BY LEE SUSTAR
PORTO ALEGRE — At the first World Social Forum (WSF) in 2001, delegates assembled to challenge the elite World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, with a live debate via videoconference.
"[T]he best gift that the 2000 corporate executives at Davos can give to the world is for them to board a spaceship and blast off for outer space", radical Filipino economist Walden Bello, speaking from Porto Alegre, told financier George Soros in Davos. "The rest of us will definitely be much better off without them."
This year, another speaker was broadcast live at the WSF from Davos — President Luis Inacio "Lula" da Silva of Brazil. While his comments to journalists in Davos drew cheers from the crowd in Porto Alegre, Lula's trip to meet the assembled CEOs, politicians, bankers and bureaucrats symbolised the rightward move of the Workers Party (PT) over the past three years.
The WSF was launched in Porto Alegre because the PT then controlled the city and state governments and presented itself as a new type of left-wing rule. Ironically, in the same election that Lula won the presidency, the PT was voted out of those city and state offices — following widespread bitterness over austerity measures that it imposed.
Now Lula, after two decades of arguing for the need to refuse to pay previous government's foreign debt and to stand up to the US, has announced that his government will repay Brazil's US$344 billion foreign debt, even though a third of the population is under the poverty line.
The other major concession is that Lula has agreed to negotiate a Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA) with the US after years of opposition.
During the election campaign, the PT refused to participate in a referendum on the FTAA organised by the rural workers' movement in the MST, the churches and the United Socialist Workers Party (PSTU). Nevertheless, more than 10 million people participated in the plebiscite — and 98% voted against participation in the FTAA.
Since the election, the MST has moderated its stance and given critical support to Lula. But the PSTU used the WSF to gather an estimated 30,000 signatures from delegates to demand a new plebiscite.
Lula remains hugely popular. Crowds chanted his name during his speech at a rally — and again at the mention of his name at the final rally. But at the end of that rally, the crowd poured out into an enormous march against war on Iraq and against the FTAA.
The potential for real change for Brazil can be seen in this fighting mood. And in fact, the massive left-wing opposition to neoliberalism on display at the WSF shows that there is an alternative in the struggle for change that has boiled up across Latin America. The challenge ahead will be to build the organisations and politics that can bring that change from below.
[Abridged from Socialist Worker, weekly paper of the US International Socialist Organization.]
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, February 5, 2003.
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