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Another World is Possible
A family’s report from a New Latin America
By Chesa Boudin, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers

The crowd pulsed and swayed and swirled along the avenue, flags and banners flying against the sky, songs and slogans rising with the wind and falling away, only to rise again seconds later, encouraged by a sudden outburst of drums. Tens of thousands joined the parade to unite with the fifth World Social Forum (WSF) on January 26th in Porto Alegre, Brazil, all manner of color and costume and cause. Tens of thousands more packed the line of march, cheering and chanting for many hours, call and response, as each new delegation swung noisily into view.

In all an estimated 150,000 people were on hand. This was the Olympic parade in spirit and enthusiasm, only more chaotic, more shambling, ten times larger, and powered by resistance and rebellion, the politics of possibility.

“ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE” was the big idea and unifying theme of the week-long event, announced hopefully in every language on giant banners, hung from bridges and highway overpasses, adorning stadium walls and office façades. The unity broadly represents una red de redes, a “network of networks” of the hundreds of millions who are marginalized, exploited, and excluded, linking their varied resistances to imperialist hegemony.

Neoliberalism, the “free” trade economic agenda of the neoconservative political movement, presents itself globally as the only possible way forward, inevitable and taken-for-granted. The WSF says otherwise, and this theme dominated the vast and dusty parade grounds and parks that served as Forum headquarters, and popped up cheerfully on T-shirts and buttons every few steps throughout the day. “Un otro mundo es posible,” “Um outro mundo é possivel”...so many people expressing the same simple conviction—a world at peace and in balance, each of us a full citizen of planet earth, enjoying our right to a life of dignity and justice—the same elegant dream spoken in wildly divergent tongues.

As the sun went down on the huge soccer field that first night, as the throng drummed and danced and sang, a brilliant blue and green earth ball the size of a small house suddenly appeared, floated into our midst, and was sent aloft by cheers and the help of a hundred hands. It felt absolutely right: the flight of the beautiful globe, fragile but tough, and in our hands.

Get 150,000 progressive activists together and anything can happen, and it did. Marches, demonstrations, actions and counter actions, sit-downs and arrests, and mostly, of course, the ceaseless talk at meeting after meeting: workshops on the militarization of Latin America and human rights, panels on the Brazilian landless movement and sustainable environment, discussions on the case of the Cuban 5 and restorative justice with adolescents, talks on economic development and Freirian participatory education, meetings of indigenous people and about the global march of women. Here was a place where no one ever accused the Left of having nothing to say, even if what there was to say had just been said by several comrades preceding the speaker in the long line to the microphone. Never mind. We had come to talk. We did so all over the city, with some meetings in tents set up in public parks, some in the port’s warehouses and shipping crates. The logistics were disorganized at best. We each had a newspaper with a list of all the workshops and meeting places, but ultimately everyone ended up wandering around asking, for example, “Where is F108?”

There were, of course, those who shouted slogans at the generally amiable crowd, and those who made it their business to shout even more loudly, strike an even more extravagant pose, reach for even loftier, more delirious and rhetorical heights. And there were, as always, representatives of the organized sects, recognizable by the unmistakable gleam in the eye that comes from spending too many days in the well lighted prison of a single idea.

But the vast majority was not this at all. There were trade unionists from every part of the globe, environmentalists, community organizers, health workers, teachers, peace forces, human rights lawyers, HIV/AIDS activists, native leaders, students, artists, musicians, journalists, indie media, hipsters, and hippies. Overwhelmingly, folks came armed with the wisdom of practice. Every progressi ve NGO was there and the grassy grassroots was there.

Across nationality and color and creed and cause, across preference and ethnic background, the common denominator was this: like the world itself, the assembly was young. They brought with them the energy and the courage of youth, camping out far from the hotels of downtown Porto Alegre, dancing and partying into the nights. They came in the best tradition, ready to listen with the possibility of being changed, prepared to speak with the possibility of changing others.

A poster depicting the location of every U.S. military base in the world—over 130 of them—adorned the wall of the anti-militarism workshop. Someone asked, “How many bases does your country have inside the U.S.?” and the 30 in attendance—Italian, Cuban, Brazilian, Haitian, and Japanese (we were the only ones from the U.S.)—laughed out loud. The next question: “And how many U.S. military bases are in your country or your region of the world?” and we all turned to the map. The questions clarified the attitude of most participants, who freely and easily referred to the U.S. as an imperialist power. If U.S. agribusiness, supported by massive government subsidies, routinely dumps corn and cotton, among other products, on the world market at prices well below the cost of production in the name of “free trade,” even as the world objects, perhaps those bases are doing more than the benign work of democracy.

The World Economic Forum was meeting in icy Switzerland at the same time. Caviar and champagne

in a major center of international finance, or sweat, sun, and organic fresh fruit juices in steamy Brazil: where would you rather be? Lula, the popular labor leader, now President of Brazil, spoke to a packed stadium in Porto Alegre to open the WSF and 24 hours later he appeared in Davos, bridging—or more likely, stretched between—two worlds.

Contradictions, contradictions, contradictions. While participants made plans large and small to change the world, street kids picked through garbage in search of cans—trash to us, but gold for those who get the 5-cent deposit back in cash. One wonders if the street children differentiate between the committed participants of the WSF and any other big convention, whose participants presumably consume more Coca Cola than we did.

And while everyone respects the environment, one felt for the forests who had given their all to become a leaflet, a poster, a newspaper, all now discarded in great careless mounds on the grounds of the World Social Forum. The richest NGOs organized panels, brought posters, leaflets, banners, and T-shirts to garner high attendance, while the poorer NGOs simply planned their workshop; thousands more could not afford to send representatives at all. And the vast majority of events featured only male speakers, with notable and spirited exceptions, including a diverse and powerful series of women’s rights events.

In every gathering of women and men alike, Che was well represented on buttons and T-shirts in one of his by now iconic poses: courageous global freedom fighter, inspiring humanitarian, romantic revolutionary, benign and sainted demigod. Che lives! But there were other T-shirts as well: “Globalize the Struggle, Globalize the Hope,” “Libre Palestina,” “Catholics Organized to Legalize Abortion,” “Loose your mind,” “Trotski,” and over a picture of the Marx brothers, “Sure, I’m a Marxist.”

English was not the first language, nor the second. Everything began in Portuguese, migrated to Spanish, and only then, unevenly, to English. A valiant team of organized and impromptu translators—anyone who spoke more than one language had their services commandeered on at least one occasion—worked to ensure basic communication, and demonstrated that language can serve to unify rather than to divide. The translators often walked a blurry line between facilitators and participants but they always reminded us of the power of language, and in particular the beautiful utility of multilingualism, a skill sorely missing from American priorities.

We, citizens of the U.S., were a dramatic minority of one or two or three in most workshops. This was surely a worthwhile experience, and perhaps it was as it should be, since we are collectively less than 5 percent of the world’s population and U.S. self-importance is in large part illusory. There seemed to be a universal ability to make a hard distinction between the American people and the U.S. government. When Ricardo Alarcon, President of the Cuban national assembly, spoke of U.S. aggression around the world, he mentioned that news had just arrived of a helicopter downed in Iraq, killing over 30 U.S. troops. A few people cheered, but Alarcon cut them off. “No,” he said sharply. “There isn’t any joy in the deaths of dozens of young people. The U.S. army is black and Latino and working class. These too are victims of the U.S. government.”

The WSF is the most spontaneous, decentralized, autonomous formation in the world. Popular power is the idea, participatory democracy the means. People have been skeptical of any government participation whatsoever, but this year marked a departure. Lula was greeted enthusiastically on that first day, and Hugo Chavez, the fiery President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, spoke in the same spot to an even more energized crowd on the penultimate evening. Chavez is a captivating, charismatic speaker, charming, self-effacing, full of energy and good cheer. But he had a serious purpose here, and it was both to explain the process of social change underway in Venezuela and also to lay claim to leadership in the pan-Latin American resistance to empire.

“The people of the South” he said, “do not need to be saved by our neighbors to the North. Paradoxically, it is we in the South who have the responsibility to save ourselves, and in the process to save humanity.”

Hugo Chavez is much maligned by U.S. policy makers and the American press. Recently declassified CIA files reveal that the U.S. had detailed information about a plot to overthrow President Chavez and failed to alert his democratic government of its imminent danger. All of this is predictable but a bit ironic if you buy for a moment U.S. rhetoric about support for democracy. Chavez has, after all, won eight popular elections in five years, and survived an attempted coup as well as a U.S.-financed recall referendum. He holds no political prisoners and has repressed no opposition parties. Yet he is as despised in the halls of power as he is loved by the poor masses of his own country.

Chavez quoted from a letter written in the early 19th century by the prescient Simon Bolivar: “The United States seems destined by providence to spread misery throughout Latin America in the name of liberty.”

Chavez and all of us who participated in the Fifth World Social Forum, armed with renewed energy and more knowledge, left determined to end that sorry history.

Chesa Boudin is currently working in defense of the Venezuelan revolution on leave from a Rhodes Scholarship. He has previously published with The Nation, and is working on a book under contract with Thunder’s Mouth Press.

Bernardine Dohrn is an antiwar, anti-racist activist. Her teaching, writing, and organizing is focused on juvenile justice, human rights, and international law.

Bill Ayers is a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His most recent books are Fugitive Days (Beacon Press) and Teaching Toward Freedom (Beacon Press).

Chesa’s parents, Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn.