Social Transformation 2022 - 2023

The times they are a-changinʼ—the world is changing. Change has been coming and happening for quite some time, and in most parts of the world it has been accompanied by crises carrying existential threats for the vast majority of the local populations. Now, however, even in the global centres of prosperity a “turning point” is being proclaimed because overlapping crises are exacerbating each other as they come together. The word “turning point” is still used as a defensive spell to prevent the changes already impacting most of the world from also having a massive effects where decision-making power and prosperity accumulate. But at the same time, the proclamation of the “turning point” also calls for a fundamental restructuring of Western societies, including drastic “impositions:” [Y]ou better start swimminʼ or you’ll sink like a stone.

The order is rapidly fadinʼ—the world is changing. And the change taking place today – despite all of the inherent ecological, economic, and political dynamics – is not a process that simply happens to us. The change of the world is also driven and engineered. Often this is done with little transparency and on behalf of those who have the economic and political power to protect and enforce their interests. As a comprehensive process of change, however, change of the world demands that it be designed by all and in the interests of all. The changes that are taking place require the transition to conscious emancipatory change, to outright revolution. And so, we see how numerous political movements – with thoroughly conflicting motives, approaches, and goals – are fighting for comprehensive and structural changes to the current way of life and the entire social system. There is battle outside and it is raginʼ.

How, by whom, and in what form the corresponding systemic change can be brought about, however, remains controversial and in many cases notoriously vague. It is obviously wrong to play off the urgency of one crisis against other social conflicts. Furthermore, it continues to hold true that many social conflicts cannot be reduced to class conflicts, whilst at the same time no other social conflict can play such a central role as was once ascribed to class antagonism. Today, there is no privileged conflict from which all other social conflicts derive and which would allow us to understand and conduct all struggles as one. Nevertheless, the motto is: Come gather ’round people/Wherever you roam.

The fact that there is no clear centre of crises and conflicts does not mean that they exist in isolation from each other or that they cannot be related to each other. For a conscious change of the world with emancipatory intent, it is even necessary to establish such relations. Forms of solidarity must be developed across the fields of social contestation, and the political subjects who practice the new forms of solidarity must transcend and bring together old interests and identities. The fact that society does not have such forms of solidarity and practices of transformation in sufficient measure, and that instead processes of desolidarisation are repeatedly set in motion, reinforces the crises and prevents their resolution. Such blocks to necessary social changes also show that indignation alone is not enough as a reaction to the changes in the world. Analysis and critique of a society, which produces desolidarisation out of its internal mechanisms instead of enabling solidarity, must join indignation. Come writers and critics […] And keep your eyes wide.

Desolidarisation is not simply the result of wrong political decisions seeking to protect vested interests (although often only doing so by appearances) nor stems from the defence of one’s own privileges. Desolidarisation also results from the way society structures the relationship between individuals and entire groups. In this respect, the focus of the year 2022/23 continues the previous year’s theme “Structures of Domination.” The understanding of society, of the interrelations it produces, and of the way in which such interrelations are produced also plays a decisive role for the question of the changeability of a changing world. On the one hand, what can be changed must be contingent; on the other hand, however, dynamics and convergences of social developments are precisely not random or arbitrary but conditioned by the systematic context of social practices and conflicts. Without an understanding of these relations any change of the world that consciously aims at emancipation must fail. Don’t criticize/What you can’t understand [i.e. what you haven’t properly analysed].

As indispensable as it is to know how the world – which is changing and which must be changed – works it is also important to understand what we mean when we speak of radical change, fundamental change, or even revolution of a social order. Is it enough to cut off the head of the king, to overthrow the government, or to expropriate the owners of the means of production? Since the bourgeois revolutions in North America and France social systems have not just been fundamentally changed – this has always happened – but there has also been increasing reflection on what changes can and should be understood as improvement and progress. In addition to thinking about what makes a society better, the theories of social change that have emerged since then include a reflection on the means by which social transformations can be brought about: Civil war, insurrection, revolution, general strike, conquest of the state, as well as reform, exodus, abolition, counterculture, and alternative economics are just a sample of the approaches that have been developed in theory and practice to set the world on a new course. These theories and approaches now have their own histories, which show that changing the world does not follow a pre-drawn trajectory for the better (or worse) nor is it the result of a pure decision to create an order of contingent relationships. The emergence and crises of theories and approaches to changing the world, which range across the spectrum between these two extremes, are intimately tied to the successes and failures that have resulted from attempts to make the world a better place. Your old road is rapidly agin’

The concepts for changing the world, therefore, cannot simply be invoked. They emerge in critical engagement with the political vocabulary, and they evolve as attempts are made with that vocabulary to identify and pinpoint the challenges of the day in ways that contribute to the overcoming of crises. In the coming year we want to understand how crises drive social change, what role social actors can play in this process, and what conceptual tools are and can be made available to such actors. We are particularly interested in new forms of solidarity, the interplay of processes of social reproduction, blockages to social progress, the role of social movements, and concepts of social change. For the times they are a-changin’