Fences and Windows (21 page)

Most, however, blamed the Americans themselves. “Part of it is simply a reflection of U.S. parochialism,” said Peter Marcuse, a professor of urban planning at Columbia University and a speaker at the forum. It’s a familiar story: if it doesn’t happen in the United States, if it isn’t in English, if it’s not organized by American groups, it can’t be all that important—let alone be the sequel to the Battle of Seattle.

Last year,
New York Times
columnist Thomas Friedman wrote from Davos, “Every year at the World Economic Forum there is a star or theme that stands out”—the dotcoms, the Asian crisis. Last year, according to Friedman, the star of Davos was Seattle. Porto Alegre had a star as well; it was, without question, democracy: what happened to it? How do we get it back? And why isn’t there more of it within the conference itself?

In workshops and on panels, globalization was defined as a mass transfer of wealth and knowledge from public to private—through the patenting of life and seeds, the privatization of water and the concentrated ownership of agricultural lands. Having this conversation in Brazil meant that
these issues were not presented as shocking new inventions of a hitherto unheard-of phenomenon called “globalization”—as is often the case in the West—but as part of the continuum of colonization, centralization and loss of self-determination that began more than five centuries ago.

This latest stage of market integration has meant that power and decision making are now delegated to points even farther away from the places where the effects of those decisions are felt at the same time that ever-greater financial burdens are off-loaded to cities and towns. Real power has moved from local to state, from state to national, from national to international, until finally representative democracy means voting for politicians every few years who use that mandate to transfer national powers to the WTO and the IMF.

In response to this global crisis in representative democracy, the forum set out to sketch the possible alternatives, but before long, some rather profound questions emerged. Is this a movement trying to impose its own, more humane, brand of globalization, with taxation of global finance and more democracy and transparency in international governance? Or is it a movement against centralization and the delegation of power on principle, one as critical of left-wing, one-size-fits-all ideology as of the recipe for McGovernment churned out at forums like Davos? It’s fine to cheer for the possibility of another world—but is the goal one specific other world, already imagined or is it, as the Zapatistas put it, “a world with the possibility of many worlds in it?”

On these questions there was no consensus. Some groups, those with ties to political parties, seemed to be pushing for a united international organization or party and wanted the forum to issue an official manifesto that could form a governmental blueprint. Others, those working outside traditional political channels and often using direct action, were advocating less a unified vision than a universal right to self-determination and cultural diversity.

Atila Roque was one of the people who argued forcefully that the forum should not try to issue a single set of political demands. “We are trying to break the uniformity of thought, and you can’t do that by putting forward another uniform way of thinking. Honestly, I don’t miss the time when we were all in the Communist Party. We can achieve a higher degree of consolidation of the agendas, but I don’t think civil society should be trying to organize itself into a party.”

In the end, the conference did not speak in one voice; there was no single official statement, though there were dozens of unofficial ones. Instead of sweeping blueprints for political change, there were glimpses of local democratic alternatives. The Landless Peasants Movement took delegates on day trips to reappropriated farmland used for sustainable agriculture. And then there was the living alternative of Porto Alegre itself: the city has become a showcase of participatory democracy studied around the world. In Porto Alegre, democracy isn’t a polite matter of casting ballots; it’s an active process, carried out in sprawling town hall meetings. The centrepiece of the Workers Party’s platform is
something called “the participatory budget,” a system that allows direct citizen participation in the allocation of scarce city resources. Through a network of neighbourhood and issue councils, residents vote directly on which roads will be paved and which health care centres will be built. In Porto Alegre, this devolution of power has brought results that are the mirror opposite of global economic trends. For instance, rather than scaling back on public services for the poor, as is the case nearly everywhere else, the city has increased those services substantially. And rather than spiralling cynicism and voter dropout, democratic participation increases every year.

“This is a city that is developing a new model of democracy in which people don’t just hand over control to the state,” British author Hilary Wainwright said at the forum. “The challenge is, how do we extend that to a national and global level?”

Perhaps by transforming the anti-corporate movement into a pro-democracy movement that defends the rights of local communities to plan and manage their schools, their water and their ecology. In Porto Alegre, the most convincing responses to the international failure of representative democracy seemed to be this radical form of local participatory democracy, in cities and towns where the abstractions of global economics become day-to-day issues of homelessness, water contamination, exploding prisons and cash-starved schools. Of course, this has to take place within a context of national and international standards and resources. But what seemed to be emerging
organically out of the World Social Forum (despite the best efforts of some of the organizers) was not a movement for a single global government but a vision for an increasingly connected international network of very local initiatives, each built on direct democracy.

Democracy was a topic that came up not only on the panels and in workshops but also in the hallways and in raucous late-night meetings at the youth campground. Here the subject was not how to democratize world governance or even municipal decision making—but something closer to home: the yawning “democratic deficit” of the World Social Forum itself. On one level the forum was extraordinarily open: anyone who wanted to could attend as a delegate, with no restrictions on numbers of attendees. And any group that wanted to run a workshop—alone or with another group—simply had to get a title to the organizing committee before the program was printed.

But there were sometimes sixty of these workshops going on simultaneously, while the main-stage events, where there was an opportunity to address more than a thousand delegates at a time, were dominated not by activists but by politicians and academics. Some gave rousing presentations, while others seemed painfully detached: after travelling eighteen hours or more to attend the forum, few needed to be told that “globalization is a space of dispute.” It didn’t help that these panels were dominated by men in their fifties, too many of them white. Nicola Bullard, deputy director of Bangkok’s Focus on the Global South, half joked that the opening press conference “looked like the Last
Supper: twelve men with an average age of fifty-two.” And it probably wasn’t a great idea that the VIP room, an enclave of invitation-only calm and luxury, was made of glass. This in-your-face two-tiering amid all the talk of people power began to grate around the time the youth campsite ran out of toilet paper.

These grievances were symbolic of a larger problem. The organizational structure of the forum was so opaque that it was nearly impossible to figure out how decisions were made or to find ways to question those decisions. There were no open plenaries and no chance to vote on the structure of future events. In the absence of a transparent process, fierce NGO brand wars were waged behind the scenes—about whose stars would get the most airtime, who would get access to the press and who would be seen as the true leaders of this movement.

By the third day, frustrated delegates began to do what they do best: protest. There were marches and manifestos—a half-dozen at least. Beleaguered forum organizers found themselves charged with everything from reformism to racism. The Anti-Capitalist Youth contingent accused them of ignoring the important role direct action played in building the movement. Its manifesto condemned the conference as “a ruse” using the mushy language of democracy to avoid a more divisive discussion of class. The PSTU, a breakaway faction of the Workers Party, began interrupting speeches about the possibility of another world with loud chants of “Another world is not possible unless you smash capitalism and bring in socialism!” (It sounded much better in Portuguese.)

Some of this criticism was unfair. The forum accommodated an extraordinary range of views, and it was precisely this diversity that made conflicts inevitable. By bringing together groups with such different ideas about power— unions, political parties, NGOs, anarchist street protesters and agrarian reformers—the World Social Forum only made visible the tensions that are always just under the surface of these fragile coalitions.

But other questions were legitimate and have implications that reach far beyond a one-week conference. How are decisions made in this movement of movements? Who, for instance, decides which “civil society representatives” go behind the barbed wire at Davos—while protesters are held back with water cannons outside? If Porto Alegre was the anti-Davos, why were some of the most visible faces of opposition “dialoguing” in Davos?

And how do we determine whether the goal is to push for “social clauses” on labour and environmental issues in international agreements or to try to shoot down the agreements altogether? This debate—academic at previous points because there was so much resistance to social clauses from business—is now urgent. U.S. industry leaders, including Caterpillar and Boeing, are actively lobbying for the linking of trade with labour and environmental clauses, not because they want to raise standards but because these links are viewed as the key to breaking the Congressional stalemate over fast-track trade negotiating authority. By pushing for social clauses, are unions and environmentalists unwittingly helping the advancement of these negotiations, a process
that will also open the door to privatization of such services as water and more aggressive protections of drug patents? Should the goal be to add on to these trade agreements or take entire sections out—water, agriculture, food safety, drug patents, education, health care? Walden Bello, executive director of Focus on the Global South, is unequivocal on this point. “The WTO is unreformable,” he said at the forum, “and it is a horrible waste of money to push for reform. Labour and environmental clauses will just empower an already too-powerful organization.”

There is a serious debate to be had over strategy and process, but it’s difficult to see how it will unfold without bogging down a movement whose greatest strength so far has been its agility. Anarchist groups, though fanatical about process, tend to resist efforts to structure or centralize the movement. The International Forum on Globalization—the brain trust of the North American side of the movement— lacks transparency in its decision making and isn’t accountable to a broad membership, even if many of its most visible members are. Meanwhile, NGOs that might otherwise collaborate often compete with one another for publicity and funding. And traditional membership-based political structures like parties and unions have been reduced to bit players in these wide webs of activism.

Perhaps the real lesson of Porto Alegre is that democracy and accountability need to be worked out first on more manageable scales—within local communities and coalitions and inside individual organizations. Without this foundation, there’s not much hope for a satisfying democratic process
when ten thousand activists from wildly different backgrounds are thrown on a university campus together. What has become clear is that if the one “pro” this disparate coalition can get behind is “pro-democracy,” then democracy within the movement must become a high priority. The Porto Alegre Call for Mobilization clearly states that “we challenge the elite and their undemocratic processes, symbolized by the World Economic Forum in Davos.” Most delegates agreed that it simply won’t do to scream “Elitist!” from a glass house—or from a glass VIP lounge.

Despite the moments of open revolt, the World Social Forum ended on as euphoric a note as it began. There was cheering and chanting, the loudest coming when the organizing committee announced that Porto Alegre would host the forum again next year. The plane from Porto Alegre to São Paulo on January 30 was filled with delegates dressed head-to-toe in conference-branded swag—T-shirts, baseball hats, and with mugs and bags—all bearing the utopian slogan Another World Is Possible. Not uncommon, perhaps, after a conference, but it did strike me as noteworthy that a couple sitting in the seats across from me were still wearing their WSF name tags. It was as if they wanted to hang on to that dream world, however imperfect, for as long as they could before splitting up to catch connecting flights to Newark, Paris, Mexico City, absorbed in a hub of scurrying businesspeople, duty-free Gucci bags and CNN stock news.

March 2001

A month ago, I got an e-mail from Greg Ruggiero, the publisher of
Our Word Is Our Weapon
, a collection of writings by Subcomandante Marcos, spokesperson of the Zapatista National Liberation Army in Chiapas, Mexico. He wrote that Zapatista commanders were going on a caravan to Mexico City and that the event was “the equivalent of Martin Luther King Jr’s March on Washington.” I stared at the sentence for a long time. I have seen the clip of King’s “I have a dream” speech maybe ten thousand times, though usually via advertisements selling mutual funds or cable news. Having grown up after history ended, I hadn’t imagined that I might see a capital-H history moment to match it.