A Kafkaesque trial – the case against Boaventura de Sousa Santos - by Júlio Marques Mota

Whenever I read a text by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, I feel extremely uncomfortable and deeply disturbed, because I sense the cruelty of the situation that has been created for him: canceled across the entire span of his academic career and on a global scale. In this short note, I will draw on one of my favorite authors, Piero Sraffa, an author who has nothing to do with this, of course, but who offers us a very curious suggestion.

To paraphrase Sraffa, I will say:

One can imagine a man coming from the moon observing society, who sees the entire circular process of production and exchange as a whole, as well as the entire process of income creation and distribution, without being part of it or being influenced by its internal contingencies.

The reference to the man from the moon refers to an event that took place in the British Parliament during a debate on the agricultural crisis on May 30, 1820. During this debate, Ricardo reportedly said that “because he consulted the interests of the whole community, he would oppose the laws on wheat” (Ricardo, Works V: 49). Henry Brougham, the MP for Winchelsea, who supported the farmers' motion for additional protectionist measures, described Ricardo's argument as coming from a man who “had fallen from another planet” and lived in a “utopian world” (Ricardo, Works V: 56) 7. The reference to the “man from the moon” can thus be seen as a metaphor designed to indicate the need to adopt a detached point of view, to see things as they are, and not through the colored glasses of some particular interest group.

As Heinz D. Kurz and Neri Salvadori point out in “On the ‘Photograph’ Interpretation of Piero Sraffa’s Production Equations A View from the Sraffa Archive”.

Sraffa’s quote tells us a lot about the path to follow in the analysis of the case against Boaventura de Sousa Santos and, above all, because of its symbolic parallel with Boaventura’s situation. Sraffa lived in exile in Great Britain, was a communist, was Jewish, and was an intellectual reference of the first importance. Boaventura lives in exile in Quintela, is a solid figure on the left, and his work, a global reference in the field of sociology, is being canceled on a global scale, while Sraffa's work should have been burned, according to the logic of the neoliberals who dominated at the time. At the same time, both Sraffa and Boaventura are relatively isolated in academic circles, where the scientific work of each is a worthy expression of what we might consider the mission of the university. The parallels are evident (...)

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