Quincy Saul
In this article, Quincy Saul shares snippets of his experiences at the World Social Forum in Kathmandu, Nepal. He highlights the moments and movements – on democracy, food justice, and protecting river ecosystems – that have inspired him.
By the Nepali calendar, it’s the month of Falgun in the year 2080. Genocide is underway in Gaza. Indian farmers are facing down tear gas on the road to Delhi. Proxy war continues in Ukraine. Julian Assange is facing final extradition, it’s the 25th anniversary of Abdullah Öcalan’s capture, and in Nepal, it’s Democracy Day. The air is thick in Kathmandu – the average air pollution concentration is nearly five times above the World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines. And here in little, legendary Nepal, there is an archway over which is printed the invitation: “Another World is Possible.”
A welcome song in six languages. Walden Bello from the Philippines recalls the origins of the World Social Forum (WSF) 23 years ago. He quotes Charles Dickens: “It is the best of times, it is the worst of times.” Neoliberalism – against which the WSF originally convened – is stronger than ever. Next, a traditional dance by the Indigenous Federation: ten couples from different regions in gorgeous clothes, each with their unique plants, musical instruments, and flags. Jeevan Sharma sings a song about a porter in the mountains, lamenting his migrant children. Aleida Guevara expresses that our biggest problem is ignorance caused by mass media, and our most urgent cause is to free Palestine.
Everything all at once: the truth is like that; over-saturated, layered, swirling. Medha Patkar from India got the most applause perhaps: “There is war in every country, not just Ukraine and Gaza. We must build a new world on the basis of nonviolence and truth. We are here for an alternative development paradigm with justice for all. Climate change is a crime against humanity. Rivers should flow freely. Forests are the real ventilators. We should learn simple self-sufficiency from the tribals. We need a people’s power movement – without it, there is no alternative!”
The opening ceremony is over. Down the block at the Nepal Tourism Board, there is a forum on Palestine; over a hundred people packed into the beautiful wooden auditorium across the lobby from where all the trekkers and alpinists get their permits to ascend the Himalayas. We listen to people in the room and onscreen. “I have lost forty friends and family.” Entire families have been wiped out. We hear from a professor of postmodern literature in Palestine who can’t get milk or even clean water for his children. “Palestinians were very naive to think that the international community would do something about this.” Mireille Fanon follows and explains: The UN declaration of human rights is just for white people. Six million dead in the Congo and barely a word! What’s going on in Gaza is a continuum, a paradigm, and a process of dispossession… The media wakes up when savages fight back against the civilized, and likes counting the dead. If anything comes out of the WSF, it better be for Palestine. She ends by quoting her father: “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, and fulfil or betray it.”
It’s not every day you get direct transmission from the daughters of Che Guevara and Frantz Fanon, not every lifetime that you find yourself at the crossroads and crossfire of all the problems and solutions, frozen in the headlights of history. I want to tell the story in as few chapters as possible, to distill the spirits fermenting in the crowds. But it’s not easy. Competing sound systems, constant cultural performances, a galaxy of smaller serious conversations, and always at least a dozen large auditoriums or tents full of hundreds of people. Unity but also cacophony. Democracy but with great dissonances. A chaotic fractal of beautiful complexity and heat-death. So many melodies, the harmony is difficult to hear. So many rhythms, it’s easy to lose the beat. This essay is my attempt to hear the music – of other paradigms of development, of other possible worlds.
Movement 1: Rivers
Every day in the mornings for about two hours, a group, mostly from Nepal and India, convenes to discuss rivers. Their goal is simple – that the rivers which flow through their homelands should unite not divide them; should be a source of cooperation, not conflict. They are up against enormous obstacles – dams, mines, deforestation, governments and corporations; imaginary lines on the land, and in hearts and minds as well. Nevertheless, for three days, about thirty people divided by those lines and united by rivers, dreamed and schemed how to find unity across national borders, though the collective defense of their shared rivers.
The defense is urgent: “Trans-Himalayan rivers are the lifeline of 1.4 billion people,” says river guide and activist Megh Ale: “If we want to preserve the Ganga, we have to be serious: it begins in the Himalayas. Whatever happens in Nepal winds up in India.” The emergency is already upon us. A researcher from India, Manshi Asher, explained that 2023 was the year of Himalayan disasters. “Disaster”, she clarified, “is not an event; it’s a social, economic, and political process.” We’ve heard the story before but there are new wrinkles. Starting in the 1990s, dam-building became less about creating large catchment reservoirs and more about hydropower. They don’t submerge immense valleys anymore but they do wreck mountain watershed ecosystems. Most recently, this is carried out under the banner of ‘green energy’. Since all dams are now sold as clean and renewable energy projects, fewer laws apply to them. “You cannot question green development. The bigger the dam, the bigger the commission.”
To mitigate and ultimately resolve the disaster, the participants discussed the need for a transboundary people’s dialogue and a treaty on transboundary rivers. Soumya Dutta from India explained the important principle of ‘first users’ rights’. He also noted that existing river treaties are measured in cusecs[1], and don’t include any of the cultural, political, and ecological aspects of rivers. From Thailand, Laddawan Tantivitayapitak explained that the process of developing this treaty had to be approached differently. “Digital email networking is not working,” she insisted, “it leaves out people on the ground.” The cultural meaning of rivers was also richly expressed in these gatherings: “We have a problem with vision,” said Megh Ale, “not only about how to save our rivers but about how to see them as what they really are.” “Humans have forgotten what the river is.” Roots of civilization! Arteries of the earth! Other participants echo: “Water is a gift of nature.” “To commodify it is a sin.” “Rivers should flow free.”
The clearest call and campaign which emerged from this forum, and maybe from the whole WSF was Save the Karnali! The river that flows from the peacock’s mouth in Tibet; the longest river in Nepal, which connects three civilizations, from the Tibetan plateau to the Gangetic plains; the sacred source of holy waters for Hindus and Buddhists and Sikhs and Jains – and the last free-flowing river in Nepal. “Can we have prosperity without destruction?” someone asked. to nobody in particular. Three hydropower dams are already planned for the Karnali. A campaign to save it could unite the whole subcontinent, from Kailash to Kataragama. See you there!
Movement Two: Democracy
Democracy is the heart of the WSF. It’s not particularly controversial: there’s hardly anyone in the world today who is against democracy. Ruling and opposition parties around the world claim to uphold it. The divine right of kings is over; we are in the era of democracy. In Nepal this is very recent, and therefore very sensitive. But here, as everywhere in the world, at the very moment that this political principle is most universal, it is simultaneously losing all meaning.
The answers are not forthcoming from the USA which claims to be democratic. Even Princeton University scholars were forced to admit nearly a decade ago that there’s no such thing as democracy in America.[2] Usha Titikshu of Kathmandu spoke about democracy in Nepal: “There is no more monarchy, now it’s a secular federal republic. The left is in power in alliance with reactionary parties. USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development) was kicked out of the WSF but the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and ADB (Asian Development Bank) control the government.” Not in spite of but because of these reasons, Nepal has a lot to teach the world about democracy. While Princeton has admitted defeat, in the dusty hallways of the rundown Nepal Law Campus, I crowd into a workshop titled “Radical Democracy and Autonomy” hosted by Global Tapestry of Alternatives.
Ashish Kothari opened the panel by noting that 2024 is the biggest election year in world history. Perhaps needless to say, we are not as thrilled as we might imagine we should be. Democratic elections have brought us Modi, Trump, Biden, Marcos, Netanyahu, et. al. We’ve had faith for too long in what he called “neoliberal democracy” and in doing so “we have given up our birthright: the power to make decisions.” The largest polling in history is thus really the largest giving up in history – and this helps explain how it coincides with record inequality, war, and mass extinction.
“But politics and democracy that are truly transformative do actually exist,” continued Kothari. He drew inspiration from the village assemblies that grew out of an anti-dam movement in central India a few decades back. Over a dozen years, a process of study circles, assemblies, and consensus decision-making, which eventually resulted in the unanimous communalization of all land, took place in a village called Mendha-Lekha in the state of Maharashtra in India[3]. Inspired by this, a federation of 90 village assemblies called Korchi Maha Gramsabha, united many such experiences of real people power. Kothari also referenced the adivasi slogan from Mendha-Lekha of the 1980s: “we elect the government in Delhi, but in our village, we are the government.”
There was also discussion of the Zapatistas – a revolutionary social movement in Chiapas, Mexico – which while small in numbers (especially by Asian standards) has had a tremendous influence on people all over the world. In the Americas, the Zapatistas are pretty well known and respected, but it was amazing to hear how they also resonate in China. Lau Kin Chi from the Global University of Sustainability in China suggested that the Zapatista principle of ‘commanding by obeying’ can re-inform the theory and practice of democratic centralism. Professor Wen Tiejun compared them with the Chinese Red Army in the 1920s, when villages were governed by local leaders who received no salaries.
Then the floor went to two Kurdish women. The Zapatistas often express their struggle in terms of 500 years of indigenous resistance to colonialism. The communes of Kurdistan – freely associated according to the principles of democratic confederalism[4] – take us back even farther in history. Necibe Qeredaxi from the Jineoloji Academy explained that there is a visible war which is more or less well known, but also an invisible war: “The latter has no name. It started 5,000 years ago.” Radical democracy existed 12,000 years ago, she argued, before the advent of patriarchy. It’s a different understanding of colonialism, which begins with the enslavement of women. It has culminated today in what Noam Chomsky has called “rotten democracy.” Rokhosh Shexo from Kongreya Star explained how the Kurdish experience of democracy emerged from the recent war: “We didn’t just fight ISIS, we defended ourselves – and not just against external forces but against mental systems.” They went door to door, organizing women, families, and society. In their autonomous villages and towns, “everyone in society has to be part of some organization.” Necibe explained that it’s not just about liberating women but about liberating life itself: “We should not beg or demand anything from the system,” she insisted: “we should build our own.”
Movement Three: Food
In between panels and assemblies and workshops, we eat. Vendors are selling momos and other Nepali snacks in bowls made out of leaves. We are what we eat, so it’s no surprise that many of the conversations and campaigns revolve around food – farmer protests, peasant rights, rural reconstruction. All the songs of other possible worlds return to this source – our daily bread.
Krishna Paudel from Nepal framed the global food crisis in two sentences: “We are exporting farmers and importing food… (and) what we are eating today is sending us to the hospital.” A woman from India completed the picture of crisis by relaying news from the road to Delhi, where farmers are being tear gassed and shot with pellets.
In a workshop titled “Food Justice”, Alex Jensen from the USA summarized the findings of a recent global study titled ‘The Food Barons’[5]: Four to six companies control world agriculture from seed to retail. As power over food gets more concentrated and more globalized, diets are becoming more homogeneous and less healthy. It doesn’t come cheap: the industrial food system is the leading cause of early death around the world; the estimated cost in healthcare amounts to $20 trillion annually. Agribusiness is subsidized to the tune of $600 billion per year. But that’s just the tip of the melting iceberg; the only reason that global food trade is happening at all is because of an annual $7 trillion subsidy for fossil fuels. So the food we eat not only poisons us, along with the soil and the water, but it’s also one of the primary sources of global warming. A statement circulated in Nepal by the Alliance of Agriculture for Food (dated February 14) states: “The air is unbreathable. Water is not drinkable. The soil is constantly dying.” Half a century of the green revolution has revealed its grotesque harvest: production increase and nutrition decrease. Farmer suicides.
Luckily, we are at the WSF where the alternatives are legion. Cidi Otiemo from the Kenyan Peasants League was very clear: “Food is a socialist matter because it brings us together. Peasants are the majority in the world, but they are fragmented. Peasants have power – we are the majority!” But he lamented how farmers’ organizations and movements have been infiltrated by consumerism as a way of life: “Campaign against the WTO and IMF and then go buy food at the supermarket? What a contradiction!”
But the resolution of these contradictions can be found if you know where to look. Sheelu Francis from the Women’s Collective in Tamil Nadu, India, shared one of the most inspiring and hopeful narratives. In addition to helping women farmers, they purchase land in the name of the collective. They focus on the production of millet, which is more nutritious than rice or wheat, and 90% of it is still rain-fed and not chemicalized. “We are not going for marketing,” she explained – the surplus is exchanged within the collective or stored. The solution and the slogan is simple: “nutritious food for children.” To accompany this mission, filling the vacuum in education caused by the pandemic, the Women’s Collective have organized a children’s panchayat and children’s kitchen gardens. Children are some of the primary consumers of ‘fast food’ so this is not a minor point. To counter the force of advertising, they organize traditional recipe competitions, learning from grandmothers and bringing them into schools.
From the heartwarming prefigurative small picture, another workshop zoomed out to consider these questions on a much larger scale. A panel of rural reconstruction experts from China, India and Nepal sat together. There is so much ignorance and prejudice and hostility between South and East Asia that the session itself was a revelation; representatives from the two most populated countries on earth, and Nepal between them, giving fresh water to both.
Professor Wen Tiejun from Renmin University, a celebrity in China for his writing and advocacy about rural reconstruction, explained its long history – for over a hundred years there have been organized, large-scale efforts to recover the legacy of rural life. Rural reconstruction, he explained, is aimed at creating a soft landing from global crises. What’s the difference between a soft and a hard landing? Life or death. People have no safety in cities. Dirty water, dirty air, bad food. By the millions they have been mobilizing urban populations to link up with rural reconstruction. This is not just about roads and schools and hospitals, not even just about farms and food. There has been a $1 trillion investment in rural infrastructure in China since the 2008 financial crisis. But he emphasized that more than buildings, rural reconstruction must be about cultural revitalization. “5000 years of history are not preserved in mega-cities,” he insisted, and spoke about the spiritual force of village songs.
Lanying Zhang noted that the many waves of rural reconstruction in China have been led by philosophers but enacted by youth. Frances Davies from Zambia recounted the distilled essence of rural reconstruction as told to her by an old woman: “We want our children to come home.” How to persuade the children to come home before it’s too late? Electricity and schools are not enough to keep people in rural areas, indeed they seem to have the opposite effect. Something more is required. A cultural revolution?! Whatever the program or the ideology, Professor Tiejun insists that it all comes down to one question: are the rural people organized?
Conclusion
A complete report from the WSF in Nepal is impossible because two infinities converge here: The Himalayan contradictions of Nepal, and the WSF itself. You can’t get a bird’s eye view on either – both are too vast. Nepal convenes the world system. There is no omniscient narrator, no possible third person. Contradictions from all continents are represented here. Can ideology, spirituality and the urgency of geopolitics possibly be reported all at once? Like the Nanda Devi traverse according to Tenzing Norgay: “It is not ‘impossible’ of course, and there is no such thing anywhere.” [6] Like the alpinism, only the Nepalis can be reliably be trusted to guide you. The only way to find the line is by following their tracks. There are no fixed ropes on the summits of world revolution and world awakening, but we can try to keep up as the Nepalis lead the way. Shabash, comrades, and thank you: you may be humble and kind in a system ruled by the mighty and mean, but you stand tall in a system which is falling fast, and the world looks up to you as we look up to the mountains which frame your lives, your dreams, and your destiny.
Quincy Saul is a writer, musician, and a co-founder of Ecosocialist Horizons. He is the co-editor of Maroon the Implacable: The Collected Writings of Russell Maroon Shoatz. Saul has authored “Truth and Dare: A Comic Book Curriculum for the End and the Beginning of the World.” He is also the co-producer of The Music of Cal Massey. Saul’s articles have been published by Truthout, Counterpunch, The Africa Report, Capitalism Nature Socialism, Telesur, and more.
Read a longer version of the article here.
[1] a unit of flow, equal to one cubic foot per second.
[2] See: https://discovery.princeton.edu/2014/11/14/study-casts-doubt-on-fairness-of-u-s-democracy/ and https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B
[3] Read more: https://kalpavriksh.org/mendha-lekha-village/
[4] Learn more about the principles of democratic confederalism: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/komun-academy-the-main-principles-of-democratic-confederalism
[5] Link to study: https://www.etcgroup.org/content/food-barons-2022
[6] See: https://explorersweb.com/nanda-devi/