Logos a Thing of the Past? Not So Fast, World Social Forum!

摘要

It is a fear that can keep anyone up at night; the dread that one day you could become that which you fought to destroy. For the past four years many scholars, activists and champions of alternative systems of democracy have praised the World Social Forum (WSF) as a new system of governance (Conway 2004; Pleyers 2004). Rising as the anti-thesis to the World Economic Forum (WEF), the WSF used principles of collective participation to change the nature of governance in global society. Its basis of openness, inclusion, anti-hierarchy and horizontal networks seemed to showcase a new system in-the-making. But the experience of the 2005 forum in Porto Alegre challenges this claim. Now, with an increase in popularity and a rise in participation to nearly 200,000 persons from 5000 in 2001, the WSF is hardly an open space of governance. The growth in size, the rise in popularity, and the quiet intrusion of corporations have all taken the WSF in a hauntingly corporate structured direction. The last meeting in Porto Alegre clearly showed that the WSF is becoming something that it stood against: a logo. Amidst the dizzying collage of dance, emotion and activism that brewed in Porto Alegre in January 2005, the WSF has withered as a new system of governance and instead has blossomed into an anti-neoliberal logo.