World Social Forum

Discussion

The WSF as Critical Utopia

Boaventura de Sousa Santos:

“Utopias have their timetable”, says Ernst Bloch.

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. Does the WSF have a utopian dimension ? And, if so, what is its timetable ?

The WSF is a set of initiatives — of transnational exchange among social movements, NGOs and their practices and knowledge of local, national or global social struggles against the forms of exclusion and inclusion, discrimination and equality, universalism and particularism, cultural imposition and relativism, that have been brought about or made possible by the current phase of capitalism known as neoliberal globalisation. The utopian dimension of the WSF consists in claiming the existence of alternatives to neoliberal globalisation.

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”.2 The possibility of alternatives is discredited precisely for being utopian, idealistic, and unrealistic. Under neoliberalism, the criterion is the market. The total market becomes a perfect institution. Its utopian character resides in the promise that its total application cancels out all utopias. What distinguishes conservative utopias such as the market from critical utopias is the fact that they identify themselves with present-day reality and discover their utopian dimension in the radicalisation or complete fulfilment of the present. Moreover, if there is unemployment and social exclusion, if there is starvation and death in the periphery of the world 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 re-emergence of critical utopia, that is, of a radical critique of presentday reality and the aspiration to a better society. This occurs, however, when the anti-utopian utopia of neoliberalism is dominant. The utopian dimension of the WSF consists in affirming the possibility of a counter-hegemonic globalisation; it is a radically democratic utopia. In this sense, 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. For the WSF, the claim of alternatives is plural, both as to the form of the claim and the content of the alternatives. The other possible world is a utopian aspiration that comprises several possible worlds. It may be many things, but never a world with no alternative. Yet the question remains : once the counter-hegemonic globalisation is consolidated, and hence the idea that another world is possible is made credible, will it be possible to fulfil this idea with the same level of radical democracy that helped formulate it ?"

The World Social Forum as Epistemology of the South

Boaventura de Sousa Santos:

"Neoliberal globalisation is presided over by technico-scientific knowledge, and owes its hegemony to the credible way in which it discredits all rival knowledge, by suggesting that they are not comparable, as to efficiency and coherence, to the scientific nature of market laws. This is why the practices circulating in the WSF have their origin in very distinct epistemological assumptions (what counts as knowledge) and ontological universes (what it means to be human). 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 hierarchising 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 also reveals, in this context, that the knowledge we have of globalisation is much less global than globalisation itself.

To be sure, many counter-hegemonic practices resort to the hegemonic scientific and technological knowledge paradigm, 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 is such knowledge 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 : on the basis of which knowledge or epistemology are these problems to be formulated ?

Science is doubly at the service of hegemonic globalisation, whether by the way in which it promotes and legitimates it, or by which it discredits, conceals or trivialises counter-hegemonic globalisation. Hegemony presupposes a constant policing and repressing of counter-hegemonic practices and agents. This goes largely hand in hand with discrediting, concealing and trivialising 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. Confronted with this situation, 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 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 knowledge, practical, often tacit knowledges that must be made credible to render such practices credible in turn.

The 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 of showing that the concepts of rationality and efficiency presiding over hegemonic technico-scientific knowledge are too restrictive. They cannot 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. The concealment and discrediting of these practices constitute a waste of social experience, both social experience that is 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 speak of sociologies because my aim is to critically identify the conditions that destroy non-hegemonic and potentially counter-hegemonic social experience. Through these sociologies, 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."

Source

• Article: The WSF : Challenging Empires.