Social Forums, Social Movements and Social Change: A Response to Peter Marcuse on the Subject of the World Social Forum
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This response to Peter Marcuse situates his reading of the World Social Forum in the larger ‘space versus movement’ debate that has been raging among the WSF’s organizers. The author argues that this debate signals: (1) a power struggle over its future; (2) profound disagreement over the character of its power, which is itself based in conflicting understandings and visions of power and change in the contemporary period more generally; (3) at the heart of this last conflict is a yet more basic one about the status of multiplicity and diversity — in understanding power(s), in building resistance(s), in creating alternatives, in crafting solidarities, in imagining other possible worlds as les raisons d’être of the Social Forum. Drawing on the historical experience of feminism, the author proposes an alternative reading of the meaning of the Social Forum grounded in more multivalent understandings of power, movements and change, and argues that, in the evolving practice of the World Social Forum, a new democratic imaginary — post‐liberal and post‐Marxist — is taking shape and, with it, other possible futures are coming into view. Cette réponse à Peter Marcuse replace son explication du Forum social mondial dans le débat plus vaste ‘espace et mouvement’ qui a enflammé les organisateurs du FSM. En effet, ce débat met en évidence plusieurs aspects: une lutte de pouvoir pour son avenir; un désaccord profond quant à la nature de son pouvoir, s’appuyant lui‐même sur des appréhensions et visions contradictoires du pouvoir et du changement dans la période contemporaine, de manière générale; au cœur de cette opposition, en existe une autre encore plus fondamentale sur la situation de multiplicité et de diversité, pour comprendre le ou les pouvoirs, élaborer une ou plusieurs résistances, créer des alternatives, tisser des solidarités, imaginer d’autres possibilités de monde comme les raisons d’être du Forum social. S’inspirant de l’expérience historique du féminisme, l’article propose une autre lecture du Forum social, fondée sur des compréhensions plus polyvalentes du pouvoir, des mouvements et du changement; de plus, il affirme que, dans le cadre de l’exercice évolutif du Forum social mondial, prend forme un nouvel imaginaire démocratique — post‐libéral et post‐marxiste — et, qu’avec lui, se dessinent d’autres possibilités d’avenir.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".