While many of us in Australia in late January were lamenting the end of our summer holidays, considering Lleyton Hewitt’s prospects in the Open or reflecting on Steve Waugh’s contribution to Australian cricket, in India a tide of humanity was on the move. In their saris, salwar kameez, kurtas, t-shirts, trousers, lunghis and banians, people from Assam to Kerala, from Gujarat to Jharkhand, along with others from around the world, were gathering in Mumbai for the World Social Forum (WSF).
The crowd was a kaleidoscope of colour and sound, reflecting the variety of languages and cultures of the participants. Every group had its coterie of pounding drums and bells: everywhere there was dance and movement. Few conforming corporate suits and ties here: this was a march of the Dalits (the lowest of the major caste groups), the Adivasis and Nagas (two of India’s principle indigenous groups), the farmers, fishers and rickshaw pullers, transvestites and peace activists, the marginalised from India and the world, drawn to five days of debate, discussion, and cultural performance by the Forum’s slogan ‘Another World is Possible’.
Conceived around a kitchen table in Paris four years ago, the WSF was envisaged as an international forum for people in civil society who share a desire and commitment to shaping a world centred upon the human person. It aims to counter-balance the World Economic Forum held in Switzerland each January and opposes the domination of neo-liberalist values, the flow of capital as the determining factor in international relations, as well as any form of imperialism. The WSF styles itself as a ‘non-organisation’, neither a neat political platform nor a process in which the participants are required to come to agreement or adopt common positions. There are no conference declarations thrashed out around the committee table. Rather, the idea is to create a space for open ended discussion of social and economic alternatives to capital-driven globalisation, for sharing experiences and creating networks, for creating friendships and alliances.
The founders, Francisco Whitaker, from the Brazilian Bishops’ Justice and Peace Commission and Bernard Cassen, the president of ATTAC in France (an international movement for democratic control of financial markets and their institutions), took just six months to bring the idea to reality. The first Forum, held in January 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, attracted 20,000 people. Its success guaranteed a world stage for the politics of transformation. The original organisers drafted a