Spectacle of civil society

¡EL PLANETA SOMOS TODOS, MUÉVETE!

finally, an alternative to the stupid support our troops ribbons: http://www.funkyribbons.com

The reverence that people display toward human rights -- it almost makes one want to defend horrible, terrible positions. It is so much a part of the softheaded thinking that marks the shabby period we were talking about. It's pure abstraction. Human rights, after all, what does that mean? It's pure abstraction, it's empty. It's exactly what we were talking about before about desire, or at least what I was trying to get across about desire. Desire is not putting something up on a pedestal and saying, hey, I desire this. We don't desire liberty and so forth, for example; that doesn't mean anything. We find ourselves in situations.

The media in India - both the print and the audio-visual - has either outrightly trashed the WSF 04 or has raised very fundamental ethical and political questions about what in their version looks like a pointless jumboree of anti-globalisation groups from God knows where. Even those who were willing to write positive things about WSF focused either on the sensational or the iconic. The skeptics of course wondered aloud whether we managed to make another world in the week's time!

No doubt the times they’re a-changing when internal strategic debates of the ‘anti globalisation movement’ make it into mainstream publishing. According to amazon.com “Naomi Klein's No Logo told us what was wrong. Now George Monbiot’s The Age of Consent shows us how to put it right.” Its publisher, Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins sells Monbiot’s manifesto as “authoritative and persuasive de facto figurehead for the contrarian movements in the UK.” Environmental activist Monbiot is columnist for the Guardian and author of a bestseller about UK’s privatisation disasters.

If there was one thing I learnt at the World Social Forum in Mumbai, it was patience. Patience while trying to choose from among the scores of simultaneous events that were taking place at any given time. Patience while trying to get from one event to another, steering my way through the 100,000 people who had gathered to speak, dance, sing, march, listen, act, network and organise around every conceivable issue with any bearing on the well-being of humanity. Patience while straining to listen to voices that were barely audible in large enclosures with poor acoustics, made worse by the unrelenting din of celebration and protest outside. Patience while waiting for speeches to be translated, line-by-line, into the three or four most commonly understood languages of the audience. Another world was possible, but it was going to require a hell of a lot of patience.

The notion of cosmopolitics has a long history in European political philosophy. The historian Enzo Traverso traces its development and underscores its contradictions. At the Paris FSE, especially in sessions dealing with world peace, the term "cosmopolitics" was used a lot. What’s it all about?