ponedeljek, 5. avgust 2019

THE BREAKTHROUGH OF THE SOCIAL Dubrovnik Draft Manifesto (Version 1.2)[1]





The Social

The aim of the conference is to reassert, or even reinstate, social work. However, it is also about the social re-emerging or even breaking through as real action. 

After decades of a diminished social, a conjuncture that has privileged the economic and neglected and downgraded the social dimension as the basis of our existence, there is an urgent need for the breakthrough of a brand-new social, analogous to the one superseding classic liberalism at the end of the 19th century in the Global North.

Social work has, not only to be a part of this breakthrough, strengthened by this emergence and enabled to survive as an essential feature of society, but also needs to play an active role in bringing it to fruition.

Radical Social Transformations

We are living, in Polanyi’s terms, through yet another great transformation: a radical transformation. The transformation of the future will be radical anyway, whether we give up and merely observe the collapse of civilisation, or if we try to bring about a more socially just world, based on the common good and on living together – actively preserving that which is good, including the natural world and the eco-system, and radically changing what does not work. Globalisation, digitalisation, forced migration, demographic change, a changing division of labour, etc., have all exposed us to unprecedented, and sometimes unseen risks, but has also created numerous new opportunities in terms of communication, mobility, diversity, productive capacity and culture. Yet we crave for security (both social and physical) and fear violence, which keeps emerging in new forms and with a growing intensity.

The natural and political dimensions of the catastrophe merge into one through global warming, caused by fossil capitalism and the need to turn natural resources into profit. They are epitomised by migration, including migration forced as a result of conflicts, climate change and/or economic misery; fear exploited by authoritarianism (containing and fuelled by many kinds of religious fundamentalisms of many kinds , growing and massive inequality created by neo-liberal regimes, and the removal of liberties and freedom (gentrification for the rich – immobility for the poor), growing exploitation through new forms of work in the so-called gig economy, an expanded precariat, with deep psychological and social consequences, making human existence precarious indeed.

Yet, there have been important developments towards an inclusive society. The rights of people with disabilities and children have been clearly stated, enshrined in global Conventions, and, albeit with some hiccups, implemented on the ground, although not fully. Deinstitutionalisation and long-term care, have been introduced, not without obstacles, contributing to a re-evaluation of old age (Old is good), madness, handicap, childhood, and disability. More and more new social movements keep arising desiring a better, more dignified, life connecting the grassroots and global scales. New, alternative, forms of economic relations are being developed and a new kind of urban revolution seems to be imminent, not least in the Fearless cities movements. Although the age of austerity seems to be waning, what post-austerity will look like is still under construction. Trades unions, including trades’ unions of social workers, need to adapt to new forms of work and to advocate for measures to benefit the whole of society. 

Wisdom of Social Work Interfaces

To steer the transformation toward human solutions, practical wisdom is needed. The role of social work is to do just that; even more, it has to safeguard and promote the local or indigenous knowledge of minorities so it withstands and has impact on the global rule of abstract schemes. Ordinary everyday life – the Life World - should become the basic and pragmatic criterion of policy change and mutations – assuring the sovereignty of people (over the abstract schemes).

Besides the unalienable mandate of social work to provide the everyday, users’ perspective on life and the world, the strength of social work lies in bringing together unseemly combinations of knowledge and logic of action. The major sources of social work action syntheses are ethics, organisation and politics. There is the need to know what is the right thing to do, how to organise the transition and where to get the power to do it. Social work’s ethics of Inclusion and imperative of non-exclusion provide the humanist synthesis of the broken dialectics of Reason/ Unreason. To follow its ethical imperatives, forms of self-management (rather than social service management) should be sought. Social work engagement in politics needs to stem from popular activism and a  politics of intersectionality and emotions.

The practical power of social work lies in its transversal, inter-disciplinary, approach and inter-sectoral position. The Welfare (State) needs to be reinvented on the grounds of a critical evaluation of the post-socialist (with post-austerity in mind) syntheses (Balkan, East, Third World) and social work’s role in the bottom-up construction of social policies asserted. Social work has to create productive links with the human disciplines and sectors. In education, social work can contribute to learning in action and provide the solutions to schooling problems (bullying, teacher protection). In health, being constantly in relation with social work, it can bestow the importance of the user’s perspective, involvement and participation leading to a holistic approach to health and well-being. In combining legal frame and social process (in the law and administration), it can counter the debasing practices and bureaucratisation with empowering and advocacy practices. 

Practical Utopias (Challenges for Social Work)

Social work is a practical, everyday Utopia (Basaglia), it is always about becoming, searching for a better place, more human and more social. It has to have a (utopian) goal of desire – be it about changing for the better or conserving what is good. In its history, social work has developed many productive Tools, which need to be re-strengthened and re-loaded, with new alternatives sought and built. With classic tools and stories joined by new ones and governed by the notion of users’ emancipation.

Comparative social work should enable the transfer and translation of good practices, not only across diverse national and local contexts, but also over the life cycle in working with children and youth, the old, families facing multiple challenges, with people with diverse labels – poverty, delinquency, disability, heavy mental health concerns and so on. An intersectional approach should focus on the inter-relationship between gender, age, ‘race’, class, sexuality, and disability. Specific attention needs to be focused on providing appropriate support for LGBTQ emancipation and to the attitudes to refugees and migrants and the role of social work in this area.

Deinstitutionalisation, which has in recent decade become a global platform, needs an overview and a context, an appreciation of its achievements, obstacles and traps and a vision how to handle it as a technology and an ethical imperative. Simultaneously it has to be sensitised and polemic to the remaining elements of oppression, detention, constraint, punishment and even torture in the care system. Long-term care, which aspires to become a universal provision is a challenge per se and needs to be consistently and radically implemented as such – to connect with other types of existing provision in order to become universally available. Attention needs to be brought on instances of increased power of service users (e.g. shared decision-making, co-managers, co-trainers and co-researchers)

There are new areas social work is entering into (such as green social work) and new means of performing social work (such as through social media and new technologies).  There is a constant struggle between social work and fragmentising governance and management. In the past decades social work has been under attack of ‘proceduralism’ and projectualism/projectisation, even if social work has invented practical solutions to resolve the formal contradictions between protection (care) and freedom.

Increasing atomisation, individualisation and impotence of a practice based solely on individual social work, calls for a Reinvention of community social work and action (also to challenge the rise of religious fundamentalisms and authoritarian neoliberalisms).

The challenge for social work today is to build a vision that will guide us through new areas, foster and preserve freedoms based on (social) security, dealing simultaneously and comprehensively with diverse adversity and enabling people (both professionals and users) to address life issues in a transversal and intersectional manner; enabling people to live together with minimum exclusion and maximum availability of support for personal and communal projects, without fearing the consequences of oppression and without becoming prey to authoritarian power.




[1] This draft of the manifesto is based on the ideas of the conference content brainstormed by the programme committee and compiled by Vito Flaker. It is 'a draft' – subject to comments, suggestions and additions by the participants before and during the conference The Breakthrough of the Social: Practical Utopias, Wisdom and Radical Transformations – Social Work @IUC: Lessons Learned and Future Challenges. The conference will be held at Inter-University Centre in Dubrovnik, 2–6 September 2019, organised by the IUC ‘School of Social Work Theory and Practice’. 

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