Complexity and Social Movements: Multitudes at the Edge of Chaos ...

under-enforced exclusion of political parties or the failure to engage armed
groups, in practice, it is difficult for those who would willingly exclude
themselves to define what they are excluding themselves from. This applies
to both the political parties themselves, who frequently utilise front groups
to attend, and those who wish to curtail participation by these parties and
front groups. This he suggests is the ‘WSF’s power of attraction’ and is the
reason why the WSF has grown so quickly, the minimalist criteria for participation
acts as an incentive to participation. The emphasis that the WSF
has placed upon process and flexibility and its declared intention to defy temporal
or geographical boundaries also strengthens this inclusive trajectory:
The World Social Forum at Porto Alegre was an event localized in time
and place. From now on, in the certainty proclaimed at Porto Alegre
that ‘another world is possible’, it becomes a permanent process of
seeking and building alternatives, which cannot be reduced to the
events supporting it.
(Point 2 WSF Charter of Principles)
Waterman (2003) describes this as akin to discovering the ‘secret of fire’,
a secret which he describes as the capacity to ‘keep moving’, to constantly
challenge any process of capture or stratification. The construction of the
WSF as process rather than event advances these goals of continuous,
reflexive critique, which when iterated via CMC result in a situation
Waterman describes as ‘around the world in 80 seconds’. However, in order
to understand the emergent qualities of this system, derived from the ‘edge
of chaos’ or process of self-organised criticality (Bak and Chen 1991,
Cilliers 1998) that the WSF exhibits, we must first look to the processes of
political competition between attractors within the state space of GCS
described by the WSF.
The importance of the ‘minor’: attractors,
margins and peripheries
Beyond resistance to global nexus 123
The rapid growth of the WSF is attributed to a number of factors. These
include the cultural politics (Osterweil 2004b) produced through personal
and collective outcomes derived from encountering and interacting with an
extraordinarily diverse group of people from all over the world. The WSF
also provides a partial withdrawal or reprise from the confrontations that
feature so prominently in summit siege gatherings where experiences of solidarity,
affectivity, mutual learning and cultural exchange are framed by the
risk of violence (Donson et al. 2004). The massive marches/protests at the
end of social forum events have notably attracted little media coverage with
police and State agencies adopting low profile approaches. As we detailed
in Chapter 5 the period of growth and popularity of the forum concept