Denied a sense of possibility and stuck in the trap of false necessity, we have no future and we have forgotten or repressed the past. But that there is no alternative to the way things are is simply untrue. 

In the great crisis in which we are mired, the mantra that “there’s no alternative” appears destined to dominate our way of thinking. There is no alternative to the policies of austerity, the judgment of the market, the surrender to global financial capital, and to soaring inequality. There is no alternative to the erosion of our rights and opportunities as democratic citizens; to a market-based Europe as opposed to a rights-based Europe. We are in a kind of dictatorship of the present, conducted in the name of a hypocritical realism, robbing any sense of possibility and reducing the scope for political and moral imagination. The result is a shocking increase in social malaise. We are in desperate need of new and audacious ideas, which only political and moral imagination can generate. Ideas that challenge our ultimate goals and are not confined to the means at our disposal for exiting the crisis.
This conversation on the boundaries of the possible takes place in three stages. In the first, there is an acknowledgement of the political, economic, social and cultural repercussions of the great crisis. In the second, an enthusiastic exploration of the past to rediscover social experiments that defeated the “no alternative” mantra and delivered some of civilization’s most important achievements. The third stage consists in the restoration of the conception and desire for new social worlds. Of the categorical desire called Utopia. A contextualized and realistic Utopia that while taking reality seriously does not surrender or renounce the possibility of a praiseworthy future.  

“I wonder: tools to exit the crisis and for what? To get back on the old merry-go-round? To continue with the same rules, at times explicit but mostly opaque, of illusory growth and social carnage, to the loss and dissipation of the fundamentals of a democratic and civil coexistence? The point is that we have simply lost sight of the space in which we must define our aims. But it is precisely in this space that the essential features of how we live, of how institutions are organized, of social practices that coincide with one or several projects, are all established. Which brings us back to the vital question: what idea of the future merits our praise and why? For what reasons and on what grounds? For what collective purpose and social design?”