One No, Many Yeses

by Paul Kingsnorth

  The World Social Forum is a riposte to all this: not a protest against it, but an alternative forum, positing an alternative future; a conspiracy of a wholly different shade. This year, the World Economic Forum (theme: ‘Leadership in Fragile Times’) has switched its location, for the first time, from Davos to New York. The organisers say that this is in a spirit of ‘solidarity’ with the stricken city – a magnanimous gesture which also has the convenient effect of reducing the likelihood of the kind of vast demonstrations that besieged Davos’s mountaintop retreat in 2001.

  What is on display in Brazil is evidence of just how far this movement has come in one short year. The second World Social Forum is bigger, more complex, more sophisticated and more significant than the first, and is also proving something of a global inspiration. Already it has spawned a host of similar positive gatherings on several continents: wherever activists meet now you are likely to find a ‘social forum’ debating ways and means of changing the world. In the last year alone, a European Social Forum has been held in Italy, an African Social Forum in Ethiopia, and an Asian Social Forum in India. Mini forums have sprung up in Genoa, Monterrey in Mexico, Buenos Aires in Argentina, Durban in South Africa, Beirut in the Lebanon and in Washington and New York, with many more coming soon. They rarely garner the media attention that a good tear-gas and cobblestones punch-up with the police does – positive agendas don’t make such good copy as ‘violent protest’ – but they are likely to define the future of this movement in a way that street showdowns like Seattle defined its past.

  This year’s event at Porto Alegre, like its predecessor, operates on principles I can almost recite by now with my eyes closed: opposition to ‘the domination of the world by capital’, the desire to build a world based on the principles of human rights, democracy and social justice, rather than on ‘a process of globalisation commanded by large multinational corporations’; and a plurality of participation. This last point means, of course, that no one person or organisation is in charge of the WSF or can speak for it; that no ‘final declaration’ will be issued that everyone will be expected to agree with and that no political parties or single ideologies will be allowed to hijack it.6

  I’ve been looking forward to the World Social Forum for months. This, for me, is something big, something new and something wholly different. Unlike Seattle, unlike Genoa, unlike Prague, Porto Alegre is a mass gathering of people who come not to react to something else, but to push a positive agenda forwards; to scheme and to dream. The test now is what that agenda is made of, and how it can help me to answer certain questions I’ve been storing up on my travels. How co-ordinated, for example, is this movement; and how co-ordinated does it want to be? What ideas is it coalescing around, and are they the same ideas I’ve seen developing from Chiapas to Cochabamba to Soweto? If so, how can they be applied on a global scale? How will it reconcile some of its internal tensions? And how can it make itself heard, just five months after 11 September 2001, in a new world of revenge and war and uncertain futures?

  The slogan of the World Social Forum – so ubiquitous that by the end of the week I never want to hear it again as long as I live – is a simple one: ‘Another world is possible’. At first it seems trite. Then, after a few days of seeing it written on everything from banners to coffee mugs, it occurs to me that its effectiveness depends on its pronunciation. Not ‘another world is possible’, but ‘another world is possible’. Not an expression of desperation, but one of defiance – and of hope.

  I’m sitting in an uncomfortable moulded plastic chair on the first floor of a university building listening to a respectable American MBA and ex-Harvard economist explaining how to abolish capitalism. David Korten – middle-aged, bearded, shirt and tie – has a career history as conventional as establishment economics gets: Ph.D. and MBA from Stanford University Business School, training in ‘organisation theory and business strategy’, business studies teacher at Harvard. All of this makes his belief, brought about by twenty years’ working on development projects in Asia, that the economic model he had been taught to promote was causing more problems than it solved, very hard to ignore. His 1995 book When Corporations Rule the World, still probably the best summary of the arguments against the corporate economy, has since become one of the movement’s primers. Now he is impressing upon an intrigued audience the need to do away with everything he grew up believing in.

  ‘We’ve been conditioned to believe,’ he is saying, mildly, as I take my seat, ‘that there are only two economic systems – a state socialist system in which governments own all the assets or a “capitalist” economy. “Capitalism” is a word which emerged in the eighteenth century to describe a system in which a few control production to the exclusion of the many. The crucial point to understand is that capitalism and a true market economy are not the same thing. In a true market economy, many small firms, rooted in real communities, trade and compete with each other. Under capitalism, large, rootless transnational corporations with no responsibility to anyone but their shareholders destroy real market economies and monopolise production. Let’s be clear here – the idea is precisely to abolish capitalism, and with it the institutional form of the limited liability corporation.’

  What I’m hearing is a curious but not an unusual paradox: a believer in market economics who hates capitalism. There are a fair number of these milling around the corridors of Porto Alegre: people who believe that small property, rooted markets, accountable companies and equitably distributed land are the basis for stable economies and stable societies, and who believe that the current model of supposedly ‘free’ trade – ‘free’ from any social obligations or responsibilities – destroys that as effectively as any socialist regime. It’s an interesting approach – though one that plenty within the movement reject as ‘reformist’. Korten is trying to explain how it might work. Someone, reasonably, has asked him what strategy could be pursued to achieve his aims.

  ‘The strategy,’ he says, ‘. . . well, there already exists a network of thousands and thousands of real, locally rooted markets and communities. There always has done. So the strategy would be to strengthen and promote these as you pull apart the large corporations.’ He holds up a copy of a report he’s been preparing with some of the other people on the platform with him. All of them are from the San Francisco-based International Forum on Globalization (IFG), a thinktank staffed by wonks like Korten which likes to ‘think the unthinkable’ on globalisation. The report contains some suggestions that the delegates over at the World Economic Forum would find most discomfiting.

  ‘In here are some bold but workable proposals,’ says Korten. ‘The World Bank is in the business of maintaining external debt. Let’s close the World Bank and replace it with an international clearing union to get rid of those debts. The IMF is in the business of entrenching poverty through structural adjustment. Let’s replace the IMF with an international finance organisation to help countries control financial flows, maintain trade balances and ensure that investment is actually useful for people. The WTO is in the business of regulating governments so that they don’t regulate corporations. Let’s replace it with a UN-mandated organisation to regulate corporations, track and prosecute corporate criminals, hold corporations legally and financially accountable and impose an enforceable code of conduct for all transnationals, which must include a ban on corporate involvement in politics. Let’s unify global governance under a restructured UN, and ensure that economies work for people’s needs, and not the other way around. Let’s eliminate corporate welfare, promote clean energy, institute land reform, promote sustainable farming. All this is possible, workable and practical.’

  It’s a hell of a wish-list but, as Korten says, it’s a workable one. How to make it happen, of course, is another matter. That, as ever, comes down to political will: and that comes down to a widespread and forcible demand for real change.

  ‘These are big and bold changes,’ says Korten, ‘but with real power behind our demands,
they are practical and possible. And that power comes through building this movement, and through changing public opinion. I’ve been working on these issues for a long time, and I can see things changing. The people in the World Bank used to laugh at me ten years ago when I came out with this stuff. I’m meeting a bunch of them tonight to talk about why we think they should be abolished, and they’re not laughing any more. Their legitimacy in the eyes of the world’s people is being worn away. And when your legitimacy goes, your system usually follows.’

  When I file out of the room an hour or so later, I feel invigorated. You didn’t have to agree with Korten’s ideas to see that there was real creative thinking in the air as he expounded them. After so many protests and rebuffs, after putting up with so much rubbish from defenders of the status quo, it’s refreshing to see that this young movement can have big ideas all of its own – it’s refreshing to be setting the agenda, rather than rejecting it.

  Does it want them though: Big Ideas? Aren’t they supposed to be part of the problem, not part of the solution? One of my worries before I arrived at the World Social Forum was that it would be used as a platform for people and organisations who were convinced they had the One True Way to solve every problem on Earth; convinced that the way out of our current mess could only be another grand enterprise, a new Big Idea. Would the Forum be co-opted, as the old Workers’ Internationals were, by an intellectual elite, a vanguard of ideologues pushing their Utopian visions on the backs of a mass movement?

  This question made me nervous before I arrived, but it’s making me progressively less nervous the more I see. For what I thought, and hoped, was true of this movement as a whole seems to be true of Porto Alegre: no one here is willing to be pushed around any more. If Lenin’s ghost is here, it must be disappointed.

  Still, big questions remain. Autonomy, economic independence, local democracy – all these could perhaps be foundation stones of a new political worldview, but they can’t be all it is built of. How will they deal with global financial architecture, with trade flows, with international conflicts? How will they deal with climate change or global environmental destruction? How, in other words, does probably the most international political movement in history apply its principles internationally without losing their essence, and without losing the lust for diversity and democracy that makes it what it is?

  Korten’s approach gives some idea of how this might happen: institutions and approaches that are international in scope and outlook, but often also local and specific in much of their application. A ‘New New World Order’ which looks forward to a world of co-operation and internationalism, but which is rooted too in participatory democracy and community control. Can it work? We don’t know; not yet. But ideas like this – like many of the ideas coming out of Porto Alegre – are both big and small, global and local. Most importantly, they are liberating rather than prescriptive. So the IFG’s proposals, for example, don’t prescribe one economic or social model for all, but they do remove the worst of the obstacles – illegitimate corporate power, iniquitous debt, skewed terms of trade, the power of the markets, corrupted democracy – which stand in the way of people changing their societies for the better.

  That, at least, is the theory. Whether what is happening elsewhere will back it up is for me to find out. If, that is, I can find my way around.

  Fortunately, I’m not alone. My girlfriend Katharine is here, too, so we can get lost together. It’s the next morning and we’re both sitting on the grass in an area of the university campus that has been given over to food stalls run by agricultural co-operatives selling cuisine from the four corners of the world. We’ve managed an early start, but already the crowds are beginning to build around us. There’s a student dressed exactly like Che Guevara, right down to the red-starred beret and scraggy beard; a couple of NGO leaders, shirts tucked in, delegate badges prominent; an Indymedia journalist filming three Indian women holding a banner protesting against the Narmada dams; two Belgian farmers; a Malaysian academic in T-shirt and jeans; a gaggle of law students; a French MEP. We’re basking in the morning sunlight drinking fresh orange juice, flicking through the programme and deciding how to use our day most productively.

  ‘What,’ I am saying, ‘is “Fisco’s little store”, and why is it listed under “workshops”?’

  ‘Why don’t you go along and find out?’ says Katharine.

  ‘Because it sounds stupid. Sounds like something you’d find at the Edinburgh Festival.’

  ‘Let’s go to this one instead, then – “another socialist world is possible”. I must have missed the first one. We could ask them when it was.’

  ‘Or what about “A people’s capitalism”? Bet that one’s popular.’

  ‘Or “The interdependence of all beings”?’

  ‘“Recycling residue: an alternative to social integration”!’

  ‘“Relax and multilogue: a space of silence and extended language”!?’

  ‘“Cartography in the new millennium”! Hold me back!’

  This could go on for some time. It’s one of the wonders of the World Social Forum that anyone can turn up and do a workshop, meeting or event on any subject they like, and nobody will try to stop them. It’s deliberate, it’s multitudinous, it’s diversity at work. My democratic heart is warmed to see a space being created in which people can, indeed, relax and multilogue without being oppressed by anyone else. I just have no intention of going anywhere near it.

  Instead, I go to a packed and popular press conference. Noam Chomsky, mild-mannered Massachusetts professor, dissident thinker and owner of what may be the largest brain in the West, is one of the Forum’s biggest draws. Later, he will almost cause a riot when thousands cram the halls and corridors of the university, forcing a last-minute change to a bigger room which still won’t begin to accommodate the numbers who want to hear him quietly expounding his refreshingly egalitarian opinions. A mildly disturbing cult of personality has hung around Chomsky for years, but he never seems to notice. This morning, in the Porto Alegre town hall, under vast, pompous stone columns, classical murals and heavy chandeliers, he is telling the press what he thinks of his government’s ‘war on terror’. He’s also telling them what he thinks of the World Social Forum, and of the movement it represents.

  A local reporter has asked him if all this World Social Forum stuff isn’t a bit, well, pie in the sky. What alternatives has it come up with, and what examples can the professor give of any countries that have actually made them work?

  ‘Well, you could have come to me two centuries ago,’ responds Chomsky, ‘and asked, “Can you give me an example of a society that functions without slavery, or with a functioning parliamentary democracy or with full women’s rights?” and the answer would have been no. Following on from that, the response should have been “right, well let’s go ahead and create such societies”, and people did. The people here – many of them have come with alternative programmes proposed in great detail and explicitness on issue after issue. They can work, and they should be pursued. There is plenty to be excited about, if you have the vision.’

  Another journalist pops up. What’s the state of the anti-globalisation movement these days, she wants to know. Chomsky does a little frown.

  ‘I think,’ he says, ‘that we should be careful not to call this an anti-globalisation forum. Every progressive popular movement’s goal throughout history has been to create a movement of solidarity which is global – in the interests of the people of the world. This meeting is about ways and means of transferring leadership from centres of power to the general population, and that’s a global ambition. In my view, this is the only globalisation forum – there’s an anti-globalisation forum taking place right now in New York which is trying to prevent this development. I believe that it is unlikely to succeed.’

  It’s only a couple of hours later, sitting in one of the university’s cavernous but packed lecture halls – steel roof beams hung with spotlights, hundreds of people
wearing simultaneous translation headsets, Indymedia journalists videoing everything that moves from the edges of the room – that I realise that Chomsky is not alone: that something wider is going on at Porto Alegre. Speaker after speaker, delegate after delegate, is working to reposition the way the movement is seen by the wider world.

  Up on the stage this time it’s a conference on international trade. Speakers from Malaysia, South Africa, Belgium, Mexico and the USA are putting out proposals to change the terms of international trade, which they say favours the rich. So far, several proposals have been widely agreed upon: abolishing or radically reworking the WTO; subordinating trade agreements to UN treaties on human rights and the environment; developing global policies to protect local markets and national industries; stopping any new trade round; removing agriculture from the WTO agreements to prevent further destruction of small farms by colossal agribusinesses. Hector de la Cueva, of Mexico’s Alianza Social Continental, talks of ‘neoliberalism’s disastrous effects on Latin America’, and of his organisation’s efforts to create a continental alliance focused on ending external debt, refusing any more IMF or World Bank ‘adjustments’, taxing financial transactions and protecting small farming. Martin Khor, of the Third World Network in Malaysia, and one of the global movement’s most prominent economists, is even more stark.

  ‘We should not be negotiating with the WTO,’ he says, simply. ‘We should be working to delegitimise it and build popular support to prevent any new agreement liberalising trade in services. This organisation should be rolled back, not negotiated with.’

  The next speaker is Lori Wallach, an American trade lawyer from the watchdog organisation Public Citizen and the woman who probably did more than anyone else to expose and thus destroy the ill-fated Multilateral Agreement on Investment in 1998. She is small, blonde, fast-talking and brilliant, and she knows how to hold an audience’s attention. In her hand she is holding a very, very thick document.