World Social Forum and the Global Left

To: Retort
Via: AG

The World Social Forum and the Global Left
Boaventura de Sousa Santos

[Some food for thought for this coming Saturday. Boaventura de Sousa Santos teaches sociology at the University
of Coimbra, Portugal. This was delivered at a 'Politics and Society' mini-conference in New York, August 9, 2007]

Enough has been said about the crisis of the left, and part of what has 
been said has worked as self-fulfilling prophecy. The mortal fatigue of
history is the mortal fatigue of the women and men that make it in their
daily lives. The fatigue increases when the habit of thinking that 
history is with us, when it is put in question, inclines us to think
that history is irremediably against us. History does not know any
better than we do where it is headed, nor does it use women and men to
fulfil its ends. Which is to say that we cannot trust history more than 
we trust ourselves. To be sure, trusting ourselves is not a subjective
act, decontextualized from the world. For the past few decades, the
political and cultural hegemony of neo-liberalism gave rise to a
conception of the world that shows it as being either too well made to
allow for the introduction of any consequent novelty, or too fragmentary
to allow for whatever we do to have consequences capable of making up
for the risks taken in trying to change the status quo.

The last thirty or forty years of the last century may be considered
years of degenerative crisis of the global left thinking and practice.
To be sure, there were crises before, but not only were they not global
— restricted as they were to the Eurocentric world, what nowadays we 
call the Global North, and compensated for, from the 1950s on, by the
successful struggles for the liberation of the colonies —they were
mainly experienced as casualties in a history whose trajectory and
rationality suggested that the victory of the left (revolution,
socialism, communism) was certain. This is how the division of the
workers' movement at the beginning of World War I was experienced, as
well as the defeat of the German revolution (1918-1923), and then
nazism, fascism, franquismo (1939-1975) and salazarismo (1926-1974), the 
Moscow processes (1936-1938), the civil war in Greece (1944-1949), and
even the invasion of Hungary (1956). This kind of crisis is well
characterized in the works of Trotsky in exile. Trotsky was very early
on aware of the seriousness of Stalin's deviations from the revolution,
to the point of refusing to protagonize an opposition, as proposed to
him by Zinoviev and Kamenev in 1926. But he never for one moment doubted
that history went along with the revolution just as the true
revolutionaries went along with history. The author that, to my mind, 
most brilliantly portrays the increasingly Sisyphean effort to safeguard
the historical meaning of the revolution before the morasses of the
Moscow processes is Maurice Merleau-Ponty in Humanisme et terreur (1947). 

The crises of left thinking and practice of the last thirty or forty
years are of a different kind. On the one hand, they are global, even
though they occur in different countries for specific reasons: the
assassination of Lumumba (1961); the failure of the Che in Bolivia and
his assassination (1966); the May 1968 student movement in Europe and
the Americas and its neutralization; the invasion of Czechoslovakia
(1968); the response of American imperialism to the Cuban revolution;
the assassination of Allende (1973) and the military dictatorships in
Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s; Suharto's brutal repression of the
left in Indonesia (1965-1967); the degradation or liquidation of the 
nationalist, developmentist, and socialist regimes of sub-Saharan Africa
that came out of the independences (1980s); the emergence of a new/old
militant and expansionist right, with Ronald Reagan in the US and
Margaret Thatcher in UK (1980s); the globalization of the most
anti-social form of capitalism, neo-liberalism, imposed by the
Washington Consensus (1989); the plot against Nicaragua (1980s); the
crisis of the Congress Party India and the rise of political Hinduism
(communalism) (1990s); the collapse of the regimes of central and
eastern Europe, symbolized by the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989); the
conversion of Chinese communism into the most savage kind of capitalism,
market Stalinism (starting with Deng Xiaoping in early 1980s); and
finally, in the 1990s, the parallel rise of political Islam and
political Christianism, both fundamentalist and confrontational.

Furthermore, the crisis of left thinking and practice of the last thirty 
or forty years appears to be degenerative: the failures seem to be the
result of history's mortal exhaustion, whether because history no longer
has meaning or rationality, or because the meaning and rationality of 
history finally opted for the permanent consolidation of capitalism, the
latter turned into the literal translation of immutable human nature.
Revolution, socialism, communism, and even reformism seem to be hidden 
away in the top drawers of history's closet, where only collectors of
misfortunes reach. The world is well made, the neo-liberal argument
goes; the future finally has arrived in the present to stay. This
agreement on ends is the uncontested fund of liberalism, on whose basis 
it is possible to respect the diversity of opinions about means. Since
means are political only when they are at the service of different ends,
the differences concerning social change are now technical or juridical 
and, therefore, can and must be discussed regardless of the cleavage
between left and right.

In the mid-1990s, however, the story of this hegemony started to change.
The other side of this hegemony were the hegemonic practices that for 
the past decades have intensified exclusion, oppression, destruction of
the means of subsistence and sustainability of large populations of the
world, leading them to extreme situations where inaction or conformism
would mean death. Such situations convert the contingency of history in
the necessity to change it. These are the moments in which the victims
don't just cry, they fight back. The actions of resistance into which 
these situations were translated, together with the revolution in
information and communication technologies that took place meanwhile,
permitted to make alliances in distant places of the world and
articulate struggles through local/global linkages.

The 1994 Zapatista uprising is an important moment of this construction,
precisely because it targets a tool of neo-liberal globalization, the
North American Free Trade Agreement, and because it aims to articulate
different scales of struggle, from local to national to global, from the
Chiapas mountains to Mexico City to the solidary world, resorting to new
discursive and political strategies, and to the new information and 
communication technologies available. In November 1999, the protesters
in Seattle managed to paralyze the World Trade Organization (WTO)
ministerial meeting, and later many other meetings of the World Bank,
International Monetary Fund (IMF), WTO, and G8, were affected by the 
protests of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and social movements
intent on denouncing the hypocrisy and destructiveness of the new world
dis-order. In January 2001, the World Social Forum (WSF) met for the 
first time in Porto Alegre (Brazil), and many other meetings followed:
global, regional, thematic, national, sub-national, local forums.

Thus was gradually constructed an alternative globalization, alternative
to neo-liberal globalization, a counter-hegemonic globalization, a
globalization from below. The WSF may be said to represent today, in
organizational terms, the most consistent manifestation of
counter-hegemonic globalization. As such, the WSF provides the most 
favourable context to inquire to what extent a new left is emerging
through these initiatives — a truly global left, with the capacity to
overcome the degenerative crisis that has been beleaguering the left for
the past forty years.

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 carried out in compliance with the Porto Alegre 
Charter of Principles 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 neo-liberal globalization.

The 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 an NGO or a confederation of NGOs, even though its
conception and organization owes a great deal to NGOs. 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 neo-liberal globalization, is it a struggle against a given 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 post-capitalist,
socialist, anarchist horizon, or, on the contrary, does it presuppose
that no horizon be clearly defined at all? Given that the vast majority
of people taking part in the WSF identify themselves as favouring 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 north-centric or west-centric
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 non-violence, 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 non-violence 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. (1)

These features are arguably not new, as some of them, at least, 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, 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
harbouring 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 non-existence. In other words, if the WSF is 
arguably the "movement of movements" it is not one more movement. It is
a different kind of 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. (2) This risk is all the more serious as
the WSF, given its scope and internal diversity, not only challenges
dominant political theories and 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 slogan: "another world is
possible." At stake is less a utopian world than a world that allows for 
utopia

In this paper, I will start by analysing the reasons of the success of
the WSF, contrasting them with the failures of the conventional left in
recent decades. I will then try to ask the question of whether this 
success is sustainable. Finally, I will identify the challenges that the
WSF process poses to both critical theory and left political activism.

STRONG QUESTIONS AND WEAK ANSWERS
Contrary to Habermas, for whom Western modernity is still an incomplete
project, I have been arguing that our time is witnessing the final
crisis of the hegemony of the socio-cultural paradigm of Western
modernity and that, therefore, it is a time of paradigmatic transition
(3). It is characteristic of a transitional time to be a time of strong 
questions and weak responses. Strong questions address not only our
options of individual and collective life but also and mainly the roots
and foundations that have created the horizon of possibilities among
which it is possible to choose.  They are, therefore, questions that
arouse a particular kind of perplexity. Weak responses are the ones that
cannot abate this perplexity and may, in fact, increase it. Questions
and responses vary according to culture and world region. However, the
discrepancy between the strength of the questions and the weakness of
the responses seems to be common. It derives from the current variety of
contact zones involving cultures, religions, economies, social and
political systems, and different ways of life, as a result of what we
ordinarily call globalization. The power asymmetries in these contact
zones are as large today, if not larger, as in the colonial period, and 
they are more numerous and widespread. The contact experience is always
an experience of limits and borders. In today's conditions, it is the
contact experience that gives rise to the discrepancy between strong
questions and weak responses.

In my view, one of the reasons of the success of the WSF lies in the
disjuncture between strong questions and weak answers. But before
elaborating on this, a conceptual precision is in order. There are two
types of weak answers. The first type is what I call the weak-strong
answer. Paraphrasing Lucien Goldman, such answer represents the maximum
of possible consciousness of a given epoch. It transforms the perplexity
caused by the strong question into a positive energy and value. Rather
than pretending that the perplexity is pointless or that it can be
eliminated by a simple answer, it transforms the perplexity into a
symptom of underlying complexity. Accordingly, the perplexity becomes
the social experience of a new open field of contradictions in which an
unfinished and unregulated competition among different possibilities
exists. The outcomes of such competition being most uncertain, there is 
plenty of room for social and political innovation, once perplexity is
transformed into a capacity to travel without reliable maps. The other
type of weak answer is the weak-weak answer. It represents the minimum
possible consciousness of a given epoch. It discards and stigmatizes the
perplexity as the symptom of a failure to understand that the real
coincides with the possible and to value the fact that hegemonic
solutions are a  "natural" outcome of the survival of the fittest. 
Perplexity amounts to an irrational refusal to travel according to
historically tested maps. But since perplexity derives in the first
place from questioning such maps, the weak-weak response is an
invitation to inaction. On the contrary, the weak-strong answer is an 
invitation to move at high risk.

The WSF success lies in that it is a weak-strong answer to two strong
questions of our time. I formulate the first one in the following way:
if humanity is one alone, why are there so many different principles
concerning human dignity and just society, all of them presumably
unique, yet often contradictory among themselves? At the root of this
question is the verification, today more unequivocal than ever, that the
understanding of the world largely exceeds the Western understanding of
the world. One of the most widespread of the weak-weak answers to this
question is the conventional understanding of human rights. It banalizes
the perplexity by postulating the abstract universality of the
conception of human dignity that underlies human rights. The fact that
such conception is Western based is considered irrelevant, as the
historicity of human rights does not interfere with its ontological
status. It is equally irrelevant that many social movements fighting
against injustice and oppression do not formulate their struggles in
human rights terms, and indeed often formulate them in terms that
contradict human rights principles. The arrow of time is there to assure 
us that this is a provisional or transitional deficiency of such movements.

This weak-weak answer has been fully embraced by the conventional left,
particularly in the global North. It has therefore blinded itself to new 
realities taking place in the countries of the Global South. Movements
of resistance have been emerging and flourishing, both violent and
non-violent, against oppression, marginalization, and exclusion, whose
ideological bases have nothing to do with the ones that were the
references of the left during the twentieth century (Marxism, socialism,
developmentalism, anti-imperialist nationalism). They are rather
grounded on multi-secular cultural and historical identities, and/or 
religious militancy. It is not surprising, therefore, that such
struggles cannot be defined according to the cleavage between left and
right. What is actually surprising is that the hegemonic left as a whole
does not have theoretical and analytical tools to position itself in
relation to them, and that it does not think it a priority to do so. It
applies the same abstract recipe of human rights across the board,
hoping that thereby the nature of alternative ideologies or symbolic
universes will be reduced to local specificities with no impact on the
universal canon of human rights. Without trying to be exhaustive, I
mention three such movements, of very distinct political meanings:  the
indigenous movements, particularly in Latin America; the "new" rise of
traditionalism in Africa; and the Islamic insurgency. In spite of the
huge differences among them, these movements have in common the fact
that they all start out from cultural and political references that are
non-western, even if constituted by the resistance to western
domination. The difficulties of political evaluation experienced by the
left derive, on the one hand, from the failure to envision a future
society as alternative to the capitalist liberal society and, on the 
other, from the north-centric or euro-centric cultural and
epistemological universe that has presided over the left.

In my opinion, the WSF is so far the most convincing weak-strong answer
to this question. In spite of its limitations and criticisms coming both 
from inside and outside,  the WSF has credibly established itself as a
global open space, a meeting ground for the most diverse movements and
organizations, coming from the  most disparate locations in the planet, 
involved in the most diverse struggles, speaking a Babel Tower of
languages, anchored in western as well as non-western philosophies and
knowledges, sponsoring different conceptions of human dignity, calling
for a variety of other worlds that should be possible. The WSF does not
answer the question of the why of such diversity, nor the questions of
what for, under which conditions, and for the benefit of whom. But it
has successfully made such diversity more visible and more acceptable by
the movements and organizations; it has made them aware of the
incomplete or partial character of their struggles, politics and
philosophies; it has created a new need for inter-knowledge,
inter-recognition and interaction; it has fostered coalitions among
movements up until now separated and mutually suspicious of the other.
In sum, it has transformed diversity into a positive value, a potential
source of energy for progressive social transformation.

The success of the WSF resides in that it celebrates a diversity that as
yet cannot be fully theorized nor converted into the motor of a globally
coherent and locally anchored collective action of progressive social 
transformation. In a sense, the WSF represents the maximum possible
consciousness of our time. Dialectically, its weakness (the
non-discrimination among diverse solutions) cannot be separated from its
strength (the celebration of diversity as value in itself) and 
vice-versa. The WSF is as transitional as our time and draws attention
to the latent possibilities of such transition. Herein lies its success.

The second strong question for which the WSF provides a weak-strong 
answer can be formulated in this way: Is there any room for utopia in
our world? Is there really an alternative to capitalism? After the
historical failure of so many attempts at building a non-capitalist
society, with such tragic consequences, shouldn't we look at the most 
for alternatives inside capitalism rather than for alternatives to
capitalism? The perplexity caused by this question lies in three
factors. Firstly, on the theory of history that underlies it. If all
that exists in history is historical, that is, has a beginning and an 
end, why should it be different with capitalism? Secondly, the hegemonic
thinking that discredits the search for an alternative to capitalism is
the same that promotes a certain type of capitalism, neo-liberalism, as 
the only possible type of capitalism. In other words, it also discredits
the idea of alternatives inside capitalism. Thirdly, the perplexity
stems from some disturbing facts. Is there no alternative to a world in
which the 500 richest individuals pull as much income as the poorest 40
countries, meaning 416 million people, and where the ecological
catastrophe is an increasingly less remote possibility? Is it to be
assumed as an unavoidable fact that the problems caused by capitalism
can only be solved by more capitalism, that the economy of unselfishness
is not a credible alternative to the economy of selfishness, and that
nature does not deserve any other rationality than the irrationality
with which capitalism deals with and destroys it?

The crisis of left politics of the last thirty or forty years derives in
part from the weak-weak answers that the conventional left has given to
this question. The conception of an alternative society and the struggle
for it have been the back bones of both critical theory and left
politics throughout the twentieth century. Such conception, however
vague, was consistent enough to serve as evaluation criterion of the
life conditions of the working class, excluded social groups, and 
victims of discrimination. On the basis of this alternative vision and
the credible possibility of fulfilling it, it would be possible to
consider the present as violent, intolerable, and morally repugnant. The
strength of Marxism resides in this unique capacity to articulate the
alternative future with the oppositional way of living the present.

In the last decades, however, neo-liberal conservatism became so
dominant that the left politics, particularly in the Global North, split 
into two fields, none of them, paradoxically, on the left. On the one
hand, there were those who took the eradication of the idea of an
alternative society to be such a devastating defeat that there would be
space left only for the old centrism dominated by the "more enlightened"
right; on the other, there were those who, in the absence of an
alternative, saw a victory capable of encouraging a new centrism, this
time dominated by the left (the UK labour party third way and its 
developments in Latin America). These two fields responded to the
perplexity caused by the question by denying any reason for perplexity.
 Indeed, as it is becoming more and more evident, these two fields were
two ways of announcing the death of the left and, in fact, ended up
being not easily distinguishable. They both missed some thing: without a
conception of an alternative society and without the politically
organized struggle to bring it about, the present, however violent and 
intolerable, would be depoliticized and, as a consequence, would stop
being a source of mobilization for revolt and opposition. This fact has
certainly not escaped the right. Bearing it in mind, the right has based 
its government, since the 1980s, not on the consensus of the victims,
but on their resignation.

The WSF, in contrast, offers a weak-strong answer to the question. It
takes the perplexity seriously and strongly claims that there are 
alternatives. But it does not define the content of such alternatives
and, according to some of its most radical critics, it does not even
respond to the question of whether these are alternatives to capitalism
or alternatives inside capitalism. It also claims the legitimacy of
utopian thinking but of a different kind than the one dominating at the
turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Rather than referring
to the conceptions that throughout the twentieth century conveyed the 
idea of an alternative society -- socialism, communism,
developmentalism, nationalism -- it insists that "another world is
possible". In abstract, this seems very little, but in the context it
emerges it amounts to a utopia of a new type(4). 

The hegemonic conception of our age which, as I said, has been accepted
by the conventional left, is that capitalism in the form of neo-liberal
globalization is both the only present that counts and the only possible
future. Whatever is currently dominant in social and political terms is
infinitely expansive, thereby encompassing all future possibilities. The
total control over the current state of affairs is deemed to be possible
by means of extremely efficient powers and knowledges. Herein lies the
radical denial of alternatives to present-day reality. This is the
context underlying the utopian dimension of the WSF, which consists in
asserting the existence of alternatives to neo-liberal 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 (2002). The possibility of alternatives is
discredited precisely for being utopian, idealistic, unrealistic. All
conservative utopias 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.
Neo-liberalism is one such conservative utopia for which the sole
criterion of efficiency is the market or the laws of the market. Its 
utopian character resides in the promise that its total fulfilment or
application cancels out all utopias. According to Hinkelammert, "this
ideology derives from its frantic anti-utopianism, the utopian promise
of a new world. The basic thesis is: whoever destroys utopia, fulfils
it" (2002: 278). What distinguishes conservative utopias 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 fulfilment of the present. Moreover, 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, 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 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 neo-liberalism 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 WSF puts in
question the totality of control claimed by neo-liberalism (whether as
knowledge or power) only to affirm credibly the possibility of
alternatives. Hence, the open nature of the alternatives. In a context
in which the conservative utopia prevails absolutely, it is more
important 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). Herein lies the mix of weakness and strength of its answer to 
the strong question about the possibility of alternatives.

The specificity of the WSF as critical utopia has one more dimension.
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
fulfilment of utopia was under way. The openness of the utopian
dimension of the WSF corresponds to the latter's 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,
focused 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 a strong agenda. This utopian design, which
is also an ethical design, privileges the ethical discourse, quite
evident in the WSF's Charter 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. Is the mix of weakness and
strength in the WSF's answer sustainable in the long run? Once the
counter-hegemonic globalization 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? This is the question that Walden Bello has recently raised
and to which I will turn below.

A SENSE OF URGENCY AND A SENSE OF CIVILIZATIONAL CHANGES
Another reason for the success of the WSF is the way it has dealt with 
the following paradoxical character of our time, probably another
symptom of its transitional nature.

Critical thinking and transformative practice are today torn apart by
two extreme and contradictory temporalities disputing the time frame of
collective action. On the one hand, there is a sense of urgency, the
idea that it is necessary to act now as tomorrow will probably be too
late. Global warming and the imminent ecological catastrophe, the
conspicuous preparation of a new nuclear war, the vanishing life 
sustainability of vast populations, the uncontrolled drive for eternal
war  and the violence and unjust destruction of human life it causes,
the depletion of natural resources, the exponential growth of social
inequality giving rise to new forms of social despotism, social regimes
only regulated by naked extreme power differences, all these facts seem
to impose that absolute priority be given to immediate or short run
action as the long run may not even exist if the trends expressed in
those facts are allowed to evolve without control. Most certainly the
pressure of urgency lies in different factors in the global North and in
the global South, but seems to be present everywhere.

On the other hand, there is a sense that our time calls for deep and
long-term civilizational changes. The facts mentioned above are symptoms
of deep seated structures and agencies which cannot be confronted by 
short-run interventionism as the latter is as much part of the
civilizational paradigm as the state of affairs it fights. The twentieth
century proved with immense cruelty that to take power is not enough,
that rather than taking power it is necessary to transform power. The 
most extreme versions of this temporality even call for the
transformation of the world without taking power (Holloway, 2004).

The coexistence of these polar temporalities is producing great
turbulence in old time distinctions and cleavages such as between
tactics and strategy, or reform and revolution. While the sense of
urgency calls for tactics and reform, the sense of civilizational
paradigmatic change calls for strategy and revolution. But the fact that
both senses coexist and are both pressing disfigures the terms of the 
distinctions and cleavages and makes them more or less meaningless and
irrelevant. At best, they become loose signifiers prone to contradictory
appropriations. There are reformist processes that seem revolutionary
(Hugo Chavez) and revolutionary processes that seem reformist
(Neo-zapatism) and reformist projects without reformist practice (Lula).
The fall of the Berlin Wall, while striking a mediatic mortal blow on
the idea of revolution, struck a silenced but not less deadly blow on
the idea of reform. Since then we live in a time that, on the one hand,
turns reformism into counter-reformism which, on the other, is either
too late to be post-revolutionary or too premature to be
pre-revolutionary. As a result, political polarizations become
relatively unregulated and with meanings which have very little to do
with the names attached to them.

In my view, the WSF captures very well this unresolved tension between
contradictory temporalities. Not just as an event but also as a process,
the WSF has fostered the full expression of both senses and even the
juxtaposition in the same panels, campaigns, coalitions of discourses
and practices that focus on immediate action and, on contrary, on long
term transformation. Calls for Immediate debt cancellation get
articulated with long duration campaigns of popular education concerning
HIV/Aids; denunciations of the criminalization of social protest by
indigenous peoples before the courts go hand in hand with the struggle
for the recognition of the cultural identity and ancestral territories
of the same peoples; the struggle for the immediate access to sufficient
potable water by the people of Soweto, in the wake of the privatization
of water supplies, becomes part and parcel of a long strategy to
guarantee sustainable access to water throughout the African Continent,
as illustrated in the constitution of the Africa Water Network in
Nairobi during the WSF-2007. 

These different timeframes of struggle coexist peacefully in the WSF for
three main reasons. Firstly, they translate themselves in struggles that
share the same radicalism, whether it concerns the maximum obtainable
now or the maximum obtainable in the long run. And the means of action
may also be equally radical. This constitutes a significant departure
from the conventional left throughout the twentieth century. For the
latter, the struggle for short range objectives was framed as legal
gradualism and therefore was conceived of as a non-radical,
institutional action. Secondly, mutual knowledge of such diverse
temporalities among movements and organizations has led to the idea that 
the differences among them are much wider in theory than in practice. A
radical immediate action may be the best way of giving credibility to
the need for a civilizational change, if for no other reason because of 
the unsurpassable obstacles it is bound to run against, as long as the
civilizational paradigm remains the same. This explains why some major
movements have been able to combine in their overall strategies the
immediate and the civilizational. This is the case of the MST (Movement
of the landless rural workers in Brazil) which combines illegal land
occupation to feed hungry peasants with massive actions of popular
political education aiming at a much broader transformation of the 
Brazilian state and society. The final reason for the coexistence of
contradictory temporalities is that the WSF does not set priorities
between them; it just opens the space for discussions and coalition
building among the movements and organizations, the outcomes of which
can be the most diverse. An overriding sense of a common purpose,
however vaguely defined, to build another possible world tends to
deemphasize polarizations among the movements and invite the latter to
concentrate on building more intense coalitions with the movements with 
which they have more affinities. Selectivity in coalition building
becomes a way of avoiding unnecessary polarization.

A GHOSTLY RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CRITICAL THEORY AND LEFTIST PRACTICES
The third reason for the success of the WSF lies in the way it deals 
with the gap between left practices and classical theories of the left,
which is broader today than ever. This is probably another feature of
the transitional nature of our time. 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 (5) 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 a result, there
seems to be emerging a mutual blindness between theory and practice — of
the practice vis-à-vis the theory and of the theory vis-à-vis the practice.

The reason for this lies in the fact that while critical thinking and
left theory was historically developed in the global North, indeed in
five or six countries of the global North, the most innovative and
effective transformative left practices of recent decades have been
occurring in the global South. One might argue that this is not a
completely new phenomenon as the anti-colonial struggles and the
movement of the non-aligned countries, founded in Bandung in 1955, also 
contributed important new concepts and ideas to the hegemonic
north-centric left script. This is true to a certain extent. But
contrary to what happened then, the new left practices not only occur in
unfamiliar places carried out by strange people, but they also speak 
very strange non-colonial languages (Aymara, Quechua, Guarani, Hindi,
Urdu, Arabic, ki-Zulu, ki-Kongo) or less hegemonic colonial languages
(such as Spanish and Portuguese) and their cultural and political
references are non-western. Moreover, when we translate their discourses
into a colonial language there is often no trace of the familiar
concepts with which western-based left politics was historically built,
such as revolution, socialism, working class, capital, democracy or
human rights, etc. Instead, we encounter land, water, territory, racism, 
dignity, respect, cultural and sexual oppression, pachamama, ubuntu,
control of natural resources, poverty and starvation, pandemics, such as
HIV/Aids, cultural identity, violence. The left thinking generated in 
the global North gets provincialized by the emergence of critical
understandings and practices of the world that do not fit the western
critical understandings and practices of the world. It is therefore not
surprising that the North-centric left thinking does not recognize as
belonging to the left some of the critical understandings and practices
emerging in the global South and that the latter often refuses to
include its experiences in the binary left/right, a North-centric 
binary, according to some of them.

The wild effects of the mirror games between blind theories and
invisible practices were brought to its climax in the WSF. The WSF,
which is the first internationalist gathering of the twentieth-first 
century, originated in the global South according to cultural and
political premises that defied all the hegemonic traditions of the left.
Its novelty, which was strengthened as the WSF moved from Porto Alegre
to Mumbai and later to Nairobi, lies in that such traditions rather than
being discarded were invited to be present but not in their own terms,
that is, as the sole legitimate traditions. They were invited along with 
many other traditions of critical knowledge, transformative practice and
conceptions of a better society.  The fact that movements and
organizations coming from disparate critical traditions -- united by a
very broadly defined purpose to fight against neo-liberal globalization
for an even more broadly defined aspiration to that "other world" that
is "possible" -- could interact during several days and plan for
collaborative actions had a profound and multifaceted impact on the
relationship between theory and practice.

The blindness of the theory results in the invisibility of the practice,
hence its sub-theorization, 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 reciprocal
blindness 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.

As I mentioned above, the experience of the WSF had a profound and
multifaceted impact on the relationship between theory and practice.

Firstly, it has made clear that the discrepancy between the left in 
books and the left in practice is more of a western problem. In other
parts of the world and even in the west among non-western populations
(such as indigenous peoples) there are other understandings of
collective action for which such discrepancy doesn't make sense. The 
world at large is full of transformative experiences and actors that are
not educated in the western left. Moreover, scientific knowledge which
has always been granted absolute priority in the western left books is
in the WSF's open space one form of knowledge among many others. It is
more important for certain movements and causes than for others and in
many instances it is resorted to in articulation with other knowledges,
lay, popular, urban, peasant, indigenous, women's, religious knowledges.

In this way, the WSF posed a new epistemological question: if social
practices and collective actors resort to different kinds of knowledge,
an adequate evaluation of their worth for social emancipation is
premised upon an epistemology, which, contrary to hegemonic
epistemologies in the west, does not grant a priori supremacy to
scientific knowledge (heavily produced in the North) thus allowing for a 
more just relationship among different kinds of knowledge. In other
words, there is no global social justice without global cognitive
justice. Therefore, in order to capture the immense variety of critical
discourses and practices and to valorize and maximise their 
transformative potential, an epistemological reconstruction is needed.
This means that we need not so much alternatives as we need an
alternative thinking of alternatives.

Such epistemological reconstruction must start from the idea that 
hegemonic left thinking and the hegemonic critical tradition, in
addition to being North-centric, are colonialist, imperialist, racist,
and sexist as well. To overcome this epistemological condition and
thereby decolonize left thinking and practice it is imperative to go 
South and learn from the South, but not from the imperial South (which
reproduces in the South the logic of the North taken as universal),
rather from the anti-imperial South (the metaphor for the systematic and 
unjust human suffering caused by global capitalism and the resistance
against it). Such an epistemology in no way suggests that North-centric
critical thinking and left politics must be discarded and thrown into 
the dustbin of history. Its past is in many respects an honourable past
and has significantly contributed to the liberation of the global South.
What is imperative, rather, is to start an intercultural dialogue and 
translation among different critical knowledges and practices:
South-centric and North-centric, popular and scientific, religious and
secular, female and male, urban and rural, etc., etc. This intercultural
translation I call the ecology of knowledges (6). 

The second impact of the WSF on the relationship between theory and
practice, and probably more decisively for its success, is the way it
has valued the diversity of philosophies, discourses, styles of action, 
political objectives present in its meetings. Two aspects must be
emphasised in this regard. On the one hand, the WSF has so far resisted
reducing its openness for the sake of efficacy or political coherence.
As I mention below, there is an intense debate inside the WSF about this
issue, but, in my view, the idea that there is no general theory of
social transformation capable of capturing and classifying the immense
diversity of oppositional ideas and practices present in the WSF has
been one of the most innovative and productive decisions. On the other
hand, this potentially unconditional inclusiveness has contributed to
create a new political culture that, as I mentioned above, privileges
commonalities to the detriment of differences, and fosters common action
even in the presence of deep ideological differences once the
objectives, no matter how limited in scope, are clear and adopted by
consensus.

In the antipodes of the idea of an all encompassing general theory or of
a correct line dictated from above, the coalitions and articulations
made possible among the social movements are generated from bottom-up, 
tend to be pragmatic and to last as long they are viewed to further each
movement's objectives. In other words, while in the tradition of the
conventional left, particularly in the global North, to politicise an 
issue was equivalent to polarize it, which often led to factionalism, in
the WSF another political culture seems to be emerging in which
politicization goes hand in hand with depolarization, with the search
for common grounds and agreed-upon limits of ideological purity or of 
ideological messiness. In my view, the possibility of global collective
action lies in the development of this political culture (more on this
below).

COMPULSIVE SELF-REFLEXIVITY AND THE UNFINISHED TASK OF THE WSF 
Since its beginning the WSF, has been intensely debated both inside,
among its participants, and outside, mostly among members of the
conventional left that from the WSF's inception have looked at it with a
suspicious eye. The themes of debate are numerous: the political nature 
of the WSF; its relationship with  the national struggles historically
conducted by the left;  goals, both hidden and explicit; ideological
makeup; internal democracy; limits of its globalness; sociological base 
in light of the profile of participants; exclusions; financial
dependency; transparency of decisions by organs with apparently no
decision power; relationships between NGOs and social movements;
organizational and political autonomy vis-à-vis particular states and 
left parties; representativeness; efficacy in changing the power
structures in the world; the role of intellectuals; etc., etc.. Along
the way, such debates and the evaluations they gave rise to led to
important organizational changes. I have argued elsewhere that, contrary
to the opinion of its critics, the WSF has shown a remarkable capacity
to reform itself (7). The issues of organization and representation have
been the main playing field upon which such capacity has been tested. In 
my view, the limitations of self-reform have lied so far less in the WSF
itself than in the global and national structural conditions under which
it unfolds.

The debates exploded after the WSF 2005 and were a conspicuous presence
in the WSF 2007, in Nairobi.  From 2005 onwards the debates started to
focus on the future of the WSF. Two different debates can be identified.
One debate focus on the profound changes the WSF should undergo in order
to keep up with the transformative energies it has unleashed.  From an
open space to a movement of movements? From talk shop to collective
action? Global political party? Deep changes in the Charter of
Principles in order to allow for political positions on major global 
concerns, such as the invasion of Iraq, the reform of the UN, or the
Israel/Palestine conflict? From consensus to voting? The other debate
focuses on whether the WSF has a future at all, whether it has exhausted
its potential, whether it should come to an end, opening space for other
types of global aggregation of resistance and alternative. This second
debate won particular notoriety with a recent paper (8) by Walden Bello, 
in which he asks:

'… having fulfilled its historic function of aggregating and linking the
diverse counter-movements spawned by global capitalism, is it time for
the WSF to fold up its tent and give way to new modes of global
organization of resistance and transformation?"

Before trying to answer this question, I would like to answer another
one, concerning the sociology of the debate: why has the debate been so
intense and why the more radically it questions the WSF the least 
consequences it has for the unfolding of the WSF process? Following very
closely the evolution of the WSF since the very beginning I have come to
three conclusions.

Firstly, the debate has been very intense since the first edition of the 
WSF and the issues being discussed fall into two categories. On the one
hand, issues that express the resistance to acknowledge the novelty of
the WSF vis-à-vis the traditions of the conventional left.  These are 
the issues of efficacy, ideological makeup, political goals, etc. On the
other hand, the issues that, recognizing the novelty of the WSF,
question certain aspects or features that might compromise such novelty.
These are the issues of global reach and representativeness, internal
democracy and transparency, relationships with states and financing
agencies. In my view, in both instances the intensity of the debate
confirms the novelty of the WSF in the global landscape of left 
politics. On one side, given this novelty, it has been difficult to map
the WSF within this landscape and any misfits become deficits whose
burden of proof falls on the WSF. On the other side, the novelty calls
for a radical departure from past experiences; the frustration caused by
the past is such that any "impurity" or underperformance is easily
converted into a suspicious vengeance of the past, a signal that such
departure has not been radical enough. In both cases, it is the novelty 
that mobilizes criticism and in a sense it is confirmed by it.  Our time
is so soaked, both on the right and on the left, in the neo-liberal
ideology of TINA (there is no alternative) that any institutional and
political novelty seems to be forced into compulsive self-reflexivity.

My second conclusion is that the criticisms that started from the
premise of the novelty of the WSF led in general to changes and
innovations aimed at correcting acknowledged deficiencies. The meetings
of the International Council in the last three years are abundant
evidence of this. In fact, I cannot think of any other organization of
the left in which the capacity for self-reform has been so consistent.

My third conclusion is that the most radical debates, those that call
for a radical transformation of the WSF or for its extinction, have very
little consequences and rarely leave the rooms or sites in which they 
take place to become topics of conversation among the activists that
have been joining the WSF process. I experienced this very notably in
Nairobi, in January 2007, the meeting in which more panels were
organized to discuss the future of the WSF. While in these panels very 
vehement discussions took place, outside peasants from Tanzania and
Uganda met their comrades from Kenya for the first time,  under the
auspices of the Via Campesina, and celebrated the "surprising" fact that
they shared the same problems caused by the same factors; women from all
over the world were busy preparing the second draft of the Manifesto on
reproductive and sexual rights, trying to overcome last minute
difficulties deriving from differences in the feminist consciousness and 
culture across continents, in this case most particularly focused on the
"sensibility" of African feminists; urban dwellers from different cities
of the planet were planning collective actions against forcible
evictions and the privatization of water supply; community leaders from
all over Africa were setting up the Africa Water Network and, together
with NGOs and human rights and health  movements and organizations from
all over the world, were planning the most comprehensive campaign
against HIV/Aids.

There is something in the structure and practice of the WSF that makes
it immune to radical questioning. Or better, the WSF is not an entity 
that fits the capacity for radical questioning to have real
consequences. The open space and process put in march by the WSF tends
to depolarize differences, to reform itself in light of constructive
criticisms and to ignore those that are identified as potentially
destructive. This resilience is, in my view, a sign that the WSF has not
yet fulfilled its "historical task", has not yet exhausted its potential.

This conclusion takes me to Walden Bello´s article "The Forum at the 
Crossroads"(9). After acknowledging all the accomplishments of the WSF,
very much in line with my analysis above, Bello argues, however, that
one of the criticisms against the WSF has become particularly relevant:
 "this is the charge that the WSF as an institution is unanchored in
actual global political struggles, and this is turning it into an annual
festival with limited social impact". He agrees with those for whom the 
liberal conception of the "open space" defended by many founders of the
WSF -- that is, the idea that the WSF cannot endorse any political
position or particular struggle, though its constituent groups are free
to do so -- has created the illusion that the WSF can stand above the
fray, turning the WSF into some sort of neutral forum, where discussion
will increasingly be isolated from action, draining "the energy of civil
society networks  [which] derives from their being engaged in political
struggles". This criticism has been addressed to the WSF since the very
beginning and I have myself subscribed to it (10). But while I see in it
just another opportunity for self-reform, Bello considers it as
dictating the death sentence of the WSF. The core argument is that the
WSF corresponded to a stage of anti-capitalist struggle that is over.
Its historical task consisted in bringing together old and new movements
and leading them to "the realization that they needed one another in the
struggle against global capitalism and that the strength of the
fledgling global movement lay in a strategy of decentralized networking
that rested not on the doctrinal belief that one class was destined to
lead the struggle but on the reality of the common marginalization of
practically all subordinate classes, strata, and groups under the reign
of global capital." This has now been accomplished and indeed the WSF
has been left behind by more advanced struggles.

Implied in the argument is the idea that the continuation of the WSF may
even become an obstacle to the success of these struggles. Bello's 
example of such a struggle is Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian revolution.
According to him, the polycentric WSF of 2006 in Caracas was so "bracing
and reinvigorating" because "it inserted some 50,000 delegates into the
storm center of an ongoing struggle against empire, where they mingled
with militant Venezuelans, mostly the poor, engaged in a process of
social transformation, while observing other Venezuelans, mostly the
elite and middle class, engaged in bitter opposition." Therefore,
"Caracas was an exhilarating reality check", that is, it showed that
"the WSF is at a crossroads." To make his argument even more explicit,
Bello argues that "Hugo Chavez captured the essence of the conjuncture
when he warned delegates in January 2006 about the danger of the WSF
becoming simply a forum of ideas with no agenda for action. He told
participants that they had no choice but to address the question of
power: 'We must have a strategy of 'counter-power.' We, the social 
movements and political movements, must be able to move into spaces of
power at the local, national, and regional level.'" For Bello, the
historical accomplishment of the WSF lies in having created the
conditions for such struggles to have now better chances of succeeding:

"developing a strategy of counter-power or counter-hegemony need not
mean lapsing back into the old hierarchical and centralized modes of
organizing characteristic of the old left. Such a strategy can, in fact, 
be best advanced through the multilevel and horizontal networking that
the movements and organizations represented in the WSF have excelled in
advancing their particular struggles. Articulating their struggles in 
action will mean forging a common strategy while drawing strength from
and respecting diversity."

I fully agree with Bello that Latin America is today in the forefront of
the struggle against imperialism and that Hugo Chavez represents the 
most advanced moment of such struggle, which is also very much in march
in Bolivia and Ecuador. Moreover, I think that the WSF, emerging in
Latin America, has contributed a great deal to this. Two questions,
however, still need to be asked. First, does the continuation of the WSF
interfere negatively with the future outcomes of these struggles?
Second, are the transformations on left politics brought about by the
WSF really so widespread and, if so, are they sustainable?

Concerning the first question, I think that the WSF has never claimed
that the correction of the errors of the past would imply the acceptance
of a single alternative path. Indeed, the core idea underlying the WSF 
is the celebration of the diversity of the struggles against exclusion
and oppression with the purpose of drawing from such celebration
additional energy and strength for the existing struggles and additional
creativity to develop new ones. To assume that the WSF may become
detrimental to the success of the most advanced struggles presupposes,
firstly, that there is a single and unequivocal criterion to establish
what is more and what is less advanced, and, secondly, that the
coexistence of struggles of different types, scales and degrees of
advancement is detrimental to the overall objective of building another
possible world. In my view none of this presuppositions is borne by
reality. The doubts about adopting any such single criterion, and the 
frustration with the historical record of some candidates to such a
privileged status, are at the core of the success of the WSF. Moreover,
even assuming that a general agreement is possible within the global
left about what is more or less advanced, it is hardly conceivable that
it is possible to progress at the same pace in the different struggles
against the different kinds of oppression in the different parts of the
world. On the contrary, the uneven and combined development of the
different anti-capitalist struggles -- probably, more evident now thanks
to the WSF -- will always mirror the uneven and combined development of
global capitalism. In the words of Chico Whitaker in response to Bello,
the WSF's crossroads are in fact two parallel paths that can co-exist,
as mutual sources of inspiration. Even assuming that the WSF has been
outpaced by other conceptions and practices of resistance and
alternative, it is important that the WSF continues to provide an anchor
for the struggles that still need it, and also reduce the negative
impact and the frustration caused by the eventual defeat of the most 
advanced struggles.
In a recent evaluation of the US Social Forum, Thomas Ponniah, even
though arguing that the USSF  "demonstrated the accuracy of both Bello
and Whitaker's arguments, affirming the importance of continuing the 
Social Forum process but on much more innovative, decisive, political
ground", recognizes that, in the last instance, the richness of the idea
of the WSF as an open space received a robust confirmation in the USSF. 
According to him,

"The U.S. Social Forum created an open space that allowed different
people's movements to come together from around the United States. For
the first time diverse activists from around the country were able to 
collectively interact in a non-hierachical, horizontal manner that
emphasized mutual understanding. The Open Space infrastructure
facilitated the possibility for a variety of movements to meet. If the
space had been dominated by one ideology, for example socialism, or if 
it had been dominated by one strategy, for example, statism, then it
would not have attracted so many movements… The Open Space permitted
activists to move away from focusing on the differences between social
movements and instead focusing on commonalities."

Even if we think that it was the weakness or backwardness of the US
left, combined with its multi-culturality, that made the format of the
WSF fit the USSF so well, we are thereby confirming the continuing
usefulness of the WSF. Particularly if we consider how crucial it is to
strengthen the US left in order to put an end to US imperialism.
To answer the second question involves an evaluation of the impact of
the WSF. To it I dedicate the next section of this article. 

THE WSF AND THE GLOBAL LEFT
Given the short period of the WSF's maturation, the inquiry into its
contribution to transforming critical theory and the global left 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.

In my view, the most salient features of the WSF's contribution are the
following, without any criterion of precedence: the passage from a
movement politics to an inter-movement politics, that is, to a politics 
run by the idea that no single issue social movement can succeed in
carrying out its agenda without the cooperation of other movements;
broad conception of power and oppression; network politics based on
horizontal relations and on combining autonomy with aggregation;
intercultural nature of the left and of the very concept of what is
considered to be  "left" and, following from this, the idea of cognitive
justice functioning as an important political criterion; a new political 
culture around diversity; different conceptions of democracy
(demodiversity) and their evaluation according to transnational and
transcultural criteria of radical democracy conceived of as the
transformation of unequal power relations into shared authority
relations in all fields of social life; combined struggle for the
principle of equality and for the principle of recognition of
difference; privileging rebellion, non-conformism and insurgency
vis-à-vis reform and revolution;  sustained effort not to convert
militants into functionaries; pragmatic combination of short term and
long term agendas; articulation between different scales of struggle,
local, national and global, together with an intensified awareness of
the need to match global capitalism with global anti-capitalism; focus
on transversality both in terms of themes and processes; broad
conception of means of struggle with the coexistence of legal and
illegal action (barring illegal violence against people), direct and 
institutional action, action inside and outside the capitalist state;
pragmatic conception of differences and commonalities, with emphasis on
the latter; refusal of correct lines, general theories and central
commands in favour of agreed upon  aggregations and depolarized pluralities.

The last contribution is probably the most crucial and needs some
elaboration (11). But before doing that and assuming that these
different contributions to the reinvention of the left in the twentieth
first century are important, one should realize that the end of the WSF
would be fully justified if and when such contributions had been fully
internalised by the left throughout the world, and particularly by the 
left involved in the more advanced struggles. If this is accepted as the
criterion to decide whether or not the WSF has a future, I think that it
cannot be reasonably argued that the historical task of the WSF has been 
completed. It would be indeed overly optimistic to think that the
transformations on the left under the impact of the WSF are widespread
and are fully present in the more advanced struggles. Much less can it
be argued that the internalised contributions so far are internalised in
a sustainable way. On the contrary, I think that, in light of this
criterion, the task of the WSF is far from being completed.

Moreover, I think that the continuation of the WSF (with all the changes
that might improve its performance) will become more crucial in the
coming years, for two main reasons. Firstly, in recent years,
globalisation is assuming the form of regionalization. In the Americas,
in Africa, in Asia and, of course, in Europe new kinds of regional pacts 
are emerging and, in some instances, they assume the form of a new kind
of nationalism, what I call transnational nationalism. Just like
globalisation, regionalisation may be hegemonic and counter-hegemonic.
But in both cases, and for different reasons, it may contribute to
isolate the progressive movements and organizations of one region from
those of other regions. It may be argued that the other side of this
reciprocal isolation will be the strengthening of coalition building 
inside the same region, which will probably contribute to more advanced
struggles at the regional level. I think, however, that, as long as
capitalism remains global in its reach, regionalism will be in the end
instrumental to deepen its global nature. If so, it would be disastrous
for the construction of that other world that is possible if the
possibilities for trans-regional linkages and collective action -- such
as those offered by the WSF -- were diminished. Secondly, I suspect that 
we are probably heading for more difficult times.  The securitarian and
bellicose ideology that is taking hold of both internal and
international politics is going to make it more difficult for activists
to organize and even more difficult to cross borders. The 
criminalization of social protest is under way. The global vocation of
the WSF will be all the more needed when it becomes crucial to make
visible and to denounce the restrictions on organizations and
mobilizations being implemented on a global scale. 

The sustainability of the impact of the WSF on global left politics is
an open question depending on the ways the WSF will reform  and reinvent
itself as new conditions and new challenges  arise. I would like to 
conclude this article by drawing attention to the most precious
contribution of the WSF, the one that most unequivocally calls for the
dynamic continuation of the WSF.

TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY LEFT: DEPOLARISED PLURALITIES AND INTERCULTURAL
TRANSLATION
One of the remote sources of the ghostly relationship between theory and
action that, as indicated above, became so extreme in the last decades
was, to my mind, the virulent, theoretical extremism that dominated the 
conventional left throughout the twentieth century. As a result, left
politics 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 gathered a diffuse will to join forces
against the avalanche of neo-liberalism 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 and beginning of the 
twenty-first.

In this context, pragmatism combined with the reconceptualization of
diversity as a strength rather than as a liability became a tremendous
source of energy and political creativity. The WSF showed eloquently
that no totality can contain the inexhaustible diversity of the theories
and practices of the world left today. Therefore, diversity rather than
an obstacle to unity becomes the condition for unity. In view of the 
heavy weight of the past, this is no easy task and demands continuous
vigilance and reinforcement. It will be based on two pillars:
depolarized pluralities and intercultural translation. Given their
novelty and counter-factuality they can be easily perverted into their 
opposites, new polarizations and new monocultural impositions. Though
the WSF is no guarantee that this may not occur, without it or without
some other entity with a similar profile this is exactly what will most 
certainly occur.

DEPOLARIZED PLURALITIES
As I mentioned above, the WSF has created a political environment in
which politicisation may occur by means of depolarisation. This is
particularly crucial in the case of global or transnational collective
action, that is, action across national borders and cultures. It
consists in 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 depriving differences of the conspicuous capacity for
thwarting collective actions. In other words, the point is to create 
contexts for debate, in which the drive for union and similarity may
have at least 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. It amounts to a
new paradigm of transformative and progressive action.

The construction of depolarised pluralities can only take place in the 
process of deciding about concrete collective actions. The priority
conferred to participation in collective actions, by means of
articulation or coalition, has a first effect which is precious in light
of the factionalist heritage of the left: it allows for the suspension
of the question of the political 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 with the conception or unfolding of the
collective action. Indeed the latter can never be the result of abstract
subjects. In light of my reconstruction of the WSF's contribution to the
left of the twentieth first century, 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, it is particularly important not to squander any social 
experience of resistance on the part of the exploited, excluded or
oppressed, 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 their ability to change the ground and
terms of the conflict during the struggle. That is, by the concrete
transformation of unequal power relations into shared authority
relations in the specific social field in which the collective action
takes place. Success, in turn, is the only credible measure of the
correctness of the theoretical positions assumed.
5.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 on productive questions.

To my mind, the struggle for another possible world will be made of a
rich and internally diversified constellation of struggles. To the
extent that global collective struggles will be part of it, depolarised
pluralities will be a necessary condition of possibility of such
struggles.

INTERCULTURAL TRANSLATION
The other major contribution of the WSF to the reinvention of the global
left in the twentieth first century is indeed a promise, the creation of 
a need, which up until now, has not been satisfied. It refers to the
methodology to maximize the consistency and the strength of depolarised
pluralities. With the WSF it became clear that the global left is
multicultural. This means that the differences that divide the left 
escape the political terms that formulated them in the past. Underlying
some of 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 has thereby been 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.

As I mentioned above, the political theory of western modernity, whether
in its liberal or Marxist version, constructed diversity as an obstacle
to unity and 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.  As I mentioned, 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 cannibalised by false universalisms
or false single strategies propounded by any general theory. The WSF
underwrites the idea that the world is an inexhaustible totality, as it
holds many totalities, all of them partial. Accordingly, there is no
sense in attempting to grasp the world by any single general theory,
because any such theory will always presuppose 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. In other words, we need a
negative universalism: a general agreement on the fact that no
individual, no single theory or no single practice has the infallible
recipe to conceive of another possible world and to bring it about.

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 without jeopardizing
their identity and autonomy, without, in other words, reducing them to
homogeneous entities.

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 up until then was only latent.
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 from the others. Their identity is thereby created on
the basis of what separates them from all the others. The feminist 
movement sees itself as very distinct from the labour movement, and
vice-versa; both distinguish themselves from the indigenous movement or
the ecological movement; and so on and so forth. All these distinctions
and separations have actually translated themselves into very practical
differences, if not even into contradictions that contribute to bringing
the movements apart and to fostering rivalries and factionalisms. From 
this derives the fragmentation and atomisation that are the dark side of
diversity and multiplicity.

This dark side has lately been pointedly acknowledged by the movements
and NGOs. The truth is, however, that none of them individually has had 
the capacity or credibility to confront it, because, 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/articulation made possible by the WSF is
of low intensity. The goals are limited, very often circumscribed to
mutual knowledge or, at the most, to recognize differences and make them
more explicit and better known. Under these circumstances, joint action
cannot but be limited. (12)

The challenge that counter-hegemonic globalisation faces now may be
formulated in the following way. The forms of aggregation and 
articulation made possible by the WSF were sufficient to achieve the
goals of the phase that may be now coming to an end. Deepening the WSF's
goals in a new phase 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
project is to promote counter-hegemonic practices that combine
ecological, pacifist, indigenous, feminist, workers' and other 
movements, and to do so in an horizontal way 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 expand reciprocal
intelligibility without destroying the identity of the partners of 
translation. 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 reinforce what is common in the diversity of
counter-hegemonic drive. Cancelling out what separates is out of the
question. The goal is to reduce to a minimum the conditions under which 
the acknowledgment of differences precludes the possibility of
articulating and cooperating . Through translation work, diversity is
celebrated, not as a factor of fragmentation and isolationism, but
rather as a condition of sharing and solidarity. The work of translation
concerns both knowledges and actions (strategic goals, organization,
styles of struggle and agency). Of course, in the practice of the
movements, knowledges and actions are inseparable. However, for the
purposes of translation, it is important to distinguish between contact 
zones in which the interactions focus mainly on knowledges, and contact
zones in which interactions focus mainly on actions (13).

The work of intercultural and inter-political translation has just
started among some movements participating in the WSF. Practice has 
shown that such work is needed not only to densify the network of
transformative practices across movements but also inside the same
movement, that is, among its different national or regional expressions.
In this regard, the feminist movement is probably the most advanced, as 
illustrated by the conversations inside feminist movements in Latin
America  around community-based conceptions of liberation, prevalent
among indigenous and afro-descendant movements, and individual-based
conceptions of liberation, prevalent among western movements. It is 
imperative that the WSF grant more priority in the future to the work of
mutual translation among and within movements.

CONCLUSION
The WSF is unquestionably the first large international progressive
movement after the neo-liberal backlash at the beginning of the 1980s. 
Its future is the future of trust in an alternative to la pensée unique
(single 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 neo-liberal
globalisation. The fact that the latter has been acquiring a bellicose
component fixated on security will no doubt affect the evolution of the
WSF. The future of the WSF depends in part on the evaluation of its 
trajectory up until now and the conclusions drawn from it, with a view
to enlarging and deepening its counter-hegemonic efficaciousness.  One
thing seems clear: it is still too early to say that after the WSF the 
global left will not be the same. Ultimately, this is why the WSF must
continue.

* 

NOTES
1. For a better understanding of the political character and goals of
the World Social Forum, see the Charter of Principles, available at 
http://www.forumsocialmundial.org.br.
2. One of the most paradigmatic examples is the poverty - conceptual
hubris coupled with bloodless narrow positivism - of the mainstream US 
sociology of social movements (McAdam, McCarthy, Zald, 1996; McAdam,
Tarrow, Tilly, 2001).
3. See Santos, 1995.
4. By 'utopia' I mean the exploration of new modes of human possibility
and styles of will, and the use of the imagination to confront the 
apparent inevitability of whatever exists with something radically
better that is worth fighting for, and to which humankind is fully
entitled (Santos, 1995: 479).
5. In English, Free Trade Area of the Americas - FTAA. 
6. See Santos, 2004, 2006.
7. See Santos, 2006.
8. See Bello, 2007.
9. See Yearbook Global Civil Society 2006
10. See next section.
11. A good example was the first European Social Forum held in Florence
in November of 2002. 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.
12. I deal with this issue in greater detail in Santos 2006.