Looking for alternatives

Looking for alternatives

What a difference from Davos! 

No fashionable three piece suits, no fancy parties or waiters serving cocktails to the world's richest and most powerful after a day of discussions in state of the art conference rooms.  

Here in Porto Alegre it's strictly sandals and tennis shoes at the world's largest gathering of social movements and NGO's, the World Social Forum. The heat is excrutiating and there is no airconditioning at the seminars taking place in old warehouses and - fittingly - in a recycled therno-electric plant.

It has been exactly ten years since the first World Soical Forum was convened here in Porto Alegre as an alternative  to the World Economic Forum in Davos.

There are several thousans activists from the world over, but mainly from Latin America,  brainstorming and networking with like minded people who are staunchly critical of the free market economic model that they blame for the state the world is in. 

I am hearing a lot of people congratulating themselves, saying that  the global financial and economic meltdown proves they were right all along. But they are still debating how to best tackle  issues like sustainable development, land rights, women's rights, corporate greed and poverty.

Of course this meeting is more than just about criticising capitalism. There is a lot of soul searching, brainstorming and networking going on here amongst activists who do not always agree about what is the best way to confront the world's corporate and political power structure.

A big debate underway has to do with whether or not to include progressive political parties in the mix and possibly turn the WSF into a V International Socialist Movement ... or whether to keep this space purely for social movements, which are considered the real driving force for change.

There is also a lot of  self-critciism about what went wrong at the Copenhagen Climate Change conference in December. 

The progressive forces of the world were not sufficiently prepared to exhert pressure and propose solutions, says Pat Mooney, a long time Canadian activist.

And just like in Davos, one gets the distinct feeling that the World Social Forum is suffering from an identity crisis, trying to figure out how to have more of an impact in global decision making.

"This next decade will be more diffult than the one that just passed for progressive forces", predicts Boaventura de Sousa Santos, sociologist and founder of the World Social Forum.