Worlds set to collide By John Lloyd
The World Economic Forum at Davos was not created for controversy: it was created to bring capitalists into contact with politicians, media people, non- governmental people and intellectuals, and to spark debate and action on some of the world's problems. It was a serious, heuristic exercise.
It succeeded - beyond the dreams of Klaus Schwab, its founder - in attracting the leaders of business, politics, media and academe. But, in the past two years, it has suffered the same fate as other institutions created to moderate capitalism and give it structures and rules - the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organisation. It became a proxy for capitalist exploitation.
This year, as concrete blocks and razor wire surrounded the Swiss resort, and police beat rioting demonstrators diverted to Zurich, Davos - the antidote to greed, the tamer of Mammon - became, along with Seattle and Prague, another embattled emplacement of exploitation, protected from the wrath of "the global people" only by clubs, tear gas and jails.
At the same time, across the north-south divide (no longer west-east), a new pole of attraction was created. In Porto Alegre, southern Brazil, the World Social Forum was inaugurated. The brainchild of French and Brazilian leftists, it was, and intends to remain, the alternative to, and enemy of, Davos.
The forum was the idea of Bernard Cassen, senior editor at the radical monthly Le Monde Diplomatique. His flourishing ATTAC network of anti-globalisation activists provided much of its organisational spine.
Cassen told me: "We have nothing to say to the people in Davos. We know what their line is. We know what they mean by global responsibility. It is press relations. This is an attempt to construct something quite different."
Yet much of Porto Alegre was dismissable as a convention of the posturing, the arrogant, the starstruck. While Davos genuflected to Bill Gates, Porto Alegre revered the long-dead (since 1967) Argentine revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, companero of Fidel Castro.
Che, with Castro, developed the theory of "foco-ism" - centres of insurrection from which revolutionary activity can be advanced as the enemy's weak points become clearer. He is a worthy patron saint, then, for a gathering of those who wish to sweep away "Davos world". He was everywhere - on T-shirts, posters, paintings, computer screens.
The host of the event was Olivio Sutra, governor of Rio Grande do Sul, a square man with thick hair and a big moustache, who loved to give long speeches against neo-liberalism. Neo-liberalism was the all-purpose anti-brand.
In his speech opening the conference, barely audible amid the noisy worship he was getting from the heaving hall, he said: "[The neo-liberals] have created a jungle where only strong beasts survive. They legitimise violence against the people. We can, we must, find a better world."
In three other speeches I heard (there were more, of course), he said the same kind of thing. It was by way of painting a background, a series of ideological poles, from which to deviate was to court mockery. And indeed, there were worse than he.
The North Americans were often worse - possibly driven to rhetorical excess by being in a meeting where so many, if not all, the world's sins were blamed on the Yankees.
Peter Marcuse, who teaches urban planning at Columbia University in New York, ended a speech in which all the ills of the cities were based on capitalist globalisation with the view that "we need a global workers' movement to take power globally".
Norman Solomon, head of the Institute of Public Accuracy in San Francisco, said "the right to be heard is largely foreclosed by the globalised system. The actually existing media are fundamental to the lack of democracy."
Maude Berlow, a Canadian writer who is director of the International Forum on Globalisation, said: "We are the most important political and cultural development since the creation of nation states in the 19th century."
The spouting of nonsense was not confined to North Americans. Ahmed Ben Bella, leader of Algeria's anti-colonial struggle against the French and subsequently Algerian president, talked of "light shining from Che's dead and naked body, in newspapers everywhere, and his gaze, which continues to inspire us".
Regina Festa, of the School of Communication of the University of So Paulo, said "we have the right to the total visibility of all people".
Outside the lecture halls, in the boiling corridors of Porto Alegre's modern Catholic University, groups denouncing neo-liberalism, globalisation and the north shouted, beat drums and chanted. One man, in sandals, strode through the crowds bearing a dead rodent in a plastic sheath, to make a point about environmental pollution.
The "March against Neo-Liberalism" through Porto Alegre, one of many events that opened the conference, was a high point of anti-globalism as fiesta. It underlined that the forum was run by Latins who knew how to be sociable, unlike the Calvinists of icy, police-ringed Davos.
The march was led by three chauffeur-driven executive saloons of Workers' party notables, including the governor. You could see their neatly folded jackets in the back, behind the chauffeurs grinding along in first gear.
The march itself was also an open display of pluralism. There were Brazilian communists with hammer-and-sickle banners; a little group of drag queens with Lurex jump suits, parasols and lights flashing on their belts; anarchists on stilts dressed in black and bearing banners with "Rage against the Machine" stenciled over a portrait of Che.
The Greens held up three grotesque puppets of all-purpose elder statesmen - one with his hands to his ears, and the word "Liberty" round his neck; one blind, with "Solidarity"; one dumb, with "Democracy".
The most popular placard was of Brazil's President Cardoso and three of his senior cabinet ministers, with the words "Put them on Trial - Betrayers of the People". A black Brazilian group with a drum band proclaimed "The United Black Movement against Racist Neo-Liberalism". A small band of gays wore pink triangles, the sign homosexuals had been forced to wear in Nazi concentration camps. Two embarrassed-looking Koreans in neat shirts and trousers walked, one holding a banner saying, in Korean and English, "Korean Farmers League".
The conference took political correctness to the point of totalitarianism. The atmosphere, a mix of old and new leftism, anti-capitalist activism and moral rectitude, quashed open debate. Questions or comments from the floor were requested in writing; it meant all forums outside the small workshops were preaching without challenge to the (presumably) already converted.
There were thousands of Latin Americans, but few Indians and no Chinese as far as I could see. The Europeans were overwhelmingly French, with a smaller Italian contingent and few others.
Two French junior ministers came, who gave embarrassed and careful press conferences and were booed when they spoke.
So, too, was Jean-Pierre Chevenement, who resigned as interior minister in the French cabinet last year over the granting of greater autonomy to Corsica. He told the audience he shared their condemnation of a neo-liberalism "which destroys social cohesion and concerns itself only with the possessors of capital".
His populist present, however, was a martyr to his governing past. A group of French radicals, including some Green deputies, got up a communique that denounced him for "applying a policy of violence against thousands of illegal immigrants [sans-papiers] . . . and a repressive policy against many activists of social movements".
While he spoke, there were cries (in French) of "Chevenement out!" and "What about the immigrants?" - a French-French quarrel that, fortunately for him, did not catch fire in the Latin American ranks.
But Porto Alegre had something going for it which Davos has lost. It was a sense of being astride a movement.
Roberto Savio, founder of the Interpress news agency, was one of several speakers who distanced themselves from the totalitarian correctness of the event to say what he thought.
In one of the best forums - on the future of the nation state - he talked of the need to claw away from inflamed rhetoric to "giving substance to the institutions which are there, and there for the protection of those in whose name we claim to speak, as the International Labour Organisation. The ideals we have are often in our countries' constitution: we must animate them. We have the morality on our side. The age of the neo-liberal binge is over."
Luiz Soares, a Workers' party member who had been in charge of public security in Rio de Janeiro for more than a year, gave a moving and thoughtful speech on his experience in the city's favelas (shanty towns).
There, he said, "the people fear the police more than the drug dealers because the latter, though they torture and extort, are at least predictable while the police are as violent but unpredictable. But we cannot leave this to the police and the right. Police are victims, too, of ignorance; people want security and relief from crime. We have denounced without understanding" - and he was cheered.
You could hear a little echo of Tony Blair's formula - "tough on crime, and tough on the causes of crime" - whispering at the back of his talk.
Even the governor could be interesting, when he talked (too little) of the "participative budgets" for which Porto Alegre is famous. It's a system that lets its citizens vote on spending priorities and, from the evidence of a visit of a few days, has helped to create a city that is clean, has extensive and new public (bus) transport and seems to work.
Though the tribunes of the people could, and often did, speak badly, and though there was little trace of the people for whom they spoke, they were speaking for real misery and real change.
Even those who spoke dogmatically could make real points: Solomon, the US media critic, pointed to the dangers of the concentration in global media, entertainment and culture through the oligopoly of AOL Time Warner, Disney, News Corporation and other companies.
His citation from AOL's Gerald Levine that "the global media is becoming more important than governments, than NGOs, than the educational institutions" was - if correctly quoted - chilling in its arrogance and insouciance for the consequences of media on the public sphere.
In the TV link established between Porto Alegre and Davos, one saw the discomfiture of the latter, especially of financier George Soros, who has given away many fortunes to assist development in eastern Europe. Davos was penitent, shifty, divided.
Thus when Walden Bello, a Filipino academic and trade activist, told Davos that, "we live on different planets. Here in Porto Alegre, we are looking for ways of saving the planet: you in Davos are looking for ways of maintaining the hegemony of multinationals across the world" - he looked and sounded substantial.
The Davos-ians, all chosen for their emollience and even partial agreement with the Alegreans, protested their desire for improvements.
But they do so against evidence - endlessly quoted in the Social Forum - of desperation in Africa, multinational exploitation in Asia, widening inequalities everywhere.
Good-hearted liberals had, in the 1930s, been seduced by communism because of evidence of miseries that the communists were to the fore in condemning - and the rise of fascism, to which the communists were most militantly opposed. So the contemporary goodhearted could see and hear much in Porto Alegre, beneath the posturing, that would incline them to agree with Bello that here were "different planets", and that they should land on the Alegre-an one.
It is 10 years since capitalism and democracy triumphed over state socialism. Enough is still wrong with the southern world - in particular, its growing distance from the northern one - to give those militant in the south's cause a strong sense of moral worth, and those who speak for the north an empty feeling in the gut.
Porto Alegre, and the demonstrations and fervour associated with it, are now a fixture. If the causes it champions cannot find in reforms a satisfaction of some of the needs to which it points, then the two planets will collide more often, and more violently.