Backwardness has moved to Davos

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).

The supposed progress of market globalization were presented as inevitable and necessary to the prosperity of nations. Eight years later, neoliberal mantras not only lost strength but are also covered by heavy clouds of suspicion and distrust. From 2001 to 2009, market optimism and euphoria changed into affliction and lamentation.

There is, however, an atmosphere of novelty surrounding the WSF 2009. The world has changed, after all. And there is a great novelty as well to the paraenses, who are receiving for the first time the Forum. At hotels, streets and restaurants of Belém, English, French, German, among other languages begin to be heard. Such polyphony, however, is not even news in a State in which 60 languages are spoken. The polyglot Amazon is going to meet with other languages and parts of the world, and vice-versa.

Conservative voices in the city, as occurred in Porto Alegre, in 2001, speak about the possibility of chaos taking over Belém. There is, beyond doubt, a chaotic dimension in the WSF, but it is an extremely creative chaos. One of the greatest expressions of this creativity is the capacity that the Forum had, since 2001, to anticipate diagnostics and analysis that ended up being confirmed by reality. The lack of control of the market, the maddened and maddening free circulation of financial capital, the environmental destruction by the commoditization of the world, the energetic crisis and the growing militarization of the political agenda of nations are some examples.

Belém will have the opportunity to witness and formulate some of the first great synthesis of the world leftist about the crisis that highlights the beginning of 2009: economic, political, environmental and energetic crisis. And this in very different global environment than that one that took place in the birth of the Forum. This novelty, by itself, already represents a great challenge to the movement, which, in refusing the policies and principles of neoliberal globalization, has launched ideas and proposals that today no longer receive the label of anachronistic. Anachronism, today, has moved to the cold mountains of Davos.

Translated from Portuguese (for the translation, please see About page)
For the Original Text in Portuguese click here