story and photos by BRETT STORY

“We will not stop,” cries a member of Pastors for Peace to his audience of thousands, “until the walls of the empire fall and until we realize, like you, that another world is possible.”

He says it like the walls are just chisels away from crashing into a dust of irrelevant capitalism around our ankles. The crowd cheers ecstatically. And why shouldn’t they? We’re in Caracas, Venezuela, where there is a self-proclaimed revolution going on. The pastor is speaking to an audience of almost 70,000 activists, anti-capitalists and anti-imperialists gathered for the World Social Forum, the most eminent of social justice gatherings.

Workshops, panels, marches and buttons

The Forum was envisaged six years ago as a progressive alter ego to the old-boys club known as the World Economic Forum, where, for over 30 years, a select group of CEOs and world leaders have met in Davos, Switzerland, at the end of January to determine how the global economy should be governed. The idea of an alternative summit was first spawned by lefty French organizers, who suggested it be held in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre. Now in its sixth edition, the World Social Forum of 2006 is being partitioned across three geographic locales, with Caracas, Venezuela, currently hosting the bulk of those attending from across the Americas.

Despite the geographic dispersal of the polycentric forums—others are being held in Pakistan and Mali—the agenda of the Caracas forum is still almost entirely overwhelming. The opening march against war and imperialism was just the first in a non-stop dizzying array of workshops, debates, panels, performances and practices conducted over a mad six-day marathon of activist knowledge-share. The WSF program is built through an open process, so anyone with an event or workshop to convene can sign up. This year there are over 2,000 such events, and, like the movements they are meant to progress, they constitute a motley bunch. Between the anti-war activists, immigrant labour organizers, environmental NGOs and landless peasants gathered here, the workshops amassed span a spectrum of topics from “The Defence of the Perija Mountains and Colombian Peasants Displaced by Armed Conflict” to “Catholicism and Class” to “Keep the Gauchazo—Tools for Planned Nourishment and Farmer Simulation.” All this and cool buttons to buy.

Not just Yanqui liberals

Buttons aren’t the only distraction. For those too confused by Caracas’s 1960s modernist coupe-bizarre architecture, or frustrated by the notable lack of translation and last-minute room changes, there is plenty else with which to keep one’s political mojo occupied. Political art installations and documentary screenings dot the landscape of the forum’s central buildings, while nearby parks host endless drum circles and capoeira performances. There is always a political conversation to be found, whether it be under the “solidarity” tents where well-pamphleted activists earnestly table their causes, or in the sprawling youth campground. Early morning sessions are made that much harder to attend by the profusion of music programmed deep into the night. From hot Cuban salsa to political hip hop to Venezuelan heavy metal and strange Brazilian theatre rock (excitedly described by one delegate as “a Portuguese Rocky Horror Picture Show”), the music pouring from the streets of Caracas this week tempted many to shake it into the wee hours.

The World Social Forum is, of course, not without its critics and detractors. Sitting in the lobby of the Hilton Caracas the eve of the forum, watching legions of well-scrubbed NGO professionals check into their luxury rooms, my own inner chorus of cynics began doing karaoke in my head: Is the WSF just an indulgent exercise in self-promotion? Will it be dominated by Vermont hippies buying fair trade coffee to assuage their liberal guilt? As the actual forum unfolded, it became quickly apparent that in actuality, Westerners are in the distinct minority here, with Portuguese and Spanish dominating the workshops and local women’s and indigenous groups maintaining an active and visible presence.

The cult of Hugo

What does seem to be a legitimate criticism is the significant role the government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has taken in the orchestration of the Caracas forum. Chavez may be extremely popular here (“Oh, eh, Chavez is not going away” is but one emphatically recited rally chant) but aspects of his “socialism for a 21st Century” are not without their public censure. Ecological and indigenous rights groups at the WSF have expressed great concern about the environmental devastation visited upon the country thanks to his reliance on oil. And delegates from across the Americas joined Venezuelan indigenous groups in a large protest during the course of the forum against government plans to increase the extraction of coal in an outlying, impoverished region of the country.

The fact that the figure of Chavez himself so pervades the fabric of the forum just exemplifies the inevitable focus on personalities at the expense of issues and grassroots campaigns. There are more Chavez T-shirts being peddled here than even Che Guevara shirts. And unlike Che, Chavez can boast his own (younger and thinner) battery-operated doll, which repeats such revolutionary slogans as “It’s your dream, it’s your hope, it’s your job to be free and equal” against a background of peppy disco music.

Even activists are prone to rock star distraction. Not to begrudge the work that Cindy Sheehan does as an important U.S. anti-war activist, but it is a little weird seeing little Brazilian teenagers crowd round her, posing for photos as if she was Mariah Carey. I myself admit to stalking various old white-haired men I took to be the elusive Gore Vidal. Vidal was unfortunately so elusive that he failed to show up to his own workshop on independent media, leaving us instead to the mercy of the open mic and a room full, it seems, of self-aggrandizing Western activists. I left the room after Anna, a shrill Norwegian woman, took to the stage and ranted for 20 minutes about the need to “do something about imperialism.” Her solution was buying a big satellite.

Revolution between dances

But the bulk of the forum’s attendees have a determined and focused demeanour. At one workshop I attended, participants ardently discussed the imperatives and challenges of organizing workers around issues of environmental justice, and shared such examples as the formation of a Bus Riders Union in central Los Angeles, and transitioning workers out of unsustainable energy industries. One of the workshop organizers, Genaro Rendon from U.S.-based Southwest Workers’ Union, tells me that he’s been in meetings all week, building relationships with similarly focused organizations from across the Americas.

To that end, the workshops are almost irrelevant. Many a delegate has just given up on them, instead choosing to hatch their plans or make their contacts in self-organized meetings, over café con leche in the hallways and on the lawns outside sweaty dancefloors. Remonstrating my companion for abandoning me to the tireless salsa-spinning arms of teenage Venezuelan boys in the Cuban tent late one night, he responded with, “Sorry, I was helping to organize a mass dismantling of the U.S.-Texas border wall.”

What is most striking about the World Social Forum in Caracas this year is the degree to which attendees are looking to Venezuela itself for alternatives to the capitalism they so decry. “This is the first forum in which the best alternative proposals are not being given within the forum, but outside,” remarked one delegate.

Many larger delegations opted out of forum activities to instead visit the city’s barrios and missions, where self-organized communities are engaged in massive literary projects and Cuban doctors have set up health-care clinics. There is just no escaping Chavez or his “Bolivarian revolution” here. Certainly not every forum delegate agrees with Chavez’s proclamation, repeated throughout his address to the WSF crowd, “It is socialism or death,” but most refer to the galvanizing energy Venezuela has provided them for their return home.

And while some may have felt a little awkward as the stadium of forum delegates rose for a rousing rendition of “The Internationale,” they stood and swayed like the rest of us nonetheless.