of resistance that are also starting to link up, to strategise together, to form a united surge of resistance. We saw all this happening in Mumbai, and those who were at Porto Alegre came back with the confidence that the movement to “globalise resistance” is alive and growing, and that “Another World” is indeed possible.
./english/577.txt:22:This diversity in opinion and approach is both a strength of the Forum, as well as its principal weakness. The Forum derives strength from this diversity as it provides the opportunity for a very large number of movements and organisations to come together, each feeling that their views have a place in the open space of the Forum. At the same time the diverse trends and opinions leads, often, to a sense of frustration that the Forum is not able to hammer together a consensus regarding both a strategic understanding and tactics to be applied. This has led to a tendency to attempt to “force” the Forum to take unified positions. An example of this was the declaration of a “Porto Alegre” consensus by a few prominent individuals this time at the WSF. While the contents of the “consensus” suggested was fairly bland and not objectionable, what was problematic was the fact that this went against the grain of the way the WSF as an “open space” functions.
./english/577.txt:28:GOOD BYE PORTO ALEGRE?
./english/577.txt:32:The International Council decided in its meeting just before the Forum in Porto Alegre that in 2006 there would not be a single Forum, but attempt would be to organise dispersed Forums in different continents. In 2007 the Forum travels to Africa, the venue for which is being discussed within the African Social Forum process. Mumbai had shown that the WSF can be made to be a success in a setting vastly different from Porto Alegre, and the WSF is now poised to sprout wings and fly to different corners of the globe.
./english/577.txt:34:As we prepared to leave Porto Alegre, the question on the lips of everybody who lives in the city was: is this the last Forum in Porto Alegre? We do not know the answer today. But everyone who has been in Porto Alegre for the Forum, this year or in earlier years, will hope that maybe the Forum will come back again one day to this city which embraced us all with such love and affection. Good bye to Porto Alegre for ever? Perhaps the WSF is not ready for that yet!
./english/578.txt:14:The African Social Forum's founding principles recognise the primacy of social movements over non-government organisations in the struggle against neoliberalism. NGOs, research institutes, individuals and academics are important but they must play a supportive role. It is the masses themselves who possess the power to liberate themselves — hence the importance of social movements and other mass organisations such as trade unions, grassroots women’s and youth groups, informal traders' associations and homeless people's federations. But it seems that the African delegations to the WSF still largely consist of NGO types. This was clearly the case in the meetings of the ASF council held in Porto Alegre during the WSF 2005.
./english/579.txt:4:There is an obvious irony in the shifting of the 4th World Social Forum (held between January 16 and 21, 2004) from Porto Alegre, the city of the participatory budget fully geared to welcome the WSF, to an indifferent Mumbai, the city most starkly symbolizing the impact of neoliberalism in India. Mumbai is a rapidly de-industrialising, financial-commercial-services centre with an expanding informal sector of self-employed and unorganized labour. It has heavy vehicular and small factory pollution with over 40 percent of its 17 million population living in slums. The choice of the WSF venue – a dusty, environment-unfriendly, long disused industrial site – completed the symbolism. But the restricted area of the venue contrasted sharply with the sprawling geography of Porto Alegre’s WSF, forcing an extraordinary physical mingling of over a 100,000 participants with more than 15,000 from outside India.
./english/579.txt:6:Asia from West, South and East was well represented as also Western Europe; the rest of the world less so. This concentration when coupled with the unmatchable social and cultural diversity of India, fully represented at this WSF, created a general atmosphere of collective political solidarity and vitality that has clearly set a new standard for future WSFs.(1) By contrast, the social composition of participants at the 3rd WSF was far more middle class and youthful. If the youth camp in Porto Alegre was a considerable success, in Mumbai it was organizationally and politically a disappointment. The ironies and contrasts do not end here. Lula, unwanted at, and uninvited to, the WSF was the honoured guest of the Indian government at this year’s official Republic Day celebrations on January 26, 2004.
./english/579.txt:14:Nonetheless, after allowing for all reservations and qualifications, the end result justified the decision to hold the 4th WSF in India. Asian presence and involvement in the Social Forum project, hitherto marked by a strong Latin American and European ‘face’, has taken a leap forward. Africa and North America remain laggards. Porto Alegre last year brought together for the first time the two great global streams – the movement against neoliberalism and that against US imperialism. This confluence has been sustained and further consolidated in Mumbai. The introduction of newer themes and a stronger emphasis on some older ones also took place enhancing the awareness-raising aspect of the WSF. The Indian organizers gave some shape to the otherwise amorphous character of the ‘politics of the open space’ by holding a series of WSF-sponsored events focusing on five broad themes – imperialist globalisation; patriarchy, gender and sexuality; militarism and peace; casteism and racism, work and descent-based exclusions and discriminations; religious fanaticism, sectarian violence – themselves subdivided to include issues of ecologically sustainable development; matters of food, land and water sovereignty; media culture and knowledge; labour and the world of work; health, education and social security.
./english/579.txt:56:Rather than maintain the hectic pace of a WSF every year which drains the time and energy of too many activists away from their basic areas of implantation and concern, it would be much better after the 5th WSF in Porto Alegre next year to schedule WSFs for every second or even third year. This would allow for holding more forums at intermediate (city, provincial, national and regional) levels. The time has surely also come to take a breather and synthesise the experiences and lessons of the major local, national, continental and global forums that have so far been held.(10) The one great lacuna in the Social Forum project is the failure to extend it to North America, particularly the US. Even at the WSFs, American participation has always been disproportionately much smaller than the size and importance of the progressive sectors of American society has warranted. This insularity must be broken.
./english/579.txt:63:2. Inadequate infrastructure obviously hampered proper discussion and mass participation especially in the big conferences. This failing was linked to the otherwise laudable determination of the organisers to limit foreign funding sources and to keep overall costs low. An approximate total estimate for holding the event (excluding all other costs) would be around $2.4million or a third of what it was at Porto Alegre.
./english/580.txt:7:While formulation the programme methodology and content for the WSF in Mumbai, there were two kinds of considerations that needed to be factored in. One was that the programme should not depart radically from the structure of the WSF in Porto Alegre -- to provide continuity and also to respect the rich experiences of the hugely successful Forums held between 2001 and 2003. At the same time it should not be a carbon copy of the Porto Alegre "model" but must build in local concerns and formatting that is required by local considerations.
./english/580.txt:12:· The need to learn from past experiences at the WSF in Porto Alegre from 2001 to 2003
./english/580.txt:110:It must be noted here that some of the gap in co-ordination was covered by the Brazilian Sectt. deputing two of their senior associates to work closely in with the Programme Group in India. Their presence and help is deeply appreciated and helped in a large way to ensure a continuity and co-ordination with the WSF process in Porto Alegre.
./english/580.txt:128:· The WSF facilitate the organisation of events by groups working on specific issues. For example, the Water Forum and the Health Forum held before the WSF in Mumbai (like the Education Forum held every year in Porto Alegre), and the Anti-war Assembly, Farmers Forum (Kisan Chaupal) held during the WSF 2004. More such assemblies/ forums can be facilitated – they are not owned by the WSF but the WSF provides the infrastructure.
./english/582.txt:8:“ Planet Porto Alegre needed to step on beaten earthen floor, to breathe this dust, to fell the smell of the people” says the Cuban José Miguel Hernandez, who represents the Pan-American campaign against FTAA at the International Council of the WSF. He is in the geographical center of WSF 2004: a huge map of the facilities of Nesco Conventions Ground, the exhibition park of about one kilometer square, chosen to host the event. In front and behind him, there are two of the not many permanent constructions of this huge open field: Hall 1, the mega-auditorium for 8 thousand people, and the building that shelters the Media Center and the Organizing Committee of the event.
./english/582.txt:20:It broke out from the streets, but also from more than a thousand workshops and seminars – the so called “ self- managed activities” , that any organization registered in the WSF can propose and organize. In Porto Alegre, were carried out in the rooms of the PUC. In Mumbai, it was necessary to improvise.
./english/582.txt:24:There were 140 installations like this, and the Forum of the workshops and the seminars was as diverse, plural and colorful as those of Porto Alegre. Who walked 19th morning, along part of one of the corridors, could find debates about the increasing abortion of female embryos in India ( qualified as “ hidden femalecide”); about the international campaign against North – American bases (promoted by a 25 organizations network based in different countries); about Cordillera Peoples’ Alliance ( a Philippine woman explained, in English, that for many Asiatic communities, the concept individual, sees in each human being, a part of the community), about the new international relations system ( emerged from a refined critic about the lack of transparency and democracy in WTO, IMF and WB); about dwelling rights and livable cities ( a fiction in Mumbai), about the struggle against monarchy in Nepal ( besides the rounded faces and the hard eyes of the Nepalese, it attracted the attention the fact that they reached to understand each other, even if they were speaking so low, that many times the voices were replaced for the microphone of the room next door), about the impact of globalization among the “ untouchable” Indians ( the debates on these topics were always the most crowded and able to attract the street Forum).
./english/582.txt:41:Present at the last conference in Porto Alegre 2003, next to Noam Chomsky, the Indian writer Arundhati Roy attracted attention also in Mumbai 2004. She participated in the opening conference, next to almost ten speakers. But she stood out because of her concrete proposal. The WSF, she suggested, should identify two international firms very involved in Bush imperial war, in human rights attack or in nature destruction – and it should spark off an international boycott against them.
./english/582.txt:43:The proposal would mobilize the intellectual energies of the WSF ( because it would demand the effort of identifying and choosing the firms). Besides, it would allow to combine diversity, one of the main marks of the Forums, with common action. To participate, none organization linked to Porto Alegre planet would be forced to leave its aims, methods or strategies aside. There would be great chances of success. An international boycott concentrated in just two firms would cause real damages: Invoicing and shares´ prices fall, flight of investment. A first success could, later, stimulate other kind of common initiatives
./english/582.txt:55:A WSF International Council meeting openen, two days after Mumbai 2004 ending, the process that will lead to Porto Alegre 2005. In a year, the meeting of those who want a new world, will be again organized in Brazil. From now on, there are twelve months of work, to guarantee the flame to keep lighted.
./english/586.txt:4:The fourth edition of the World Social Forum (WSF), which took place in Mumbai (India) this past January (16-21), was a very significant step towards consolidating the WSF process. The three previous editions, having taken place in Porto Alegre (Brazil) and attracting only a modest number of African and Asian delegates, led many to believe that the WSF, even though allegedly world-wide, was indeed a Latin-American and European initiative. The success of the Mumbai WSF signifies that the spirit of Porto Alegre — the “Porto Alegre Consensus” that a more just and solidary world is possible, as is the political will to fight for it — constitutes a universal aspiration. If the WSF could be recreated in Asia, there is no reason why it couldn’t be recreated in Africa or in any other part of the world. As a matter of fact, the decision has already been made that the WSF following the one in 2005 — set for Porto Alegre since last year — will take place in Africa. Whether in 2006 or 2007 depends on whether the WSF continues to be an annual event or becomes biennial, a decision to be taken at the next meeting of the WSF International Council (IC) this coming April.
./english/586.txt:6:The Mumbai WSF succeeded in demonstrating that the spirit of Porto Alegre, while being a universal aspiration, acquires specific tonalities in different regions of the globe. Its universality is actually a product of the very reach of neoliberal globalization, which subjects every region of the world to the same economic model and its consequences: deepening of social inequalities, demoralization of the state, destruction of the environment. In this sense, the choice of Mumbai as the venue of the 2004 WSF could not have been wiser. With its population of almost 15 million, Mumbai is the living symbol of the contradictions of capitalism in our time. An important financial and technological center and the site of India’s thriving film industry — Bollywood, producing more than 200 movies a year for an increasingly global audience — Mumbai is a city whose extreme poverty easily shocks western eyes. More than half of the population live in slums (roughly two million on the streets), whereas 73 percent of the families, usually large, live in one-room tenements. The recent spread of informal economy has turned 2 percent of the population into street vendors. In India, however, the struggle against this background of inequalities gains specific nuances that have left their mark on this Forum. First, on top of economic, sexual and ethnic inequalities there are caste inequalities, which, though abolished by the Constitution, continue to be a decisive factor of discrimination. The Dalits, one of the lower castes, formerly designated as the “untouchables,” made a very strong appearance at the Forum. Of the 100.000 participants, more than 20. 000 were Dalits, who saw in the Forum a unique opportunity to denounce the discrimination that victimizes them. Second, the religion factor, which in the West tends to carry less weight in view of the secularization of power, is in the East a crucial social and political factor. Religious fundamentalism — a plague all over Asia, including India itself with the increasing politicization of Hinduism — was a major topic for debate, as was the role of spirituality in the social struggles for a better world. Third, having taken place in Asia, the Forum could not help but pay special attention to the struggle for peace, not only because it is in the West Asia, from Iraq to Afghanistan, that US’s war aggression is strongest, but also because today South Asia (India and Pakistan) is a region full of nuclear weapons. Having all this in mind, the Social Movements Assembly called a world march against the war on March 20, the first anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Fourth, at the Mumbai WSF the western conception of ecological struggles gave way to broader conceptions, so as to include the struggle for food sovereignty, land and water, as well as the preservation of biodiversity and natural resources, and the defense of forests against agro-business and lumber industry.
./english/586.txt:8:By its very success, the Mumbai WSF creates new challenges for the WSF process. I single out three main ones. The first is the Forum’s expansion. It is not just a question of geographic expansion, but the expansion of themes and perspectives as well. Meeting in Mumbai, the IC decided to encourage the organization of local, national, regional and thematic forums, in order to deepen the syntony of the “Porto Alegre Consensus” with the concrete struggles that mobilize such a diversity of social groups across the globe. Furthermore, the WSF has been collecting an impressive amount of knowledge concerning its organizations and movements, the world we live in, and the proposals that go one being presented and implemented to change it. This knowledge must be carefully evaluated to be adequately used and render the Forum more transparent to itself, thus allowing for self-learning for all the activists and movements involved in the WSF process. Finally, as knowledge accumulates and the large areas of convergence are identified, the need for developing plans of collective action increases. The issue is not so much to augment the WSF’s efficaciousness as a global actor — efficaciousness is not gauged by global as much as by local and national actions — but mainly to prepare responses to the attempts of the World Bank, IMF and the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos to coopt the agendas of the WSF and sanitize them in favor of solutions that will leave the ongoing economic disorder intact. Given its open-space nature, the WSF will not present proposals in its own name; it will rather facilitate the articulation between the networks that constitute it, in order to deepen plans of collective action and put them into practice.
./english/587.txt:6:The World Social Forum, held this year in Mumbai, India, has gained an important new facet: it has demonstrated its universal dimensions. Leaving Porto Alegre, where it all started in 2001, was a huge challenge, but the WSF continues to grow as a movement of a diverse and emergent planetary citizenry. Around 75,000 delegates were there, 20,000 of them from outside India. Another 10,000 people from Mumbai city itself joined the events and demonstrations every day. All in all, some 120,000 participants were mobilised by the idea that, despite the prevailing globalisation and its evils, "another world is possible".
./english/587.txt:10:More than 20,000 dalits took part, giving a really grassroots dimension to the World Social Forum. Indians were joined by an abundant sampling of other Asian peoples, along with Europeans, North Americans, Africans and Latin Americans. Worth mentioning is that there were more Brazilians – upward of 480 – at WSF 2004 in Mumbai than Asians at WSF 2003 in Porto Alegre. The Nesco Grounds – the premises of a bankrupt iron and steelworks on the outskirts of Mumbai adapted for the World Social Forum by improvising rooms with bamboo and partitions, ceiling and floors of rustic fabrics –became the full expression of all that, one way or another, stands outside globalisation: people in flesh and blood sharing the same ideal of human freedom and dignity over and above the market.
./english/590.txt:6:Member of the organising committee of the World Social Forum at Porto Alegre and one of its founders, the Brazilian Chico Whitaker proposes here a critical reading of the last book by Bernard Cassen (1) about the World Social Forums and indicates some perspectives to maintain their creativity:
./english/590.txt:20:In this sense, one of the ideas to which Cassen also attributes importance may create even more confusion: that of formulating a “Consensus of Porto Alegre”, counterpart of the “Washington Consensus”. The objective would be to announce a dozen of strategic objectives to be reached by the action of all involved. However, paradoxically the realisation of this idea, just as the definition of converging or even priority themes - formulated during the preparation of Mumbai but in view of the 2005 Forum - would lead us dangerously close to the “final document” that all claim not to wish. Moreover, one of the networks participating at the Mumbai Forum just circulated its “30 propositions to make an other world possible”. Should one mix these 30 proposition with the ten or fifteen of a “Porto Alegre Consensus”? And who would do it without constituting themselves as “board of directors” of the WSF, which some still seem to experience the need of? And what to do with all the other proposals for action not comprised in these two inventories and considered by its authors as really strategic to overcome neo-liberalism? The respect of diversity is not a condition solely for entering and participating in the Forums, but also to get out of them, without any impoverishing homogenisation having to take place. Of course, everybody has the right to produce syntheses, convergences and priorities. The “good ones” will be followed by those who are in agreement with them. What no one has the right to do, is to impose them on the others or to want to talk in the name of everybody.
./english/590.txt:27:(1) Tout a commencé à Porto Alegre: mille forums sociaux! (Everything began at Porto Alegre : a thousand social forums), Paris: Mille et Une Nuits, 2003.
./english/595.txt:4:Attempts to make the WSF genuinely global and develop it beyond its Brazilian roots have proved successful, since the quest to create truly global resistance and formulate alternative paths to capitalist globalisation aims at strengthening the combat of every actor, whether from the North, South, East or West. After Mumbai, Porto Alegre is even stronger. Thanks to the tenacity of the Indian organisers and above all to the strong presence and art of living of the Indians that gave life to this event, we are now stronger than before.
./english/595.txt:8:1. The Mumbai Forum was above all a popular demonstration for and by the people. In comparison to Porto Alegre, but above all in comparison to the European Social Forums which have mainly mobilised the middle classes. At Mumbai the great majority of the people present were untouchables, peasants, and members of women’s and young people’s organisations. Not only has the Forum become more “global” it is now also more “social”.
./english/595.txt:22:The means for obtaining a global vision, to facilitate legibility sufficient to highlight the wealth of the debates and proposals, also remains a task on standby. Efforts have been made in the sectors of documentation and systematising the ideas formulated at the Forums since the first forum at Porto Alegre in January 2001. There is no nostalgia in this quest to keep archives on the forums. An amnesic movement is liable to become diluted, or else others will write its history. The work of archiving, documentation and systematisation is essential for emphasising the intercultural, social and political wealth contributed by the participants themselves. This effort permits proposing the new ideas and alternatives that social actors are implementing in order to respond to and overcome the policies dictated by the proponents of neo-liberal and neo-imperialist globalisation. The capacity to innovate to ensure that the programmes and methods of the forthcoming forums are genuinely original and participatory will be one of the key elements for continuing the alternative world movement.
./english/598.txt:38:Coordinating linkages that are horizontal rather than vertical, that function across popular movements rather than up from the masses to the party leadership, was the original vision of the social forum [idea/ founders]. Chico Whitaker, an activist intellectual from Brazil with a history of involvement with the Workers Party and radical movements associated with the Catholic Church, was one of those who formulated [it/ the WSF Charter of Principles]. A modest man, now in his 60s, Whitaker believes that the forum idea draws on the most important political discovery of recent times - the power of open, free horizontal structures. He told Red Pepper: It is this idea that explains the success of the first three WSFs in Porto Alegre as well as of Seattle and the 15 February demonstrations [against the war in Iraq] and now Mumbai.
./english/598.txt:50:2001: The first WSF meets at Porto Alegre, a city of 1.5 million people in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. Both the city and the state are governed by the Workers Party of Brazilian president Lula. There are 30,000 participants.
./english/598.txt:52:2002: The second WSF meets again at Porto Alegre. At least 60,000 people participate.
./english/598.txt:54:2003: Porto Alegre hosts the third WSF. More than 100,000 people attend.
./english/598.txt:58:2005: The fifth WSF is planned for Porto Alegre.
./english/600.txt:6:Hay tres momentos de origen de esa experiencia. El primero fueron las protestas masivas durante la reunión de la Organización Mundial de Comercio (OMC) en Seattle, en noviembre de 1999. Un gran número de manifestantes, principalmente estadunidenses -una coalición sorpresiva de sindicalistas del AFL-CIO, militantes ambientalistas y anarquistas- logró echar a pique la reunión. Dos meses después, en enero de 2000, en Davos, un grupo de unos 50 intelectuales de todo el mundo intentaron una táctica diferente y organizaron un "Antidavos en Davos", buscando que se difundieran en la prensa mundial una serie de argumentaciones antineoliberales. En febrero de 2000, dos dirigentes brasileños de movimientos populares, Chico Whitaker y Oded Grajew, fueron a París a hablar con Bernard Cassen, director de Le Monde Diplomatique y presidente de Attac-France. Le sugirieron unir fuerzas para lanzar un encuentro mundial que combinara la protesta masiva y el análisis intelectual. Convinieron que esto ocurriera en Porto Alegre, Brasil, en 2001, al tiempo en que en Davos se realizaba la reunión del Foro Económico Mundial. Le llamaron a esto Foro Social Mundial, y Cassen declaró que el objetivo era "hundir Davos".
./english/600.txt:8:Porto Alegre 2001 esperaba recibir a mil 500 participantes. Arribaron unos 10 mil. El grueso de ellos provenían de América Latina, Francia e Italia. Los principios básicos del FSM fueron que sería "un punto de reunión abierto" para "grupos y movimientos de la sociedad civil que se oponían al neoliberalimo y a la dominación del mundo por el capital o por cualquier forma de imperialismo". Su lema era "otro mundo es posible". Era un "proceso", no una organización. No tomaría posiciones, ni haría propuestas de acción, pero generaría posiciones y propuestas de algunos o todos los que tomaran parte en el FSM. Era "plural, diverso, no confesional, no gubernamental y no partidista", y actuaría de "modo descentralizado". En resumen, no habría jerarquías ni disciplina organizativa.
./english/600.txt:10:La fórmula era original y muy diferente de los movimientos contra el sistema, incluidos el comunista o las internacionales. Y prendió fuego. La segunda reunión en Porto Alegre atrajo a 40 mil participantes, incluyendo ahora a un enorme grupo de América del Norte. La tercera, en 2003, juntó entre 70 mil y 80 mil personas. Estuvieron ahí toda suerte imaginable de movimientos, reformistas o revolucionarios, cada una de las variedades de personas oprimidas o marginadas, la vieja izquierda y la nueva, los movimientos sociales y las organizaciones no gubernamentales (ONG).
./english/600.txt:14:Los tres problemas se pusieron a prueba en la reunión de Mumbai, la primera en efectuarse fuera de Porto Alegre.
./english/600.txt:22:El deseo de expandir el espectro geográfico del FSM fue uno de los objetivos perseguidos al cambiar de sede a Mumbai, y fue un éxito espectacular. En 2002, según el organizador principal en India, no había 200 personas que hubieran oído hablar del foro. Para 2004, cientos de organizaciones y más de 100 mil personas de India asistieron, procedentes de todos los grupos sociales imaginables, por lo menos 30 mil dalits (intocables) adivasis (pueblos tribales) y mujeres por todas partes. Es más, contradiciendo toda la cultura política de India, representaban un amplio espectro de puntos de vista políticos, trabajando juntos. El FSM retornará a Porto Alegre en 2005, pero planea desplazarse a Africa en 2006.
./english/605.txt:4:IV World Social Forum (WSF) held in Mumbai, India, from January 16th to January 21st 2004 has proved the vitality of the“WSF-Format”, from the “open space” method that gradually has been built in the three Porto Alegre forums, in the two European Social Forums (Florence and Paris) and in the Asiatic Social Forum (Hyderabad), as well as countless another forums. The Mumbai Forum has renewed and expanded the achieve of the proposal, generating a wave of vitality in the process. But, after three years, there is a general perception that it needs a change in its directions, focusing specially on the articulation of actions capable of having an impact in the balance of world power. This was the focus in the discussion in the International Council (IC), gathered in Mumbai in January 15th, January 22nd and 23rd in order to prepare the process towards V WSF to be held in Porto Alegre, in January 2005.
./english/605.txt:51:The decisive logistical option in Mumbai was concentrating the activities in one place and don´t disperse them. That has made easier the effervescence and vital mood in the IV WSF. It was carried out in an abandoned textile complex that now serves as events center, creatively transformed by the Forum organizers in order to house the multiple activities to be realized. We had not had, such as in Porto Alegre, the classrooms and the PUC (University) infrastructure, but even so the result of the activities was not harmed. The critical note is related to the Youth Camp, which had much more modest dimensions than Porto Alegre Youth Camp – it had settled in the area belonging to a catholic high-school ten kilometers away, what has made difficult a better integration with the Forum ensemble.
./english/605.txt:59:From the methodological point of view, the Mumbai Forum went from a situation in which the effort of activities organization fall over Organizing Committees (OC) with support of the IC for a situation in which just a few activities are organized by the OC. Among the 48 activities organized to more than 4,000 people in WSF 2004, 13 were responsibility of the COI and 35 were “self-organized” (chosen among more than 200 submitted). Nevertheless, some of these great activities had a low quorum. The dynamism of debates were, more than in Porto Alegre, principally in medium-size activities, capable of attracting general participation, but not so big to obstruct dialogue with the present.
./english/605.txt:81:Mumbai has enriched the WSF agenda and integrated new and important forces in the process. But also reinforced the will of the Forum being a new and more useful tool to multiply political action and moving current correlation of forces. The more the neoliberalism seems sold out, the more this aspiration nourishes. At last, the Forum is not an end in itself, but a mean so what thousands of movements in the world can articulate and strengthen their struggles. And in Mumbai, with the consolidation of the Forum in the most conflictive and populated zone of the planet, this will has gained a sense of emergency. That has expressed in several critical discussions and self-criticism among the process protagonists, who point the need of changing directions towards Porto Alegre 2005. What balance can be made today about the Forum´s role in motivating our alternatives?
./english/605.txt:92:This was also the basis of the preoccupations in the IC meeting in Mumbai and the key indication to methodological and shape definitions for Porto Alegre 2005, which should stimulate, “since before and during WSF, dialogue, identification of convergences related to themes and strategies, articulations and formulation of plans of action… respected… every values signed in our Charter of Principles” (Propuestas adoptadas en la reunion del CI in www.forumsocialmundial.org.br)
./english/611.txt:4:WSF 4 in Mumbai was a quite different experience than prior Porto Alegre WSFs. In many respects it was better organized. Women were far more visible, empowered, and empowering - often providing the most important as well as the best presented material. The attendee composition altered dramatically from being overwhelmingly South American with a significant U.S. and European presence, to being overwhelmingly Asian with a significant African and some U.S. and European presence.
./english/611.txt:6:Whereas the city of Porto Alegre was a well off, small, left-administered welcoming host in a left-administered welcoming Brazilian state -- Mumbai was the indifferent massive financial center of an indifferent right-leaning India. The pervasive poverty of Mumbais streets exceeded anything I had seen before. The mammoth Mumbai bustle transcended other bustle Id seen, as well. It feels misleading to use the same term "diversity," to describe what was present in Mumbai and to also describe Western cultural variety. Diversity in India, and apparently in Asia more broadly, is truly diverse.
./english/614.txt:15:The experience in Mumbai has been useful to prove that the WSF is possible out of Porto Alegre, that its open character facilitates the integration of a broad plurality of many social movements, feeds the social mobilization and makes clear that the WSF globalization is not only possible but also necessary. Besides, it has made clear that the organization of the WSF is possible with distinct parameters in relation to those that had been used in Porto Alegre: to have a presence and visibility of the most oppressed social sectors, to block the space for sources of money that compromise the Forum, etc. Mumbai has also showed that there are movements that oppose neoliberalism but do not feel comfortable with the working and acting procedures of the WSF and that there are many spaces to be built in order to integrate as much movements as possible.
./english/614.txt:25:Its not a matter of turning the WSF into a deliberative space that decides among options under debate, nor of approaching the alternatives elaboration through academic meetings that submit to WSF a proposal to conclude as a alternative paradigm, the “Porto Alegre consensus” against the “Washington consensus”, but that, preserving the open and plural character of the WSF, to begin a common reflection on the concrete problems that the struggle against neoliberalism and war faces and to move to the WSF the debates present in the real dynamics of the movements, as way to move forward in the building of alternatives in the distinct scales in which this movement is expressed: global and local.
./english/614.txt:39:The WSF periodicity and the location or, what is the same, where and when it will occur is another of the key points towards its future. Until now, it has been taking place every year, and despite the fact that in the beginning the conclusion was that the Forum would “circulate” throughout the planet, the reality is that the Forum seems to be “attached” to Porto Alegre. Nevertheless, the Mumbai experience has contributed to the future of the WSF: contact with other realities, inclusion of social movements, new dynamics; also, new problems (Mumbai Resistance, The II People’s Movements Encounter…), etc. and to this end it points out the path to follow. The best is when the new culture that presumes the accomplishment of the Social Forums (horizontality, consensus, open and plural space…) allows to generate unified and working dynamics and to feedback the mobilizations among the social movements, as has occurred in India this year.
./english/614.txt:41:These are the reasons why it worries that, after a four years trajectory and a broad umbrella of social movements actively and stably participating in the WSF, the decision concerning where to hold the Forum is limited to the framework of the International Council, from which results incomprehensible that whenever the move of the WSF to Mumbai was decided it was only with the condition to go back to Porto Alegre, when this decision could have been left open and/or directed to other continent and other country.
./english/618.txt:7:When India was approached in January 2002 to initiate the WSF’s “migration” out of Porto Alegre, Indian organisations were still only marginally integrated into the international process of social forums. They had only two years to assimilate this unifying “philosophy” and to assemble the necessary conditions for success, especially of assuring the presence of delegations from all over a country in many respects as diversified as the whole of Europe. After a successful trial run – the Asian Social Forum in Hyderabad – in January 2003, social forums were organised in India’s states, very often at the grassroots level of groups of villages.
./english/625.txt:20:The fact that all the activities were concentrated at a single venue made for sociability in a real melting pot of differences. The youth camp, however, was nearly 10 kilometres from the central Forum venue, making it difficult to integrate young people into the activities. The city also missed out, because it could not interact with the WSF as happens in Porto Alegre.
./english/625.txt:22:The Forum in India has confirmed the feeling left by Porto Alegre, that what makes the event is much more the small panel debates, workshops, debates in the corridors, sitting on the floor; the exchange of experience among the participants and the self-organized activities. At Mumbai, more than at Porto Alegre, the large conferences, led by intellectuals and internationally recognised leaders, were not very participatory, even though some did spark interesting debates.
./english/625.txt:26:WSF 2005… What now? Porto Alegre?
./english/625.txt:28:After Mumbai, Porto Alegre can never be the same again – that is the feeling of those who either took part or followed this fourth edition WSF from a distance. We have to move ahead with new proposals that both rise above the limits we were running into and that embody all that is new about the Indian WSF.
./english/625.txt:40:Last but not least, a venue has to be set for the next WSF after Porto Alegre 2005. There is intense political will to hold it in Africa, but conditions are not yet ripe for that.
./english/626.txt:6:Yes, this is what you witnessed when you entered the NESCO grounds in Goregaon East, Mumbai, India - the venue of the fourth World Social Forum (WSF). The first WSF outside Porto Alegre, Brazil. The first WSF in Asia. The first WSF in India.
./english/626.txt:8:Porto Alegre was clean, developed, air-conditioned. Mumbai was chaotic, dusty, hot. Porto Alegre was rich. Mumbai was poor. Porto Alegre was gentler on the senses. Mumbai was more brutal. Porto Alegre was more polished. Mumbai was more raw. Both were outstanding, overwhelming events. Both were memorable, in different ways.
./english/629.txt:4:The success of the World Social Forum 2003 in Porto Alegre and its process of globalization throughout the year of 2002, brought about many questions about its continuity. Many valuations have been written, pointing to different directions, as well as new proposals have been put forward for the organization of 2003, 2004 and 2005 events. In fact, the Forum faces a positive crisis, one of growth, that demands a deeper look at some of the issues remarked in its Principles Charter. To avoid the risk of destroying its potentialities, it is imperative that some ambiguities are overcome, before the process moves toward irretrievable crystallized orientations. A timely occasion for this could be the next meeting of the WSF International Council - better prepared and longer than the previous ones - expected for June 2003.
./english/629.txt:28:Furthermore: if we do it, we will be – without any help from those we are fighting against...- throwing away a powerful instrument of struggle that we were able to create drawing on the most important political discovery lately: the power of the free horizontal articulation, which explains the success in Porto Alegre, as well as in Seattle and of the February 15th manifestations against the war. And we have to bear in mind that if the horizontal social articulation still has so much to contribute now for our fight, it will also be necessary in the very process of construction of the world we want.
./english/629.txt:60:This option adopted in the Forum was, by the way, easily grasped by a great number of participants in its last edition in Porto Alegre, who contributed to the “panel” with “Proposals for action adopted during the 2003 Forum”. In addition to the fact that this “panel” enabled everyone to express themselves, the final proposals and declarations brought - or sent later - clearly depict the richness and the diversity of the engagement of the participants. The proposals can already be found in the Forum’s web page, but it was not possible this year to show everything that its participants decided to do as a result of the Forum, once the “panel”, as an innovation introduced in this edition, was poorly publicized.
./english/629.txt:62:Nevertheless, its present diffusion through the Internet - indicating how to contact the authors of the proposals –opens yet other perspectives: through the new contacts and relationships now made possible, it will allow the enlargement of the new articulations around the proposals during the Forum. As if the Forum’s square had become permanently open, outliving in time and space, lasting longer than the limited five-day event of Porto Alegre. The contacts may be multiplied and lead to more concrete actions, fostered by the unlimited new possibilities opened by the Internet. The same can happen with the “panel of proposals” set up in others events.
./english/629.txt:86:One last outcome of the character of the Forum-space is the feeling of mutual responsibility that permeates the realization of its events. The fact that it is a “square without owner” promotes this fairly easily, more than in movements where the development of this feeling is sought. In the Forum nobody can go against anybody, nor is willing to supervise each other’s commitments. Even the errors of the organizers - in general a lot, considering the dimension that the events have taken - are accepted and corrected by the initiatives and creativity of the participants. In the WSF 2003 edition in Porto Alegre a serious and involuntary mistake - that forced the organizers to make a great effort trying to minimize its effects - could have destroyed the entire event: only on the 2nd day were the workshops’ programs published. Nevertheless, the participants found ways to compensate the failure by their own, and there were even initiatives from “outside”- as the “savage” publication of the program which availed itself of the Internet information in the evening prior to the beginning of the works.
./english/629.txt:106:In a Forum-space the self-organized activities would have priority, in the minds of the event organizers, once it’s with them that the WSF works more clearly as a space. However, we verify that the part of the events programmed by the organizers is over-valued, at the expense of meetings and seminaries programmed by the participants themselves. These activities, the core of a Forum-space, are treated almost with negligence. They are almost looked down on, like secondary, less important activities holding low prestige, even as if they were a load that the organizers are forced to carry, after this way of organizing the events was invented in the 2001 Porto Alegre’s Forum.
./english/629.txt:108:In fact, the choices of the themes and of the lecturers of the conferences and panels have always taken most of the organizers’ time, in all the Forums already held. This also occurred with the International Council: the meetings of Bangkok and Florence had devoted great part of their working program to this type of decision, to prepare Porto Alegre’s Forum. Long meetings beyond the Council’s schedule have become necessary, and even a special meeting, in Brazil, between Bangkok and Florence, of the new working group created for this – bringing together the “coordinators of the main themes” - with all the costs that such meetings entail. Actually, the themes and the lecturers turn out to be the “showcase” of the Forum, or the public and visible demonstration of what it deals with and what is discussed in it, and this must be carefully planned, in order to keep its positions and proposals clear. As it occurs with the Davos’ Forum, which has not self-organized activities and has to choose carefully, in each circumstance, the main theme of its events...
./english/629.txt:112:On the other hand, as the number of these activities tends to be big, only some fortunate one have the possibility of taking place in the central areas of the event, the rest being distributed in the best possible way in all available spaces – sometimes in different places of the cities, even of difficult access. Adding to these difficulties, the “catalog” of the workshops and seminars is distributed during the registration of the participants on the first day of the event, along with their identification cards – or even later, as unfortunately happened in Porto Alegre 2003.
./english/629.txt:116:The situation gets even worse when the organizers of the event manage to bring renowned persons to the part of the event that they organize, and when these conferences with celebrated people overlap with the workshops and seminars, as occurred in Porto Alegre 2003: the big conferences attracting most of the participants, leaving the self-organized activities to those who really insist on participating in them. In this perspective, besides, the function of the big conferences and panels in an event would have to be reexamined.
./english/629.txt:120:A second but equally important precaution would concern the distribution of places for the self-organized activities: these should be held in the main space of the events, in the main “square”, with better infrastructure, easy access and good divulgation. And they could not suffer the concurrence of the events oriented to all participants - as occurred in Porto Alegre’s 2003, giving reason to those who said that the big “stars” usurped the Forum...
./english/634.txt:1:Report on Porto Alegre 2003
./english/634.txt:7:de Porto Alegre: novidade e responsabilidade histórica” 06/03/2003.
./english/634.txt:10:The US delegation of 1,100 people was said to be the second largest, after having been small in previous years. Organized labor’s representation doubled to 717 organizations from 156 countries. While most labor analysts have concluded since the meetings at Porto Alegre III that organized labor still has a long way to go to catch up with the WSF and the current anti-globalization movements, I was more favorably impressed with labor’s progress, based on my frequent informal meetings with several different trade unionists from Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil. Brazilians, as always, were present in huge numbers (as many as 70,000), something that will change in 2004 when the fourth WSF annual meeting takes place in India. More than 4,000 journalists attended, representing 1,423 media organizations (more than at the last World Cup Soccer matches in Japan, which is the international standard for maximum attendance by reporters). The always dynamic Youth Camp, which tented 2,500 the first year and 15,000 the second, mushroomed to 30,000 this year. I attended a meeting, as an invited guest, of young activists in a “big tent” at the Youth Camp where plans for an International Youth Network were discussed. Young women were a majority and led the discussion.
./english/634.txt:14:Aside from numbers and mega-male events (which were not as prevalent as Klein makes out, although the general impression is that women were less well represented than the previous year—an ominous sign!), the atmosphere at Porto Alegre III was electrifying – 5 days of multi-ethnic, multi-racial, internationalism in a country bubbling over with hope after the overwhelming electoral victory of a veritable “working-class hero” to Brazil’s presidency (Lula). Social analyst Peter Waterman has given the flavor of Porto Alegre III in this personal commentary: “[I was inspired by the] energetic and innovative social protest, and original analyses of the local-national-global dialectic in Argentina…by the Kidz in the Kamp who were discussing under a tree, and with informal translation, how to ensure that the emancipatory and critical forces have more impact on the Forum process…by the increasing number of compañer@s, of various ages, identities, movements and sexual orientations, who believe that, in the construction of a meaningfully civil global society, transparency is not only the best policy but the only one” (Waterman, “First
./english/634.txt:15:Reflections on The 3rd World Social Forum, Porto Alegre, Brazil” 06/02/2003.
./english/634.txt:17:Yes, the numbers are growing. Indeed, although crowds moved in an orderly way, organizationally it seemed like Porto Alegre III was too big for the local hosts to handle, many interesting events being held in hard-to-locate places or simply going unannounced.
./english/634.txt:19:A second “triumph” at Porto Alegre III was the WSF’s for the first time completely upstaging the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF, a club of the world’s wealthiest individuals, or “unelected Masters of the Universe" as the London Financial Times has dubbed them), held this year in Davos, Switzerland. Indeed, even the harshest critics of WSF acknowledge that in terms of world impact on both public opinion and many key power centers the WSF is beginning to leave the WEF in its wake. As one commentator noted in Terraviva (a WSF daily newspaper printed during Porto Alegre III): “Davos is discussing the crisis of confidence afflicting its own [neoliberal] model, whereas Porto Alegre shows an impressive liveliness.” WEF president Klaus Schwab reportedly said that the new year found the world at its most “fragile” and “dangerous” state in the WEF’s 33-year history. Despite this, the millionaire delegates to Davos scrambled around all the major issues of the day without coming up with anything resembling a unified leadership position to guide the world further along the paths of neoliberal globalization--this time, by their own admission, with a much needed “more human face.” The WEF once again stated its agreement with the Tobin Tax but took no action toward its implementation. On the burning issue of the US war plans in Iraq, the WEF delegates at Davos floundered completely. US Secretary of State Colin Powell “did not receive loud applause at the Davos meeting, as did many others…[who] criticized the US for ‘militarizing the world” (Terraviva).
./english/634.txt:21:Many reporters at Davos noted that the appearance of Brazil’s newly elected president Lula practically saved the WEF from obscurity. The number of journalists instantly increased with his appearance. Lula had been criticized by many when he told the WSF a few days earlier that he would be going to Davos. Nonetheless, at Porto Alegre III, crowds of people rushed to a giant TV screen to watch and cheer his speech at Davos, where he did, as he had promised, say the same words he had spoken at WSF, while also reaching out to dialogue with the rich and powerful.
./english/634.txt:23:The WEF’s relative failure at Davos in turn reflected upon a third “triumph” at Porto Alegre III: the impetus and leadership given by the WSF to a nascent international antiwar movement, which two weeks later (February 15) exploded on the international scene and has been shaking world leaders and events ever since. Indeed, the main message coming out of Porto Alegre III was “No war!” A year earlier, Porto Alegre II had called for regional social forums. The European Social Forum held in Florence, Italy, in November 2002 and attended by 50,000 delegates (plus up to a million in the streets), developed the first plans for a February 15-type day of international protests (the date later became set as February 15). The WSF at Porto Alegre III finalized plans for February 15 and concluded its meetings with a spirited anti-war march. Truth to tell, the organizers of February 15 in every nation were caught by surprise when so many millions turned out (from 12 to 30 million globally, depending on your source). Organizers now openly acknowledge that no single group or coalition of groups can possibly lead this new anti-war movement – the movement is leading them!
./english/634.txt:25:At Porto Alegre III, the war in Iraq and the US plan of “Shock and Awe” were seen as a logical outgrowth of the IMF’s “shock therapy” applied around the world under neoliberal capitalist globalization. [Note: senior Bush officials have confirmed that Shock and Awe "is the concept on which the war plan is based"; the architect of Shock and Awe, military strategist Harlan Ullman, has gloated to the press that the effect of the war’s opening 48-hour bombardment of Baghdad will be "rather like the nuclear weapons at Hiroshima."].
./english/634.txt:27:The fourth, and in my eyes, final “triumph” at WSF was its making significant progress in its campaigns against the WTO and FTAA and for the cancellation of Third World debt. How significant this progress turns out to be remains to be seen. As Cándido Grzybowski, charged with the task of “officially closing” the Porto Alegre III meetings, stated: “We have succeeded in delegitimizing neoliberalism before world public opinion, although we are far from a victory translated into new macroeconomic and social policies in the world” (my translation, Correo de Prensa de la IV Internacional Boletín Electrónico No 562 – América Latina y el Caribe – 30/1/03 --). Most observers are saying now that both the September 2003 WTO meeting in Cancún, Mexico, and various related “official” meetings on WTO and FTAA in the coming years may be the scenes of not only increased massive protest outside the secretive halls of the powerful but also of protest by official delegates inside them (for example, Brazil, Malaysia, and other regional influentials may balk at current WTO and FTAA plans, the way some such nations did at the WTO summit in Seattle – remember Seattle anyone?).
./english/634.txt:29:All this said, most “advances” at Porto Alegre III were not really “triumphs” but simply small steps, some of them not necessarily “forward.” I will give only two examples.
./english/634.txt:31:First, a growing trend in the discussion of alternatives has been whether all of capitalism should be jettisoned and a new type of economy and society introduced—participatory, transparent, pluralist, socialist in the anti-Stalinist humanist sense—or whether capitalism should be radically reformed (a kind of resurrection of the social democrats in Europe and “liberals” in North America, who have until now been lining up with neoliberalism). In Porto Alegre III the participatory socialist position seemed stronger, much stronger, according to my informants, than at Porto Alegre II. People simply can’t find examples of capitalism reforming itself in any lasting way. In other words, reforms come and go, but capitalism storms ahead. In most parts of the world reforms are crushed by capitalism or its military forces, as Latin Americans have noticed for decades. Argentina’s historic Mothers of the May Plaza have concluded: “Another world is possible, only with revolution and socialism.”
./english/634.txt:33:On the other hand, the number of “reformists” was larger than ever at Porto Alegre III—it’s just that their position could not hold people’s attention without moving to the left, something many of them are reluctant to do beyond the rhetorical level. Meanwhile, a few groups of the world’s miniscule far left boycotted Porto Alegre III because they thought it was too “reformist.” India’s prize-winning novelist and political activist Arundathi Roy, who was on the panel featuring Noam Chomsky, received far greater applause than Chomsky did when she ended her moving speech with these words: “The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability. Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them. Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing” (the entire speech is available on ZNet, January 28, 2003, www.zmag.org/).
./english/634.txt:35:My own impression is that the political tensions within the WSF remain fructifying, fortunately with the usual joyful (if tense) tolerance and pluralism that has come to characterize the WSF. This democratic spirit is healthy. Divisions within the two main schools of thought—anti-capitalist left and radical reformist—also continue to percolate of course. One is the continuing division between anarchists and participatory socialists within the anti-capitalist left, although I notice more in common between their positions each year. The occasional putdown at Porto Alegre III of anything on the left as “sectarianism” carries less weight than ever, a bit like beating a dead horse.
./english/634.txt:37:Second, a kind of confusion reigns, as it always has done, in the WSF. How long any of us will put up with this almost inevitable confusion remains to be seen, but so long as pluralism holds as a basic premise of the entire WSF there is hope the WSF will at least stay together, however confused it may be, and continue winning ground in the battle of ideas as it has been doing. A decision was made at the end of Porto Alegre III to rename the WSF “the World Social Forum of Porto Alegre,” since that is how the rest of the world has come to know it even though the fourth annual meeting will take place in India. More importantly, there was a general recognition that activists must have more regional social forums, build better global networks, incorporate better representation from Asia, Africa, women, and the working poor (including organized labor), and not look at the WSF of Porto Alegre as “the center of the universe.” The WSF of Porto Alegre also decided not to hold its meetings when the WEF meets, as it had done in the past.
./english/634.txt:39:To sum up Porto Alegre III: confusion, of course, but increased signs of organization, long-term commitment, taking the offensive more than ever, and genuine hope in “another possible world” even in these dark times.
./english/634.txt:42:* James Cockcroft is Research Fellow at the International Institute of Research and Education in Amsterdam, Holland and an online professor for the State University of New York. He has written 35 books on Latin America, international affairs, and human rights, including Latin America: History, Politics, And U.S. Policy (Belmont, California: Wadsworth/International Thomson Publishing, Second edition, 1998, in Spanish as América Latina Y Estados Unidos: Historia Y Política País Por País, Mexico City: siglo veintiuno editores, 2001) and Mexico’s Hope: An Encounter With Politics And History, New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999, in Spanish as La Esperanza De Mexico, Mexico City: siglo veintiuno editores, 2001). In Porto Alegre III, he participated in the panel “Imperialismo e resistência popular à globalização capitalista na América Latina” (Imperialism and popular resistance to capitalist globalization in Latin America), along with Raul Pont, Prof. Janette Habel, and Michaël Löwy.
./english/636.txt:4:PORTO ALEGRE, BRAZIL -- "I will tell the people at Davos that the world does not need war, the world needs peace and understanding," said President Lula da Silva to a cheering crowd of tens of thousands in this sunny port city in Southeastern Brazil. If there is one theme that unified this years World Social Forum -- and captures the irrationality and destructiveness of letting a handful of people determine so much of the worlds fate -- it is opposition to the looming war against Iraq.
./english/636.txt:8:The WSF has grown enormously, attracting more than 100,000 participants to Porto Alegre for this years series of events. And among the delegates from 126 countries, the largest contingent outside of Brazil this year is -- to the surprise of many -- from the United States.
./english/636.txt:22:"I was not elected by the financial markets, and I was not elected by the powerful economic interests . . . I was elected through the high level of consciousness of Brazilian society," Lula told the crowd in Porto Alegre.
./english/639.txt:8:The key word at this years World Social Forum, held this week in Porto Alegre, Brazil, was "big". Big attendance: more than 100,000 delegates in all. Big speeches: more than 15,000 crammed in to see Noam Chomsky. And most of all, big men. Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the newly elected president of Brazil, came to the forum and addressed 75,000 adoring fans. Hugo Chavez, the controversial president of Venezuela, paid a "surprise" visit to announce that his embattled regime was part of the same movement as the forum itself. "The left in Latin America is being reborn," Chavez declared, as he pledged to vanquish his opponents at any cost. As evidence of this rebirth, he pointed to Lulas election in Brazil, Lucio Gutierrezs victory in Ecuador and Fidel Castros tenacity in Cuba.
./english/639.txt:26:Right now, it looks as if Lula has only two choices: abandoning his election promises of wealth redistribution or trying to force them through and ending up in a Chavez-style civil war. But there is another option, one his own Workers party has tried before, one that made Porto Alegre itself a beacon of a new kind of politics: more democracy. He could simply refuse to play the messiah or the lone ranger, and instead hand power back to the citizens who elected him, on key issues from payment of the foreign debt, to land reform, to membership of the Free Trade Area of the Americas. There are a host of mechanisms that he could
./english/643.txt:10:The "older" and "younger" generations would not have met and combined to form a global civil society if it werent for Porto Alegre.
./english/643.txt:21:But that is not where India 2004 and Porto Alegre 2005 are leading. Their success will be measured by the number of participants. Is this the path we need to achieve a better world? And when it is said that we have no proposals, that all we do is talk, will we answer that we dont want to be elitist like other Forums? The time has come for us to reflect so our route is broader, but stronger in order to challenge neoliberal globalisation and its mercenaries.
./english/644.txt:6:As politicians and corporate executives met at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, a very different meeting took place in the city of Porto Alegre under the slogan "Another World is Possible." The third World Social Forum (WSF) brought over 100,000 people to Brazil. Participants from all sectors of civil society--trade unions, community organizations, womens groups, indigenous peoples, students, and environmentalists--discussed and debated proposals for how build and mobilize an effective movement to fight corporate globalization.
./english/644.txt:19:The top priority in UEs international work is to connect up with other unions to forge worker-to-worker contacts and build real solidarity relationships. So, for example, it was exciting for us to be able to go to Campinas where we spoke at a plant gate meeting to hundreds of GE workers to bring news of the recent national strike. We were also able to build a bridge between workers in a Terex plant just outside Porto Alegre and our members at another Terex plant in tiny Elk Point, South Dakota, and we began to make connections with workers at two other companies.
./english/645.txt:7:The final triumphs of the World Social Forum (WSF) were the questions with which it ended: When next? and Where? They affirmed that after three years, Porto Alegre is no longer an event but a process. There is a new eagerness to those questions now, arising from the victory of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in the Brazil elections last October. The Left is in.
./english/645.txt:9:PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil, Jan 27 (IPS) - The final triumphs of the World Social Forum (WSF) were the questions with which it ended: When next? and Where? They affirmed that after three years, Porto Alegre is no longer an event but a process.
./english/645.txt:13:Lulas visit to the WSF and then days later to the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos meant that the message from Porto Alegre is now direct and political.
./english/645.txt:17:Thousands of people from around the world, determined to address all sorts of wrongs in all sorts of ways, met here in hundreds of meetings. The discussions at Porto Alegre, fast becoming the Mecca of all those in search of a better world, were underlined by a massive rally before the conference started - a spectacular way of making the point that the people on the street and those in the seminar rooms were headed in the same direction.
./english/645.txt:21:The start of the conference demonstrated the Porto Alegre way, with Iraqi delegates handing their flag to U.S. delegates, and Israelis and Palestinians holding hands. The rights of Palestinians and the wrongs of an attack on Iraq dominated the conference. The attack on Iraq has clearly become a test case for a peoples movement fighting the U.S. government and the oil giants on its side.
./english/645.txt:23:That movement includes more from the U.S. side than many had imagined. An estimated 1,000 U.S. delegates marked their strongest ever presence at Porto Alegre. And no one was cheered more than those ones who spoke in opposition to the war.
./english/645.txt:31:Globalisation, and what it means to whom, was inevitably at the heart of most discussions. Differences arose among delegates that were a great deal more nuanced than the broad differences between Porto Alegre and Davos.
./english/645.txt:45:Porto Alegre witnessed a new kind of socialism, which has come to mean society first. The bad guys were the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the multinationals that put markets first.
./english/645.txt:47:The very act of being in Porto Alegre became a message, a delegate pointed out. It was a pointed demonstration of living on relatively small resources, as much of the developing world does.
./english/645.txt:49:Per capita consumption here is so much less than in Davos, the city or the conference - but Porto Alegre seemed a much happier place. (END)
./english/646.txt:26:In February 2000, Bernard Cassen, chair of Attac and director of Le Monde Diplomatique, met in Paris with Grajew and Francisco Whitaker, of the Brazilian Justice and Peace Commission (CBJP), to discuss the possibility of such a forum. They shared three ideas: it should be held in the south, in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre; it should be called the World Social Forum to target its adversary; and it should coincide with the staging of the WEF to attract global media attention.
./english/646.txt:28:With clear support from many other organisations influential within transnational activist networks, eight Brazilian civil society groups agreed to form the Organising Committee. In March 2000 they formally secured the support of the municipal government of Porto Alegre and the state government of Rio Grande do Sul, both controlled at the time by the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT).
./english/646.txt:30:The mayor of Porto Alegre, Raul Pont, was particularly enthusiastic in welcoming the idea, followed closely by the state government led by Olivio Dutra. In June 2000, the proposal for such an event was tabled internationally by Miguel Rossetto, vice-governor of Rio Grande do Sul, during an alternative UN meeting in Geneva.
./english/646.txt:32:Porto Alegre
./english/646.txt:34:Events conceived in transnational contexts often have relatively weak roots in their own locality. This was never the case in the WSF of Porto Alegre. Porto Alegre, the capital of the Rio Grande do Sul state in southern Brazil, is one of the most important strongholds of the Workers Party. Already during Brazil’s military rule, the city was a centre of resistance, with energetic neighbourhood associations. Founded in 1980, the PT has deep roots in these associations, trade unions, Catholic organisations, women’s movements and other parts of a vibrant Brazilian civil society.
./english/646.txt:36:A smart choice for hosting the WSF, both municipal and state governments in Porto Alegre were willing to allocate significant material and human resources to the event, empowered by a 1988 Federal Constitution that increased resource transfer to local authorities and consequently their taxation powers. In 2002 the municipality provided approximately $300,000 and the state $1 million for the event. In 2003, there was some increase in the money invested by the municipal government and a substantial decrease in the investment by the state government, as a direct consequence of the electoral defeat of the PT in the October 2002 gubernatorial elections. The new state government led by Germano Rigotto, from the center-right PMPD party, decided to cut the money the preceding PT government had budgeted; but the new federal government of President Lula da Silva decided to compensate for this cut.
./english/646.txt:40:Whereas in short-term commercial terms the WSF is considered a good deal by most locals, in ideological terms not everyone agrees. Two months after the WSF 2002, various business organisations and right-wing groups of Rio Grande do Sul organised what they christened a Forum of Liberties, with positions openly critical of the World Social Forum. And during WSF 2003, a bomb threat paralysed proceedings momentarily, until it was established that it was probably a “joke of bad taste” by some participant of the forum. Despite such marginal expressions of animosity, many seasoned international participants can testify to the warm welcome of Porto Alegre residents – one of the most pleasant aspects of the event.
./english/646.txt:48:The other main organ of the WSF, the International Council (IC), was founded in São Paulo in June 2001. According to Cândido Grzybowski, director of IBASE, the idea emerged in Porto Alegre on the last day of the first WSF. During the months that followed, the OC made a list of organisations to invite to the founding meeting in São Paulo. As of June 2003 the Council nominally consists of 113 organisations, though in practice many of them have not actively participated. This number also includes the eight members of the OC. Most IC members come from the Americas and western Europe, though many also have activities in other parts of the world. Organisations based in Asia and Africa include the Asian Regional Exchange for New Alternatives (ARENA), Environnement et Développement du Tiers-Monde (ENDA) and the Palestinian NGO network.
./english/646.txt:60:So far, the most difficult decision the IC has made was in January 2003 when it decided to organise WSF 2004 in India. A small, vociferous minority argued strongly against the decision until the very end – the strongest opposition being voiced by some Cuban delegates arguing that Latin America was the traditional stronghold of radical movements, and that the Forum would be removed from Porto Alegre at its peril.
./english/646.txt:64:Indian organisations have now constituted a new organising committee for the WSF 2004. Not much else is yet clear. The decision to organise WSF 2004 in India was made conditional on agreeing that WSF 2005 will return to Porto Alegre. It has not yet been defined whether this return will mean that the old organising committee consisting of the eight Brazilian groups will be reconstituted as the new committee.
./english/646.txt:86:Further debate ensued in Bangkok in August 2002 when the Brazilians strongly opposed the plans of the Italians to invite political parties to take part officially in the European Social Forum. According to the Charter of Principles, the WSF process is “non-party”, but the Italian delegates responded by accusing the Brazilian Organising Committee of hypocrisy, since the PT was so visibly present in all the Porto Alegre forums. The Italians claimed that the open violation of the Charter by the Brazilians had been always accepted by WSF participants and that therefore the Brazilians should not get upset when minor political parties play a small role in a regional forum.
./english/646.txt:104:In at least two meetings of the WSF International Council there have been angry demands by some groups to issue a declaration on a particular topic, whether it be crises in Argentina, Palestine or Venezuela. In the Bangkok meeting in August 2002, Walden Bello and others argued that the council should produce a public statement encouraging movements around the world to take part in protests in Cancún in 2003. In the Porto Alegre meeting of the council in January 2003, various delegates argued strongly in favour of making a public statement against the imminent war in Iraq. In both cases, the apparently consensual decision of the council was not to issue any such statements. It is, however, likely that there will be more intense debates on this in the near future.
./english/646.txt:108:Until now, social movement declarations produced during the WSF events have not been circulated very widely and their impact has been relatively modest. The clearest exception is the call for anti-war demonstrations of 15 February 2003 that many movements gathered in the WSF 2003 in Porto Alegre made public. Nevertheless, they have created controversy among the organisers, with people like Chico Whitaker fearing that the media may consider them semi-official. One way to avoid political silence without violating the Charter of Principles may be for the organisers to facilitate their production and endorsement.
./english/646.txt:130:The participation of Lula da Silva in WSF 2001 and 2002 was technically as the representative of an NGO he had once founded. Once elected as president of Brazil, his participation in WSF 2003 changed. The role of the host government, from municipal to federal levels, was given a special status in recent semi-official formulations of the WSF. It was on this basis that Lula was included in the official WSF programme, whereas Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez (who arrived unexpectedly in Porto Alegre during the forum) was not accorded a space within the official Forum. Participation of various ministers of the French government in WSF 2002 was criticised by many delegates, and the Belgian prime minister, who had announced a visit, was told not to come.
./english/646.txt:136:The question of how to relate to the WSF’s original symbolic adversary has also been repeatedly debated and modified. One of the motivations for the naming and timing of the first WSF in Porto Alegre was to attract media attention. But this oppositional stance toward the World Economic Forum in Davos was always combined with a quest for critical dialogue, as reflected in the televised debate between Davos and Porto Alegre.
./english/646.txt:138:From Porto Alegre to Mumbai
./english/646.txt:140:The global media impact of the second and third Porto Alegre forum was significantly stronger than in 2001. If there were fewer attempts in the second and third year to interact with the WEF, this reflected a growing self-confidence of the organisers, some of whom liked to repeat that “from now onwards Davos will be the shadow event of Porto Alegre”.
./english/646.txt:142:In the WSF 2003 there was, however, one particular issue that made the activists in Porto Alegre focus on Davos in passionate debate. The decision of Lula da Silva to travel to Davos immediately after the WSF 2003 in Porto Alegre raised plenty of criticism among the organisers. In his main public appearance in front of tens of thousands of admirers during WSF 2003 Lula compared his decision to travel to Davos to his decision over twenty-five years ago to get involved in trade unions. Friends had then advised him against getting involved with “dirty trade union politics”, but the fact that Brazil has a vibrant and progressive trade union movement today shows that he was right to act. Lula was, however, not explicit about whether he believed the WEF could expect similarly progressive results. At least within the IC, many remained sceptical.
./english/646.txt:146:WSF 2004 in India will be a crucial moment. On the one hand it offers the concrete possibility of giving the process a better geographical (and corresponding thematic) balance. On the other hand, it will be difficult to find local governments willing to dedicate as much energy to the process as was the case in Porto Alegre. The host city of Mumbai (Bombay) has a government that is far more distant from the WSF ideals than that of Porto Alegre.
./english/646.txt:156:Many of them are, I would claim, looking for a different kind of globalisation, though some may prefer to use the older term internationalism. From a democratic perspective, the problem in some anti-globalisation rhetoric is that one easily ends up with rather strange bedfellows. Professing anti-globalisation pure and simple is not very helpful in terms of making a distinction between regulating the cross-border movements of speculative capital and those of black immigrants. Outra globalização (another globalisation) is an expression that has been emphasised by some of the key players of the Porto Alegre meetings. Yet despite their insistence, the mass media in many parts of Latin America often speak of anti-globalisation activists when referring to both Porto Alegre and the events it has inspired.
./english/651.txt:6:The World Social Forum is part of that process. Its short trajectory is indicative of how expectations regarding globalization are shifting. As a Forum, its aim is precisely to enable a global agenda to be built up in a process of dialogue among the whole diversity of civil networks, public campaigns, alliances and coalitions that, in their specificity and differences, stand in opposition to the dominant globalization. That purpose was helped by identifying as anti-Davos, as counter to the ideas and perspectives issuing from the World Economic Forum. That is how it was in 2001, at World Social Forum I in Porto Alegre, which surprised by its innovation and multiple potential. Now, from January 31 to February 5, at World Social Forum II, once again in Porto Alegre, adhesion to the idea of the Forum and the major impact it has had in the world media have turned the tables. Although it has existed for only two years - negligible against the 32 of the World Economic Forum at Davos - the World Social Forum at Porto Alegre now seems to be dictating the agenda. Now it is from their side, from Davos, that the opposition - anti-Porto Alegre - has to come...
./english/651.txt:8:Like it or not, the Porto Alegre Forum has become a global reference for an emerging conviction that "another world is possible". Is that a small matter? Certainly it is not enough, but enormous creative energies are awakened by our coming to believe collectively that we are not condemned to become one super-casino at the hands of large economic and financial groups that commodify life and speculate with human beings and whole peoples. What is more, at an admittedly difficult juncture, we have restored globalization itself to the centre of world debate, thus evading the trap of the logic of terror and war into which religious and trade fundamentalists were leading us after the fateful events of September 11, 2001. One telling response by the World Social Forum to the dominant globalization was to show that diverse and emotionally charged expressions of culture, song and dance also are constitutive of the globalization we want, grounded in the ethical principles of human solidarity with freedom and equality, in the diversity of cultures and situations we live in.
./english/654.txt:1:Lessons from Porto Alegre
./english/654.txt:4:In the program "Roda Viva", produced by the public broadcasting system "TV Culture", in São Paulo, which was recorded after the World Social Forum 2002, Boaventura de Souza Santos was asked if the Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores - PT) had manipulated the Forum in its own interest. The portuguese sociologist, who was an important celebrity in that meeting, answered saying that the PT is too small for that. In an interview given to the newspaper "Folha de São Paulo" on the same occasion, Tarso Genro, mayor of Porto Alegre, declared that all left-wing parties of all the world, united, would not be able to call together something like the World Social Forum.
./english/654.txt:7:Figures increased spectacularly from the first to the second meeting of the World Social Forum. The participants, for example, went from 20,000 in 2001 to 50,000 in 2002. About 35,000 listeners from Porto Alegre, other places in Brazil and also from the bordering countries, came along, many having to endure long bus trips, just to see and hear in person the people they admire and to enjoy the energizing atmosphere of this huge worldwide meeting.
./english/654.txt:13:This Charter explicitly states that the World Social Forum of Porto Alegre does not have a deliberative character. The same happens with the World Economic Forum, in Davos, to which the Forum of Porto Alegre is proposed as an alternative (and it is to highlight this aspect that it is held on the same days). To all participants, those days simply represent a stronger and more intensive opportunity to deepen their commitments and articulations, on a worldwide level, within an effort which already existed and will continue to exist after the Forum It is obvious that behind this similarity there exists a huge difference: the participants of Davos aim to maintain and increase the domination of the capital - which they control - over the human beings of the whole world, as well as the expansion of their private business. The Porto Alegre participants, feeding on the increasing protests that come up everywhere against a globalization dictated by the interests of that capital, want to move forward in their proposals to build another world, centered on human beings and respectful of nature, a world which is not only seen as possible but also necessary and urgent and which, in fact, they are already building in their practical action.
./english/654.txt:15:This difference in objectives and contents lead to a difference in method, too: the main activity developed in Davos consists in conferences and debates on previously defined issues, to which the organizers invite great intellectual representatives of the neo-liberal "unique-monolithic thought", the most powerful nations political leaders and great multinationals owners or executives. In the Porto Alegre Forum an important space is also given to conferences and debates, as well as to testimonies of people with significant experiences or reflections. In order to do that, Porto Alegre, like Davos, invite people who have already reflected or are already acting in domains relevant to the issues being discussed - though in 2002, the Porto Alegre conferences have being conducted not by isolated people but by great world nets. But the most enriching activity in the World Social Forum is the one related to the workshops and seminars freely proposed and organized by the participants themselves: 400 in 2001 and 750 in 2002. In fact, it is the joyful people movement around these workshops and seminars that create the atmosphere of enthusiasm of the World Social Forum, in the corridors and gardens where the Forum is held, with a variety of sounds and colors, good spirited protests and presentations of proposals and actions, as well as unexpected performances and events - exactly the opposite of what happens in the well-bred gray of Davos. Obviously, these organizing options of the World Social Forum are not carried out without misunderstandings, pressures, deviations and even attempts at manipulation of the Forum as a whole. Its large scale induces greed and its horizontal character puts in a uncomfortable position those who are in a hurry to see changes taking place and were also brought up within the traditional paradigms of political action.
./english/654.txt:17:Most journalists, for example - and this appeared in the coverage they gave to the Forum -, used as they are to interview leaders and gurus or to highlight struggles for power, do not understand why there is not a "final document" or "concrete proposals" of the Forum. They do not ask for the same in Davos, but they do want it in Porto Alegre. They find it hard to understand that the World Social Forum is not a summit, but one of the bases of a social movement that, in order to develop itself, cannot have summits or bosses. A "final synthesis" after five days of work, with 15,000 or 50,000 people, would necessarily mean an impoverishment and could only be approved through some kind of manipulation; and everybody leaves the Forum happier than if they had had to fight to include at least one line of their proposals in the final document...
./english/654.txt:21:Naturally, there are other tensions that come up even among those who organize the Forum or those who come to help them. For instance there are those who would prefer the Forums International Advisory Council to become a new world direction of the struggle against neo-liberalism, controlling and guiding that process. The perspectives of continuity assumed by the organizers seem to aim in another direction, with the consolidation of the method oriented by the Forums Principles Chart. It is more and more accepted that the Forum is a process and not an event or a new international organization directed by the leaders of a substitutive "unique-monolithic thought", which would be fatal to the Forum itself. It is also necessary , for example, to see to it that the conferences dont end up with guiding syntheses, voted by their respective audiences, or that they do not prevail over the workshops. At the same time, the decisions taken by the organizers so far aim at enabling the power of attraction of the Forum to generate in other parts of the world the same mobilization it has engendered in Brazil. The 2003 Forum will probably start with some ten regional or thematic Forums in the different geopolitical areas of the world, from September to December 2002, before a new world Forum, to take place once again in Porto Alegre. In September 2003 it would start in the same way, with the possibility of finishing it with a world meeting in India in 2004.
./english/658.txt:1:Beyond Porto Alegre...
./english/658.txt:17:Numbers, I repeat, are not important, but if we are to mention numbers, they should all be included in the estimate. Aside from that, it is evident that basically, this lack of balance is due to economic reasons: plane fare from Delhi to Porto Alegre is about 2,500 US dollars, while a trip from Paris to Porto Alegre costs less than 800 US dollars.
./english/658.txt:33:The perspectives are promising. The Indians have already offered, during a press conference in Porto Alegre, to organize the 2004 Forum in India. This news was carried by the press in Porto Alegre and in India, and Siddhartha reaffirmed it in his speech during the beautiful closing ceremony. In addition, the African members of the International Council of the WSF also stated their will to organize the 2005 Forum in some African country. To enlarge the Forum, to make it known in China and in India and in other big and small regions not only of Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Arab world, but also even of Europe, especially of Eastern and Northern Europe, and of the American continent, above all in United States, is a "historical task" of the next months and years. To succeed in having the Forum assumed as an own claim by the people, by the simple people, is an indispensable step if we expect to counter the capitalist globalization, which has, on its part, been extended all over the world and has penetrated all the different aspects of peoples daily life. Now that we are opening a new stage, let us do all we possibly can to give birth to three, four, five, and more "Porto Alegres"... in the most diverse and populated regions of the world, embracing the greatest variety of actors, and leaving the plural records of the proposals elaborated and carried forward by the people.
./english/668.txt:4:CorpWatch, February 6, 2002, PORTO ALEGRE
./english/668.txt:6:The only way to really describe the World Social Forum (WSF), that just ended here in Brazil, is a global political "carnaval." Not that there was much of the glitter and hedonism associated with that most famous Brazilian street party which begins later this week. Rather, inside the conference halls and out, this astounding event--part-political convention, part-art and music festival, part-intellectual gathering of social movements, was in a state of nearly perpetual celebratory protest for five days and five nights.In the friendly territory of the socialist-run Porto Alegre government, one demonstration followed another. Protests spilled into the streets for womens rights, Indigenous rights, Palestinian rights and for land reform.
./english/668.txt:8:Protestors marched against fundamentalism of all sorts, against hunger and genetically modified agriculture, the IMF, the Free Trade Area of the Americas and much more. The vibe was almost always near-euphoric with horns blaring, hands clapping, feet dancing, flags waving and chants singing out regularly in at least four languages.Sharp Contrast to World Economic ForumThe World Social Forum began last year to provide a counter vision and voice to the World Economic Forum a staid corporate and government gathering designed to informally facilitate corporate globalization. And while "Davos" -- along with the protestors against it -- grabbed the lions share of the corporate-media headlines by switching its venue to New York City this year, Porto Alegre was a cauldron of ideas, creativity and debates all under the slogan "Another World is Possible."Candido Gryzbowski, director of the Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Analysis, one of the events main organizers, went so far as to assert that Porto Alegre had left the World Economic Forum in the dust. "We dont need them. Our message, our concerns are more comprehensive," he noted. "We want to create alternatives, not just to neo-liberalism, but also to various types of fundamentalism and un-democratic governments."Certainly, the World Economic Forum 3,000 person event in New Yorks Waldorf Astoria was a significant gathering of powerful world players. But the sheer magnitude of the Porto Alegre event far surpassed Davos this year, becoming so large as to be difficult to comprehend, even for its most avid participants.The program of conferences, workshops and seminars, along with films, music and artistic events ran more than 70 tabloid pages in each language.
./english/668.txt:9:While last year 15,000 people showed up, this year, all told more than 51,000 people from 131 countries officially participated in the World Social Forum. In the virtual realm, the WSF website found itself hosting another half million visitors a day. Overall, the event was extremely well organized, with barely any noticeable glitches or conflicts.Tens of Thousands in the Streets -- PeacefullyIn contrast with the streets of New York City -- or for that matter Seattle, Prague or Genoa -- police presence in Porto Alegre was once again nearly non-existent as huge marches peacefully wound through the street. The opening ceremony saw more than 40,000 people demonstrating. The anti-FTAA protest, held on the final day, gathered about 10,000. The beautiful and inspiring closing ceremony, held in a giant hall at the main venue -- the beautifully appointed Catholic University -- was packed with a diverse group of 6,000 people; it was simulcast to thousands more at two other venues.This being a left-political gathering in the heart of Latin America, Che Guevara was everywhere.
./english/668.txt:15:Strategy sessions addressed not only how to combat the WTO, the World Bank and giant corporations, but also on how to build alternative economic, political and cultural structures. The main conference on corporate power, in which CorpWatch participated, focused on a series of proposals to "separate the corporation and the state." The argument went that just as we need to separate church and state to avoid a religious fundamentalist nation and build democracy, it is also necessary to separate the corporation and the state to avoid market-fundamentalist governance. From there sprang a fruitful discussion.This approach fit well with one of the most interesting and innovative movements to make its voice heard in Porto Alegre.
./english/668.txt:17:"La Boca Fundamental" (Fundamental Mouth) movement held a series of creative demonstrations and workshops under the slogan, "your mouth is fundamental to fight fundamentalism of all types." Guacira Cesar de Olivera explained to CorpWatch that "everyone has their own, Single Truth -- be it the Taliban, the IMF or the Catholic Church -- and we believe that women suffer most from all types of fundamentalism." These fundamentalisms, she argues, share the basic characteristics of exclusion and domination. The Fundamental Mouth movement took over the inside of the main conference hall one afternoon, urging everyone, women and men to use their mouths to speak out against fundamentalism.Coming Soon to a Venue Near YouOverall, its impossible to quantify or even articulate the "results" from Porto Alegre. The mainstream Brazilian media even criticized the absence of a final declaration. But to reduce the diversity of cultures, the plurality of ideas and opinions, the cacophony of alternative visions to a simple declaration would have been counterintuitive to the World Social Forums "big tent" vision.
./english/668.txt:18:Instead, the international organizing committee for the event decided to hold a series of regional World Social Forums over the next year. This increasingly decentralized process will culminate in the 3rd World Social Forum, to be held once again in Porto Alegre this time next year. "An important part of the World Social Forum process," says Atila Roque, an event organizer and CorpWatch adviser in Brazil, "is developing new ways to organize internationally and regionally -- we are at the beginning stages of figuring it out."And despite the lack of "concrete" results, most here agreed that the World Social Forum is of immense value. Its importance of the ongoing nature was perhaps best summed up by a delegate from India, who told the closing ceremonys jubilant and massive crowd that it has become an symbolic landmark for those working for social change everywhere. "As we move into the 21st century," he told the cheering throng, "Porto Alegre will be etched into the collective historical memory of all those working for a different world."
./english/671.txt:1:Porto Alegre: Today´s Bandung?
./english/671.txt:4:Rather than opposing the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre to the World Economic Forum in New York, it is more revealing to imagine it as the distant offspring of the historic Bandung Conference that took place in Indonesia in 1955. Both were conceived as attempts to counter the dominant world order: colonialism and the oppressive Cold War binary in the case of Bandung, and the rule of capitalist globalization in that of Porto Alegre. The differences, however, are immediately apparent. On one hand the Bandung Conference, which brought together leaders primarily from Asia and Africa, revealed in a dramatic way the racial dimension of the colonial and Cold War world order, which Richard Wright famously described as being divided by the colour curtain. Porto Alegre, in contrast, was a predominantly white event. There were relatively few participants from Asia and Africa, and the racial differences of the Americas were dramatically underrepresented. This points toward a continuing task facing those gathered at Porto Alegre: to globalize further the movements, both within each society and across the worlda project in which the Forum is merely one step. On the other hand, whereas Bandung was conducted by a small group of national political leaders and representatives, Porto Alegre was populated by a swarming multitude and a network of movements. This multitude of protagonists is the great novelty of the World Social Forum, and central to the hope it offers for the future.
./english/671.txt:6:The first and dominant impression of the Forum was its overflowing enormity; not so much the number of people therethe organizers say 80,000 participatedbut rather the number of events, encounters and happenings. The programme listing all the official conferences, seminars and workshopsmost of which took place at the Catholic Universitywas the size of a tabloid newspaper, but one soon realized that there were innumerable other unofficial meetings taking place all over town, some publicized on posters and leaflets, others by word of mouth. There were also separate gatherings for the different groups participating in the Forum, such as a meeting of the Italian social movements or one for the various national sections of ATTAC. Then there were the demonstrations: both officially planned, such as the opening mass May Day-style parade, and smaller, conflictual demonstrations against, for example, the members of parliament from different countries at the Forum who voted for the present war on terrorism. Finally, another series of events was held at the enormous youth camp by the river, its fields and fields of tents housing 15,000 people in an atmosphere reminiscent of a summer music festival, especially when it rained and everyone tramped through the mud wearing plastic sacks as raincoats. In short, if anyone with obsessive tendencies were to try to understand what was happening at Porto Alegre, the result would certainly have been a complete mental breakdown. The Forum was unknowable, chaotic, dispersive. And that overabundance created an exhilaration in everyone, at being lost in a sea of people from so many parts of the world who are working similarly against the present form of capitalist globalization.
./english/671.txt:8:This open encounter was the most important element of Porto Alegre. Even though the Forum was limited in some important respectssocially and geographically, to name twoit was nonetheless an opportunity to globalize further the cycle of struggles that have stretched from Seattle to Genoa, which have been conducted by a network of movements thus far confined, by and large, to the North Atlantic. Dealing with many of the same issues as those who elsewhere contest the present capitalist form of globalization, or specific institutional policies such as those of the IMF, the movements themselves have remained limited. Recognizing the commonality of their projects with those in other parts of the world is the first step toward expanding the network of movements, or linking one network to another. This recognition, indeed, is primarily responsible for the happy, celebratory atmosphere of the Forum.
./english/671.txt:13:The Porto Alegre Forum was in this sense perhaps too happy, too celebratory and not conflictual enough. The most important political difference cutting across the entire Forum concerned the role of national sovereignty. There are indeed two primary positions in the response to todays dominant forces of globalization: either one can work to reinforce the sovereignty of nation-states as a defensive barrier against the control of foreign and global capital, or one can strive towards a non-national alternative to the present form of globalization that is equally global. The first poses neoliberalism as the primary analytical category, viewing the enemy as unrestricted global capitalist activity with weak state controls; the second is more clearly posed against capital itself, whether state-regulated or not. The first might rightly be called an anti-globalization position, in so far as national sovereignties, even if linked by international solidarity, serve to limit and regulate the forces of capitalist globalization. National liberation thus remains for this position the ultimate goal, as it was for the old anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles. The second, in contrast, opposes any national solutions and seeks instead a democratic globalization.
./english/671.txt:15:The first position occupied the most visible and dominant spaces of the Porto Alegre Forum; it was represented in the large plenary sessions, repeated by the official spokespeople, and reported in the press. A key proponent of this position was the leadership of the Brazilian PT (Workers Party)in effect the host of the Forum, since it runs the city and regional government. It was obvious and inevitable that the PT would occupy a central space in the Forum and use the international prestige of the event as part of its campaign strategy for the upcoming elections. The second dominant voice of national sovereignty was the French leadership of ATTAC, which laid the groundwork for the Forum in the pages of Le Monde Diplomatique. The leadership of ATTAC is, in this regard, very close to many of the French politiciansmost notably Jean-Pierre Chevènementwho advocate strengthening national sovereignty as a solution to the ills of contemporary globalization. These, in any case, are the figures who dominated the representation of the Forum both internally and in the press.
./english/671.txt:24:In a previous period we could have staged an old-style ideological confrontation between the two positions. The first could accuse the second of playing into the hands of neoliberalism, undermining state sovereignty and paving the way for further globalization. Politics, the one could continue, can only be effectively conducted on the national terrain and within the nation-state. And the second could reply that national regimes and other forms of sovereignty, corrupt and oppressive as they are, are merely obstacles to the global democracy that we seek. This kind of confrontation, however, could not take place at Porto Alegrein part because of the dispersive nature of the event, which tended to displace conflicts, and in part because the sovereignty position so successfully occupied the central representations that no contest was possible.
./english/671.txt:28:Like the Forum itself, the multitude in the movements is always overflowing, excessive and unknowable. It is certainly important then, on the one hand, to recognize the differences that divide the activists and politicians gathered at Porto Alegre. It would be a mistake, on the other hand, to try to read the division according to the traditional model of ideological conflict between opposing sides. Political struggle in the age of network movements no longer works that way. Despite the apparent strength of those who occupied centre stage and dominated the representations of the Forum, they may ultimately prove to have lost the struggle. Perhaps the representatives of the traditional parties and centralized organizations at Porto Alegre are too much like the old national leaders gathered at Bandungimagine Lula of the PT in the position of Ahmed Sukarno as host, and Bernard Cassen of ATTAC France as Jawaharlal Nehru, the most honoured guest. The leaders can certainly craft resolutions affirming national sovereignty around a conference table, but they can never grasp the democratic power of the movements. Eventually they too will be swept up in the multitude, which is capable of transforming all fixed and centralized elements into so many more nodes in its indefinitely expansive network.