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WORLD SOCIAL FORUM: A Not So Little Leap Forward

Analysis - By Sanjay Suri

PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil, Jan 27 2003 (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. 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.

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.

Lula’s 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.

A global opinion poll released at the start of the conference, which showed that most people want a global agenda based on social values and not economic growth, confirmed what Brazilians had said with their vote. Far from being a club of the outdated, the WSF has begun to look more and more convincing as a blueprint for the future.

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.

While the first WSF meeting in 2001 was about analysing the world situation, the second one about proposals for changing the situation, this one focussed on ”devising strategies to achieve those changes”, said Susan George, associate director of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam and vice-president of Attac-France.

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 people’s movement fighting the U.S. government and the oil giants on its side.

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.

”We need a victory in our international campaign to show that this momentum of globalisation can be broken,” said Nicola Bullard from Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South. ”The war being planned is the most grotesque symbol of their globalisation. Our resistance is the most important symbol of our globalisation.”

Popular opposition to war on Iraq will be tested soon enough at demonstrations planned around the world Feb. 15.

A delegation from Stop the War Campaign in London held extensive meetings with groups from Latin American countries, which now plan to hold demonstrations that day. Tariq Ali, the Britain-based writer of Pakistani origin won a standing ovation after making a passionate case against war.

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.

”We cannot turn away from the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and return to the laws of the jungle,” said Pierre Calame from the group ‘Alianca por um Mundo Responsavel e Solidaire’ in the opening debate on globalisation.

”We are already in the law of the jungle,” replied Ricardo Navarro of Friends of the Earth International. ”The difference now is that the caveman speaks English.”

Shared beliefs clearly do not mean cloned views.

Issues around human rights, diversity, equality and ethnicity were debated extensively at several meetings. Education, health and social security were discussed as matters of rights, rather than benefits.

Some groups also took off from where the World Summit on Sustainable Development had ended in Johannesburg to, debating biodiversity, water and energy as needs that must be developed sustainably.

A youth camp that drew thousands became an experiment in living the new way. Youths from more than 20 countries learnt to practise waste disposal in productive ways, to develop respect for water and land resources, and to live in a community spirit.

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.

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.

Per capita consumption here is so much less than in Davos, the city or the conference – but Porto Alegre seemed a much happier place.