Defending Open Space

First Reflections on The 3rd World Social Forum, Porto Alegre, Brazil,
January 23-8, 2003:

From Comrades' Agreements to the Reinvention of Social Emancipation

Peter Waterman

Email: waterman@antenna.nl
Website: www.antenna.nl/~waterman/
List: http://groups/yahoo.com/groups/GloSoDia

'If we agree that the most important characteristic of the Forum is the
'open space' it offers for free exchange, then especially at the present
juncture in history, the World Social Forum needs to make it its task to
promote the idea of open space as a general political culture in civil and
political work. Building open space - building an open political culture,
and defending open space - needs to be seen as a project in itself, and
those who believe in this idea need to come and work together on this.Given
that the World Social Forum is meant to be an open plural process, embracing
people of many different persuasions, we need to work to build an
organisational process that is based on norms and principles that are openly
and commonly defined, and not on gentlemanly or comradely behaviour between
a few and that cannot be questioned by others'. (Jai Sen 2003)

'What we want is the full development of cyberspatial practices.We want
social movements and social actors to build on this logic in order to create
unheard of forms of collective intelligence - subaltern "intelligent
communities" capable of re-imagining the world and inventing alternative
process of world-making.The result could be a type of world-scale networking
based on internationalist principles (a Fifth International? The
Cyberspatial International)[.] What we want is the world's Left to take this
model seriously in their organising, resistance and creative practices. The
lessons for the Left are clear! In the long run, this amounts to reinventing
the nature and dynamics of social emancipation.' (Arturo Escobar 2003)

Introduction: Dis/Orientations

 In my tiny corner of the Third World Social Forum (WSF3, Porto Alegre,
Brazil, late-January, 2003) the expressed experiences were those of euphoria
and disorientation, of simultaneous stimulation and frustration, of being
both in a unique international meeting-place and in a commercial
market-place (dual meanings of 'agora' in Greek), of an increasing
scepticism of the intellect not necessarily accompanied by a similar
optimism of the will (I borrow from Gramsci).

This area might be small, my angle of vision narrow, but they are also, I
would like to think, significant. It is as difficult to place and name this
space/approach as is the WSF itself. Both are novel and in process of rapid
growth, spread and evolution: people are talking of the globalisation of the
Forum. I think my space is somewhere between the Centre of the event/process
and one of its several peripheries. I have been playing with such names for
this area/orientation as 'libertarian', 'emancipatory', 'post-capitalist'
(to be distinguished from the negative 'anti-capitalist'). It is significant
because it is on a critical but committed edge of the Forum. It is
significant, also, because it overlaps with the decision-making Centre and
various other peripheries: po-faced Leninists; pie-throwing,
self-marginalizing anarchists; and intellectuals such as myself who prefer
the incalculable freedom of cyberspace to the measurable power (lessness?)
of the political institution that the Forum has been increasingly becoming.

The original title of this piece was 'Out of Control'. This seemed to me a
nice one precisely because of its simultaneous negative and positive
connotations. The ambiguity appealed to my more dialectical moments (as
contrasted with those in which I slip back into Left- Manicheanism:
Left/Right, Revolutionary/Reformist, Socialist/Capitalist;
Utopian/Dystopian, Hetero/Homo, Wo/Man, Future/Past, Virtuous/Vicious). It
seems to me that the Forum is out of control in various negative ways: too
big; lacking in openness, transparency and accountability; reproductive of
traditional Party and BINGO (big international non-governmental
organisation) politics. But it is also out of control in various positive
ways: the Centre (its initiators) can no longer control the process they
themselves invented and developed; the idea of social forums is now out of
the bottle and subject to numerous and varied local or specific (feminist,
indigenous, intellectual-elitist, libertarian, social-democratic,
nationalist, Leninist) claims, forms and inflections. This 'positive' is
not, however, identical with 'virtuous'. It is itself riven with
contradictions, some suggested by the just-identified claims/forms. Perhaps
one should rather use the word 'new', in so far as this is not necessarily
associated with virtue. Consider 'new' world order.

Speaking at WSF2 with younger activists from Barcelona and Belgrade, I
argued that what was about to call itself the 'global justice and solidarity
movement' (GJ&SM) had at last discovered the secret of fire. This secret, I
suggested is 'keep moving'. In other words, any movement peak or plateau,
any institutionalisation of the movement (both so far inevitable), will be,
or should be, or could be, immediately challenged. This is a necessity
because of the 'iron law of oligarchy' that for a century or more has
afflicted social movement institutions. The Keep Moving Emancipation Show is
now made a possibility because of the internet, and because of the
increasing shift of the site of power contestation, particularly at global
level, from the political sphere to the cultural/communicational one, from
the institutional to the cyberspatial. The GJ&SM is also the first such
movement to immediately produce its own internal critics, and the first one
in which such criticism can be immediately circulated to the interested
public and beyond. This is now a matter of Round the World in 80 Seconds. In
a movement that prides itself on opening the route from 'protest to
proposition' (originally, I think, a Latin American feminist concept), the
message goes out simultaneously from the movement and to the movement.

In the following, I will briefly comment on the following issues: 1) The
danger of going forward to the past of social movements and
internationalism; 2) The problematic relationship with the trade unions; 3)
The uneven composition of the Forum; 4) The uncertain future of the social
movement network; 5) The necessity of a communications/media/cultural
internationalism.

1. The Future of the Movements and Internationalism: Forward to the Past?

At the Centre of initiative and decision-making within the Forum has been
the Brazilian Organising Committee (OC) and the International Council it
created (IC). These have been themselves out of control since neither of
them is subject to the principles of participatory or even representative
democracy. The NC members may or may not be accountable to their respective
communities (mass organisations, NGOs, funding agencies) and the same is
true of the IC, the role of which seems to have been to give international
legitimacy to the OC, whilst having a quite ambiguous relationship to it.
The justification for the existence of both has been the innovative ship
they have launched - an international and internationalist encounter, within
the civil-social sphere, targeted against neo-liberalism and capitalist
globalisation, increasingly concerned with proposing radical-democratic
alternatives to such. And this all on the understanding that the place,
space and form is the guarantee for the necessary democratic dialogue of
countries and cultures, of ideologies, of political levels, collective
subjects and movements/organisations.

This space has never been a neutral or innocent one. (Like death and taxes,
money and power are always with us and it is best to face up openly to
this). Nor has it been as far beyond the old politics and parties as it
might have liked to suggest.

The NC consists of a number of representatives of social-movement and
non-governmental organisations (NGOs), the latter of which might address
themselves to social movements and civil society but be answerable only to
themselves. (Two movements, six NGOs, seven men, one woman). These bodies
have been oriented toward the Partido de los Trabalhadores (PT, Workers'
Party), and/or to its recently successful presidential candidate, Lula da
Silva. Just as the Porto Alegre Forums have been places where this (and
other Brazilian parties) could publicise themselves, so was the European
Social Forum, Florence, November 2002, one in which the Rifondazione
Communista (and other Italian political parties) did. Such parties, and
far-less-sophisticated and interesting others, have often hidden their
political lights behind NGO bushels. The WSF has been a site to which
various inter-state agencies, such as the United Nations organisations for
women (Unifem) and for labour (ILO) have likewise been given free access.
State-dependent funding agencies, national and international, and the
massive private-capitalist US foundations, have supported the Forum itself,
or various, selected, inter/national NGOs.

The IC was created top-down by invitation from the OC (of 90-100 members,
mostly NGOs and inter/national unions, about 8-10 are women's networks).
This gargantuan assembly has no clear mandate or power, therefore acting for
the OC largely as a sounding board and international legitimator. The nature
and representativity of the members, and the extent to which they are
answerable to any but themselves, has not been considered. Many of them do
no other work in the IC than turning up and then fighting for their corner -
such as the maximum number of representatives within the Central part of
Forum programmes in the hands of the OC. The IC does not operate behind
closed doors, but its proceedings are barely reported by its members, to
even the interested public (isn't this what elite-formation looks like?).
There has, recently, been discussion about the role and rules of the IC, as
decision-making shifts from the Brazilian national to the international
level. But whilst part of this discussion (actually more like an interesting
consultation, see http://www.delibera.info/fsm2003ci/GB/) is posted on a
publicly-accessible website, the existence of this is known to few.

The Forum itself is an agora in which there are a few large, well-publicised
and well-placed circus tents, surrounded by a myriad of tiny others (now
over 1,000, i.e. 200 per day), proposed by social movements, political
organisations, academic institutions and even individuals. The Marginal
events compete for visibility, for sites, for translators/equipment, often
overlap with or even reproduce the topics of others, and - whilst certainly
adding to the pluralism of the Forum - have inevitably less impact. Whilst,
again, the decision that the Forum is not a policy-forming body allows for
pluralism and creativity, the result is, inevitably, domination by the
official programme - one which has been conceived without notable public
discussion. The concentration of power at the Centre is reinforced by the
presence of our own celebs (celebrities) - who themselves may have to choose
between appearance in a hall seating thousands, or in a classroom seating 25
(I am aware of people taking the second option, but the compass clearly
swings here to the North Pole).

This formula is out of control in different ways.

FSM3, 2003, with maybe 100,000 Brazilian and foreign participants, was too
big for the hosts to handle: a number of experienced organisers had
apparently been lured away to Brasilia by the new government, and the
original PT sponsors had lost control of both the city and the state. Unlike
last year, the programme was never published completely in either English or
Portuguese. (A well-organised North American left, internationalist,
pro-feminist group, invited to run a five-day programme on 'Life after
Capitalism', found itself without publicity, and then geographically
marginalized in a club unmarked on the maps, unknown to the information
booths, and a taxi-ride away from the main site. (See www.zmag.org/lac.htm).

The Forum is also out of control in the sense that it is beyond the reach of
the Centre, with regional, national, local and problem-specific forums
mushrooming worldwide. The Forum is slipping out of the hands of the
original NGO elite (I use this term loosely) as it is challenged by those
who are demanding that its decision-making bodies consist of
regional/national representatives. The Forum is in danger of losing its
'social' profile, as major politicians and governments recognise the
importance of the agora, and turn up invited (President Lula da Silva) or
uninvited (President Hugo Chavez). And, whilst there was no way that the
Forum could fail to invite Lula, no one gave him the right, in the words of
a sympathetic regional newspaper, to 'Start the Dialogue between Porto
Alegre and Davos'. The Forum's place as a focus for what I would call the
'new global solidarity' is being put in question by those who seek to not
only give it national but nationalist character. This is evidenced in the
Indian case (Sen 2003), where an Asian Social Forum, dominated by certain
traditional Indian communist parties, attacked imperialist wars in Asia but
had no word for the Indo-Pakistani conflict - in which nuclear threats are
issued by both chauvinist regimes (both national states enjoying US
imperialist military cooperation)!

Given all these problems, there is a danger that the Forum will be
overwhelmed by the past of social movements and internationalism. This was
one in which these movements were dominated by the institutions they
spawned, by political parties that instrumentalized them, in which the
movements were state-oriented and/or state-identified, and in which
internationalism was literally that - a relationship between nations,
nationals, nationalisms, nationalists.

2. The Union-Forum Relationship: Movable Objects and Resistible Forces

WSF3 saw a growth and deepening of the relationship between the Traditional
International Union Institutions (TIUIs) and the Forum. The increasing
interest of this major traditional movement in the Forum was demonstrated by
the presence, for the first time of the General Secretary of the the
International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). But top officers
of Global Union Federations (GUFs, formerly International Trade
Secretariats) were also present, either prominently on platforms or quietly
testing the water. Also present were inter/national union
organisations/networks from beyond the ICFTU family (now Global Unions).
This year there were, in addition to the radical union networks from France
or Italy, an independent left union confederation from the Philippines, a
Maoist union leader from Southern India, and, no doubt, hundreds of
movement-oriented unionists from other countries. I noted also an increasing
openness amongst even the most traditional of TIUIs. Whilst the first big
union event was a formal panel with only gestures in the direction of
discussion (here, admittedly, reproducing a problematic Forum formula),
another major panel saw the platform shared between the Global Unions,
independent left unions and articulate leaders of social movements or NGOs
identified with the Forum process. The unions, moreover, seem increasingly
prepared to recognise that they are institutions and that it is they that
need to come to terms with a place and process that, whilst lacking in
formal representativity and often inchoate, nevertheless has the appeal,
dynamism and public spread or reach that they themselves lack and need.

The question, however, remains of what kind of relationship is developing
here. From the first big union event, patronised by the charismatic Director
of the International Labour Organisation, veteran Chilean socialist, Juan
Somavia, I got the strong impression that what was shaping up was some kind
of understanding or alliance between the Unions, the Social Forum and
Progressive States/men, as here evidently represented by the
repeatedly-praised PT Government and President Lula. Juan, who had just met
Lula in Brasilia (in inter/state capacities), made explicit comparison
between the ILO's new programme/slogan of 'Decent Work' and Lula's election
slogan 'For a Decent Brazil'. In so far as the TIUIs appear to have adopted
'Decent Work' - hook, line and two smoking barrels - what is here implied is
a global neo-keynesianism, in which the unions and their ILO/WSF friends
would recreate the post-1945 Social Partnership model, but now on a global
scale! This model seems to me problematic in numerous ways. The main one,
surely, is whether the role of the WSF, or the more general Global Justice
and Solidarity Movement is going to be limited to supporting a project aimed
at making capitalist globalisation 'decent', or whether this movement should
not have a project for labour that might be more utopian (post-capitalist)
and, simultaneously, more realistic (morally challenging work-for-capital,
appealing to 'non-workers', addressing related social and ethical issues).
When an old institution meets a new movement, something's gotta give.
Bearing in mind that decision-makers of both the TIUIs and the WSF could
have quite instrumental reasons for relating to each other, one cannot be
certain that the openness within the Forums will guarantee that the
principles at stake here will be continually and publicly raised. (There are
about a dozen inter/national union organisations on the IC, most or all of
which are likely to favour 'decent work' rather than questioning
work-for-capital).

3. Combined and Uneven Development: Gender, Ethnicity, Class and Age

 I was somewhat alarmed, at the elite hotel I eventually found myself in at
Porto Alegre, by the number of people who looked like me: White, Male,
Middle-Aged (hey, I am not yet 70!) and, evidently, Middle-Class. I do not
know to what extent this bias applies to the decision-making committees, but
it existed visibly on the various platforms and other public events. This
does not, of course, mean that women, Africans, Indians, Indigenous Peoples,
or the Under-30s are excluded from the Forum, or from that hotel. But the
youth were under canvas in the Youth Camp, the Argentinean piqueteros were
in the streets, and, it seemed to me, the women were less visible than they
had been at WSF2.

 Amilcar Cabral, assassinated leader of anti-Portuguese struggle in colonial
Africa, suggested that after independence there would occur the 'suicide of
the petty-bourgeoisie'. Nice idea, but no cigar! As the more-sceptical
Frantz Fanon argued at the same time, the post-colonial elites were going to
do everything they could to retain and increase their privileges. There are
striking power/wealth differences between Forum participants, particularly
visible in the case of the South. In two or three Latin American cases known
to me, the poorer participants travelled by bus - this sometimes meaning a
4-5 day journey, with entry obstacles at various border-crossings. There is
no reason to assume that any elite is suicidal (nor that I was going to
abandon a hotel with hot and cold running internet) without irresistible
pressure from outside or below. In so far, on the other hand, as the WSF
elite has declared certain principles relating to liberty, equality,
solidarity, pluralism, the respect of difference and the pursuit of
happiness, then it might be possible to confront them (us) with the
necessity of re-balancing the power equation. The elites could then put
their efforts, in their home states/constituencies into facilitating rather
than dominating or controlling the Forum process.

 The experience of women within the Forum might point here in different
directions. I have no figures for this year, but at both previous events,
women were almost 50 percent of the participants. There are powerful
feminists on the panels and in at least the IC, quite capable here of making
the Forum a Feminist Issue. There are numerous panels on gender and
sexuality in both the Central and Marginal programmes. Whilst the recent
Latin American/Caribbean Feminist Encounter considered alternatives to the
old pattern, and addressed itself centrally to globalisation, it seems to
have not identified itself as such with the Forum process. Despite a
discernible shift in the international women's/feminist networks, over
recent years, away from the inter/state bodies and toward the public arena,
I am wondering whether the lobby has not been shifted from that old site to
this new one.

 It occurs to me that the power/presence balance within the Forum might be
corrected by two measures. One would be quotas for under-represented
categories. The other would be an official programme structured according to
collective subjects rather than, or as well as, major problems. Thus one
could have major panels/programmes on Labour, Women, Youth, Indigenous
Peoples - even the Old (I hope to become such myself one day).

4. A Social Movement Network: De/Centralised?

 At two previous Forums there has been issued a 'Call of Social Movements'.
The initiative for such has come from members of the OC and IC, some being
recognisable social movements, others being recognisable NGOs. Both Calls
have been publicly presented and then signed by 50-100 other organisations
and networks. This year, the notion of a 'Social Movements World Network'
(SMWN) was widely circulated on the web and subject to a two-session public
discussion within the Forum. This eventually produced a much shorter,
one-page, declaration, proposing a continuation of discussion about the
nature of such a network, with further meetings to take place during major
movement events this year and next. It may be that what I received was an
interim document and that there either is or will be a longer one. But,
following the two dramatic previous Calls, and the larger,
better-publicised, two-stage, discussion this year, one is struck by the
modesty and caution of this proposal.

 There are good reasons for such caution. The Call - like other Forum bodies
and initiatives - is surrounded by a certain amount of mystery. Given
overlapping memberships, are we to understand the Call as a device for going
beyond the Forum's self-limitation on making political declarations? How
come the Secretariat of the Call, in Sao Paulo, only came to this interested
observer's attention one year after it came into existence? Why did it take
seven or eight months for the signators of Call 2 to be publicly identified
(at least on a website), when those of Call1 were published instantaneously?
What, for the purposes of this new initiative, is a social movement?

 I am actually favourable to, even enthusiastic about, the creation of such
a network. In part this is because there exists no such internationally. In
part because it is going to provide information and ideas on a continuing
basis - and to those people/places otherwise excluded from the periodic
Forums. In so far as this will have an existence in 'real virtuality'
(Manuel Castells), it may go beyond a WSF that remains largely earth-bound
and institutional. Apart from the questions above, certain crucial others
remain (about which I may only have yet other questions).

 Is the network going to be primarily political/institutional or primarily
communicational? In the first case, communication is likely to be made
functional to the political/institutional. In the second case, we may be
into a different ballgame or ballpark. In the first case, there is likely to
operate a 'banking' model of information, in which maximum information is
collected, to be then dealt out to customers in terms of power and profit.
In the second case, there can operate the principle of the potlatch, or gift
economy, in which individual generosity is understood to benefit the
community. The understanding here is a common African saying: I am who I am
because of other people.

 Even in the best of all possible cyberworlds, however, there remain
questions of appropriate modes (information, ideas, dialogue), of form
(printed word at one end, multimedia at the other) and control (handling
cybernuts and our own homegrown fundamentalists). There do exist various
relevant, if partial, models of international social-movement, civil
society, anti-globalisation networks - earth-bound or cyberspatial. Indy
Media Centre (IMC) has got to be the most important here, and needs to be
reflected upon both for what it can do and what it doesn't. Finally, any
SMWN is going to have to go beyond network babble and recognise that
networks do not exist on one, emancipatory, model. In discussing networks,
Arturo Escobar (2003) has said that

It is possible to distinguish between two general types: more or less rigid
hierarchies, and flexible, non-hierarchical, decentralised and
self-organising meshworks. Hierarchies entail a degree of centralised
control, ranks, overt planning, homogenisation, and particular goals and
rules of behaviour conducive to these goals. Meshworks.are based on
decentralised decision making.self-organisation, and heterogeneity and
diversity. Since they are non-hierarchical, they have no overt goals. It can
be said they follow the dynamics of life, developing through their encounter
with their environments.

In the end, however, it does not too much matter in which place/space, on
which model the SMWN takes shape. The existence of the web, combining low
cost of entry, wide reach and great speed, provides the assurance that such
a network will be supplemented or challenged by others.

5. From Organisation to Communication in the Global Justice and Solidarity
Movement

 I am here moving from cyberspace to communication, and from the FSM to the
GJ&SM. Whereas the movement-in-general has shown, at its best, an almost
instinctive feel for the logic of the computer, and has expressed itself in
the most creative and provocative ways (in Quebec a man was arrested for
threatening to catapult a possibly largish teddy bear over the globalised
razor wire), this is not the case for the FSM in particular. The FSM uses
the media, culture and cyberspace but it does not think of itself in
primarily cultural/communicational terms, nor does it live fully within this
increasingly central and infinitely expanding universe.

 The FSM website remains a disgrace - promoting year-old ideas (chosen by
whom?) in its meagre library. Trying to reach a human being on this site, to
whom one could pose a question, reminds one strongly of Gertrude Stein (or
whoever) on Oakland, California: 'There is no there there'. The only FSM
daily is Terra Viva, an admirable effort by the customarily unaccountable
NGO, but which this year seemed to me to add to its space-limitations,
delays and superficialities a heavier bias toward the Forum establishment.
The more-professional, substantial and independent regional paper, Zero
Hora, gave wide coverage but only in Portuguese. For background information
and orientation one was this year dependent on free handouts of La Vie/Le
Monde (marked by a certain social Catholicism?), and Ode, a glossy,
multi-lingual, New Age, magazine from Rotterdam, with impressively relevant
coverage (which I have used in this paper).

 The FSM seems to me something of a shrine to the written and spoken word.
(In so far as I worship both deities, I am throwing this stone from my own
glasshouse). At its core is The Panel, in which 5-10 selected Panellists do
their thing in front of an audience of anything from five to 5,000, the
latter being thrown the bone of  three to fine minutes at a microphone. And
these were the lucky ones! At the other end of the Forum's narrow spectrum
of modes there is The Demonstration. Here euphoria is order of the day: how
can it not be when surrounded by so many beautiful people, of all ages,
genders and sexual options, of nationality and ethnicity, convinced that
Another World is Possible? But here we must note the distinction made 30
years ago, between mobilisation and mobility, as related to the old
organisation and the new media:

The open secret of the electronic media, the decisive political factor,
which has been waiting, suppressed or crippled, for its moment to come, is
their mobilising power. When I say mobilize I mean mobilize.namely to make
[people] more mobile than they are. As free as dancers, as aware as football
players, as surprising as guerrillas. Anyone who thinks of the masses only
as the object of politics, cannot mobilize them. He wants to push them
around. A parcel is not mobile; it can only be pushed to and fro. Marches,
columns, parades, immobilize people [.] The new media are egalitarian in
structure. Anyone can take part in them by a simple switching process [.]
The new media are orientated towards action, not contemplation; towards the
present, not tradition [.] It is wrong to regard media equipment as mere
means of consumption. It is always, in principle, also means of production
[.] In the socialist movements the dialectic of discipline and spontaneity,
centralism and decentralization, authoritarian leadership and
anti-authoritarian disintegration has long ago reached deadlock. Networklike
communication models built on the principle of reversibility of circuits
might give indications of how to overcome this situation. (Hans Magnus
Enzensberger 1976:21-53)

There is, of course, also The Rally - a panel writ very large indeed.

The paucity of cultural expression at WSF3 is the most surprising thing,
bearing in mind we are in Brazil. The WSF3 song, which has an attractive
lilt but is sung only in Portuguese, and which did not seem to be available
in written or CD form even in this language, was the same as in 2002. The
tee-shirts are still not going to win any design prizes. And the most
popular icon - no fault of the organisers - remains Che. (I suspect there
might be a market for Subcomandante Marcos, for Rigoberta Menchú, for Chico
Mendes, for La Naomi, for El Noam, for Arundhati and even for Frida and
Diego, and for Beatle or two, but I may be wrong here).

 Something of an exception to the general Forum rule was, in 2002, the
campaign against fundamentalisms of the Articulación Feminista Marcosur. I
had and have doubts about both the subject of and the interpretation offered
by this campaign, but it was one which intimately combined the customary
Forum modes with dramatic cultural expression of undeniable originality and
impact: last year there were masks, an enormous hot-air balloon,
hoarding-sized posters and more. This year activity was concentrated in a
big and packed-out book launch, at which was also projected a 10-minute CD
production of  considerable originality and power (Lucy Garrido, the
Uruguayan designer, opted for visuals, music and minimal words, in
successive English and Spanish). We could have had, we should have had, a
discussion around this. Even a panel.

Conclusion: the Secret of Fire

 I am concerned about the future of the Forum process but not worried.
Pandora has opened her box, the genie has is out of the lamp, the secret of
fire is now an open one. Already in Florence, young libertarians were
mumbling, 'Another Forum is Possible'. This possibility is not only a matter
of information and communication technology (which has yet to produce an
English/Spanish translation programme with an appropriate vocabulary). It
may be the combination, precisely, of this with youth, given that urban kids
have grown up with cellular phones, playing arcade computer games, and
therefore with an affinity for any computer technology,  and a healthy
disregard for attempts to coral such. (I was moved to produce my first-ever
Power Point production, on WSF2, by my 12-year-old granddaughter, Joelle,
who is also puzzled about  my resistance to the cell phone, text-messaging
and computer chat).

For the rest, I am inspired by: energetic and innovative social protest, and
original analyses of the local-national-global dialectic in Argentina; by
the belated appearance in Peru of a network, Raiz/Root, which clearly has
some feeling that the WSF is more than an NGO jamboree; by the Kidz in the
Kamp who were discussing under a tree, and with informal translation, how to
ensure that the emancipatory and critical forces had more impact on the
Forum process; by the struggle, against all odds, of the US Znet people to
mount 'Life after Capitalism', an event of  post-capitalist propuesta within
the Forum; by the increasing number of compañer@s, of various ages,
identities, movements and sexual orientations, who believe that, in the
construction of a meaningfully civil global society, transparency is not
only the best policy but the right one.

Buenos Aires-Lima
February 2-4, 2003

Bibliography

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