Juan José Tamayo, Emeritus of the "Ignacio Ellacuría" Chair of Theology and Religious Sciences. Carlos III University of Madrid.
Provocative questions
Why is it so difficult today to construct philosophical theories and critical social sciences, when there is so much to criticize, when there are more and more situations that arouse discomfort, even indignation, and lead to nonconformity in all scenarios: cultural, political, economic, social, ecological, legal? This is demonstrated by the popular protests in the Arab world against autocrats, the student mobilizations; the movement of the Indignados, which began in May 2011 in Spain and spread throughout the world, the massive calls against the war from all social sectors, the Arab Spring, the World Social Forums, the Movement for Alternatives, the World Forum on Theology and Liberation, etc.
Why is it so difficult to propose development alternatives from political and economic sciences, when the great promises of freedom, equality and perpetual peace of modernity were left unfulfilled and, when the realization of some promises such as that of dominating nature, has had such perverse consequences for the planet? Can a postmodern thought of opposition be formulated that recovers these promises and goes beyond the deconstruction and political disenchantment of the dominant postmodernity? How to fight against hegemonic globalization and what strategies to follow in favor of a counter-hegemonic globalization? How can we counteract the proliferation or, better, the structural growth of exclusion in the Third World, which is on its way to leading to social fascism? How do we approach the task of reinventing the state, democracy and political culture to respond to this situation?
These are all questions of great importance to which Boaventura de Sousa Santos (Coimbra, Portugal, 1940), PhD in Sociology of Law from Yale University, Professor of Sociology at the Faculty of Economics, former Director of the Center for Social Studies, has been giving answers with scientific rigor, intellectual creativity and in tune with social movements for more than five decades. Coordinator of the Permanent Observatory of Portuguese Justice at the University of Coimbra (Portugal) and Distinguished Legal Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (U.S.A.) Law School.
In 2003 his work Crítica de la razón indolente appeared in Spain. Against the Waste of Experience (Desclée de Brouwer, Bilbao, 2003)- Two years later The Orphan Millennium was published. Ensayos para una nueva cultura política (Trotta, Madrid, 2005). I dealt with them in two reviews of the newspaper El País and they served to get to know the creative thinking and critical theory of Boaventura de Sousa Santos. In 2009 I read Critical Legal Sociology. For a New Common Sense in Law (Trotta, Madrid, 2009). They are three major works that offer fundamental keys to the elaboration of a critical theory of society, politics, economics and law.
In 2014 he published two works that can be considered foundational of the new paradigm of the Epistemologies of the South: Epistemologies of the South. Justice against Epistemicide (Paradigme Publisher, London, 2014) and Epistemologies of the South. Perspectivas (Akal, Madrid, 2014), co-directed with María Paula Meneses. To these must be added If God Were a Human Rights Activist (Trotta, Madrid, 2014), which is an approach to the political theologies of liberation elaborated in and from the global South. In 2017 Justice among knowledges: Epistemologies of the South against epistemicide (Morata, Madrid) appeared. In April 2019, The End of the Cognitive Empire was published. The affirmation of the Epistemologies of the South (Trotta, Madrid, 2019), where he defends the need for an epistemological transformation that guarantees global cognitive justice as a necessary condition for global justice.
Transgressive thinking
Boaventura de Sousa Santos's intellectual itinerary is not precisely characterized by the installation in the system, or even in a single discipline or branch of knowledge, but by the search for and transgression of disciplinary boundaries. In all his works, the most varied disciplines interact harmoniously: philosophy, from Aristotle to Foucault, political science, social sciences, legal sciences, philosophy of law, legal sociology, anthropology, aesthetics, literary criticism and the sciences of religions. I have the honor of having contributed to your dedication to the latter in our meetings and texts in permanent dialogue. The result is a dynamic, plural, non-corseted way of thinking, open to the new cultural climates and the many challenges of our time.
From the beginning he confesses his true socio-cultural location. "I'm not a modernist. And I am not a postmodernist in the aforementioned sense (celebratory postmodernism)." Between the two he proposes a third position: "postmodernism of opposition", from which he defends that there are modern problems for which there are no modern solutions. The modern paradigm can contribute to the solutions we seek, but it can never produce them.
Santos is one of the most creative social scientists on the current intellectual landscape. He has a great capacity for innovation both in his own language loaded with images, symbols and intuitions, as well as in the contents and proposals, and he knows how to coherently articulate critical analyses with alternatives, protests with proposals, ethical indignation with political reconstruction, critical theory with historical utopias. Far from traveling along well-trodden paths, he opens new paths in research and writing.
The symbol makes you think, said Paul Ricoeur. I think that the same can be applied to Boaventura's itinerant and non-installed thought: it gives us food for thought, because it has been thought and meditated on in depth and with the radicalism of a transgressive thought. He places himself in the critical tradition of modernity, although with a distance in fundamental aspects, precisely in those who were born already sick and developed pathologically.
While modern critical theory persists in its efforts to develop emancipatory possibilities within the dominant paradigm, the Portuguese social scientist believes that it is not possible to conceive genuine emancipatory strategies in this field, since they all end up being transformed into regulatory strategies dictated by the system itself and, ultimately, at the service of the dominant paradigm, which is more exclusive than welcoming in all fields. that of knowledge and that of daily life, that of politics and economics, that of religion and culture.
It is necessary to design, through the utopian imagination, a new horizon where the emerging paradigm is announced. A horizon that points everywhere in social movements and in the struggles of global resistance, in the social sciences and in the sciences of religions, but to which the gatekeepers of modernity are still insensitive, many of them converted into fundamentalists of modern values with an expiration date, which, nevertheless, they want to impose on all humanity and nature, as the most developed and, therefore, the one with the greatest universalist projection.
The critical theory of Modernity must be transformed into a "new emancipatory common sense", believes Santos, who defines his intellectual work as a double excavation:
a) in the cultural garbage generated by the canon of Western modernity, with a well-defined objective: to recover the traditions, alternatives and utopias expelled from it;
b) in colonialism and neo-colonialism, to discover more egalitarian and reciprocal relations between Western culture and other cultures. The excavation is motivated not by an archaeological interest, but by the desire to identify, in the midst of the ruins, epistemological, cultural, social and political fragments that help to reinvent social emancipation.
The work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos is transgressive in all the fields of research in which he works. At least three levels should be highlighted in its transgression:
a) That of the boundaries between academic disciplines, since it circulates with great freedom and competition through all of them: epistemology and law, literature and history, anthropology and psychology, moral and political philosophy, sociology and political science.
b) That of geographical and cultural borders, due to its cosmopolitanism in scientific work, especially in countries of the global South, but not from the neutrality of a distant researcher, but through a vital immersion, political commitment and a multidirectional dialogue between theories and actors from all latitudes.
c) That of the jealously respected separation in the academic field, between theory and practice, by establishing an intrinsic connection between the two.
Reinventing the law beyond the neoliberal model
His book Critical Legal Sociology. For a New Common Sense in Law (Trotta, Madrid, 2009) is a new demonstration that the academic and research itinerary of the Portuguese intellectual, social scientist and critical jurist is characterized by interdisciplinary work, the transgression of disciplinary boundaries and the proposal of alternatives. The key question that arises is how to reinvent the law beyond the neoliberal and democratic-socialist model, without falling into the conservative agenda and how to achieve it in order to combat the latter efficiently.
The answer is a new critical theory of law that translates into the proposal of the legality of subaltern, insurgent cosmopolitanism, based on the counter-hegemonic use of law and rights. The most diverse disciplines interact in the book: philosophy, from Aristotle to Foucault, the philosophy of law, political science, social sciences, legal sciences, aesthetics, social thought, etc. The result is an interdisciplinary masterpiece of sociology of law.
New critical theory of society
We live in times of paradigmatic transition. With the consolidation of the convergence between the paradigm of modernity and capitalism, from the middle of the nineteenth century, a process of degradation was entered into by the transformation of emancipatory energies into regulatory energies. And that's where we are. Regulation has eaten the ground for emancipation, and even those of us who believe we are emancipated live installed in regulation.
The collapse of emancipation places this paradigm in its final crisis, without the possibility of renewal. Now, among the ruins there are signs, however vague, of the emergence of a new paradigm. In his work Critique of Indolent Reason. Against the waste of experience, Santos defines the parameters of the paradigmatic transition at its double level, epistemological and social, and in three fields, science, law and power, which constitute the central object of his critique, as they are the ones that occupy a central place in the configuration and trajectory of the paradigm of Western modernity.
Boaventura lays the foundations for a new critical theory of society, convinced that the inherited social sciences are not capable of accounting for the new sociocultural, economic and political climates. However, he is not unaware of the difficulties in building it and faces the challenges rigorously. There are four main lines on which the new theory is based. The first is a new theory of history as a response to the challenge of technological renewal that achieves two objectives: to incorporate silenced, marginalized and discredited social experiences, to reconstruct nonconformity and social indignation, and to seek alternatives.
The guide in this search is Walter Benjamin's allegory of history in his commentary on Klee' s painting Angelus Novus, about the "angel of history" who turns his face towards the past, where he observes a perennial catastrophe that piles up ruins, sips ruins and throws them at his feet, an image of the accumulation of suffering in history. Hegel had already announced it, defining human history as the butcher's bench. It is one of the most incisive criticisms of the modern philosophy of "progress", the predominant one in Western thought, especially in the philosophy of history and in social democratic political theory and practice, questioned by Walter Benjamin.
The second focuses on overcoming the prevailing North-centric and Western preconceptions in the social sciences. De Santos shows the coloniality of power and knowledge in all its extension, and expands the criteria and principles of social inclusion through new synergies between equality and difference that must be reconstructed multiculturally.
The third is the reinvention of knowledge as emancipation and as ethical interrogation, with three important implications for the social sciences: the passage from monoculturalism to multiculturalism and from multiculturalism to interculturality; that of heroic specialized knowledge to edifying and contextualized knowledge; that of conformist action to rebellious action.
The fourth is to give priority to the theoretical reconstruction and political refoundation of the State and democracy in times of globalization. "Contrary to what neoliberal globalization claims, the state continues to be a decisive field of social action and political struggle, and democracy is something much more complex and contradictory than the hasty recipes promoted by the World Bank would have us suppose." The necessary condition for confronting the social exclusion that affects more and more human beings is to carry out a double reinvention: that of the State and that of democracy.
New forms of domination and refoundation of the State and democracy
Santos conceives the State as a "very new social movement", which demands the democratic refoundation of the public administration to make efficiency compatible with democracy and equity, and to achieve an improvement in results without falling into the limitation of privatization. Another indispensable democratic refoundation is that of the third sector, which requires a correct articulation between it and the State, without having to lead to the complementarity of both or to the substitution of one by the other. The third sector is subject to the same vices as the State. In many countries it has not yet been democratized and easily falls into paternalism and authoritarianism.
Inseparable from the two previous reinventions is the reinvention of democracy. The values of modernity, freedom, equality, autonomy, subjectivity, justice, solidarity, and the antinomies between them, the professor from Coimbra and Wisconsin believe, survive, but they are subject to a growing symbolic overload. They come to mean increasingly disparate things for different groups and people, to the point that the excess of meaning paralyzes the effectiveness of these values and, therefore, neutralizes them.
Santos proposes suggestive alternatives for theoretical and analytical reconstruction focused on the State, democracy and globalization. To this end, it seeks a new equation between the principle of equality and that of the recognition of difference in the face of the two systems of hierarchical belonging in the paradigm of modernity in its capitalist version: the system of inequality and the system of exclusion. He draws attention to the fallacies of globalization, including determinism and the disappearance of the South. And, very importantly, it establishes a distinction and differentiation between hegemonic globalization and counter-hegemonic globalization.
One of the important elements to take into account in the critical analysis of the paradigm of modernity is that there is not a single form of domination or a single principle of social transformation, but many and interconnected ones. Domination and oppression are presented with multiple faces, some of which, like patriarchal domination, have barely been the object of attention of modern critical theory, which has passed through it as if by embers, hardly paying attention to it; worse still, reinforcing it even more.
The Five Monocultures and the Five Ecologies
The most suggestive and creative chapter of The Orphan Millennium is, in my opinion, the one entitled "Towards a sociology of absences and a sociology of emergencies", which summarizes the theoretical and epistemological reflections of an extensive research project in six countries belonging to different continents (Mozambique, South Africa, Brazil, Colombia, India and Portugal). whose main objective was to show what possibilities there are to carry out alter globalization from below, that is, from social movements and non-governmental organizations, and what its limits are.
It takes up again the critique of indolent reason in its various forms: impotent, arrogant, metonymic and proleptic, which underlies the hegemonic knowledge produced in the West during the last two centuries and which unfolded in the context of the consolidation of the liberal State, industrial revolutions, capitalist development, colonialism and imperialism. The critique focuses on metonymic reason, which operates obsessively with the idea of totality in the form of order and is today the dominant one. It is here that Boaventura de Santos designs his original sociology of absences and emergencies.
He analyzes, first, the world of the five monocultures, a world that wastes experience:
a) monoculture of knowledge, which believes that the only knowledge is rigorous knowledge (epistemicide);
b) monoculture of progress, of linear time, which understands history as a path of a single direction: ahead goes the advanced, developed world; the rest is residual, obsolete;
c) monoculture of the naturalization of hierarchies, which considers a phenomenon inscribed in nature, and therefore believes hierarchies unchangeable for reasons of race, ethnicity, class, gender;
d) monoculture of the universal as the only valid one, regardless of the context; the opposite of the universal is vernacular, it lacks validity; the global takes precedence over the local;
(e) a monoculture of productivity, which defines human reality by the criterion of economic growth as an unquestionable rational objective; a criterion that is applied to human labor, but also to nature, which has become an object of exploitation and predation; Whoever does not produce is lazy, lazy.
The five monocultures provoke five main social forms of non-existence legitimized by metonymic reason: the unbelievable, the ignorant, the residual, the local, and the unproductive.
Boaventura questions each of the five monocultures, all of them constructions of Western modernity, and proposes the corresponding answers:
a) In contrast to the monoculture of scientific knowledge, it offers the ecology of different forms of knowledge with the necessary dialogue and the unavoidable confrontation between them.
b) In contrast to the logic of linear time, which is a secularization of the eschatology of Judaism and Christianity, he designs the ecology of temporalities, which positively values the different temporalities as ways of living contemporaneity, without establishing hierarchies or value judgments about them, for example, between the activity of the African or Asian peasant. that of the World Bank executive and that of the U.S. hi-tech farmer . Both activities have different temporal rhythms, but equally valid; The recognition of the different temporalities implies the recovery of their corresponding ways of life, manifestations of sociability and productivity processes.
c) In contrast to the monoculture of social classification, which tries to identify difference with inequality, the ecology of recognitions appears, which seeks a new articulation between both notions giving rise to "equal differences"; this ecology of differences is constructed on the basis of reciprocal recognitions; this implies the reconstruction of difference as a product of hierarchy and of hierarchy as a product of difference.
d) In the face of the monoculture of the universal as the only valid one, he presents the ecology of trans-scales, valuing the local as such, deglobalizing it, that is, placing it outside of hegemonic globalization, where the local is undervalued, even despised, ignored. Is there no room then for the globalization of the local? Yes, Boaventura answers, but he clarifies that it is a "counter-hegemonic reglobalization", which expands the diversity of social practices. It is an exercise in cartographic imagination to discover at each scale both what it shows and what escapes and to seek a new articulation of the global and the local, in which this is not swallowed up by the former.
e) In the face of the productivist monoculture of capitalist orthodoxy, which prioritizes the objectives of accumulation over those of distribution, it defends the ecology of social productions and distributions, that is, the need to recover and value other alternative systems of production, such as workers' cooperatives, "fair trade", self-managed enterprises, etc. of popular economic organizations, of the solidarity economy, etc., discredited by orthodox capitalism.
A subaltern God and human rights activist
It is worth highlighting the sensitivity that Boaventura shows in his most recent research and interventions towards the role of religions and progressive and pluralist political theologies in the processes of reinvention of knowledge, of the State, of democracy, of counter-hegemonic human rights, and in social movements. This is a field in which he has made relevant contributions, as he demonstrated at the World Forum on Theology and Liberation, held in Porto Alegre (Brazil) from January 21 to 25, 2005, where we met personally, we melted into an embrace, I thanked him for the clairvoyance and luminosity of his texts and he thanked me for having written a review of his book La razón indolente. I believe that it was in this Forum that he initiated a fruitful dialogue between the critical theory of society and theology in a liberating perspective, which reached its zenith with his aforementioned work If God Were a Human Rights Activist. I thank him for the numerous references he makes in it to my socio-theological works and their incorporation into the final bibliography. They are the best expression of our harmony on the road to another world possible by the path of learned hope, as Ernst Bloch said.
Boaventura notes that we live in a time when scandalous social injustices and unjust human suffering do not generate the moral indignation and political will to combat them and to build a more just and egalitarian society. In these circumstances, we cannot waste any of the social experiences of an emancipatory nature that can contribute to this construction.
As an active participant in the WSF he observes that many activists in the struggle for socio-economic, ecological, ethnic, sexual and postcolonial justice support their activism and their claims in Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, indigenous religious beliefs or spiritualities, etc. It is the emergence of new subjectivities that combine anti-globalization militancy with transcendent or spiritual references, which, far from distancing them from the material and historical struggles for another possible world, commit them with more radicalism and depth.
All religions, he recognizes, have a potential to develop liberating political theologies, which are capable of being integrated into counter-hegemonic struggles for human rights and against neoliberal globalization, and which can be a source of radical energy in such struggles.
It makes a rigorous analysis – both for its content and depth, as well as for its breadth of knowledge – of such political theologies: Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Palestinian, etc., feminist theologies, intercultural and interreligious theologies that theoretically ground the relationship between religious experience and counter-hegemonic commitment, and refer to emancipatory practices. In turn, it identifies the main challenges that these theologies pose to human rights.
These religious discourses do not conform to the Enlightenment conception of religion, which places it in the private sphere and confines it to places of worship, but defends its presence in the public sphere, but not by means of an alliance with power, but located in spaces of marginalization and exclusion. linked to social movements, respectful, while critical, with the autonomy of temporal realities and the process of secularization, and without any pretension of confessionalizing society, politics, culture, etc.
In short, what Boaventura does is an exercise in intercultural translation of the two normative policies that aim to operate globally: that of human rights and that of liberating political theologies, seeking areas of contact from which new or renewed energies can emerge to carry out a radical social, political, economic and cultural transformation.
If God were a human rights activist is certainly a metaphorical conditional to which de Sousa Santos gives a metaphorical response: "If God were a human rights activist, He or She would definitely be in search of a counter-hegemonic conception of human rights and a practice consistent with it. In doing so, sooner or later this God would confront the God invoked by the oppressors and would find no affinity with This or That. In other words, He or She would come to the conclusion that the God of the subalterns cannot but be a subaltern God."
This definition of God as "subaltern" is in full accord with the image of God in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim tradition as the God who chooses impoverished individuals and groups, the God to whom the Jewish prophet Jeremiah gives the name "Justice": "Yahweh, our righteousness. That is his name (Jeremiah 33:16). Boaventura's definition of God seems to me to be very accurate, as is José Saramago's: "God is the silence of the universe, and the human being is the cry that gives meaning to that silence." These are the two definitions that I like the most of the many that I have read and with which I identify.
The limits of discursive rationality
Santos distances himself from the Eurocentric critical tradition with the aim of opening analytical spaces for "surprising" realities, where liberating emergencies can emerge. It recognizes the masterful intellectual reconstruction of Western modernity carried out by Jürgen Habermas, but also the limits of a second modernity built on the first. What characterizes the second modernity is the abysmal line it establishes between Western and colonial societies. A line that Habermas captures with great lucidity, but that he is not able to surpass.
The German philosopher believes that with his theory of communicative action, as a new universal model of discursive rationality, both relativism and eclecticism can be overcome. But, asked if this theory can be useful to the progressive forces of the Third World and to the struggles for democratic socialism in democratic countries, the German philosopher answers: "I am tempted to answer no in both cases. I am convinced that this is a limited and Eurocentric vision. I'd rather not have to answer." An apophatic answer that Santos interprets correctly, I think, in this way: "despite its proclaimed universality, Habermas's communicative rationality excludes, de facto, the effective participation of four-fifths of the world's population. Exclusion that takes place in the name of a supposed universality and with the utmost honesty. We are facing a "benevolent but imperial universalism".
But not everything is imperial universalism and dominant in Western modernity. There are other marginalized versions that must be recovered. They are those that were made invisible, silenced and marginalized "for doubting the triumphalist certainties of the Christian faith, of modern science and of law, which simultaneously produced the abyssal line and made it invisible," says Boaventura, showing us the way for the search for utopias, Western or not, of yesterday and today from the "epistemologies of the South." one of the most creative contributions of Professor Santos, which I analyze below.
Epistemologies of the South
In 1995 Boaventura formulated with great lucidity the three orientations on which an Epistemology of the South would be based: "to learn that the South exists, to learn to go to the South, to learn from the South and with the South". He did so in his auroral work Towards a New Common Sense. Law, Science and Politics in the Paradigmatic Transition. The initiative coincided with the impact and great dissemination of Mario Benedetti's collection of poems "El Sur también existe", sung by Juan Manuel Serrat with this cadence: "... And here there are those who die/ and there are those who go out of their way/ and so together they achieve/ what was impossible:/ that everyone knows/ that the South also exists". A new paradigm was being born: the irruption of the global South in the field of emancipatory knowledge and experiences with its own identity and empowerment.
Since then, the initiative has been taking shape and has been developed in different publications, discussion forums, conferences and congresses. One of the most important was the International Colloquium on "Epistemologies of the South. Global learning South-South-South-North and North-South", organized by the Center for Social Studies (CES), of the University of Coimbra, in July 2014 within the ALICE project, directed by Boaventura, with the participation of six hundred people.
Today it finds its most rigorous and interdisciplinary development in three works cited at the beginning: Epistemologies of the South. Perspectives (Akal, Madrid, 2014), the latter edited together with María Paula Meneses, researcher at the Center for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra, Justice between Knowledges: Epistemologies of the South against epistemicide (Morata, Madrid, 2017) and The end of the cognitive empire. The affirmation of the Epistemologies of the South (Trotta, Madrid, 2019).
In Epistemologies of the South. Perspectives collaborate thinkers and thinkers mostly from the geographical South – Africa, Latin America and Asia – but also from the North, who are also vitally and intellectually, in heart and mind, on the side of the metaphorical South, that is, on the side of those oppressed and exploited by the different forms of capitalist domination in their colonial relationship with the world.
Precisely one of the objectives of the paradigm of the epistemologies of the South is to repair the serious damage caused by the colonial-capitalist "holy alliance", which has generated the homogenization of the world with the consequent elimination of cultural differences and the waste of many experiences of an emancipatory nature, as Santos already made clear in his work Critique of Indolent Reason: against the waste of experience. The extreme expression of the colonial-capitalist alliance has been "epistemicide", which consists of the suppression or, rather, the violent destruction of local non-Western knowledge.
Today colonialism is still alive and active, although in a more subtle way, in the form of the coloniality of power, economy and knowledge, which is analyzed by the Peruvian intellectual Aníbal Quijano, who accurately distinguishes between colonialism and coloniality. Colonialism refers to a structure of domination/exploitation in which control of the political authority, production resources and labor of a population is held by another authority of a different identity that has its headquarters in another territorial jurisdiction.
Coloniality is one of the elements that constitute the global pattern of capitalist power and is based on the imposition of an ethical classification of the world's population as the cornerstone of that pattern of power and operates in all areas of human existence and nature.
Boaventura's starting point in his epistemologies of the South is that there is no knowledge without practices and social actors, and that both take place within social relations. It is these that give rise to the different epistemologies, none of which is neutral. Modern capitalism and colonialism have played a fundamental and very negative role in the construction of the dominant epistemologies. From here, some fundamental questions are raised, to which this work tries to answer with the richness and creativity that can be expected from the inter-cultural, inter-continental, inter-ethnic and inter-disciplinary character of its collaborators:
Why, Boaventura asks, has the dominant Western epistemology eliminated from reflection, in the last two centuries, the social and economic, cultural and political context of the production and reproduction of knowledge? What consequences does this elimination have on the body of knowledge? Are there inclusive alternatives that correct the systematic exclusion of knowledge from the South? How can we redefine, based on a symmetrical dialogue of epistemologies, the major issues that are at the center of the debates?
Among these topics he cites the following: the dictatorship of the markets and the democratization of democracy; dignity and human rights and their denial by neoliberalism; the ecological crisis and its main manifestations, the emerging ecological consciousness, its struggles and alternatives; tradition and progress; the emancipation of women and neo-patriarchy; corporeality and power relations; corporality, violence and resistance; neocolonialism and decoloniality, the theory of social classes and the theory of social classification; neoliberal globalization and alter-globalization movements; the new economies; the new constitutionalism, etc.
A fundamental fact to take into account is the existence of a great plurality of knowledge in the world, which constitutes the richness of the human and of nature in all orders, including the epistemological. No knowledge is absolute, nor can it understand itself in isolation, but in reference to other knowledge. Everyone has their possibilities, but also their limits. This leads to the need for a relationship, comparison and horizontal dialogue between knowledges.
However, the relationship between different forms of knowledge is characterised today by asymmetry, even in its own typology: Western knowledge sets itself up as "superior" and declares itself "hegemonic", while it degrades non-Western knowledge as inferior and considers it subaltern. This asymmetry is intended to be recognized as natural until it becomes a criterion and ultimate instance in comparison with other knowledge.
Colonialism has exercised and continues to exercise, in addition to other dominations, epistemological domination, which translates into an unequal relationship of knowledge and power with the result of the suppression or undervaluation of many artistic forms, of knowledge, of social organization, of the exercise of power and of spirituality of colonized peoples.
Eduardo Galeano expresses it with the originality and literary brilliance that characterize him: "The dominant culture admits the indigenous and the blacks as objects of study, but does not recognize them as subjects of history; they have folklore, not culture; they practice superstitions, not religions; they speak dialects, not languages; they make crafts, not art."
And I add: they are wild nature, they do not cultivate nature; they have idols, not gods; they practice idolatrous cults, not sacred rites; they have superstitions, not sacraments; they have ancestral uses, not knowledge; they do magic, not science; they are contemplative, not active; they live anchored in the past with no prospect of the future.
In response to such discrimination and such derogatory judgments, the paradigm of the epistemologies of the South denounces the elimination of local knowledge, values the knowledge that successfully resisted colonialism, recognizes in all its breadth and depth the plurality of heterogeneous experiences and knowledge and the continuous and dynamic interconnections between them, and investigates the conditions of horizontal dialogue between different knowledges. In this way, it aims to contribute to the decolonization of the different fields of knowledge, having and power.
The book is structured around four thematic axes. The first, under the title "From coloniality to decoloniality", identifies, analyzes and questions the way in which economic, political and cultural domination constructed the hierarchies between knowledge and its naturalization. The second, characterized as "The Modernities of Traditions", studies the process of construction of the rigid dichotomy between modernity and tradition, and the consideration of non-Western knowledge as residues of the past that must be dismissed.
The third axis, entitled "Geopolitics and subversion", reflects on the epistemological diversity of the world and highlights the knowledge hitherto devalued as local. The fourth, "The reinventions of places", states that the hegemonic definition and imposition of places in Western capitalist modernity meant an impoverishment of the great richness and diversity of cultures and epistemologies in the global South, but also in the global North, and offers euristics of new marginalized and forgotten places of knowledge not subjected to colonial and capitalist domination.
The alleged and pretentious Western monopoly in the sphere of knowledge has ended in a resounding failure. Your unique game has to end, if it isn't already over. There are other actors, other protagonists from the South and the alternative North who are asking for passage. The West needs a cure of humility to recognize this, although, given its historical arrogance, it will be difficult for it to make that "confession".
It is necessary to geograph humanity, nature, science, culture, thought and daily life in a more plural (and counter-hegemonic) way, beyond the narrow and clipped Eurocentric cartography of modernity. This is the challenge facing the new paradigm of epistemologies of the South and that advances at a good pace with the collaboration of epistemological and cultural traditions hitherto silenced, if not denied. .
This book constitutes a fundamental step in that direction and embarks on an exciting journey that leads us from the one to the multiple, from knowledge to inter-knowledge, from the universe-world to the pluriverse-world, from abstract universal thought to contextual pluriversal thinking, from Western hegemonic epistemology to inter-epistemology; from the coloniality of power and knowledge to decoloniality, from the Eurocentric theory of social classes to a historical theory of social classification, from exclusionary monocultures to the inclusive ecology of knowledge.
From the European periphery
A new contribution by Boaventura is his book La difícil democracia, which collects texts written between 1980 and 2016, duly contextualized, "from the European periphery", which constitutes the hermeneutical key to the entire work and moves within the horizon of the book Epistemologies of the South. In it he makes a rigorous critical analysis of the democratic processes experienced in several countries of Southern Europe, especially in Portugal, which he contextualizes in their historical moment and in the European and world space.
The analysis deals with the different crises of the last decade: financial, economic, political, environmental, energy, food and civilization, all of them globally related, although, he clarifies, they occur with different intensity and differentiated consequences according to countries and religions.
It emphasises the repercussions of the crisis in European countries considered peripheral in relation to a centre that has a very negative impact on their political and social choices. I find very pertinent his lucid assertion that it has been the indigenous peoples of Latin America who in the last two decades have made visible, in different ways, the conception of the global crisis of capitalism at its different levels: as a crisis of their mode of production, their way of life, coexistence and relationship with nature.
An aggravating factor of the crisis that few social scientists and political scientists notice and to which Boaventura attaches special relevance in his political analyses is the proliferation and strengthening of fascism with a democratic façade. Boaventura distinguishes two types of fascism: social and political. The first takes place in social relations when the stronger party holds such a power superior to that of the lower part that it allows it to have an unofficial right of veto and control over its desires, needs and aspirations for a dignified life. It is a right exercised despotically, which is the most contrary to a right founded on human dignity.
Three significant examples of social fascism are violence against women exercised by patriarchy; the work carried out in real working conditions of slavery and the young Afro-Brazilians on the peripheries of the big cities. "We live," he asserts, "in societies that are politically democratic and socially fascist (p. 320). The statement could not be more accurate. The greater the restriction of social and economic rights and the less effective justice in the face of the violation of human rights, the greater the scope that is left free to social fascism.
Social fascism, together with the overexploitation of natural resources and the environmental catastrophe it causes, constitutes one of the two most destructive impacts that neoliberal capitalism causes in social relations. The phenomenon that feeds social fascism is the weakening of democratic processes that gives rise to forms of domination similar to those of the savage capitalism of the nineteenth century. History repeats itself in its most dehumanizing and predatory aspects of nature!
Political fascism consists of and manifests itself in "a dictatorial nationalist, racist, sexist, xenophobic political regime" (p. 320), which, in certain circumstances, can be the preferred regime of the ruling classes when their interests are significantly affected, and which can also seduce the working classes by threatening their standard of living by social groups that are below them.
How to live through the crisis and get out of it? I share Boaventura's answer:
- With dignity and hope in a world that is transforming the right of all into the privilege of a few. However, hope is not invented, it has to be built with nonconformity, nourished by "competent rebellion" and translated into real alternatives to the present situation. Reason and hope are inseparable. As the philosopher of utopia Ernst Bloch, well known to Boaventura, affirms, "reason cannot flourish without hope; Hope cannot speak without reason. Only when reason begins to speak does hope begin to flourish again in which there is no falsehood."
The cards to the left
Especially brilliant from the literary point of view, lucid in their political analyses and suggestive in their transformative proposals for the future seem to me the "Fourteen letters to the left", which I read at the different times in which they were written and which I have reread grouped with the luminosity that the overall vision brings.
I was struck by no. 14: I don't know if it has a symbolic character or if it is just a cardinal number. Many texts have symbolic numbers: the Four Rules of the Discourse on Method, by Descartes, the Decalogue, by Moses, the Eleven Theses of Marx on Feuerbach, the 13 Theses of Matanzas, by Enrique Dussel, the 95 Theses of Luther. The truth is that Boaventura's own epistolary literary genre demonstrates the modesty with which the author makes his proposals: they are "letters", not theses, they are invitations, not impositions.
The letters addressed to different collectives that make up the plural left today: political parties and social movements that fight against capitalism, colonialism, racism, sexism, homophobia, as well as unorganized citizens who share the objectives and aspirations of these parties and movements.
The letters are a call to rebuild the left to avoid barbarism and constitute an interpellation for the left to reinvent itself in the current conditions based on a rigorous reading of the paradigm shift that is taking place and to which they can and must also contribute politically and ideologically.
Decalogue
Here are, in the form of a decalogue, some of the lines, for me fundamental, of the agenda that Santos sets for the left for today and tomorrow.
1. Urgency of reflection. The left is not usually ready for reflection either when it governs or when it is in opposition. They always have other urgencies before reflecting. And that is suicide, because without reflection the tiresome repetition of timeless slogans that do not advance history towards emancipation, but subject it to the dictatorship of the given, is imposed. Faced with the installation in the given, which is limited to giving answers from the past to questions of the present without any creativity, the left should follow Bloch's proposal: "If the theory does not coincide with the facts, so much the worse for the facts".
2. Nation states are post-sovereign: they have lost sovereignty and have transferred many of their prerogatives to the financial powers. That is precisely the aim of neoliberalism: to disorganize the State by following a series of regressive transitions: from collective to individual responsibility; from action based on taxation to action based on the credit generated by the financial asphyxiation of the State; from the recognition of the existence of public goods to be taken care of by the State to the idea that State interventions in potentially profitable areas illegitimately reduce the possibilities of private profit; from the primacy of the State to that of the market; from social rights to philanthropy.
3. The lefts of the global North began as colonialists, subscribed to the "colonial pact", uncritically accepted that the independence of the colonies would end colonialism and undervalued neocolonialism and internal colonialism. It's time to change course. The challenge before them is to prepare for anti-colonial struggles of a new kind.
4. The left must refound democracy beyond neoliberalism and confront anti-democracy, combine representative democracy and participatory and direct democracy, articulate these democracies with the community democracy of African, Asian and Latin American indigenous and peasant communities, legitimize other forms of democracy such as demo-diversity, expand the fields of democratic deliberation in the family, the street, the school, the factory, knowledge and knowledge, the media, to promote the democratic reform of the UN and international agencies, to defend an anti-capitalist democracy in the face of an increasingly anti-democratic capitalism and in case of having to choose between capitalism and democracy, to make real democracy prevail.
In Boaventura's fortunate expression, it is necessary to democratise democracy, besieged by the dictatorship of the market and hijacked by anti-democratic powers, to put justice at the service of democracy and citizens, and in the case of our continent, to democratise Europe! A real and radical democracy that is at the same time post-liberal, anti-capitalist, anti-colonial and anti-patriarchal.
5. It is a priority, even an inalienable imperative, to de-commodify. We produce and use commodities, but neither we nor others are commodities, nor is nature. That is why our relationship with others and with nature has to be fraternal-sororal and eco-human, not commercial. Human beings are citizens before consumers and entrepreneurs. Not everything is venal, not everything is bought and sold. There are goods that are public and common with which you cannot commodify, market: nature, water, health, culture, education.
6. De-colonization is another of the urgent tasks of the left. This means eradicating from social relations all forms of domination based on the superiority-inferiority dialectic of some human beings: women, blacks, indigenous people, etc. The task of decolonization particularly affects Europe, the center of modern colonialism.
Her superiority complex in all areas: religious, cultural, political, scientific-technical, epistemological, etc., led her to believe that she had a mission to colonize the world and made her unable to discover the values of other non-European cultures. If Europe wants to reconcile itself with the world and with itself, its decolonisation is necessary, decisive and urgent.
7. There is a disjunction, which Boaventura describes as disturbing, between the Latin American and European lefts. The European ones seem to agree on the need for growth as a response to the pathologies that Europe suffers, as a solution to the problem of unemployment and as an improvement in the living conditions of those who are most at risk. The Latin American left is debating the model of development and growth and specifically about extractivism.
There are two positions: the one that is in favor as a means to reduce poverty and the one that declares itself against neo-extractivism because it considers it the most recent phase of colonialism. For Boaventura, neo-extractivism constitutes the most direct continuity of historical colonialism, since it supposes:
. The expulsion of peasants and indigenous people from their lands and territories (denial of the right to territory).
. The multiple and unpunished murder of social leaders at the hands of hitmen hired by businessmen.
. The expansion of the agricultural frontier without assuming any environmental responsibility.
. The poisoning of peasant populations by the aerial spraying of herbicides and insecticides.
8. The left must build an alternative of power, and not just an alternation in power. Left-wing politics must be simultaneously and jointly anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, counter-hegemonic, anti-racist, anti-colonial, anti-patriarchal and anti-homophobic.
9. The plurality of the left is a value to be promoted and defended, but fragmentation must be avoided. For the same reason, it is necessary to recognize difference as a right, but trying to maximize convergences and minimize divergences.
10. Progressive or left-wing parties and governments have relatively often abandoned the defence of the most basic human rights in the name of development. Boaventura looks at the world with the eyes of the Blimunda in Saramago's novel Memorial del convento, which they saw in the dark, and notes that:
-The majority of human beings are not subjects of human rights, but objects of human rights discourses.
- There is a lot of unjust human suffering not considered a violation of human rights.
- The defense of human rights is invoked to justify the invasion of countries, looting of their wealth and deaths of innocent victims considered collateral effects.
In view of these situations, he asks: "Is the primacy of the language of human rights the product of a historic victory or a historic defeat? Is the invocation of human rights an effective tool in the fight against the indignity to which so many social groups are subjected, or is it rather an obstacle that de-radicalizes and trivializes the oppression into which indignity translates and softens the bad conscience of the oppressors?" (p. 337).
The best synthesis of the fourteen letters is the affirmation that the choice of the left is not between the politics of the possible and that of the impossible, but "in knowing how to always be to the left of the possible".
Reformulation of Marx's Thesis 11 on Feuerbach
In 1845, a year after the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Karl Marx wrote the famous Theses on Feuerbach, which can be considered the first formulation of his intention to construct a materialist philosophy centered on transformative praxis, in a direction radically different from the dominant philosophy then dominated, which had Ludwig Feuerbach as its main representative. In thesis 11 eleventh thesis, undoubtedly the best known and most cited of all, he states: "Philosophers have done nothing more than interpret the world in different ways, but what is at stake is to transform it." When he speaks of "philosophers" he is referring to the people who produce scholarly knowledge, which today would include all humanistic and scientific knowledge considered fundamental as opposed to applied knowledge.
Throughout his work, Boaventura highlights the three main modes of modern domination – class (capitalism), race (racism) and sex (patriarchy) – that act in an articulated way and whose articulation varies with the social, historical and cultural context. Subsequently, he has paid attention to the fact that this mode of domination is based on the duality of society and nature, without which no liberation struggle will achieve its goal.
In this scenario, he reformulates thesis 11 in this way: "Philosophers, social scientists and humanists must collaborate with all those who fight against domination in the sense of creating forms of understanding of the world that make possible practices of transformation of the world that jointly liberate the human world and the non-human world".
Non-Westernist Western thinker
In one of his collaborations in Epistemologies of the South. Perspectives, which is entitled "Beyond Abysmal Thought: From Global Lines to an Ecology of Knowledge", Boaventura analyzes "non-Westernist" Western thought exemplified in the philosophy for sale of Lucian of Samosata, the learned ignorantia of Nicholas of Cusa and Pascal's wager.
Perhaps two other "non-Westernist" Western thinkers could be incorporated: Bloch and Benjamin. I spoke about both in the conferences to which I was invited at the Boaventura de Sousa Santos Chair, of the Faculty of REconomy of the University of Coimbra in 2015. Ernst Bloch elaborates a utopian philosophy that is based on hope, considered as the Principle (Prinzip Hoffnung) and fundamental determination of objective reality in its totality, and on the Ontology of -not-being-yet (Noch-Nicht-Sein), which understands reality as a process.
It is precisely Boaventura's sociology of emergencies that offers a concept of reality that is fully in tune with Blochi's conception in that it does not reduce it to the factual, to what is given once and for all, to the immutable, but understands it as the processual, the imagined, the emergent, what has not yet appeared. the future. Boaventura agrees with Bloch that if theory does not coincide with facts, so much the worse for facts. The Epistemologies of the South do not move only on the plane of logos, but also of imagination and myth.
Walter Benjamin is critical of the philosophy of the history of the European Enlightenment and of its idea of progress, uncritically assumed by social democracy, which is also questioned by the philosopher of the Frankfurt School. Michael Löwy defines him as "a revolutionary critic of the philosophy of progress, a Marxist adversary of 'progressivism', a nostalgic for the past who dreams of the future, a romantic supporter of materialism".
Benjamin's theses on the concept of history, written in 1940 a few months before his death, constitute the best synthesis of his philosophical thought and are, in the words of Michael Löwy, a "fire warning"[1]. Of these, it is worth highlighting thesis 9 on the painting by Klee Angelus Novus, which serves as the title of one of Boaventura's books (The Fall of the Angelus Novus) and as inspiration for the elaboration of a new theory of history that, in Boaventura's own words, "allows us to rethink social emancipation from the past, in a way, for the future."
To the authors cited as non-Westernist Western thinkers should be added Boaventura de Sousa Santos himself. Everything that has been said so far about his intellectual profile confirms this.
The World Social Forums
Santos is one of the creators and main inspirers of the World Social Forum (WSF), as well as a member of its International Committee. His book World Social Forum. Manual de uso (Icaria & Antrazyt, Barcelona, 2005) is a living chronicle of the history of this Forum, which is undoubtedly the strongest manifestation of resistance to neoliberal globalisation and which the author defines as "subaltern cosmopolitan politics".
The Forums are not limited to being just a "factory of ideas"; From the beginning they became "proposal machines". Looking to the future, he proposes moving from realistic utopias to alternatives formulated in a credible way and with a high degree of concreteness. Bloch's idea of moving from abstract utopia to concrete utopia resonates here. The political strength of the WSF and the movements that make it up depends on it.
The epistemology of the WSF is built through two processes that the author defines as "sociology of absences and sociology of emergencies", to which I have referred before, in clear contrast with the hegemonic social sciences and in the face of the epistemology of neoliberal globalization, which is presided over by scientific-technical knowledge and discredits all rival knowledge.
I conclude this intellectual profile with the assessment of Boaventura de Sousa Santos by the Puerto Rican decolonial sociologist Ramón Grosfoguel, which I subscribe: "The work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos constitutes a fundamental contribution to the decolonization of the social sciences. His work is an example of a decolonial theory produced from Europe in critical dialogue with the thinking of the Global South. Based on Santos' work, there is no justification for arguing that it is not possible for a thinker from the Global North to think together with and with the Global South."
[1] Cf. Michael Löwy, Walter Benjamin: fire warning. A reading of the theses 'On the concept of history', Fundo de Cultura Económica, Buenos Aires-Mexico, 2013.
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