The globalisation of anti-globalisation activists

“What we are seeing here is the globalisation of the Forum.” This statement by Peruvian globalisation critic Virginia Vargas was not meant ironically. According to her, the previous three World Social Fora (WSF) in Porto Alegre had basically been meetings of movement activists from Europe and Latin America. In Bombay, many Asian groups were present – as well as more African representatives than in 2003. Therefore this year’s Forum became a truly global event.

In India, the Forum was confronted with so far unknown issues. The problem of religious fundamentalism (and its sometimes astounding cohabitation with market liberalisation) was one example. Equally important, social exclusion as experienced by Dalits (as India’s untouchables call themselves) and the protest by affected groups was on the agenda. In other cases, there suddenly was a new perspective on familiar WSF topics. “In Latin America the right to abortion is a central issue of the feminist struggle,” said Vargas. “And here we are in a country where abortion is not only promoted by the state, but where women abuse this right to abort female foetuses because they want male children.”
In Bombay, seasoned WSF visitors had the opportunity to take a close look at the anarchic power of their classic opponent – market economy globalisation. According to a Brazilian participant, Porto Alegre had always been liberated territory. This is an allusion to the fact that city and province are governed by the Workers’ Party, which is one of the World Social Forum’s main promoters. During a WSF, Porto Alegre throws open its doors for five days and allows itself to be taken over by anti-globalisation activists. In India’s financial capital, by contrast, the 15 million inhabitants hardly noticed the event.

Visitors from Latin America were particularly overwhelmed by the scale and depth of urban poverty in Bombay. They were also impressed by the conspicuous power of global companies, whose investments in Bombay go along with an alluring promise of jobs and prosperity.

Unlike the rest of the city, however, radical left-wing groups did take notice of the Forum. They even staged a counter-event on the other side of the motorway that, ironically, is called the “Western Expressway”. With their motto “Mumbai Resistance”, they insisted on the legitimary of armed struggle in the war against the imperialism of the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund and the USA.

Nonetheless, for several thousand Indian groups and movements, the Forum was a “new and instructive experience”, as Jai Sen of the Organising Committee affirmed. Indian civil society, with its myriad of NGOs, is so busy with its own countless problems that it had so far hardly noticed the emergence of an international network of activists sharing similar views on the world’s indefensibly misdirected development.

However, what was actually new and stimulating about the World Social Forum in Bombay for many Indians was its open structure. The Forum’s success has, so far, not led to a rigid institutionalisation. The Forum renounces possible momentum because it does not want to become a power factor – and thus become a mirror image of its enemies. For Indians, who mostly think in hierarchical terms, this idea of the political activists being horizontally rather than vertically networked was quite a challenge. As the organisers, they were quite aware of the drawback that this implies: a cacophony of thousands of voices that finally no longer even hear one another. But in a countermove the hosts were able to utilize their experience with the noisy Indian variety of democracy which time and again has to get its act together. Forming coalitions based on their model could give the World Social Forum a certain coherence in confrontation with global powers without having to adopt their mechanisms.