The World Social Forum celebrated its ninth reunion in Belem, Brazil in the Amazonian state of Pará from January 26 to February 1, 2009. A lot of expectations are piled on to this peculiar event. 91,000 delegates registered, a majority from Brazil, and probably a majority well under 35 years old. But there are hundreds of regular attendees, folks from India, South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Philippines, Japan, Ecuador, Bolivia, France, Senegal, and dozens of other countries, giving the global south an ample representation. Notably few in number were Americans from the U.S., which I considered something of a relief. There are many representatives of major and minor NGOs and a healthy number of old-style socialist militants too.

The event is a big chaotic mess. It took place on two university campuses, the Federal University of Pará and the Federal Rural University of Pará, separated by about a mile and a half that you could theoretically walk, but most people took the free bus, paid a dollar for a regular bus ride, or took a taxi for about 4-6 dollars. There was also a crazy “put-put” ferry system of small wooden boats that ran from one campus to the other on the Guamá River, which was exotic and fun until you arrived and were stuck for a half hour while the skipper maneuvered his boat into the overcrowded dock area, trying to get a tiny corner to let his passengers out. The Forum program was over 135 pages, mostly small print on large newsprint sheets, listing over 2,000 workshops and roundtables and meetings. In fact, the program was deemed useless by many attendees, as the events were listed at the wrong times, wrong places, and most people I spoke with learned that few of the events they were interested in or in some cases, presenting, were listed at all. (This was true of the three workshops held by Ecologia Urbana of Sao Paolo, one of which was my Nowtopia talk, none of which were listed in the official program.)

This banner was planted alongside the road on the UFRA campus, but I never saw any of the folks behind it (typically, you could find signs and indications without information on how to meet the people).

A discussion on urban reform and a much-cited idea, "The Right to the City."

Random snapshot of delegates at Urban Reform talk.

Behind the scenes there are several organizational efforts, an administrative office that runs most of the time from Sao Paolo, and is horribly understaffed and overworked. There is also a mysterious International Committee (IC), which is some kind of self-selecting group with representatives from many parts of the world, and many different organizations, but seems to be unaccountable and lacking in transparency. Apparently this IC makes the decisions about where and when the WSF will be held, and what the theme and scope of it will be, and has some say over how the “movement of movements” is brought together and given space to produce all the workshops and discussions and performances that made up the four days of the event. The Brazilian government says it spent $13 million to support the event with extra security in Belem (the city was chock full of police and military), and in subsidizing the facilities, some travel expenses for various delegations, and more. (Though I was in daily contact with some folks who were insiders, it remained opaque and difficult to understand what exactly the process of self-governance was.)

The big theme of this one was the Amazon, with the first day dedicated to presentations and workshops and performances by and about the people of the Amazon and its rich resources. A major effort was made to integrate the Indians from all the nine countries in the region, and to foreground the questions of native people’s rights, resistance to dam construction and deforestation, and a celebration of diverse cultures and different stages of development. The global economic crisis was of course an elephant in the room too, but the gathering was not capable of a coherent response to that. I heard a rumor of some discussions and meetings going on towards the conclusion that involved various tribal leaders and some of the IC, seeking ideas on different ways to structure a democratic process going forward, perhaps drawing on experiences of Amazonian tribal cultures to help invent some new political forms. Jai Sen of the Indian group India Institute for Critical Action Centre in Movement (CACIM), told me about having a great meeting privately with some Indian chiefs from Rondônia (far west of Amazonia), primarily getting to know them and hear what their issues are, how they see this historic moment.…

Trying to summarize this event is impossible. As I left I spent some hours poring over the newspapers that were published during the last days of the Forum. There I learned a lot about the politicians and the official proclamations, the “real news” that occurred in Belem, and got something of an overview of developments. But the overwhelming sensation during the four days was of being in a sprawling political summer camp. The official meetings were far less significant than the endless serendipitous encounters that were nonstop. On the campuses, in the hallways, cafes, and restaurants, and along the waterfront at other establishments far removed from the official sites, meetings and parties continued without a break. Encounters with strangers was the norm, but it was also the case that various friends who had been at previous World Social Forums set up regular gathering points. I gravitated to Jai Sen’s convergence at the Restaurant Palafita (a place on stilts over the River, near the historic center), where many delegates spent the evenings dining and drinking and occasionally dancing. My pal Jeff Conant and his colleague Marcela Olivera from Cochabamba (Food & Water Watch), as well as Javier Taks (Red Temática de Medio Ambiente) from Montevideo, (all involved in what I think they called the Rede Vida, or Life Network) were primarily focused on presenting water issues and building political coalitions to push for water-as-commons. They came to the Palafita many nights too.

View from the ferry moving from UFPA to UFRA.

Libyan leader Qaddafi had his own distribution guy with books on a cloth...

I was lucky because I had Thiago from the Sao Paolo office of the Forum who helped me and my pals get an apartment, got me a press credential, and generally made a complicated situation pretty comfortable and manageable for us. Meanwhile, he was working about 14+ hours a day and was holding up surprisingly well in spite of having so many people making so many demands on him. His Paulista pals from Ecologia Urbana befriended me, as did a number of cyclists from Brasilia and Belem itself, so I had a great time hanging out during and after the Forum with Brazilian Critical Mass (Bicicletada) cyclists.

A women's rights discussion.

Not sure what point these cavewomen were making in front of the media center, but they were visually quite entertaining! (They reminded me a lot of women's street theater I filmed in 1988 in Sao Paolo.)

Rooaaaarrr!

I had a number of random encounters that really enriched my visit. Berto walked up and started talking to me in great English as we got off the Po-po ferry from one campus to the other. He lives in a city of about 100,000 near Belem (Belem itself is 1.5 million!) and is quite involved in political efforts to save the Amazon. He was so warm and curious, like many locals I met at the World Social Forum. They were having the time of their lives!

Berto, a Paranense who warmly chatted me up as we got off the ferry.

On the Cotijuba tractor ride I chatted with Diego, another local with a real enthusiasm for languages, who had a sweet idiosyncratic English. He was with a couple of Swedes and a boisterous local woman. He’d had a lot of trouble finding what he was looking for at the WSF—the most common lament. Johanna from Sweden explained to me that her visit had been a bad use of her time from her employer’s point of view. She said she could have been getting work done all week at her job—she was happy for the vacation-like trip, but didn’t expect to go again to the WSF, and she would suggest to her employer not to send anyone—but I didn’t find out who she worked for—some Swedish NGO I presume. I met Elizabeth from Portland on the first leg of my flight home. She came with her boyfriend unaffiliated with any organization (he’s involved in sustainable furniture, she works in childcare), and she was very frustrated by her experience in Belem. Typically, they couldn’t find anything and when they did find the place where something was supposed to be, it was often cancelled or moved. My Sao Paolo friends lamented the wide dispersion over two separate campuses, so if something you attended didn’t turn out, it was hard to switch to something else because it would be miles away.

I had an interesting, brief chat with a German parliamentarian, Sascha Raabe (SPD-Frankfurt), while waiting in the interminable line at the Belem airport. I gave him a brief account of Nowtopia and he was quick to affirm that we have different politics, but as the conversation continued, we managed to make it interesting for us both anyway. After being separated in mid-discussion he really wanted to finish his point about why water can’t just be free—because people waste it like crazy—and it set me off on a whole thought process later about my own dogma regarding money. As he was describing it, clearly he’s seeing it as a feedback mechanism with regard to scarce resources. I agree we need some way to encourage more conservationist behavior and negative consequences for profligacy are probably always going to be useful.

Typical scene on the streets of the UFRA campus.

My friends who’d been at previous World Social Forums told me this was the first one to be explicitly anti-capitalist. Previous ones had been focused on anti-neoliberalism but hadn’t been comprehensively anticapitalist. I briefly met Walden Bello there, thanks to Teivo, one of the insiders in the International Committee. I noticed that David Harvey was speaking but I didn’t make it to the workshops where he was supposed to speak (I wanted to say howdy, since he’s my daughter’s thesis advisor). The big South American “left-wing” presidents held a summit during the WSF. Brazil’s Lula hosted Hugo Chavez (Venezuela), Evo Morales (Bolivia), Fernando Lugo (Paraguay) and Rafael Correa (Ecuador). All agreed that neoliberalism is to blame for the global financial crisis and together they declared the end of the dictatorship of the “Market-God,” and the necessity of a common exit from the crisis for South American countries. Lula cemented his role as the favorite of U.S. rulers by arguing for free trade and against tariffs and domestic trade barriers. Burnishing his national populism at the same time as he defended free trade, he specifically criticized an Obama announcement to use only U.S.-made steel in public works projects. All of this was on the January 31 edition of Público, a daily paper put out by “F.S.M. Communicāo” which given its broad left and popular tone, including interesting essays from academics, seems to have been a project of the Social Forum, or at least a part of it.

On the cover is a big picture of Lula with the headline “Lula demands end to commercial barriers,” while below the fold the Governor of the state of Pará where the Forum was held, Ana Julia Carepa, is seen at a press conference announcing plans to plant one billion trees in a major reforestation program in her state. I was pretty surprised to read her comments going well beyond anything I ever heard from a Brazilian politician regarding the Amazon or Indians. She publicly declared the Amazon is an indigenous territory with a rich biodiversity. “The view of the Amazon as a green hell devoid of people doesn’t correspond to the truth. There are already 20 million residents and these people have relations among themselves. In other words, the Amazon has people!” To govern an Amazonian state like Pará is challenging, first by its geographic size, then by the pressure of agribusiness and exploration for forest and mineral resources, she said. “It is a predatory and neocolonial economic model implanted here since the second half of the 20th century”… She highlighted her administration’s commitment to construct a new model of development for the Amazon, pushed by struggles and social movements that, embedded in the agenda of the World Social Forum, daring to accept the imperative to construct another world. “Sustainable Amazon—the challenge of the future: strategies of local development in the context of a global crisis” was the theme of the first roundtable of the Local Authorities Forum which took place just before the World Social Forum (there was a parallel and overlapping gathering of the Local Authorities Forum of the Amazon).

Clearly the presence of the World Social Forum creates a lot of momentum that pushes local politicians to at least look like they’re doing something! A friend who was part of the follow-up International Committee meeting on Feb. 2 told how the day had been dominated for some hours by a major fight over the Forum’s next location. African delegates had been promised it two years ago, and it’s likely to be in Dakar, Senegal. But some Brazilians and others, imagining that Obama would be an enthusiastic supporter of the Forum, and that the presence of the WSF would push him to the left, urged the IC to consider instead the U.S. as the next host. It’s a nonstarter of course, given the ridiculously restrictive visa system enforced by the U.S. now, but beyond that, the political fantasy that Obama is somehow with the movement of movements you could see in Belem is simply bizarre.

This camp provided a central gathering point for a lot of local hippies, but more importantly, a number of Nowtopian-like initiatives, countercultural practices that weren't as prominent as typical leftist demands and iconography.

A Free Seed exchange at the Peace Camp.

An Agroecology campsite.

Couldn't follow the discussion, but the camp dwellers seemed to be solving some kind of problem as I passed by.

A permaculture demonstration hut from afar.

The same permaculture hut closer.

Joāo Pedro Stédile, coordinator of the global peasant organization Via Campesina and member of the National Directorate of the Landless Workers Movement (Movimento Sem Terra—MST) attacked the left presidents for supporting banks and capitalists more than the people, for too much lip service and not any real action. The crisis is hitting South America, too, of course, and it shows how integrated the economies are with the world. Neoliberalism is still very influential in terms of shaping a debate that leaves politicians on the defensive whenever they try to invest in or expand the public sectors (unless it’s to surreptitiously bolster certain private interests). Stédile said at a January 29 press conference “The Amazonian populations have to counterpose a popular project; to recover the sovereignty of the people over the Amazon’s wealth; to renationalize [the big mining company] Vale so they don’t mess with forest anymore. We of the MST defend zero deforestation. From here on out, no tree should fall. In the degraded areas, we demand agrarian reform, land distribution to rural workers, and to make reforestation programs as well as new agriculture that doesn’t depend on deforestation.”

In another interesting article Amanda Meta reported on a demonstration in Belem by representatives of schools, NGOs and social movements in Paraguay, Ecuador and Bolivia against Brazilian multinationals like Petrobrás and Odebrecht (both supported by the Lula government via National Bank of Economic and Social Development subsidies), claiming they are directly responsible for environmental and social damages in their countries. Interesting that my friends at Ecologia Urbana also had a panel dedicated to exposing Petrobrás, Brazil’s national oil company, as a murderous corporation. Petrobrás sent over a dozen employees to the gathering to denounce the criticism being leveled at them, but Ze Paolo of Ecologia Urbana was prepared. He had his credentials in order (a Ph.D. in economics) and he used Petrobrás’s own statistics from their annual report to make his case. By the end of the meeting, though a number of the oil workers left unconvinced and remained hostile to the Paulista ecologists, the company’s chief greenwasher, a woman responsible for their public relations, offered to help Ecologia Urbana! We’ll see if that was sincere or not in the months and years to come. (It doesn’t seem impossible to me that someone in that role sincerely might want to help “the opposition”; if you have to lie for your job everyday and you know it, you might want to make amends or get even at some point… Of course she might have been disingenuous and only trying to manipulate them.)

Another newspaper was also published regularly at the World Social Forum—TerraViva which in the trilingual edition I have, starts with a hilarious editorial in Portu-Spanglish, or is it Spanglinol? In it the iconography and rhetoric of the left was rather prominent, but there is also a tone of self-critical urgency. Ultimately the WSF raises a lot of hope and expectations that there could be some kind of unified political movement that helps organize the many disparate and local efforts that dot the planet. If Paul Hawken’s Blessed Unrest is right, then there are more than a million organizations worldwide that share a basic purpose of trying to repair the planet’s ecology, to alter the way we live on earth. The World Social Forum invites people to come and then leaves us all hanging, because there both is and isn’t a center, a place where the diverse thinking and acting can somehow congeal into a coherent set of proposals to move everyone forward in a new, comprehensive and radically new direction.

Brazilian and U.S. rappers found a home too.

My own frustration over the call for a Global Labour Charter is perhaps indicative of the underlying dynamics. The old left in its institutional form (unions or parties) shows up and meets with professional NGO staffers, and together they shape a conversation that is rooted in several decades of institutional evolution. The problem, predictably, is that they cannot wrap their heads around a deep break with the framework they’ve worked so hard to establish. The conversation at the meeting I attended led me to write my rant a couple of posts back. Interestingly, the network on Labour & Globalization published a 10-point summary that is actually more sophisticated and nuanced than anything I heard at the meeting. Perhaps outside of the open space in which various national trade union reps aired out their parochial positions, a deeper conversation took place in private afterwards.

Points 7, 8 and 9 of the summary lay out these complementary (and contradictory) ideas:

7.) L&G Network members agree that the climate change crisis will change the way people live and work. Trade unions must develop pro-active campaigns on climate change or decisions will be made by corporations and government without participation by workers and their organizations.

On the next one, #8, the old defensive posture is reiterated: “A top priority for participants in the L&G Network debate has been to defend existing jobs; to promote shared work where necessary through the reduction of workweek without loss of pay; and to demand the creation of new jobs. Job creation programs must focus on sustainable employment such as “green jobs” and jobs in public and social services.” The problem here is that existing jobs ARE THE PROBLEM! Sharing dumb, destructive work is no solution. Nor is demanding that capital provide more jobs. Jobs Don’t Work! Even sustainable “green jobs” still reinforce the basic subordination to capital and the initiative of the monied to determine what work gets done, how and by whom. Aren’t we ready to jettison this insane system that leaves even the organized working class as passive spectators of their own lives?

In #9, the summary statement credits network participants for demanding more public investment for social security and social protection programs” which is hard to be against in a situation where millions are being disemployed and lives are being routinely destroyed. But the most hopeful avenue out of this impasse might lie in the last sentence in this section:  “A more inclusive social and solidarity economy also has been identified as a possible common goal of all existing forms of work, included informal and autonomous ones.” Funny that it is presented almost as an afterthought, when it ought to be the front and center of any agenda for human liberation with respect to our capacity to reproduce life with our shared labor.

Whenever the WSF itself lost my interest, I could always walk into the nearby forest.

I was reading Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy along the way, a really great book. He’s making a basic degrowth argument without using that term much, and like a lot of folks these days he wants to be positive about alternative currency ideas, seeing money as a mechanism of social exchange that can be made to serve other purposes than capital accumulation. I remain skeptical about that, but it was funny that he also admitted that most alternative currency schemes so far have only worked in college towns and mostly only for getting things like massages. I appreciated many of his practical examples, from the growth of local agriculture and farmers’ markets (and the useful work they require) to the invention of a bicycle-powered food processing device in Guatemala. He also understands that our era is one of extreme atomization, and any chance for radical politics will require new networks to emerge: “By some surveys, three-quarters of Americans confess that they don’t know their next-door neighbors. That’s a novel condition for primates; it will take a while to repair those networks.”

Getting to know one’s planetary neighbors through the World Social Forum is a good beginning. Far from sufficient, it is a necessary precondition for the emergence of a new kind of political agency, one that can reinvent political and economic life outside the pernicious logic that traps us now. I’m curious to hear what initiatives emerge from the many invisible networks that have been meeting and consolidating themselves in the spaces opened up by the Forum.

Some talented stencil artists were making themselves heard during the WSF too.

Waiting out the daily rain on Feb. 1 at Prédio Central.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5VLp5RbjEI&feature=related]

Under steady rain, 100 cyclists took to the streets of Belem in the first Bicicletada in the Amazon!

It was a great night! Pai d’Egua! (That’s a charming idiomatic expression that local Belem cyclists have taught us: literally Father of the Mare, but translates as “Cool!” The Paulistas were charmed by this as much as me!) I don’t think anyone knew if it would work or not, and when it turned out to be a rainy night, doubts must have been raised. But one hundred enthusiastic cyclists took to the streets of Belem last night, bringing the global Critical Mass movement to the Amazon and the World Social Forum, under the Brazilian name “Bicicletada”.  They chanted and sang, we rode all over town, into a gas station, past the center’s Praca da Republica, and eventually into one of the city’s most posh public parks where Raoni had had his bike’s tires slashed by disturbed security guards the day before when he stopped there for lunch and had a tiff with them about rolling his bike into the gated park. The chants were funny and boisterous: “Mais Adrenalina, menos gasolina!” (More adrenaline, less gasoline!), “Mais Bicicletas, Menos Carros” (more bikes, less cars), and a few others that I’ll try to add later when I get someone to remind me of them… one was a song, “Motorista! Motorista! Olha a bike! Olha a bike! Deixa o Carro aí-í! Deixa o carro aí – e Vem Pedalar! Vem Pedalar!” (“Motorist, Motorist, Watch out for bikes! Watch out for bikes! Leave your car there! Leave your car there… and come and pedal, come and pedal”–to the tune of the nursery rhyme Frêre Jacques.)

The Bike Lift is an increasingly universal gesture of Critical Mass cyclists, here in the pouring rains.

Several times we passed local tourist hotels full of WSF delegates. Here we are at the Crown Plaza, with delegates cheering us from the balconies while we all chanted "Mais Bicicletas, Menos Carros"!

We took over this big Shell station for a half hour, which was taken in good spirits by all.

Allan was one of the locals from Belem who normally takes treks to the countryside on weekends, but found a new thrill in a Bicicletada in his home town... and it was his farewell too, because he's moving to Brasilia soon to work for the Supreme Court as a techie.

Bertina and Nicholas from Lyon, France. I met Bertina at the Big CM in Rome last May and here we found each other again at the mouth of the Amazon! small world...

The contrast between Critical Mass and the wider experience of the World Social Forum was pretty palpable. The excitement and energy, the camaraderie in the streets, the actual riding and being out in public instead of sitting indoors hearing familiar litanies of problems and “solutions,” all work towards something deeper and more interesting. One of my main concerns with the WSF is that it would consist of so many predictable and oft-repeated ideas. Seems that is true. But to reduce the WSF to the 2,000+ workshops is to miss the real event I think. Something rather different is happening in the halls, gardens, bars, and restaurants around the area. The authentic, unvarnished, unrehearsed conversations are the real deal here, and they happen informally, outside of the presentations. I’ve only poked my head into a dozen Talks, and as an avowed classroom-phobe, I quickly withdraw. It’s all very “educational” and the brief snippets of talk that I heard was always remarkably uninformative unless you came in knowing nothing at all. Was the World Social Forum really designed to be a place where you come and present the altogether familiar critiques of capitalist barbarities and ecological calamities? Because that’s a big majority of what’s out there. I really hope to find out I’m wrong, and that there are lots of great conversations happening in the formal sphere too, but I haven’t yet. During Critical Mass I met Paula from Lima, Peru, an anthropologist who is here and then heading to do more graduate work in Sao Paolo. She attended a number of the indigenous-led events (I missed them all) and was quite disappointed at the lack of new thinking, new information, or anything that departs from what’s been said for the past decade at these kinds of events.

Critical Mass was preceded by my Nowtopia Talk at a forum hosted by Ecologia Urbana of Sao Paolo, and though I felt I wasn’t as crisp and coherent as I wanted to be, and had to drastically shrink the argument for time and translation issues, it still was very well received. Earlier in the day Ecologia Urbana EU) hosted two other panels, one on the national oil company Petrobras, which they called Petrobras: Assassino! (Petrobras: Murderer!). Apparently Petrobras sent a dozen or more of their employees to harangue the presentation, and to cheer their own counter-speakers. Ze Paolo, one of my hosts from EU, has a Ph.D. in Economics (“But that’s fiction!” I exclaimed when he told me) and with that credibility he depended on stats he gleaned from their own annual report to make the arguments about the devastating role of Petrobras on the ecology and economy of Brazil. Interestingly, the chief greenwasher for Petrobras, a woman, approached them afterwards with what seemed to be a sincere desire to work with them. I can believe it. A lot of corporate pr people know they’re dishing out bullshit and given the chance, might easily become moles or even turn against their employers more substantially. Here’s a photo at the end of the night at the bar, with Jean Paolo on the left and Ze Paolo on the right.

At midday they gave a Talk on Green Cities, and I thought they did a really good job, very coherent and direct, discussing the impact of energy, transit and consumption choices on the possiblities of a green city transformation, but arguing compellingly that it is possible to do it, even on a Planet of Slums (they quoted Mike Davis on that), and specifically in a mega-city like Sao Paolo, if you take it one street and one neighborhood at a time. I was able to understand a lot of the presentation, as I was later able to follow my good friend Thiago’s wonderful addition to my Nowtopia talk, where he went on at some length about fear and isolation and the importance of Nowtopian initiatives for breaking those down and bringing people into social processes that reinforce themselves towards greater convivility and cooperation. I was surprised I could understand as much as I did (on the other hand, I still draw a complete blank about half the time when someone says something to me!)

Post-Nowtopia talk group portrait!

So among the hundreds of events here, I snapped a few photos of signs just to capture the breadth.

This sounds like it could be interesting....didn't get to see it though.

If you’re trying to keep up with any kind of serious schedule of attending all these meetings and discussions, you are approaching exhaustion by now! Even if you’re not, like me, being so far from home in a strange muggy climate with unusual surroundings and language demands is pretty exhausting in itself! Here’s a couple of shots:

These guys are grabbing 40 winks between sessions. With such an overwhelming schedule, anyone trying to attend a lot of events is becoming incredibly exhausted.

I’ve been happy to have this media center to work in. It’s air-conditioned and the internet always works!

My workplace here in Belem. This gym was lined in fabric and is now air-conditioned! Very comfy, and a very reliable internet connection too! Thank you WSF!

And now a couple of nature shots for the day…

Heavy rains provide lots of habitat for herons, grazing in a flooded field with a sleeping delgate barely visible in the vehicle in the background.

OK, ornithologists! Name this bird!

OK, a final note: I wrote a much longer entry a bit ago, and for the 3rd consecutive time, it got wiped out when I tried to save it. Something is wrong with the software, and it’s making me crazy! This time I wrote a lot of it here in the WordPress editing window, thinking that would save me, maybe it was a MS Word thing, but I got hosed anyway. So I’m trying to rewrite it, but a lot of good words got lost… SHIT!!!

The panel on the proposed Global Labour Charter here at the World Social Forum on January 29 demonstrated in stark terms the historic dead-end of trade unionism. The Charter was cautiously embraced by some, dismissed by others, but in any case, has yet to be written by a broad effort (Peter Waterman, who invited me to participate via the New Delhi group CACIM, has a draft with some things you’d expect, like a 6-hour day, 48-week year, Global Labour Rights including right to strike and engage in solidarity actions, a Global Basic Income Grant, a campaign for the defense and extension of Commons and common ownership, and what I liked best, a Global Campaign for Useful Work to deal with useful production, socially-responsible consumption, and environmental sustainability—I’d probably write this a lot more assertively, but at least he had it in there; there were another half dozen points included too.) To be sure, the participants were radical and well-intentioned, but their ideological commitment to their function (negotiators for “labor power” under/within capitalism) blinds them to an epochal opportunity to seize the initiative. If there was ever a time to break with logic of capital, to go on the offensive and to begin a global process of reinventing life itself, this is it! Especially what work we do: workers movements should be leading a redesign of our lives on relocalized and ecological principles of cooperation, generalized abundance, and enjoyable work.

Instead, nearly every speaker yesterday (most of whom were union officials, a preponderant number from metal worker unions for some reason) spoke in clichés about the need to connect as trade unionists with social movements, to organize migrant labor, to bring ignored groups of workers like sex workers into unions, and so on. The South African speaker, the head of the S.A. Communist Party (I think), spoke with a note of bitterness about the lack of solidarity from northern country unions towards southern country unions, especially with regard to neoliberal “free trade” negotiations (e.g. WTO; he noted that many northern trade delegations do not include trade unionists, which the South Africans consider a basic necessity for a coherent negotiation). (He was backed up at length by one of his comrades in the back of the room, who continued the critique of northern unions’ lack of solidarity.) In light of the unfolding global Depression it seemed strangely “yesterday’s news” and in any case, extremely narrow. As global climate change and ecological collapse quicken their pace, quibbling over sectoral and regional biases of various unions seems to miss the point entirely.

There were also speakers from Nepal, Colombia (head of Nat’l. Organization of Indigenous), Belgium, India, South Korea, Norway, Nigeria, and Italy, with about 40+ in attendance from England, Japan, France, Brazil, and some others I didn’t get. So quite a broad representation, which itself was interesting, but the tone of the discussion was terribly disappointing. I admit I chimed in to say that the work we are all doing, globally, is making the mess, and that if we don’t get out front on the reinvention of work, and continue to abdicate to Capital, we can only lose. Some cheered me, I think mostly Italians (hah!) but the conversation didn’t really change direction as I (perhaps arrogantly) thought it might… alas. (I probably wasn’t as compelling as I wanted to be.)

The Int’l Metalworkers Union South Asia representative was one of the more thoughtful contributors, noting that the geography of production has changed, serving to decentralize and informalize work places across the world. He contrasted the growing irrelevance of unions (he didn’t actually characterize them as irrelevant, but his comments indicated an awareness of their diminishing role) with “new” marginal sectors that have used the internet and new communications technologies AND skills to make themselves heard. As he noted, all of society is having the ground disappear beneath their feet, and all existing institutions, to remain relevant, will have to forge new alliances, especially with less formal groups. He also intelligently noted that the old male-dominated trade unionism has not come to grips with the fact that globalization has feminized workplaces everywhere, and that women migrant workers are probably the largest category of unorganized workers. Later, from the audience, another guy from India who Peter Waterman told me represented a Left Union organization that had emerged in recent years, gave a lengthy speech dismissing any notion that trade unions were anything less than crucial institutions as powerful and relevant today as ever, maybe more so. He insisted that everything involving resistance and struggle against capitalism in India for the last 100 years depended first and foremost on trade unions! I was a bit flabbergasted that anyone could make such a claim, since there are countless examples in history of unions being impediments to social struggles, and their ongoing role in disciplining workers to the needs of capital is hardly invisible.

The leader of the Hyundai branch of the South Korean metalworkers union repudiated the tone of nationalism that permeated a lot of comments, but had been holding back the discussion even among these folks going back to 2005. He lamented the slow progress they’d made on efforts to unify their efforts, noting that Capitalism was moving at a much faster speed.

Indeed, the ponderous conversation that went on in the sweltering heat of a classroom in the Prédio Central on the UFRA campus (outside in a nearby tent some kind of New Age/religious ceremony was going on, occasionally emitting loud chanting over which we struggled to be heard), confirmed a sense of missed opportunity. A big broom and a “dustbin of history” seemed to be closing in on the gathering as it concluded… I don’t doubt that many of these individuals will make important contributions to real social struggles in the future, but the framework of their discussion, and their apparently years-long effort to advance the conversation, demonstrated a deeper impotence than anyone there would care to admit. For myself, the urgency of merging conversations about work (labor) and ecology grows stronger, while my patience for blathering bureaucrats and tired old formulas is more or less exhausted.

I have way too many photos from the Opening March day before yesterday. I didn’t find anyone I knew until it was nearly over, though I had a very fun time regardless. I made my way through the crowd several times in search of good signs and interesting moments and out of 250 photos, I got a few… The March was scheduled to leave from the riverfront around 3 pm for some odd reason… sure enough at 3:45 the torrential equatorial rains opened up and we all got super soaked. I had an umbrella and parked myself under a big mango tree with a few others, but the water made its way up from the ground anyway. It was hilarious to see how quickly the marchers either gave in to the giddy fun of being completely soaked to the bone, or peeled off to sheltering awnings along the sides.

Soggy socialists march under a downpour, Jan. 26, 2009, Belem, Brazil, opening the World Social Forum.

Many of the contingents were Brazilian socialist or communist groups, but just about every “issue” was well represented too. Groups of women, gays, Indians, ecologists of many stripes, people from all over the global south, a few of us northerners (really not many), and a healthy number of Christian hippies to boot! Turns out to be a substantial presence of Christian activists—ecology- and peace-oriented. After about 40 minutes of off and on hard rain (I mean HARD rain!), the skies cleared and after another 30 minutes we were all dry again! It’s damn hot when it’s not raining, so it doesn’t take long to dry out… After marching along for a few miles shooting photos, enjoying the canopy of mango trees that cover many streets here, I finally stopped off for a traditional soup I remembered here called Tacacá. It’s a strange broth based on some kind of leafy green, a half dozen shrimp, and a big blog of something black and gelatinous. It doesn’t look very appetizing but it tastes great and is quite a great street-side small meal.

I snuck this photo when they started to pose for another photographer.

These folks were from Guinea Bissau I think, and were giving an opening invocation, about 40 minutes before the rain started.

"I come to work, not to die!" says the banner, at left end is the following cartoon.

"Cause of death: workplace"

This giant globe was carried along on the march, this photo taken about an hour after the rains had stopped.

At the beginning, many striking scenes of earnest marchers and hopeful banners, this one calling for Economic Democracy and a vision for a new world.

So many locals are really proud to be hosting, and here you can see one older woman volunteer in the middle, practically giddy at the start of the march--really sweet!

I ended the night last at the same restaurant I ate at two days ago, Palafita, which sits on a deck over the Rio Guama. It’s a spectacular location and Jai Sen from CACIM in India was holding court with Kathy and Andrej and another Andres who is a Belem local, Juliana and Ron from the Canadian Postal Workers Union, and a few other folks who came and went. It was great to meet him, as we’d been in correspondence for a while regarding an article I wrote on Rostock that he’s including in an anthology he’s putting out.  I have a lot more images of this march, concluding with some of my wider thoughts at the moment. Read on if you dare!

Women are a major self-organized presence here.

A closer look at the same Brazilian women's contingent.

One of the many socialist blocs at the start.

The oil workers are campaigning to keep the oil in national hands... ecologists note that the deep Atlantic drilling plans have not been carefully vetted for environmental consequences.

When the rain started, most people took shelter, but plenty of diehards kept marching anyway.

A moment to consider: youth socialism or a dry shelter?

Many horizontal banners were sponges that needed repeated shaking and squeezing.

After a half hour the rains stopped and the march never did. Here's a big multinational cow under the ubiquitous mango trees that line the old streets of Belem.

Next, various crowd shots during the walk.

Even I was there!

These folks broke into "Guantanamera" at one point... very charming!

Sometimes eyes meet your camera and you don't notice until later.

Looking up at locals looking down!

More watching from the neighbors.

Local indians are well represented in all activities here.

The contingent of Indians kept coming up from the rear, moving at triple the speed of the rest of us, so they came out a bit blurry!

I wrote that yesterday and now it’s Thursday morning, I’m sitting in the big air-conditioned media center at the UFPA, and it’s about 9 am here. I am having a great time, but the big story so far is that you can’t figure out what the big story is, as an individual. There are hundreds of workshops and panels, scattered over two campuses that are separated by an endless traffic jam. The UFRA campus is where the big Youth Camp is, and also where one goes to register as a delegate. There is a long road that runs through the space, maybe a mile and a half from one end to the other, and it’s a hilarious, crowded passage thronged by thousands of walkers, too many cars (mostly refilling the restaurants) and every half hour or so a fire truck goes through with its sirens wailing. It’s a bit like Burning Man, or one of the summit-protest camps, and you have to marvel at the countless connections that are surely being made among the tents and parties and informal gatherings that are nonstop 24/7 here.

Another political summer camp!

Somehow there's a huge number of Christian hippies here...

Humans have all been friendly, but as usual, Nature is trying to kill us!

The more “serious” events are happening over here at UFPA, a campus well protected by lots of military police. Actually both sites have heavy security, but stories of massive theft at campsites in past Forums seems to justify it… the two campuses are both adjacent to the largest slum in Belem, and the residents have been encouraged to come in to sell artesania and food as an economic boon for their communities, and a way to defuse any potential anger or confrontations between the rather desperate locals and the obviously more affluent Forum crowds. Locals are constantly warning us against walking anywhere too, which is apparently a class thing here in Brazil, a deep fear of walking through the cities on the grounds that you will surely be mugged. But I’ve been walking all over, and only have been greeted by friendly people, if at all…

Yesterday I made it to the Bicycle Museum that’s been set up at the UFRA, and spent a very enjoyable afternoon schmoozing with lots of passersby. It’s right on the main road that everyone is continually walking back and forth on, making their passeata, checking each other out, going to one event or another. Everyone stops and gawks at the bike collection, but it’s not for rent or riding, so that’s frustrating for many. Apparently bicycles have never been a presence at previous Forums, so thanks to Thiago and Raoni and Marcello and the cyclists from Brasilia and Sao Paolo, they are having a greater impact already this time. There’s a plan for a big Critical Mass after the Nowtopia panel tomorrow at 6 (in line with normal CM time everywhere) and expectations are for a great turnout of local cyclists. Tons of people use bikes here routinely, often two and three to a bike (lots of parents riding their children around, and Thiago assures me that the scene at 7 am is like the old days in China, streets jammed with cyclists who form spontaneous “critical mass” and push through the aggressive motorized traffic). It’s a failure of imagination that a fleet of several thousand bikes wasn’t arranged to use in the sprawling campuses by the tens of thousands of delegates who are having to walk back and forth endlessly in the heat and periodic torrential downpours.

A fleet of bikes make up an impromptu Museum at the UFRA.

The History of the Bicycle display.

An original 1963 Brazilian bike next to a bamboo-wrapped beauty.

Marcello, the fleet owner and "Museum Director."

Me and JP with a mini...

Lots of photo ops at the Bike camp... here's Fabianne from Critical Mass in Curitiba!

The media love the Bike Camp... here Ze Paolo is being interviewed.

As the bike camp is on the main road in UFRA, various demos march by all the time. Here's another woman's march.

They drummed energetically and had a provocative banner!

Speaking of which, yesterday I was about to leave with a half dozen cyclists (they loaned me a Dahon) and suddenly the third huge rainfall of the day started. Drops the size of golfballs came pelting down, winds whipped the water sideways and we all crowded under the small tarp/roofs of the bike installation. In there for about a half hour while the roads cleared and the rains pounded down, we got to know each other even better. I had a great conversation with Javier from Montevideo, Uruguay, who had briefly interviewed me for his efforts down there to promote bike paths and general bicycle improvements, and to learn about Critical Mass and the bigger politics around cycling. Javier is also part of the same water-as-commons network with Jeff C. so our worlds overlapped in more ways than one. Delano from Brasilia was there too, and we’d already been chatting for an hour before we were imprisoned by rain. Later, with his friend Amara, and Uira and Uera and later Claudio, we made our way to the Palafita, where we got the molasses-slow service, but eventually had some good fish and beer, for which they once again tried to overcharge us. This time I had Brazilian companions to put up a fight, and we got the bill reduced quite a bit. Hanging out on a deck over the river in the evening is one of the sweet pleasures of being here, and that locale is becoming the networking center for a bunch of overlapping communities, so it’s all the more fun. I ran into Peter Waterman there, and today I’ll be on a panel with him on the Global Labour Charter he’s promoting; Jai Sen is holding court there each night, and of course Kathy and Andrej are regulars too… Jeff and Marcella and Javier and the water folks were all there last night too…

I guess that’s the part of these events that I give the most importance to. The incredible richness of new friends and connections that excite and deepen our lives in these moments, but have a real chance of lasting beyond this political Carnival of Conversation. I am lucky with my bicycling/Critical Mass role, because I can see how excited people are to connect with a “movement” that lives up to a lot of the fantasies embedded in the WSF’s self-conception—decentralized, local and global, open to reinvention and redefinition in each location, but still remaining connected to a larger process of transformation, a global revolt against oil and car industries, against a structure of life that is killing us all—in bicycling and Critical Mass people find a form that allows for individual action that doesn’t feel empty and pointless, but instead is enjoyable and meaningful and portends bigger possibilities.

Whatever one might hope for in terms of some kind of new nascent system of global self-governance, the fact is that the WSF, like many aspects of a common politics these days, is NOT interested in taking power, but in fundamentally eroding and abolishing it as we know it. Replacing the power structures that exist with something enduring and capable of managing, say, your local water system, in a non-bureaucratic, horizontalist, democratic and accountable way, is the great mystery—perhaps the impossible task. Adhocracy is extremely flexible and mobile by definition. Our more “permanent” infrastructure and the institutions that have evolved to maintain it are by nature anything but ad-hoc, or at least that’s been the case up until the present. Can a networking, consultative and horizontal democracy that stays local and moves up in complexity only AS NEEDED emerge from this chaos and overwhelming good will and hopefulness? That’s the $64,000 question and the easy answer is no. Certainly the statists and traditional socialists who are very present here in Brazil are adamant that there is no answer outside of state power. But the urgency and camaraderie and joy and discussion all create a cultural imperative that moves in a very different direction. Can it find a new form that replaces states without becoming a state? Is it even possible to imagine that?