The air resonated with the sounds of bells, drums, chants and songs; throats were lined by dust; hands were crammed with pamphlet upon pamphlet; and vision was filled with posters, flags, banners and placards as thousands of activists converged for the opening of the World Social Forum (WSF). Those contemptuous of the differences between the many groups who oppose corporate globalisation and war would have been at their most scornful as an array of rallies criss-crossed and dovetailed into one another in what was indeed a ‘world of many worlds’.
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Unionists, farmers, fisher folk, sex workers, transgender campaigners, peace activists, women’s organisations, environmentalists, Dalit groups and those opposing communal violence came together in an endless milieu of opposition to exploitation in its innumerable forms — patriarchal, racial, ethnic, economic, environmental — giving life to the exclamation ‘Another World is Possible!’Held between 16 and 21 January 2004, this was the fourth World Social Forum and the first outside of Porto Alegre in Brazil, where it has been held annually since 2001. As a precursor to holding the WSF here in Mumbai, the Asian Social Forum was held in Hydrebad in 2003 and was attended by over 20,000 people from 840 organisations. In preparing for the World Social Forum, the Indian General Council was made up of some 200 organisations, and the Indian Organising Committee of 57 persons. The event was attended by approximately 100,000 participants and, as in Brazil, the majority of participants were people from the immediate region. The relationship between place and event is an important theme in the campaigns and movements that contest neo-liberal globalisation, and the shift to Mumbai in India is a critical development in the WSF process. The city was chosen not only for its massive size and good transport connections, but also because it is seen as a site of contestation in itself. Mumbai is home to some of the most progressive movements in India and has a history of militant trade unionism. Yet it is also seen as the corporate capital of India and is home to regressive political movements such as the right-wing political group Shiv Sena. Some 800 people were killed in the city in communal violence following the 1992 destruction of the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya, and Mumbai has been the site of bombings in the years since, including late last year.Holding the WSF in Mumbai created an opportunity not only for others to attend, but also for activists around the world to learn by giving local issues far greater exposure. Of the designated major themes for WSF 2004, ‘Communalism’ (religious sectarianism and fundamentalism) and ‘Casteism and Racism’ were of obvious pertinence to various struggles in India.
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Even the more generalised themes of ‘Imperialist Globalisation’, ‘Patriarchy’ and ‘Militarism and Peace’ were often discussed in terms of local experiences and locally based campaigns, such as the campaign for justice for the Bhopal victims twenty years after that extraordinary crime, received wide recognition and impetus from international participants. Further, holding the WSF in India gave an opportunity for a range of nationally and regionally based organisations and movements to come together in a way that had previously not been possible.Over the opening days of the WSF in Mumbai, it soon appeared that there were in fact two forums occurring: one in the halls centred on debates and another in the streets of the venue, with many local groups expressing political agendas through rallies, marches, singing and open theatre. As educative as the best panels were, the sight of people articulating their politics through endless creative demonstration was one of the most significant aspects of this year’s WSF. Alongside the WSF-organised conferences, public meetings, panels, round-tables and testimonies were 300 independently organised seminars and workshops per day, each involving between 50 and 200 participants, accompanied by organised film showings at a cinema and continuous theatrical and artistic displays at a range of theatres and exhibition halls. Add to the interpreters’ network, known as ‘Babel’, the Free Software Network and the daily newspaper, Terraviva, it is evident that there was never a lack of activity or options for a participant, even when particular proceedings faltered under the weight of the logistical demands and lack of resources. While the scale of the event left an obvious impression, there were, of course, innumerable critics of the WSF process — many of the strongest coming from the Left. The most noticeable of these was a kind of rival counter-counter-conference set up as an explicit challenge to the WSF under the banner ‘Mumbai Resistance’ (MR). MR drew the support of a range of Indian Marxist organisations, farm unions such as the Bharatiya Kisan Union and the Karnataka Rajya Raitha Sangha, groups concerned with the rights of tribal groups in India, and a collection of non-Indian radical organisations and unions. MR was timed to coincide with the WSF and was held at a site in walking distance from the WSF grounds. The organisers of the MR argued that the WSF was interested only in reforming global capital, that it had been captured by elite NGOs and key funding bodies, was a mere ‘talking shop’, and condemned the WSF for excluding ‘militancy and armed resistance’. While the MR had organised a substantial graffiti campaign to advertise its presence in Mumbai, as an event it did not seriously challenge the legitimacy of the WSF in India. The major accusation — that the WSF process is characterised by ‘endless debate’ which is treated ‘as an end in itself’ — is of particular importance to movements that share the same concerns as both of the forums. The accusation that the WSF is an arena for liberal reformists and a mere talking shop is an easy one to make when the WSF is treated in relative isolation. As Sukumar Muralidharan has pointed out, this criticism partly stems from the fact that the WSF does not distil the variety of messages into a platform of policies or an articulated agenda. There is no concluding party program or ‘WSF Declarations’ to finish proceedings. Such a criticism also stems from the fact that the WSF is open to many of those who seek to reform corporate globalisation. Hence, one of the effects of MR could be that it has given the WSF the legitimacy it neither seeks nor deserves in the eyes of pro-capitalist elites, for in itself the WSF is neither radical nor reformist, but a space where various kinds of debates can occur. In Mumbai, Joseph Stiglitz, author of Globalization and its Discontents, argued for the humanising of global capital on the same panel as radical activists and thinkers, such as Samir Amin, Dita Sari and Trevor Ngwan. The WSF does not issue a coherent agenda and an organised strategy for resistance, and similarly there are no demands on how movements that contest neo-liberalism should develop. The WSF is a plural space in which to share, exchange and learn, without applying the demands of rigid ideological frameworks that have too often silenced as much as they revealed.In this regard, the WSF is a crucial moment in building links between innumerable local struggles and transnational movements in order to contest neo-liberalism.
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If the WSF was the sole activity of those contesting corporate capitalism then the critics would have more than a point. Yet, the WSF has been born out of innumerable conflicts, whether on city streets or in rural farming districts, and the recent protests in Cancun testify that such movements have the ability to strategise, interlink and work together in militant actions that clearly take on a wide variety of forms. The WSF process helps forge the links that make such blockades as that at Cancun the victory that it was claimed to be. Similarly, the struggles of fisher folk, unionists, groups campaigning for women’s rights and those opposing war continue to pursue an extraordinary array of strategies, sometimes at very local levels and at other times in more abstracted national or regional levels. Many such groups have found benefit in participating in the WSF in that it has helped reinvigorate respective campaigns. Hence, the WSF should never be mistaken for the movement, an error that may become increasingly common on both the Left and Right. In this way, groups such as MR and those similar critics that will inevitably follow should focus on building their respective strategies and mobilisations rather than attacking the WSF for what it is not. The WSF needs to continue to be able to provide an alternative model for human interaction, not just in terms of creating open and plural spaces, but also in contesting an existing political terrain dominated by nation-states. To achieve this, participants in the WSF need to be attentive to the potential of reinforcing existing political structures. In particular, the spectre of the nation was still particularly evident in many of the organisational assumptions at this year’s forum. For an event that could be deemed a great cosmopolitan moment, lists of speakers were still accompanied by a bracketed nationality. This may seem a minor concern, but is an important consideration when such added information could have instead been used to denote gender, what language would be spoken, what organisation the speaker may have been associated with, or in what locality the speaker typically was based. Similarly, a range of speakers suggested that the fight against neo-liberalism needed to be ‘taken back’ and waged at the national level, declaring that a reinvigoration of national politics would be an appropriate future strategy for contesting neo-liberalism. While it is important not to overstate such a tendency, for movements that have typically emphasised the local and the global as the appropriate locations for action, the importance of the nation did not seem far below the surface in many debates. If the WSF is unable to help build a global consciousness linking various sites of struggle, but instead becomes a site for reinforcing the apparent legitimacy of the nation, then the ability of the forum to contest neo-liberalism will be marred in a way that will make accusations that the WSF is a talking shop seem minor. Increased debate within the forum may be one way of ensuring that the WSF does not fall too easily into habitually reinforcing existing political structures at the cost of either its aims or strengths. Debates over what kind of space the WSF is are, of course, a central concern and will inform the adaptations to the forum in the following years. Changes will need to occur if the WSF is able to maintain the momentum it has already been able to develop, including the further democratisation of the practices within the forum itself and the capturing of information and ideas that are communicated. While individual presentations may have been of great value in Mumbai, the lack of debate between panellists and the lack of time for questions from the floor meant that at several of the large sessions there was little rigour in terms of debate and a too-easy rhetoric. Such rigour will be necessary to ensure that the WSF process is properly positioned to combat changing international events, political manipulations, and the difficulties posed to the movements contesting neo-liberal capitalism by various forms of state and capitalist intervention. In the longer term, and although the WSF will return to Porto Alegre in January 2005, it is imperative that in 2006 it move to Africa, to a contested site such as Cairo. The move to Mumbai has been the first step in the direction of truly globalising the process and has confirmed the WSF as more than a counter-conference to the World Economic Forum. With the WSF as one moment in an ongoing struggle, the move to Africa would be a vital step in building a genuinely trans-national movement and have important symbolic and practical effects in making another world possible.
Links
http://www.wsfindia.org
http://www.forumsocialmundial.org.br/home.asp
Damian Grenfell works with Friends of the Earth, Melbourne, contesting corporate globalisation.
