Chaos among people of goodwill - Flip Side

"Another world is possible," the slogan of the World Social Forum, seemed at first to be confirmed by the sheer size of this year's anti-globalization--and anti-war--gathering in Porto Alegre. A hundred thousand people showed up from fifty one countries, making the forum twice as large as last year's and at least ten times larger than any conference I'd ever attended. Hotels were packed, right down to the hot-sheets motels that offer sex toys on your room service menu. About 25,000 young people happily made do in tents along the lakefront, turning their encampment into a kind of utopian favela, with guitars and earnest discussions sounding into the night. Here was the "other world" in gestation, ready to replace the suicidal old one.

There's something to be said for size. A mere few thousand people could never have generated the excitement of the 100,000--some of them locals--who greeted Brazil's new leftwing president, Lula, at a vast, multi-acre amphitheater. And maybe it took 40,000 packed bodies to ignite the mood at the final rally, where the crowd sang, did the wave, and passed flags from hand to hand around the stadium in a moment of collective euphoria. At times like these, you catch the empowering hit that comes from knowing you are part of "something larger than yourself," and that that something can succeed.

It was especially good for us Americans--excuse me, North Americans--to be so overwhelmingly outnumbered. Back in the U.S., we tend to think "we are the world," or at least the only source of meaningful agency within it, as if our nation's imperial power somehow makes our activism more central and significant than anyone else's. So here we were--living-wage campaigners from Miami, affordable housing activists from Boston, campus anti-war organizers from Denver--lost in the crowd of Brazilian trade unionists, indigenous people in their native outfits, Argentinean militants, feminists of all colors and nationalities, members of peasant organizations, water rights activists, students from Manila, Seoul, and Rome. The fact that English was only a distant third among the forum's most commonly spoken languages, behind Portuguese and Spanish, added to our newfound sense of proportion.

A point comes, though, where size exceeds administrative capacity, and this year's forum went well beyond it. To handle the numbers, sessions were distributed among at least three sites, each about a twenty-five minute bus ride from the others, making it impossible to, say, sample the cyberspace workshop and then drop by the meeting to discuss the war on drugs. The full program wasn't available until the third day, so it was impossible to plot one's day in advance. Many sessions mysteriously changed venues more than once, leaving you to trek from site to site and building to building. Every time I asked a veteran forum-goer--like Britain's Peter Waterman or New Delhi's Jai Sen--what they thought of this year's event, they responded in the same words: "It's out of control."

Chaos among people of goodwill is not necessarily a terrible thing, but in this case it threatened to defeat the purpose of the gathering. No one expects the forum to come up with resolutions and action plans; it's just supposed to be a space for networking, mutual education, and dialogue about our common vision. But the confusion undermined even these modest goals. I quickly abandoned my plan of focusing on the Argentinean crisis and began to settle for almost any session I could find, excluding only the more obscure ones on topics like Esperanto and--don't ask--aluminum. Many sessions on hot topics were shamefully under-attended, simply because no one could find them or they had somehow been omitted from the program. At one point there was a near "insurrection" at the main forum site, or so I was told by a witness, because of the shortage of programs.

These are not just your usual tourist complaints. In fact, let me say right here that basics like food, restrooms, transportation, and Internet access were all in place, and handled more deftly than in most U.S. leftwing conferences I've attended. But given that one aim of the forum was to provide the space for imagining a post-capitalist or at least post-neoliberal world, the chaos began to take on a substantively ominous quality: If we can't organize a conference of 100,000 people, what about a world of six billion?

For me, the question came into sharp focus at a panel--again, sadly under-attended--on economic visions." A British socialist and an Italian advocate of "participatory economics" (or "Parecon," as in the title of U.S. radical Michael Albert's admirably ambitious new book) offered familiar left versions of "another world"--one in which markets had been replaced with a system of democratic planning. Then a former mayor of Porto Alegre described a real-life experiment in democratic planning--the city's "participatory budget," introduced by the Workers' Party (P.T.). For a year, hundreds of ordinary citizens representing different neighborhoods and themes--health, welfare, housing, transportation, etc.--met repeatedly to devise the next year's budget, or at least that half of the budget other than fixed expenses: an impressive, and clearly strenuous, exercise.