By RS Urgente
Belem sees, in a very peculiar way, the atmosphere that Porto Alegre met in 2001, when received for the first time the World Social Forum. There are, for sure, important differences. One of them is not a detail: the world has changed. When WSF was born, as a counterpoint to the World Economic Forum in Davos, globalization still used to be sung in prose and verse, and its critics, rated as anachronistic, enemies of technology and fools. At the time, the then Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso even wrote an article calling luddites the organizers and participants of the Forum (referring to the English workers’ movement in early nineteenth century, which used to destroy the machinery for fear losing their jobs for them).