Blogging the WSF

Mumbai, Jan 19 - Events continue. So do marches, rallies, and all manner of meetings. It is a jarring, sometimes depressing, always invigorating, often instructive, and finally quite exhausting experience -- so much diversity, so much poverty, and so much energy for change and struggle.

My own activities have been varied. A dinner for many friends and associates of ZNet -- with about 85 in attendence helped people meet and learn about and exchange information with others and was, I hope, quite successful.

I spent some time at the Mumbai Resistance -- a kind of parallel and counter gathering. I spoke and also watched and learned, The contrasts and differences, contradictions and similarities are interesting and instructive, but too much to convey while having just a moment at this machine. 

Last night was a major session -- in a kind of stadium/field -- about women and war and wars on women. It was, in my view, very well done and powerful, one of ht emost powerful sessions at this, or any past WSF. Many events are sparcely attended, while the crowds dance, sing, and celebrate in the paths outside - partly this is due to language and shortage of transtlations, partly, I think, it is due to the fact that the content of most venues is so familiar to people that being outside feels more contentful, and partly it is that the schedules are very hard to follow so as to find the more unusual and provocative gatherings.

A large demonstration is planned, I am not even sure of the time or place, to block rail lines with a huge list of demands, etc. Other manifestations occur regularly. But, it must be said, in the streets of the city there is only very small notice, and the deprivations and indignities imposed by corporate globalization - but also, of course, capitalism itself - are continuous and ubiquitous, and at a scale that teaches, quickly, that the ills of war and the ills of just plain old business as usual, are not, in certain respects, all that different- horrendous and deserving of continuous opposition until victory.

I just finished a session -- rather large -- on alternatives to globalization. It was interesting, there was at least some discussion (other than my own) about actual institutional choices we might opt for and their implications for how we struggle. But, ultimately, there is all too little of that...though more than in the past.

I guess my feeling so far is that the trajectory of the WSF phenomena continues to be very positive --- increasing and enriching mutual ties and solidarity, expanding attentiveness to explaining what we are for now, and in the mid term, and even as our ultimate visions, and increasing --what words to use for this -- identification with struggle as the center of one's existence...to win that new world people now constantly mention and proclaim, and sometimes even try to describe.