Posted on 19-2-2002

The End Of The Beginning
by Paul Kingsnorth

The tide is turning and the times a-changing. The second World Social Forum
in Porto Alegre is no longer simply an ‘alternative’ to Davos’s illustrious
jamboree ­ it is a phenomenon in its own right, a key channel for making
the arguments and longings of global protest and radical movements into a
coherent force for a different social order.

In January last year, ten thousand dissidents against the system we have
been conditioned to call ‘globalisation’ gathered in the Gaucho capital of
southern Brazil, the city of Porto Alegre. They came for the first ever
World Social Forum (WSF). Timed to coincide with the World Economic Forum
in Davos, Switzerland, the WSF was billed as the first truly global meeting
in which alternatives to global capitalism would be on show.

Two weeks ago, the second World Social Forum, again in Porto Alegre, began:
picking up where 2001 had left off, but in a very different world. After 11
September, Enron and Argentina, things were never going to be the same. The
same applied to the World Economic Forum, which moved from Davos to New
York. The move was reported as a symbol of solidarity with Manhattan, but
rumours abounded that corporate leaders were afraid to fly and that the
Swiss government was no longer prepared to tolerate mass protests against
the summit.

For the ‘anti-globalisation’ movement, the second WSF could become a moment
of crystallisation. The movement was dismissed after 11 September as dead
in the water. Supposedly born with the protests at Seattle, it had
apparently been brought down with the Twin Towers of the World Trade
Centre. Instead, this year at Porto Alegre the ‘movement of movements’
showed that, far from dying off, it had emerged stronger: it had even, in a
way, grown up. The number of attendees increased six-fold. The gathering of
60,000 caused real problems for the organisers. It was impossible to move
fifty yards through the main conference venue in anything less than an
hour. What could easily have been a talking shop, or a gathering of
cautious reformists, turned out, for the most part, to be a powerful
collection of people, movements and ideas ­ an event which Noam Chomsky,
one of the Forum’ s biggest draws, called “the first real promise of a
genuine International”.

In over a thousand conferences, workshops and seminars, some of the
smartest thinkers in the movement ­ economists, trade lawyers,
educationalists, philosophers, writers ­ laid out their stalls, laden with
sometimes new, often exciting, occasionally unconvincing but almost always
challenging ideas. Representatives of grassroots movements and NGOs with
support bases numbering millions talked about their work, made links, found
common ground, discussed strategies for the future. Altogether, despite its
limitations and problems, the second World Social Forum was a significant
success. A success which shattered two of the most widespread myths about
the anti-globalisation movement.

Myth One: we, the anti-globalisers. One of these myths is that this is an
‘anti-globalisation’ movement at all. Chomsky, in his forensic way, said
what many others repeated over the six days of the 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. In my view, Porto Alegre is the only globalisation forum.
There’s an anti-globalisation forum taking place in New York, which is
trying to prevent this development.” This theme was touched on time and
time again, as delegates tried to dismantle the myth, powerfully played
upon by proponents of corporate libertarianism, that this movement is a
collection of ‘antis’ opposed to an inevitable historical process.

Lori Wallach, the American trade lawyer who almost single-handedly launched
the global campaign which wrecked the proposed Multilateral Agreement on
Investment four years ago, took it up when she said, “the enemy labels us
‘anti’. They are the antis ­ they are holding on to a failed status quo.
We’ re the pros ­ we’re pro-democracy, diversity, equity, environmental
health. We must go forward as a movement for global justice.”
Myth two: we, the anti-poor.

The second myth, shattered at Porto Alegre by sheer numbers, is the idea
put about by people and institutions as varied (and as similar) as the
World Bank, the WTO, Clare Short, George Bush, Vicente Fox and Tony Blair.
It is the accusation that this movement is ‘anti-poor’ ­ a collection of
ill-informed young rabble-rousers, neo-Luddites and protectionists from the
developed world, driven by ideology, ignorance or self-interest to oppose a
system which, through the spread of trade and industrialisation, lifts the
world’s poor out of poverty. “Opposition to globalisation comes mainly from
the rich world” wrote former IMF executive Stanley Fischer in The Economist
recently, in a recent example of this spin. Fischer didn’t come to Porto
Alegre, where he would have witnessed tens of thousands of poor farmers,
fisherfolk, industrial workers, landless peasants, indigenous people and
slum dwellers who had come in far greater numbers than the representatives
of western NGOs.

Via Campesina, the global peasant farmers union, was here in its thousands,
camped in a local park. Members of Brazil’s landless workers movement
(MST), one of the organisations responsible for the birth of the WSF in the
first place, slept in a local gym with other farmers and landless people
from across Latin America. Township dwellers from South Africa mingled with
Thai rice farmers, Indian women about to be made homeless by the Narmada
dam, Bangladeshi fishermen, Afghani women fighting fundamentalism,
Palestinian torture victims, Quilombos from the free slave colonies of
Colombia and Amazon Indians in t-shirts and feather head-dresses.
All were united in their opposition to an economic system which, in
different yet strikingly similar ways, is making their lives not better,
but considerably worse. Either the poor themselves are anti the interests
of the poor, or Stanley Fischer and his kind are telling us fibs. The
evidence in Porto Alegre was not on his side Ways and means.

So what, apart from rhetoric and sheer numbers, was on display at Porto
Alegre? With the huge diversity of the participants ­ from Oxfam to a
ragbag of communist parties, from local anarchists to global market
reformers ­ there was never going to be any one line, manifesto, or agreed
statement on a way forward. This diversity is a strength which should
ensure that what emerges will not be yet another, homogenising top-down
blueprint for a new utopia ­ market or state-based, old left or new right ­
but a collection of realities and systems operating within a single world.
But the diversity is also what has made it so difficult until now for the
movement to focus on coming together around an agreed programme for the
necessary steps to tackle the global institutional framework, regulate
global trade and corporate power and take the democratic project to its
next stage. Nevertheless, common themes began to emerge at Porto Alegre,
and it is this which suggests that the movement is maturing. One area of
broad agreement was the concept of the ‘global commons’ ­ certain areas of
life which are, or should be, public ­ common ­ property, protected in
perpetuity from privatisation and commodification.

Such areas include the world’s genetic and biological heritage, basic needs
like water, the atmosphere (which cuts out the use of ‘carbon trading’ to
tackle climate change), public services (particularly health and
education), the airwaves, and the land. From such general agreement came
the launch of the Porto Alegre Treaty on the Genetic Commons, put together
by a coalition of scientists and advocacy groups, which will be taken to
the Johannesburg (Rio+10) Earth Summit in September. It calls for the
recognition that “the Earth’s gene pool … exists in nature and therefore
must not be claimed as intellectual property even if purified and
synthesised in a laboratory.”

Reining in the corporations

Another common theme emerged around the issue of global economics.
Attendees foresee the abolition of the Bretton Woods institutions such as
the World Bank, IMF and the WTO, and a new charter for the radical
reining-in of corporations. Some of the most interesting proposals came
from the San Francisco-based International Forum on Globalisation (IFG),
which proposed unifying global governance under a restructured, genuinely
democratic UN. Its agenda includes creating an International Insolvency
Court, an International Finance Organisation and an Organisation for
Corporate Accountability (which would impose tight rules on business
lobbying, and oversee the banning of corporate donations to political
parties). Corporate subsidies must be eliminated, business costs must be
internalised, and directors and shareholders must take liability for
corporate wrongdoing. Some might observe that, far from being radically
new, such proposals represent simply a neo-Keynesian solution to current
problems. They would have a point. That such ideas are considered radical
at all is perhaps an indication of how advanced the cult of corporate
libertarianism currently is. IFG founder and author of When Corporations
Rule the World, David Korten, carried such ideas further when he argued for
the abolition of capitalism. It should be replaced with a “true market
economy”, in which companies would be rooted in local and national
economies. Multinationals and financial speculation would be banned, and
the right restored to governments and communities to take whatever economic
measures they deem in their interests. “Capitalism”, he said, “is a word
which originated in the eighteenth century to describe a system in which
the few control production to the exclusion of the many. This is not the
same as a true market economy, in which many small firms, rooted in local
communities, compete with each other. Let’s be clear here ­ the idea is
precisely to eliminate capitalism, and with it the institutional form of
the limited liability corporation.”

Korten skilfully criticised corporate libertarians like WTO founder Peter
Sutherland (recently interviewed by openDemocracy) for presenting a false
contrast between the benefits of a ‘free’ market and the corrupt hand of
‘inefficient’ government. He explained that today’s markets, far from being
‘free’, are skewed by and in favour of the largest corporations, with a
mixture of hidden subsidies, tax breaks, opaque lobbying, political
donations, externalised costs and no meaningful corporate accountability
for wrongdoing. He noted that the extension of the current global economic
system, far from lifting the poor out of poverty, is concentrating power at
the top of the economic pile. With the support of the IMF, World Bank and
WTO triumvirate, it is consolidating the privatisation of precisely those
common resources ­ land, food crops, genetic inheritance, water and more ­
which the poor need to survive.

It would be interesting to see Korten respond to Sutherland’s challenge to
“name me a country that hasn’t benefited from greater access to free (sic)
trade.” There is little doubt he could do so without blinking. The ideas
keep coming. The now familiar idea of a ‘Tobin tax’ on international
financial speculation was promoted heavily at Porto Alegre. But newer
ideas, which have already been shown to work, were on show too. In Porto
Alegre itself, the city government has been running a successful model of
participatory budgeting for ten years. Its citizens are given genuine
control over how their resources are spent. Such models are beginning to
link political liberty with economic liberty ­ genuine control of resources
and spending by the people affected ­ which is becoming a key theme of the
movement.

Economic liberty can be seen again in the concept of “food sovereignty”.
This is explained by Paul Nicholson of Via Campesina as “the right of
citizens to define the food they eat”. It includes removing agriculture
from free trade agreements, banning GMOs and instituting radical land
reform for the benefit of the poor. Democracy, too, is in for a revamp,
with ideas about community resource control, participatory democracy and
the radical localisation of power doing the rounds on a daily basis.

Worth mentioning, too, are now familiar proposals often defined as ‘anti-’,
but which, if carried out, would create a more positive world order. The
unconditional abolition of Third World Debt, the abolition of the WTO
Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement, the end of
the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) ­ such measures, though
specific and reactive, would turn current realities on their head, which is
probably why we should not hold our breath in expectation.

Problems

Porto Alegre 2002 was not without its drawbacks. The fact that the local
governing Workers Party (PT) was co-organiser of the Forum led to
disturbing displays of propaganda from the party, which faces a
presidential election in September. The top-down nature of some of the
conferences, with long lectures and little participation from the audience,
went against the grain of the movement’s lust for genuine democracy at
every level. This led to the organisation of counter-summits to this
counter-summit by some more radical activists. A coalition of Brazilian
unions issued a statement condemning the WSF as too reformist, and the lack
of any final statement or agreed programme, understandable though it may
be, left a sense of an unfinished project. This, combined with the bad
organisation of some aspects of the conference (the programme was
notoriously hard to decipher, venues changed at the last minute, the
building was too small and there was simply too much going on for anyone to
take in) meant that unresolved stresses remained. Many will resurface next
year.

Ultimately, though, the achievement of bringing so many people and ideas
together cannot be understated. They made the official, almost unbearably
overused slogan of the event ­ “Another world is possible” ­ begin to
transcend its own cliché and move into the realm of truth.

Hunger and anger

There were other reasons to be at Porto Alegre, and one of them ­ perhaps
even the most valuable ­ was to catch a glimpse of realities rarely covered
responsibly in the media. In my last article for openDemocracy I reported
on how across a number of very different ‘developing’ countries I have just
visited, there is anger and resentment boiling up against the Western
economic and social model. I tried to explain how the unlistened-to were
channeling their rage, not through murder, terrorism and anomie, as Bin
Laden and his twisted followers do, but through peaceful civil disobedience
and attempts to build radically different systems of economics and
democracy with the basic values which the WSF exemplifies. Perhaps I didn’t
explain myself properly, or perhaps he wasn’t concentrating, for Paul
Hirst, in the recent openDemocracy debate with David Held on globalisation,
declared that my article was “flirting” with violence. He then went on to
say, in a dispiriting display of defeatism, that “the wealthy countries,
corporations, and bodies like the WTO must all be persuaded to help
construct a more egalitarian world ­ which they alone have the power to do..
We must work on the minds and consciences of the rich.”

It’s a shame Paul Hirst wasn’t at Porto Alegre. I hope he will be next
year, for it may help to change his mind and conscience. For a start he
would hear people like the Kenyan delegate from a mass-based fisherfolk’s
union confirm that “hunger equals anger”, and that that anger, across the
world, is often aimed at those who promote the current model of
development. He might also have bumped into Susan George, the
French-American economist, who wrote recently of the shattering of her hope
that the US and its allies would respond to 11 September by following
Hirst’s prescription of becoming nicer people. “Those who hold our futures
in their hands”, she wrote just before the Forum, “are not serious. They
see no further than the noses of their bombers. Frightening though the
prospect may seem, citizens must accept the risk of being serious in their
place.”

Who knows, if Paul Hirst does attend next year, he might even start to
believe that swift and radical change, initiated from the bottom up, rather
than the top down, is a genuine possibility. That, in a nutshell, is
certainly the hope, and the intention, of this movement.

Inevitability and change

For nothing is inevitable in history. Time and time again, paradigm-shifts
happen. Systems can be, and regularly have been, swept away by their own,
often shockingly sudden, perception of illegitimacy in the eyes of their
people. Radical change, as in nature itself, is the rule rather than the
exception. I’m not old enough to remember when Marxists trumpeted the
“inevitable” triumph of labour over capital. But I hear the same logic
being used for precisely the opposite system. The claim is equally false.
What happened at Porto Alegre opened up a space in which orthodox fatalism
can be challenged and people can begin to see the possibility of testing
alternatives, on a grand scale even, against the roughness and complexity
of reality.

Nothing, similarly, is inevitable about the collapse of the current system,
or the triumph of the movement against it. But now, more than ever, it
seems a real possibility. In just a few years, this movement has instituted
a real debate about values, economics and power. Through our numbers on the
streets, through the work of key dissident thinkers and through the actions
of vast grassroots movements in the Global South we have gone from being
ignored, or sneered at, to being grudgingly respected. Already, less than
three years after the “Battle of Seattle”, we are at the stage where the
president of the World Bank can be turned away from our Social Forum (oh,
the joy!); at the point where the French government sends twice as many
ministers to Porto Alegre (six) as to New York (three). Something, it
seems, is shifting our way. The Gap sells ‘anti-capitalist’ fashions; The
Economist devotes a front cover and editorial to (badly) attacking No Logo;
the WTO desperately, and unconvincingly, names its latest trade stitch-up a
“development round”.

Certainly the depression felt by many in this movement after 11 September
has already almost fully lifted, and the collapse just before Porto Alegre
of two of global capitalism’s favourite poster boys ­ Argentina and the
Enron corporation ­ lent a grim new confidence to those who have been
pointing out the structural weaknesses of the system for decades. It’s not
clear exactly what it is, but at Porto Alegre, everyone could feel it:
something is in the air. A tide turning, a paradigm slowly shifting.

Whatever it is, suddenly and inexplicably it seems that the future really
could lie in the hands of the people gathered in Brazil, and not in the
creaky, unstable, divisive cult of global corporatism championed by the
delegates in New York. For some years now, the rhetoric of this movement
has insisted that things are shifting in our direction. I wasn’t sure. But
for the first time, at Porto Alegre, I felt that, somehow, it was beginning
to be true.