The WSF, which started as a direct counterpoint to the World Economic Forum (WEF) usually held in Davos, Switzerland, is no longer single-mindedly anti-Davos. It is not even anti globalization. It is pro-Porto Alegre, pro-people, pro a world where poor children don't die from preventable diseases. The 60,000 or so workers, peasant farmers, activists and philosophers who came here this year--triple last year's figures- are singleminded in their goal, expressed in the slogan "An Other World is Possible." Perhaps the difference from last year's gathering is best illustrated by the fact that José Bové left early and Noam Chomsky, the hero of this year's WSF, stayed on. Bové, the French farmer who drove his diesel tractor into a McDonald's hamburger stand and set the standard for violent opposition to globalization, was last year's hero. At the 2001 closing ceremony, those standing on the dais wrapped themselves in a flag reading "We Are All José Bové," as some four thousand people chanted the same phrase.

This year, tearing down McDonald's is out. This year Chomsky, the left-leaning MIT professor who has been a thorn in the side of American administrations for more than two generations, drew 8,000 cheering people to his oration condemning the worst sides of world capitalism. But he wasn't anti globalization. He was pro a peoples globalization.

"One should be scrupulous in not defining the World Social Forum as anti globalization," he said. "There is no one who is anti globalization. This is certainly true of the workers and the left who began their modern existence calling for an internationalŠ Every progressive movement, every popular movement has had this goal: to create an international solidarity and an interaction. And that is globalization, but in the interest in of the population of the world. So, in my view, this is a globalization forum. There is an anti-globalization forum taking place in New York which is trying to prevent international popular movements which will develop a form of globalization which will help the population."

The continuity of purpose might be reflected in two almost identical statements, one before the meeting and one at the closing ceremony.

Before the meetings began in Porto Alegre's Pontifical Catholic University, organizing committee member Oded Grajew strongly condemned the "assassination, the murder, murder of some 4,000 persons" in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, but added, "That story made headlines in all of our countries for months. But every single day 40,000 children die, die of preventable hunger. That is 10 times the amount of people who died in the attacks... There are no headlines about this. This is what we want to do here. When this becomes news, that is the point where we will have succeeded."

At the closing ceremony, very serious-looking young Brazilian actors read a special message sent to the WSF by Nobel Literature Prize winner Jose Saramago who blamed globalization for the daily deaths of thousands from diseases "that are curable for some, but not for others."

By and large, the theme of some 800 meetings in Porto Alegre was a more equitable distribution of wealth in the world, with comparatively fewer specific references to the Davos-in-New York WEF meeting being held simultaneously.

"Last year, the meeting was really anti-Davos," said organizing committee leader Candido Grzybowski. "But this year it was more of an effort to define our agenda of work, of what we are going to do in the future to make it a better world."

Francisco Whitaker of the Brazilian Bishops' Conference said "this year's conference was a success because we deepened the reflection, we widened the subject matter covered, we enlarged the articulation of it and increased our efforts to build a new world."

The WSF gathering was much larger than last year, roughly tripling the figures in almost all categories. According to the final statistics, 15,230 delegates came from 131 countries, representing 4,909 organizations and including 2,300 peasant farmers and 2,670 trade unionists. They attended more than two dozen plenary meetings, 100 seminars and 700 workshops--only very few of which were covered by the roughly 3,000 journalists coming from 48 countries.

The organizers said that some 50,000 persons came without delegates' credentials, just to attend the sessions. Sergio Haddad of the Association of Brazilian Nongovernmental Organizations said the forum's website, www.worldsocialforum.org, got in excess of a half million hits per day for every day of the conference.

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan sent a message to the forum, saying "I know that you have come together to voice deep concerns and convictions about the direction in which globalization is taking our world, and about what we should do to remedy it. Some of these I share, some of them I do not. But whatever the case, I respect and share wholeheartedly your commitment to improving the lives of individual men and women on this planet."

Annan said that he spoke to the World Economic Forum in New York to share "some of the concerns that you and I do have in common," about world hunger and other issues affecting the world's poor, and said he would tell participants at the Davos in New York meetings that, "these issues can no longer be settled in private conclave among the rich and powerful."

His remarks reflected those of Michael Hardt, a Duke University professor who has been calling for an international answer to globalization.

In a plenary session on national sovereignty Hardt said the new form of dominance of the classes is really international, and "without a center." He also said the resistance to domination and oppression should also be international.

He said demonstrators protesting against the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank in Seattle and Genoa "have been experimenting with new enemies."

"They have understood it is not the United States as a nation state that is responsible," he said. "If the demonstrations were aimed at the United States, they should have taken place at the White House, or on Wall Street, or at the Pentagon. But, instead, they went to the G8 and the IMF, and experimentation with understanding the new enemy."

But Daniel Bensaid, of the University of Paris, vehemently disagreed that the United States is the wrong target. He drew loud cheers when he said, "The United States not only dominates, but dominates the international organizations." And Alex Callinicos of the University of York said, "Power is enormously concentrated in the United States." He said the United States openly shows how it mistreats prisoners in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba "as a kind of political theater, to demonstrate what will happen to anyone who seeks to challenge U.S. domination."

In other fora: Naomi Klein, activist author of the book "No Logo," said that if the demands of the WSF were ignored, the people should look to "civil disobedience" as a main weapon. Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Perez Esquivel of Argentina proposed the creation of a new entity to mediate conflicts and avoid wars now that "the United Nations has been dismembered by the economic power of the United States."

A second Nobel Prize winner, Rigoberta Menchu, said that globalization had "dehumanized" the enemy. "Before, we used to confront the rich man on the corner because we knew him," she said. "Now we don't have anyone with whom we can fight." In a separate WSF venue, the governor of Rio Grande do Sul, Olívo Dutra, whose Workers Party administration paid for much of the conference, told a cheering audience that Brazil's and other countries' foreign debts should not be paid.

Condemning what he called high interest payments, he said, "This is a debt that has been paid already more than three times in some countries."

Martin Khor of the Third World Network in Malaysia told another plenary the World Trade Organization's aim is "to entrap poor countries into indebtedness, to trap them into their system, to make them fall into debt."

He said the WTO, unlike voluntary trade agreements, is a "powerful system because they can take you into court." Lori Wallach of the American-based Public Citizen advocacy group told a meeting on international trade that "the market über alles model of trade liberalization and the new protection for corporations is doing bad things for many people all over the world."

She urged attendees to put pressure on their national governments to put "a leash on uncontrollable global corporations and global capital."

Haddad, of the Association of Brazilian Nongovernmental Organizations, said the real achievement of the WSF is in the contacts made, networks formed and actions planned to counter neo-liberalism. He said that the organizing committee had decided to encourage demonstrators to protest future meetings of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and other traditional targets of the anti-globalization demonstrators who clashed with police in similar meetings in Seattle and Genoa.

Potentially significant was a small meeting in a seminar room where Davos-minded attendees and Porto Alegre delegates sat down together to discuss what was on their minds.

Three members of the French militantly anti-globalization group ATTAC, including one who had demonstrated against the IMF in Genoa, sat next to a retired Bavarian Christian Democratic Union (conservative) delegate who owns his own factory and deals on a daily basis with wage problems. Tom Spencer, a former Conservative member of the British parliament, several other left wing activists, an adviser to the French President, and two men from the World Business Academy of Brazil all pitched in to discuss 'global governance.'

The WSF does not issue final documents, Haddad of the Association of Brazilian NGOs said, because, "this is place for debate, for plans for action. It begins here. It does not end here."