[DEBATE] : Rise of Global Left - Boa Santos

[Peter Waterman]

BoaCh9RiseOfLeft – For Web - 240806





Note: This paper is part of a work in progress, made available as a
contribution to current global web discussion on the World Social Forum.
Those wishing to quote or cite it should refer to the Zed book (See Box
following) and to the status of this text as an uncorrected draft. The
author can be reached at: bsantos at fe.uc.pt. [Peter Waterman. Lima, August
24, 2006.]



………………………………………………………………………….



Box:



Book Synopsis on Amazon UK



The Rise of the Global Left:

The World Social Forum and Beyond




Leading sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos makes an impassioned case for

 the politicisation of the World Social Forum, arguing that its full
potential as a force for social, economic and political change can be
achieved only by taking a stand against neo-liberal globalization, war,
famine and corruption.



However, since its inception in Porto Alegre in 2001, the World Social Forum
has refused to adopt political positions on world events, preferring instead
to provide a platform that facilitates cooperation between diverse social
movements.



Through a detailed analysis of the WSF's history and organization, he
demonstrates that it has always been an inherently political organization,
and argues that if the WSF is able to realise its potential as an
institution for a new form of politics, it will become a global power to be
reckoned with in the 21st century.



Boaventura de Sousa Santos



London: Zed Press, Due October 1, 2006. c. GBP 17.



More information:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1842778013/202-1631865-9945466?v=glance&n
=266239&s=books&v=glance



……………………………………………………………………………





Draft Chapter 9:



The Left After the World Social Forum



The large majority of movements and organizations that have dynamized the
WSF consider themselves to be on the left, even though, as I said at the
beginning, they very much disagree on what it means to be on the left these
days. As I have indicated throughout this essay, these disagreements are
reflected in the debates carried out at the Forum, whether concerning
organizational issues or issues of political theory and action. In this
chapter, I engage in an inverse kind of inquiry: the Forum’s impact on left
thinking and practice. Given the short period of the Forum’s maturation,
this inquiry cannot but be somewhat speculative. It is, nonetheless,
possible to identify some of the left problems highlighted by the WSF, as
well as some of the solutions made possible or more credible in the light of
its experience. By its very nature, the WSF does not have an official line
on its own impact on the left’s future, and I suspect that many of the
movements and organizations involved in it are not concerned about it. What
I present next is a personal reflection drawn from my own experience of the
WSF.



9.1 The Phantasmatic Relation between Theory and Practice



The WSF has shown that the gap between left practices and classical theories
of the left is broader today than ever. Of course, the WSF is not alone in
this, as witness the political experiences in the region where the WSF
emerged, Latin America. From the EZLN in Chiapas to Lula’s election in
Brazil, from the Argentinean piqueteros to the MST, from the indigenous
movement in Bolivia and Ecuador to Uruguay’s Frente Amplia, and to the
successive victories of Hugo Chavez, as well as, more recently, the election
of Evo Morales, from the continental struggle against ALCA[1] to the
alternative project of regional integration led by Hugo Chavez, we are faced
with political practices that are in general recognized as left, but which
were not foreseen by the major left theoretical traditions, or even
contradict them. As an international event and meeting point of so many
resistance practices and projects of alternative society, the WSF has given
a new dimension to this mutual blindness — of the practice vis-à-vis the
theory and of the theory vis-à-vis the practice — and created the conditions
for an ampler and deeper reflection on this problem. This is what I propose
to engage in here.



The blindness of the theory results in the invisibility of the practice,
hence its subtheorization, whereas the blindness of the practice results in
the irrelevance of the theory. The blindness of the theory can be seen in
the way the conventional left parties and the intellectuals at their service
have stubbornly not paid any attention to the WSF, or have minimized its
meaning. The blindness of the practice, in turn, is glaringly present in the
contempt shown by the great majority of the activists of the WSF for the
rich left theoretical tradition, and their militant disregard for its
renewal. This mutual misencounter yields, on the practice side, an extreme
oscillation between revolutionary spontaneism and innocuous, self-censured
possibilism, and, on the theory side, an equally extreme oscillation between
the post-factum reconstructive zeal and arrogant indifference to what is not
included in such reconstruction.



In such conditions, the relation between theory and practice assumes strange
characteristics. On the one hand, the theory is no longer at the service of
the future practices it potentially contains, and rather serves to
legitimate (or not) the past practices that have emerged in spite of itself.
Thus, avant-garde thought tends to tag along the rear-guard of practice. It
stops being orientation to become ratification of the successes obtained by
default or confirmation of pre-announced failures. On the other hand, the
practice justifies itself resorting to a theoretical bricolage stuck to the
needs of the moment, made up of heterogeneous concepts and languages which,
from the point of view of the theory, are no more than opportunistic
rationalizations or rhetorical exercises. From the point of view of the
theory, theoretical bricolage never qualifies as theory. From the point of
view of the practice, a posteriori theorization is mere parasitism.



This phantasmatic relation between theory and practice yields three
political facts, all of them made evident by the WSF, that are decisive for
our understanding of the present left situation. The first one is that the
discrepancy between short-term certainties and medium- and long-term
uncertainties has never been so wide. A certain insistence on tactics
prevails, therefore, which can either be revolutionary or reformist, or can
even go beyond such dichotomy. This insistence on tactics has been
conditioned by the metamorphoses of the enemy of the left. For the last
three decades, neoliberal capitalism has been subjecting social relations to
the law of the market to an extreme until recently unthinkable: it includes
the commodification of culture, leisure, solidarity and even self-esteem,
along with the reduction or elimination of the non-marketable interactions,
on the basis of which the modern social state was built (education, health,
welfare). The brutal worsening of exploitation and exclusion, hence, of
social inequalities, brought about by the dismantling of the juridical and
political mechanisms of regulation, which until very recently seemed
irreversible, confers to the resistance struggles an urgency that allows for
ample convergences regarding short-term goals (from the struggles against
savage privatisations to the blockage of the World Trade Organization or
FTAA). What remains unclear is if the struggle is aimed at capitalism in
general on behalf of socialism or some other postcapitalist future, or, on
the contrary, against this capitalism on behalf of a capitalism with a more
human face.

This lack of clarity is not a new problem. On the contrary, it remained with
the left throughout the twentieth century. But it gains now a new urgency.
The impetus of neoliberal capitalism is so overwhelming that what actually
ends up conniving with it can be seen as struggling against it. By the same
token, the uncertainty regarding the long term has now a new dimension: and
that is whether there is indeed a long term at all. That is to say, the long
term has become so uncertain that conflicts about it cease to be important
or mobilizing. As a consequence, the short term lengthens, and the concrete
political polarizations occur in the light of the short-term certainties and
urgencies. If, on the one hand, discrediting the long term favours tactics,
on the other, it prevents the polarizations about the long-term from
interfering with the short-term polarizations. It permits a total opening to
the future on which consensuses are easy. If until recently dissent
concerning the long term was strong, energies of convergence being
concentrated on the short term, today, once the long term has been
discredited, strong dissent has moved to the short term, where there are
certainties. Now, certainties, because they are different for different
groups, are at the root of strong dissent.



The increasing uncertainty and openendedness of the long term has a long
trajectory in left thought. It is expressed in the transition from the
certainty of the socialist future as the scientific result of the
development of the productive forces, in Marx, to the dichotomy of socialism
or barbarism, formulated by Rosa Luxemburg, to the various conceptions of
socialism, after the schism in the workers movement, at the beginning of WW
I, and, after many intermediate transitions, to the idea that “another world
is possible,” presiding over the WSF.

The long term has always been the strong horizon of the left. In the past,
the greater the difference of that horizon from the landscapes of
present-day capitalism, the more radical the way to reach it. Hence the
cleavage between revolution and reform. Nowadays, this cleavage suffers an
erosion similar to that of the long term. It is still there, but it no
longer has its former consistency and consequences. It has become a
relatively loose signifier, prone to contradictory appropriations. There are
reformist processes that seem revolutionary (Hugo Chavez in Venezuela),
revolutionary processes that seem reformist (Zapatistas in Mexico), and
reformist processes that don’t even seem reformist (the PT government in
Brazil, 2002-2006).



The second fact that derives from the phantasmatic relation between the
theory and the practice is the impossibility of a consensual account
regarding the performance of the left. If, for some, the left has undergone
a reflux of the class struggle since the 1970s, for others, this was a
period teeming with innovation and creativity, in which the left renovated
itself through new struggles, new forms of collective action, new political
goals. According to the latter position there was certainly a reflux, but it
concerned rather the classical forms of political organization and action,
and it was thanks to this reflux that new forms of political organization
and action emerged. For those who sustain the idea of the general reflux,
the balance is negative and the supposed novelties result from the struggles
’ deviation from primary objectives (class struggle in the domain of
production) to secondary objectives (identity, culture, in a word,
objectives in the domain of social reproduction). This was no more than a
yielding to the enemy, no matter how radical the discourses of rupture. For
those who support the idea of innovation and creativity, the balance is
positive, because the blocking dogmatisms have been shattered, the forms of
collective action and the social bases supporting them have been enlarged,
and, above all, because the struggles, by their forms and range, have
managed to reveal new vulnerabilities in the enemy. Among the participants
in the WSF, the latter position prevails, even though the former, arguing
the idea of the general reflux, is quite visible in the participation of
some organizations (mainly trade unions). Theirs is, however, a
participation that verges on despair, having an unhappy awareness of the
minimal dreams that history allowed to be fulfilled. In this argument about
the assessment of the last thirty years, both positions resort to the
fallacy of hypothetical pasts, be it to show that, if the bet on the class
struggle had prevailed, the results would have been better, be it to show,
on the contrary, that, without the new struggles, the results would have
been much worse.

The third fact derived from the phantasmatic relation between theory and
practice is the new theoretical extremism. It concerns polarizations that
are simultaneously much larger and much more inconsequent than the ones that
characterized the theoretical arguments of thirty years ago. Unlike the
latter, the current polarizations are not directly linked to concrete,
political organizations and strategic forms. Compared with the more recent
ones, the extreme positions of the past seem less distant among themselves.
And yet, opting among them yielded far more concrete consequences in the
life of the organizations, militants, and societies than what happens today.
The main dimensions of present-day theoretical extremism are three.

As regards the subjects of social transformation, the polarization is
between a well defined historical subjectivity, the working class and its
allies, on the one hand, and, on the other, indeterminate and unlimited
subjectivities, be they all the oppressed, “common people therefore rebels”
(Sub-comandante Marcos),[2] or the multitude  and , 2000(“we are all
communists,” according to Michael Hardt). Until thirty years ago, the
polarization occurred “only” in the delimitation of the working class (the
industrial avant-garde versus retrograde sectors), in the identification of
the allies, whether the peasants or the petty bourgeoisie, in the move from
“class in itself” to “class for itself”, and so on and so forth.



Concerning the goals of the social struggle, the polarization is between the
seizure of power and the total rejection of the concept of power, that is to
say, between the statism that has always prevailed in the left, one way or
the other, and the most radical anti-statism, as in John Holloway, that it i
s possible to change the world without seizing power (Holloway, 2002). Until
thirty years ago, the polarization occurred around the means to seize power
(armed struggle or direct peaceful action versus institutional struggle) and
the nature and goals of the exercise of power once seized (popular
democracy/ dictatorship of proletariat versus participatory/representative
democracy).

Concerning organization, the polarization is between the centralized
organization in the party and the total absence of centralism and even
organization, beyond that which emerges spontaneously in the course of the
collective action, by the initiative of the actors themselves as a whole.
Until thirty years ago, the polarization occurred between communist and
socialist parties, between one single party and a multiparty system, it
addressed the relation between party and the masses or the forms of
organization of the workers’ party (democratic centralism versus
decentralization and right of tendency).

We are facing, therefore, polarizations of a different kind, between new and
more demarcated positions. It doesn’t mean that the previous ones have
disappeared; they just lost their exclusivity and centrality. The new
polarizations do have consequences for the left; but they are certainly more
diffuse than those of previous polarizations. The reason is twofold. On the
one hand, the aforementioned phantasmatic relation between theory and
practice contributes to rendering the latter relatively immune to
theoretical polarizations or to encouraging it to use them selectively and
instrumentally. On the other, actors in extreme positions do not dispute the
same social bases, do not mobilize for the same objectives of struggle, do
not militate in the same organizations, not even in rival organizations. The
contours of the left, therefore, look rather like the parallel lives of the
left. Such disjunctions, however, have an important consequence: they make
difficult the acceptance of plurality and diversity, and impossible their
conversion into motors of new forms of struggle, of new coalitions and
articulations. This is an important consequence, particularly if we bear in
mind that the extreme positions in the new polarizations go beyond the
universe of the left culture as we know it. We face very distinct cultural,
symbolic, and linguistic universes and, without a translation procedure
among them, it will not be possible to reach a mutual intelligibility. If,
on one side, the talk is about class struggle, power relations, society,
modern rationality, the State, reform, revolution, on the other, the talk is
about love, dignity, solidarity, community, rebellion, spirituality,
emotions and sentiments, transformation of subjectivity, “a world to
encompass all the worlds.” There is, therefore, a cultural, as well as an
epistemological fracture.[3] These fractures have a sociological basis in
the emergence of collective actors from subaltern, indigenous, feminist,
Asian, African, and African American cultures, which were ignored, if not
hostilized, by the classical left throughout the twentieth century.

Considering this last aspect of the phantasmatic relation between theory and
practice (theoretical extremism), the following question is quite
legitimate: how was the WSF possible? To my mind, this virulent, if
inconsequent, theoretical extremism lost gradually contact with the
practical aspirations and options of the activists engaged in concrete
political action. Between concrete political action and theoretical
extremism, a vacuum, a terra nullius, was formed, wherein there gathered a
diffuse will to join forces against the avalanche of neoliberalism and to
admit that this would be possible without having to sort out all the pending
political debates. The urgency of the action turned against the purity of
the theory, as it were. The WSF is the result of this Zeitgeist of the left,
or rather, of the lefts, at the end of the twentieth century.



9.2 Twenty-first Century Left: Depolarised Pluralities



Does the WSF mean that a synthesis of the new and old extremisms of the left
is possible? Certainly not. As I said above, such a synthesis is not only
not possible but also undesirable. The search for a synthesis requires the
idea of a totality that brings diversity back to unity. Now, the WSF shows
eloquently that no totality can contain the inexhaustible diversity of the
theories and practices of the world left today. Rather than a synthesis, the
WSF suggests a call for depolarised pluralities. The aim is to reverse a
tradition with deep roots in the left, based on the idea that to politicise
differences is to polarize them. On the contrary, the WSF allows for
politicisation to occur my means of depolarisation. It consists of giving
priority to constructing coalitions and articulations for concrete
collective practices and discussing the theoretical differences exclusively
in the ambit of such constructing. The goal is to turn the acknowledgment of
differences into a factor of aggregation and inclusion, by robbing
differences of the possibility of thwarting collective actions, thus
creating a context of political strife in which acknowledgment of
differences goes hand in hand with the celebration and use of similarities.
In other words, the point is to create contexts for debate, in which the
drive for union and similarity may have the same intensity as the drive for
separation and difference. Collective actions ruled by depolarised
pluralities stir up a new conception of “unity in action”, to the extent
that unity stops being the expression of a monolithic will to become the
more or less vast and lasting meeting point of a plurality of wills.

The conception of depolarised pluralities counters all the automatisms of
political strife inside the left. Hence it will not be easy to apply. Two
important facts recommend its application, however. The first one is the
current predominance, mentioned above, of the short term over the long term,
with the result that the long term never conditioned the short term so
little as today. In the past, when the long term was the great factor of
political polarization inside the left, the short term — whenever it was
conceived with some autonomy vis-à-vis the long term — played a depolarising
role (the old distinction between tactics and strategy). In view of this,
the tacticism that results from the current predominance of the short term
may facilitate an agreement to give priority to the concrete collective
actions, in order to discuss plurality and diversity, but only in the
context of the said collective actions. In the short term, every
revolutionary action is potentially reformist, and every reformist action
may eventually escape reformist control. Concentration on short-term
certainties and urgencies, therefore, does not only imply neglecting the
long term; it implies as well that long term be conceived of as being open
enough to include diffuse consensuses and complicities silences. That the
long term remains indefinite may well encourage depolarisation.

The other factor favourable to the construction of depolarised pluralities
is the recognition, obvious today after the Zapatista uprising and after the
WSF, that the left is multicultural. What this means is that the differences
that divide the left escape the political terms that formulated them in the
past. Underlying them are the cultural differences that an emergent global
left cannot but acknowledge, since it would make no sense to fight for the
recognition and respect of cultural differences “outside,” in society, and
not to recognize or respect them “at home,” inside the organizations and
movements. A context is thereby created to act under the assumption that
differences cannot be erased by means of political resolutions. Better to
live with them and turn them into a factor of collective strength and
enrichment.

The next step will be to analyse in some detail the fields and procedures
behind the construction of depolarised pluralities. The goal is to highlight
new paradigms of transformative and progressive action guided by the
operative principle of depolarised pluralities. The construction of
depolarised pluralities is carried out by collective subjects involved, or
willing to become involved, in collective actions. The priority conferred to
participation in collective actions, by means of articulation or coalition,
allows for the suspension of the question of the subject in the abstract. In
this sense, if there are only concrete actions in progress, there are only
concrete subjects in progress as well. The presence of concrete subjects
does not annul the issue of the abstract subject, be it the working class,
the party, the people, humanity or common people, but it prevents this issue
from interfering decisively in the conception or unfolding of the collective
action. Indeed the latter can never be the result of abstract subjects.
Giving priority to participation in concrete collective actions means the
following:

1. Theoretical disputes must take place in the context of concrete
collective actions.

2. Each participant (movement, organization, campaign, etc.) stops claiming
that the only important or correct collective actions are the ones
exclusively conceived or organized by it. In a context in which the
mechanisms of exploitation, exclusion and oppression multiply and intensify
themselves, it is particularly important not to squander any social
experience of resistance on the part of the exploited, excluded or opressed,
and their allies.

3. Whenever a given collective subject has to put in question its
participation in a collective action, withdrawal must proceed in such a way
as to weaken the least the position of the subjects still involved in the
action.

4. Since resistance never takes place in the abstract, transformative
collective actions begin by occurring on the ground and in the terms of the
conflicts established by the oppressors. The success of the collective
actions is measured by the ability of collective action to change the ground
and terms of the conflict during the struggle. Success, in turn, assesses
the correctness of the theoretical positions assumed. The pragmatic
conception of theoretical correctness creates willingness towards the
depolarisation of the pluralities while the action is taking place.

There are three major dimensions of the construction of depolarised
pluralities inside transformative collective actions: depolarisation through
intensification of mutual communication and intelligibility; depolarisation
through searching inclusive organizational forms; depolarisation through
concentration in productive questions. To the two first ones I refer here
only briefly, since the previous chapters have already suggested how
depolarisation may be undertaken. I will analyse in more detail
depolarisation achieved through concentration in productive questions.



Depolarisation through increment of mutual intelligibility

This form of depolarisation is the one in which the contribution of the WSF
is most consistent. The WSF has been a meeting point of movements and
organizations from all over the world. In many cases, the relations therein
established last way beyond the events, and are reflected in ever more
consistent articulations of global transformative action. The progress made
in the past few years is particularly remarkable in some areas: the struggle
against the external debt and predatory free trade; transcontinental
feminist agendas; peasant movements, namely through the Via Campesina;
indigenous movements, mainly in the Americas. As I said above, the diversity
of the articulations, of the sociological, political and cultural profile of
the movements and organizations, as well as the traditions of resistance
renders impossible, and if possible undesirable, a general theory capable of
giving global coherence to the wealth of meetings and initiatives. Inspired
by the experience of the WSF, I propose in chapter 7 that the search for a
general theory be replaced by the consequent elaboration of processes of
translation aimed to deepen mutual intelligibility without putting in
question the autonomy of current movements and organizations. The
translation procedure, while safeguarding and even deepening diversity,
contributes to turning it into a factor of inter-group proximity and
enrichment of collective action.



Depolarisation by searching for inclusive organizational forms

In this domain, the role of the WSF has been to show that the will to
collective action made manifest in dozens of forums for the past few years
can only be concretised through new forms of political organization and
articulation. The forms traditionally available to the left — national
generalist parties and sectorial local movements — are insufficient in
themselves, but are above all deficient vis-à-vis the exclusive and
exclusionary policies they generated. As I have mentioned before, in many
countries, the collaboration between parties and social movements has been
blocked by two opposed and symmetrical fundamentalisms, each with deep
roots: the anti-movement fundamentalism on the part of the parties and the
anti-party fundamentalism on the part of the social movements. Furthermore,
any of these organizational forms was designed in terms of the specific
objectives and contexts, whether national or local, or general or thematic.
It is not easy on their basis, and particularly on the basis of the
political culture of which they are the product, to create new exigencies
and new activisms, inter-thematic (among feminists, workers, peasants,
ecologists, indigenous people, gays and lesbians, pacifists, activists of
human rights, etc., etc.) and multiscalar articulations (local, national,
regional and global).

The very organization of the WSF and of the different forums to which it has
given rise is in itself a remarkable innovation, and their limits and
difficulties, which I have pointed out in the previous chapters, have more
to do with its success than its failure. What is at stake is the design and
the actual carrying out of collective actions made possible and urgent by
the action of the WSF, for which new organizational forms are necessary:
forms that maximize internal democracy, guarantee efficacy at the level of
the different scales of intervention, respect diversity and sustainability,
and allow for the accumulation of anti-capitalist energy and collective
memory. Such organizational forms must be different according to the goals
in question: from mere exchange of information and experience to planning
and carrying out global collective actions, involving different movements
and organizations in different continents, operating in very distinct
political and cultural contexts from quite unequal milieus. How to combine
autonomy with working in common? How to guarantee equality and respect for
difference when the resources available to the different participants are so
different? How to articulate particular agendas, contextualized locally and
legitimated by well-defined social bases, with new transnational or
translocal initiatives, formulated in different languages, whose
articulation with the particular agendas is neither obvious nor transparent
for all members of the organization? How to assume and measure the risks of
innovation, organization and action in often such difficult contexts and
holding such precarious internal equilibriums? How to decide if what is
gained by the new activism makes up for the losses of the old one? What is
the impact of the change of scale or thematic objective on the transparency
and accountability of the organization vis-à-vis its members and target
audience?

The major achievement of the WSF so far has been to put this issue on the
agenda of the social forces interested in the emancipatory transformation of
the societies and the world, and interested as well in the concretisation of
collective actions conceived within the WSF but to be carried out outside of
it. I strongly believe that the relationships among parties, social
movements, and NGOs must change radically to prevent the expectations
created by the WSF process from being frustrated.[4]



Depolarisation by concentration on productive issues

I consider productive questions the issues whose discussion has direct
consequences for the conception and unfolding of the collective action and
for the conditions under which it takes place. All the others are
unproductive issues. Without being necessarily neglected, they must be left
to a level of indecision or state of suspension allowing for different
responses. Many of the issues that insensed the left in the past and led on
to the best known polarizations do not pass this test today, and must
therefore be considered unproductive. The experience of the WSF, namely as
regards the political cleavages inside the Forum analysed in chapter 6,
permits to identify some productive and some unproductive issues. Among the
latter, I highlight the following.



Unproductive issues

1. The issue of socialism, that is to say, the kind of society model that
will succeed socialism. This issue suffered a tremendous impact with the
fall of the Berlin Wall. If it could be considered productive before, to the
extent that the socialist future was on the political agenda, at least in
some countries, and could, therefore, have practical consequences at the
level of the collective action, the same is not true today, with the
exception of Cuba. As an unproductive issue, it must be left in a state of
indecision, whose most eloquent formulation is the idea that “another world
is possible.” This formulation permits to separate the current radical
critique and the struggle for a post- or anti-capitalist horizon — one and
the other constitutive of the collective actions — from the commitment to a
specific model of future society.

2. Reformism or revolution. This issue stirs up various productive issues
that will be mentioned below, but in itself it is unproductive, since the
conditions under which the option between reform and revolution turned into
a decisive political battlefield are no longer in place. As I argue in
chapter 6, the issue was one of principled option between legal and illegal
means to seize power, hence between a gradual and peaceful and an abrupt and
potentially violent seizure. In either case, the seizure of power aimed to
construct the socialist society, and was in fact its precondition. Actually,
neither strategy succeeded, and as a result the opposition between them
became complicity. Whenever power was actually seized, it was either to
govern capitalism or to build societies that only with the utmost
complacency could be deemed socialist. Another form of complicity between
the two principles is that historically they have always existed in
reciprocal complementarity. On the one hand, revolution has always been the
founding act of a new cycle of reformism, since the first revolutionary
acts, as witness the Bolsheviks, was to stop new revolutions, legislating
reformism as the only future option after them. On the other hand, reformism
only had credibility while the revolutionary alternative existed. This is
why the fall of the Berlin Wall brought about both the end of revolution and
the end of reformism, at least in the forms available to us throughout the
short twentieth century. Moreover, in view of this and in view of the
changes of capitalism in the last thirty years, the two terms of the
dichotomy suffered such a drastic semantic evolution that they have become
little trustworthy as guiding principles of social struggle. Lately,
reformism has been the object of a brutal attack on the part of the
political forces at the service of global capitalism. This attack started
out by being illegal (as when Salvador Allende was toppled down in Chile in
1973). With the neoliberal turn in the 1980s, it began resorting to the
“legal” means of structural adjustment, external debt, privatisation,
deregulation, and liberalization of trade. Reformism is, therefore, reduced
today to a miniature caricature of what it used to be, as illustrated by the
cases of Tony Blair’s England, Thabo Mbeki’s South Africa, and Lula’s
Brazil. In its turn, revolution, which started out by symbolizing a
maximalist seizure of power, ended up evolving semantically towards
conceptions of rejection of seizure of power, if not indeed of radical
rejection of the idea of power, as illustrated by John Holloway’s highly
polemical interpretation of the Zapatista (2002). Throughout the twentieth
century, between the two extremes of seizure of power and the total erasure
of power, there were many intermediate views concerned with the idea of a
change of power, as very early on the Austro-Marxists’ non-Leninist
conceptions of revolution.[5]

For all these reasons, it does not seem productive to debate between reform
and revolution. By its past, the discussion is polarizing. By its present
and near future, it is inconsequent. While other terms are not found, I
propose to leave this issue in abeyance, which in this case means to
recognize that social struggles are never essentially reformist or
revolutionary. They may eventually assume either one or the other
characteristic in view of their consequences (some of them intentional, some
not), in articulation with other social struggles and according to the
resistance of the forces that oppose them. In other words, abeyance entails
here changing reform and revolution from guiding principles of future
actions into evaluating principles of past actions. As I suggest in chapter
6, the WSF points to the advantages of this state of suspension.

3. The State: privileged objective or irrelevant objective. Linked with the
previous issue, there is another one that I consider unproductive, as well.
It consists in arguing whether the State is relevant or irrelevant to a left
politics and, consequently, if the State should be the object of social
struggles, or not. The option is between social struggles aiming at the
power of the State in its many forms and levels, and social struggles aiming
exclusively at the powers that circulate in civil society and determine the
inequalities, exclusions, and oppressions. Whether the State should be
defended or attacked is not the matter, but rather to decide if the social
struggles should have other goals than to defend or attack the State. This
issue can also unfold into a few productive issues, as I will show below,
but in itself it is an unproductive issue. Related to it is the issue,
broached above, whether power must be seized or extinguished, as well as the
issue, approached in chapter 6, whether the State is an ally or an enemy of
the emancipatory social movements (one of the cleavages of the WSF).

That the issue of the relevance or irrelevance of the State is unproductive
has to do with the fact that the modern capitalist State does not exist but
in relation with the civil society. The two of them, far from being external
to each other, are the two faces of the grundnorm, that is to say, of the
fundamental political relation in capitalist societies. From another
perspective, the three pillars of modern social regulation are the State,
the market, and the community (Santos, 1995: 1-5; 2002b: 1-4), and it is not
possible to conceive of either one outside their relations with each other.
Finally, since the State is a social, hence historical, relation, its
relevancy or irrelevancy cannot be established regardless of the result of
the social struggles that in the past had it as their object. To neutralize
its potential of polarization I suggest the following level of indecision or
state of suspension: the social struggles may have the power of the State or
the powers that constitute the civil society as their privileged objective,
but, in either case, the powers not privileged are always present, affect
the results of the struggles and are affected by the struggles.



Productive issues
Likewise in the light of the experience of the WSF, I will next give some
examples of productive issues, that is to say, issues which, once discussed,
may yield the depolarisation of the pluralities that constitute today the
thought and action of the left.

1. The State as an ally or as an enemy. Unlike what happens regarding the
unproductive issue of the State’s relevance or irrelevance, this issue is
productive precisely because it does not take the State’s relevance in the
abstract.  It confers to it a specific political meaning. The
transformations undergone by the State throughout the entire twentieth
century, both in core countries and in countries liberated from colonialism,
and the contradictory role it played in the processes of social
transformation, give historical and practical consistency to this issue. The
experiences of social struggle, of parties and social movements in the
different countries are in this respect widely diversified and very rich,
and cannot be reduced to a general principle or recipe.

The WSF, convening movements and associations with the most diverse
experiences of relations with the State, is today an eloquent manifestation
of this wealth of social struggles. The possibility of constructing in this
domain a depolarised plurality resides precisely in the fact that, as I say
in chapter 6, the majority of movements and associations refuse to take a
rigid, principled stance in their relations with the State. The experiences
of struggle show that the State, being often the enemy, can also be,
particularly in peripheral and semiperipheral countries, a precious ally,
for instance, in the struggle against transnational impositions. If in some
situations confrontation with the State is justified, in others
collaboration is advisable. In others still, it is appropriate to combine
the two, as witness the strategy of the MST in Brazil, a strategy that can
be described as autonomous and confrontational cooperation. The choice of a
given kind of interrelation with the State depends on a multiplicity of
factors: history and dimension of the movement or organization; kind of
political regime; structure of opportunities for direct or for institutional
action; national or local traditions of social struggle; level of complexity
of the claims gauged by the kind and number of dimensions it involves
(social, political, cultural, ethnic, religious); kind and orientation of
public opinion; international context. The most important factor is perhaps
the structure of the opportunities: political opportunities (the larger or
smaller fractures in the social and political basis of the State’s action;
the greater or lesser permeability to social contestation and political
opposition; the level of social and political exclusion of the social groups
engaged in the struggle); institutional opportunities (greater or lesser
penetration and functionality of public administration, more or less
availability, independence and efficacy of the judicial system, legalism or
discretionary power in the way the repressive, police, and military forces
take action); and ideological opportunities (receptivity of public opinion,
relation between politics and ethics or religion, criteria to define  the
limits of tolerance and of what is negotiable).

The conception of the State as a contradictory social relation creates the
possibility of contextualized discussions on what position to take vis-à-vis
the State on the part of a certain political party, organization, or
movement, in a given social field, in a concrete country and historical
moment. It also permits to evaluate comparatively different positions
assumed by different parties, organizations or movements in different areas
of intervention or in different countries or historical moments. Hence
results the possibility of the recognition of the existence of different
strategies, all of them contextual and not free from risks, and, above all,
none of them susceptible of becoming a general principle.  This is what
depolarised plurality consists of.

2. Local, national, and global struggles. The issue of the relative priority
of local, national, or global collective actions is today amply debated, and
in this case, too, the diversity of left practices is enormous. As I say in
chapter 6, this issue is present in the political options of the large
majority of the organizations and movements that participate in the WSF. To
be sure, the theoretical tradition of the left was moulded on the national
scale. The local struggles were traditionally considered minor, or else the
germ of national struggles, to the detriment of the internationalist goals.
The vicissitudes of internationalism, in turn, were evidence of the priority
of national struggles and interests. The national scale presided over the
formation of left parties and unions, and continues to structure their
activism to this day.

In the second half of the twentieth century, particularly after the 1970s,
as a result of the emergence of the new social movements, the local scale of
social struggles assumed an unprecedented relevance. The organizational
tradition of the left prevented the emancipatory potential of the
articulation between local and national struggles to be explored to the
utmost. The building processes of the African National Congress, in South
Africa, and of the PT in Brazil were perhaps the most successful ones. From
the 1990s on, particularly with the Zapatista uprising, the rallies in
Seattle in 1999, and the WSF in 2001, the possibility of articulations of
local, national and global struggles gained an unprecedented credibility. On
the other hand, the field of concrete experiences of struggles in different
scales broaden considerably, thus making possible contextualized debates on
the different scales of collective action, their relative advantages,
organizational demands and possibilities of articulation. Such a debate is
ongoing these days in the WSF, and is one of the most productive, mainly
regarding the specific instruments of articulation among different scales of
action.

As was patent in the preceding chapters, the WSF gathers together social
movements and organizations with different views of the relative priority of
the different scales of action. While the WSF itself is a collective action
on the global scale, many of the movements and organizations that
participate in it have had only experiences of local and national struggles
until recently. Even though they all view the WSF as the possibility to
enlarge their scales of action, they ascribe, as we have seen, very
different priorities to the different scales of action. If, for some, the
global scale of struggle will become more and more important as the struggle
against globalisation intensifies, for others, the WSF is only a meeting
point or a cultural event, no doubt useful, but in no way changing the basic
principle that the “real struggles,” the ones really important for the
welfare of the populations, continue to be fought at the local and national
level. There are still other movements and organizations that systematically
articulate in their practice the local, national, and global scales (the
MST, for example, and, outside the WSF, the Zapatistas). As I said, however,
for the vast majority of the movements, even if each concrete political
practice is organized according to a given scale, all the others must be
involved as condition for success. The productive issues in this domain
concern the way in which this involvement must take place.

The wealth of experiences of social struggle in this regard is thus huge,
and allows for contextualized, hence productive debates. The possibility
that depolarised pluralities may emerge in this domain derives from the fact
that, in the light of recent experience, it makes increasingly less sense to
give absolute or abstract priority to any of the scales of action. The space
is thus opened to valorise the coexistence of social struggles in different
scales and the articulations of variable geometry among them. The decision
that determines the scale to be privileged is a political decision that must
be taken according to concrete political conditions.

3. Institutional action, direct action, civil disobedience. Unlike the issue
of choice between reform and revolution, the issue concerning the option
between institutional action and direct action or resorting to civil
disobedience is a productive issue in that it can be discussed in practical
contexts of collective action. The question regards what is to be privileged
in the concrete conditions in which a given collective struggle or action is
carried out: the use of legal means, - i.e. political or juridical work
inside the institutions and dialogue with those in power -- or, on the
contrary, illegality and confrontation with the State institutions. In the
case of direct action, a distinction must be made between violent and
non-violent action, and, in the case of violent action, between violence
against human and nonhuman (property) targets.[6] In the case of
institutional action, a distinction must be made between institutional
action in the ambit of the power of the State (whether national or local)
and institutional action in the ambit of parallel powers, namely by creating
parallel institutionalities that avoid direct confrontation with the State
or take place in regions not penetrated by the State. Parallel
institutionality is a hybrid type of collective action in which elements of
direct action and elements of institutional action are combined.  The
institutions of autonomous local power created by the Zapatists in Chiapas
(caracoles, juntas de buen gobierno) and the forms of government in the
assentamentos of the MST are forms of parallel institutionality.[7] Both
courses of action (direct or institutional) have costs and benefits that can
only be assessed in concrete contexts, demanding, of course, different kinds
of organization and mobilization. What in general may be said of any other
kind of collective action is not enough to make decisions upon
contextualized discussions about them. The context is not limited to the
immediate conditions of action, it also involves surrounding conditions,
indeed, the same factors that condition the relations with the State,
mentioned above. The institutional action tends to take better advantage of
the power contradictions and the fissures amongst the elites, but it is
liable to the cooptation and emptying of its conquests. It has difficulty as
well keeping high levels of mobilization, namely because of the disjunction
between the pace of the collectivisation of claims and protests, on the one
hand, and the judicial or legislative pace, on the other. Direct action
tends to be better at exploring the inefficiencies of the power system and
the fragilities of its social legitimation, but has difficulty formulating
credible alternatives and is liable to repression. If excessive, repression
may actually compromise mobilization and even organization. While
institutional action tends to call for articulation with the political
parties, whenever they exist, direct action tends to be hostile to such
articulations.

Civil disobedience (whether individual or collective) is a form of
non-violent direct action with a long history (Thoreau, Tolstoy, Gandhi,
Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Martin Luther King, etc). It is being much
discussed again in the wake of the WSF.[8] One of the movements with some
protagonism in Europe is the tute bianche, which after 2001 came to be
designated as the Movement of the Disobedient (Disobbedienti). The “new”
civil disobedience combines various traditions of direct action: anarchism,
grassroots christianism, communitarianism, the Paris Commune, and utopian
socialism. But is also brings along some new features, such as its
performativity, recourse to the media, and manipulation of symbols. Civil
disobedience has stirred up a lively debate, deriving mainly from two
factors, which I consider very productive. On the one hand, the transition
from revolution to rebellion, mentioned in chapter 3, meant the substitution
of the idea of partial ruptures, exactly those derived from actions of civil
disobedience, for the idea of total rupture with the existent society.[9] On
the other, the movements and organizations that participate in the WSF act
in countries with different political regimes and cultures, differences that
decisively condition the debates on the legitimacy, the opportunity and
efficacy of civil disobedience. For example, one of the debates concerns
whether in liberal democratic societies, where legal resistance is allowed,
collective civil disobedience is legitimate. Such a debate has led to
another one concerning the quality and limits of democracy. On the one hand,
there are political regimes that are formally democratic but have so many
limitations to the expression and organization of the opposition that, in
practice, the democratic conflict and lawful resistance are banned. Such are
the low intensity democracies to which I allude in chapter 3. On the other,
even in more credible democracies, under the excuse of the fight against
terrorism, some legislation has been promulgated restricting the fundamental
liberties to such an extent that some scholars speak of the emergence of a
new state of exception.[10] In this framework, the possibilities of legal
resistance become more and more limited, which in turn leads to a
reassessment of the role and legitimacy of illegal resistance.

The possibility of depolarisation regarding the option for either the
legality or illegality of the actions of resistance, when the world, in all
its political and cultural diversity (including different conceptions of
legality and violence), is taken as the unit of analysis, is once again
grounded in the wealth of the left struggles of the past thirty tears. This
wealth is today condensed most eloquently in the WSF. The Charter of
Principles contains, however, an important limitation: it excludes movements
and organizations that advocate armed struggle as a form of political
action. Violent direct action against people is, therefore, excluded. As I
say in chapters 4 and 5, the WSF convenes movements and organizations with
very distinct experiences in this regard. If so many privilege institutional
actions, as many privilege direct actions. But what is most significant, in
terms of depolarising potential, is the experience of many movements and
organizations which, in different struggles or different moments of the same
struggle, resort to both kinds of action. Again, a good example is the MST:
direct action against property (land occupation) and institutional action
(legalization of the assentamentos and financial participation of the State
in their government). Even though it is not physically present in the WSF,
the EZLN opened up a horizon of convergent possibilies in this regard and
exerts nowadays a strong influence, even if not too well known, in the
movements, especially in Lain America. In the struggles of the EZLN there
are clearly moments of violent direct action (the uprising of 1994),
non-violent direct action (the march from Chiapas to Mexico City in 2001),
institutional action (Santo Andrés Accords, lobbying in the Mexican
congress), and parallel institutional action (caracoles, juntas de buen
gobierno). Once conditions for systematic evaluation are created, this vast
experience will yield every condition to give credibility to the formation
of depolarised pluralities.

4. Struggles for equality and struggles for respect of difference. The issue
concerning the relative priority of the struggles for equality and struggles
for respect of difference has been part of left struggles since the end of
the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. It started with the
first wave of feminism and gained a new impetus in the 1950s and 1960s with
the civil rights movement of African Americans in the USA. But you could say
that up to the 1970s and 1980s it was a marginal issue in left debates.
Since then, however, it acquired some centrality, mainly because of the
impact of the new feminist, indigenous, and LGBT movements, as well as the
movements of Afro-descendents in the Americas and Europe. Organized on the
basis of discriminated identities, these movements came to contest the
conception of equality that presided over the social struggles of the
previous periods, a conception focussed on class (workers and peasants),
based on the economy, and hostile to the recognition of politically
significant differences among the popular classes. Identity movements,
without contesting the importance of class inequalities, argue for the
political importance of inequalities based on race, ethnicity, sex, and
sexual orientation. According to them, the principle of equality tends to
homogenize differences and thus to conceal the hierarchies established in
their midst. Such hierarchies are translated into discriminations that
irreversibly affect the opportunities of personal and social fulfilment for
the discriminated. On the basis of the principle of equality alone, they
achieve no more than a subordinate, decharacterizing social inclusion. To
avoid this, alongside equality, the acknowledgment of difference must be
considered a principle of social emancipation as well.

The articulation between the principles of equality and recognition of
difference is no easy task. But also in this regard the diversity of the
social struggles for the past thirty years makes possible the formation of
depolarised pluralities. There are, to be sure, extreme positions that
reject the validity of one of the principles, or even recognizing the
validity of both give total priority in the abstract to one or the other.
The majority of the movements, however, tries to find concrete forms of
articulation between the two principles, even if giving priority to one of
them. This is quite visible in the labour movement, certainly founded on the
principle of equality, but increasingly sensitive to the recognition of the
importance of ethnic and sexual discriminations and favourable to
articulations with identity movements in concrete struggles. It is likewise
visible in the identity movements, particularly in the feminist movement, in
view of the increasing acknowledgment and politicisation of class difference
inside the movement.

In this domain, as well, the conditions are created for the formation of
depolarised pluralities. Once again, the WSF offers a wide space where
opportunities may be generated to construct articulations and coalitions
among movements with different conceptions of social emancipation.
Inter-knowledge is a necessary condition of mutual recognition. Progress in
this regard is allowing for the discussion concerning the two principles of
emancipation not to occur in the abstract and between radical positions,
rather between concrete options in the configuration of concrete struggles
capable of engaging the movements without forcing on them fundamental
changes of their basic cultural, philosophic, or political conceptions.





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[1] In English, Free Trade Area of the Americas - FTAA.

[2] “Somos mujeres y hombres, ninos y ancianos bastante comunes, es decir,
rebeldes, inconformes, incómodos, soñadores” (Sub-comandante Marcos, 1999,
in La Jornada, 4 de Agosto).

[3] Referring to the Zapatistas, Ana Esther Ceceña speaks precisely of a
“new libertarian epistemology” (2004: 11). Similarly, in chapter 2, I speak
of the emergence of “an epistemology of the South.”

[4] Wainright (2003: 196-200) calls our attention to recent experiences of
mutually enriching relations between parties and movements and to the
emergence of new hybrid movement/party organizations. On this issue and, in
general, on the challenges facing the left as we enter the twentieth first
century, see Harnecker, 2005: 289 ff; Rodriguez-Garavito, Barrett and Chavez
(eds.), 2005.

[5] VER EM TEXTO ANTERIOR MINHAS REF AO AUSTROMARX;

[6] The topic of violence was absent from left debates in the developed
capitalist world during the second half of the twentieth century. It
returned in the first decade of 2000 as a result of the brutal attacks on
the Twin Towers in New York City on September 11, 2001, and the reactions
thereby emerging. The concept, kinds, degrees, legitimacy, efficacy and
opportunity of violence are now discussed. When there is mention of the
violence of the movements’ direct action, what is usually meant is a
restrictive concept of violence: physical violence. Whereas the violence
against which the movements fight may be physical, symbolic, structural,
psychological, etc. Recourse to violence in a given direct action may derive
from the original plan of action or emerge as response to the State’s
violent repression by means of police or military forces.

[7] In revolutionary or pre-revolutionary contexts, the forms of parallel or
dual power assume specific characteristics. This was the case of Russia
between February and October 1917, when there were side by side the
Provisional Government and the Soviets (Lenin, 1978: 17-ss; Trotsky, 1950:
251-ss). The cases of Germany (Broué, 1971: 161-ss), Spain (Broué and
Témime, 1961:103-ss), Latin America (Mercado, 1974), and Portugal (Santos,
1990: 29-ss) have also been analyzed. The current most salient case is
Venezuela, where the government of Hugo Chavez, faced with the inertia or
blockage of public administration, created the missiones to make basic
public services (subsidized education, health, and food) available to the
popular classes.

[8] A good summary of the debate can be read in Buey, 2005: 211-264.

[9] This does not mean that the movements that resort to civil disobedience
accept the global legitimacy of the established order. It just means that
resistance against the established order is not conceived of as global,
illegal resistance.

[10] On this subject, see Agamben (2004).




PUBLICATIONS 2005:
Waterman Symposium, Labour+Social Movements, ‘Labor History’ 46:2;
Ocho ensayos acerca del internacionalismo
http://democraciaglobal.org/index.php?fp_verpub=true&idpub=34;
The Liberation of Time from Work
http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=05/03/24/170247;
Communication, Culture, WSF
http://www.nigd.org/docs/MakingTheRoadWhilstWalkingPeterWaterman;
Movements+Global Governance
http://www.nigd.org/docs/AntiglobalistMovementGhent2005PeterWaterman;
Civil Society: Defining, Disputing,
http://www.nigd.org/docs/GlobalCivilSocietyPeterWatermanNovember2005;
Trade Unions, NGOs+Global Social Justice
http://www.nu.ac.za/ccs/default.asp?3,28,11,1260.