THE WORLD SOCIAL FORUM: TOWARD A COUNTER-HEGEMONIC
GLOBALIZATION
by Boaventura de Sousa Santos
Boa Santos is Professor of Sociology at the School of Economics, University
of Coimbra, Portugal, and Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison Law School.
First draft (March 2003)
Presented at the XXIV International Congress of the Latin American Studies
Association
Dallas, 27-27 March, 2003. This version was originally published at: http://www.ces.fe.uc.pt/bss/fsm.php
© Boaventura de Sousa Santos
Please send comments to bsantos@sonata.fe.uc.pt
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. The World Social Forum as Critical Utopia
2. The World Social Forum as Epistemology of the South
3. The World Social Forum as Subaltern Cosmopolitan Politics
4. The World Social Forum and the Future: From Realistic Utopias to Alternatives
5. The Future of the World Social Forum: Self-Democracy and the
Theory of Translation
Introduction
The World Social Forum (WSF) is a new social and political phenomenon.
The fact that it does have antecedents does not diminish its newness,
quite the opposite. The WSF is not an event. Nor is it a mere succession
of events, although it does try to dramatize the formal meetings it
promotes. It is not a scholarly conference, although the contributions
of many scholars converge in it. It is not a party or an international
of parties, although militants and activists of many parties all over
the world take part in it. It is not a nongovernamental organization
or a confederation of nongovernamental organizations, even though its
conception and organization owes a great deal to nongovernamental organizations.
It is not a social movement, even though it often designates itself
as the movement of movements. Although it presents itself as an agent
of social change, the WSF rejects the concept of an historical subject
and confers no priority on any specific social actor in this process
of social change. It holds no clearly defined ideology, either in defining
what it rejects or what it asserts. Given that the WSF conceives of
itself as a struggle against neoliberal globalization, is it a struggle
against a form of capitalism or against capitalism in general? Given
that it sees itself as a struggle against discrimination, exclusion
and oppression, does the success of its struggle presuppose a postcapitalist,
socialist, anarchist horizon, or, on the contrary, does it presuppose
that no context be clearly defined at all? Given that the vast majority
of people taking part in the WSF identify themselves as favoring a
politics of the left, how many definitions of "the left" fit
the WSF? And what about those who refuse to be defined because they
believe that the left-right dichotomy is a northcentric or westcentric
particularism, and look for alternative political definitions? The
social struggles that find expression in the WSF do not adequately
fit either of the ways of social change sanctioned by western modernity:
reform and revolution. Aside from the consensus on nonviolence, its
modes of struggle are extremely diverse and appear spread out in a
continuum between the poles of institutionality and insurgency. Even
the concept of nonviolence is open to widely disparate interpretations.
Finally, the WSF is not structured according to any of the models of
modern political organization, be they democratic centralism, representative
democracy, or participatory democracy. Nobody represents it or is allowed
to speak in its name, let alone make decisions, even though it sees
itself as a forum that facilitates the decisions of the movements and
organizations that take part in it.
These features are arguably not new, as they are associated with what is conventionally
called "new social movements." The truth is, however, that these
movements, be they local, national, or global, are thematic. Themes, while
fields of concrete political confrontation, compel definition - hence polarization
- whether regarding strategies or tactics, whether regarding organizational
forms or forms of struggle. Themes work, therefore, both as attraction and
repulsion. Now, what is new about the WSF is the fact that it is inclusive,
both as concerns its scale and its thematics. What is new is the whole it constitutes,
not its constitutive parts. The WSF is global in its harboring local, national
and global movements, and in its being inter-thematic and even trans-thematic.
That is to say, since the conventional factors of attraction and repulsion
do not work as far as the WSF is concerned, either it develops other strong
factors of attraction and repulsion or does without them, and may even derive
its strength from their nonexistence. In other words, the "movement of
movements" is not one more movement. It is a different movement.
The problem with new social movements is that in order to do them justice a
new social theory and new analytical concepts are called for. Since neither
the one nor the others emerge easily from the inertia of the disciplines, the
risk that they may be undertheorized and undervalued is considerable. This
risk is all the more serious as the WSF, given its scope and internal diversity,
not only challenges the various disciplines of the conventional social sciences,
but challenges as well scientific knowledge as sole producer of social and
political rationality. To put it another way, the WSF raises not only analytical
and theoretical questions, but also epistemological questions. This much is
expressed in the idea, widely shared by WSF participants, that there will be
no global social justice without global cognitive justice. But the challenge
posed by the WSF has one more dimension still. Beyond the theoretical, analytical
and epistemological questions, it raises a new political issue: it aims to
fulfil utopia in a world devoid of utopias. This utopian will is expressed
in the following way: "another world is possible." At stake is less
a utopian world than a world that allows for utopia. In this paper, I deal
with the WSF as critical utopia, epistemology of the South, and cosmopolitan
politics.
1. The World Social Forum as critical utopia
Ernst Bloch says that "utopias have their timetable" (1995: 479).
The conceptions of and aspirations to a better life and society, ever present
in human history, vary as to form and content according to time and space.
They express the tendencies and latencies of a given epoch and a given society.
They constitute an anticipatory consciousness that manifests itself by enlarging
the signs or traces of emerging realities. It is therefore appropriate to ask:
Does the WSF have a utopian dimension? And, if so, what is its timetable?
The WSF is the set of initiatives of transnational exchange among social movements,
NGOs and their practices and knowledges of local, national or global social
struggles against the forms of exclusion and inclusion, discrimination and
equality, universalism and particularism, cultural imposition and relativism,
brought about or made possible by the current phase of capitalism known as
neoliberal globalization.
The utopian dimension of the WSF consists in claiming the existence of alternatives
to neoliberal globalization. As Franz Hinkelammert says, we live in a time
of conservative utopias whose utopian character resides in its radical denial
of alternatives to present-day reality. The possibility of alternatives is
discredited precisely for being utopian, idealistic, unrealistic. In the last
one hundred years, Hinkelammert distinguishes three conservative utopias: Stalinism,
Nazism, and neoliberalism (combined with neoconservatism and Christian fundamentalism).
All of them are sustained by a political logic based on one sole efficiency
criterion that rapidly becomes a supreme ethical criterion. According to this
criterion, only what is efficient has value. Any other ethical criterion is
devalued as inefficient. Under Stalinism, the one efficiency criterion was
the plan, or planned economy. Under Nazism, the criterion was racial superiority.
Under neoliberalism, the criterion is the market, or the laws of the market.
In the latter case, the total market becomes a perfect institution. Its utopian
character resides in the promise that its total fulfillment or application
cancels out all utopias. As Hinkelammert says, "this ideology derives
from its frantic anti-utopianism, the utopian promise of a new world. The basic
thesis is: whoever destroys utopia, fulfills it" (2002: 278). What characterizes
conservative utopias and distinguishes them from critical utopias is the fact
that they identify themselves with the present-day reality and discover their
utopian dimension in the radicalization or complete fulfillment of the present.
The problems or difficulties of present-day reality are not the consequence
of the deficiencies or limits of the efficiency criteria, but result rather
from the fact that the application of the efficiency criteria has not been
thorough enough. If there is unemployment and social exclusion, if there is
starvation and death in the periphery of the worls system, that is not the
consequence of the deficiencies or limits of the laws of the market; it results
rather from the fact that such laws have not yet been fully applied. The horizon
of conservative utopias is thus a closed horizon, an end to history.
This is the context in which the utopian dimension of the WSF must be understood.
The WSF signifies the reemergence of a critical utopia, that is to say, the
radical critique of present-day reality and the aspiration to a better society.
This occurs, however, when the anti-utopian utopia of neoliberalism is dominant.
The specificity of the utopian content of this new critical utopia, when compared
with that of the critical utopias prevailing at the end of the nineteenth and
beginning of the twentieth century, thus becomes clear. The anti-utopian utopia
of neoliberalism is grounded on two presuppositions: the illusion of total
control over present-day reality by means of extremely efficient powers and
knowledges; and the radical rejection of alternatives to the status quo. The
WSF puts in question the totality of control (whether as knowledge or power)
only to affirm credibly the possibility of alternatives. Hence the open nature,
vague if you will, of alternatives. In a context in which the conservative
utopia prevails absolutely, it is better to affirm the possibility of alternatives
than to define them. The utopian dimension of the WSF consists in affirming
the possibility of a counter-hegemonic globalization. In other words, the utopia
of the WSF asserts itself more as negativity (the definition of what it critiques)
than as positivity (the definition of that to which it aspires). The specificity
of the WSF as critical utopia has one more explanation. The WSF is the first
critical utopia of the twenty-first century and aims to break with the tradition
of the critical utopias of western modernity, many of which turned into conservative
utopias: from claiming utopian alternatives to denying alternatives under the
excuse that the fulfillment of utopia was under way. The openness of the utopian
dimension of the WSF is its attempt to escape this perversion. For the WSF,
the claim of alternatives is plural, both as to the form of the claim and the
content of the alternatives. The affirmation of alternatives goes hand in hand
with the affirmation that there are alternatives to the alternatives. The other
possible world is a utopian aspiration that comprises several possible worlds.
The other possible world may be many things, but never a world with no alternative.
The utopia of the WSF is a radically democratic utopia. It is the only realistic
utopia after a century of conservative utopias, some of them the result of
perverted critical utopias. This utopian design, grounded on the denial of
the present rather than the definition of the future, focussed on the processes
of intercourse among the movements rather than an assessment of the movements'
political content, is the major factor of cohesion of the WSF. It helps to
maximize what unites and minimize what divides, celebrate intercourse rather
than dispute power, be a strong presence rather than an agenda. This utopian
design, which is also an ethical design, privileges the ethical discourse,
quite clear in the WSF's Charterer of Principles, aimed at gathering consensuses
beyond the ideological and political cleavages among the movements and organizations
that compose it. The movements and organizations put between brackets the cleavages
that divide them, as much as is necessary to affirm the possibility of a counter-hegemonic
globalization.
The nature of this utopia has been the most adequate for the initial objective
of the WSF: to affirm the existence of a counter-hegemonic globalization. This
is no vague utopia. It is rather a utopia that contains in itself the concretization
that is adequate for this phase of the construction of counter-hegemonic globalization.
It remains to be seen if the nature of this utopia is the most adequate one
to guide the next steps, should there be any next steps. Once the counter-hegemonic
globalization is consolidated, and hence the idea that another world is possible
is made credible, will it be possible to fulfill this idea with the same level
of radical democracy that helped formulate it? I shall come back to this.
2. The World Social Forum as Epistemology of the South
The practices and knowledges circulating in the WSF have their origin in very
distinct epistemological and ontological universes. Such diversity exists
not only among the different movements but also inside each one of them.
The differences within the feminist movement, for instance, are not merely
political. They are differences regarding what counts as relevant knowledge,
on the one hand, and, on the other, differences about identifying, validating
or hierarchizing the relations between western-based scientific knowledge
and other knowledges derived from other practices, rationalities or cultural
universes. They are differences, ultimately, about what it means to be a
human being, whether male or female. The practice of the WSF reveals, in
this context, that the knowledge we have of globalization is much less global
than globalization itself. Neoliberal globalization is presided over by technico-scientific
knowledge, and owes its hegemony to the credible way in which it discredits
all rival knowledges, by suggesting that they are not comparable, as to efficiency
and coherence, to the scientificity of the market laws. Since neoliberal
globalization is hegemonic, no wonder that it anchors itself in the knowledge,
no less hegemonic, of western-based modern science.
The counter-hegemonic globalization to which the WSF aspires thus immediately
confronts itself with the epistemological problem of the validity of that same
scientific knowledge to advance the counter-hegemonic struggles. To be sure,
many counter-hegemonic practices resort to the hegemonic scientific and technological
knowledge, and many of them would not even be thinkable without it. This is
true of the WSF itself, which would not exist without the technologies of information
and communication. The question is to what extent such knowledge is useful
and valid, and what other knowledges are available and usable beyond the limits
of utility and validity of scientific knowledge. To approach these problems
raises an additional epistemological problem, indeed a meta-epistemological
problem: on the basis of which knowledge or epistemology are these problems
to be formulated?
The core idea that presides over the epistemological questioning provoked by
the WSF is that the knowledge of globalization, whether hegemonic or counter-hegemonic,
is less global than each kind of globalization itself. Scientific knowledge,
however supposedly universal, is concentrated in the countries of the developed
North and, however presumably neutral, promotes the interests of these countries
and constitutes one of the productive forces of neoliberal globalization. Science
is doubly at the service of hegemonic globalization, whether by the way in
which it promotes and legitimates it, or by the way in which it discredits,
conceals or trivializes counter-hegemonic globalization. Hegemony presupposes
a constant policing and repressing of counter-hegemonic practices and agents.
Discrediting, concealing and trivializing counter-hegemonic globalization go
largely hand in hand with discrediting, concealing and trivializing the knowledges
that inform counter-hegemonic practices and agents. Faced with rival knowledges,
hegemonic scientific knowledge either turns them into raw material (as is the
case of indigenous or peasant knowledge about biodiversity) or rejects them
on the basis of their falsity or inefficiency in the light of the hegemonic
criteria of truth and efficiency.
The epistemological alternative proposed by the WSF is that there is no global
social justice without global cognitive justice. This alternative is grounded
on two basic ideas. First, if the objectivity of science does not imply neutrality,
science and technology may as well be put at the service of counter-hegemonic
practices. The extent to which science is used is in general arguable inside
the movements, and it may vary according to circumstances and practices. Second,
whatever the extent to which science is resorted to, counter-hegemonic practices
are mainly practices of nonscientific knowledges, practical, often tacit knowledges
that must be made credible to render such practices credible in turn.
This second point is more polemical because it confronts the hegemonic concepts
of truth and efficiency directly. The epistemological denunciation that the
WSF engages in consists in showing that the concepts of rationality and efficiency
presiding over hegemonic technico-scientific knowledge are too restrictive
to capture the richness and diversity of the social experience of the world,
and specially that they discriminate against practices of resistance and production
of counter-hegemonic alternatives. Hegemonic rationality and efficiency thus
bring about a contraction of the world by concealing or discrediting all the
practices, agents, and knowledges that are not accounted for by their criteria.
Such concealment and such discrediting constitute a waste of social experience,
both social experience that is already available but not yet visible, and social
experience not yet available but realistically possible.
The epistemological operation carried out by the WSF consists of two processes
that I designate as sociology of absences and sociology of emergences. I mean
sociologies built against hegemonic social sciences and upon alternative epistemological
presuppositions. I speak of sociologies because my aim is critically to identify
the conditions that destroy nonhegemonic and potentially counter-hegemonic
social experience. Through the sociology of absences and the sociology of emergences,
social experience that resists destruction is unconcealed, and the space-time
capable of identifying and rendering credible new counter-hegemonic social
experiences is opened up.
The following description of the sociology of absences and the sociology of
emergences represents the ideal-type of the epistemological operation featured
by the WSF. In real life, the practices and knowledges of the different movements
and organizations, as well as of the global interactions amongst them, come
more or less close to this ideal-type.
The World Social Forum and the sociology of absences
The sociology of absences consists of an inquiry that aims to explain that
what does not exist is in fact actively produced as nonexistent, that is,
as a noncredible alternative to what exists. Its empirical object is deemed
impossible in the light of conventional social science, and for this reason
its formulation already represents a break with it. The objective of the
sociology of absences is to transform impossible into possible objects, absent
into present objects.
There is no single, univocal way of not existing. The logics and processes
through which hegemonic criteria of rationality and efficiency produce the
nonexistence of what does not fit them are various. Nonexistence is produced
whenever a certain entity is disqualified and rendered invisible, unintelligible,
or irreversibly discardable. What unites the different logics of production
of nonexistence is that they are all manifestations of the same rational monoculture.
I distinguish five logics or modes of production of nonexistence.
The first derives from the monoculture of knowledge and rigor of knowledge.
It is the most powerful mode of production of nonexistence. It consists in
turning modern science and high culture into the sole criteria of truth and
aesthetic quality, respectively. The complicity that unites the "two cultures" resides
in the fact that both claim to be, each in its own field, exclusive canons
of production of knowledge or artistic creation. All that is not recognized
or legitimated by the canon is declared nonexistent. Nonexistence appears in
this case in the form of ignorance or lack of culture.
The second logic resides in the monoculture of linear time, the idea that history
has a unique and well known meaning and direction. This meaning and direction
have been formulated in different ways in the last two hundred years: progress,
revolution, modernization, development, globalization. Common to all these
formulations is the idea that time is linear and that ahead of time proceed
the core countries of the world system and, along with them, the dominant knowledges,
institutions and forms of sociability. This logic produces nonexistence by
describing as backward whatever is asymmetrical vis-à-vis whatever is
declared forward. It is according to this logic that western modernity produces
the noncontemporaneity of the contemporaneous, and that the idea of simultaneity
conceals the asymmetries of the historical times that converge into it. The
encounter between the African peasant and the officer of the World Bank in
his field trip illustrates this condition. In this case, nonexistence assumes
the form of residuum, which in turn has assumed many designations for the past
two hundred years, the first being the primitive, closely followed by the traditional,
the premodern, the simple, the obsolete, the underdeveloped.
The third logic is the logic of social classification, based on the monoculture
of naturalization of differences. It consists in distributing populations according
to categories that naturalize hierarchies. Racial and sexual classification
are the most salient manifestations of this logic. Contrary to what happens
in the relation between capital and labor, social classification is based on
attributes that negate the intentionality of social hierarchy. The relation
of domination is the consequence, rather than the cause, of this hierarchy,
and it may even be considered as an obligation of whoever is classified as
superior (for example, the white man's burden in his civilizing mission). Although
the two forms of classification (race and sex) are decisive for the relation
between capital and labor to stabilize and spread globally, racial classification
was the one most deeply reconstructed by capitalism, as Wallerstein and Balibar
(1991) and Quijano (2000), among others, have shown. According to this logic,
nonexistence is produced as a form of inferiority, insuperable inferiority
because natural. The inferior ones, because insuperably inferior, cannot be
a credible alternative to the superior ones.
The forth logic of production of nonexistence is the logic of the dominant
scale: the monoculture of the universal and of the global. According to this
logic, the scale adopted as primordial determines the irrelevance of all other
possible scales. In western modernity, the dominant scale appears under two
different forms: the universal and the global. Universalism is the scale of
the entities or realities that prevail regardless of specific contexts. For
that reason, they take precedence over all other realities that depend on contexts
and are therefore considered particular or vernacular. Globalization is the
scale that in the last twenty years acquired unprecedented relevance in various
social fields. It is the scale that privileges entities or realities that widen
their scope to the whole globe, thus earning the prerogative to designate rival
entities as local. According to this logic, nonexistence is produced under
the form of the particular and the local. The entities or realities defined
as particular or local are captured in scales that render them incapable of
being credible alternatives to what exists globally and universally.
Finally, the fifth logic of nonexistence is the logic of productivity. It resides
in the monoculture of the criteria of capitalist productivity and efficiency.
According to this logic, economic growth through market forces is an unquestionable
rational objective. As such, the criterion of productivity that best serves
this objective is unquestionable as well. This criterion applies both to nature
and to human labor. Productive nature is nature at its maximum fertility in
a given production cycle, whereas productive labor is labor that maximizes
generating profit likewise in a given production cycle. In its extreme version
of conservative utopia neoliberalism aims to convert labor into a productive
force among other, subject to the laws of the market as any other productive
force. It has been doing this by transforming labor into a global resource
while at the same time preventing at any cost the emergence of a global labor
market (via immigration laws, violation of labor standards, union busting,
etc.) According to the logic of capitalist productivity, nonexistence is produced
in the form of nonproductiveness. Applied to nature, nonproductiveness is sterility;
applied to labor, "discardable populations", laziness, professional
disqualification, lack of skills.
There are thus five principal social forms of nonexistence produced by hegemonic
epistemology and rationality: the ignorant, the residual, the inferior, the
local, and the nonproductive. They are social forms of nonexistence because
the realities to which they give shape are present only as obstacles vis-à-vis
the realities deemed relevant, be they scientific, advanced, superior, global,
or productive realities. They are, therefore, disqualified parts of homogeneous
totalities which, as such, merely confirm what exists and precisely as it exists.
They are what exists under irretrievably disqualified forms of existing.
The social production of these absences results in the waste of social experience.
The sociology of absences aims to identify the scope of this waste so that
the experiences produced as absent may be liberated from those relations of
production and thereby made present. To be made present means to be considered
alternatives to hegemonic experience, to have their credibility discussed and
argued for and their relations taken as object of political dispute. The sociology
of absences aims thus to create a want and turn the supposed lack of social
experience into waste of social experience. It thereby creates the conditions
to enlarge the field of credible experiences in this world and time. The enlargement
of the world occurs not only because the field of credible experiences is widened
but also because the possibilities of social experimentation in the future
are increased.
The sociology of absences proceeds by confronting each one of the modes of
production of absence mentioned above. Because the latter have been shaped
by conventional social science, the sociology of absences cannot but be transgressive,
and as such bound to be discredited. Nonconformity with such discredit and
struggle for credibility, however, make it possible for the sociology of absences
not to remain an absent sociology. The sociology of absences works by replacing
monocultures by ecologies. I therefore identify five ecologies.
The ecology of knowledges. The first logic, the logic of the monoculture of
scientific knowledge and rigor, must be confronted with the identification
of other knowledges and criteria of rigor that operate credibly in social practices.
Such contextual credibility must be deemed a sufficient condition for the knowledge
in question to have enough legitimacy to participate in epistemological debates
with other knowledges, namely with scientific knowledge. The central idea of
the sociology of absences in this regard is that there is no ignorance or knowledge
in general. All ignorance is ignorant of a certain knowledge, and all knowledge
is the overcoming of a particular ignorance (Santos,1995: 25). This principle
of incompleteness of all knowledges is the condition of the possibility of
epistemological dialogue and debate among the different knowledges. What each
knowledge contributes to such a dialogue is the way in which it leads a certain
practice to overcome a certain ignorance. Confrontation and dialogue among
knowledges is confrontation and dialogue among the different processes through
which practices that are ignorant in different ways turn into practices that
are knowledgeable in different ways.
In this domain, the sociology of absences aims to substitute an ecology of
knowledges for the monoculture of scientific knowledge. Such an ecology of
knowledges permits not only to overcome the monoculture of scientific knowledge
but also the idea that the nonscientific knowledges are alternatives to scientific
knowledge. The idea of alternatives presupposes the idea of normalcy, and the
latter the idea of norm, and so, nothing being further specified, the designation
of something as an alternative carries a latent connotation of subalternity.
If we take biomedicine and African traditional medicine as an example, it makes
no sense to consider the latter, by far the predominant one in Africa, as an
alternative to the former. The important thing is to identify the contexts
and the practices in which each operates, and the way they conceive of health
and sickness and overcome ignorance (as undiagnosed illness) in applied knowledge
(as cure).
The ecology of temporalities. The second logic, the logic of the monoculture
of linear time, is confronted with the idea that linear time is only one among
many conceptions of time and that, if we take the world as our unit of analysis,
it is not even the most commonly adopted. The predominance of linear time is
not the result of its primacy as a temporal conception, but the result of the
primacy of western modernity that embraced it as its own. Linear time was adopted
by western modernity through the secularization of Judeo-Christian eschatology,
but it never erased, not even in the West, other conceptions of time such as
circular time, cyclical time, the doctrine of the eternal return, and still
others that are not adequately grasped by the images of the arrow of time.
The need to take into account these different conceptions of time derives from
the fact, pointed out by Koselleck (1985) and Marramao (1995), that societies
understand power according to the conceptions of temporality they hold. The
most resistant relations of domination are those based on hierarchies among
temporalities. They reduce much social experience to the condition of residuum.
Experiences become residual because they are contemporary in ways that are
not recognizable by the dominant temporality.
In this domain, the sociology of absences aims to free social practices from
their status as residuum, devolving to them their own temporality and thus
the possibility of autonomous development. Once liberated from linear time
and devolved to its own temporality, the activity of the African or Asian peasant
stops being residual and becomes contemporaneous of the activity of the hi-tech
farmer in the USA or the activity of the World Bank executive. By the same
token, the presence or relevance of the ancestors in one's life in different
cultures ceases to be an anachronistic manifestation of primitive religion
or magic to become another way of experiencing contemporaneity.
By freeing alternative realities from their status as residuum, the sociology
of absences replaces the monoculture of linear time with the ecology of temporalities.
Societies are constituted of various temporalities. Many practices are disqualified,
suppressed or rendered unintelligible because they are ruled by temporalities
that are not contained in the temporal canon of western capitalist modernity.
Once these temporalities are recuperated and become known, the practices and
sociabilities ruled by them become intelligible and credible objects of argumentation
and political debate.
The ecology of recognition. The third logic of production of absences is the
logic of social classification. Although in all logics of production of absence
the disqualification of practices goes hand in hand with the disqualification
of agents, it is here that the disqualification affects mainly the agents,
and only secondly the social experience of which they are the protagonists.
The coloniality of western modern capitalist power mentioned by Quijano (2000)
consists in collapsing difference and inequality, while claiming the privilege
to ascertain who is equal or different. The same can be said of the unequal
sexuality of modern capitalist power. The sociology of absences confronts coloniality
and unequal sexuality by looking for a new articulation between the principles
of equality and difference, thus allowing for the possibility of equal differences
- an ecology of differences comprised of mutual recognition. It does so by
submitting hierarchy to critical ethnography (Santos, 2001b). This consists
in deconstructing both difference (to what extent is difference a product of
hierarchy?) and hierarchy (to what extent is hierarchy a product of difference?).
The differences that remain when hierarchy vanishes become a powerful denunciation
of the differences that hierarchy reclaims in order not to vanish.
The ecology of trans-scale. The sociology of absences confronts the fourth
logic, the logic of global scale, by recuperating what in the local is not
the result of hegemonic globalization. The local that has been integrated in
hegemonic globalization is what I designate as localized globalism, that is,
the specific impact of hegemonic globalization on the local (Santos, 1998b;
2000). As it deglobalizes the local vis-à-vis hegemonic globalization,
the sociology of absences also explores the possibility of counter-hegemonic
globalization. In sum, the deglobalization of the local and its eventual counter-hegemonic
reglobalization broadens the diversity of social practices by offering alternatives
to localized globalisms. The sociology of absences requires in this domain
the use of cartographic imagination, whether to see in each scale of representation
not only what it reveals but also what it conceals, or to deal with cognitive
maps that operate simultaneously with different scales, namely to identify
local/global articulations (Santos, 1995: 456-473; Santos, 2001a).
The ecology of productivities. Finally, in the domain of the fifth logic, the
monoculture of capitalist productivity, the sociology of absences consists
in recuperating and valorizing alternative systems of production, popular economic
organizations, workers' cooperatives, self-managed enterprises, solidarity
economy, etc., which have been hidden or discredited by the capitalist orthodoxy
of productivity. This is perhaps the most controversial domain of the sociology
of absences, for it confronts directly both the paradigm of development and
infinite economic growth and the logic of the primacy of the objectives of
accumulation over the objectives of distribution that sustain global capitalism.
In each of the five domains, the objective of the sociology of absences is
to disclose the diversity and multiplicity of social practices and confer credit
to them in opposition to the exclusive credibility of hegemonic practices.
The idea of multiplicity and nondestructive relations is suggested by the concept
of ecology: ecology of knowledges, ecology of temporalities, ecology of recognition,
ecology of transcale, and ecology of productivities. Common to all these ecologies
is the idea that reality cannot be reduced to what exists. It amounts to an
ample version of realism that includes the realities rendered absent by silence,
suppression, and marginalization. In a word, realities that are actively produced
as nonexistent.
In conclusion, the exercise of the sociology of absences is counterfactual
and takes place by confronting conventional scientific commonsense. To be carried
out it demands sociological imagination, both epistemological imagination and
democratic imagination. Epistemological imagination allows for the recognition
of different knowledges, perspectives and scales of identification, analysis
and evaluation of practices. Democratic imagination allows for the recognition
of different practices and social agents. Both the epistemological and the
democratic imagination have a deconstructive and a reconstructive dimension.
Deconstruction assumes five forms, corresponding to the critique of the five
logics of hegemonic rationality, namely un-thinking, de-residualizing, de-racializing,
de-localizing, and de-producing. Reconstruction is comprised of the five ecologies
mentioned above.
The WSF is a broad exercise of the sociology of absences. As I pointed ut,
it is internally unequal as to its closeness to the ideal-type. If it is in
general unequivocally noticeable a refusal of monocultures and an adoption
of ecologies, this process is not present with the same intensity in all movements,
organizations, and articulations. If by some opting for ecologies is unconditional,
by others hybridity between monocultures and ecologies are visible. It is often
the case, as well, that some movements or organizations act, in some domains,
according to a monocultural logic and, in others, according to an ecological
logic. It is also possible that the adoption of an ecological logic is decharacterized
by the faccionalism anf power struggle inside one movement or organization,
and turn into a new monocultural logic. Finally, I offer as an hypothesis that
even the movements that claim different ecologies are vulneble to the temptation
of evaluating themselves according to an ecological logic, while evaluating
the other movements according to a hegemonic monocultural logic.
2. 2 The World Social Forum and the sociology of emergences
The sociology of emergences is the second epistemological operation protagonized
by the WSF. Whereas the goal of the sociology of absences is to identify
and valorize social experiences available in the world, although declared
nonexistent by hegemonic rationality and knowledge, the sociology of emergences
aims to identify and enlarge the signs of possible experiences, under the
guise of tendencies and latencies, that are actively ignored by hegemonic
rationality and knowledge.
The concept that rules the sociology of emergences is the concept of Not Yet
(Noch Nicht) advanced by Ernst Bloch (1995). Bloch takes issue with the fact
that western philosophy was dominated by the concepts of All (Alles) and Nothing
(Nichts), in which everything seems to be contained in latency, but from whence
nothing new can emerge. Western philosophy is therefore a static philosophy.
For Bloch, the possible is the most uncertain and the most ignored concept
in western philosophy (1995: 241). Yet, only the possible permits to reveal
the inexhaustible wealth of the world. Besides All and Nothing, Bloch introduces
two new concepts: Not (Nicht) and Not Yet (Noch Nicht). The Not is the lack
of something and the expression of the will to surmount that lack. The Not
is thus distinguished from the Nothing (1995: 306). To say No is to say yes
to something different. The Not Yet is the more complex category because it
expresses what exists as mere tendency, a movement that is latent in the very
process of manifesting itself. The Not Yet is the way in which the future is
inscribed in the present. It is not an indeterminate or infinite future, rather
a concrete possibility and a capacity that neither exist in a vacuum nor are
completely predetermined. Indeed, they actively re-determine all they touch,
thus questioning the determinations that exist at a given moment. Subjectively,
the Not Yet is anticipatory consciousness, a form of consciousness that, although
extremely important in people's lives, was completely neglected by Freud (Bloch,
1995: 286-315). Objectively, the Not Yet is, on the one hand, capacity (potency)
and, on the other, possibility (potentiality). Possibility has a dimension
of darkness as it originates in the lived moment, which is never fully visible
to itself, as well as a component of uncertainty that derives from a double
want: 1) the fact that the conditions that render possibility concrete are
only partially known; 2) the fact that the conditions only exist partially.
For Bloch, it is crucial to distinguish between these two wants: it is possible
to know relatively well conditions that exist only very partially, and vice-versa.
The Not Yet inscribes in the present a possibility that is uncertain, but never
neutral; it could be the possibility of utopia or salvation (Heil) or the possibility
of catastrophe or damnation (Unheil). Such uncertainty brings an element of
chance, or danger, to every change. At every moment, there is a limited horizon
of possibilities, and that is why it is important not to waste the unique opportunity
of a specific change offered by the present: carpe diem (seize the day). Considering
the three modal categories of existence - reality, necessity, and possibility
- hegemonic rationality and knowledge focus on the first two and neglect the
third one entirely. The sociology of emergences focuses on possibility. As
Bloch says, to be human is to have a lot ahead of you (1995: 246). Possibility
is the world's engine. Its moments are: want (the manifestation of something
lacking), tendency (process and meaning), and latency (what goes ahead in the
process). Want is the realm of the Not, tendency the realm of the Not Yet,
and latency the realm the Nothing and the All, for latency can end up either
in frustration or hope.
The sociology of emergences is the inquiry into the alternatives that are contained
in the horizon of concrete possibilities. It consists in undertaking a symbolic
enlargement of knowledges, practices and agents in order to identify therein
the tendencies of the future (the Not Yet) upon which it is possible to intervene
so as to maximize the probability of hope vis-à-vis the probability
of frustration. Such symbolic enlargement is actually a form of sociological
imagination with a double aim: on the one hand, to know better the conditions
of the possibility of hope; on the other, to define principles of action to
promote the fulfillment of those conditions.
The sociology of emergences acts both on possibilities (potentiality) and on
capacities (potency). The Not Yet has meaning (as possibility), but no direction,
for it can end either in hope or disaster. Therefore, the sociology of emergences
replaces the idea of determination by the idea of care. The axiology of progress
is thus replaced by the axiology of care. Whereas in the sociology of absences
the axiology of care is exerted vis-à-vis available alternatives, in
the sociology of emergences the axiology of care is exerted vis-à-vis
possible alternatives. Because of this ethical dimension, neither the sociology
of absences nor the sociology of emergences are conventional sociologies. But
they are not conventional for another reason: their objectivity depends upon
the quality of their subjective dimension. The subjective element of the sociology
of absences is cosmopolitan consciousness and nonconformism before the waste
of experience. The subjective element of the sociology of emergences is anticipatory
consciousness and nonconformism before a want whose fulfillment is within the
horizon of possibilities. As Bloch says, the fundamental concepts are not reachable
without a theory of the emotions (1995: 306). The Not, the Nothing, and the
All shed light on such basic emotions as hunger or want, despair or annihilation,
trust or redemption. One way or another, these emotions are present in the
nonconformism that moves both the sociology of absences and the sociology of
emergences.
Whereas the sociology of absences acts in the field of social experiences,
the sociology of emergences acts in the field of social expectations. The discrepancy
between experiences and expectations is constitutive of western modernity.
Through the concept of progress, this discrepancy has been so much polarized
that any effective linkage between experiences and expectations disappeared:
no matter how wretched current experiences may be, they do not preclude the
illusion of exhilarating expectations. The sociology of emergences conceives
of the discrepancy between experiences and expectations without resorting to
the idea of progress and seeing it rather as concrete and measured. The question
is not to minimize expectations, but rather to radicalize the expectations
based on real possibilities and capacities, here and now.
Modernist expectations were grandiose in the abstract, falsely infinite and
universal. As such they have justified death, destruction, and disaster in
the name of a redemption ever to come. With the crisis of the concept of progress,
the future stopped being automatically prospective and axiological. The concepts
of modernization and development diluted those characteristics almost completely.
What is today known as globalization consummates the replacement of the prospective
and axiological by the accelerated and entropic. Thus, direction turns into
rhythm without meaning, and if there is a final stage, it cannot but be disaster.
Against this nihilism, which is as empty as the triumphalism of hegemonic forces,
the sociology of emergences offers a new semantics of expectations. The expectations
legitimated by the sociology of emergences are both contextual, because gauged
by concrete possibilities, and radical, because, in the ambit of those possibilities
and capacities, they claim a strong fulfillment that protects them, though
never completely, from frustration. In such expectations resides the reinvention
of social emancipation, or rather emancipations.
The symbolic enlargement brought about by the sociology of emergences consists
in identifying signals, clues, or traces of future possibilities in whatever
exists. Hegemonic rationality and science has totally dismissed this kind of
inquiry, either because it assumes that the future is predetermined, or can
only be identified by precise indicators. For them, clues are too vague, subjective,
and chaotic to be credible predictors. By focusing intensely on the clue side
of reality, the sociology of emergences aims to enlarge symbolically the possibilities
of the future that lie, in latent form, in concrete social experiences.
The notion of clue, understood as something that announces what is to come
next, is essential in various practices, both human and animal. For example,
it is well known how animals announce when they are ready for the reproductive
activity by means of visual, auditory, and olfactory clues. The preciseness
and detail of such clues are remarkable. In medicine, criminal investigation
and drama, clues are crucial to decide on future action, be it diagnosis and
prescription, identification of suspects, or development of the plot. In the
social sciences, however, clues have no credibility. On the contrary, the sociology
of emergences valorizes clues as pathways toward discussing and arguing for
concrete alternative futures. Whereas regarding animals clues carry highly
codified information, in society clues are more open and can therefore be fields
of argumentation and negotiation about the future. The care of the future exerts
itself in such argumentation and negotiation.
As in the case of the sociology of absences, the practices of the WSF also
come more or less close to the ideal type of the sociology of emergences. I
submit as a working hypothesis that the stronger and more consolidated movements
and organizations tend to engage less in the sociology of emergences than the
less strong or consolidated. As regards the relations between movements or
organizations, the signs and clues given by the less consolidated movements
may be devalued as subjective or inconsistent by the more consolidated movements.
In this as well, the practice of the sociology of emergences is unequal, and
inequalities must be the object of analysis and evaluation.
3. The World Social Forum as subaltern cosmopolitan politics
The newness of the WSF is more unequivocal at the utopian and epistemological
level than at the political level. Its political newness does exist, but
it exists as a field of tensions and dilemmas, where the new and the old
confront each another. The political newness of the WSF resides in the way
in which these confrontations have been handled, avoided, and negotiated.
Before I deal with this topic, let me state more clearly what I mean by the
WSF. My previous definition is too general to serve the analytical interests
of this section. The WSF is not confined to the three meetings that took place
in Porto Alegre between 2001 and 2003. The WSF is the whole set of initiatives
of exchange and articulation among the movements and organizations, with a
view to advance counter-hegemonic globalization according to the Porto Alegre
Charter of Principles. Before anything else, we must include in the WSF all
the other thematic forums that have been meeting alongside the WSF in Porto
Alegre: the Forum of Local Authorities (3 editions); the World Parliamentary
Forum (3 editions); the World Education Forum (2 editions); the World Forum
of Judges (2 editions); the World Trade Unions Forum (2 editions); the World
Choral Forum (2 editions); the World Junior Forum (2 editions); the Forum of
Sexual Diversity; the World Water Forum. Moreover, all the forums that have
taken place on their initiative for the past two years - national, regional,
and thematic forums - are part of the WSF as well. National or international
meetings of movements or organizations to prepare the aforementioned forums
or other meetings of international organizations, such as UN summits and parallel
meetings resulting thereby, must be also included in the WSF.
Given this scope, the WSF is a very important component of counter-hegemonic
globalization. Two crucial dimensions, however, remain outside its scope: the
local and national activities and social struggles of the various movements
and organizations that fight for a solidary globalization, whether having taken
part in the WSF or not; and the rallies against WTO meetings, international
financial institutions, and the G8. As we shall see, some of the political
tensions concerning the WSF have as their reference a narrower definition of
the WSF, namely the three Porto Alegre meetings. I refer to these tensions,
nonetheless, because, with some addaptation, they do aply to the WSF in the
broader sense I here adopt.
Let me begin by stating what to my mind constitutes the WSF's political novelty.
I shall then proceed to analyse the problems and tensions that this novelty
creates at three levels: representation; organization; political strategy and
political action. I should stress that the two first levels - representation
and organization - conceive of the WSF in a narrow sense, that is to say, the
set of three meetings so far held in Porto Alegre. In section 4. I shall deal
with the political agenda, that is to say, with the future as envisaged by
the WSF; and in seciton 5., with the future of the WSF.
3.1 The World Social Forum as Political Emergence
The political novelties of the WSF can be formulated in the following way:
1.A very broad conception of power and oppression. Neoliberal globalization
did not limit itself to submitting ever more interactions to the market, nor
to raising the workers' exploitation rate by transforming the labor force into
a global resource, and, at the same time, by preventing the emergence of a
global labor market. Neoliberal globalization showed that exploitation is linked
with many other forms of oppression that affect women, ethnic minories (sometimes
majorities), indigenous peoples, peasants, the unemployed, workers of the informal
sector, legal and illegal immigrants, guetto subclasses, gays and lesbians,
children and the young. All these forms of power create exclusion. One cannot
ascribe to any one of them, in abstract, nor even to the practices that resist
them, any priority as to the claim that "another world is possible." Political
priorities are always situated and conjunctural. They depend on the concrete
conditions of each country at a given historical moment. To respond to such
conditions and their fluctuations, the movements and organizations must give
priority to the articulations amongst them. This ultimately explains the organizational
novelty of a WSF with no leaders, its rejection of hierarchies, and its emphasis
on networks made possible by the internet.
2. Equivalence between the principles of equality and acknowledgment of difference.
We live in societies that are obscenely unequal, and yet equality is lacking
as an emancipatory ideal. Equality, understood as the equivalence among the
same, ends up excluding what is different. All that is homogeneous at the beginning
tends eventually to turn into exclusionary violence. Herein lies the grounding
of the aforementioned political and organizational novelty. Herein lies as
well the grounding of the option for participatory democracy, as ruling principle
of social emancipation, to the detriment of closed models such as that of state
socialism.
3. Privileging rebellion and nonconformity to the detriment of revolution.
There is no unique theory to guide the movements strategically, because the
aim is not so much to seize power but rather to change the many faces of power
as they present themselves in the institutions and sociabilities. Furthermore,
even those for whom seizing power is a priority are divided as to the strategy.
Some prefer drastic breaks to bring about a new order (revolution), while others
prefer gradual changes by means of an engagement and dialogue with the enemy
(reform). At this level, the novelty consists in the celebration of diversity
and pluralism, experimentalism, and radical democracy as well.
3.2 The issue of representation
The Charterer of Principles contains a double statement in this regard: first,
the WSF does not claim to be representative of counter-hegemonic globalization;
second, no one represents the WSF nor can speak in its name. These are two
separate, yet related issues: whom does the WSF represent? Who represents
the WSF?
The first issue - the WSF's representativity - has been discussed at different
levels. One of them concerns the limits of the world dimension of the WSF.
The numbers and greater geographical origin of participants has been increasing
steadily, from the first to the third WSF. Here are some statistical data.
Total attendance in the 1st WSF: 20, 000; in the 2nd: 60, 000; in the 3rd:
100, 000. Number of delegates in the 1st WF: 4, 702; in the 2nd: 12, 274; in
the 3rd: 20, 763. Number of workshops in the 1st WSF: 420; in the 2nd: 748;
in the 3rd: 1,286. Number of countires represented in the 1st WSF: 117; in
the 2ns: 123; in the 3rd: 156. Although unquestionably significant, these data
conceal the limits of the WSF's geographical scope. In all its editions, more
movements and organizations from Latin America have participated than from
other continents. This was particularly noticeable in the last WSF. Of the
100.000 participants, the estimate is that between 60.000 and 70.000 were Brazilian
and 15.000 from other Latin American countries. If this is so, then no more
than 15.000 participants from the "rest of the world" could have
been there. The presence of participants from many countries says nothing about
the size of participation.
This fact has led some critics to affirm that the WSF is far from having a
world dimension. The absences of Africa and Asia have been criticized. But
the truth of the matter is that participation is self-funded, and many of the
movements and organizations of these continents have no financial capacity
to support their own participation in the WSF. Those that have attended have
been often funded by European and American NGOs. In such cases, the NGOs claim
the right to choose who is to be funded. Thus, even if world participation
becomes quantitatively broader and more diverse, the issue of representation
will always be there until the selection criteria are more tansparent and democratic.
The scarse participation from Africa and Asia is negative in itself, but it
is even more so if one bears in mind that the absence of movements and organizations
from these continents reflects itself, in part, in the absence of themes and
debates particularly relevant for or specific of their realities. A vicious
circle may thereby emerge: African or Asian movements do not take part in the
WSF because the debates that they most cherish are absent, and they are absent
precisely because of the scarse participation of Africans and Asians. To obviate
this problem, some proposals have been made. For example, movements and organizations
of the North, besides paying for their own participation, should contribute
towards a common fund to support the participation of movements and organizations
of the South that would otherwise be unable to participate. The decision to
hold the fourth WSF in India was also in part argued for by the need to facilitate
the presence of Asian movements and organizations. Africa's problem is that
the Atlantic Ocean separates it from Latin America, the Indian Ocean from Asia,
and it does not seem to be ready yet to offer to convene the WSF in the future.
I do not question the relevance of this issue and support every effort to enlarge
and balance the geographical representation of the WSF. I believe, however,
that the WSF must not be deligitimized for not being worldwide enough. If that
were the case, we would be submitting it to a much more demanding criterion
of globality than what we apply to organizations and institutions of hegemonic
globalization. Moreover, the criterion of geographical representation is only
one of the representativity criteria. There are no doubt others, with perhaps
far more relevance from the political standpoint. Consider, for example, the
representation of different themes and struggle goals, different kinds of organizations
and movements, different strategical perspectives, and so on and so forth.
I have no doubt that, in other phases of the counter-hegemonic globalization,
all these criteria may, or perhaps should be taken into account. Indeed, as
I will show below when I deal with issues of political strategy, the question
of the presence and affirmation of different strategic alternatives is already
in place and drawing heated debate. I do think, however, that in the present
phase the representative criteria would raise obstacles to the spontaneous
congregation of movements and organizations that has been so decisive to affirm
the existence of an alternative kind of globalization.
The WSF had its origin around a small group of organizations that represented
only themselves. The enthusiasm the idea generated surprised even its authors.
It gave voice to the need many movements and organizations felt for an arena
or space that would not be circumscribed to contesting institutions of hegemonic
globalization, but would rather function as meeting point for the exchange
of experiences, debate of alternatives, and elaboration of plans for joint
action. The idea's success was gauged by free circulation, celebration of diversity,
participation without conditions, and the absence of negotiations that might
compromise the movements. Any restrictive criterion would end up bringing about
exclusion at a time when only inclusion would make sense. As a matter of fact,
even if one would have wanted to resort to criteria, it would have been impossible
to identify them, let alone resort to an organization capable of legitimately
selecting and decreeing them, and supervising their enforcement.
It is understandable that the success yielded by the WSF would have contributed
to raising the issue of the representativity of participation. In evaluations
of the 2nd and 3rd WSF this issue crops up frequently. I am sure that, if the
consolidation of the WSF continues, this issue will have to be adequately faced.
Further down I mention some recent proposals in this direction.
Besides geographic representation, two other representation issues are raised:
the representation of different strategies and political goals, and the representation
of different themes or agendas (the latter partly overlaps the former). I deal
with them below.
The issue concerning the representativity of participation ends up unfolding
into another one, which concerns the quality of participation. The latter has
to do with the different kinds of participation and how participants are placed
in each kind. This issue is related to the themes that comprise the organization
of the WSF, to which I now turn.
3. 3 The organization issue
Just like the previous issue, the organization issue takes the WSF in its narrow
sense. Francisco Whitaker, one of the organizers of the WSF, relates that
the idea for the WSF was struck among a bunch of Brazilians who wished to
oppose resistence to neoliberalism's single way of thinking, so well expressed
in the more than 20 annual meetings of the World Economic Forum in Davos.
A resistance, that is, that aimed to go beyond protests and rallies. According
to Whitaker, "the idea was, with the participation of all the organizations
that were already networking in the mass protests, to arrange another kind
of meeting on a world scale. The World Social Forum - directed to social
concerns. So as to give a symbolic dimension to the start of this new period,
the meeting would take place on the same day as the powerful of the world
were to meet in Davos". Whitaker himself and Oded Grajew presented the
idea to Bernard Cassen, editor of Le Monde Diplomatic and president of ATTAC
- formerly the Association for a Tobin Tax for the Aid of Citizens and now
the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of
Citizens. Cassen was excited by the idea and proposed that the Forum take
place in Brazil, in the city then already praised worldwide for its municipal
participatory democracy known as participatory budgeting. Soon a steering
committee was put together to organize the WSF from 2001 on. This committee
included the following organizations: ABONG (Brazilian Association of Non-Governmental
Organizations), ATTAC, CBJP (Brazilian Justice and Peace Commission), CIVES
(Brazilian Association of Entrepreneurs for Citizenship), CUT (Central Trade
Union Federation), IBASE (Brazilian Institute for Social and Economic Studies),
CJG (Centre for Global Justice) and MST (Landless Rural Workers Movement).
In June 2001, a delegation of the organizations presented the Forum to the
movements gathered together in Geneva for a summit parallel to the UN "Copenhagen
+ 5" Summit. The idea was very well received and an International Committee
to support the Forum was promptly created. The first WSF was under way. The
program was put together according to two dynamics. In the morning there
would be four simultaneous panels on each one of the four chosen thematic
areas: Production of Wealth and Social Reproduction; Access to Wealth and
Sustainability; Empowering Civil Society and the Public Realm; and Political
Power and Ethics the New Society. Panelists, invited by the organization,
were, in Whitaker's words, "leading names in the fight against the One
Truth." In the afternoon there would be workshops coordinated by the
participants themselves to engage in debate and exchange experiences. Sessions
were also planned to allow for testimonies from people involved in different
kinds of struggles.
This structure was kept in the 2nd Forum. It was somewhat changed in the 3rd,
, though the basic structure of two kinds of sessions was still there: sessions
organized directly by the Organizing Committee (OC), featuring guest speakers
invited by the Organizing Committee itself and by the International Committee;
and sessions submitted by the participating movements and organizations. During
the 2nd Forum the decision was taken to confer more power on the International
Committee (IC) for the planning of the Forum, while ascribing mainly an executive
role to the Organizing Committtee, predominantly composed of Brazilians.
On the nature of the IC, one can read the following in the documents of the
WSF: "The creation of the IC reflects the concept of the WSF as a permanent,
long-term process, designed to build an international movement to bring together
alternatives to neoliberal thinking in favor of a new social order ... Accordingly,
the IC will be set up as a permanent body that will give continuity to the
WSF beyond 2002, to consolidate the process of taking the WSF to the world
level. The Council will play a leading role in defining policy guidelines and
the WSF's strategic directions. National Organizing Committees will serve as
organizers and facilitators in tandem with the IC." The IC consists of
the groups and organizations invited to the first meeting and all that were
admitted later on by cooptation. The IC acknowledges that it consists of a
basic core wherein regional imbalances still exist (sparse participation by
Africa, Asia and the Arab World) as well as sectorial ones (young people, blacks,
among others). The IC has no fixed number of members. At present, it is comprised
of 111 organizations. Among the thematic, issue-oriented organizations, the
most represented are the trade unions, followed closely by feminist organizations.
This organizational model has raised many issues and provoked tensions. Let
me identify some of them.
Internal democracy. Both the OC and the IC were put together by cooptation.
Their legitimacy derives foram their having organized the WSF with relative
success. Their members were not elected and they are not accountable to any
jurisdiction. The OC has kept its constitution from the beginning, whereas
the IC has become increasingly broader to strengthen its internationalization
and to balance its regional and thematic representation.
Although, according to the Charter of Principles, nobody represents the WSF,
in practical terms the OC has been assuming that capacity, and that has been
a source of tensions. Besides other reasons, the fact remains that the OC is
overwhelmingly Brazilian, whereas the WSF aims to be international. The IC
was actually created to take care of this problem, the tendency being to strengthen
the IC's role in its relations with the OC. This is no easy task. Since the
WSF takes place in Porto Alegre, the predominantly Brazilian OC tends to play
a crucial role in organizational and other kinds of decisions. The difficulties
piled up during 2002, when the IC wanted to assume the WSF's strategic leadership
and give general recommendations for its organization. In the course of the
year, the IC held meetings in Porto Alegre, Bangkok, Dakkar, Barcelona and
Florence, important decisions having been made each time. It seems that it
was not always easy to articulate the IC's and the OC's work. According to
some members of the IC, the OC resisted its loss of autonomy. For instance,
the decisions made by the coordinators of the thematic areas were not always
respected by the OC, specially as far as the choice of guest speakers was concerned.
Without wishing to dismiss this point, I believe that the lack of articulation
had a lot to do with conjunctural conditions. The IC became stronger in 2002,
at a time when the OC lost some of its operativeness due to internal political
reasons in Brazil. 2002 was election year in Brazil. There were state and federal
(both legislative and presidential) elections. The Workers' Party, ever a staunch
supporter of the WSF in Porto Alegre, both at the organizational and financial
levels, lost the elections in Rio Grande do Sul, whose capital is Porto Alegre.
This fact not only provoked a financial crisis, to be solved only later on,
but also upset the administrative apparatus, which had contributed so much
towards the success of the two previous forums.
Be it as it may, there emerged a tense climate of mutual accusations of lack
of transparency and accountability. Although none of these committees was elected
by the movements and organizations that take part in the WSF, the truth of
the matter is that the IC has been assuming the position of the most representative
structure of the WSF, as well as a promoter of its internal democracy. Furthermore,
the IC has been assuming a decisive role towards strengthening a broad conception
of the WSF, turning the WSF into a permanent process and promoting the continuity
among its many initiatives, so as to transform the WSF into "an incremental
process of collective learning and growth", as stated in the resolutions
adopted at IC meetings during the 2003 WSF.
At these meetings, other decisions were made with a view to changing the correlation
between the IC and the OC. The first decision was to hold the next WSF in India.
The major reason for this decision was, as stated above, the need to deepen
the Forum's global nature, encouraging the participation of movements and organizations
from world regions up to now with scarse presence in the WSF. But the fact
is that this decision deprived the OC its former centrality. Indeed, the role
of the OC with its present composition is no longer clear, as the India WSF
will be certainly organized by a another OC put together for that purpose.
Curiously enough, however, at the same meeting the decision was made that the
2005 WSF should be held in Porto Alegre once again, perhaps to preempt the
risk of holding the WSF outside the city where it became so famous.
3. 4 Transparency and hierarchies in participation
The issue of internal democracy has other facets. Two of them seem particularly
pertinent to me. The first one concerns the lack of transparency of some
of the decisions which, seemingly organizational, actually have or could
have political meaning. The criticism has been swelling that such decisions
are taken by a very restrictive group, without the least control by the movements
and organizations affected. Such decisions may include the rejection or maginalization
of proposals submitted by the movements and organizations, without explicit
justification. The US Left, for example, considered itself marginalized by
the organization of the 2002 WSF, a perception that was deepened in 2003.
Michael Albert, who organized a wide group of sessions under the general
title of "Life After Capitalism", considered himself discriminated
against by the OC. The sessions did not appear on the program, room assignment
was chaotic (successive room changes, lack of simultaneous translation, etc.),
and participation became very difficult as a consequence. Again withou wishing
to question the facts, I believe that, in this concrete case, the alleged
discrimination was rather the result of the near organizational collapse
of the 2003 WSF. For reasons already stated and others I shall mention below,
the organization of the 2003 WSF was far from reaching the quality that distinguished
the organization of the two previous Forums.
The second dimension of the democracy and transparence issue concerns the hierarchical
structure of the various events at the WSF meetings and relates to the choice
of guest speakers. This has to do with the already mentioned quality of participation.
The distinction between sessions organized directly by the OC and those proposed
by the movements and organizations has created some tension. On the one hand,
whereas those who participate in the first kind of sessions are invited by
the WSF and have their participation funded, those who participate in the second
kind of sessions must count only upon funding generated by the movements and
organizations themselves. On the other hand, the sessions promoted directly
by the organization are considered to be the most important ones and are granted
time and space conditions that the others do not have. For instance, it was
evident during the 2003 WSF that the most serious organizational problems affected
more the sessions promoted by the movements and organizations than the sesions
promoted by the OC-IC.
The idea that all different kinds of ssessions should be treated the same way,
has been gaining strength. As much transpires from an IC resolution in its
meeting of January 2003:
"When holding the forums, to organize discussions and the search
for alternatives giving equal weight to the activities scheduled by
the organizers and to the seminars and workshops proposed and organized
by the participants themselves."
Another resolution goes in the same direction:
"To deepen the process of experimentation of horizontal organizational
practices and systems based on co-responsibility."
Criticism concerning lack of democracy and transparence is also frequent
regarding the choice of invited guests. The criticism respects both
the choice process, and the specific invitations themselves (or exclusions
from lists of potential invitees), namely when well-known personalities
are at stake, be they Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Ben Bella, Mário
Soares. Criticism also concerns the toleration of the presence of controversial
figures, such as leaders of guerilla groups.
Feminist movements have been particularly critical of the choice process, because
women have been scarcely represented on the panels of plenary sessions, even
though they constitute such a large proportion of all the participants (in
the 2002 WSF, women were allegedly 52 percent of the participants). Faithful
to their two mottoes - "another world is possible" and "no one
single way of thinking" - feminist movements have been claiming larger
presence of women among guest speakers, as well as on the organizational structures,
both the IC and the OC. Bearing in mind the experience of the two first forums,
says Virgínia Vargas of the Flora Tristan Feminist Center (Peru) the
Marcosur Feminist Articulation: "despite women's more visible impact,
women have not been proportionally represented in the Conferences organized
by the Forum or on the Organizing Committee. This is still a single way of
thinking, huddled away amidst strategies for change."
Other critics mention the top-down nature of the conferences and the co-existence
in the WSF of a top-down WSF, comprised of the initiatives of the IC and the
OC, and a bottom-up WSF, comprised of the large majority of the participants.
Commenting on the experience at the 2nd WSF, Hebe de Bonafini, of the Argentinean "Mothers
of Plaza de Mayo," criticizes the inequality of representation, of which
she distinguishes three levels: the organizers, the official participants and
the "rank-and-file." Says Hebe de Bonafini: "There were three
different levels to this WSF. First, there were the small gatherings of those
who were in charge, controlling things ... Then there were all the commissions
and seminars where all the intellectuals, philosophers and thinkers participated.
And then there were the rank-and-file folks." Viewing herself as part
of the last group, she concludes: "We participated at that level and discussed
with all sorts of people. But the fact is that we were brought to the WSF so
we could listen - not so the rank-and-file could participate." Michael
Albert is likewise critical of the forum's top-down organization. Commenting
on the 3rd WSF, Albert distinguishes it from all the others that have been
occurring in different parts of the world, often inspired by the WSF. Whereas
the WSF is top-down, the others are bottom-up. "Without exaggerating the
virtues of the forums worldwide," adds Albert, "they are having positive
effects and moving in participatory, transparent, and democratic directions.
The WSF, however, is different." Michael Albert offers several proposals
aimed to deepen the WSF's participatory and democratic nature (more on this
below).
Curiously enough, the organizers themselves acknowledge many of these criticisms,
which makes me think that these organizational tensions are part of the Forum's
growing and learning process itself. Some of the criticisms denounce accusations
of less limpid intentions on the part of the OC, and some come even close to
conspiracy theories. I have been following the activity of the OC and, as far
as I can tell, such criticisms have no grounding. The results of the decisions,
some of which are rightly criticizable, have mainly to do with the OC's incapacity
to handle an event that became umanageable because of its dimension and complexity.
By way of example, let me quote three proposals made by myself with a view
to increase internal democracy and transparence: posting the decisions taken
by the OC or IC in designated places; saving some space in the evening for
an open debate about organization or other issues; taking advantage of the
technologies of electronic democracy to carry out referendus on organizational
or strategic decisions. The two first proposals would have been easy to put
in place, had not been an administrative breakdown. Suffice it to say that
during the 3rd WSF the full program including all activities was never published.
The WSF's organizational struture was the most adequate to launch the Forum
and render it credible internationally. For instance, the idea of ascribing
to the OC the promotion of some of the sessions and the choice of guests was
adopted with a double goal in mind: first, minimally to structure the themes
to be debated in order to go from the denouncing discourse of mass protests
to the discourse of proposals and alternatives; second, to give international
visibility to the Forum by addressing invitations to well-known indviduals.
Let us not forget that the WSF saw itself as an alternative to the WEF and
was ready dispute with it the attention of the global media. To my mind, without
this kind of organization and without the extraordinary devotion of the people
that were charged with it, the WSF would never had accomplished what it has
so far. The consolidation of the WSF will lead it to another phase of development,
in which case its organizational structure will have to be reconsidered so
as to adjust it to its new demands and the tasks ahead.
3. 5 Parties and Movements
The relation among political parties, social movements, and NGOs in the construction
of counter-hegemonic globalization is no doubt controversial. In a broad
sense, it also affects the WSF. The Charter of Principles is clear on the
subordinate role of parties in the WSF. The WSF is an emanation of the civil
society as organized in social movements and nongovernamental organizations.
In practice, however, things are ambiguous. The articulation between parties
and social movements varies from country to country and depends on specific
historical and political conditions.
Here, I am not concerned with this general topic. I just want to highlight
a specific issue: the role of the Workers' Party (PT) in the organization of
the three editions of the WSF. The PT, in its capacity of government party
in the State of Rio Grande do Sul and in the city of Porto Alegre, gave decisive
support to the organization of the WSFs, both at the financial and logistical
and administrative level. Without such support it would have been impossible,
at least in Brazil, to organize the WSF with the ambition that characterized
it from the start. To be sure, this kind of support had its price. Particularly
during the 2nd Forum, PT's attempt to use the WSF to spread its message and
engage in political propaganda, was quite visible. Many participants were ready
to criticize the organization on this account. Some of them went so far as
to criticize the PT for instrumentalizing the WSF. These criticisms originated
mainly among autonomist, anarchist groups or extreme left groups.
To my mind, the issue of the relation between parties and movements cannot
be decided in the abstract. As I said, the historical and political conditions
vary from country to country, and may dictate distinct responses in different
contexts. In the Brazilian context, the PT itself is an emanation of the social
movements, and its history cannot be separated from their history. Since the
mid-1980s, the struggles against the dictatorship received their best support
from the unions and social movements, and the PT was founded in the midst of
this powerful social mobilization. Since its foundation, the PT has continued
to have a privileged relation with the social movements. The support that the
PT grants the WSF must be understood in this very context. The PT's attempt
to use the 2002 WSF in its electoral campaign is definitely to be condemned.
Contrary to what some other critics argue, I do believe, however, that the
PT did not interfere with the choices of the organization, whether it be thematics
or invited guests. The WSF became much bigger, and the PT was in any case too
small to have a significant impact in this regard.
The relation between political parties (specially parties on the left) and
the WSF will no doubt continue to be debated in the different countries in
which forums will be held. In the majority of the cases, the issue is not so
much whether such a relation should or should not exist, but rather to define
the exact terms of such a relation. If the relation is transparent, horizontal,
and mutually respectful, it may well be, in some contexts, an important lever
for the consolidation of the WSF. The European Social Forum, held in Florence
in 2002, clearly illustrates this. The strength of Italian social movements
made possible horizontal articulations between them and the parties on the
left, particularly the Rifundazione Comunista and the o PDS (left democrats).
Such articulations contributed decisively towards the Forum's success.
3. 6 Size and Continuity
The 3rd WSF had 100.000 participants. Allowing for the conjunctural reasons
that, as I mentioned, may have affected the OC's efficiency and organizational
capacity, it is not easy to imagine a well organized Forum with so many participants.
Somehow, the WSF was victim of its own success: its size rendered it unmanegeable.
It is to be believed that this organizational form has reached its limits.
The next WSF will take place in India, and the number of its participants
is hard to predict. When the WSF returns to Porto Alegre in 2005, a new organizational
formula will be presumably in place.
Granting that the WSF is a learning process, more and more voices have been
supporting the idea that the WSF should increasingly turn into a permanent
phenomenon, comprised of many meetings articulated amongst themselves. Thus
it will be possible to further the internationalization of the WSF, structure
and focus the dialogues and debates much better, and strengthen the formulation
of alternatives. The number of participants in these other forums will certainly
be lower and manageable. This was also the purport of the IC in its meeting
of January 2003:
To stimulate the multiplication of regional, national and even local
events, as well as theme events, that intercommunicate horizontally
and that will not be articulated as preparatory for one another but
as meetings with their own political value.
The intention is, thus, to further highlight partial meetings to the
detriment of the "global event" that WSF has been. Such a
change compels new coordination tasks. Quite aware of this, the IC
decided at the same meeting to take on the task of producing a continued
and systematic analysis of the situation in the world and, on the basis
of it, to assess "the continuity of the process, to ensure the
respect for its Charter of Principles when holding regional and theme
forums, to identify themes for the IC's work, for the world events
and for the theme forums to be stimulated, as well as to identify regions
of the world in which the process needs to expand, acting in alliance
with movements and organizations from these regions".
3.7 The issue of strategy and political action
While utopia, the WSF is characterized, as I have already said, by its claim
to the existence of an alternative to the anti-utopian, single way of thinking
of neoliberalism's conservative utopia. It is a radically democratic utopia
that celebrates diversity, plurality, and horizontality. It celebrates another
possible world, itself plural in its possibilities. The newness of this utopia
in left thinking - which has in Zapatista thinking an eloquent formulation
- cannot but be problematical as it translates itself into strategic planning
and political action. These are marked by the historical trajectory of the
political left throughout the twentieth century. The translation of utopia
into politics is not, in this case, merely the translation of long range
into medium and short range. It is also the translation of the new into the
old. The tensions and divisions brought about by this are no less real for
that reason. What happens is that the reality of the divergencies is often
a ghostly reality, in which divergences about concrete political options
get mixed up with divergences about codes and languages of political option.
Moreover, it is not always possible to determine if the reality of the divergences
lies in real divergences.
It should be stressed, however, that the novelty of the utopia managed to overcome
the political divergences. Contrary to what happened in the thinking and practice
of the left in western capitalist modernity, the WSF managed to create a style
and an atmosphere of inclusion of and respect for divergences that made it
very difficult for the different political factions to self-exclude themselves
at the start under the excuse that they were being excluded. For this contributed
decisively the WSF's "minimalist" program stated in its Charter of
Principles: emphatic assertion of respect for diversity; access hardly conditioned
(movements or groups that advocate political violence are excluded); no voting
or deliberations at the Forum as such; no representative entity to speak for
the Forum. It is almost like a tabula rasa where all forms of struggle against
neoliberalism and for a juster society may have their place. Before such openness,
those who choose to exclude themselves find it difficult to define what exactly
they are excluding themselves from.
All this has contributed to making the WSF's power of attraction greater than
its capacity to repel. Even the movements that are most severely critical of
the WSF, such as the anarchists, have not been absent. There is definitely
something new in the air, something that is chaotic, messy, ambiguous, and
indefinite enough to deserve the benefit of the doubt or be susceptible to
manipulation. Few would want to miss this train, particularly at a time in
history when trains had ceased to ride. For all these reasons, the desire to
highlight what the movements and organizations have in common has prevailed
upon the desire to underscore what separates them. The manifestation of tensions
or cleavages has been relatively tenuous and, above all, has not resulted in
mutual exclusions. It remains to be seen for how long this will to convergence
and this chaotic sharing of differences will last.
Neither the kinds of cleavages nor the way the movements relate to them are
randomly distributed inside the WSF. On the contrary, they reflect a meta-cleavage
between western and nonwestern political cultures. Up to a point, this meta-cleavage
also exists between the North and the South. Thus, given the strong presence
of movements and organizations of the North Atlantic and white Latin America,
it is no wonder that the most salient cleavages reflect the political culture
and historical trajectory of the left in this part of the world. This means,
on the one hand, that many movements and organizations from Africa, Asia, the
indigenous and black Americas, and the Europe of immigrants do not recognize
themselves in these cleavages; on the other, that alternative cleavages that
these movements and organizations might want to make explicit are perhaps being
concealed or minimized by the prevailing ones. After this caveat, may next
step is to identify the main manifest cleavages.
1. Reform or revolution. The formulation of this cleavage denounces
that it is under the weight of the tradition of the western left. It
is the cleavage between those who think that another world is possible,
by the gradual transformation of the unjust world in which we live,
through legal reform and mechanisms of representative democracy; and
those who think that the world we live in is basically a capitalist
world, that this world will never tolerate reforms that will put it
in question, and that it must therefore be overthrown and replaced
by a socialist world. This is also regarded as a cleavage between moderates
and radicals. Either field comprises a wide variety of positions. For
instance, among revolutionaries, there is a clear cleavage between
the old left, that aspires to a kind of state socialism, the anarchists,
that are radically anti-Statist, and some newer left rather ambivalent
about the role of the State in a socialist society. Although they amount
to a very minor proportion of the WSF, the anarchists are among the
fiercest critics of reformism, which they claim controls the WSF's
leadership.
This cleavage reverberates, albeit not linearly, in strategic options and options
for political action. Among the most salient ones should be counted the strategic
option between reforming the institutions of neoliberal globalization (WTO
and IFIs) or fighting for eliminating and replacing them; and the option for
political action between, on the one hand, constructive dialogue and engagement
with those institutions, and, on the other, confrontation with them.
This cleavage translates itself into opposite positions, either as regards
the diagnosis of contemporary societies, or as regards the evaluation of the
WSF itself. As to the diagnosis, contemporary societies are at times viewed
as societies where there are multiple discriminations and injustices, not all
of them attributable to capitalism. Capitalism, in turn, is not homogeneous,
and the struggle must focus on its most exclusionary form - neoliberalism.
Other times, contemporary societies are viewed as intrinsically unjust and
discriminatory because they are capitalist. Capitalism is an enveloping system
in which class discrimination feeds on sexual, racial and other kinds of discrimination.
Hence, the struggle must focus on capitalism as whole and not against any single
one of its manifestations.
As to the evaluation of the WSF, the WSF is viewed now as the embryo of an
efficatious contestation to neoliberal globalization, for confronting neoliberal
globalization at the global scale where more social injustice has been produced,
now as a movement which, because it is not grounded on the principle of the
class struggle, will accomplish little beyond a few rhetorial changes in dominant
capitalist discourse.
What is new about the WSF as a political entity is that the majority of the
movements and organizations that participate in it do not recognize themselves
in these cleavages and refuse to take part in them. There is great resistance
to assuming rigidly a given position and even greater to labeling it. The majority
of movements and organizations have political experiences in which moments
of confrontation alternate or combine with moments of dialogue and engagement,
in which long range visions of social change cohabit with the tactical possibilities
of the political and social conjuncture in which the struggles take place,
in which radical denunciations of capitalism do not paralyze the energy for
small changes when the big changes are not possible. Above all, for many movements
and organizations, this cleavage is westcentric or northcentric, and is more
useful to understand the past of the left than its future. Indeed, many movements
and organizations do not recognize themselves, for the same reasons, in the
dichotomy left and right.
Precisely because for many movements and organizations the priority is not
to seize power but rather change the power relations in oppression's many faces,
the political tasks, however radical, must be carried out here and now, in
the society in which we live. It makes no sense, therefore, to ask a priori
if their success is incompatible with capitalism. Gramsci's concept of hegemony
is useful to understand the movements' political actions. What is necessary
is to create alternative, counter-hegemonic visions, capable of sustaining
the daily practices and sociabilities of citizens and social groups. The work
of the movements' leaderships is of course important, but in no way is it conceived
of as the work of an enlightened avanguard that breaks the path for the masses,
ever the victims of mystification and false consciousness. On the contrary,
as Subcomandante Marcos recommends, it behooves the leaderships to "walk
with those who go slowlier." It is not a question of either revolution
or reform. It is, for some, a question of rebellion and contruction, for others,
a question of revolution in a nonLeninist sense, a question of civilizational
change occurring over a long period of time.
2. Socialism or social emancipation. This cleavage is related to the
previous one but there is no perfect overlap between the two. Regardless
of the position taken vis-à-vis the previous cleavage, or the
refusal to take position, the movements and organizations diverge as
to the political definition of the other possible world. For some,
socialism is still an adequate designation, however abundant and disparate
the conceptions of socialism may be. For the majority, however, socialism
carries in itself the idea of a closed model of a future society, and
must, therefore, be rejected. They prefer other, less politically charged
designations, suggesting openness and constant search for alternatives.
For example, social emancipation as the aspiration to a society in
which the different power relations are replaced by relations of shared
authority. This is an inclusive designation focussing more on processes
than on final stages of social change. Many movements of the South
think that no general labels need be attached to the goals of the struggles.
Labels run the risk of taking off from the practices that originated
them, acquiring a life of their own, and giving rise to perverse results.
As a matter of fact, according to some, the concept of socialism is
westcentric and northcentric, while the concept of emancipation is
equally prey of the western bias to create false universalisms. Hence
many do not recognize themselves in either term of this dichotomy,
and don't even bother to propose any alternative one. More on this
in the final version.
3. The State as enemy or potential ally. This is also a cleavage in
which movements of the North recognize themselves more easily than
movements of the South. On the one hand, there are those who think
that the State, although in the past it may well have been a battlefield,
for the past 25 years has been transnationalized and turned into an
agent of neoliberal globalization. Either the State has become irrelevant
or is today what it has always been - the expression of capitalism's
general interests. The privileged target of counter-hegemonic struggles
must, therefore, be the State, or at least they must be fought with
total autonomy vis-à-vis the State. On the other hand, there
are those who think that the State is a social relation and, as such,
it is contradictory and an arena of struggle. Neoliberal globalization
did not rob the State of centality, it rather reoriented it better
to serve the interests of global capital. Deregulation is a social
regulation like any other, hence a political field where one must act
if there are conditions for acting.
The majority of the movements, even those that acknowledge the existence of
a cleavage in this regard, refuse to take a rigid and principled position.
Their experiences of struggle show that the State, while sometimes the enemy,
can often be a precious ally in the struggle against transnational impositions.
In these circumstances, the most adequate attitude is, again, pragmatism. If
in some situations confrontation is in order, in others collaboration is rather
advised. In others still a combination of both is appropriate. The important
thing is that, at every moment or in every struggle, the movement or organization
in question be clear and transparent regarding the reasons for the adopted
option, so as to safeguard the autonomy of the action. Autonomy is, in such
cases, always problematical, and so it must be watched carefully. According
to the radical autonomists, collaboration with the State will always end up
compromising the organizations' autonomy. They fear that collaborationists,
whether the State or the insitutions of neoliberal globalization be involved,
end up being coopted. An alliance between the reformist wing of counter-hegemonic
globalization and the reformist wing of hegemonic globalization will ensue
thereby, ending up compromising the goals of the WSF.
4. National or global struggles. This is the most evenly distributed
cleavage in the totality of movements and organizations that comprise
the WSF. On one side, there are the movements that, while participating
in the WSF, believe that the latter is no more than a meeting point
and a cultural event, since the real struggles that are truly important
for the welfare of the populations are fought at the national level
against the State or the dominant national civil society. For instance,
in a report on the WSF prepared by the Movement for National Democracy
in the Philippines, one can read: "The World Social Forum still
floats somewhere above, seeing and trying yet really unable to address
actual conditions of poverty and powerlessness brought about by Imperialist
globalization in many countries. Unless it finds definite ways of translating
or even transcending its "globalness" into more practical
interventions that address these conditions, it just might remain a
huge but empty forum that is more a cultural affair than anything else...
national struggles against globalization are and should provide the
anchor to any anti-globalization initiative at the international level".
In other words, globalization is most effectively fought against at
the national level.
On the other side, there are the movements according to which the State is
now transnationalized and thus is no longer the privileged center of political
decision. This decentering of the State brought about as well the decentering
of the civil society, which is subjected today to many processes of cultural
and social globalization. Furthermore, in some situations, the object of the
struggle (be it a decision of the WTO, the World Bank, or the oil drilling
by an MNC for) is outside the national space and includes a plurality of countries
simultaneously. This is why the scale of the struggle must be increasingly
global, a fact on which the WSF draws its relevance.
Acording to the large majority of the movements, this is again a cleavage that
does not do justice to the concrete needs of concrete struggles. What is new
about contemporary societies is that the scales of sociability are increasing
more interconnected. I mean the local, national, and global scales. In the
most remote village of the Amazon or India the effects of hegemonic globalization
and the ways in which the national State engages with it are clearly felt.
If this is the case with scales of sociability, it is the same with the scales
of counter-hegemonic struggles. It is obvious that each political practice
or social struggle is organized in accordance with a privileged scale, be it
local, national, or global, but whatever the scale may be, all the others must
be involved as condition of success. The decision on which scale to privilege
is a political decision that must be taken in accordance with concrete political
conditions. It is therefore not possible to opt in the abstract for any one
hierarchy among scales of counter-hegemonic practice or struggle.
5. Direct or institutional action. This cleavage is clearly linked
to cleavages 1 and 3. It specifically concerns the modes of struggle
that should be adopted preferably or even exclusively. It is a cleavage
with a long tradition in the western left. Those for whom this cleavage
continues to have a great deal of importance are the same that slight
the newness of neoliberal globalization in the historical process of
capitalist domination.
On the one side, there are the movements that believe that legal struggles,
based on dialogue and engagement with State institutions or international agencies,
are ineffectual because the political and legal system of the State and the
institutions of capitalism are impervious to any legal or institutional measures
capable of really improving the living conditions of the popular classes. Institutional
struggles call for the intermediation of parties, and parties tend to put those
struggles at the service of their party interests and constituencies. The success
of an institutional struggle has, therefore, a very high price, the price of
cooptation, decharacterization, and banalization. But even in the rare case
in which an institutional struggle leads to legal and institutional measures
that correspond to the movements' objectives, it is almost certain that the
concrete application of such measures will end up being subjected to the legal-bureaucratic
logic of the State, thereby frustrating the movements' expectations. In the
end there will be only a hollow hope. This is why only direct action, mass
protest, strikes will yield the success of the struggles. The popular classes
have no weapon but external pressure on the system. If they venture into it,
they are defeated from the start.
On the contrary, the supporters of institutional struggles assume that the "system" is
contradictory, a political and social relation where it is possible to fight
and where failure is not the only possible outcome. In modernity the State
was the center of this system. In the course of the twentieth century the popular
classes conquered important institutional spaces, of which the welfare system
is a good manifestation. The fact that the welfare system is now in crisis
and the "opening" that it offered the popular classes is now being
closed up, does not mean that the process is irreversible. Indeed, it won't
be so if the movements and organizations continue to struggle inside the institutions
and the legal system.
This cleavage is not spread out at random among the movements that comprise
the WSF. The stronger movements and organizations are those that more frequently
privilege institutional struggles, whereas the less strong are those that more
frequently privilege direct action. This cleavage is much more lively among
movements and organizations of the North than of the South. The large majority
of the movements, however, refuse to take sides in this cleavage. According
to them, the concrete legal and political conditions must dictate the kind
of struggle to be privileged. Conditions may actually recommend the sequential
or simultaneous use of the two kinds of struggle. Historically, direct action
was at the genesis of progressive juridico-institutional changes, and it was
always necessary to combat the cooptation or even subversion of such changes.
6. The principle of equality or the principleof respect for difference.
As I have already said, one of the novelties of the WSF is the fact
that the large majority of its movements and organizations believe
that, although we live in revoltingly unequal societies, equality is
not enough as a guiding principle of social emancipation. Social emancipation
must be grounded on two principles - the principle of equality and
the principle of respect for difference. The struggle for either of
them must be articulated with the other, for the fulfillment of either
is condition of the fulfillment of the other. Nonetheless, there is
a cleavage among the movements and even, sometimes, inside the same
movement on whether priority should be given to one of these principles,
and in that case to which one. Among those that say yes to first question,
the cleavage is between those that give priority to the principle of
equality - for equality alone may create real opportunities for the
recognition of difference - and those that give priority to the principle
of the recognition of difference, for without such recognition equality
conceals the exclusions and marginalities on which it lies, thus becoming
doubly oppressive (for what it conceals and for what it shows).
This cleavage occurs among movements and intra-movements. It traverses, among
others, the workers', the feminist, the indigenous, and the black movements.
Whereas the workers' movement has privileged the principle of equality to the
detriment of the principle of the recognition of difference, the feminist movement
has privileged the latter in detriment to the former. But the most shared position
is indeed that both principles have priority together, and that it is not correct
to prioritize either one in the abstract. Concrete political conditions will
dictate to each movement which one of the principles is to be privilege in
a given concrete struggle. Any struggle conceived under the aegis of one of
these two principles must be organized so as to open space for the other principle.
In the feminist movement of the WSF, this position is now dominant. Virgínia
Vargas expresses it well when she says: "At the World Social Forum, feminists
have begun... nourishing processes that integrate gender justice with economic
justice, while recovering cultural subversion and subjectivity as a longer
term strategy for transformation. This confronts two broad expressions of injustice:
socio-economic injustice, rooted in societal political and economic structures,
and cultural and symbolic injustice, rooted in societal patterns of representation,
interpretation and communication. Both injustices affect women, along with
many other racial, ethnic, sexual and geographical dimensions." Agreeing
with Sonia Alvarez, she asks for new feminisms - feminisms of these times -
as a discursive, expansive, heterogeneous panorama, generating polycentric
fields of action that spread over a range of civil society organizations and
are not constrained to women's affairs, although women undoubtedly maintain
them in many ways. And she concludes: "Our presence in the WSF, asking
these very questions, is also an expression of this change."
Many of the tensions and cleavages mentioned above are not specific
of the WSF. They in fact belong to the historical legacy of the social
forces that for the past 150 have struggled against the statu quo for
a better society. The specificity of the WSF resides in the fact that
all these cleavages coexist in its bosom without upsetting its aggregating
power. To my mind, two factors contribute to this. First, the different
cleavages are important in different ways for the different movements
and organizations, and none of them is present in the practices or
discourses of all the movements and organizations. Thus, all of them,
at the same time that they tend towards factionalism, liberate potential
for consensus. That is to say, all the movements and organizations
have room for action and discourse in which to agree with all the other
movements or organizations, whatever the cleavages among them. Second,
there has so far been no tactical or strategic demand that would intensify
the cleavages by radicalizing positions. On the contrary, cleavages
have been fairly low intensity. For the movements and organizations
in general, what unites has been more important than what divides.
In reckoning of union and separation, the advantages of union have
overcome the advantages of separation. Third, even when cleavages are
acknowledged, the different movements and organizations distribute
themselves amongst them in a nonlinear way. If a given movement opposes
another in a given cleavage, it may well be on the same side in another
cleavage. Thus, the different strategic alliances or common actions
featured by each movement tend to have different partners. In this
way are precluded the accumulation and strengthening of divergences
that could result from the alignment of the movements in multiple cleavages.
On the contrary, the cleavages end up neutralizing or disempowering
one another. Herein lies the WSF's aggregating power.
4. The World Social Forum and the Future: From Realistic Utopias to
Alternatives
As I have already suggested, the critical and democratic utopia symbolized
by the WSF manifests itself at the outset as an imbalance between negative
expectations (what is rejected) and positive expectations (what is proposed
as alternative). The success of the first WSF and the increasing counter-hegemonic
globalization up until September 11 convinced the movements and NGOs in charge
of the organization of the WSF that the movement of movements might be entering
a new phase, a politically more consistent one, which would require a higher
level of concretization of alternatives. Once the idea of an alternative globalization
to hegemonic globalization was consolidated, the political strength of the
movement of movements would depend on its capacity to formulate credible proposals
for the political agendas of nations and multilateral organizations alike.
On the other hand, the consolidation of the WSF rendered more striking the
cleavages about strategies and political action that I analyzed in the previous
section. Now, the cleavages reverberating on the kinds of proposals submitted
were in turn an incentive to further discussion on alternatives and proposals.
By the middle of 2001 the WSF's organizing committee was spreading among movements
and organizations, the coordinators of the four major themes (The Production
of Wealth and Social Reproduction; Access to Wealth and Sustainability; Civil
Society and the Public Realm; Political Power and Ethics in the New Society),
as well its guest speakers, the recommendation that interventions and debates
were to focus on formulating concrete proposals. The mot d'ordre was: "we
must advance more proposals." Besides formulating more proposals, some
participants also engaged in the formulation of general objectives or principles
that identified the need for alternatives and justified them ethically. This
is the case of Vandana Shiva, for example, who, following earlier positions,
presents the potential for the global justice movement itself-specifically
in the form of what she terms, "the living democracy movement"-as
an alternative to globalization in and of itself. She argues, "Living
democracy is about life, at the vital everyday level, and decisions and freedoms
related to everyday living-the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the water
we drink. It is not just about elections and casting votes once every 3 or
4 or 5 years. It is a permanently vibrant democracy" (Shiva, p. 4). In
sum, by keeping the commitment to democracy alive, we will both create and
sustain an alternative world.
Theses were also formulated that had a higher level of concretization, but
which lacked the format as well as the substantive and procedural concreteness
that might push them on to a political agenda. I myself presented 15 theses
for deepening democracy, and François Houtart presented a series of
strategic recommendations toward the coherence among the different proposals,
as a way to prevent the WSF from becoming a supermarket of alternatives. According
to him, "There is need for both a coherence in the proposals and a broad
view of the alternatives (Houtart; p. 1). As a guide, he proposes thinking
of alternatives on three levels: 1) in terms of "rebuilding the utopias," not
in the sense of impossible things but rather as specific goals that serve to
mobilize people; 2) defining medium-term alternatives, or those goals that
will take time to achieve because they involve lengthy struggles or are up
against capitalist resistance; 3) defining short-term alternatives, or those
goals that are feasible in the foreseeable future and can serve as mobilizers.
In addition, Houtart emphasizes the importance of strategizing in the "struggle
against the globalization of capital" and considers the conceptualization
of strategy as key to any conceptualization of alternatives. He lists the main
elements of strategy as follows: 1) delegitimization of the "logic" of
the capitalist system; 2) building convergence among efforts and networks to
work against the system; 3) formulation of alternatives at the three levels
mentioned above: utopias, medium-term and short-term; 4) finding formulas for
political expression; 5) not to be marginalized as a movement, ie, not to be
rendered "folkloric", "violent" or "rare." He
also stresses three criteria as important for selecting themes and actions
in which the movement should concentrate their efforts: 1) the need to keep
in mind the popular contemporary sensitivity of certain themes, 2) the importance
of linking up "events of the moment"; 3) the need to address themes
on which considerable preparation has already been done by specific groups
- which can lead to concrete alternatives.
Hundreds of proposals in this more restricted sense were nonetheless submitted.
The great majority of these proposals were presented and discussed in the workshops
put together at the initiative of the movements and organizations present.
By way of example, I mention some the proposals focussing on economic amd institutional
changes:
1. Proposal by the Focus on the Global South for a "Pluralistic System
of Global Economic Governance." This proposal states the aim "not
to reform the TNC-driven WTO and Bretton Woods institutions, but, through a
combination of passive and active measures, either a) to decommission them;
b) neuter them (e.g. converting the IMF into a pure research institution monitoring
exchange rates of capital flows); or c) radically reduce their powers and turn
them into just another set of actors coexisting with and being checked by other
international organizations, agreements, and regional groupings." (Bello
quoted in Kerrr; p. 2). This strategy would include strengthening institutions
like UNCTAD, the ILO and economic blocks (Mercosur, SADCC, ASEAN, etc.); and
the formation of new international and regional institutions dedicated to "devolving
the greater part of production, trade, and economic decision-making to the
national and local level" with multiple checks and balances, and "based
on their values, their rhythms, and the strategies of their choice." (Kerr;
p. 2)
2. Proposal by the ATTAC (Association For The Taxation Of Financial Transactions
For The Aid Of Citizens) for the Control of Financial Capital. It includes
aims to restore and promote controls over capital flows to nation-states, through
national-level policy measures and international fiscal measures; levy tax
on international financial transactions (Tobin Tax), which would have a low
average rate and its annualized cost inversely proportional to the duration
of the transactions - to discourage speculation; levy a variable tax on FDI
(foreign direct investment); levy tax on the profits of transnational corporations;
reinforce specific controls on all financial markets; elimination of tax havens,
by the lifting of banking confidentiality, intervening in states that harbour
tax havens, publishing data on tax havens, respecting anti-money laundering
laws, etc; reinforcement of controls on banks; prudential rules for international
investors; make private actors who are responsible for the crises pay; and
reform the international financial institutions (IMF and World Bank).
3. Proposal by the CorpWatch's for the Conference on Transnational Corporations
(facilitated by Joshua Karliner). It states that: "The current corporate-globalization
paradigm, which prioritizes corporate profit maximization over human rights,
labor rights and environmental rights, should be turned on its head to prioritize
these universal life values." It then proceeds with detailed proposals
to realize this objective, including the separation of corporations and the
state which "should also extend from local and national governance, to
global governance institutions such as the WTO, World Bank, IMF, UN, etc.";
campaigns against specific corporations and their activities; campaigns to
seek to ally with alternative, smaller scale, local, more accountable businesses
that are providing similar goods or services; campaigns for, and indices to,
measure corporate responsibility; binding rules on transnational corporate
behavior to be established through a Framework Convention on Corporate Accountability;
and strengthening collaboration between social movements in the South and the
in North, fighting for corporate accountability and democratic control over
corporations.."
4. Proposal by the Committee for Cancellation of the Third World Debt as an
alternative to Neo-liberal Type Adjustment Programs in Southern Countries.
This alternative to the present development strategy would entail three phases:
1) ending of structural adjustment policies; 2) adoption of partly self-based
development models; such models would entail constructing sufficiently solid
internal economic foundations to allow the country to open up to international
trading. This type of development involves creating politically and economically
integrated zones, bringing to bear endogenous development models, strengthening
internal markets, creating local savings funds for local financing, developing
education and health, setting up progressive taxation and other mechanisms
to ensure the redistribution of wealth, diversifying exports, introducing agrarian
reform to guarantee universal access to land for small farmers and urban reform
to guarantee universal access to housing, etc; 3) acting upon trading practice.
This would entail six elements: a) mechanisms guaranteeing a better price for
the basket of products exported on the world market by Developing Countries
would be introduced. These might include stabilizing the prices of raw materials,
building up regulatory stocks - which means doing away with zero stocks, etc.;
b) Developing Countries would be encouraged to establish cartels of producer
countries; c) the right of each country (or group of countries) to nutritional
autonomy and self-sufficiency in staples would be guaranteed - implying protection
measures for imports, in total opposition to the minimal agricultural export
quota of 5% imposed by the WTO on member countries; d) rules of global trading
to become subordinate to strict environmental, social and cultural criteria
would be enforced.; e) Public services in the general interest would be excluded
from the General Agreement on Trade and Services (GATS); f) the Trade-Related
Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) agreement would be abolished.
5. Proposal by IRAM (Institute for Research and Application of Methods of Development)
for agrarian reform and land policy (presented by Michel Merlet). It presents
a synthesis of proposals for agrarian reform and land policies as being developed
(for the purpose of producing a practice-oriented workbook) in several stages
on the basis of discussions with researchers, development specialists and representatives
of small farmers organizations in various world regions.
Merlet proposes that first the discussion of land rights be reframed from one
of those who "own" the land to one of those who "use" the
land, or rather the differentiation between a legal recognition and a social
definition of land rights. From that base he proposes several measures for
addressing land rights as a public policy priority in countries with highly
unequal land distribution. First, he calls for a system of agrarian reform
accompanied by a systematic method for improving agrarian reform policies and
putting them into action. This agrarian reform should include a revision of
the relationship between collective and individual property and the development
of social land management mechanisms as well as greater security of the rights
of individual producers. In addition, it should concentrate on developing local
capacity for land management whereby peasant/small farmers organizations learn
to increasingly coordinate with models of regulation and markets as well as
with groups of producers operating on non-reformed land. Finally this process
should include the coordination of agrarian reform with agricultural policy,
tariff protection on key products, mechanization and modernization policies
in promote product quality but compensate for regions disadvantaged in terms
of natural resources, etc.
In countries where intensity of access to land is not as severe, he calls for
the development of a management policy for agrarian structures "which
facilitates the modernization of the units of production and guarantees their
social function"; and for the implementation of social "structural" policies
directed towards the organization of agrarian structures (including policies
that regulate the land market) that fulfill the needs of society as a whole.
In addition he emphasizes the need to construct land management bodies which
take into account the "multiple rights of different actors" with
regard to land and natural resources, as well as the decentralization of a
large part of management and administrative systems and the concurrent coordination
of national systems with local ones. Finally, he calls 1) for creating networks
between peasant organizations, researchers and experts; 2) promoting educational
and training programs for all producers and those who deal in the strategic
importance of land; 3) carrying out of a lobbying campaign to influence international
organizations and bilateral coordination on land issues; 4) developping linkages
between rural and urban interests; and 5) promoting the inclusion of the theme
of land use and distribution in broader discussion agendas of world poverty
and global justice.
Using as an example the Thematic Area II, "Access to Wealth and Sustainability",
many proposals were presented concerning water, food sovereignty, knowledges
and patents, and health. I mention here the proposal on water.
Proposals to fight against the commodification and privatization of
water and for the right to water
Globalize the struggle against the economic system which promotes the destruction
and degradation of water and inequality in its distribution, forming a broad
civil society coalition including local communities, indigenous people, national
and international organizations in the fight for water, in order to:
1. Oppose neo-liberal policies of the international financial institutions,
the WTO, and regional free trade agreements such as the Free Trade Zone of
the Americas, and the commodification and privatization of water.
2. Oppose unsustainable development projects, such as large dams, industrial
waterways, large-scale mining, large-scale agribusiness and others, which destroy
and degrade water sources.
Propose and promote sustainable water management alternatives:
1. Establish a world water parliament, which will implement a global water
contract;
2. Establish an International Convention at the United Nations, on water as
a fundamental human right
3. Organize protests throughout the world during the week 14 March, 2002 (international
day of struggle vs. dams) to 22 March (world water day), promoting the fight
for water, in opposition to privatization of water, and for the universal right
to water, with the slogan "water for life, not for death".
4. Establish an international treaty on water as a common good, between nation
states and indigenous peoples
5. Form an alliance of social movements on water, to submit to the Sustainable
Development Summit in Johannesburg a proposal for a global water agreement.
6. Ensure adequate supplies of clean water for all individual, community and
national water needs (domestic, food production, energy, recreation, maintaining
environmental quality).
7. Support and promote global solidarity with those peoples who suffer the
consequences of desertification and drought.
8. Support the struggle of local communities and national movements for the
control of their water sources and distribution systems (ex: Coordinadora de
Cochabamba) in resistance to the privatization process and for the re-establishment
of sustainable community-management water management systems.
9. Denounce the systematic persecution of leaders of the Coordinadora del Agua
de Cochabamba, including Oscar Olivera, by the Bolivian government.
Sustainable Water Management:
1. Managing water from its sources, through sustainable management of territories
and through the effective participation of civil society, in particular indigenous
communities, in decision-making processes.
2. Requiring companies that destroy water sources to repair the social and
environmental damages they have caused and to restore the quality of these
water sources.
3. Prohibiting the use of chemical products that destroy water quality
4. Promoting campaigns against the conversion of rivers into industrial waterways.
5. Using experiences gained during climatic disasters, such as el Niño,
to promote campaigns for sustainable water management and in resistance to
the economic system.
6. Implementing alternative biological systems for sewage management
7. Promoting rainwater harvesting methods for domestic and agricultural use.
The Fight Against Dams
1. To establish a moratorium on new dams until all the economic, social, cultural
and environmental impacts they have caused are resolved.
2. To pressure national governments, export credit agencies, and international
financial institutions to adopt the recommendations of the World Commission
on Dams.
3. To promote a new energy model, based upon efficiency, conservation, and
use of alternative energy sources such as wind, solar, and biomass.
4. To support and express solidarity with the populations fighting Sardar Sarovar
dam on the Narmada river in India by signing a petition aimed at the Indian
Prime Minister, who will be making a final decision on the project.
Besides proposals of global scope, others of regional scope have been also
presented. One of the more consensual ones among Latin American social movements
is to sumit ALCA (Free Trade one of the Americas) to a referendum in each one
of the Latin American countries. The great majority of the proposals have their
origin in the articulations among mvements concerned with the same thematic
area.
Contrary to the what the corporate media reports, the WSF has been "a
machine of proposals." The design, complexity, and technical detail of
many of them is of higher quality than many of those presented by the institutions
of neoliberal globalization. The challenge ahead is to press these proposals
on to the political agendas of the different states and the international community
is. It is a long-range challenge because, for these proposals to become part
of the political agendas, the national and transnational political institutions
must be changed. And, as I mentioned in the previous section many such institutional
changes will occur only on the basis of institutional struggles. They will
require rebellion, nonviolent but often illegal direct action.
5. The future of the WSF: Self-democracy and the Theory of
Translation
In the WSF the new and the old face each other. As utopia and epistemology,
the WSF is something new. As a political phenomenon, its novelty coexists with
the traditions of thought on the left or, more generally, counter-hegemonic
thought, both in its western and southern and eastern versions. The newness
of the WSF is consensually attributed to its absence of leaders and hierarchical
organization, its emphasis on cyberspace networks, its ideal of participatory
democracy, and its flexibility and readiness to engage in experimentation.
The WSF is unquestionably the first large international progressive movement
after the neoliberal backlash at the beginning of the 1980s. Its future is
the future of hope in an alternative to la pensée unique Isingle thinking).This
future is completely unknown, and can only be speculated about. It depends
both on the movements and organizations that comprise the WSF and the metamorphoses
of neoliberal globalization. For instance, the fact that the latter has been
acquiring a bellicose component fixated on security will no doubt affect the
evolution of the WSF. In light of this, the future of the WSF depends in part
on the evaluation of its trajectory up till now and the conclusions drawn from
it, with a view to enlarge and deepen its counter-hegemonic efficaciousness.
The evaluation of the WSF is one of the exercises that best discloses the confrontation
between the new and the old. From the point of view of the old, the WSF cannot
but be assessed negatively. It appears as a vast "talk-show" that
hovers over the concrete problems of exclusion and discrimination without tackling
them; a cultural movement without deep social roots, therefore tolerated and
easily coopted by the dominant classes; it has no definite agents or agency,
because, after all, it doesn't have any definite enemies either; its inclusiveness
is the other side of its inefficaciousness; its efficaciousness, besides having
an effect on the rhetoric of hegemonic discourse, has been minimal, since it
has achieved no changes as far as concrete policies go, nor contributed to
ameliorate the ills of exclusion and discrimination.
In this evaluation, the WSF is assessed according to criteria that prevailed
in progressive struggles up until the 1980s. Such criteria do not concern strategies
and tactics alone; they also concern the time frames and geopolitical units
that are the reference of their applicability. The time frame is linear time,
a time that it gives meaning and direction to history; the temporality or duration
is that of the State's action, even if the action aims to reform or revolutionize
the State. The geopolitical unit is the national society, the boundary within
which the most decisive progressive struggles of the last 150 years have occurred.
Let's speak in this case of positivist epistemology.
It seems obvious that the positivist epistemology underlying this evaluation
is completely different from the one I ascribed to the WSF above. In order
to be minimally adequate, the evaluation of the WSF must be carried out according
to the epistemology of the WSF itself. Otherwise, the assessment will be always
negative. In other words, the evaluation must be carried out on the basis of
the sociology of absences and sociology of emergences. In this case, the geopolitical
unit is trans-scale: it combines the local, the national, and the global. Its
time is not linear. From the standpoint of linear time, many of the counter-hegemonic
experiences will always be absent or impossible. The temporalities of these
experiences are indeed multiple, from the instant time of mass protests to
the glacial time of utopia.
In this light, the evaluation of the WSF is cannot but be positive. By affirming
and rendering credible the existence of a counter-hegemonic globalization,
the WSF has contributed significantly towards enlarging social experience.
It has turned absents struggles and practices into present struggles and practices,
and shown which alternative futures, declared impossible by hegemonic globalization,
were after all giving signs of their emergence. By enlarging the available
and possible social experience, the WSF created a global consciousness for
the different movements and NGOs, regardless of the scope of their action.
Such a global consciousness was crucial to create a certain symmetry of scale
between hegemonic globalization and the movements and NGOs that fought against
it. Before the WSF, the movements and NGOs fought against hegemonic globalization
without being aware of their own globality.
The decisive importance of this consciousness explains why the WSF, once aware
of it, does everything to preserve it. It explains, ultimately, why the factors
of attraction and aggregation prevails over those of repulsion and disaggregation.
This consciousness of globality was decisive to make credible among the movements
and the NGOs themselves the trans-scale nature of the geopolitical unit wherein
they acted. By encompassing all those movements and NGOs, however, the WSF
incorporated that same trans-scale nature, and that is why its efficaciousness
cannot be assessed exclusively in terms of global changes. It has to be assessed
as well in terms of local and national changes. Given all the levels involved,
the evaluation of the WSF's efficaciousness is undoubtedly more complex, but
for that same reason it does not allow for rash assessments derived from positivist
epistemology.
The WSF is today a more realistic utopia than when it first appeared. Increased
realism, however, poses considerable challenges to utopia itself. The challenges
consist in deepening its political existence without losing its utopian and
epistemological integrity. I identify two main challenges, one short-range,
the other long-range.
Self-democracy
The first, short-range challenge I designate as self-democracy. The WSF's utopia
concerns emancipatory democracy. In its broadest sense, emancipatory democracy
is the whole process of changing power relations into relations of shared
authority. Since the power relations against which the WSF resists are multiple,
the processes of radical democratization in which the WSF is involved are
likewise multiple. In brief, the WSF is a large collective process for deepening
democracy. Since this is the WSF's utopian distinction, it is no wonder that
the issue of internal democracy has become more and more pressing. In fact,
the WSF's credibility in its struggle for democracy in society depends on
the credibility of its internal democracy.
The WSF's initial phase corresponds, as I said, to the three main forums held
in Porto Alegre, together with all the others - local, national, regional,
and thematic - also held under the aegis of the WSF. It was a phase of beginnings
and consolidation. The organizing structure, in the case of the WSF, was based
on the IC and OC. In the case of the others, it depended on ad hoc committees
constituted through "contact groups" connected with movements and
NGOs that in general had taken part in one of the editions of the WSF. For
this phase, the organizing structures were, to my mind, the most appropriate.
Admittedly, the criteria of representation and participation could have been
better tuned up to the diversity of the movements and NGO's. But it should
be stressed that the successive editions of the WSF tried to respond to the
criticisms advanced. If the response was not always satisfactory, I believe
the reason has more to do with administrative incapacity than politically motivated
intentionality.
The challenge consists in changing the organizing structure according to the
demands of the new phase, with a view to deepening the internal democracy of
such a structure. Two paths to reach this goal may be identified. One of them
consists in transferring the WSF's core from the global event to the national,
regional, and thematic forums. The point here is that at this more circumscribed
levels the issues of representation and participatory democracy are easier
to solve. The WSF, as a global event, will continue to affirm the globality
of counter-hegemonic globalization, but it will lose some of its centrality.
The OC will continue to have a decisive role, but a role that will tend to
be increasingly more executive, while the IC will continue to be charged with
defining the broad thematic options and the organizing structure. The democratizing
effort must therefore focus on the IC, urging it to go on reflecting on the
multiple diversities that congregate in the WSF. This path, which seems to
be close to what some members of the IC have been proposing, assumes its continuity
with the previous phase. The aim is not to take decisions that might put at
stake the extraordinary successes achieved so far.
This path does not claim to solve the issue of participatory democracy. That
is to say, however representative and democratic the leading and organizing
structures of the forums may be, the issue of the participation of the rank-and-file
will be always there, whether participation concerns the debates or decisions
taken in a given forum about the next forums. As I have suggested above, the
information and communication technologies offer today new possibilities to
resort to voting and carrying out referendums during the forums. If it is true
in general that cyberdemocracy has an individualistic bias in its reducing
the citizen's political capacity to handling the terminal, it is no less true
that such a bias is neutralized by the meetings of the forum, where intercommunication
- the exchange of experiences and points of view - is so intense, precisely
among the rank-and-file.
The second, far more structured path aims to increase the WSF's internal democracy
constructing it from bottom up. On the basis of the smaller forums or forums
of narrower scope, such as local or city forums, representative structures
are created at the different levels in such a way that the structures at the
higher ranks are elected by the immediately lower ranks. The result envisaged
is a pyramidal organization having at the tip the WSF turned into a forum of
delegates. The most recent and complete version of this path is the one proposed
by Michael Albert, of Znet. According to the proposal's author himself, it
has some thoughts that "may have some merit", "but whether they
do or not," he adds, "certainly changes must be made". Here
are the main points of Albert's proposal:
1. Emphasize local forums as the foundation of the worldwide forum
process;
2. Have each new level of forums, from towns, to cities, to countries, to continents,
to the world, be built largely on those below;
3. Have the decision-making leadership of the most local events locally determined;
4. Have the decision-making leadership at each higher level chosen, at least
in considerable part, by the local forums that are within the higher entity.
Italy's national forum leadership is chosen by the smaller local forums in
Italy. The European forums' leadership is chosen by the national forums within
Europe, and similarly elsewhere.
5. Mandate that the decision-making leadership at every level should be at
least 50% women;
6. Have the forums from wealthier parts of the world charge delegates and organizations
and attendees a tax on their fees to apply to helping finance the forums in
poorer parts of the world and subsidize delegate attendance at the world forum
from poorer locales, as well.
7. Have the WSF attendance be 5,000-10,000 people delegated to it from the
major regional forums around the world. Have the WSF leadership be selected
by regional forums. Mandate the WSF to share and compare and propose based
on all that is emerging worldwide - not to listen again to the same famous
speakers who everyone hears worldwide all the time anyhow - and have the WSF's
results, like those of all other forums, published and public, and of course
reported by delegates back to the regions;
8. Ensure that the WSF as a whole and the forums worldwide not make the mistake
of trying to become an international, a movement of movements, or even just
a voice of the world's movements. To be a forum, the WSF and the smaller component
forums need to be as broad and diverse as possible. But, being that broad and
that diverse, is simply being too broad and too diverse to be an organization.
9. Mandate that the forums at every level, including the WSF, welcome people
from diverse constituencies using the forums and their processes to make contacts
and to develop ties that can in turn yield national, regional, or even international
networks or movements of movements which do share sufficiently their political
aspirations to work closely together, but which exist alongside rather than
instead of the forum phenomenon.
The above proposal, besides recommending the pyramidal construction
of the WSF's democracy, includes measures that aim to correct structural
defficiencies of representation, derived for example, from sexual and
North/South inequality and difference. This proposal poses a radical
break with the organizational model adopted up until now. Although
there is a widespread feeling that the present model is exhausted,
one suspects that such a radical break may stir up the fear that one
might be throwing away the baby with the bath water. It is, however,
as Michael Albert himself asserts, a proposal to be discussed. Needless
to say, any proposal, specially one so radical, must be debated and
ultimately voted. But by whom? By the current IC, certainly not representative
of the whole WSF let alone democratically elected by its members? By
the participants of the forums? Which forums? These questions show
that there is no machinery of democratic engineering capable of solving
the problem of internal democracy at a single blow. To my mind, such
a problem will end up being taken care of through successive partial
solutions. Its cummulative effect will be the result of a learning
process which, on each democratization landing, consolidates its force
and gathers energy to venture on to an upper landing.
The theory of translation
The second challenge is long-range. The challenge of internal democracy concerns
the processes of decision making, rather than the content of the decisions,
let alone the practices of struggle that may evolve thereof. In the long
run, the evaluation of the WSF will depend on its capacity to transform the
immense energy that is congregated in itself into new forms of counter-hegemonic
agency - more efficacious forms because combining the strength of different
social movements and NGOs.
The political theory of modernity, whether in its liberal or Marxist version,
constructed the unity of action from the agent's unity. According to it, the
coherence and meaning of social change was always based on the capacity of
the privileged agent of change, be it the bourgeoisie or the working classes,
to represent the totality from which the coherence and meaning derived. From
such capacity of representation derived both the need and operationality of
a general theory of social change.
The utopia and epistemology underlying the WSF place it in the antipodes of
such a theory. The extraordinary energy of attraction and aggregation revealed
by the WSF resides precisely in refusing the idea of a general theory. The
diversity that finds a haven in it is free from the fear of being cannibalized
by false universalisms or false single strategies propounded by any general
theory. The WSF underwrites Ernst Bloch's idea that the world is an inexhaustible
totality, as it holds many totalities, all of them partial. According to this
conception of the world, there is no sense in attempting to grasp the world
by any single grand theory, because any such general theory always presupposes
the monoculture of a given totality and the homogeneity of its parts. The time
we live in, whose recent past was dominated by the idea of a general theory,
is perhaps a time of transition that may be defined in the following way: we
have no need of a general theory, but still need a general theory on the impossibility
of a general theory. We need, at any rate, a negative universalism that may
give rise to the ecologies made possible by the sociology of absences.
I cannot pursue this point here. I shall concentrate rather on what derives
from it: What is the alternative to the general theory? To my mind, the alternative
to a general theory is the work of translation. Translation is the procedure
that allows for mutual intelligibility among the experiences of the world,
both available and possible, as revealed by the sociology of absences and the
sociology of emergences.
The WSF is witness to the wide multiplicity and variety of social practices
of counter-hegemony that occur all over the world. Its strength derives from
having corresponded or given expression to the aspiration of aggregation and
articulation of the different social movements and NGOs, an aspiration that
had been only latent up until then. The movements and the NGOs constitute themselves
around a number of more or less confined goals, create their own forms and
styles of resistance, and specialize in certain kinds of practice and discourse
that distinguish them form the others. Thus is constituted the identity that
separates each movement from all the others. The feminist movement distinguishes
itself from the labor movement, both distinguish themselves from the indigenous
movement or the ecological movement, and so on and so forth. All these distinctions
have actually translated themselves into very practical differences, if not
even into contradictions that contribute to bringing the movements apart and
create rivalries and factionalisms. Hence derives the fragmentation and atomization
that are the dark side of diversity and multiplicity.
This dark side has lately been acknowledged by the movements and NGOs. The
truth is, however, that none of them individually has had the capacity or credibility
to confront it, for, in attempting it, it runs the risk of falling prey to
the situation it wishes to remedy. Hence the extraordinary step taken by the
WSF. It must be admitted, however, that the aggregation and articulation made
possible by the WSF is low intensity. The goals are limited and circumscribe
themselves to recognizing differences and wishing for exchange in order to
make the differences more explicit and better known. Under these circumstances,
joint action cannot but be limited. A good example was the European Social
Forum. The differences, rivalries, and factionalisms that divide the various
movements and NGOs that organized it are well known and have a history that
is impossible to erase. This is why, in their positive response to the WSF's
request to organize the ESF, the movements and NGOs that took up the task felt
the need to assert that the differences among them were as sharp as ever and
that they were coming together only with a very limited objective in mind:
to organize the Forum and a Peace March. The Forum was indeed organized in
such a way that the differences could be made very explicit.
The challenge that counter-hegemonic globalization faces now may be formulated
in the following way. The aggregation and articulation made possible by the
WSF were enough to achieve the goals of the phase that has now reached its
end. However, deepening the WSF's goals requires forms of aggregation and articulation
of higher intensity. Such a process includes articulating struggles and resistances,
as well as promoting ever more comprehensive and consistent alternatives. Such
articulations presuppose combinations among the different social movements
and NGOs that are bound to question their very identity and autonomy as they
have been conceived of so far. If the idea is to promote counter-hegemonic
practices and knowledges that have the collaboration of ecological, pacifist,
indigenous, feminist, workers' and other movements, and if the idea it to go
about this horizontally and with respect for the identity of every movement,
an enormous effort of mutual recognition, dialogue, and debate will be required
to carry out the task.
This is the only way to identify more rigorously what divides and unites the
movements, so as to base the articulations of practices and knowledges on what
unites them, rather than on what divides them. Such a task entails a wide exercise
in translation to enlarge reciprocal intelligibility without destroying the
identity of what is translated. The point is to create, in every movement or
NGO, in every practice or strategy, in every discourse or knowledge, a contact
zone that may render it porous and hence permeable to other NGOs, practices,
strategies, discourses, and knowledges. The exercise of translation aims to
identify and potentiate what is common in the diversity of counter-hegemonic
drive. Canceling out what separates is out of the question. The goal is to
have host-difference replace fortress-difference. Through translation work,
diversity is celebrated, not as a factor of fragmentation and isolationism,
but rather as a factor of sharing and solidarity.
To describe fully the procedures of the translation work is beyond the limits
of this paper. Elsewhere I have proposed translations between the concept of
human rights and the Hindu and Islamic concepts of human dignity; between western
strategies of development and Ghandi's swadeshi; between western philosophy
and African oral sagesse; between "modern" democracy and traditional
authorities; between the indigenous movement and the ecological movement; between
the workers' movement and the feminist movement. To be successful, the work
of translation depends on demanding conditions. Nonetheless, the effort must
be taken up. On it depends the future of counter-hegemonic globalization.
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© 2003 Boaventura de Sousa Santos
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