A carnival of anti-globalization angst, the World Social Forum (WSF) is convened annually as a radical left rejoinder to the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, a yearly symposium of top business leaders, eminent political figures, journalists, and pundits. Its real agenda is to fulfill the failed communist hope of a socialist international. In contrast to the World Economic Forum whose concern is how to generate wealth, Social Forum concerns itself with “how to better distribute wealth.”In the estimation of its organizers, the World Social Forum is an open meeting place “for reflective thinking [and] democratic debate of ideas.” For all of its pretensions to open-mindedness, however, the forum welcomes only those groups that reject capitalism as an oppressive and imperialistic system, embrace radical environmental agendas and share the WSF’s desire too inaugurate a leftist version of utopia. The WSF mission statement condemns “neo-liberalism” (i.e., capitalism) and the “domination of the world by capital and any form of imperialism.” Held for the first time on January 30, 2001 in Porto Allegre, Brazil’s industrial hub, the WSF brought together an array of anti-globalization forces. Although the WSF has no official roll of member organizations, groups that have taken part in WSF forums include NGOs, trade unions, and leftwing activists and politicians from over 120 countries, most prominently France. The WSF was the brainchild of members of the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens (Association pour la Taxation des Transactions pour l'Aide aux Citoyens), a socialist-leaning group that extols protectionism and assails free trade while exalting anti-globalization extremists like Jose Bove, who attended the first forum. Other French representatives included Danielle Mitterrand, a former First Lady of France; two ranking French politicians – Guy de Hascoet, a member of France’s economic solidarity ministry, and François Huwart, a minister of foreign trade; and a delegation from the leftwing French newspaper Le Monde, including that publication’s editor, Bernard Cassen, who serves on the forum’s organizing committee. According to Cassen, the chief aim of the forum was “to prove that another world is possible” – previous socialist utopias having failed so miserably.Exactly what kind of world Cassen envisioned was spelled out by other attendees to the first Forum. “The world must change its economic development model,” contended Oded Grajew, a leftist businessman and a coordinator of the Brazilian Association of Entrepreneurs for the Citizenry, who expressed his hope that environmentalist agendas and leftist social agendas would trump globalization. In keeping with this theme, the WSF featured numerous overtures of support for Cuba’s communist regime—this despite the fact that the WSF’s Charter of Principles proclaims that the forum “is opposed to all totalitarian and reductionist views of economy, development and history and to the use of violence as a means of social control by the State.” Nor was the 2001 Forum’s affinity for revolutionary violence confined to celebrations of Communist Cuba. Also in attendance in 2001 was the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC), a Communist guerrilla force classified, in November 2001, as a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. Numerous accounts report that the FARC played a prime participatory role at the WSF, with some members delivering speeches and others presiding over workshops. Following the attacks of September 11, the WSF, wary of associating itself with terrorists, would move to distance itself from the FARC at subsequent forums; though FARC representatives were reportedly present at the 2001 WSF, they were denied an active role at the Forum. However, this earned WSF organizers the scorn of other Forum participants. In a report filed after the 2002 WSF, a delegation from the International Action Center reproachfully registered its discontent at the WSF decision to marginalize the FARC’s role: “Last year anti-imperialists sharply criticized the WSF’s social democratic organizers for refusing to invite groups waging legitimate armed struggles of national liberation, like the FARC-EP of Colombia. These groups were also not invited this year. The ideological thrust of the WSF organizers denies the pressing need for workers and oppressed peoples to struggle for power,” the report said. The seething hostility toward business interests and wealth, anathematized by WSF participants as the foundations of globalization, was the distinguishing feature of the 2001 forum. Excoriating corporate executives attending the World Economic Forum, some WSF participants expressed hope of a leftwing takeover of corporations. “If only all entrepreneurs were leftists,” Grajew mused. Meanwhile Olivio Dutra, a governor from the Brazilian city of Rio Grande do Sul, and a member of Brazil’s leading leftist party, the Party of Workers, condemned what he called the tendency of globalization” to accumulate and concentrate wealth.” A parallel argument was advanced by Cándido Grzybowski, a director-general of the Brazilian Institute of Socio-Economic Analysis, an NGO that helped organize the forum, who called for participants of the forum “to be bold enough to think, to create an affirmative wave of action and a different kind of globalization.”This demand for “a different kind of globalization” was once again aired at the second WSF, which also took place in Porto Alegre between January and February of 2002. Here, its chief exponent was none other than Noam Chomsky. In an interview conducted prior to the forum, Chomsky hailed the WSF as a confrontation between the righteous activists in Porto Alegre on the one hand, and corrupt government and corporate interests in Davos (at the WEF) on the other. “Such confrontations are major themes of history,” Chomsky explained, “And fortunately, popular forces have won many victories over the centuries, overcoming illegitimate and unaccountable concentrations of power, such as those gathering in Davos. They of course pretend to represent democratically-elected governments, but that is such a transparent absurdity that I presume we need waste no time on it, particularly with regard to neo-liberal globalization.” Yet Chomsky could not resist his wont for trafficking in conspiracy theories. Taking a swipe at the United States, he darkly claimed that U.S. authorities were deliberately keeping the public uninformed about the evils of globalization and free trade. “In fact, it would be a misunderstanding to say that on these issues, there even exist ‘elected governments,’” Chomsky said. “The reason is that the issues are kept from the general public even in the most free and democratic societies, the United States for example.” Conversely, Chomsky argued, the WSF represented a prime opportunity to assemble a global activist network, on the model of the Communist International, to beat back the advance of globalization. “The WSF has the promise to become the first really significant manifestation of such globalization from the bottom, a very welcome prospect, with enormous promise,” Chomsky said.Echoing Chomsky’s enthusiasm was the columnist Naomi Klein, another presence at the conference. Recounting the forum’s highlights in the journal Tom Paine, Klein delighted in the overt militancy of the anti-capitalist forum’s protestors. “In Porto Allegre last week,” she wrote, “much of the talk was about nearby Buenos Aires, where some say a revolt from the seams is already taking place. Street demonstrators aren’t calling for a changing of the political guard but have instead adopted the sweeping slogan ‘Get rid of them all.’ They have concluded that it’s not enough to overthrow one political party and replace it with another. They are instead attempting something infinitely more difficult: to topple an economic orthodoxy so powerful, it can withstand even its strongest advocates whipping and kicking it from the center.”Despite the presence of such high-profile foes of globalization, the 2002 forum, organized under the banner of “Another world is possible,” offered little in the way of a viable alternative to globalization. Even as the 12,000 official delegates and 51,000 attendees denounced globalization, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, they struggled to articulate an economic agenda independent of these institutions. As a result, many of the 652 workshops and the 27 featured talks concentrated on crafting new slogans to replace “anti-globalization,” which protesters agreed reflected poorly on their movement. Activists accordingly debated “de-globalization” and “earth democracy” as more public-relations-friendly names for their anti-globalization agenda. Among the leftwing groups that took an active role in such activities was the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, which conducted three anti-globalization worskhops. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, while he did not attend the Forum, sent a letter of support to its organizers. And, despite its pledge to bar terrorist groups from participation in WSF activities, the 2002 forum included two members of ETA, the Basque Separatist Movement terror group. At the same time, World Bank president James Wolfensohn was denied his request to speak at the forum because, organizers maintained, the “atmosphere would not be favorable.”The 2003 World Social Forum was marked by a similar atmosphere, with its obligatory protests against capitalism and its heated indictments of globalization. Because of the looming war against Iraq, however, it also devolved into a massive anti-war rally and a referendum on American “imperialism.” Noam Chomsky, having once more been granted a prime speaking role, embarked on a diatribe against “U.S.-backed state terror.” Railing against the imminent war, Chomsky condemned it as a plot by the U.S. government to extend the hold of American imperialism on Iraq. “The September 11 terrorist atrocities provided an opportunity and pretext to implement longstanding plans to take control of Iraq’s immense oil wealth,” Chomsky said in February of 2003.Calling on WSF protestors to combat these allegedly imperialist aims, Chomsky said, “The way to ‘confront the empire’ is to create a different world, one that is not based on violence and subjugation, hate and fear. That is why we are here, and the WSF offers hope that these are not idle dreams.” In keeping with the more-idealist-than-realistic spirit of the WSF, Chomsky even claimed that the anti-globalization movement had already triumphed over capitalism. “At the WSF,” he said, “the range of issues and problems under intense discussion is very broad, remarkably so, but I think we can identify two main themes. One is global justice and Life after Capitalism – or to put it more simply, life, because it is not so clear that the human species can survive very long under existing state capitalist institutions. So we have won. There is nothing left for us to do but pick up the pieces -- not only to talk about a vision of the future that is just and humane, but to move on to create it.”Yet another radical leftist on hand was Medea Benjamin. Like Chomsky, Benjamin, a director of the group Global Exchange and a former Green Party candidate insisted that the Bush administration was determined to prosecute a war against Iraq and was only making a show of diplomacy. “We know Bush will say to Congress that Iraq is not cooperating, whatever the U.N. inspections reveal. He wants to start bombing on February 15 because of the better weather conditions in Iraq,” Benjamin said. In a thinly veiled threat Benjamin warned that “there will be more terrorism at home if the U.S. carries out this attack.”Benjamin’s efforts to stir anti-war feeling were quite redundant in the setting. One participating delegation joyously reported, “Chants against the war in Iraq in many different languages could be heard.” In addition to leftist ideologues like Chomsky and Benjamin, the 2003 forum also included politicians, like Brazil’s socialist president Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva and Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez; Nobel laureates, like Argentina’s Adolfo Perez Esquival; writers, like India’s radical leftist novelist Arundhati Roy; actors, like Danny Glover; and even Olympic athletes, like Cuba’s gold medalist boxer Teofilo Stevenson. Typically for World Social Forums, Cuba was the object of widespread adoration, with scores of protestors chanting “Cuba yes, Yankees no.” Meanwhile, Danny Glover, an enthusiastic apologist for the Castro dictatorship, made headlines when he attempted to attack Juan Lopez Linares, a Brazilian citizen and Cuban refugee. Linares’ transgression, according to Glover, was making an appeal on behalf of his four-year-old son, detained by the Communist government of Cuba. After being restrained by security guards, Glover lashed out at Linares, calling him a “selfish man” and chiding him for seeking “to talk about a personal case instead of highlighting the positive qualities of the [Castro] regime.” The Forum was determined not to engage contrary ideas. As The Nation magazine’s contributing editor, Marc Cooper, noted, “Opposition to the war was beyond any debate here.” Cooper also reported that the 2003 Forum, like its predecessors, provided no novel solutions to global problems, and instead served as an opportunity for leftist activists to exercise their collective grievances against capitalism and war. “Having drawn more than 100,000 participants,” Cooper wrote, “to scores of panel discussions and more than 1,500 seminars, debates and workshops on globalization and its effects, there will be no firm conclusions, resolutions or marching orders. Merely some consensual ideas and suggestions for how what is known as the global justice movement should move forward.”The 2004 WSF was a departure from the previous three in that it took place in Mumbai (Bombay) India. In both form and content, however, the 2004 forum followed the model laid in the previous forums. Where the 2004 forum broke new ground was in its attending extremism. Even before its commencement, WSF organizers labored to incite a backlash against globalization throughout India; one WSF document laid bare their intention to sow the seeds of radicalism in India through a “process” wherein a series of smaller activist events would be staged across the country, just prior to the forum, in a bid to arouse opposition to globalization. “The process,” explained the document, “should be designed to seek and draw out people’s perceptions regarding the impact of neo-liberal economic policies and imperialism on their daily lives. The language of dissent and resistance toward these will have to be informed by local idioms and forms.”Kindling this radical atmosphere still further were leftwing Indian activists. In a militant harangue she delivered at the forum, the novelist-activist Arundhati Roy inveighed against the U.S.-led war against Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime, likening it to a duel between serial killers. “To applaud the U.S. army’s capture of Saddam Hussein and therefore, in retrospect, justify its invasion and occupation of Iraq is like deifying Jack the Ripper for disemboweling the Boston Strangler,” Roy declared. Moreover, she obliquely directed WSF protestors to embrace, and perhaps even join, the terrorist insurgency in Iraq. “If all of us gathered here and at the Mumbai resistance are really against imperialism,” she said, “if we are really against neo-liberalism, then I think we should turn our gaze on Iraq, because Iraq is the culmination of both imperialism and neo-liberalism. So, I think if we are against imperialism, if we are against neo-liberalism, then we must not just support the resistance in Iraq, we must become the resistance in Iraq.” Under the rubric of anti-globalization, some leftist Indian politicians also sought to reach out to other radical groups. Nilotpal Basu, a Communist Party member of India’s parliament who attended the WSF, argued that any group congenial to the WSF’s opposition to globalization was welcome at the Forum. “The WSF is essentially a broad-based platform for opposing globalization of economy and to that extent the party will like to join hands with other outfits who are against the expansion of the so-called globalized economy,” Basu remarked. As a consequence of such prompting, the WSF swiftly degenerated into a virulent display of anti-Americanism and anti-Israeli sentiment. Both American and Israeli flags were set ablaze. Israel in particular was singled out for opprobrium. A delegation of 25 Palestinian activists led a rally against the Israeli security fence, proclaiming it an “Apartheid Wall,” a slogan that was embraced by WSF protesters. Additionally, some 60 WSF seminars were devoted to the subject of Israeli “crimes” against Palestinians and the Arab world. Radical leftist groups like the U.S.-based Jewish Voice for Peace lobbied for a halt of American aid to Israel. That message was amplified by a radical member of the Palestinian delegation, Ahmed Shawki, who called for activists to undertake a global campaign to sever support for Israel “We need you in the belly of the beast to destroy U.S., Indian, and European support for Israel in every sector,” Shawki declared. Despite the radicalism on parade at the Indian WSF, for some anti-globalization groups, the 2004 forum was not radical enough. Calling themselves Mumbai Resistance 2004 (MR 2004), a number of extreme-left groups demanding a “genuine socialist order” convened a parallel conference. Advocating an “organized resistance in continuation of the militant traditions of the recent anti-globalization and anti-war movements” this conference called on its participating groups, which included communist and socialist revolutionary groups from India and around the world, to support the “resistance” in Iraq, and to “smash American imperialism.” As for the WSF, MR 2004 participants denounced it as mere frivolity devoid of a compelling ideological core. One MR 2004 proclamation mocked the “carnival atmosphere” of the WSF, describing it as a “reactionary” movement. Such censure did not go unnoticed by WSF participants. One member of India’s Communist Party, Doraiswamy Raja, complained that the 2004 forum fell well short of its declared aim to transform the world. “If this is all about networking and building solidarity, then it is okay,” said Raja. “But that is not the case, since they are trying to change the world by declaring that ‘Another World is Possible.’” However, Raja added, “There is no agenda for action to back such impressive words. This is cheating.” Similar disappointment was expressed by other delegates to the forum. The website Socialistworld.net, for instance, pointed out that for all its anti-capitalist pageantry, the 2004 WSF was notably short on substance. “Unfortunately,” the website lamented, “most of those searching for an answer from the organizers of the WSF and the speakers at the various meetings would not have found a program for an effective fight back against mass unemployment, poverty, and discrimination.” The site expressed no hope that the 2005 WSF forum, scheduled to be held once more in Porto Allegre, would produce much in the way of tangible solutions.Short as it is on substantive policies, it remains the case that the World Social Forum does not lack sponsors. French groups are particularly well represented, and the influence of Le Monde extends to the WSF’s organizational activities. Other sponsors include the Heinrich Böll Stiftung, an affiliate of Germany’s far-left Green Party, Die Grünen, which presently governs in a “red-green” coalition with the Social Democratic Party of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder; the Droits et Démocratie, a leftwing group under the auspices of the Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs; several leftist Brazilian groups, including the prefecture of Porto Alegre, the Prefeitura de Porto Alegre; and the anti-globalization outfit Oxfam, which held several workshops at the 2004 WSF. Another longtime sponsor of the WSF is the Ford Foundation, which doled out $100,000 for the 2001 WSF and $500,000 for the 2003 forum. Among the sponsors of the 2005 WSF were Christian Aid and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Unions have also rallied to the WSF’s cause. The labor union lobby Jobs With Justice is an American sponsor of the WSF, and unions like the United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America have in the past dispatched delegations to the forum.
