 
· Do Public Floggings at the World Economic Forum
Represent True Progress?
By Naomi Klein
On the first day of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre Brazil,
the hallways were buzzing with rumours of defections from the North.
Top delegates were jumping ship from the World Economic Forum in
New York and coming to Porto Alegre instead: a European prime minister,
World Bank directors, even corporate executives.
Some never showed up, others did. But debates raged nonetheless
about what it all meant. Was it evidence of the Forum's new strength
(it attracted some 60,000 participants, after all) or a sign of
imminent danger?
The World Social Forum was founded last year as an alternative
to the annual gathering of the top 1,000 corporations, world leaders
and opinion-maker who usually meet in Davos, Switzerland but this
year met in New York City.
With these new high-powered arrivals, however, the WSF now risked
turning from a clear alternative into a messy merger: teams of photographers
trailed politicians; market researchers from PricewaterhouseCoopers
trolled hotel lobbies, looking for opportunities to "dialogue";
students threw a cream pie at a French minister.
It was much the same muddle in New York, with NGOs acting like
corporations, corporations rebranding themselves as NGOs, and pretty
much everyone claiming they were really there as a Trojan Horse.
The tone -- if not the times -- has certainly changed.
The World Economic Forum used to be a place for the rich to be
utterly unapologetic about their wealth and for the elite to be
absolutely defiant about their elitism. But over the course of only
three years, Davos has been transformed from a festival of shamelessness
to an annual parade of public shaming, a dour capitalist S&M
parlor.
Instead of gloating, the ultra-rich now attempt to outdo each other
with self-flagellating speeches about how their greed is unsustainable,
how the poor will rise up and devour them if they don't change their
ways. Again and again, delegates willingly strap themselves in for
whippings from their critics, from Amnesty International to Bono.
This year, when the conference fell off its alpine perch and landed
in the rubble and rabble of New York City, the abuse climbed to
a peak higher than Davos itself.
"The reality is that power and wealth in this world are very,
very unequally shared, and that far too many people are condemned
to lives of extreme poverty and degradation," said Chief Davos
Dominatrix, United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan. "The
perception, among many, is that this is the fault of... the people
who attend this gathering."
Ouch! As one protester's sign put it on the streets outside, "Bad
Capitalist! No Martini."
So, are these public floggings, from the WEF to the Enron hearings,
a sign of actual progress? What, to borrow a phrase more often directed
at those of us who gathered in Porto Alegre, are their alternatives?
Do they have clear ideas about how to better distribute wealth?
Do they have concrete action plans for ending the AIDS crisis or
slowing climate change? Sadly, no. The core economic policies governing
globalization have only accelerated in the past year (fresh tax
cuts, plans for new oil pipelines, deeper privatization programs,
weaker labour protections...).
No wonder so many young people have concluded that it is not the
individual policies or politicians that are the problem, but the
system of centralized power itself.
For this reason, much of the appeal of the World Social Forum is
that its host city, Porto Alegre, has come to represent a possible
challenge to this trend. The city is part of a growing political
movement in Brazil that is systematically delegating power back
down to people at the municipal level rather than hoarding it at
the national and international levels. The party that has been the
architect of this decentralization in Brazil is the Workers Party,
the PT, now in power in 200 municipalities with its leader ahead
in the polls federally.
Many PT cities have adopted the "participatory budget,"
a system that allows direct citizen participation in the allocation
of scarce city resources.
Through a network of neighborhood and issue councils, residents
vote directly on which roads will be paved, which health care centers
will be built. In Porto Alegre, this devolution of power has brought
results that are the mirror opposite of global economic trends.
For instance, rather than scaling back on public services for the
poor, the city has increased them substantially. And rather than
spiraling cynicism and voter drop-out, democratic participation
increases every year.
The participatory budget is far from perfect and it was only one
"living alternative" on display at the WSF. It is, however,
part of a pattern of a rejection of what Portuguese political scientist
Boaventura dos Santos calls "low-intensity democracy"
in favour of higher-impact democracies, from independent media activists
creating new models of participatory media to landless farmers occupying
and planting unused land all over Brazil.
Many remain unimpressed, still waiting for a new top-down ideology
to chart the course. One reporter attending the Forum told me that
all the focus on local power represented "a Maoist retreat
to countryside." The New York Times declared in one headline,
"Brazil Forum More Local Than Worldly."
In fact, with simultaneous mass events in New York and Porto Allege,
last week was a truly global moment for this movement. For me, the
crystallizing moment came late one night at the youth campsite in
Porto Alegre. Around a thousand young people were gathered in front
of a loudspeaker. It was broadcasting live news from the street
demonstrations in New York outside the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. The
news was coming from an Indy Media Centre reporter who was on her
cell phone in the crowd. Her voice was being streamed live on the
Internet. It was picked up by a micro radio station set up in the
camp, where her words were translated into Portuguese and then broadcast.
At one point the U.S. server went down and was immediately replaced
by a back-up in Italy.
Pretty much everyone agreed that the heart of the World Social
Forum wasn't really in the official events. It was in unscripted
moments like when my Italian friend Luca Casarini tried to sum up
the summit over dinner. "It's about -- how do you say it English?
-- this," he said. And using the Forum's activist Esperanto
of butchered second languages and mime, he tugged at his t-shirt
sleeve and showed me the seam.
Right, the seams. Maybe change isn't really about what is said
and done in the centers, it's about the seams, the in-between spaces
with their hidden strength. In Porto Alegre last week, much of the
talk was about nearby Buenos Aires, where some say a revolt from
the seams is already taking place. Street demonstrators aren't calling
for a changing of the political guard but have instead adopted the
sweeping slogan "Get rid of them all."
They have concluded that it's not enough to overthrow one political
party and replace it with another. They are instead attempting something
infinitely more difficult: to topple an economic orthodoxy so powerful,
it can withstand even its strongest advocates whipping and kicking
it from the center.
The question is: can it sustain an attack from the seams?
Excerpted from: Bad Capitalist! No Martini, 2001.
Naomi Klein is the author of No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies
Published: Feb 12 2002. Copyright Naomi Klein. To publish or reprint
this article, contact media@nologo.org
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