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The epistemologies of the South and identitarianism – Boaventura de Sousa Santos

All theories are subject to pervert because they are all elaborated, explicitly or implicitly, with the aim of having an impact on the world of life, either because they intend to interpret it or because they intend to transform it. Theories, no matter how esoteric, always have a dimension or vocation of extra-theoretical application, often without the consent of their authors. Moreover, theory is a porous and somewhat incomplete artifact because it is always open to interpretation. Application only constitutes perversion when theories are converted into doctrine or ideology, that is, into a closed normative system at the service of concrete practices of power, whether of states or of specific social groups. A normative system is closed when freedom of interpretation is expropriated by an interpretation center in charge of issuing authoritative interpretations and, consequently, of prohibiting all possible others. The perversion stems from the pragmatic objectives (political, religious or other) intended by the ideology or doctrine becoming the criterion for validating and interpreting the theory. In the case of state power practices, the two best-known cases of this perversion in the Eurocentric political universe occurred with liberalism and Marxism. In both cases, and although in very different ways, the theory was converted into the official doctrine of self-designated liberal or Marxist (socialist or communist) states. The perversion of theory in the service of ideologies or doctrines and practices of concrete social groups occurs whenever such doctrines or ideologies and practices directly contradict the purposes of the authors of the theory. Sometimes the perversion does not involve the whole theory, but only one of its concepts.


A well-known example in postcolonial theory is the concept of "strategic essentialism" coined by Gayatri Spivak. With this concept, Spivak sought to provocatively characterize the deconstruction of historiography carried out by the theoretical work of the "Subaltern Studies", a remarkable group of Indian social scientists, to which she herself belonged, committed to the revision of the history of India (Guha, 2002; Spivak, 2006). Spivak wanted to show that the positivist essentialism of many studies of this group had a very concrete political objective (to subvert the dominant reading codes of Indian society and history) and in this sense it was strategic. Applied to the concept of identity, the concept of strategic essentialism was not intended to mean that certain concrete practices flowed naturally from the concept of identity, but rather that the use of this concept could, in certain circumstances, be necessary as a political tactic.


Very early on, Spivak realized that the concept of strategic essentialism was being used as a panacea or alibi for academic or other proselytisms, and for that reason he detached himself from the concept. A concept that, in its formulation, aimed to serve very concrete political needs that legitimized its use in these concrete circumstances and only in them, had been transformed into an alibi to justify all identity essentialisms – or identitarianism. According to her, it was serving to justify those who "convert identity into the main agenda of political and cultural survival" and "ignore what is most interesting about being alive, that is, being oriented towards the other" (in Flaganan et al, 2007: 4 and 16-17).

 

The Epistemologies of the South: Critiques and Perversions

 

A very brief sketch

The epistemologies of the South that I proposed in Toward a New Common Sense (Santos, 1995: 506-519; and, finally, Santos, 2018) have recently been the subject of several criticisms from very different scientific-political quarters. I will refer to criticism worthy of the name, not to insults or low blows, unfortunately increasingly frequent in the academic world. As for the latter. I mention, for example, those who wrote that I, being European (and, specifically, Portuguese), had no legitimacy to propose the epistemologies of the South. A variant of this "criticism" was the same denial of legitimacy because I am white. This type of pseudo-criticism came mainly from the Latin American decolonial current and was made in double bad faith. On the one hand, it confused the epistemologies of the South with decolonial theory; on the other hand, it was almost always made by white descendants of European settlers who, by the way, I had never seen by our side in the struggles in which I participated with indigenous peoples and Afro-descendants in defense of their territories and their cultures. These pseudo-criticisms, which disqualify authors so as not to have to confront ideas, are examples of an essentialism that is not even strategic, but rather mediocrely tactical, to defend the propriety of a given theoretical narrative or to promote one academic career or another.


Before continuing to discuss the serious criticisms, it is appropriate to make a very brief summary of what the epistemologies of the South are. I warn you at the outset that, contrary to some decolonial thought, the epistemologies of the South are not anti-modern science. They only argue that science, being valid knowledge, is not the only valid knowledge and, as such, must allow itself to dialogue and interact with other knowledge, which I designate, in general, as vernacular knowledge. On the other hand, the epistemologies of the South are as committed to the search for truth as the epistemologies of the North. They refuse praise of ignorance that is not guided by the enlightened ignorance of Nicholas of Cusa (Santos, 2023), just as they refuse religious or secular, classist, racial or gender identity illuminations, whether propagated in good faith or in bad faith. They only consider that the search for truth has to be broader than what is possible using the scientific methodologies enshrined in the global North because they reduce this search to that which is required by instrumental reason, which is at the service of capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy or subscribes, when it criticizes them, to  the epistemological assumptions on which they are based.


The epistemologies of the South refer to the identification and validation of knowledge anchored in the experiences of resistance of all social groups that have been systematically victims of injustice, oppression and destruction caused by capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy. I call the vast and very diverse scope of these experiences the "anti-imperial" South. It is an epistemic, non-geographical South, composed of many epistemic Souths that have in common the fact that they are knowledges born in struggles against capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy of the modern era, from the sixteenth century onwards. The goal of the epistemologies of the South is to enable oppressed social groups to represent the world as their own and on their own terms, for only in this way will they be able to transform it according to their own aspirations. Fundamental to the epistemologies of the South is the notion that capitalism cannot be maintained without colonialism (racism and other manifestations of colonial violence) and patriarchy. It is not possible to imagine a non-racist and non-patriarchal capitalist society.

 

Epistemological critiques

The first criticism is of an epistemological nature. The epistemologies of the South, by seeking to validate knowledge other than scientific knowledge, open the door to irrationalism, subjectivism, anti-science denialism. I have responded to this criticism in different works (Santos, 2003; 2007). In short, I argue that no system of knowledge solves all the human eagerness to overcome ignorance. All knowledge systems have internal and external limits. Science does not answer the question of what is the meaning of life or what happiness is. If I want to go to the moon I need scientific knowledge, but if I want to know the biodiversity of the forest I need indigenous, native or peasant knowledge. The vast majority of people and social groups conduct their lives with recourse to non-scientific knowledge. In the scientific laboratories themselves, a lot of artisanal, non-scientific knowledge circulates. There are incompatibilities between scientific and non-scientific knowledge, but there are also convergences. Convergences are at the origin of the ecologies of knowledge between scientific and non-scientific knowledge that enable a broader understanding of the world and a more prudent transformation of life in society.

 

Political criticism

The second criticism is of a political nature. Much of the non-scientific knowledge is conservative, if not reactionary. Their revalidation may mean a political setback, justifying forms of thought that are anti-democratic and hostile to the deepening and broadening of human rights, for example, the human rights of women, ethnic, racial or religious minorities (sometimes majorities), different sexual orientations, etc. The refutation of this criticism lies, in the first place, in the recognition that all knowledge systems and the respective cultures in which they emerge have different versions, some progressive and others reactionary. This is as true of Western culture as it is of Islamic, Hindu, Chinese or the indigenous cultures of Latin America and Oceania or Northern Europe. Secondly, the epistemologies of the South, by privileging the knowledge born in the social struggles against capitalist, colonialist and hetero-patriarchal domination, position themselves on the side of the oppressed and not the oppressors. They cannot, therefore, be confused with epistemological perspectives that, on the contrary, legitimize these modes of domination. The core concern of the inquiry into the epistemologies of the South is the constant epistemic vigilance about which side they are on in the concrete struggles, since the oppressed are sometimes also oppressors, just as the oppressors are also oppressed.

 

Theoretical critiques

The third criticism is theoretical. The epistemologies of the South belong to the tradition of critical thinking. In this tradition, Marxism is the most consistent theory of the critique of capitalism and the formulation of the socialist alternative. I will not go into the very rich history of internal debates in the Marxist camp of the last seventy years. The most stimulating debates were those that confronted Marx's analyses, which were closely linked to the European reality (especially English) of the second half of the nineteenth century, with non-European realities that were very different from those of Europe and that aroused more attention from the anti-colonial movements. In these debates, we must highlight, among many others, W. AND .W. Du Bois in the USA, based on the experience of the "black problem"; José Carlos Mariategui and, later, Anibal Quijano and Enrique Dussel, in the face of the Latin American reality and, especially in the case of Mariategui, specifically in the face of the "problem of the Indian"; Antonio Gramsci, confronted with a Europe that had little to do with developed Europe, the Italian "problem of the Mezzogiorno"; Kwame Nkrumah, Leopold Senghor and Julius Nyerere focused on the anti-colonial struggle in Africa; Aimé Cesaire, Frantz Fanon and Walter Rodney, thinking about Marxism from the Caribbean reality, but extending its interest to Africa.


The World Social Forum held for the first time in 2001 in Porto Alegre (Brazil), and with regular meetings from then on in several countries until 2016, revealed the immense global diversity of social movements, processes of struggle and their protagonists, narratives and repertoires of resistance and political agendas. For many intellectual-activists involved in this process, such as myself, it became clear that Marxism, especially what came to be called Western Marxism, despite its radical critique of European capitalism, shared many of the philosophical assumptions of Western modernity (pragmatic rationalism, conception of nature and of the infinite, albeit discontinuous, development of the productive forces, etc.). On the other hand, Marxism, with the exception of the Chinese version, attributed the exclusive protagonism of the class struggle to the proletariat, while in the WSF other social groups previously neglected or even made invisible by Marxism (indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant peoples, landless peasants, women, LGBTI groups, ecological movements, solidarity economy movements, etc.) showed their capacity for struggle.  religious movements linked to liberation theology, etc.). Marxism revealed itself as a Eurocentric theory. If some intellectual-activists had never been Marxists, others abandoned it and still others, including myself, continued to consider themselves Marxists, but they thought it was urgent to refound Marxism in order to extricate it from its Eurocentrism. For the latter, it was a matter of decolonizing Marxism. This movement often focused on new readings of Marx's published texts or on the analysis of new texts left unpublished by Marx, written after 1867 (about 30,000 pages), what Theodor Shanin called late Marx (1984).


The epistemologies of the South are one of the manifestations of this movement. I realized that the first transformation had to be epistemological. What the WSF had shown most clearly was the epistemological diversity of the world, the immense variety of knowledge – scientific, popular, vernacular, ancestral, religious, profane, peasant, indigenous, feminist, quilombola, gypsy – all born or used in the social struggles in which the social movements were involved. By coining the term epistemologies of the South, I was aware that I was not inventing anything new. It was only a matter of broadening the meaning of epistemological practices and conceptions, some of which were ancestral, which a certain scientific positivism, to which Western Marxism had not been immune, had made invisible, ignored or rejected. Therefore, the South of the epistemologies of the South is epistemic, and can be present in the struggles of the geographic South as well as in the struggles of the geographic North (just take into account the struggles of immigrant communities in Europe). The concept of social struggle against domination became essential because in the struggles the combination, or even fusion, of different systems of knowledge was visible. For example, in the struggles against the use of pesticides, scientific knowledge (chemical, agronomic) was combined with knowledge of peasants, indigenous people, and quilombolas. I called this process of combining and reciprocal transformations of knowledge as ecologies of knowledges and showed that, in order to maximize these articulations and promote the mutual enrichment of knowledge, it was often necessary to resort to intercultural translation (Santos, 2018).


Once the epistemic issue was faced and the concept of struggle was given centrality, it was necessary to revisit the concept of domination. Marxism had defined capitalist domination as the exploitation of free labor, although original accumulation (and permanent, as Rosa Luxemburg and later David Harvey would add) required the violent expropriation of land and so-called natural resources. The struggle against domination would have to be carried out by those who were the object of this exploitation, once they were aware of it, that is, the class-conscious workers. Now, at the beginning of the millennium, ten years after the end of Soviet socialism, with the crisis of European social democracy, neoliberalism's violent attack on workers' rights and trade union organizations, the (provisional?) end of socialism as a realistic horizon of emancipation or liberation, the transformations in the composition and nature of wage labor caused by neoliberal globalization and the information technology revolution,  It was difficult to insist on the exclusive role of the working class in liberation against domination. The world of the exploited and oppressed had expanded greatly.


At bottom, it was the very nature of domination that had been transformed, at least in part, and these transformations had become more visible in the face of the social groups emerging in the struggles against it. Indigenous peoples and Afro-descendants, Roma, landless peasants, women, youth, groups with disabilities (in light of the dominant criteria of efficiency), homeless populations, LGBTIQ+, pacifist ecologists, etc. A deep reflection, inspired by activism with social movements within the WSF and the works of Marxist feminists and black Marxists, led me to the conclusion that modern Eurocentric capitalist domination is based on three main pillars: capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy (later understood as heteropatriarchy)[2]. Capitalist exploitation and expropriation maintained their centrality, but their realization was not possible without the two other dominations. They were the ones who, based on racist and sexist conceptions and practices that predated capitalism, but were reconfigured by it, created racialized and sexualized bodies, whose labor was over-exploited or unpaid. Without these two kinds of productive labor, capitalism could not function. In other words, it would not be possible to imagine a capitalist society that was not sexist and colonialist. Thus, capitalism was based on three dominations, not just one, and the struggle against one of them would have to involve the other two in order to succeed or not to lead to perverse effects (for example, marginally improving one dimension of domination by aggravating the other two).


For this transformation, it was necessary to reconceptualize patriarchy and colonialism. Once again, it was not necessary to invent anything, it was just necessary to read with other eyes (other theoretical lenses) the texts of many great intellectual-activists of the past and contemporary. In the case of patriarchy, the work of Silvia Federici (2004, 2012), Nancy Fraser (2020), and Cavallero and Gago (2021) were fundamental. In the case of colonialism, I have made use of the profound reflections of Kwame Nkrumah (1964, 1965), Frantz Fanon (1952, 1961) and Walter Rodney (1973). With the political independence of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a form of colonialism had (almost) ended, historical colonialism, characterized by territorial occupation by a foreign power, but colonialism had continued in other forms: racism, the expulsion of peasants from their ancestral territories, mining extractivism and the contamination of ecosystems, work analogous to slave labor,  the asphyxiation of families and small producers by financial capital, the control of reserves in banks of colonizing countries, the unequal trade in raw materials, military tutelage, the drowning and deportation of immigrants, police brutality and ethnic profiling.


Criticism of the epistemologies of the South by Marxists whom I consider orthodox has been increasing. There are three main criticisms. On the epistemic level, Marxist theory is based on an epistemology that attributes to Marxist scientific knowledge the monopoly of rigorous knowledge. Moreover, bourgeois science lacks the rigour of Marxist science because it is at the service of the capitalist class. On the contrary, Marxist science is at the service of the working class, which represents the interests of what Hegel called the "universal class". By questioning science's monopoly on rigorous knowledge, Southern epistemologies open the door to irrationalism and cacophony. The ecology of knowledge and intercultural translation are procedures considered foreign to Marxist theoretical culture and cause confusion and lack of rigor. However, if we analyze the concrete social struggles of great Marxists, from Lenin to Rosa Luxemburg and from Kwame Nkrumah and Aimé Cesaire to Amilcar Cabral, we see that they always resorted to other knowledge and articulated it with Marxist theory.


The second criticism lies in the distinction between mode of production and social formation. Marxism is a theory about the capitalist mode of production. The central concepts are the concept of exploitation of wage labor and the concept of class. Race and gender, and the respective prejudices and discriminations they cause, exist at the level of concrete social formations and contribute to reinforcing levels of exploitation and deepening class oppositions (and divisions), but they cannot be equated with the concept of class nor contribute decisively to the socialist transformation of society, since this will always be the product of class struggle. This line of theoretical reasoning was used early on to argue that racial and gender discrimination would disappear when the workers' struggle finally won and socialist society arrived.


I do not intend to enter here into the technical details of the refutation of this theoretical criticism. For the epistemologies of the South, the central concept is that of struggle against modern domination and this, when seen from the historical experience of the peoples who were subject to European colonialism and analyzed from the perspective of the epistemic South, has always been a multifaceted domination and, in fact, began with ontological domination, the domination of bodies for what they were (and not for what they did or did not do) and,  For this reason, appropriation and violence over bodies (including extermination) have always existed alongside over-exploitation. And this has not changed qualitatively with political independence. As in the racialized body, the domination of the sexualized body began with ontological domination. It was on this basis that women were the object of appropriation and violence and that the conditions for over-exploitation were created through the concept of non-productive work, without which it would not be possible to extract the surplus value from productive work. In this case too, the achievements of the feminist movements, although very important in reducing sexual discrimination, have not changed the basic structure of capitalist exploitation. For these reasons, from the point of view of the epistemologies of the South, the anti-capitalist struggle, being a class struggle, must also and necessarily be an anti-colonialist and anti-patriarchal struggle. If class, race, and gender are inextricably linked in concrete social struggles when it comes to the post-capitalist future of the world, why is it insisted that the status of the three concepts is not on the same theoretical level? Does the class struggle cease to be class struggle because it is organized in such a way that it is also a struggle against racism and heteropatriarchy? It is perhaps less a theoretical question than a question for theorists. It is certainly a central issue for political activists.


The third criticism of orthodox Marxists is political. Marxism aims at the transformation of society in the direction of socialism and communism. These last two concepts rarely appear in the narratives of concrete social struggles, especially outside the Eurocentric political world. This is perhaps the greatest divergence between Marxism and the epistemologies of the South. It is well known that Marx did not devote much of his time to describing the future socialist or communist society. What he did, and in a decisive way, was to show that capitalism was not the end of history and that humans had the right to a better and fairer society. This is also the central idea of the epistemologies of the South.  The reason why many social movements in the global South do not formulate the project of the future society in terms of socialism or communism has to do with many factors. These are two fundamental concepts of Eurocentric critical thinking and, in a way, they have been the object of the same criticisms that outside Europe were made of the philosophical and ideological assumptions of Eurocentric critical thinking in general. In addition, the designations "socialism" and "communism" were closely linked to the socialist and communist parties that emerged in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, beginning of the twentieth century, and which were later founded on other continents as social struggles allowed.


The central ideas of these parties were often the same as those that presided over the European parties, especially in the golden period of the workers' internationals. The social, economic, political, cultural and historical contexts were very different from those that prevailed in industrialized and colonialist Europe at the time. This mismatch has sometimes had serious consequences on the concrete practices of these parties because it has led them to invisibilize, devalue or even repress many practices of resistance and struggle just because they did not coincide with the European socialist or communist recipe. Although it is a personal experience and is worth no more than that, I remember conversations with indigenous leaders in Ecuador fighting for their territories and their culture in which they declared themselves outraged by the "anti-Indian and racist" character of the socialist party of Ecuador. Unfortunately, for decades there were not many Marxist politicians to follow the example of José Carlos Mariateguei in Latin America.


For the epistemologies of the South, the struggle against capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy is a struggle against ideas and practices of European origin, but which, especially after political independence, were the object of processes of hybridization and creolization in which European ideas were combined with non-European ideas, in the same way that international bourgeoisies articulated with emerging national bourgeoisies. In the same way, the ideas of a more just future society have undergone various metamorphoses due to the same processes of hybridization and creolization, in this case occurring in the struggles of the popular classes and oppressed peoples.


For example, the protagonism of indigenous movements in the first decade of the millennium in Latin America led to the future society being named according to concepts of the respective indigenous languages, namely the concepts of Sumak kawsay (Quechua) or Suma qamana (Aymara), in approximate translation, buen vivir. These are not concepts equivalent to socialism or communism (quite the contrary, with regard to the underlying concept of nature), but express the same idea of the possibility of a post-capitalist, post-colonialist and post-patriarchal society. In some countries, tensions between Eurocentric and non-Eurocentric conceptions of a better society to which the peoples are entitled and worth fighting for have been particularly intense. Just keep in mind the tensions between Jawaharlal Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi over the nature of India's independence (1947). Socialism and communism, like Sumak Kawsay and suma qamana and many other terms in different cultures (swaraj and swadeshi in Gandhi), are so many expressions of the same aspiration for liberation on the part of oppressed, dominated and exploited peoples. The intercultural translation between them is a necessary condition for the articulation of transnational struggles against contemporary domination.

 

Perversions: reactionary non-Eurocentric thinking

As I mentioned at the beginning, we speak of perversion when a given theory is used to justify means or ends of action that directly contradict those who presided over the formulation of the theory. In the case of the epistemologies of the South, two perversions have acquired some notoriety. Because of them, I do not intend to follow Spivak's option, detaching myself from the epistemologies of the South. I prefer to denounce perversions. The first perversion lies in resorting to the epistemologies of the South to legitimize systems of thought of non-European origin, prior to or contrary to modern science and Western philosophy, with the aim of promoting conservative, capitalist, racist and sexist policies. Such systems of thought claim an originality and authenticity superior to modern science, a consonance with autochthonous philosophies that were despised by European colonialism and often attribute to themselves a religious aura that makes them even more irrefutable and their questioning more dangerous. Outstanding examples of these systems of thought are certain currents of political Islam and political Hinduism that today have a great prominence in some countries in the Middle East and India.


The perversion in the use of Southern epistemologies to legitimize these systems of thought occurs at different levels. First, the policies put in place by these systems of thought are not anti-capitalist (they are sometimes enthusiastically capitalist), contrary to what the epistemologies of the South propose. They are also colonialists and patriarchals, with even more violent manifestations than those of Eurocentric modernity, legitimizing their positions as expressions of resistance against "Western discourses". This argument is used to, for example, repress Islamic and Hindu feminist movements that, from their own cultures (and not from "Western discourses"), fight for the end of sexual discrimination and the liberation of women. Curiously, capitalism, although as Western as modern colonialism, is not considered to be contrary to "ancestral thinking". In this sense, the reactionary system of thought is as modern as the Western system of thought and its "strategic essentialism" sins from the same perversion denounced above by Spivak.


Secondly, reactionary thought is formulated with an ideological rigidity that runs counter to the fundamental idea of the epistemologies of the South, according to which different cultures and systems of thought and knowledge have great internal diversity. In addition, this ideological rigidity gives reactionary thought a monopoly that makes any intercultural dialogue, intercultural translation or ecology of knowledge unfeasible. At a deeper epistemic level, the perversion of the epistemologies of the South consists in the fact that for them all systems of thought and knowledge are incomplete and, for this reason, can only contribute to liberation struggles against domination to the extent that they are creatively articulated with other systems of thought and knowledge.

 

Perversions: identitarianism

The other perversion of the epistemologies of the South lies in identitarianism, defined in the terms mentioned above. This perversion is particularly grievous for the epistemologies of the South because, as we have seen, the epistemologies of the South have been criticized by Marxist thought for conceiving colonialism and patriarchy as two of the main modern dominations alongside capitalism. And without a doubt, the epistemologies of the South have contributed decisively to amplifying the voice and transformative meaning of the feminist and anti-racist movements. But, as we have seen above, from the perspective of the epistemologies of the South, the struggles against colonialism and patriarchy only have a progressive sense of struggle against the domination of the modern era to the extent that they are articulated with the anti-capitalist struggle. Separated from the anti-capitalist struggle, these struggles will be easily co-opted by conservative and capitalist political forces interested in dividing social resistance. This division creates false enemies and makes invisible the true enemy of the popular classes, the capitalism-colonialism-patriarchy triad. From the moment that the struggles against colonialism and patriarchy (anti-racial and anti-sexist struggle) are separated from the struggle against capitalism (class struggle) they will be easily co-opted by the system of domination as a whole. And, on the political level, they will become instrumentalized by the most conservative political forces, including the extreme right-wing forces.


Given the nature of the social movements that led these struggles, it was perhaps foreseeable that the perversion would occur. Social movements, unlike political parties, focus on a specific dimension of social struggle, be it trade union, ecologist, anti-racist or anti-sexist. They tend, therefore, to consider this dimension as the most important, while at the same time developing narratives, repertoires and organizational forms of struggle that fit this dimension of the struggle, but not other dimensions. In turn, the national and international entities that finance these movements contribute to further accentuate this concentration in a single dimension of domination. The terms of reference that condition the financing are clarifying in this regard.


But identitarianism means two other perversions. The first is that social struggles, when isolated, can contribute to deepening global domination, rather than attenuating it. An improvement in capital-labor relations can have adverse consequences for racial or patriarchal relations. And the same can happen with isolated victories in any of these relationships. The real struggle lies in the articulation of struggles. This does not mean that the different social struggles do not have specificities that distinguish them from each other. I have proposed a distinction between importance and urgency in social struggles. The fact that all struggles are important does not mean that they are all equally urgent. It only means that the most urgent struggles in a given social or historical context must be organized in such a way as to account for the other dimensions of domination. This implies transformations in the narratives, repertoires and organizational forms of the struggles. However urgent the anti-racial or anti-patriarchal struggle may be in a given context, it must never lose sight of the fact that, in order to be successful, it must be organized taking into account that it is also a class struggle.


This perversion has not escaped some feminist movements in the global North. In the  roundtable already mentioned, the Guerrilla Girls declare: "Are we 'identitarians'? Well, we still think that the feminist perspective is a great starting point for critiquing politics and culture. But we don't like to be caught up in wars that pit one feminist thinker against another. What works for one time and place may not work for another. We believe there are many different feminists and feminisms, and we support most of them!" (Flanagan et al 2007:18). And Jennifer Gonzalez points out: "I understand that feminist activist art has as its long-term goal the critique and dismantling of patriarchal systems of power. The most progressive forms of feminism recognize that this goal necessarily includes a critique of the racism and class domination through which patriarchy often operates. For this reason, I do not believe that feminist activist art can or should be described as an 'identity' cultural practice that simply focuses, for example, on the category 'women' or the concept of 'gender'. Rather, it should be recognized as a set of critical compromises with systems of power that are oppressive to a wide variety of people" (Flanagan et al, 2007: 19).


The perversion of the isolationist separation of struggles has yet another dimension: the criteria by which the success of social struggles is defined. The funders of social movements that separate the feminist or anti-racial struggle from the class struggle are lavish in offering menus of small short-term victories to justify the continuation of funding.


The second identitarian perversion is that the identity struggle, once separated from the class struggle, makes it possible for certain versions of the struggle to become globalized and make invisible or even discredit other struggles against the same dimension of domination, but in different socio-historical-cultural contexts. This is particularly serious in the case of feminism. Certain currents of white and middle-class Western feminism, which respond to specific contexts of patriarchy in the global North, have been imposing themselves globally thanks to the funding of non-governmental or quasi-governmental organizations that privilege them. Black, indigenous, and impoverished women from the global epistemic South often resist this imposition (or surreptitiously seek to circumvent it) because they have other agendas and narratives of struggle rooted in their socio-historical context and culture against patriarchal, colonialist, and capitalist domination. The fractures in the feminist movement stem largely from this new dimension of Eurocentric colonialism, now with the ill-disguised pretense of dominating the feminist narrative globally.


Perhaps the greatest perversion of the epistemologies of the South by identitarianism lies in imprisoning social actors (people and social groups) in a single identity, giving it exclusivity in defining the social presence of these actors and in the legitimacy of their struggle against domination. People and social groups have different identities, identities are porous, they evolve and are mobilized according to contexts and opportunities for collective actions that, at least, mitigate domination and improve their living conditions. In such collective actions against domination, what distinguishes social actors is as important as what unites them. From the recognition of diversity, it is in unity that the project of the common home lies.


The common home is the project of a post-abyssal society, in which being fully human (metropolitan sociability) is not an unjust privilege built on the subjection of others to the condition of sub-humanity (colonial sociability of populations without rights, sexualized and racialized). Such a project is not possible without recognizing that, despite the differences, the orientation towards others of which Spivak speaks is the necessary condition for building humanity, the humanity of human life and non-human life. In the same vein, Ndlovu-Gastsheni wonders if the specter of toxic identity politics will not point to the dystopia of a world without the others (2018).

 

Inconclusion

The epistemologies of the South are an ongoing collective epistemic-political project, whose main protagonists do not write books, circulate in the academic world, nor spend their time discussing the issues that intellectuals are so passionate about. Feeding one's children, defending oneself from violence, expropriation and arbitrariness, putting up with philanthropic discourses to receive crumbs, migrating to escape war, hunger or climate hostility, in short, fighting daily so that the next day is not the last, are increasingly the great priorities of the great masses of the world's population. But this does not mean that the epistemologies of the South cease to be the testimony of its resistance and its struggle.


For the intellectual-activist who intends to continue to learn from them and to expand, through theory, the meaning of their struggle and to promote that more people join this struggle, self-reflexivity must be permanent and theory must always be considered open. At the time of writing three questions remain open and bleed into my hot reason.


First question. In the face of the growing aggressiveness of capitalism and the possibility of a third world war, are the three main modes of modern domination – capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy – on the same theoretical level, or are colonialist and patriarchal dominations satellites of the main domination, capitalism? With the growing aggressiveness and destructive drive of capitalism – in which the class struggle increasingly manifests itself as the struggle of enriched minorities against impoverished majorities – the anti-capitalist struggle becomes more urgent. If for a long time the class struggle combines urgency with importance, should theory change? Can it change with reference to a certain socio-historical context and not with reference to another? For the epistemologies of the South, theory goes with the struggles, not ahead of the struggles.


Second question. The epistemologies of the South, like all critical thinking, are based on the binary between oppressors and oppressed, between dominators and dominated, and on the basis of this they define social contradictions and the abyssal line as fundamental characteristics of Western modernity. They recognize, however, that the oppressed are often oppressors as well, just as the oppressors are oppressed. How to define the level at which the quantitative difference becomes qualitative? In which someone is considered an oppressor because he is more oppressor than oppressed or is he considered oppressed because he is more oppressed than oppressor? As long as there are oppressors and oppressed as a result of modes of domination that separate human beings into beings considered fully human and beings considered sub-human (the abyssal line), the common home will be a project that will only materialize when the abyssal line ends.


Third question. The epistemologies of the South are animated by the project of inclusion that is truly inclusive, a project that is not itself exclusionary, that is, a project of inclusion according to inclusion criteria imposed by those already included. Only in this way is it possible to expand the present and fight to displace the abyssal line so that metropolitan sociability advances and colonial sociability recedes. The expansion of the present is conceived as an expansion of the right to life. In the tradition of Eurocentric critical thinking, the right to life is restricted to human life. For the epistemologies of the South, the life to be included is human life and non-human life, since the survival of the former is not possible without the survival of the latter. How can we extend to nature concepts invented to apply exclusively to human life, such as, for example, democracy, human rights, criminal law, presumption of innocence, suffering, oppression, liberation? Who will mobilize such concepts in the name of nature? Are totally different concepts necessary for nature itself to propose as the current concept of nature evolves into the concept of Mother Earth? The common house is infinitely larger than we have hitherto imagined, and the project to build it is correspondingly more audacious.


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