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Opposing fetishism by reclaiming our powers: The Social Forum movement, capitalist markets and the politics of alternatives
Author(s) -
De Angelis Massimo
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
international social science journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.237
H-Index - 43
eISSN - 1468-2451
pISSN - 0020-8701
DOI - 10.1111/j.0020-8701.2004.00519.x
Subject(s) - capitalism , sociology , politics , fetishism , social movement , power (physics) , charter , mode of production , resistance (ecology) , political economy , economic system , neoclassical economics , political science , production (economics) , economics , law , ecology , physics , quantum mechanics , biology , anthropology , macroeconomics
In this paper, I want to engage with the concept of “open spaces”, such as the World and other Social Forums (SFs), as an organisational form and discuss its relevance within the framework of a discourse on the politics of alternatives and the overcoming of capitalism. I suggest that we have to understand the organisational form of open spaces to contain elements that are alternative to the organisational forms of power that arise from capitalist disciplinary markets and other exploitative and oppressive relations. This emerges out of the SF's Charter of Principles, which proclaims the SF to be a space, a process, and a framework, within which not only resistance to neo‐liberalism is strengthened and struggles circulate, but alternatives are actively promoted. I suggest that the question of how struggles circulate, organise, and are able to coordinate alternatives is the key question around which an alternative to capitalism as a mode of organising social production can emerge. In other words, the alternative to capitalism is an alternative mode of relating, and hence also requires and must manifest alternative processes of social production.