'Tower of Babel' Aims to Give Birth to a New World

by Mario Osava

Diversity reigns at the World Social Forum, a Tower of Babel of delegates from around the world, voicing their demands and proposals for global changes.

Such variety complicates the task of those who seek to regroup the forces of the political left through this annual event, the first of which took place in Porto Alegre last year, serving as a counterweight to the World Economic Forum of Davos, which each year draws the world's most powerful political leaders, corporate executives and financial authorities.

The figures reported by the second World Social Forum (WSF) are an indication of just how diverse the event is, with some 3,500 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and civil society groups from every corner of the planet, and 19,000 pre-registered representatives, far surpassing the 12,000 limit set by the organising committee.

The organisers expect some 50,000 people to attend the WSF's 24 conferences and 800 seminars and workshops, as well as several thousand more at parallel forums organised for specific groups, like filmmakers, environmentalists, local officials, parliamentarians and even children.

The WSF serves as converging point for numerous heterogeneous, parallel and even conflicting interests, suggesting that articulating all voices will be impossible in the short term.

The challenge is to organise a universe whose original 'big-bang' occurred in the 1960s, or in 1968 for those who demand a more precise milestone. Until then, it had been impossible to unite broad sectors of the population based on national interests and class struggle.

The relations and disputes between capital and labour were determining factors for social welfare, and unionism was the main, or even exclusive, instrument in the fight for social progress and justice.

In the 1960s there was an explosion of specific demands, with the eruption of movements with varied social objectives, such as feminism, rights for ethnic groups of all colours, environmentalism, pacifism and the new cultural and religious currents.

That era saw what could be dubbed the 'diversity revolution', which is manifest today in the proliferation of NGOs.

Political parties and trade unions are no longer able to respond to so many questions, which may be local or worldwide, linked to gender or ethnic relations, or to environmental or financial threats.

While the number of social actors multiplied, unionism saw its strength diminish through another process in recent decades: the fragmentation of the labour world crossed with an inverse movement of capital, which became concentrated in the hands of big banks and national or transnational corporations.

'Outsourcing' work to third parties, employment in the informal sector and rising unemployment dispersed the workers, reducing the unions' fighting capacity because their natural base of support was found in the more easily organised and defended formal sector.

On many points, the interests of the labour movement do not coincide - and often clash - with those of feminism (which expanded the economically active population and, therefore, unemployment), and with those of environmentalism, which unionists see as blocking investment and the creation of new jobs.

The WSF pushes the diffusion of the unionism's power to the extreme, as it does the power of leftist parties, which are given no special treatment among the thousands of NGOs gathered in Porto Alegre.

It is the intellectuals invited to speak at the six-day event who will stand out for the few minutes that they have the word.

The attempt to overcome dispersion and give a more unified direction to the WSF, to achieve greater political effectiveness,

does not appear feasible in the short term.

Maintaining 'diversity and plurality' was defended by Vía Campesina, a global organisation of small farmers and rural workers, in a communiqué released Jan 21 in which it expressed "concerns" about the Forum's "tendency towards institutionalisation".

The WSF should continue to be an open platform upon which "organisations can actively and freely participate in proposing

Alternatives," said the group.

Vía Campesina defends seeds as shared property of humanity, and rejects genetically modified crops and the export of food when the national population suffers from hunger.

The rejection of 'neo-liberal globalisation' seems to be the point of consensus among the participants of the movement that is widely known as 'anti-globalisation'.

Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Souza Santos, considered one of the movement's ideologues, prefers to speak of 'alternative globalisation', particularly given that the WSF itself is global.

The Forum and the parallel events that got under way Monday in southern Brazil will combine to produce nine days of intense debates. The great number of issues and positions make it difficult to identify proposals that could serve as the axis of 'another possible world' that the WSF proposes to design.

Progress, while maintaining respect for diversity, will necessarily be slow, and the Porto Alegre Forum is only the second gathering of this kind, created by the movement that began with massive protests against the institutions seen as instruments of neo-liberalism, like the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation and the Davos Forum.