The World Social Forum is not an entity, but a process - a snowballing momentum that is bringing together forces which, though developing in the same direction, were without mutual contact and often completely unaware of each other. A global constellation is coming into being that is beginning to think along the same lines, to share its strategic concepts, to link common problems together, to forge the chains of a new solidarity. All this is now moving with astonishing speed. There has just been an Asian Social Forum in India, an area with which we hitherto had virtually no contact. In Brazil, the government’s agenda is set by all the problems identified at Porto Alegre. What will Lula do about the enormous debt that is crushing the country? He has said, of course, that Brazil will be meticulous in meeting its obligations. But will it actually be able to? I believe that a moment of truth is arriving in Argentina and Brazil, which could create the conditions for a radical, world-wide revision of the neoliberal order. If the President of Brazil were to say, 'we are no longer going to pauperize our citizens to pay foreign bond-holders', and Argentina and other Latin American countries followed him, what would happen? Wall Street could do very little about it, since as a leading banker has admitted privately, 'Brazil is too big to fail'. The banks would have little alternative but to 'save the furniture', and accept losses of 30 or 40 per cent rather than write off 100 per cent of their investments.
Issue 19, Jan. Feb. 2003
New Left Review
Other texts in this series are Naomi Klein, 'Reclaiming the Commons' (NLR 9), Subcomandante Marcos, 'The Punch Card and the Hourglass' (NLR 9), John Sellers, 'Raising a Ruckus' (NLR 10), Jose Bove, 'A Farmers' International?' (NLR 12), David Graeber, 'The New Anarchists' (NLR 13), Michael Hardt, 'Today's Bandung?' (NLR 14), Joao Pedro Stedile, 'Landless Battalions' (NLR 15), Walden Bello, 'Pacific Panopticon' (NLR 16), Emir Sader, 'Beyond Civil Society' (NLR 17), Tom Mertes, 'Grass-Roots Globalism' (NLR 17) and Immanuel Wallerstein, 'New Revolts Against the System' (NLR 18).
