This paper explores the emergence, development, and trajectory of the World Social Forum(s) in order to better understand the form and strategy that social movement resistance is taking at the beginning of 21st century. As such, the paper examines the functioning of the forum process as a novel mechanism for potentially forging ?glo-cal? class consciousness for the ?re-making of the 21st century working class?. The World Social Forum process is investigated as a multi-scalar ?convergence space? (Routledge) in its relation to the ongoing shifts towards post-Fordist capitalism.Based on autonomist Marxism (Negri, Cleaver) and Marx?s distinction between ?class in itself? and ?class for itself?, the paper critically engages the contemporary approaches to (new) social movements and contentious politics. In particular, their emphasis on identity politics and their shunning of the central importance of the socio-economic structure of post-Fordist capitalism, in which class is merely one in a series of semiotically produced identities (Melucci, Laclau/Mouffe), shall be analyzed. The paper argues that post-Fordism is accompanied and driven by novel modes of resistance, which re-appropriate capitalism?s infrastructural matrix. In particular the novel information and communication technologies are employed in unique ways to organize and mobilize and in order to connect resistances and circulate the various and diverse struggles to ever wider constituencies. In this process, the social forum process is a crucial multi-scalar and transformational convergence-space that plays a key role in this re-composition and could play a central role in the re-making of the 21st century working class and class-based politics. The social forum process is providing a space for social movement networks - ranging from labor movements and ecological groups to anarchist and landless peasant movements - producing a common vision that can thread together the diverse goals of these movements across the world and attempt to build a participatory democratic process of sustained dialogue across boundaries (Snow, Benford 1992). The social forum is creating a pedagogical and political space that enables democratic learning, networking and political organization. Archival work shows that the WSF networks are based on shared discourse and values while at the same time being marked by elements of heterogeneity, fragmentation and transformation. As such, the WSF makes new forms of community and communality possible on the basis of a common vision of - and for - the social movements, which simultaneously allows both their convergence and their difference.Methodologically, this paper studies the WSF as ?strategically situated site? (Marcus 1995) in the wider topography of anti-systemic movements, employing archival work as well as ethnographic fieldwork (Scott, Mitchell). The paper employs a ?multi-sited ethnography? (Marcus 1995), which explores the political through networks, contrasts and connections across varied sites. The WSF understood and researched as a ?strategically situated site? functions as an initiating point of study, allowing me to study the WSF while ultimately tracing actors, texts and themes across diverse social arenas in quests to ?reinvent democracy?.This paper adds to our understanding of emerging transnational civil society. Focusing on the so called ?anti-globalization movements? as they congregate at the WSF allows us to gain insights into their struggle for global oppositional politics ?from below? and their quest to reinvent democracy across North-South divisions. In addition, this paper sheds light on the debate between particularism and universalism and attempts to bridge them in that the WSF movements resemble a ?universalism of difference to converge and build? (Ponniah, Fisher 2003)... ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]