The Anti-Davos.(World Social Forum )

There were Trotskyites and transvestites, Senegalese drummers and Mayan sun worshipers. Poster images of Lenin and Fidel Castro peered over the crowd, while a knot of chanting Chileans insisted over and over that "Allende is present"--a reference to the former socialist leader who was murdered in a military coup d'etat 30 years ago. Che Guevara-like beards and berets were everywhere. Forget the Finland Station. The revolution starts in Brazil's Porto Alegre.

For the last three years, this tidy regional capital has played host to the World Social Forum (WSF), a massive gathering of loosely allied anti-globalization activists who come together to draw attention away from, and to chide, the world leaders who convene the same week at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. In fact, the gathering's unofficial nickname is "the anti-Davos" meeting. This year some 29,000 delegates from 121 nations made the trip to Porto Alegre, packing the city's hotels and restaurants, snarling traffic and raising their tent cities in municipal parks. They came to protest, to march for peace, to pray, to eat organically grown food, but mostly to gab. Some 1,700 workshops were planned for the WSF--so many that scheduling them caused the forum's computers to crash. "Our only problem is we are getting too big," says Bernard Cassen, editor of Le Monde Diplomatique, and one of the founders of the event.

Actually, the event's biggest problem is that it doesn't have a coherent theme. Trying to glean an overarching message from the merry babel is almost impossible. By charter, WSF has no official spokesman, no proposals--and makes no final declaration. One of the forum's original ideas was that government officials were not welcome. But that "rule" as been changed. This year, Brazilian President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva dropped by the event to give a speech--on his way to Davos, ironically--and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez was expected, as well. Why the exception? It's partly because both leaders fall to the left of the political spectrum, and partly because the forum leaders realize they must engage more with the world's decision makers. Lula has spent the last several months tacking to the center, courting businessmen and telling the world how different he is from Chavez. Yet such differences were made to seem like fine print at the forum. In the fuzzy camaraderie of Porto Alegre, left is an ecumenical category.

While few in Porto Alegre can say what the forum stands for, everybody knows what it's against--the powerful, monied capitalists skiing in ...