The city of Mumbai, scene of the fourth World Social Forum, occupies a sharply narrowing peninsula jutting into the Arabian Sea. The once Bombay—“beautiful harbor,” according to the Portugese in the 17th century—became the Queen of the Orient, and Britain’s City of Gold after the Suez Canal made it the primary point of entry into India from the West. Since then, Bombay has never stopped growing, and in its incarnation as Mumbai (the name of a local goddess chosen in a surge of national pride by the people of Maharashtra state, of which it is the capital) is scheduled to become the world’s largest metropolis by 2020. Since globalization broke through India’s barriers in 1991, the peninsula has become a sort of antenna through which capital, whether as finance, trade or culture, enters the immense country. Torn from the soil and sucked in by that force field, labor follows, which also makes the peninsula a kind of narrow-necked funnel into the Promised Land of fame and fortune. A tiny fraction emerges to glitter in the sun; while for the rest, ghastly crowding and squalor is the rule

What a mess! If Another World is Possible, as the WSF insists, then another Mumbai must be possible, too. But at first impression this appears the wildest dream imaginable. The peninsula, feathery on the map, assaults the visitor on the ground with an appalling facticity. Already variously estimated between twelve and sixteen million, Mumbai blasts the senses in every way. “Overwhelming” was the word most resorted to by non-Indians at the Forum to describe their reaction to Mumbai: overwhelming in sulfurous, cacaphonous traffic, overwhelming in sheer numbers of people everywhere, overwhelming in the fetid ambience of pollution, and most of all, overwhelming in the spectacle of its poverty.

There are undoubtedly other places in the South where poverty is as absolutely dire as that of Mumbai, but I can imagine none where the poor live so much on the road. There are four lane highways in Mumbai where the outer two have become occupied by squatters who erect multistorey shacks out of urban flotsam and jetsam. Elsewhere, for what seems mile after mile, people simply camp out in the street (Mike Davis has estimated that the poor of Mumbai have to cope with one toilet seat for 2000 people), with cooking fires and children sleeping inches from passing vehicles. A phenomenal amount of petty commerce takes place in the road, as young men attempt to squeeze ever-diminishing amounts of value from the oceans of over-produced commodities that define the economic geography of our time, like the chap who set up a card table in the D.N. Road near our hotel with some thirty used books, there to make his fortune. Needless to say, in the aggregate the street commerce significantly worsens traffic and pollution. As a side effect, crossing the street becomes a death-defying sport. I was told that sixty people were killed last year by the red buses that efficiently, cheaply and brutally carry the population to unmarked destinations, but the wonder is that sixty times that number are not run down every day.

Worst of all, at any rate for those of uneasy conscience like myself, is the Mumbai begging industry (for which, see Rohatyn Mistry’s great A Fine Balance). Chiefly carried out by women and the very young, this has become a perennially demoralizing experience for the sojourner from the First World. One squirms inwardly to begin with at the tremendous disparities in wealth between the Indian masses and the North; and the mendicants see to it that the torment is externalized. The tiny hands touching one’s shoes or plucking at one’s sleeve, the exquisite child-mothers with their babies exposed to the choking air that come up to your taxi at traffic lights or jams, or follow you as you walk, as one did for a full mile as we strolled on the harbor road, repeating in that gentle, maddening voice, “Sah, sah,” and rubbing the stomach. There is a sepulchral woman I could swear I saw in a hundred different places, cloaked or rather shrouded in grey, face grey, too, and fine-featured with sunken-cheeks and zombie eyes. If you give to one, it seems that dozens materialize and surround you with their imprecations. Thus do numberless human stories and struggles become reduced to a single awful reminder of the injustice that rules the world, turns some of the poorest people on earth into antagonists, and hurls into one’s face the gravity of the work before us.

Is another Mumbai possible?

Well, yes, since Mumbai is by no means simply a mess. It is, after all, a very great city, as great as New York, which is also a mess and its homologue across the space of uneven development. And greatness in a city resides in the dispersed heart of its people and not its banks, five-star hotels, or towers—these rendered by the Brits in a gorgeous and syncretic “Indo-Saracenic” style, which is rapidly being overtaken by marble, glass and steel temples to capital. India is currently riding a jazzed-up and unprecedented boom, as the neoliberal intrusion that began in 1991 finally takes hold, enriching some two per cent of the population while the remainder awaits predictable further ruin. The guidebooks may celebrate Mumbai’s success-stories, its high-end real estate, as expensive as New York and Tokyo, its dream machine of Bollywood that surpasses the US film industry in sheer quantity and exuberance, and its bill boards, some stretching several hundred feet across the road, celebrating the latest IPO or mutual fund. But I would celebrate the heroism of the producers of Mumbai. These are the real soul of the city. Through all their tribulations, they never seem defeated but muster an astounding degree of resilience, ingenuity and solidarity. As I watched the artisans chiseling furniture in mini-factories next to the road, or the cabbies collectively puttering on their antique (though Indian-made and natural gas-driven) cars, or the women conjuring up meals in the road, or the street merchants packing up their productat the end of the day, taking millions and millions of commodities off the roads and putting them god-knows-where, and waiting, hopefully, for the next day, I started to see, not the “marks of weakness, marks of woe” observed by Blake as he walked through a London that was the late-18th century version of Mumbai, but another level of the Blakean vision: a kind of sleeping giant, its limbs scattered, waiting to be drawn together and awakened.

The World Social Forum, which asserts a claim to be that awakener, first assembled in 2001 as a counterpoise to the World Economic Forum, the yearly gathering of the Big Eight countries and their Satraps and Viziers for the purpose of enhancing accumulation on a planetary scale. But global capital engenders global resistance, and while the big capitalists schmoozed in the extreme, secure luxury of Davos, Switzerland, a diverse opposition came together in in Porto Alegre, Brazil, 15,000 the first year, 30,000 in 2002, and 75,000 in 2003, preparing the way for the continent-hop to India, where estimates of this year’s attendance ran from 80,000 to 125, 000. (Next year, the WSF returns to Porto Alegre.)

There’s a structural ambiguity to the opposition rendered by the WSF, however. Yes it is for and, to a degree, of the people. But a certain organization of the people is necessary for any gathering so vast, complex and ambitious; and the elements of this are provided by a formation, the Non-Governmental Organization, that itself has proliferated under the conditions of the neoliberal regime, sometimes under the moniker of Civil Society. I recall hearing that there were some 2,500 NGO’s at the Mumbai conference center, which seems about right, given the swarm of booths, banners and leaflets announcing one good work after another.

Beyond question there were a lot of excellent people at the WSF, from my friends at Anthra, who teach peasants how to give veterinary care to goats, to trade union groups protecting the dignity of workers afflicted with HIV, Japanese antinuclear activists, a great number of organizations promoting an end to the exploitation of child labor, or championing the rights of women, or opposing the privatization of water, or promoting the liberation of the 250,000,000 Dalits of India (a.k.a. Untouchables), no doubt the largest and longest-oppressed group in history.

But then there were groups whose names were not resonant with radical potential, like the All India Insurance Employee’s Association, or the Lokavidya Knowledge Society, or the Maharashtra Shelter of Love Charitable Trust. And there were others integrated with the state, like the Kitakyushu Forum on Asian Women, established with a special fund from the Japanese government and recognized as a Foundation by the Ministry of Labor; and still other groups that are not NGO’s at all, but more complex formations like various international configurations of trade unions or political parties. There was, for example, substantial presence by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the dominant political force in the states of West Bengal and Kerala. Estimable the CPI(M) may be, however, no one would confuse it for a fresh, radical initiative on the world stage, or one that has earned the right to march under the banner of Another World is Possible.

Now whatever the particulars of the internal politics of the WSF—and I know virtually nothing about the subject—the fact remains that an organization of this sort can have neither transparency nor internal democracy from below. Moreover, the influence of NGOs of every stripe and size, along with political parties, governmental agencies, and foundations (for example, the Ford Foundation, major lifeline of many NGOs, was in Mumbai keeping a keen eye on the proceedings), virtually ensures a bureaucratic modus operandi. Given these structural limits, the notion of the possible other world seems more like a lowest common denominator, an abstraction to paper over differences rather than the coherent articulation of a transforming vision. The rallying cry, like any signifier repeated often enough without concrete relation to what it signifies, becomes grating and eventually self-mocking. All right already! One wants to say: Just what other world do you have in mind? Is it the neo-Gandhian world of subsistence integrity? The bureaucratically administered, social-democratic world of fossilized Marxist-Leninist parties? The world of the foundations that stand behind the NGO’s and mediates them with capital? Or “civil society,” within whose hopeless vagueness the needs of capital for rationalization and legitimation can take refuge?

It was salutory then to see the rising of serious opposition to WSF within the event itself. One began to hear of the MR--“Mumbai Resistance”--and its intention to hold a parallel gathering, from the moment of arrival, and saw evidence of its presence on the surreal train rides out to the venue, in the shape of boldly painted slogans like “GLOBALIZATION CANNOT BE HUMANIZED – MR.” Because of bureaucratic paralysis, the WSF itself had hardly a sign posted in the teeming city; whereas the MR, lean and mean, simply went out, bought the necessary paints and brushes, and, heedless of licenses and permission from the authorities, sent cadre off to mark up the walls.

Alas, I never got to the MR counter-conference; the flesh was simply too weak in face of Mumbai logistics. But discussions and various circulated materials revealed its core to be a network of South Asian Maoist organizations with a more consistent line on imperialism than the somewhat vacillating WSF, and a common feature repellent to most if not all of the WSF’s constituents, namely, willingness to undertake armed struggle. I was struck, too, by the serious and self-effacing character of those who espoused these tendencies, which include significant ventures in Nepal, central India (generally under the rubric of Naxalites, or the Communist Party of India Marxist-Leninist), Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, as well as movements in the Philippines associated with the name of Jose Maria Sison. Given the overall tenor of the global struggle, it strikes me as timorous and self-defeating not to include such people in the debate.

Considerable attention was given to the differences between the Mumbai WSF and the previous versions in Porto Alegre. Not having attended the Brazilian version, I can say little about this distinction, which generally, speaking, goes like this: That Porto Alegre was more attuned to the panels and formal sessions, Mumbai, to the action in the street, which never ceased or even slowed no matter what was being said inside the meetings. Of course, this is at best a relative matter, and has to take into account the extreme variety of the more than 1200 panels at Mumbai, which ranged from crashing boredom in cavernous halls to intense and highly creative workshops. The distinction would hardly be worth mentioning did it not highlight what seems to me to be the most important phenomenon of the whole experience—the movement of the people.

I mean, literal movement, as the precondition for the social movement, the stirring of the giant form—a movement that never stopped so long as I was there, that pulsated up and down with cheerful cacophony, and engaged perhaps the most concentratedly diverse assemblage of human beings ever assembled. Remember, there were 130 different countries at the WSF, and one of them, the host, India, with I would estimate about three quarters of the whole, is a continent unto itself, containing numberless varieties of humanity. Put all these folks, a great many having been silenced throughout their lives, together, and give them license to make themselves heard, to march, shout, recount, costume, sing, dance, theatricize, manifest (and to drum, drum, drum), and we get a spectacle unspoken of outside the work of Mikhail Mikhailovitch Bakhtin, apostle of the carnivalesque.

Bakhtin, of course, never saw or heard of such a carnival as took place January, 2004, in Mumbai. His model was the medieval variant, as transformed by the imagination of Rabelais, which emphasized a sensual, scatological-erotic element foreign to the WSF. But the authentic pulse of Bakhtin’s carnival is the movement from below and its regenerative power. This is based, writes Bakhtin,

on the conception of the world as eternally unfinished: a world dying and being born at the same time, possessing as it were two bodies. The dual image combining praise and abuse seeks to grasp the very moment of this change, the transfer from the old to the new, from death to life. Such an image crowns and uncrowns at the same moment. In the development of class society such a conception of the world can only be expressed in unofficial culture. There is no place for it in the culture of the ruling classes; here praise and abuse are clearly divided and static, for official culture is founded on the principle of an immovable and unchanging hierarchy in which the higher and lower never merge.

That immediacy, that contact, the rubbing against each other, the mixing of ways of being (like the New York rap group which drew in an Angolan musician, all surrounded by awestruck Indians)--that fermenting, unpredictable and self-generated in interaction with one another—this to me was the true heart of the Social Forum, which will endure after all the pontifications and rhetoric: it is the authentic, “unofficial” germ of the other, better world.