Chaos among people of goodwill.

• Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara
• Position: Flip Side

"Another world is possible," the slogan of the World Social Forum, seemed at first to be confirmed by the sheer size of this year's anti-globalization--and anti-war--gathering in Porto Alegre. A hundred thousand people showed up from fifty one countries, making the forum twice as large as last year's and at least ten times larger than any conference I'd ever attended. Hotels were packed, right down to the hot-sheets motels that offer sex toys on your room service menu. About 25,000 young people happily made do in tents along the lakefront, turning their encampment into a kind of utopian favela, with guitars and earnest discussions sounding into the night. Here was the "other world" in gestation, ready to replace the suicidal old one.

There's something to be said for size. A mere few thousand people could never have generated the excitement of the 100,000--some of them locals--who greeted Brazil's new leftwing president, Lula, at a vast, multi-acre amphitheater. And maybe it took 40,000 packed bodies to ignite the mood at the final rally, where the crowd sang, did the wave, and passed flags from hand to hand around the stadium in a moment of collective euphoria. At times like these, you catch the empowering hit that comes from knowing you are part of "something larger than yourself," and that that something can succeed.

It was especially good for us Americans--excuse me, North Americans--to be so overwhelmingly outnumbered. Back in the U.S., we tend to think "we are the world," or at least the only source of meaningful agency within it, as if our nation's imperial power somehow makes our activism more central and significant than anyone else's. So here we were--living-wage campaigners from Miami, affordable housing activists from Boston, campus anti-war organizers from Denver--lost in the crowd of Brazilian trade unionists, indigenous people in their native outfits, Argentinean militants, feminists of all colors and nationalities, members of peasant organizations, water rights activists, students from Manila, Seoul, and Rome. The fact that English was only a distant third among the forum's most commonly spoken languages, behind Portuguese and Spanish, added to our newfound sense of proportion.

A point comes, though, where size exceeds administrative capacity, and this year's forum went well beyond it. To handle the numbers, sessions were distributed among at least three sites, each about a twenty-five minute bus ride from the others, making...