R E A D E R

THE ART OF ORGANISING HOPE

New Narratives for Europe
8-11 November 2019 // Ghent (BE)
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It is still dawn
but no longer dark
by Ana Cecilia Dinerstein
performed at the opening session // 8 November 2018
Thank you ever so much.
For many years we have been told over and over again
that there is no alternative, that there is nothing
that we can do about what hurt us. A paralysing
discourse that has created hopelessness. Yes,
hopelessness is socially constructed, and the social
imaginary of hopelessness draws on ideas such
as pain, sacrifice, fear, uncertainty, vulnerability,
danger. Creating a sense of hopelessness is a very
efficient way to quickly implement irreversible
structural economic changes, even if they degrade
living standards, worsen working conditions, and
generally spread fear and unhappiness. It facilitates
demobilisation and inward-looking attitudes that
detach us from other and from the real world
that we desperately need to change. The message
‘sacrifice today because otherwise you will not
have any opportunity in the future’ (!) offered by
the managers of capitalist-patriarchal-coloniality
is not an appealing political promise! Or is it?
Pierre Bourdieu tells us that the neoliberal
utopia has managed to see itself as the scientific
description of reality. But this is, of course, the
close reality of la pensée unique… Subcomander
Insurgent Marcos calls it ‘the inevitable’. Let me
quote:
‘The inevitable’ has a name today: fragmented
globalization ... the end of history, the omnipresence
and omnipotence of money, the substitution
of politics for police, the present as the only
possible future, rationalization of social inequality,
justification of super- exploitation of human beings
and natural resources, racism, intolerance, war’
The Art of Organising Hope (TAOH) detests the
inevitable’s violent discourse and has been set out
to explore and reach out for our potential, with
others and recover the POLITICAL power to dream
and prefigure, collectively, alternative possibilities.
Fear and hopelessness have short legs, and there
are extraordinary moments in history when
governing by fear reaches a cul-de-sac. At such
breaking points, often marked by economic,
financial or political crisis (or all of the above),
fear can give way to another equally important
human emotion: hope. I believe that we are at such
moment although this is not obvious and visible to
all, but we know…
This is the reason why TAOH is so important,
because we must discover a new language to name
our actions so that we can appreciate them as
significant politically.
The present is a fascinating moment in radical
politics. While the horrors of our time war, death,
violence, rape and hunger, magnify dramatically,
‘utopia’ has returned in subtler forms. We are not
in Kansas anymore. There has been a major shift
in grass-roots movements’ politics, demonstrating
that the struggles against the ineffectuality of
policy, the failure of representative democracy,
the brutality of power and the alienating character
of the economy are now mainly struggling for a
breathing space from where to conceive of and
organise social life alternatively.
A very important date for this sea change in
grassroot resistance and collective action is the 1st
of January 1994. Nothing is foundational, but some
events mark important shifts in the way we think
and experience both power and resistance. On the
1st of January 1994 the poorest of the poor and
the powerless people in the world, the indigenous
peoples of Chiapas, Mexico, organised in the
Zapatista movement, said NO to the most powerful
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and rich people in the world organised in the North
American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
Chiapas, of course, has an strategic role in the
global economic restructuring in the capitalism
of accumulation by dispossession (Harvey) and
it is incredible how it has become the epitome
of significant capitalist contradictions: while an
abundance of natural resources makes it one of
the ‘world’s paradises’ and brings unmatched
settings for the development of life, Chiapas also
constitutes one of the most hostile environments
for human life (as Ceceña and Barreda tell us).
Subcommander Insurgent Marcos describes how,
as soon as you enter Chiapas, you realise the misery
that neoliberal global capital causes. I quote:
‘Chiapas loses blood through many veins: through
oil and gas ducts, electric lines, railways; through
bank accounts, trucks, vans, boats, and planes;
through clandestine paths, gaps, and forest
trails. This land continues to pay tribute to the
imperialist: petroleum, electricity, cattle, money,
coffee, banana, honey, corn, cacao, tobacco, sugar,
soy, melon, sorghum, mamey, mango, tamarind,
avocado, and Chiapaneco blood all flow as a result
of the thousand teeth sunk into the throat of the
Mexican Southeast’
In the Zapatista’s declarations, communiques and
documents, hope is portrayed as the opposite of
globalisation and as a rejection of conformity and
defeat. YA BASTA! (Enough is enough!) means
NO to the rule of money over life, means NO
to Mexico entering the NAFTA agreement with
Canada and the US, because the new NAFTA
entailed the expropriation of the indigenous land
(ejidos)from the indigenous people to put them
on sale. Zapatistas argued that NAFTA was a dead
sentence to the indigenous of Chiapas and said
that globalisation was a war against humanity.
YA BASTA was exemplary and resonated around
the world as a genuine possibility to change the
direction of the wind, to see things differently, to
hope again.
TAOH belongs to this movement. Innumerable
collective actions today are not just dedicated
to make demands to governments but also to
developing concrete alternatives in urban and
rural territories. These are enriched by traditions
of resistance, but bring the new into play, as they
are prefiguring, i.e. anticipating, a better future in
the present.
The Zapatistas were/are not naïve. They knew what
they were doing and the impact of their actions.
Above all, they know that the only way to deal with
power is to disempower it, discursively, politically
and collectively. The deconstruction of the powerful
means also the possibility of empowering ourselves.
This is important for TAOH because, while we do
not ignore the force of the violent dictatorship, the
humiliating power of debt, the devastating effect of
hunger, the disciplining force of the police, we can
and should learn hope. We must educate our hope,
as Bloch says, so that we can think about ourselves
as those who constitute social reality rather than
those who react to a reality created by others. The
creation of reality as THE reality in underpinned
by struggles over the meaning of reality. But what
defines us as humans is the capacity to project
ourselves into the world, to share, to choose how
to live, to aspire, dream, organise, to activate and
use our intuition and emotional intelligence and of
course our imagination to do the best we can to live
with dignity.
But mine, as you know, is not a religious discourse!
Far from that, hope is a category of struggle,
an emotion and a tool to radically change the
demarcation of legibility of reality, that is the way
we read reality, rejecting the reality that is imposed
to us from hegemonic power, in many ways,
including being hungry. Hunger says Martinez
Andrade, must be taken seriously!
The main problem is to naturalise capitalist-
patriarchal-colonial society as “our society,” as
“the world we live in, as the only viable model of
collective human life. Such naturalisation is wrong
because capitalist-patriarchal-colonial society is a
‘form’ of society among many (existing, imagined
or not yet imagined). If we don’t recognise this, we
feel despaired, sad, hopeless, and we will not know
why.
By normalizing the violence which is inherent in
capitalist, colonial and patriarchal society, the
(real) illusion that reality is only what appears in
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front of us is sadly confirmed. For once possibility unhappy as many revolutionary dreamers of the
of the alternative is eliminated from the horizon, past who dreamt an abstract ideal outside herstory
we can only operate within the very partial and and context and forced themselves to be the subject
limited scope of either fantasy or probability. This of such revolution, which was not always right for
creates self-limitation and self-repression in our them.
views of the world.
Today, we are relying on the political subjectivities
Take for example President Trump. He is doubtless that have emerged from the centre of the capitalist
the American Ubu Roi: Like Jarry’s character Ubu crisis and the crisis of utopia, and which relate to
Roi, he loves power, shouts, swears, farts, screams, this particular moment of struggle: we see that this
hits people, hates women, loves war. Both Trump’s radical subject is plural, prefigurative, decolonial,
and Ubu Roi’s realities is quite ‘absurd’ but we ethical, ecological, communal, antipatriarchal,
accept it as ‘our’ reality. Moreover, Trump, Putin, anti-identitarian and democratic. Our utopias
Asaad and Bolsonaro, just to mention some of the should demonstrate those qualities, too. Their
exponents of the world crisis, are delusional if they utopias are concrete utopias, that is, praxis-
believe that they can continue playing the game oriented activities, as Ruth Levitas put it.
‘who has it bigger’ for a while and that the world will
The main difference between abstract and concrete
be still here, waiting for them to go ahead with their
utopia is that abstract utopia is a ready-made utopia,
adoration for power and war, crimes, humiliations,
while concrete utopia is of an anticipatory kind
hatred. Or the ‘democratic’ governments of UK
‘which by no means coincides with abstract utopia
and Europe, who pretend that they have nothing
dreaminess, nor is directed by the immaturity
to do with the wars in the Middle East? They look
of merely abstract utopian socialism’ (Bloch,
like characters in Edgar Allan Poe’s Heart-telltale,
1959/1986: 146). We can read how Marx refers to
remember?: ‘Oh God! What could I do? I foamed
the Paris Commune 150 years ago ‘The working
--I raved --I swore! I swung the chair upon which I
class did not expect miracles from the Commune.
had been sitting, and grated it upon the boards, but
They have no ready-made utopias to introduce par
the noise arose over all and continually increased.
décret du people ... They have no ideals to realize,
It grew louder, louder, louder! And still the men
but to set free the elements of the new society with
chatted pleasantly, and smiled."
which old collapsing bourgeois society itself is
Their hypocrisy is utterly dystopian. They probably pregnant’(Marx, 1871).
think that utopia is dead (as in URSS is over) so they
Concrete utopias offer an experiential critique of
can do as they pleased. But TAOH has changed the
the world as it is. They are open and contain the
question of utopia. We are not asking any longer
not yet within them! The Not Yet is a central notion
whether we should hold utopia or not because is
of Bloch’s philosophy. Bloch looks at humanity
becoming increasingly clear to most people in
in a remarkable way, by placing the not yet at its
the world that utopia is indispensable today. It is
centre. This means that humanity is unfinished,
no longer an option but a necessity. Yet, this begs
it is a possibility, humanity has to engage with the
a question: where is utopia? TAOH is not about
challenge to become. It is not yet in possession
creating a new paradise on our minds and draw a
of itself and it “is something that has yet to be
plan that will take us there so: what kind of utopia
discovered” (Traces, 18)’
are we talking about?
This ‘discovery’ of the not yet is what we are doing
TAOH suspects of abstract utopia because abstract
right now here with TAOH. The task to become is
utopia is an imposition that requires us to make
not contemplative or passive. It is praxis. Concrete
adjustments to fit in. It is as if I buy a lovely dress
utopias belong to the realm of the really possible.
that I like as my ideal dress but it is too small for me.
Reality is not real if it is not open, without the
So, I would need to go on a diet in order to fit into
dimension of the not yet. Bloch is adamant ‘There
the lovely dress. That would make me unhappy, as
is no true realism without the true dimension of
 TAOH READER: NEW NARRATIVES FOR EUROPE
this openness’ (Bloch, 1959/1986: 237–238). But we
must decolonise this openness. The struggles of
indigenous, women and other subaltern subjects
of resistance differ from mainstream forms of
mobilisation in the North.
How we understand these differences is important
for TAOH. The particular features of indigenous
resistance, for example, do not simply refer to
cultural differences or differences in the historical
background or the context of production, but to a
differentiated positioning of indigenous peoples
vis-à-vis the state, the law and capital. Coloniality is
embedded in the power they resist and confront. As a
praxis-oriented activity, concrete utopia challenges
Eurocentric abstract critical theory, for the latter is
detached from the decolonial experiential-critique
put forward by subaltern subjects mobilising
around issues of social reproduction and for social
justice (in the Global South and non-western
world). Concrete utopia attacks the Eurocentric
episteme that prevents critique from becoming a
critique without borders.
What TAOH does is to challenge the existing
demarcation of reality, how do we understand
reality and operates within the space that is not
yet, with no expectations or having decided a priori
the principles to would guide it. The occupation
of a space and the creation of the alternative
economy, the struggle for an alternative gender,
the need to decolonise politics, the creation of an
alternative pedagogy, the search for dignified form
of work beyond decent, all these concrete utopias
do not criticise society form outside, they are
critique. And remember: the absence of ‘facts’ or
‘conditions’ for change does not constraint TAOH
because the opposite is true: TAOH makes apparent
how constraining the reality represented by ‘facts’
is! The Sem Terra (Rural landless workers) in Brazil
ventured beyond the fact that they were condemned
to hunger and the fact that the land was not theirs.
They cut the wire, the venture beyond the wire
and occupied the lands in order to feed themselves
and implement their dream agrarian reform. They
changed the facts. They thought: we are hungry
and if our reality does not correspond to the facts,
well ‘too bad for the facts!’(Bloch with Hegel).
TAOH also contends the accusation of unrealisable
utopia usually made to TAOH movements and
contests the demand that we should be more
explicit about the alternative that we are creating.
We don’t know! All we know that we cannot keep
on going like this. Should it not be the powerful
who should explain what is it exactly what they
are defending and how is their capitalist-colonial-
patriarchal going to be fixed?
But if we don’t have a ‘plan’ to follow, how is
praxis guided? Bloch proposes that praxis is
guided by ‘educated hope’(docta spes), which
mediates between reason and passion. It is a
question of learning hope… we must engage with
what is becoming as we are doing right now, this
is where we belong! Clearly, it is not fortuitous
that one of the key features of hope movements
is the development of their own pedagogies and
knowledges. From there, we can think better about
political organisation.
To say NO is not enough and every NO contains
in itself a yes, an affirmation of what does not
yet exist. They go together. We negate in order
to spark hope. The process of organising hope is
then affirmative, but in no way positive or merely
‘optimistic’. We must then distinguish clearly
between positive and affirmative praxis. While the
former accepts reality as it is, affirmative praxis
negates by means of affirming life in, against and
beyond capital-patriarchy-coloniality. Without
this distinction between positive and affirmative
praxis, and without the need to connect negation
and affirmation, negativity becomes an abstract
critique, detached from the real movement of
struggle, without historical specificity.
Too many times I have been asked: oh, yes,
fantastic, yes, but tell me: how is it possible that
a group of people running an autonomous school
in Chiapas or the TAOH summit in Ghent, to put
a couple of examples, can produce any change at
all? Well, my first response to this is that TAOH
-generally speaking, is not about doing isolated
experiments in lovely communities to change life
styles. TAOH is primarily political action and as
such is about experimenting with other forms of
sociability and subjectivity around work, leisure,
 TAOH READER: NEW NARRATIVES FOR EUROPE
love, food, education, land. TAOH is aware of both
how difficult is to say NO and how dangerous is
to say NO: We desperately need to destroy money
as the abstract form of reproduction of life but at
the same time, and while we are doing so, we need
money in order to live. We want to be as far as we
can from the power of the state but at the same
time we need the welfare state to survive. TAOH
is about navigating these contradictions. Change
takes place as a result of this. And, to be sure,
Bloch tells us that hope must be unconditionally
disappointable. Why? Because, he says, it is open in
a forward direction, in a future- oriented direction’
(Bloch, 1998: 340. TAOH is aware of this. We have in
front of us the possibility of an unknown future and
this is problematic because it is all uncertain. We
don’t know whether we will be able to do what we
want. There is contingency and there is power. So
for Bloch hope is not confidence. Hope is critical.
However, he writes ‘hope still nails a flag on the
mast, even in decline, in that the decline is not
accepted, even when this decline is still very strong
(Bloch, 1988: 16–17).
We know well that governments and other powers of
the state, the law, the rules of the economy, cultural
norms and common sense will try to ‘translate’
TAOH into something else, repress it, ridicule it,
minimise it. They have to do this in order to create
order because TAOH is disruptive. But translation
is a process of struggle: what can be translated and
what is left outside. Here lays I think the key issue
about TAOH: what we are doing when we create an
alternative form of being with others differently,
that is, we are reading reality different, venturing
beyond ‘the wire’, inhabiting the symbolic and
territorial space that was forbidden. We have been
told: you can’t go there, as if we were kids, and this
is what TAOH does: it goes there...what is there?
There is what I call the beyond zone of collective
action, a zone where reality can be drawn differently,
where we allow ourselves to think differently,
where the parameters of legibility of reality are
wider and there is possibility! ‘Possibility’ is a key
concept in Bloch’s work and it is not the same as
probability. Most of things we dream of are not
probable (i.e. there is no objective indication that
they might happen soon). But we cannot say that
they are impossible. Who would dare to say that
to eliminate hunger in the world is not possible? It
might not be probable but it is definitely possible.
The idea of possibility is important because, as
Bronner (1997) writes, possibility expresses a
vision about realising something which is not yet
anywhere’… We cannot rule things a priori because
they are not feasible. Nothing is feasible until they
are feasible. Now: to dismantle the welfare state
seems unfeasible but in the UK is happening at a
fast speed! Utopia is always concrete and possible.
And hope is not an illusion or a wish or an idea, but
a dimension of reality.
In judging TAOH some might ask: “What did you
achieve with that?” My response: cause- effect does
not work here. We are doing something that has
a bearing. But most importantly it is not possible
to measure the success of TAOH by mainstream
standards, that wold be strange as we are altering
the mainstream ways of measure success, as part
of the alternative.
Bloch talks about the future as if you would be
watching the sun rising at dawn. What happens
when we do that? We are situated at a point in
time where ‘the singular characteristics are not
yet because the sun which radiates its light on
everything has not yet rise; it is still dawn, but no
longer dark ... (Bronner, 1997: 177). Now, right
here, right now, is no longer dark!
TAOH has created a new temporal, spatial and
political space, a true encounter, packed with what
Spinoza called ‘joyful passions’ which are essential
to human survival. Joyful passions are the opposite
to sad passions, which encourage misery, distress,
sadness…the world of the powerful, the place for
hatred (Kaminsky on Spinoza 1998: 327–328.)
The TAOH Summit is itself a concrete utopia: it is
open to the new, to discussion, to joy, to trouble,
to contradiction, to disappointment, to creating
surplus possibilities. If I have to say in a nutshell
what we will be doing during the summit, I’d say
that we will free hope from the Pandora’s jar to let it
expand freely and inhabit and populate the reality
of the not yet. I have high expectations of what is
going to happen during the next days!
Thank you!
Ana Cecilia Dinerstein
8 November 2018