Imagining another world. The role of language and political imagination in shaping a transnational movement of movements

Over the past ten years the World Social Forum (WSF) has turned into one of the most important points of aggregation for social movements worldwide. In order to bind different potential and current participants into the WSF, the Forum's organisers have devised a political language that is meant to establish a worldwide “communicative web” a key feature of which is the imagination of a future beyond neoliberalism and towards a “new possible world”. The political language in question thus revolves around

1.      The verbal construction of a symbolic aim around which a movement is supposed to coalesce;

2.      The formulation of a “world-view”, i.e. a key to interpreting events as well as political and economic relationships;

3.      The construction of a symbolic “stage” on which the symbolic aim conjoins with the image or interpretation of the “movement of movements” that the organisers aim to transmit.

More precisely, these features take the form of

 a.       A verbal and symbolic construction of “another possible world” with significant references to the “future” as a symbolic watershed between the neoliberal world and the desired world;

b.      A description of the neoliberal world and its opposition to different forms of political and economic integration and cooperation;

c.       An assessment of the present and planning of the future of the WSF as an event, as a network, and as an organisation;

d.      A WSF “Territory” as a symbolic anticipation of a future form of political life.

 The paper aims to detail these different symbolic features by means of a qualitative and quantitative content analysis of the documents available at the WSF's website. These include both the organisers' foundational documents and a representative selection of the recorded debates that have taken place at the WSF throughout its history.