PORTO ALEGRE, BRAZIL -- The third meeting of the World Social Forum -- a gathering of the tribes of international civil society that is meant to steal the thunder from the World Economic Forum, which met last week in Davos, Switzerland -- ended as it began, with an exuberant, if not exactly focused, march through the streets of Porto Alegre. Banners and flags proclaimed everything from "War in Iraq Not!" and "Stop the Monster Sharon" to "Give Bolivia Back Its Gas" and "Lesbians Against Free Trade," while three sound trucks more or less bracketing the procession offered the marchers a kind of Battle of the Latin American Protest Songs. As with the march that opened the forum, the official raison d'être was to voice opposition to an invasion of Iraq and to the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas. But as with everything at the forum, it ended up becoming an omnibus measure: In Porto Alegre, everybody got a chance to shout.
Life at the forum was frantic. There were conferences, panels, roundtables, testimonials, workshops, rallies and teach-ins -- and they all happened at the same time. The sheer volume of events forced the casual observer to make some difficult, even surreal choices: Would it be a testimonial by Anita Guevara, Che's daughter, or Hollywood sidekick-cum-social activist Danny Glover? Biodance for a New Humanity or Capoeira (a Brazilian martial art) as Social Protest? A visit to a Landless Workers' Movement collective farm or an hour-long guided meditation at the Galactic Peace Tent? The offerings never failed to surprise: A Basque delegation, openly opposed to the Basque National Liberation Movement's armed campaign, headed up a conference on drug legalization ("War on Drugs Not!"), while an indigenous peoples' rights group instigated an impromptu streaking session when the police prohibited them from bathing au natural. Meanwhile, even the big-name speakers occasionally had their talks interrupted by the odd drum-wielding procession passing by the doors of their conference rooms. At times, the chorus of divergent messages -- there were more than 100,000 participants -- got confusing, dissonant or even schizophrenic, but it never came to blows, and the non-self-consciously diverse tableau that the forum presented was, even to this jaded reporter, moving.
Jaded, in part, because of forums past. Last year, for example, as a result of a clerical error/grave misunderstanding, I got signed up for a mettle-testing, 24-hour Rio-to-Porto Alegre bus ride with the Brazilian Communist Youth League. I thought I was catching a ride with the Rio State University bus; the communists thought I was Brazilian. By the time we realized our mistake, it was too late. "If anybody asks," my sole friend on the bus warned me, "just say you are Canadian or something. These guys hate Americans." She wasn't kidding: They'd brought a whole portfolio of graphic picket signs depicting a devil-horned George W. Bush in various poses -- sinking a knife into a bleeding Palestine, puffing clouds of black smoke from a cigar that was actually a rolled-up Kyoto Protocol and violating a prostrate and buxom South America tied up in ropes that read "ALCA" (the Latin American abbreviation for the Free Trade Area of the Americas). When at one point I overheard the organizers telling the rank and file that they had to be on the lookout for spies and quislings, I realized that my infiltration of the bus was a paranoid leftist's dream come true. The truth would never convince them: I was no spy, no agent of imperialism; I was just a poor schmuck too cheap to buy my own bus ticket. Things got a little tense around the three-hour mark, as word got around of my nationality, but then some forward-thinking soul at the back of the bus lit up a joint. Guitars and bongos were taken up, and differences were set aside.
This was as good a prelude as any to what lay in store at the first two World Social Forums and, to a lesser extent, this year's. Though meant to be an incubator of new ideas, and occasionally successful as such, the forum is also, inevitably, a kind of museum of the left. All the exotic species are here: Maoists, Trotskyites, crypto-Stalinists and, if one's T-shirt is any indication of political alignment, a vast army of Che Guevarists. Indeed, all things Cuban are permanently fashionable among this crowd, as were -- this year anyway -- the Venezuelan flag and Hugo Chávez memorabilia. (Chávez actually showed up on Sunday for a few hours to soak up the sympathy.) Vladimir Lenin and Antonio Gramschi are always popular bets, too, though the Joseph Stalin shirts that were on sale last year have happily been taken off the market.
Indeed, though there are still enough radicals around to make a Prospect-style progressive feel like a member of The Heritage Foundation, the overall tone of the forum has shifted -- fewer scripted cries of protest and more constructive criticism, less defense and more offense. Along with the Stalin T-shirts went the enormous anti-United States billboard that graced the entrance to the forum in 2002, as well as some of the less comforting displays of Yankiphobia -- compulsive U.S. flag burning, for example -- that plagued the first two forums. Perhaps that had to do with a much larger Yankee presence this time around. In the forum's first year, there were very few Americans -- 50 or 60 at most -- representing only a handful of organizations. This year there were probably more than 500; the nonprofit group Jobs for Justice alone brought 130 delegates, including representatives of the AFL-CIO and other labor groups.
I'm not just cheering for the home team here. At a time when most foreign media portray us all as willing and eager proponents of an abusive, imperious and exploitative invasion of Iraq, the presence of real, live Americans who are active critics of our domestic and international politics was of inestimable importance. Kevin Danaher of Global Exchange, during a conference called "Voices from the U.S. Against the War," made a stirring speech, concluding, "Many of us stood up against our own government, risking our jobs, our welfare, even our physical safety, to stand in solidarity with many of you, when your countries were under the control of dictators who had U.S. government support. Now we need you to stand in solidarity with us, as we stand up to a dictatorial government bent on war." He received an overwhelming ovation, and days later I was still hearing Brazilians say that they never thought this kind of opposition exists in the States. Of course, watching the Democrats in Congress, why would you? Still, those Americans who attended the forum made it just a little harder to demonize us. And, who knows, they may have actually laid the groundwork for a real international anti-war coalition.
But a more fundamental reason for the new optimism surrounding the forum is entirely native: This past year's total inversion of Brazil's political landscape. At the first and second forums, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva aka Lula was present as the perennial, losing candidate of the radical opposition. It was here in 2001 that I first saw Lula speak -- and was first impressed by his ability to talk nuanced, practical policy positions to small groups of professionals and emotional, popular politics to large crowds. Now president, he has lost none of his ability to stir emotions: On Friday night he addressed 70,000 people at a lakeside amphitheater, striding up and down the stage with mike in hand -- something hard to imagine Bush pulling off -- and left them roaring in applause. Explaining why he had decided to venture into the wolves' den of Davos, where he would rub shoulders with the likes of Bill Gates and George Soros, Lula promised to bring to the captains of international capitalism what he called the "Porto Alegre message." "Instead of spending billions of dollars on war, we should seek peace, and use our energy and money to end inequality, misery and hunger!" he proclaimed. Lula thus distilled in a single sentence what is perhaps the essence of the international left, and for a moment the crowd, for all its multiple ethnicities, nationalities, party lines and affiliations, was brought together by the astonishing reality before them: One of their own was president of Brazil, and he had not -- so far, at least -- sold out.
This turning of the tide was evident as well in this year's appearance by forum top-draw Noam Chomsky. His message was uncharacteristically optimistic: Davos is shrouded in gloom over corporate scandals and lack of trust in leaders while Porto Alegre is basking in Lula's victory and the downfall of neoliberalism in Argentina. The near-universal opposition to a war in Iraq has won over a few brave leaders such as Germany's Gerhard Schröder and France's Jacques Chirac, and it continues to raise the political cost of warmongering for Bush and Britain's Tony Blair. But while Chomsky got in a few deft jabs at the establishment and neoliberal economics, he never really went for Bush's jugular. Perhaps he didn't need to. As Indian author Arundathi Roy put it in her mellifluous address, which followed Chomsky's and benefited substantially by comparison with the professor's arid monotone, though "the empire" (American power, that is) has not been stopped, it has been forced to show its true colors. Once a nation has declared it official doctrine to maintain "overwhelming superiority of force" by preemptively attacking anyone who might one day conceivably pose a threat, clever, crafty analysis of establishment rhetoric becomes unnecessary. Bush's imperialism speaks for itself.
Despite Chomsky's tepid remarks and his rhetorical efforts to undermine his own popularity -- he couches his best lines in an irony too deadpan to clear the language barrier -- he saw his unlikely elevation to rock-star status completed at this year's forum. In 2002 things got ugly when the hall he was to speak in became dangerously overcrowded and event organizers secreted him away to an empty room nearby. Just before Chomsky's talk was to begin, officials announced to the expectant crowd that, for technical reasons, the speech would be presented via closed-circuit TV -- a would-be fait accompli but for the consent of the crowd, which organizers forgot to manufacture. Furious spectators trashed one of the projection screens and shouted down the public-address system with cries of "Hypocrites!" and "Injustícia!". Lesson learned, this year Chomsky was booked at a small soccer stadium, where he was greeted by nearly 20,000 eager fans wearing simultaneous translation headsets and doing the wave. This mass appeal is, I think, indicative of Chomsky's role to many on the left as a grand intellectual father figure, a philosophical Poo-bah. He provides leftist critics with arguments that, though they may not be constructive or even sincere, are immensely gratifying. There is a kind of "nyah-nyah" schoolyard smugness to them: One feels he has tripped up foes in a web of logical contradictions, even if those contradictions are the result of a deliberate, selective literal-mindedness.
But where would the left be without big ideas? I myself, after a few days of wading through the forum's offerings, realized that I had been unconsciously in search of an answer to what I see as the central question of modern liberalism: What grand theory will replace the radical "free market" anti-Keynesianism that has ruled the economic roost for the past 20 years? I attended several symposia on a post-neoliberal world theme, listening to the likes of Tariq Ali, Alexander Buzgalin and a host of others deliver perfectly adequate critiques of the neoliberal model. However, when it came to naming a replacement, they had little to offer besides good, old European social democracy. Now don't get me wrong, European social democracy is just fine with me. I also happen to like quaint European cafés -- but the former is as much a solution to the problems of neoliberalism as the latter is a solution to the problem of Starbucks. Maybe I am asking too much of dedicated, sincere and successful social activists, but the fact remains: I have yet to find my Poo-bah.
But if the forum did not exactly produce any breakthroughs in theoretical economics, it did provide some truly first-rate mingling. Thirty thousand of the participants were delegates from one or another civil-society organization, and during the 200 or so workshops that filled up their afternoons, countless contacts were made, future protests planned and proposals, manifestos, letters and statements drafted. Moreover, a host of regional meetings and professional congresses, such as the African Social Forum, Urban Planners in Solidarity and the International Harm Reduction Movement, were important in their own right. If the worldwide march against the war in Iraq on Feb.15 or the protest against the World Trade Organization's ministerial conference in Cancún, Mexico, this September are successful, it will have been in large part because of the organizing done in Porto Alegre.
In forums past, I felt that indulging the drive to be overly inclusive compromised the effectiveness of these workshops. Inconsistent and sometimes contradictory proposals were grouped together to avoid telling anyone that they were wrong. In 2001, I was part of a workshop on genetically modified organisms (GMOs), which are currently banned in Brazil (though Monsanto, a biotechnology multinational, is fighting hard to change that). At one point, our group statement, which sought to reflect the ideas of all those present, advocated both research on GMOs to determine negative side effects -- Monsanto's own results not to be trusted -- and the destruction of all GMO plants in Brazil. A friend in the food security workshop had a similar experience, saying: "First they say they want to stop all food imports, then they want to finance substitutes through exports. It's just not economically feasible." But the fact was that these people didn't want to hear why their ideas, their demands, were economically infeasible. They had heard it all before. This was their chance to not be contradicted by know-it-all economists, to have their cries heard and appreciated without critique. And in that lay the secret purpose of the first forum: to create a world where righteous action still had some place, and to find some way out of the predetermined prisoner's dilemma of neoliberal economics. The problem is that in order to do this, you have to banish all economic and logical rigor, not to mention reality.
Indeed, the first forum was referred to in the media and even by then-Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso as "the Anti-Davos," and this negative self-definition was reflected in its oppositional and aggressive tone. (When George Soros agreed to participate in a Davos-Porto Alegre summit via satellite, he ended up getting called a "blood-stained monster" by Madres de Plaza de Mayo leader Hebe de Bonafini.) Whether it was Lula's victory, the larger pool of participants or simply the maturity of a gathering that seems to be coming into its own, this year's atmosphere was more cooperative, more creative and, by my lights, more realistic. No longer anti-Davos -- how can you be "anti" when Lula, your bearded hero, is there making the case for a worldwide fund against hunger? -- the forum was simply Porto Alegre. The city itself, an industrious, handsome inland capital, greeted the first and second forums with a fair amount of skepticism. But it opened its arms this year, with "Peace" and "Justice" signs hung even in the windows of mall boutiques; "Goodbye, Forum, We'll Miss You," read one billboard. The event moves to India next year. So you have to wonder: At World Social Forum IV, will everybody be wearing Mohandas Gandhi T-shirts?
Benjamin Lessing is a writer living in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
