Walking on the Edge of the Abyss: Conversations with Gustavo Esteva (Global University for Sustainability Book Series) 9819923247, 9789819923243

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GLOBAL UNIVERSITY FOR SUSTAINABILITY BOOK SERIES

Walking on the Edge of the Abyss Conversations with Gustavo Esteva Edited by Kin Chi Lau · Rafael Escobedo · David Barkin

Global University for Sustainability Book Series

Series Editors Kin Chi Lau, Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University, Hong Kong, China Tsui SIT, Institute of Rural Reconstruction of China, Southwest University, Chongqing, China

The book series aims to publish books and monographs drawing on the expertise of the Global U Founding Members by offering a succinct analysis of global crises affecting the ecological, social, political, and economic aspects, as well as to explore transformative visions and praxis for sustainability. Some books may be translated from their original language into English.

Kin Chi Lau · Rafael Escobedo · David Barkin Editors

Walking on the Edge of the Abyss Conversations with Gustavo Esteva

Editors Kin Chi Lau Lingnan University Hong Kong, China

Rafael Escobedo San Pablo Etla, Mexico

David Barkin Distinguished Professor in Economics Metropolitan Autonomous University Mexico City, Mexico

ISSN 2752-7379 ISSN 2752-7387 (electronic) Global University for Sustainability Book Series ISBN 978-981-99-2324-3 ISBN 978-981-99-2325-0 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2325-0 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Alex Linch shutterstock.com This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

About the Global U Book Series

Global University for Sustainability (Global U) is an international network of around 200 renowned scholars/activists, with a substantial number from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, apart from those from Europe and North America. They are academic scholars, peace activists, community workers, food producers, and rural reconstruction promoters, among others (please see https://our-global-u.org/oguorg/en/). Since 2011, Global U has organized the South South Forum on Sustainability, with over 10 co-organizing universities and institutions from China and overseas. The Forum is a platform for dialogues and exchanges among grassroots and resistance practices in the production, dissemination, and use of knowledge as instruments of problematization and self-organization, as well as interactions among thinkers in search of paradigms for peace and justice. Since 2020, Global U has organized South South Dialogue on Sustainability Series, such as Venezuela in Struggles, Experiences with Indigenous Communities in Chiapas, and African People’s Struggles for Liberation. All proceedings of the Forums and Dialogues were video-recorded and uploaded to the Global U websites. This book series aims to publish books and monographs drawing on the expertise of Global University Founding Members by offering a succinct analysis of global crises affecting the ecological, social, political, and economic aspects, as well as to explore transformative visions and praxis for sustainability. v

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ABOUT THE GLOBAL U BOOK SERIES

The three main categories falling under this series are: . General analysis (e.g., history of political economy of a country; issue of sustainability, nuclear disasters, energy crisis, pandemic, climate change); with a focus on China and the global south. . Biographies, autobiographies, or anthologies of eminent thinkers from around the world, especially from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, connecting their personal trajectory to their thought and the larger context. . Analysis and interpretation of on-the-ground experiences highlighting how local communities negotiate with economic and other forces impacting on them, and organize in alternative ways. Kin Chi Lau Tsui SIT

For Gustavo.

Photo 1 Gustavo Esteva in 1946

Photo 2 Gustavo Esteva in 1954

Photo 3 Gustavo Esteva in 1958

Photo 4 Gustavo Esteva (right 1), Monte Albán, Oaxaca, Mexico, 1992

Photo 5 Gustavo Esteva (right 4) with friends and family. San Pablo Etla, Oaxaca, Mexico

Photo 6 Gustavo Esteva (left 1) with his family, 21 December 2018

Photo 7 Building process of Gustavo Esteva’s home in San Pablo Elta, Oaxaca, Mexico, 1989

Photo 8 Gustavo Esteva (right 1) with Zapatistas, 1995

Preface by Kin Chi Lau

The legacies of Gustavo Esteva At the 8th South South Forum on Sustainability (SSFS) in 2021, Gustavo Esteva delivered an Inaugural Lecture on June 15 and Forum Opening Remarks on June 18. Although, at that time, we could not have imagined that we would not see him again in 2022, instead of having Gustavo launch this book at the 9th SSFS, we held a commemorative session to talk about his legacies. This book, published by Palgrave Macmillan under the Global University for Sustainability Book Series, was a project Gustavo and I pursued after SSFS8. We were encouraged by the positive responses of Chinese readers on social media platforms. Gustavo’s Opening Remarks for SSFS8, subtitled in English and Chinese, was watched by an audience of 120,000. [http://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1gK4y137Ey] I was keen on introducing Gustavo’s thoughts to the Chinese readers as his critique of modernization, development, and education would open up horizons for China’s young generation looking for alternatives. We also planned live streaming a series of ten lectures for him to systematically elaborate his ideas, which would complement this book. Hence, from September 2021 onwards, we had online fortnightly or monthly meetings to discuss which articles to select from his many writings, which ones need to be translated from Spanish to English, and how he would be conversing with readers not only from China but also from the global south. I emailed Gustavo on Feb 14, 2022, telling him that the following day, Feb 15, was the first full xiii

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moon of the lunar new year, the Chinese Lovers’ Day. Gustavo wrote back on Feb 14: “We are already enjoying the moon, almost full, and despite the commercial bias of the Western celebration of ‘The Day for Love and Friendship’ (February 14th), we are using the opportunity to celebrate and embrace each other. I have had a tough week. I do prefer to meet with you on Thursday, February 24th. And yes, I am advancing in the anthology to schedule the lecture series accordingly. Abrazos”. But alas! On Feb 22, Gustavo wrote to impart the bad news that he was confirmed with COVID-19. Our meeting scheduled for Feb 24 to finalize the book manuscripts was postponed. Gustavo departed on March 17. With unspeakable grief in my heart, I set to complete this book project and sought the help of Rafael Escobedo and David Barkin, who gracefully and generously came on board. The book’s title is Walking on the edge of the abyss—conversations with Gustavo Esteva. This illuminates the taking of risks and pushing of limits that Gustavo was always ready for. Gustavo was a dear friend with whom I shared many common perspectives. I resonate with Gustavo’s insistence on being rooted in the local soil of the peasant communities and seeing the creative worlds they nourish. The wide variety of experiences at the grassroots go beyond so-called development and modernity. The concrete experiences of living in a community would foster a consciousness based on the community’s commons. Gustavo, learning from Ivan Illich, names his pursuit “a philosophy of soil” to recover the grounding in both soil and virtue. This is where tradition would be readopted and renewed. I would like to highlight the philosophy and practice that Gustavo frequently refers to about the indigenous communities: “Every ‘I’ is a ‘we’”. Gustavo says, “for the marginalized, particularly the indigenous people, a ‘we’ is the first layer of their being: they are a community, not a collection of individuals. And they cannot separate the human ‘we’, family, friends, neighbours, from the non-human ‘we’ of place”. Gustavo explains that the word “world” in the Zapotec language is “labsa ba yu”, which means: “I/we in this place; my horizon, that is, the circle that my eyes can reach around me; the other side, what is beyond my horizon. The ‘real’ world is everything within my visual horizon, my place, my ‘we’. The rest is mystery”. The rendition of the term “I” and “we” into Chinese could be 我 “my self” and 我们 “our selves”, marked as singular and plural. Or, they can be rendered as 小我 “small self” and 大我 “large self”. However, there can be misleading connotations. The Chinese “small self” refers to an individual,

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whereas the “large self” refers to something larger, which can be community, nation, or even cosmos. However, a Chinese idiomatic expression is: the small self should sacrifice in order for the large self to be accomplished 牺牲小我完成大我. Thus there is a tension between the two, with a hierarchy of difference, for the interest of ONE to be subordinated to the interest of ALL. Of course, all thoughts must be contextualized in their history and culture. In Gustavo’s elaboration of the indigenous philosophy and practice of “every ‘I’ is a ‘we’”, there are different layers of being. It is recognized that a person is a social being, part of a group, member of a community, sharing language, social relations, customs, and what is commonly produced in a shared living. The person is singularity produced in social interactions and is produced in history and culture. There is no independently existing “I”. All are inter-dependent and dynamic, susceptible to change. This is why Gustavo emphasizes hospitality, friendship, and trust, from which we can find joy and hope. This philosophy recognizing that “every ‘I’ is a ‘we’” is a wise and preferred way of living together, of good living, of being rooted in the local soil, self-organizing, and cultivating one’s heart to be big enough to embrace differences. Hence, the famous motto from the Zapatistas, for “a world in which all worlds can be embraced”, where boundaries are porous and fluid, with no separation of subject/object, and the people are “collective subjects without clear boundaries or continuities, transforming the unbearable reality, constructing new worlds”. I have frequently referred to this quotation from Gustavo in my discussion of the Zapatista movement and have elaborated on its relevance to the rural reconstruction movement in China. I highlight that the “I” and the “we” are not static entities but changing subjectivities embedded in and constructed by fluid social relationships. As Gustavo says, “we” is a verb rather than a noun. The “we” is manifold, as different relationships are being woven. The question in China, as in many countries, is whether individualism and egoism have superseded identifications with collectives or communities in the modernization and urbanization process. The egoistic “I” is presumed to be autonomous, independent, rational, and surviving on one’s own competencies. This atomization process is accompanied by a century-long process of disintegration of rural communities and inter-dependent modes of production and livelihood. Even though society cannot operate without inter-dependence and cooperation, the myth of individual autonomy is propagated by modern education as well

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as institutionalized economic and social modes of governance. Money becomes the god guiding human activities. The paradox is that there is increasing dependence on the system and decreasing control of individuals over their own lives. The classic discussion of the state or the market presupposes the entities in question exist independently with fixed identities, hence failing to tackle the level concerning the conditioning of individuation—not only in material terms but in terms of the psyche and subjectivity. On the other hand, like Gustavo, I am inspired by how the Zapatista experiment offers an alternative in theory and praxis. It is an example of another world being made possible, existing, and evolving. The struggle has been arduous, with the Zapatista movement being subject to incessant violence and threat from the state, the army, the paramilitary, the mafia… Yet, the path chosen by the Zapatistas to build their communities differs from many conventional struggles. In my view, what is most impressive is that they are not reactive to external threats, they do not emulate the regimes of the oppressors, and they are not blackmailed into subservience. Instead, they develop a strong identification with the traditions of the community. Rather than having money as the central guiding criterion, something much more powerful is at work—the embrace of Dignity. “Dignity” has been exiled by the discourses of the colonial masters and the modern elites but has been carefully nurtured by the Zapatista and other indigenous communities. The self-governance of the Zapatistas is based on an intricate weaving of the social fabric, continuing with and reviving ancient traditions of not only practices but also outlooks and values. Atomized “I”s seeking individual gains gives way to a system of responsibilities and reciprocities. This is the basis for local governance going for self-sufficiency; delinking from the modernization paradigm is not only in the economic or social arena but, most importantly, in the subjectivities and collective consciousness. There is much that we can learn from the Zapatista movement and much that we can take from Gustavo’s crystallization of the gems of the Zapatista and other indigenous experiences. Gustavo was thrilled that his ideas and writings would be propagated in China. He had looked forward to a good dialogue with the Chinese friends he came to be acquainted with back in 2002. In 2002, mediated by Luis Lopezllera, I and three eminent Chinese scholars—Dai Jinhua, Huang Ping, and Wen Tiejun—visited Gustavo at the newly set up Earth University in Oaxaca. That started a two-decade-long friendship between

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Gustavo and his Chinese friends. Dai Jinhua, co-editor with me of The Masked Knight—Anthology of the Writings of Subcommander Marcos (in Chinese), had an online dialogue with Gustavo at the 7th SSFS in 2020. Together with Gustavo, we held a seminar in early 2021 and produced the book Visions, Voices, and Practices of the Zapatistas . How we miss Gustavo! We will be translating this book into Chinese and hope that it will foster dynamic and creative thinking as well as the spirit of regeneration. Let us overcome the grief over the loss of Gustavo but celebrate his life lived with such richness and continue with his intellectual and spiritual legacies! Let us work on our different soils, in our different localities, for hope and conviviality—which would be Gustavo’s wish. I thank again Rafael, David, and Nicole for supporting this project. I also thank the Global University for Sustainability Executive Team, a collective of members with strengths and weaknesses complementing each other, learning to live the “I” as a “we”. Hong Kong, China

Kin Chi Lau

Photo 9 Gustavo Esteva (left) and Kin Chi Lau (right) at the Earth University, Mexico, 18 July 2014

Photo 10 Gustavo Esteva (right 4), Kin Chi Lau (right 3), Tsui SIT (left 2) at the Earth University, Mexico, 18 July 2014

Preface by Rafael Escobedo

Most of the texts included in this anthology saw the light of day in an adobe house resting on the hills that welcome us to the mountains that warmly embrace the Central Valleys of Oaxaca. Hills that follow the pace, the colors, and the sensations of each season, where you can still live with and for nature. Fortune accompanied me to find this place, first because of the pleasure, the honor, and the provocation of meeting Gustavo Esteva and secondly because his instructions to get there were never entirely clear. Sitting at his desk at the Universidad de la Tierra in Oaxaca City, he scribbled on a piece of paper in a couple of strokes the route I had to take to see him the following day. Dear reader, I know that the intention of a foreword in an academic book should be faithful to the rigor and intellectuality of the academic canons; however, in these pages, we do not believe in such a thing, and the only way to explain the origin, importance, and enjoyment of this anthology is by telling stories. A little over three years ago, I followed the scribbles until I reached the dirt road, the little convenience store, the bridge supported by two posts, and the stream drawn to show its passing under that bridge. Gustavo was always attentive to the essential details, water, geometry, and place. “You will pass the bridge, and on the right side, you will see a sign, you are there!”. At that moment, I never imagined that this place would become my home. That this bridge would see me walk hundreds of times, with friends, with my dogs, with my partner, with joy and clarity, confusion

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and sadness, sometimes without company but never alone. Walks in which I reflected on the world of dreams and experiences that Gustavo and Nicole, his life partner, shared with me on these hills over a good coffee or a delicious meal. That morning, I reached the first mound and came across a green sign, which served as the narrator for the story that began with the scribbles that became a map. In white letters, I was hospitably welcomed by a modest wooden board, La Casa de los Esteva. I later learned that hill, once known as Los Naranjales, was nothing but rocks and eroded soil when Nicole and Gustavo arrived to live there 30 years before. Today it appears colorful and alive, with flowers, insects, and birds enjoying the work of regeneration, with a milpa, a vegetable garden, a chicken coop, and endless pots where plants for the next season are nursed, all of this setin motion by dreams, inspirations, and the hard work involved in living differently. In the stories presented here Gustavo will share with us that we only learn by doing. This is how he built in community, with friends, with experiences and failures, his milpa, his vegetable garden, his dry latrine… Gustavo’s dreams took shape in this small piece of land whose roots extend far beyond what one can see or understand. With the door always open, I would always find a smile, a hot cup of coffee, and many tasks to continue forging a path into our many worlds. This house in San Pablo Elta sheltered not only dreams and wanderings but also urgency in the face of the catastrophe that plagues our planet. From this hill, one can clearly observe the uncontrolled expansion of modernizing development which swallows the colorful hills in exchange for concrete and asphalt slabs; the deforestation, erosion, and yearly droughts brought along with progress. This is a clear example of the current civilizational crisis and so-called progress that only translates into collective suicide. Gustavo foresaw the collapse 50 years ago, reminding us, again and again, throughout the decades that the abyss was getting wider and nearer. Dear reader, inside this book, you will find stories grounded in concrete experience. In the living and dreaming of those who illuminated the heart and ideas of Gustavo, who fortunately shares with us his testimonies and spirit. His commitment to hope prevails over the horrors of the vortex of consumption, control, and individualism that has derailed us.

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A year ago, he received me in his library, wearing his coat, flat cap, and scarf with a small piece of paper in his hand. It was a contract he had made with Nicole 20 years ago where he stated in contract form, “This year, I will retire from all activities, and I will start writing”. Twenty years went by, and Gustavo could never stop walking with his friends the path in which he would recognize himself in the other, always finding more hours in the day to answer a call, answer a student’s questions, craft a manifesto to support a group of discontents, or discuss with a reader of his column in the newspaper who took the time to write to him. He always found inspiration and joy in accompanying his compas on this journey, inspiring us with concrete ideas and actions on how we could live differently. A few months before leaving us, Gustavo told me with emotion that finally, at the age of 86, he could dedicate himself to writing everything he had always wanted to reflect and share with all of us. As a child about to make a prank, I could see in his face excitement and even nostalgia for witnessing the consummation of this act. Now he would finally start writing…. This anthology is part of those dreams and walking with his friends. Professor Kin Chi Lau invited him some time ago to compile writings that would shock and inspire readers in the many Global Souths. They were thinking of an “international” anthology, friendly to those who are watching our world’s destruction face to face. Texts that would shake the ideas and myths that, at some point, we all assume as truths. Unfortunately, Gustavo could not see his dream materialize, and in March 2022, he left us in body. Professor Lau invited us to continue Gustavo’s dream. Little by little, we started looking for clues about this assignment. As in many other aspects, Gustavo knitted as he went along, changing thread or needle according to the inspiration of the moment, leaving half-made garments to which he assured he would return someday; sometimes, these incomplete garments took their own shape and thus became something in themselves. This is the path followed by this anthology. David Barkin joined us in this task, took some yarn, and merged with us in our effort to weave this book. The stories started to take their own shape, and we were inspired to share with you a small glimpse into stories and reflections that embrace the world of Gustavo, the deprofessionalized intellectual who diligently shut the doors of his chicken coop every afternoon.

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Development, learning, autonomy, and interculturality, the thematic lines serve as mere guides to position ourselves with respect to the themes that crossed Gustavo’s thinking and path. Between the alarm and urgency of the 1980s and early 1990s, between the uneasiness toward the 2000s in the face of the development farse and the bankruptcy of the American Way of Life, and submerged into the anxiety in the face of the control and violence increasingly present in what some call capitalism, Gustavo weaved stories of hope and friendship that inspire us to keep on walking. Here we find a selection of articles, lectures, and discussions, where Gustavo extends his word to us to dialogue not only with him but also with the others who were part of his weaving. The main inspiration to select the texts came from conversations with Gustavo’s friends and colleagues; all of us were left with hundreds of questions we would have liked to ask, discussions waiting to be triggered, provocations to reflect upon, laughs to share, and hugs we could no longer give each other. In his erudition, we always found humility, a genuine conviction to listen and change each other minds, eyes in which we could see ourselves reflected and understand ourselves from the other. I hope that in these pages, you will find the inspiration to face the abyss with the conviction that you can already hear the palpitation of the new worlds out there. I invite you to prepare a cup of coffee, sit down with us from any of the hills you inhabit, make yourselves comfortable, and let’s play and dream with Gustavo. As he used to say: “I will display before your eyes a few stories in the way a dealer puts the cards on the table for you to play with them”. San Pablo Etla, Oaxaca, Mexico November 2022

Rafael Escobedo

Photo 11 Gustavo Esteva (middle), Nicole Frédérique (left), and David Barkin (right)

Photo 12 Rafael Escobedo

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the thoughtfulness of Nicole Blanc, who inspired us to keep dreaming with Gustavo. We would like to thank Elias Gonzalez, Wendy Juarez, Itzel Farías Malagón Pachuca, and Gilberto Lopez y Rivas, who kindly offered to write an introduction to each section of this anthology. They provide a thoughtful presentation for each conceptual framework in which Gustavo’s ideas were embraided and a glimpse into the friendship and shared paths with him. Carlos Tornel kindly supported us with translation efforts, while Kathryn Dix offered her experience translating Gustavo to include a rather complicated and critical text in this anthology. A special mention to Gabriel Rodriguez and Tino, diligently holding the fort back in San Pablo Etla and providing, always with a smile, their assistance on real concrete matters, making possible these menial intellectual efforts. Finally, we would like to thank Nico, Appo, Kali, Rollo, and Shanti for their never-ending patience and care; this dream might have never been woven without your unconditional love.

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Contents

1

2

Introduction David Barkin Reference

1

Learning Gustavo Esteva Introduction Celebration of Learning Giving up on Education Lessons from Below Zapatista Pedagogy: A Story of Emancipation The Emperor Has No Clothes The Curriculum The Zapatista’s Pedagogical Substance Reconstituting Ourselves A Call Professionalism Struggles for the Freedom to Learn Beyond an Educating Society A Couple of Oaxacan Experiences: The Communal Middle Schools and Unitierra Rebuilding a Convivial Society References

7

6

7 10 14 30 32 36 38 41 42 45 46 56 57 60 65 74

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3

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CONTENTS

Development Gustavo Esteva Introduction Unlearning the Pretension to Be God Toward Post-Developmentalism The Challenges of Mutation Declassification of Society The Mutation Regenerating the Commons The New Orientations of people’s Initiatives The Prospect Cross-Cultural Perspectives for the Post-Development Era The New Mood of People’s Movements Relocalization of people’s Movements The people’s Discourse Bringing the Margins to the Center References Autonomy Gustavo Esteva Introduction They Are Coming The Puzzle The New Perspective Regenerating the Place: The Case of Disposable Children The Modern Creation of Waste Taking Them Away Recycling The Path to Localization Regenerating the Place Reembedding Food in Agriculture What I don’t Want to Do Beyond Reminiscences A World Where Scarcity Cannot Appear Giving up Scarcity Regenerating the Art of Living and Dying Hope from the Margins: A Future of Convivial Polities To Be Ourselves: A Story of Hopes Bibliographical Clues

77 77 80 84 90 90 91 92 95 97 106 106 108 110 113 115 117 117 121 125 126 128 129 134 135 138 141 146 148 150 153 161 165 168 170 184

CONTENTS

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The Meaning and Agenda of Anti-systemic Movements The Turning Point The End of the American Empire The End of the Old Regime in Mexico The Reactionaries Mutations in Social Movements The Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) The Zapatista Inspiration and Our Present Tasks References

185 186 186 188 189 190 191 194 198

Interculturality Gustavo Esteva Introduction Horizons of Interculturality The Disease of Underdevelopment The Intercultural Question The Cultural Backdrop Interculturality Intercultural Dialogue The First Intercultural Dialogue? The Current Dialogue Humanity? Pluralism From Tolerance to Hospitality, Friendship, and Surprise Beyond the Self: Regenerating people’s Selves Seeing with the Eyes Beyond the Text The Trouble of Being Beyond the Self Losing and Recovering Memory and Reality When the Word Became the Verb The King Wears no Clothes Rethinking the Size of the World Rooting Again Our Lives The Meaning of the Global Crisis and “Recovery” for Study Abroad: What Are We Preparing Students for? New, Dark Expectations The End of an Era From the Bottom-Up

201 201 205 205 206 209 211 212 214 216 218 218 221 224 225 226 227 232 235 238 241 245 247 250 250 253 254

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El buen vivir (Living Well) Radical Pluralism The Intercultural Dialogue Back Home References

258 259 260 264 274

References

279

Index

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Notes on Contributors

David Barkin is distinguished professor at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Xochimilco Campus in Mexico City. He collaborated in the founding of the Ecodevelopment Center in 1974. He received the National Prize for Political Economy in 1979. He is a member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences and is an Emeritus member of the National Research Council. He is recognized for his theory of Radical Ecological Economics, developed during the past 15 years. In 2016, he received an award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (Germany). His latest books are: “From Protest to Proposal: 50 years imagining and building the future” (Siglo XXI, 2018) and “The Environmental Tragedy in Latin America and the Caribbean” (ECLAC, 2020, with 20 Latin American colleagues). Rafael Escobedo does research at the intersection of organizational theory, agrarian, and non-state societies, with a particular interest in the role of peasant farmers and farmworkers’ subaltern politics. He holds an M.A. in Sustainable International Development from the Heller School. He studies how peasant farmers and farmworkers are affected and, in turn, purposefully influence complex systems through autonomous learning and resistance networks. He is currently a researcher and collaborator of autonomous organizations and farmworker communities and is the co-editor of Esteva’s intellectual legacy.

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Gustavo Esteva (1936–2022) was a grassroots activist and “deprofessionalized intellectual”. He was the founder of the Universidad de la Tierra in Oaxaca, Mexico. He was also a founding member of the Global University for Sustainability. Elias Gonzalez is a philosopher and writer. He focuses on interreligious dialogue and the bridge between mysticism and the struggles to build a new world. He has collaborated with different interreligious groups, indigenous and spiritual communities. He is currently an adjunct professor at ITESO and Ibero León. He collaborates with the Universidad de la Tierra Oaxaca and is a member of the Center for Studies of Religion and Society of the University of Guadalajara. He is author of the following books: Encounter, Religation and Dialogue, Reflections toward an Inter-Religious Dialogue, Impotent Tenderness, Discovering Yourself in the Small, and Conviviality and Political Resistance from Below: The Legacy of Iván Illich in Mexico. Wendy Juárez is a Zapotec woman, audiovisual creator, radio broadcaster, and photography enthusiast. She is part of the Red Futuros Indigenas. She collaborates in the Universidad de la Tierra taking up the critique of development and cybernetic mentality, as well as from the reflection and action in life alternatives to heal, learn, and regenerate our communities. She is University teacher of topics related to communication theories. Kin Chi Lau is coordinator of the Programme on Cultures of Sustainability, Centre for Cultural Research and Development of Lingnan University in Hong Kong, China. She has taught in Lingnan University for over 35 years. She is also a founding member of the Global University for Sustainability and director of its Executive Team. She has been involved in the rural reconstruction movement in China for over two decades, and she is also board member of Peace Women across the globe. Itzel Farías Malagón Pachuca has a degree in Psychology from FES Zaragoza-UNAM, a specialist in Developmental Neuropsychology from the Instituto de Neuropsicología y Psicopedagogía para la Intervención y Profesionalización Yollixmatiliztli S.C. (INPI) and a master’s in educational research and development from IBERO, with teaching experience at the high school and undergraduate levels. She is currently a mother and researcher of unschooling processes, in addition to being part of various networks, communities, and spaces for free and dignified learning.

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Gilberto Lopez y Rivas is professor-researcher at the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH), doctor in Anthropology from the University of Utah of the United States, teacher in Anthropological Sciences from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and the National School of Anthropology and History. He is a member of the National System of Researchers and a senior researcher at the INAHMorelos Regional Center in Cuernavaca. He has had an active political life, in which his participation in the student movement of 1968 and his election as head of the Government of the Federal District in the Tlalpan Delegation in the period 2000–2003 stand out. He is a regular contributor to the Mexican daily La Jornada and has numerous books published in Spain and Latin America.

List of Figures

Photo 1.1

Photo Photo Photo Photo

1.2 1.3 2.1 2.2

Photo 2.3 Photo Photo Photo Photo

2.4 2.5 3.1 3.2

Photo 5.1 Photo 5.2 Photo 5.3 Photo 5.4

Symposium of Economic Writers and Journalists. Gustavo Esteva (left 1) with Mexican Ambassador to Brazil, Miguel Wionszek, Sao Paulo, 1956 Gustavo Esteva (right 1) at FAO, Rome, 1974 Gustavo Esteva (right 1) with Manolo Cepeda 1988 Gustavo Esteva (right 1) at the XLI Annual Meeting of the Comparative and International Education Society, México, 19–23 March 1997 Francisco Alejo Lopez, Gustavo Esteva (right 2), Cesar Gonzalez, Antonio Ruiz, Mexico City, 1982 Mexican Society of Planning, Mexico City, 1982 1988 La Realidad, Chiapas, Mexico, April 1996 Gustavo Esteva (right 1) at the Forum on Indigenous Peoples and Constitutional Reforms, Mexico City Congress, 19 January 2001 Gustavo Esteva (right 1) with Carlos Monsiváis, San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, July 1996 Gustavo Esteva (left 3) with Barbara Duden, Bremen, Germany, 2008 Gustavo Esteva (right 1) with Grimaldo Rengifo (left 1), 2014 Gustavo Esteva (left 1) with Don McCarthy, University of Toronto

5 5 6 11

11 70 71 71 114

114 269 270 271 272

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction David Barkin

Gustavo Esteva devoted most of his life to collaborating with peoples who were trying to construct better worlds. He did this in his very private space with his closest loved ones and in the very extensive global spaces that he occupied, sometimes physically but always virtually. He was, at one and the same time, a Mexican patriot and a global citizen. As a Mexican, he never accepted the concept of the melting pot, bringing together the rich diversity of cultures, cosmogonies, cosmologies, and ideologies that is our country; nor did he accept the notion that the “Mexican Revolution” had created a State capable of bringing together this extraordinary effervescence into a single malleable polity. As a global citizen, he was committed to fostering the initiatives of peoples from around the globe to join him in building a world in which many different worlds can complement and support each other. This book brings together many of the strands of his thought and his activities, illustrating the myriad ways in which he transformed the ideas

D. Barkin (B) Distinguished Professor in Economics, Metropolitan Autonomous University, Mexico City, Mexico e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K. C. Lau et al. (eds.), Walking on the Edge of the Abyss, Global University for Sustainability Book Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2325-0_1

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of this “deprofessionalized intellectual” into a moving force that galvanized people to change their lives—as individuals, yes, but also, just as importantly, as members of communities engaged in revolutionizing their worlds. Its structure reflects the many levels that he occupied—simultaneously and with a complexity that reflected the difficult struggles of the peoples he was involved with. It begins with a series of essays on learning. A vocation he adopted from his earliest forays into collaborating with students, colleagues, friends, and strangers engaged in a very wide range of activities. From his first initiatives to promote peoples’ well-being, he was constantly concerned with communicating these activities to others and engaging others to join in this learning/teaching process. Whether it be informal seminars, newspaper supplements, pamphlets, or audio tapes in his earliest days of activism, he was always a magnet attracting some of the brightest and most creative people to join him in forging programs designed to improve the lot of peoples in the least privileged ranks. This learning process changed dramatically after his first encounters with Ivan Illich. The erstwhile cleric had already published his blockbuster essay “Deschooling Society” when they met as well as the very demanding “Tools for Conviviality”. They struck up an extraordinary and enduring friendship that would prove to be a foundation for an extended and very productive collaboration that is still bearing fruit even after both of them passed away. After Gustavo moved to Oaxaca, he soon established a “non-institutional” Universidad de la Tierra (not neatly translatable), that brought together peoples from all walks of life to explore ideas, invent and learn new techniques, solve pressing problems, or just become better members of their communities. The “University” spawned all sorts of siblings. In Oaxaca, a middle school experiment emerged, while elsewhere in Mexico other Unitierras sprung up, along with several beyond Mexico’s northern border. There was never a way of separating these developments from the evolving pedagogical experience of the Zapatistas—a story of self-guided emancipation with which Esteva was constantly interacting. Of course, the lessons offered from the depths of Chiapas nourished a continuous feedback process that left inedible marks on the steady stream of participants and visitors that passed through the rooms of the headquarters in Oaxaca City. Esteva never abandoned the second central strand of thought that is present in this collection: development. From his earliest learning/

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teaching experiences, before moving to Oaxaca, he was a prescient critic of the concept of development. His influential early insistence is on the political origins of the term in the inaugural address of Harry S. Truman, who offered to end “underdevelopment” with what would become the “Point Four” program for financial “assistance” to the underprivileged peoples of the world. All at once, those of us living in what is now known as the “Global South” became ¡Underdeveloped! His friendship and fruitful collaboration with Wolfgang Sachs led to a collection of very influential essays in the “Development Dictionary” (1992), whose disruptive analyses continue to leave their imprimatur on the field and have offered a guide for critical and thoughtful scholars ever since. From long before it became a popular theme, Gustavo insisted on the need to move beyond “development” to consider what post-development might imply. Finally, following on the cross-fertilization from a broad coterie of enthusiastic collaborators and contributors, he began to insist on the significance of the commons and its relation to social organization quite some time before it came into vogue with the award of the “Nobel” Prize to Elinor Ostrom in 2009. The last sections of this book are perhaps the most significant for considering the future of humanity. In broaching the subject of Autonomy, Esteva offers a window into what might be the most important demand of social movements that societies around the world will have to confront in the coming years. A simple term that is often banalized as self-government, autonomy involves a reconsideration of the very structure of human societies and the way they organize themselves to attempt to guarantee the well-being of all of their members. Clearly, most countries in the Global North are not even capable of considering this possibility, despite their obvious ability to do so, should their social and political structures be reorganized for this objective. Esteva’s analysis of the importance of how food production and distribution are organized points the way to alternatives that are informed by the experiences of La Via Campesina and local societies around the world that are implementing their own strategies to attend to the needs of their families. Perhaps the most important forces examined in these pages are the deliberate and evolving strategies to face the challenges of the global market with its powerful dynamics that beguilingly offer to solve many of the problems that national governments have proven unwilling and/or incapable of attending. The anti-systemic movements that he has collaborated with are spawning thriving societies better equipped to construct the better worlds

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that his collaborators are contributing to, as is evident in the essays in the third section of this book. The book’s last quarter attends to the “invisible” matter of interculturality. It is hardly recognized as a matter requiring political or social attention, even after the ratification of Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization in 1989, the rights of indigenous and tribal peoples, and a similar declaration by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 2007. Gustavo Esteva placed it at the center of his vision of a world in which many other worlds can exist. The belated recognition of Mexico’s pluriculturality by many social organizations and many of the national universities has hardly percolated into the upper echelons of the public administration, notwithstanding the repeated pious declarations of commitments to attend to the problem. As we read in this part of the book, we see that Esteva was at the forefront of attempts to change the discourse and to help his interlocutors to understand that the very conception of Mexico as a centralized state was and continues to be dead center as an obstacle to overcoming decades of impoverishment and marginalization. This section offers a variegated introduction to the possibilities of a brilliant and diverse alliance of peoples seeking to forge the myriad worlds that the country so desperately requires to overcome the inability of the state to attend to even the most basic needs of its population. These essays are testimony to the deep commitment that Esteva felt for allying himself with some of the most creative peoples in the struggle to transcend the barriers erected by the “modern world system”. His erudition and facility with communication are most evident in this last segment offering readers insights into the humanity that sustained this intellectual giant and made him a magnet for peoples around the world (Photos 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3).

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Photo 1.1 Symposium of Economic Writers and Journalists. Gustavo Esteva (left 1) with Mexican Ambassador to Brazil, Miguel Wionszek, Sao Paulo, 1956

Photo 1.2 Gustavo Esteva (right 1) at FAO, Rome, 1974

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Photo 1.3 Gustavo Esteva (right 1) with Manolo Cepeda

Reference Sachs, Wolfgang (Ed.). 1992. The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power. London: Zed Books.

CHAPTER 2

Learning Gustavo Esteva

Introduction Itzel Farías Malagón Pachuca (Hidalgo, Mexico. October 11, 2022) Translated by Rafael Escobedo Undoubtedly, Gustavo Esteva maintained a fundamental axis of reflection throughout his life: to give up on education. This statement generated waves of indignation in many people who heard for the first time that the objective was to abandon all educational pretensions to focus on the praxis of learning. This position was a direct legacy of Esteva’s coexistence and close friendship with Ivan Illich. This issue is especially controversial in academia, as it goes against some of its main pillars, i.e., the search for quality education, the large sums of money spent on pedagogical research, what content should be taught, and how to train teachers to replicate the results of such research. Thus, one of Esteva’s greatest contributions in this area was to promote the construction of projects and activities linked to the recovery of

G. Esteva (B) Oaxaca, Mexico © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K. C. Lau et al. (eds.), Walking on the Edge of the Abyss, Global University for Sustainability Book Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2325-0_2

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learning as an action, at the margins of institutional education and academy, but closely knit to the production of community, mothers, fathers, and children; this praxis is represented in creative forms such as blogs, articles, videos, podcasts, books, and compilations, in which it is clear that Illich’s contributions and Esteva’s reflections are a reality anchored in the possibility of learning without schools and living without institutions. It is essential to highlight that unschooling went from being the conscious choice of a few to being the reality of most people during the pandemic; however, the consequences of the dispossession of schools highlighted the little utility that schools have and their obsolete methodologies that took a long time to adapt to the circumstances. This element highlights the urgency of making learning processes more flexible and democratized, returning the decision of how, when, and where to learn to each person immersed in a teaching–learning process, regardless of their age, as mentioned by Esteva in the following section. It is then that, after the pandemic, the interest in exploring different ways of learning returned and intensified. Esteva promoted the investigation of how communities were learning to heal themselves and resist adversity from their own knowledge and actions—emphasizing that the proposal is to return to the common, especially in cities, where the logic of individuality, inherited from modernity, has led us to conceive ourselves as individuals and therefore to be dependent on the strategies of the State. Instead, it is essential to move toward a politicization from below, which allows us to govern ourselves from autonomy, as (Baschet 2017) argues and explains when he says that there are two forms of politics, the top and the bottom; the top is that of state institutions and political parties, the bottom is us, the people who act every day creating our own existence and shaping the common that makes it possible. The consequence of this is that those of us who are disappointed by the educational system are coming together and becoming part of movements that stop demanding better services. Instead, we organize ourselves from horizontality and affective bonds creating new possibilities and inhabiting what André Gortz calls archipelagos of conviviality, that is, the rejection of a life marked by the monopoly of companies and the state and instead recovering the ability to live outside of them by generating alliances and increasing the spheres of community. In this way, local groups that summon their affinities from the cities and diverse communities become vital resistances to a counterproductive

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system that paralyzes, sickens, and stupefies. Thus, people at the local level are coming together and recognizing the strength of the collective, and, therefore, we are cracking this system. We are flourishing from those cracks. Esteva was aware and enunciated that living without schools, healing without hospitals, and feeding ourselves without supermarkets is not easy since there are no guidelines to make these communities. Still, he was unequivocal in affirming that they are not needed since each person from their own collective and each community must re-invent life by resorting to their own constellations of knowledge and practices of commoning. In this sense, Gustavo Esteva not only reflected on learning in freedom but also collaborated in the construction of a living example of what this means: la Universidad de la Tierra (Unitierra), a space of possibilities and hopes, through which the universal, individualism, and competitiveness are resisted to make room for diversity, for the possibility of expanding other narratives, and in particular for other ways of inhabiting the world from a place of freedom and dignity. Learning from action from Unitierra, a space that hosted and will host Gustavo’s thoughts and feelings, is also a space in defense of plurality and the diversity of struggles, objectives, and ways of doing things, emphasizing that we can share to inspire and learn from each other, but not to imitate each other and fall into the trap of modernity that invites us to do everything the same way because we consider that there is only one right way, one best way, one superior struggle that can dictate to the others how to do it. On the contrary, it is indispensable to recognize and celebrate the multiple others, the pluriverse. Esteva did not speak of institutions; he preferred to focus on living processes, diverse fabrics, movements settled in territories, and communities that are governed by their traditions and that refuse to get into state-centric logic. On the contrary, they prefer to be in the margins, sprouting and flourishing between the cracks, to demonstrate day by day that other worlds are possible. The most obvious example is the Zapatistas, a topic that Gustavo explored extensively. Therefore, I allow myself to name another of the most representative examples, the community of Santa Catarina Lachatao in Sierra Norte, Oaxaca, which expelled the school system from their territory, and instead, the community is determining what and how to learn. They created the training, academic, and community center: CEFAC BENNE ZAÁ, to stop being educated by the institutional, educational

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framework that teaches them universal history, and world geography, that has deep Eurocentric roots, to learn from their own territory, their own history, their own nature, their endemic plants and animals before anything else. They are focused on self-recognition and on the rescue of Zapotec that language that may disappear because grandfathers and grandmothers were forbidden to speak it, receiving severe punishments at school if spoken that institution that is fiercely defended, but that caused so much damage and whose repercussions we still cannot measure, for example, the loss of languages and with them a whole worldview of how to inhabit this world. These examples are also replicated in the cities on a different scale. In addition, however, increasingly visible are the groups of young people and families that determine their own learning paths, from collectives, communities, tribes, and community networks focused on building their own forms and paths of existence. The final reflection that I share from the close link with Esteva and his contributions to free, joyful, and dignified learning is that there is a challenge that we must assume with total commitment, and that is to abandon the tutelage and external mandates that perpetuate hierarchies to recover our capacity for action and reflection, to allow us to live differently, to abandon fixed ideas to give way to the flow of diversity, to stop pretending to be successful in modern terms and fearing failure to give ourselves permission to make mistakes and learn from those mistakes, to cultivate our wisdom in the experiences that do not turn out as we expected so that they can reorient us and give us meaning, to try not to judge or determine the path of others, but instead, to accompany us and through radical tenderness be compassionate and understanding of the rhythms of each person, of each community. And to recognize that in these strange and complex times we are living, the answer is not to be found in isolation and fear but in community networks and hope, working from below, regenerating from everyday life, being our referents, and creating alternatives (Photos 2.1 and 2.2).

Celebration of Learning (San Pablo Etla, Oaxaca, México. 2007) Around half of Americans are involved in the educational system in the most diverse qualities—students, teachers, janitors, secretaries, writers of

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Photo 2.1 1988

Photo 2.2 Gustavo Esteva (right 1) at the XLI Annual Meeting of the Comparative and International Education Society, México, 19–23 March 1997

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textbooks, builders of schools, producers of pens… But the system does not deliver. It does not prepare people for life or work and generates or aggravates inequalities. Reformers, now epidemic, have been unable to address the situation. The people themselves, as well as teachers and students, are taking the question in their hands. There are many people courageously struggling within the educational system, not so much to change or reform it, but to give the experience meaning despite its known flaws and limitations. From the very beginning, the educational system has been exposed to serious critiques and objections. Rather than attempting to address them, men and women involved in the system, in whatever category, are trying to make sense of the experience. Perhaps the best you can say about them is what Illich expressed with the image of Schindler. (…) The example illustrates that even in a Nazi system, you can find men and women that discover ways to do within it the opposite of what the system does. Schindler saved Jews, many of them: he did not challenge in any fundamental way the machine dedicated to the extermination of Jews but used it for his own purposes; for some time, he used it for personal economic gain, but at some point, he started to use it to save people he learned to love. Love was perhaps his main motive, not an abstract ethical principle. And this is exactly what people in the educational system are doing: out of love, through the creation of human bonds between teachers and students, they are using the machine for something entirely different to their purposes and practices. They often pay a heavy personal price: they must continually struggle against bureaucratic impositions and restrictions, limiting what they try to do. For millions of students everywhere, the experience of that specific bond with that specific teacher, the Schindler of the educational system, becomes a profound transformative experience that they remember forever. For many years, many people abandoned the path of public or private education and attempted to create methods and establishments for alternative education. Accepting the main premises of the system—there is a need for education, and there is a social function and place for educators—many people created, often under the leadership of great pedagogues, schools, or other establishments that fulfilled one of two functions: to protect some people from the specific discrimination they were suffering in the conventional system (a kind of damage control) or to offer to some people the opportunity to get a different kind of education. In most cases, these efforts were conceived and implemented with

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the explicit purpose of creating an alternative for everyone. Perhaps the best example is that of Emil Molt, the owner of the cigarette factory Waldorf Astoria. He sponsored Rudolf Steiner to create a school system in which the workers may get an education as good as the one obtained by rich people. The final outcome of this adventure is the current system of Waldorf Schools. There are around 500 of them in the world. A group of highly privileged children gets there a very special education. Through alternative education establishments, some people are protected from some of the worst impacts of the educational system, and some others are getting a kind of professional attention that in the past was reserved for a few members of the elite. More and more, however, all over the world, ordinary men and women are abandoning those paths. They are looking for alternatives to education. One way of describing their efforts is to say that they are reclaiming verbs to define the human condition. When learning becomes Education or healing Health, people become immediately dependent on private or public institutions that, for definition, are scarce—because they operate under the assumption of scarcity, defining the organizing principle of the economic society. In reclaiming their verbs, the people are recovering their own agency in learning—to learn whatever they want or need in their own worlds. In the process, they discover unexpected affluence for learning: they can find every kind of opportunity to learn, with people interested in sharing with others what they know and doing what the people want to learn to do. I want to celebrate all these experiences. I want to celebrate the courageous Schindler of the system, who, against all odds, persist in creating with their students the kind of relation master-pupil that the Greeks used to illustrate superior forms of love, loving relationships in which learning is still learning, not a commodity to be consumed in educational shops. I want to celebrate those joyfully experimenting with alternative educational models, sometimes to reduce the toil imposed by the educational system to some marginal sectors of society, forced to suffer what they get in the school as an unavoidable evil, and some other times, usually dealing with the other extreme of the society—the privileged—to discover ways to share with others knowledge and skills. In most of these experiences, love is again the stuff keeping them going. And I finally want to celebrate those escaping education, reclaiming ways of learning as old as the hills, and using contemporary tools to affirm

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themselves in their dignity and freedom beyond all the restrictions and flaws of the educational system. True, those choosing this path cannot get the official diplomas certifying the modern rite of passage to adulthood and socially accepted citizenship. But this deprivation is another form of liberation. They are not learning or studying to get a certificate, which usually cannot certify but a certain number of ass hours. They learn, first of all, that studying can only be the leisurely activity of free people, as Illich once said.

Giving up on Education (University of Oldenburg, Germany. December 10, 1993) Tonight, I would like to make it credible that by giving up childhood and education, we are successfully avoiding an evil that started encroaching on our lives a long time ago and brought us to a most undignified condition in the postwar era. I want to make it credible that, in doing so, we are neither throwing out the baby with the bath water nor giving up hope or even less stepping back in history—quite the opposite. By giving up childhood and education, we are instead regenerating our dreams, hopes, and modes of being on the earth while protecting our new commons. Given the present conditions of the world, I need to explain myself immediately. By giving up childhood, we are not renouncing having children. We are not mimicking the goal of no demographic growth—a condition we cannot conceive. There has been a radical change in our reproductive patterns. The annual rate of demographic growth in México fell by almost half in the last 20 years. But it still was 2% in 1990, Mexican women still have an average of 2.5 children, and México’s population will double every 35 years. Second, by giving up modern education, we are neither renouncing learning nor blocking cultural transmission—quite the opposite. We are enriching and multiplying our opportunities for learning and strengthening every and all forms for keeping alive our own culture and for recovering historical continuity. I am not coming here to talk about the cultures that died. In what now is México, nine of every ten pre-Hispanic peoples died: hunger, smallpox, those astonishing collective suicides. If their gods died, how could they continue living? What could be the meaning of their lives after the death of their gods? When nine of every ten dies, the survivors cannot survive

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them. Over the survivor thus falls a double stigma: the ignominious mark of being what they are in a society denying them the right to be themselves, and the mark of being still what they are, of not having had the dignity of dying. I resist talking here about what died, as I resist nostalgia and sentimentality. Instead, I want to speak about what is fully alive; the cultural creations of those denied civilizations, which crossed with dignity through colonization and development and reacted with sociological imagination in the time of the crisis. I want to speak about how they are now advancing, steadfastly, in the task of regenerating their dreams and their art of living and dying; how they dedicate themselves, with unusual vigor, to creating their new commons. I want to speak about the myths they are generating and the challenges they are confronting. We are no longer creating childhood, that is, we are resisting the modern discrimination disabling people by age. Two-fifths of Mexicans are less than 14 years old. If we gave them the usual treatment applied to modern childhood, we would discriminate against them. Diego’s first birthday will be celebrated when he is three years old. That very day, he will be accepted as a full member of the community of San Pablo Etla.1 He will be able to participate in most community activities; to be in the feasts; to attend births, funerals, or rituals; and to be part of productive, religious, or political activities. Aries and others have revealed that childhood is a recent invention (Aries 1962). Every kind of economic and political pressure, like compulsory schooling and legal control of the so-called child labor, has been exerted upon us to force us to accept this transmogrification of our offspring. For the most part, among the social majorities, our resistance to this specific form of colonization has succeeded. I hope that the stories I will tell tonight will vividly illustrate such resistance. We have sons and daughters, we have godsons or nephews, and we accept them as full members of our communities; we do not have childhood. The worldwide bankruptcy of the educational systems reached in some parts of México the dimensions of a catastrophe. Yet, after a period of anger, frustration, and even desperation, we are now finding in it an unexpected opportunity for regeneration. I want to talk tonight about what we have learned in this challenging period, and also to describe some of our present dreams and hopes.

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Seven years ago, for the first time in a hundred years, an Indian became the Governor of Oaxaca—a province where 70% of the population are Indians from 16 different nations. On the day Heladio Ramírez2 launched his political campaign as a candidate for governor of Oaxaca, he met with representatives of the 16 nations.3 It was a strange ceremony. For several hours, we heard them speak in zapoteco, mixteco, mixe, triqui all speaking in their own languages, without translation. Many of them speak three, four, six Indian languages; nobody speaks 16. Heladio speaks only his own language, mixteco and Spanish. In the end, a very old man crossed the immense hall, approached the table of the candidate, and whispered to him, with a pointing finger: “We want you to be for us like the shade of a tree”. That was all. No claims for roads, hospitals, schools, security… Just a shade. The message was clear. How he could pretend to govern them all, if he could not understand them, he could not even speak in their own languages, the supreme expression of their cultures? To address him, he needs to use Spanish, the colonizer’s language, which all those attending the ceremony spoke but did not want to use to talk with him. But they wanted a government. They wanted it to have solid roots, rooted in the land and the people, a government near the grassroots. They hoped that such government would offer them protection and support in case of need—before calamities or conflicts. But this government should assist them only when asked for assistance. The government must not try to govern them all the time, following its own programs and initiatives; even less, it must try to govern against the people’s will. Four years ago, a group of Mixe Indians approached him. —“We are going to kick out of our region all the teachers. People will perhaps lynch a few. Please do not be angry with us”, they told him. Heladio Ramírez convinced them not to do that. But he understood their anger well. People had enough. A whole generation had been deprived of schooling. For almost ten years, a conflict between two factions of the powerful teacher’s union had the teachers out of the schools in strikes, marches, and political struggles. In many schools, they only attended classes one or two days of the week, the whole year round, for years. Many students could not read the diplomas they received after attending six years of school. But they were forced to stay there, in the school, waiting for something that never came. The problem was not restricted to Oaxaca and compounded with many other elements. During the last ten years, the number of dropouts

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increased faster than the school population. And the quality sank. Grading became a joke: a contest to push the students from one grade to the next, to give room for the next generation. Many university graduates now cannot write a page in good Spanish. Benjamín Maldonado, a young anthropologist, did careful research in a sample of rural villages. He described his findings in a brilliant essay: “How the school produces ignorance” (Maldonado 2000). He rigorously compared the knowledge and skills of those attending the school with the ones of those that, for any reason, were not attending the school. The latter had better skills and knew more about almost everything than the former, whose only apparent advantage was to know better how to sing the national anthem. The promise of equality associated with the school system has started to be seen as the smoke screen for the concentration of privileges in México and elsewhere. Emil Molt, the owner of the Waldorf Astoria cigarette factory who sponsored Rudolf Steiner in 1919 to found the first Waldorf School, wrote later that the original purpose of the school was basically a social one: to give to the children of the workers and employees the same teachings and education enjoyed by the children of the well-todo families. That was the dream, the same dream of most educational systems, usually proposed as an answer to inequality, as the institutional way to offer equal opportunities to everybody. I want to use the experience with Waldorf schools to illustrate this point. Far from being for the children of workers or employees, to attend now a Waldorf or Steiner School is a kind of privilege enjoyed only by a few thousand children and young men and women, the only ones who have access to the around 500 establishments of that kind existing in the world. Rather than correcting inequalities, the educational systems seem to be deepening them. Jonathan Kozol, who wrote 20 years ago “Death at an early age” as a graphic, telling indictment of the school system, has recently published a best-seller: “Savage Inequalities”, an accurate description of one of the main results of American education (Kozol 1992). It is a good illustration of what happens in other countries. Such evidence, compounded with all the reports on failures in quantity and quality, is now flooding educational experts’ desks and politicians’ desks, nourishing their compulsion for educational reform. Yet, that same evidence, felt in flesh and blood by the people, has a radically different impact on them.

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At the grassroots, the very existence of the school was, for some time, proof of our underdevelopment: the sign of our identity as leftovers of the epic venture of modernity and progress. To be without school was to be doomed to ignorance; it offered a legitimate explanation for our condition at the bottom of society and furnished a powerful motive to claim schools for our children, for whom we did not want the same miserable destiny. However, the success of our struggle in getting the schools we claimed for transformed us into dropouts, bringing us to an even more undignified condition. To be leftovers of development became the consequence of our own individual fault, of our inability to profit from an opportunity supposedly offered to all. In the 1980s, our perspective radically changed. The crisis of the educational system, that is, the budgetary reduction parallel to the increase in the demand and the deterioration of the quality, produced frustration and anger but also fostered among us a new awareness. —“What is this business of the university?”—asked rhetorically Don Ricardo, a prosperous peasant of San José de Gracia in Michoacán. His son, a lawyer in México City, had come to visit him and we were chatting and remembering our own times while he was describing his current troubles. In explaining his situation, his son mentioned his friends’ examples, driving a cab or tending a stall in México City; his own failure in getting a job as a lawyer seemed to be the rule rather than the exception. “For 20 years”, argued Don Ricardo, “the whole family sacrificed itself to give you a profession. We were proud of your success in the school. We celebrated with all our neighbors the prize you got as the best student of your generation. We were deeply satisfied for having been able to offer you an opportunity to escape from the miserable destiny of a poor peasant and leave our poor community. And now, 20 years after all this effort, I am getting in a crop season more than you can make in a year. Look to your brother. I am sure he is eating better than you. What is this business of the university?”. He had a mischievous smile. He was not blaming his son. He was not expressing frustration or impotence. On the contrary, I perceived a new sense of dignity in his face, coming from a whole reconsideration of his own life, of his condition. Twenty years ago, the populist government of President Luis Echeverría4 proudly announced a new educational system for peasant sons. Decentralized technical schools were to train them in knowledge and skills needed to bring a new flourishing for their communities. Graduates of these schools will bring new technical blood to the exhausted

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rural life. They will have the opportunity of remaining in the countryside, in a better condition than a simple peasant, and at the same time, will contribute to the technical revolution that the country needed. Ten years later, more than 90% of the graduates of this system abandoned their communities and were working for a public agency, usually in the lowest ranks, in different parts of the country. Moreover, their peasant origin qualified them to disseminate better the practices of the Green Revolution, promoted by the Mexican government with the support of the World Bank. But then came the crisis. Mounting debts and reduced budgets put all these petty bureaucrats out of the payroll. They found themselves in the middle of nowhere, away from the supporting web of their communities, and abandoned by the institutions which have produced them. They were taken by surprise. More than anger or frustration, they had a kind of astonishment. How could this happen to them? What happened to all their fantasies and the promises they heard from the first day in school about a new, brilliant destiny? After a period of confusion, they discovered that they were not on a temporary slope, an economic cloudburst, after which they would be back on the promised road under a cloudless sky. People started to react long before the economists began to recognize that the Mexican miracle’s golden years were lost forever. These young men renounced to be “zootaxistas” (for zootecnista, zootechnician) or “peterinarians” (veterinarian for pets). Many of them came back to their communities or settled in the regions they had become familiar with. They “peasantized” themselves again. They creatively used whatever they learned in their bureaucratic pilgrimage, during which they had been in contact with peasants from different parts of the country, to create a new niche in their communities or the peasant organizations to apply their knowledge and skills. They organized here a cooperative for the production of honey; there a greenhouse; they created in communal land an experimental field to test, with the peasants, different local varieties; in some communities, they shared the experiences of others for the regeneration of the soil after the use of agrochemicals; they contributed improving methods of organic agriculture… In all cases, they were finding a new place inside their communities, a new path for their lives. The system started to collapse; there were no longer budgets for agricultural experiments, school labs, practices in the fields, and even for books, paper, or pencils. Teachers and researchers, as well as the 18,000

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students enrolled in the system, suffered paralysis and impotence for a while and then associated themselves with the communities. For the first time, they really were at their Service. Since they started to depend on them to survive, they changed the whole orientation of their endeavor. They asked the peasants how they could be of some use instead of telling them what they must do. They used the school labs for the experiments or analysis suggested by the peasants, with materials provided by the latter, rather than apply bureaucratic instructions or wait for budgets that never arrived. A new, promising perspective started to loom in their professional and economic horizons. When my first daughter came of school age in the early 1960s, I started to look around to find a good school. I confronted the usual predicament: no public or private school seemed appropriate to put my daughter’s education in its hands. After an exhausting search, convinced that the problem was the quality of the existing schools, I started an adventure. Her mother was a teacher and a psychologist. I had, as you remember, some management training. Perhaps, we thought, the schools we visited looked so bad because of the underdevelopment of our country. After examining the best we could find in developed countries, we tried to create a better school for our daughter. We thus mixed a lot of Freinet, a little bit of Montessori or Steiner, some ideas of Eugene Neill and Wilhelm Reich, and a lot of courage and ignorance to create Instituto Freinet de México. Only later, we discovered that we were pioneering what would be called the Free School movement in other parts of the world. We added a grade every year to keep the school’s growth at the pace of my daughter’s needs. The school closed a little after she graduated from high school. The daughters of my daughter now are not going to school. My daughter thinks the problem is not the quality of the school but the school itself. They live in Tepoztlán, a beautiful rocky village near Cuernavaca. My older granddaughter, who is now 15 years old, puzzled me a few months ago when she dared to dismiss Ionesco and Ibsen as very oldfashioned; she got some of their plays and others in the public library of Tepoztlán, and discussed them with their friends. She used every occasion with a learned adult to pose questions or challenge opinions about them. She was preparing what she proudly describes as an “ecological play” for

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her theater group. She is constantly bugging me, asking for documentation for the stories she is writing for the puppets plays she is teaching some kids. They craft every puppet and collectively conceive the stories. My younger granddaughter, Mónica, is now nine years old. She is a magnificent cook—perhaps to compensate for her mother’s weaknesses in this area. She changed her “profession” seven times in the last three years. First, she wanted to put a restaurant, after staying a few days with a French anthropologist, who is also the cook in a small restaurant that our organization operates in México City, to give service to those visiting our documentation center. Later, she decided to be a painter and grow vegetables to imitate a sweet lady of Danish origin who lives near her. She chose to be a weaver after her aunt taught her the basics; or an Olympic gymnast, like my younger daughter, who invited her to a clinic she was giving; and so on. Her firm decisions about her future were associated with an eruption of devotion and admiration for an adult she found in the village or the family. She surprised me the other day. “I now know what the schools are for”, she told me in all seriousness. “They are for the parents to get rid of their sons”. Patrick, my nephew, is now also nine years old. He lives with his mother on our land in San Pablo Etla. He is an expert in composting, a skill he learned from an Irish friend who is visiting us; he is now sharing this knowledge with the old peasant with whom he is learning everything about the milpa or the produce we grow in our land. He oversees the chickens in our mobile henhouse and is learning how to build the pot of a dry latrine, a solar heater, or a pumping bicycle in our workshops. I need to call him whenever I am in trouble with my Toshiba. I am pretty illiterate about it. I still use it as a typewriter, and the machine does every kind of trick. I am still trying to understand how he can decipher the reference manuals, which are a complete mystery to me. His English is too poor to follow the instructions; how he succeeds in applying them? I wonder. He is not very good at writing but reads like mad, chaotically, in the time left by his football, his piano, or his fooling around. Please do not take me wrong. I even had many doubts before telling you these anecdotes of my life. We are not deschooling society. As I already mentioned, nine of every ten Mexicans between six and fourteen are now attending school. Schooling is still a universal claim in México. We have just passed from the fourth to the fifth grade in the average schooling of Mexicans, and the government recently raised the level of compulsory school to nine years. It will be foolish on my part to challenge

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all that. We are not campaigning against the school system or showing an alternative path. And I want to explicitly differentiate our experience from the one of the hundreds of thousands of American families that now have their children out of the school system, for the same reason that I wanted to differentiate our experience from the Back to the Land movement in industrial countries, for reembedding food in agriculture; or from the now conventional Alternative Healers, to be healed of Health. I cannot imagine a more profound misunderstanding than the one incurred by Harper, using its rights as a publisher to name Illich’s book “Deschooling Society” (Illich 1972). Illich felt the need to clarify the question in an article that appeared almost simultaneously. For me, since the first reading, there has been a contradiction between that title and the book’s content. Perhaps it is time to allude to my own experience with Iván Illich. He was, for me, a late discovery. I started reading him when I first met him, in 1983, at a seminar organized in México City. What fascinated me then, forcing me to read as much as I could of Illich, and what still fascinates me is that I could find in his thinking a very precise and insightful articulation of my own experience with peasants and marginals, the experience that I was unable to understand with the formal categories in which I was educated. Iván, furthermore, gave his insights a political form, which was what I was looking for at that time after experiencing the failure of all other political forms and ideologies. Illich’s research on schooling, like his research on medicine, energy, or transportation, was a collection of exercises and case studies in which he applied his central hypothesis about industrial society, exposing it to a radical critique. “Medical Nemesis” was not about closing hospitals, suppressing antibiotics or vaccines, or condemning the Medical Establishment; it was, even less, a plea for Alternative Medicine. “Energy and Equity” was not about saving energy, renouncing modern transportation, or reducing pollution; it was even less about alternative energy sources, to move from fossil to sun, following the proposals of Amory Lovins. “Deschooling society” was not about closing schools, renouncing literacy or texts, or blaming the teachers for every possible cultural disgrace of modern society; it was even less about Alternative Schools. In my reading of Illich, he was always calling for an institutional revolution—as reads the subtitle of his first book, “Celebration of Awareness”. His works are but the mature and literate extension of his “Call to Celebration”—the manifest he launched in 1967. He was inviting those

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“unwilling to be constrained by the apparently all-determining forces and structures of the industrial age” to start a new era, an era that would represent “the end of privilege and license”. He was fully aware, since then, that his call would “create major confrontations with existing values and systems”. “The expanding dignity of each man and each human relationship must necessarily challenge existing systems”. But he thought it was possible to start living the future. “Let us join together joyfully”, he said, “to celebrate our awareness that we can make our life today the shape of tomorrow’s future”. And that is, precisely, the mood I have been smelling at the grassroots, in my world, now stimulated by the collapse of all ideologies associated with the industrial system. I cannot conceive of a more preposterous proposal than to deschool this society or dismantle its medical establishment. It would be like taking off a car’s tires to make it run smoothly and faster. I immensely admired the late John Holt. The “Holt Schools” design was a clever trick to support the resisters to compulsory education. They were no alternative schools or even less schooling at home. They were no schools at all. They just created legal protection for autonomous initiatives going beyond education. His bulletin, “Growing without schooling”, is a treasure of experiences and reflections. John Holt knew very well what he was doing. Allow me to quote him extensively from an interview in 1982 when he was asked to define “education”: It is not a word I personally use... Different people mean different things with it. (One of its assumptions) is that learning is an activity which is separated from the rest of life and done best of all when we are not doing anything else and best of all in places where nothing else is done — learning places, places especially constructed for learning. Another assumption is that education is a designed process in which some people do things to other people or get other people to do things which will presumably be for their own good. Education means that some A is doing something to somebody else B.

Pressured by the interviewer, he said: “I do not know of any definition of education that would seem to me to be acceptable. I wrote a book called Instead of Education and what I mean by this is instead of this designed process which is carried on in specially constructed places under various kinds of bribes and threats. I do not know what single word I had put

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(in its place). I would talk about a process in which we become more informed, intelligent, curious, competent, skillful, aware by our interaction with the world around us, because of the mainstream of life, so to speak. In other words, I learn a great deal, but I do it in the process of living, working, playing, being with friends. There is no division in my life between learning, work, play, etc. These things are all one. I do not have a word which I could easily put in the place of “education, unless it might be ‘living’” (Falbel 1993: 71–72). Holt knew well that the standard perception of education implied some sort of “treatment”. Even self-education can reflect this: a selfadministered treatment. Many of Holt’s followers, however, as many Illich’s followers, had been concentrated in different forms of treatment. Schooling at home is a kind of nightmare, often more poisonous and dangerous than the public school: it transmogrifies the parents in pseudo-professional teachers, spoiling the whole family’s life. I suspect that the standard reading of Deschooling Society put the cart before the horse. His critics assumed that Illich was proposing deschooling as a tool for the institutional inversion of the industrial society. Sometimes, such reading was consciously used to demonstrate how unfeasible or reactionary the proposal was. Some other times, it fostered counterproductive attempts of squaring the circle. The question of the “institutional revolution” is of a different kind. When used with a political intention, the word revolution is so associated with seizing power that it prevents any serious consideration of other implications of the word. As far as I can see, Illich foresaw an “institutional inversion” as the result of a legal and political struggle of extended coalitions of those already de-institutionalized—by the very nature of the institutions of the industrial system. He conceived the possibility that dropouts, unemployed, and many others excluded from the institutions, stop claiming for their re-institutionalization, that is, for being again accepted in the school, the job, or whatever they lost or have been excluded of, and look instead for a radical liberation of the dominant institutions. The condition-sine-qua-non of such a struggle is the awareness of the nature of these institutions, assuming a critical distance from them and thus focusing the struggle on limiting them. Some people still in the institutions but unsatisfied with them may then join such coalitions to look for the institutional inversion. I contend that such coalitions have started to emerge. They are not flourishing, as apparently, Illich hoped, in the industrial countries, which

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seem, unfortunately, more trapped than ever in the dominant discourse, despite the collapse of modern ideologies and no matter how intense appears to be in them the longing for new ideas, out of fear of the conditions under which the world is falling apart. The initiative is being taken among the social majorities, at the grassroots, in the “marginal” world, among the “underdeveloped”, among all those de-institutionalized by the failure of development and the so-called crisis, who got a new awareness after experiencing what development is—before being “fully developed”, that is, before becoming fully “institutionalized”. Illich was fully aware that the elites of the underdeveloped world were obsessed with catching up and would never try an alternative. He was right. The initiatives now being taken by the people at the grassroots in these countries need, first and foremost, to oppose their own political and intellectual classes. Compulsory education, in México, is one more of our never enforced constitutional rights. There are no dog catchers in México. The social and psychological pressures, which were particularly effective when they became associated with hopes, are now a mere custom, one of the inertia of daily life at the grassroots. Schooling still is a ritual of passage for most young people. But they are increasingly aware that the “passage” is blocked and takes them to nowhere; having a diploma is no guarantee for a job and does not give them status or prestige; the school system does not correct inequalities. At the same time, they are discovering that many other rituals or practices may take them, more effectively, to the job they were looking for or, even better, to a creative, productive activity in their own contexts. They are finding opportunities to use their talents and skills, learned out of the school, in a thousand different forms in their new commons. Most of my stories are illustrations of this. Diplomas are still a felt need all over México. But they have ceased to be, a long time ago, a kind of employment insurance. Many employers raised the school requirements for the jobs they offered to get better workers. They are now reducing them after discovering the low productivity of a frustrated college graduate working as a janitor. The social role of diplomas is rapidly changing. Years ago, I campaigned for legislation imposing ten years of jail on anyone producing a diploma or asking others to produce it. In the debate that followed, the main argument I received was that most students would abandon the schools, at any grade, if they were not going to obtain a diploma. This reaction revealed to me the extended awareness that the

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schools or the universities are not for learning or for “socialization”—as it is called—but to get a diploma. After that experience, we are now giving diplomas to everyone. After three days in our workshops on dry latrines, young people receive a big, beautiful diploma as “Experts in Alternative Sanitation”. Many other forms of social certification of knowledge now have better acceptance than the diplomas of the school system: while the latter often leads to unemployment, our three days diplomas give immediate access to creative and profitable occupations. We received unexpected support for our endeavor from the “Open education” system created by the government for adult education and allowed for study outside of the school, following specified curricula, textbooks, and evaluations. It is changing the nature of the diplomas. A smart and dedicated student can get certification equivalent to three or six years in school after a few months of study. This is now offering wider access to the diplomas to all those that do not want or cannot attend school. It is also changing the social appreciation of the diplomas themselves. We are not deschooling society. On the contrary, we hope that our present struggles to protect our new commons through extended coalitions may reach the point where institutional inversion is possible. We also hope that in the new era, schools will remain as a relic of times past, a monument to a dark age that will be examined with an archeological gaze and will puzzle future historians of modernity like no other institution. They call them muchitos . It is an expression loaded with warm love, nearness, and affection. It has the diminutive, always expressing affection, and the contraction, which symbolizes nearness. They choose Muchitos instead of muchachitos. The expression designates, in Oaxaca, most people less than 16 years old. They are everywhere. All the time. Amazingly free. Undisturbed. Most of them have concrete responsibilities at home, including what usually is called work: they are in the milpa, taking care of the animals, bringing water, and doing some craft. Many of them spend a good part of their time in the streets, sometimes working, selling something, shoe shining, etc. But nobody will call them “Street children”; not even to address those without a recognized family and are hosted to sleep in a friendly house. Child labor is not a trait of capitalism but has become a social problem under capitalism. In Oaxaca, we don’t have that social problem. Two years ago, we produced for the local TV network a series called “Muchos muchitos ”, many muchitos. It received a prize from the Deutsche

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Belle, but the producer of the series, who came to receive it, had great trouble explaining here that the series was not for denunciation but for celebration. The series tells the stories of very different muchitos . We captured them in the streets of Oaxaca, in the villages, in the workshops, and in the milpas. We showed them talking, playing, working, dancing, and living. They spoke to the camera. They loved that as much as seeing themselves on the screen. —“It is so boring”, Juanito told us, a 12-year-old shoeshine boy we found in the main plaza of Oaxaca. He lost his whole family in an accident six years ago and stayed with a family that cared for him. Three years ago, when that family left the city, he decided to stay, found a place to sleep, and has lived since then all by himself. He was explaining why he decided to enter school. “It is so boring”, he said. “Sometimes, I am ready to quit. But I will do it just to show everyone that I can do it. But I will not follow further studies, just primary education. I have a friend who is a blacksmith. I love to be with him every morning before coming to my shoeshine. I am learning with him. He wants to take me as his apprentice, but I also like to be here, in the plaza, with my friends and get my income. I also want to finish school. But in three more years, I will work with him. And later, perhaps, I will have my own workshop”. For many years, federal laws against child labor failed to prevent exploitative labor due to inefficient enforcement but were a deterrent for many forms of apprenticeship: people became afraid of the law, formally imposing heavy penalties. In time, we reached a kind of compromise, at least in Oaxaca. The laws are reducing exploitative child labor, that is, the low-paid work of children in workshops, factories, or shops. But apprenticeship is again flourishing. If there is a personal bond with the apprentice, if he or she is a relative, godson, or friend, his master has some protection against law enforcement. The condition of the apprentices has thus improved, and the mechanism has become a tool for cultural transmission. I recently met with a group of children from a barrio of México City. After admiring their enthusiasm and dedication to what they were doing and being impressed by their dignity and enjoyment, I invited them ice cream and we had a long chat. Most of them went to school, worked four to six hours with their parents, often tending a stall by themselves, helped in the family chores at home, and still had time to be together and play. Most of them told me that they liked their work very much in the

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stall that for them it was a kind of play. And they were also very proud of their contribution to the family’s sustenance. Their daily schedule seems unimaginable for middle or upper classes but, in my experience, is pretty common among the so-called urban poor. There seems to be a radical difference in the family life of the social majorities and that of other social classes. At the grassroots, the children are really needed, not only in emotional terms, but as responsible members of the household, sharing chores, obligations, and predicaments, as well as opportunities for enjoyment. Far from being irrelevant or an economic burden, they are at the center of family life. Among peasants or marginals, the question of what to do with the children, how to entertain them, how to get rid of them—as my granddaughter observed— cannot be posed or even conceived. An economist will say that children are a highly profitable investment for these parents: after the first two or three years of life, in which the mother provides most of the food needed and there are very limited expenses for the child, the new member of the family starts to contribute to its sustenance. In other social classes, “children” and young people represent a heavy “investment”, which rarely renders any economic return for the family. What this economic mind will hide, however, is that the “protection” of the children, in the modern context, is in fact, disabling them: it represents radical discrimination against a whole class of people, explicitly excluded for years from family and community life, and doomed to be confined to caring institutions which additionally disable them. Our situation can be better understood if the size of the family is also considered. The so-called nuclear family, a creation of the economic society, has already sprouted in México. The number of families of four or five members constantly increased in the last decades and now represents a third of the population, like the middle classes. But the extended family still prevails. Half of the Mexican families still have more than five members; 10% have more than ten members. To have a complete picture, it must be considered that these figures refer to the household. In both urban and rural families, several households belonging to the same family may live in the same neighborhood, which brings the number of the extended family to several dozen, for example, in one section of San Pablo Etla, the Solís family groups seven households—thus composed of more than 50 persons.

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And they live in a commons. They are dwellers of the land. After all these years of argument about emigration, after all these years of development, the last Census offered a wonderful surprise. Six of every ten Mexicans still live in the province where they were born. In the 1980s, the decade with the highest rate of migration between provinces, when a fifth of the population changed their place of residence, a number of them were coming back to their province of origin. Such flow clearly contrasts with the American pattern, where every person changes seven times, on average, his/her place of residence. If the figures can tell anything, in their coldness, they establish the difference between “residents” and dwellers of the land. If education still has a concrete meaning, it means what Tolstoy used to say: it is a conscious attempt to turn one into “something”. In industrial society, that “something” is increasingly a specific ability to produce “useful things”. What is frequently forgotten is that like Marx timely warned, “They want production to be limited to ‘useful things’, but they forget that the production of too many useful things results in too many useless people”(Schumacher 1973: 124). First, we have finally reached the era of overproduction of useless people. The director-general of the World Labor Organization declared recently that belief in the possibility of a future of full employment—in rich and poor countries—was no longer an excusable illusion but a most objectionable creation of false expectation. Second, Hans-Albert Steger estimates that the programmed obsolescence of our graduates from Mexican universities is around eight years. Therefore, if they are learning at all, what they are learning will be of no use eight years later. Our new attitude, at the grassroots, simply implies abandoning the arrogance of controlling the future. Well rooted in our traditions and physical and cultural soil, we are learning as we live. We are offering our offspring as many opportunities as possible to learn with us what we still convey from our ancient cultures, as well as the concrete knowledge and experience we get in our daily lives. They are learning, with us, in our new commons, how to commit themselves with our immediate world, in our relations with the environment and with each other, in the dignity of our modest lives. They share with us all our predicaments, the constant struggle to protect ourselves from the economic invasion of our lives. Yet, they are also

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sharing the thousand and one opportunities for enjoyment we can find in our well-rooted present. And they are also learning to formulate new dreams, to create new hopes, to generate their own world, advancing step by step in the adventure of living, constantly opened to surprise. Marx’s question, Who will educate the educators?, has no other answer but the dominant ideology, the system. Despite Freire, liberation cannot come from translating the “something” of education into a “political conscience” obtained through “conscientization”. Who will educate the educator in that “conscience” he is transferring to the people? Political awareness can only come, in our experience, by radically liberating ourselves from any form of education. To start freely dreaming and living again. We are now hoping that others may share with us this awareness to extend the political coalitions which may effectively protect our new commons from the daily encroachment on our world by economy and development. Together, we may perhaps pave the way for an era in which privilege and license come to an end.

Lessons from Below (San Pablo Etla, Oaxaca, México. 2009) I dream of an intellectual who destroys proofs and universals, who discovers and reveals, within present day limitations and inertia, weaknesses, openings, lines of force; one that is always changing location. He doesn’t know precisely where he will be or what he will be thinking tomorrow because he is completely absorbed in the present. Those that to be heard must die, the always forgotten in revolutionary work and political parties, those absent in history, those always present in misery, the small, the deaf, the eternal infants, those without voice or face, the receivers of disdain, the incapacitated, the abandoned, the uncounted dead, the inciters of tenderness, the professionals of hope, those of worthy countenance denied, those with pure anger, those of pure fire, those for whom enough is enough (los del ya basta!), those of the early morning, those that say: everything for everyone, nothing for us (para todos todo, para nosotros nada).

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Those with the word that walks, us, we want no duty, no glory, no fame. We simply want to be prologue to the new world. A new world with a new way of doing politics, a new type of politics by people in government, by men and women that command by obeying (que manden obedeciendo). (Talk by subcomandante Marcos, Reality, May 17th, 1994)

In “Eco-paedagogics and the commons”, a draft prepared in 1983 for discussion with friends, Ivan Illich succinctly expressed the theme of this essay: how ordinary men and women, at the grassroots, particularly among the marginalized majorities of the world, are today the main source of hope. As Illich anticipated, when the world began to fall apart,5 they reclaimed their commons and took radical initiatives to live a convivial life in the midst of the disaster. As Ivan would say, the people at the grassroots are making their life today “the shape of tomorrow’s future” (Illich 1972: 18). For that reason, this essay is also about the spectacular success and the final failure of the global public pedagogy of development and globalization and the increasing effectiveness of the grassroots pedagogy challenging it. In the 1960s, Illich wrote devastating critiques of the public pedagogy inaugurated in 1949, when E & D (as he calls education and development when considered as a couple) became two sacred cows “harnessed as the draft animals of so-called progress” (p. 1). At that time, however, only dissident vanguards could hear him. All over the world, people were effectively educated in development’s catechism. The public pedagogy used for that purpose exhibited amazing effectiveness, creating in fact an environment in which everyone was forced to inhabit. Twenty years later, in 1983, in the draft mentioned above, Illich examined “the bond that constitutes E & D because it is becoming an evil of an unrecognized kind…and because I believe that the assumptions which made it possible have ceased to exist” (p. 2). Illich considered that many people still assumed that the growth of E & D remained a universal goal, but “they have learned not to expect Shangri-la from decades of frustration”. Many indicators were since then reminding them of the real impact of E & D: “cost overruns, dropouts, increased social polarization, declining quality and declining value of ever more expensive positional knowledge and commodities, mushrooming bureaucracies, disabling professionalism, rising repression, violence to body and mind, net transfers of privileges, class-specific burden of externalities” (p. 3). Illich timely warned about all these evils, which were not perceived in the 1950s and were consciously

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ignored in the 1960s. In the 1980s, Illich considered that the time was ripe for debunking E & D: the evil embedded in those social constructions had become increasingly evident. He was also convinced that the hope that E & D does not define an irreversible mutation was by then shared by many in Mexican slums or Indigenous communities. How shall I call the opposite project: the reconquest of the right to live in self-limiting communities that each treasures their own mode of subsistence?” asked Illich. “Pressed, I would call this project the recovery of commons… At least conceptually, we could move beyond our sacred cows”. (Illich 1972: 10)

This essay describes the story of the public pedagogy that globalized development and its final failure. It also explores the grassroots pedagogy that, as Illich anticipated, in the last 20 years, is creating the hope of a profound social transformation: the revolution of the new commons. Zapatista Pedagogy: A Story of Emancipation According to Noam Chomsky, John Berger, Immanuel Wallerstein, Pablo González Casanova, José Saramago, and many other contemporary thinkers, Zapatismo is nowadays the most radical, and perhaps the most important, political initiative in the world. No contemporary political or social movement has attracted more attention than the Zapatistas. In 2005, Wallerstein observed that the Zapatista rebellion “has been the most important social movement in the world, the barometer and alarm clock for other anti-system movements around de world” (La Jornada, 19-07-05). What kind of public, grassroots pedagogy is this? Mass media regularly disseminate news about the Zapatistas. They try continually to forget them, but they are forced to bring them again to the front page every time they start an important initiative. For fifteen years, the Zapatista communiqués had appeared on various websites, in several languages, on the very day they are released. Tens of thousands of books have been published about the Zapatistas in more than 20 languages. They include their communiqués, interviews, and all kinds of reflections. Hundreds of thousands or even millions of articles and essays in magazines and newspapers have also been published. There is an open debate about Zapatismo, continually enriched with new experiences and reflections.

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The government disqualified the Zapatistas, describing them as an “Internet guerrilla”—implying that they only existed on the Internet. The Zapatistas were never a guerrilla: they were not a fish that swims in the sea of the people, as Che Guevara famously said. They were the sea: hundreds of the communities themselves decided collectively to declare war on the Mexican government. And the image of subcomandante Marcos sending communiqués from the jungle by satellite cellphone was a media invention with no support in the real world. A few days after the uprising, a librarian from California discovered the communiqués and took the autonomous decision to translate and circulate them in her network. She thus inaugurated a tradition that can now be recognized as a new kind of pedagogy: in a decentralized, autonomous style, thousands of people and groups around the world used the web to spread the communiqués and their own reflections and experiences. There are more than 5,000 pages on the web, regularly nourished by the people who created them. Google gets mad when you ask for a search on Zapatistas: the references begin to number in the millions. However, this kind of public attention does not appropriately reflect the importance and vitality of the movement. • In Mexico, the Zapatistas have convened and inspired massive mobilizations—which reached their peak on March 2001, when 40 million Mexicans (40% of the population) attended the meetings with the Zapatista commanders on their way to Mexico City to present their views to the Congress. In 2006, when the Zapatistas organized a national and international consultation to define what the people wanted them to do (something peculiar in itself: a revolutionary group asking the people for direction and meaning?), three million people expressed their opinion through ballot boxes, established by the people themselves in a decentralized way, and people from more than a 100 countries also organized themselves to present their position. • All the anti-systemic movements after Seattle recognize the Zapatistas as the source of inspiration and the detonator of those mobilizations. The final evidence of the impact of the Zapatista pedagogy is to be found in the Zapatista presence in communities and neighborhoods in Mexico

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and the rest of the world. But to appreciate such presence has become impossible: there is no way to count. The critical point is that the search always produces something: wherever one explores, one can find Zapatista traces in any country on Earth. Of course, no one will seriously attribute only to the Zapatistas, the fall in the year 2000 of the oldest authoritarian regime in the world (Mexico’s), or the articulation of the unique transnational networks that emerged in the world in the course of the last ten years. But only total blindness can deny their weight in those processes. The Zapatistas, however, continue to be a mystery and a paradox. Can there be such a thing as a revolutionary group with no interest in seizing power? Revolutionary leaders who refuse to hold any public post, now or in the future? An army that fires words and civil disobedience, championing non-violence? An organization profoundly rooted in its local culture with a global scope? A group that is strongly affiliated with democratic principles, and yet is democracy’s most radical critic? People profoundly rooted in ancient Mayan traditions and yet immersed in contemporary ideas, problems, and technologies? “Everything for everyone, nothing for us”, a principle daily applied in their initiatives, includes power: they don’t want power, even within their own communities, where the powers that be don’t dare to interfere. What kind of movement is this? Is it possible to apply to them, to their ideas and practices, conventional or alternative notions of Power or power? Do they fit in the archetypal model of the Prince? The expression “national liberation” is included in the name they gave to their movement, but they seem to be radically different to the movements for national liberation of the postwar era. How to deal with their ideas and practices expressing their radical freedom, their fascinating notion of liberty and liberation?

What kind of pedagogy is this? There are no doubts about the depth of its radicalism. As most anti-systemic movements now recognize, the Zapatistas were the first to radically oppose and challenge globalization. In revealing that the emperor had no clothes, the Zapatistas produced immediate awareness, first in dissident vanguards and soon in millions of people, about the character of the neoliberal enterprise and particularly about the need and possibility of resisting it. Furthermore, the Zapatistas challenge in both theoretical and practical terms all the elements of contemporary societies: the economic organization of society (capitalism or socialism); the dominant political regime (the nation-state as the

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main or only political horizon; representative democracy as real democracy); the dominant homogenizing culture… and the Zapatistas, finally, render obsolete many traditions and ways of people’s mobilization for social transformation, all forms of social engineering and the theoretical underpinnings of such endeavors. The contribution of the Zapatistas to hope and imagination is perhaps the clue to appropriately grasping their pedagogy. An ancient tradition puts hope at the beginning of all time and at the very center of human life. Whence, however, does Hope arise?...Hope is the sheet-anchor of every man. When hope is destroyed, great grief follows which, forsooth, is almost equal to death itself…I think that Hope is bigger than a mountain with all its trees. Or, perhaps, it is bigger than the sky itself. Or perhaps, O King, it is really immeasurable. Hope, O Chief of kurus, is highly difficult of being understood and equally difficult of being conquered. Seeing this last attribute of Hope, I ask, what else is so unconquerable as this? (The Mahabharata, Vol. XII: 186)

At the end of Deschooling Society, the book that made Ivan Illich famous, he anticipated this opening: The Promethean ethos –he wrote- has now eclipsed hope. Survival of the human race depends on its rediscovery as a social force. (Illich 1996: 105)

The Zapatistas clearly became “professionals of hope”, as they explained to a child who wrote to them. They seem to know that hope is the very essence of popular movements: only because they hold hope the people take the initiative for change. At a time when the Promethean ethos has been threatened with the destruction of the world, when expectations continually nourished by the system vanish one after the other, the Zapatistas liberated hope from their intellectual and political prison, creating the possibility of a renaissance. Instead of pretending to guide the masses, as most revolutionary groups did in the past, they transformed themselves into a source of inspiration for millions of people after awakening their imagination with the powerful images of the struggle they started. Moreover, they do not pretend to administer the net of plural paths that emerged after their uprising. Instead, they acknowledge that we all are, or can be, Zapatistas.

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Behind our black mask, behind our armed voice, behind our unnamable name, behind what you see of us, behind this, we are you. Behind this, we are the same simple and ordinary men and women who are repeated in all races, painted in all colors, speak in all languages, and live in all places. Behind this, we are the same forgotten men and women, the same excluded, the same intolerated, the same persecuted, the same as you. Behind this, we are you.6

The Emperor Has No Clothes The Zapatista uprising is well known. On January 1, 1994, a few hours after NAFTA—the North American Free Trade Agreement between Mexico, the United States, and Canada—came into force, thousands of Mayas armed with machetes, clubs, and a few guns occupied seven of the main towns in Chiapas, a Mexico’s province bordering Guatemala, and declared war on the Mexican government. The rebels called themselves Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN). They hoped that a new political regime would allow them to reclaim their commons and regenerate their own forms of governance and their art of living and dying. It was time to say, “¡Basta! Enough!”. In Mexico, during the following days, people by the millions were in the streets to tell the Zapatistas, “You are not alone” and to claim a ceasefire—which the Zapatistas had dutifully respected since January 12, 1994, 12 days after the uprising, when the government was forced to declare it before the public pressure which changed the political balance of forces in the country. For many years the people had been suffering the impact of development and globalization, but they were also suffering a kind of blindness. Since the media and the intellectual, political, and economic elite were continually affirming that Mexico was better than ever, its president repeatedly celebrated all around the world—as a global leader who understood the winds of the time and was bringing his country out of underdevelopment—and there were—in the media—massive images of prosperity, many people assumed that their terrible condition was an individual problem: I should be stupid, or I have terrible bad luck, they were saying to themselves because the country seems to be in great shape. With the Zapatista uprising, when a thousand journalists fell into Chiapas

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like locusts, the images of the real Mexico covered the media. And the people recognized themselves in the misery that suddenly substituted the photos of new dams, bridges, or skyscrapers for the typical misery of the villages. The voice of the Zapatistas clearly revealed that the Emperor had no clothes: everybody could suddenly see that. And shared immediately their ¡Basta ya!: their individual problems were not their fault, but the consequence of a wrong regime, wrong policies, a wrong system… As I mentioned before, the Zapatistas were the first to say a clear and solid No! to globalization. They rejected a “reality” in which they were treated as disposable human beings. It was clear to them that capital had more appetite than ever but no stomach to digest all those it wanted to control. Capital had no use for people like the Zapatistas—not even as consumers because they had no buying power. They were disposable. Instead of accepting with resignation such destiny, of which they had solid proof—in the years before the uprising, the people that we know as the Zapatistas were dying like flies of hunger and curable diseases— the Zapatistas found that they were left with nothing but their dignity and affirmed themselves in it: they opted for a dignified struggle. The veil covering hearts and minds all over the world was suddenly removed. There was hope. And so the mobilization started. “Hope is that rejection of conformity and defeat” (The Zapatistas 1998: 13). Its name is also dignity, Dignity is that nation without nationality, that rainbow that is also a bridge, that murmur of the heart no matter what blood lives it, that rebel irreverence that mocks borders, customs, and wars. (The Zapatistas 1998: 13)

“The expanding dignity of each man and each human relationship must necessarily challenge existing systems” (Illich 1972: 18), wrote Ivan Illich, with a group of friends, in 1967: This “call to celebration” was a manifesto jointly enunciated by and reflecting the mood of a group of friends in 1967, among them Robert Fox and Robert Theobald. It was written at the time of the March on the Pentagon. This call to face facts, rather than deal in illusions –to live change, rather than rely on engineering- is an attempt to re-introduce the word “celebration” into ordinary English. (Illich 1972: 13)

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For fifteen years now, surrounded by 30,000 to 50 000 troops, the Zapatistas have been living the change, actively opposing all forms of social engineering. They celebrate, time and again, in the most diverse ways, despite all restrictions and continual aggression, their hard-won freedom, trying to share their conviction of facing facts rather than dealing in illusions with others. The Curriculum “The first fundamental act of the EZLN was to learn how to listen and to speak”, say the Zapatistas.7 The Zapatistas didn’t come to the world armed with a body of doctrine, an ideology, a collection of prescriptions, a marked path to be followed by others. The mountain told us to take up arms so we would have a voice. It told us to cover our faces so we would have a face. It told us to forget our names so we could be named. It told us to protect our past so we would have a future. (The Zapatistas 1998: 22)

The people that we now know as the Zapatistas attempted everything before the uprising: economic and political organization, all kinds of sitins, and that incredible march in which three thousand of them marched 2 000 miles to Mexico City to present their claims and grievances. Nobody heard, neither the government nor the civil society. They were alone, the weakest, dying like flies. All they had been left with was their dignity. So they affirmed themselves in it, using violence as the last resource, probably assuming that the rebels would be exterminated and perhaps in the hope that their sacrifice might awaken the society and their children and grandchildren may have another destiny. Their pedagogy was amazingly effective. As I already mentioned, a few days after the uprising, people by the millions were in the street, telling them they were not alone and putting pressure on the government to stop the killings. Since January 12, 1994, the Zapatistas became the champions of non-violence. After a frustrating attempt at dialogue with the government in March 1994, and the presidential elections of that year, the Zapatistas concluded that they needed to create a different kind of space for dialogue:

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We needed a space to learn to listen and to speak with this plurality that we call ‘civil society’. We agreed then to construct such space and to call it Aguascalientes, since it would be the headquarters of the National Democratic Convention, whose name alluded to the Convention of the Mexican revolutionary forces in the second decade of the 20th Century... On 8th August 1996 commander Tacho, in the name of the Revolutionary Indigenous Clandestine Committee of the EZLN inaugurated, before six thousand people from different parts of the world, the so-called Aguascalientes and he delivered it to national and international civil society...But the idea of Aguascalientes was going más allá, beyond. We wanted a space for the dialogue with civil society. And dialogue means also to learn to listen to the other and learning how to speak to him or her.

This is a synthesis of the story of the Zapatistas: they learned to listen and have changed accordingly. “Listening while you walk” is not a motto but a practice—which is contagious and currently defines an attitude of the most vigorous social movements in the world. For example, John Jordan, the activist that was one of the founders of the movement “Reclaiming the Streets” and currently participates in the global justice movement, wrote to Rebecca Solnit: Our movements are trying to create a politics that challenges all the certainties of traditional leftist politics, not by replacing them with new ones, but by dissolving any notion that we have answers, plans or strategies that are watertight or universal. In fact, our strategies must me more like water itself, undermining everything that is fixed, hard and rigid with fluidity, constant movement and evolution. We are trying to build a politics of process, where the only certainty is doing what feels right at the right time and in the right place – a politics that doesn’t wait (interesting how wait and hope are the same words in Spanish) but acts in the moment, not to create something in the future but to build in the present, it’s the politics of here and now. When we are asked how are we going to build a new world, our answer is: “We don’t know, but let’s build it together”. In effect, observes Rebecca, we are turning hundreds of years of political form and content on its head by putting the means before the ends, by putting context in front of ideology, by rejecting purity and perfection, in fact, we are turning our backs on the future. (Solnit 2004: 105)

Some people have the impression that millions, hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, are currently mobilized—sometimes struggling for sheer survival, some other times out of a new, sensible awareness. And:

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the most frequently acknowledged wellspring of this new imaginary is the Zapatista uprising in Mexico. Rejecting the old revolutionary ordering of means and ends and the “two-step strategy” of seizing state power as a prelude to social transformation (Wallerstein 2002), the Zapatistas have moved directly to institute what has been seen as a “postcapitalist” indigenous communalism (Neill 1997). Like the other movements for whom they have become both ally and avatar of possibility, the Zapatistas’ goal is not to wrest control, but to create autonomous zones of counterpower (Klein 2002, 220)…The Zapatistas’s symbolically loaded performances of “local” action have been instantly communicated via the Internet, and in countless other parallel movements the ebullience and “event” of anarchic situationism have been given a new life… (For them), Zapatismo is an intuition and a dream… Their “true secret weapon” is language (Klein 2002, pp. 212, 222-3). And also, perhaps, what their language has enabled –a re-visioning of power and a retheorizing of revolution, from strategy and tactics to affect and energetics. (Gibson-Graham, 2006: xx)

Zapatistas’ pedagogy is based on listening and changing according to what they hear. But one of the things that have not changed, a trait profoundly rooted in the Zapatista style, is their decision to walk at the pace of the slowest, to firmly adopt consensus as the key to making any decision. Instead of following the tradition of all the “revolutionary vanguards”, always attempting to be at the top to control the process in which they pretend to lead the people in the realization of their revolutionary project, the Zapatistas look continually for consensus and walk at the pace of the slowest. This attitude implies an explicit recognition of the plurality of interests, perceptions, and voices of the real world. It also implies the firm decision to allow ordinary men and women to take the movement’s lead, transforming it into the model of the society they attempt to construct. The Zapatistas insist that they are rebels, not revolutionaries, because the true revolutionaries are ordinary men and women, often inspired by the Zapatistas, which are currently bringing a radical change at the grassroots. But unfortunately, they have been unable to create the institutions reflecting that change. Still, they have already established the foundations of what can clearly be described as the first social revolution of the twentyfirst century: the revolution of the new commons (Esteva and Prakash, 1998; Esteva 2000).

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The Zapatista’s Pedagogical Substance “Our word is are our weapon”, the title of the best selection of Zapatistas’ writings in English (Ponce de León, 2001), is also an expression that clearly expresses the substance of their pedagogy. Words are windows of perception, matter of thought. Depending upon the words we use, we see, we think, we act. They form the statements with which we govern ourselves and others. Words always enfleshed in their behavior have been the main weapon of the Zapatistas. Using brilliantly and effectively their words, they have been dismantling the dominant discourse. They continually undermine the institutional system of production of the dominant statements, of the established “truth”. They thus shake, peacefully and democratically, the very foundation of the existing Power/Knowledge system. While this system hides within spectacular shows of strength its increasing fragility, the Zapatistas exploits for their struggle its profound cracks, denounce it as a structure of domination and control, and begin the construction of an alternative.

The importance of Zapatismo derives from its grassroots radicality (Esteva and Prakash 1998). Its pedagogy operates by creating conditions for a social composting of the growing discontent with the current form of capital expansion, transforming it into a path of creative transformations. When the Zapatistas broke the bars of the intellectual prison in which the whole world was trapped, ordinary men and women were able to affirm themselves in a path of thinking and acting that previously they did not dare to follow, even though their own situation was giving them intuitive insights about the prospects. An Aha! effect was one of the main consequences of the Zapatista uprising, which quickly articulated vague perceptions and timid attempts to escape from neoliberal oppression. The Zapatistas do not offer a new ideological construction or another utopia. On the contrary, in a genuine sense, they have been walking back from the future, continually widening the present with their ideas and deeds. Rooted in their dignity, the Zapatistas have been erecting some landmarks and signposts in what looks as a net of plural paths (Zapatismo). Whoever walks by these paths can see, with the diffuse and intense quality of a rainbow, a large range of political perspectives that herald a new social order, beyond both modernity and post-modernity (Esteva and Prakash 1998), beyond the economic society (be it capitalist or socialist), beyond

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formal democracy and the nation-state. Más allá (beyond) the current conditions of the world and their intellectual, ideological, and institutional underpinnings. The Zapatistas are one in a kind, and at the same time typical. They are ordinary men and women with an extraordinary behavior. They are still mystery and paradox, as the grassroots epic now running around the world. The Zapatistas are no longer the Zapatismo circulating in the world.

It’s Zapatismo, say the Zapatistas, that communities make their decisions at variance with the dominant regime. Ours is not a liberated territory nor a utopian commune. Neither is it the experimental laboratory of an absurdity or a paradise for an orphaned left. It’s a rebellious territory in resistance. (La Jornada, 2-10-04)

The Lacandona Commune observes Luis Hernández, Is not a regime, but a practice…a laboratory of new social relations…[that] recovers old aspirations of the movements for self-emancipation: liberation should be the work of those it benefits, there oughtn’t be authorities over the people, the subjects of the social order must have full decision making capacity over their destinies. Their existence isn’t the expression of a moral nostalgia, but the living expression of a new politics. (La Jornada, 7-9-04)

Reconstituting Ourselves In 1974 Ivan Illich anticipated a condition that clearly resembles what is happening today, after the global financial meltdown. From one day to the next or through a series of events accumulating evidence, the people lose confidence in the dominant institutions and the administrators of the crisis. In Mexico, there are two presidents (the “legal” and the “legitimate”), but no real government of the society and President Bush reached the end of his term with the lowest level of trust and popularity of any president in the history of the United States. Rather than exceptions, these cases seem to be the rule. Over night significant institutions will lose all respectability, all legitimacy, and their reputation for serving the public good. It happened to the

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Roman Church in the Reformation, to the French monarchy in 1793. In one night the unthinkable became obvious. (Illich 1974: 98)

For Illich, both the people and their leaders may think that it is possible to address the difficulties with the usual tools, perhaps using them in an inverted way—for example applying the power of the government to nationalize banks or bail out institutions instead of deserting of its functions in the mood of the neoliberal deregulation. No remedy is effective, but still ways are found to try them one after another. Governments think they can deal with the breakdown of utilities, the disruption of the educational system, intolerable transportation, the chaos of the judicial process, the violent disaffection of the youth. Each aspect of the global crisis is dealt with as separate from all others, each is explained in its own manner and treated particularly, each calls for a specific solution. Squabbles about alternative remedies give credibility to the sectorial reform. (Ibídem)

For many years, we have experienced the attempts of all governments to address the fundamental problems of society with mere patches and spectacular exhibitions of programs and reforms that only move the pieces of the system from one place to another to create the illusion of change and to pretend that real solutions are being implemented. Stability and coherence will soon come back to the cracking system. They produce confusion but also take the system to its limits and slowly push all dominant institutions to a precipice. In the following chaos and uncertainty, according to Illich, some men and women of calm disposition and warm heart may inspire confidence in the people, showing that not only is it necessary, but it is possible, to install a convivial society, on condition of conscious use of a disciplined process that recognizes the legitimacy of conflicting interests, the historical precedent out of which the conflicts arose, and that gives credible authority to the decisions of ordinary men recognized by the community as their representatives. In a time of disaster, only a rootedness in history will give the necessary confidence to transform the present. The convivial use of process guarantees that an institutional revolution will remain a tool whose application engenders the ends sought. To appeal lucidly to process, in a spirit of continual opposition to bureaucracy, is the only possible protection against the revolution itself becoming an institution. Whether the application of

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this process to the inversion of all major institutions is then called a cultural revolution, the recuperation of the formal structure of law, participatory socialism, or a return to the spirit of the Fueros de España, is a matter of labeling. (Illich 1974: 204)

This paragraph can be used to describe the Zapatista experience, in the area under their control, for the last 15 years. Ordinary men and women have been performing all the functions of government, recognized by their communities as their temporary representatives because the people take turns to serve in those positions: they have thus credible authority. There is a continual opposition to bureaucracy in the organization of daily life, clearly rooting in history their confidence in their capacity to transform the present. The experience also resembles that of the Paris Commune, explicitly celebrated by Marx in The Civil War in France (1975). “The convivial use of process guarantees that an institutional revolution will remain a tool whose application engenders the ends sought”, wrote Illich. The Zapatistas openly inverted the traditional revolutionary process by rejecting the separation between ends and means, and recognizing, instead, as Illich said, that practice gives rise to the ends sought. We don’t believe that the ends justify the means. Finally we think the means are the end. We construct our objective at the same time that we construct the means by which we go on struggling. In that sense, the value we give to the spoken word, to honesty and to sincerity, is great, even though at times we may err ingenuously. (Subcomandante Marcos, in an interview with García Márquez, March 2001, reproduced in Lopes 2004: 149)

Illich considered the possibility of a sudden detonation years ago, precipitating the system’s fall. Instead, junctures presented themselves that prolonged the agony of the dominant regime. In his conversations with David Cayley at the end of the 1980s, he pointed out that “people can see what scientists and administrators can’t”. When you wrote Tools for Conviviality, Cayley observed, you laid our a political program for inverting the structure of tools, as you put it. And now you’re saying, I think, that it happened, but not in the way you anticipated.

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Illich: It happened in a way I had not anticipated. In the last words of that book I said that I knew in which direction things would happen but not what would bring them to that point. At that time I believed in some big, symbolic event, in something similar to the Wall Street crash. Instead of that, it is hundreds of millions of people just using their brains and trusting their noses. We now live in a world in which most of those things that industry and government do are misused by people for their own purposes. (Cayley 1990: 117)

It is clear, anyway, that we are now living the situation that Illich foresaw, in the catastrophic form of the Fourth World War, as the Zapatistas have called it. Therefore, it is necessary to transform that increasingly general catastrophe, which covers all spheres of reality, from the planetary environment to the privacy of every home, all submitting to growing violence. It is necessary to transform it through the crisis of transformation it finds itself in now. The specific formal sign of this transformation may indeed be a constitutional process such as that put forth in the Sixth Declaration of Selva Lacandona, released by the Zapatistas in 2005, to explicitly articulate people’s reaction to the catastrophe. Back from promised futures, which make the present an always postponed future, the Zapatistas affirm themselves day after day in their surprising creation that more and more people feel day after day to be their own. It is not easy to discover another way to escape the horror that has been emerging. The Sixth is an opportunity for the people to express themselves with imagination and to walk with hope. A Call During the late sixties, wrote Ivan Illich in 1970, it has become evident than less than 10 per cent of the human race consumes more than 50 per cent of the world’s resources, and produces 90 per cent of the physical pollution which threatens to extinguish the biosphere. But this is only one aspect of the paradox of present development. During the early seventies it will become equally clear that welfare institutions have an analogous regressive effect. The international institutionalization of social service, medicine, and education which is generally identified with development has equally overwhelming destructive by-products. We need an alternative program, an alternative both to development and to merely political revolution. Let me call this alternative program either institutional or cultural revolution,

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because its aim is the transformation of both public and personal reality. (Illich 1972: 180)

The purpose of this text was “to initiate a discussion about the need of constitutional principles which would guarantee an ongoing cultural revolution in a technological society” (p. 175). So the discussion started, and one of its products, Tools for Conviviality, published by Illich a few years later, became well known. When he wrote those lines, Illich was fully aware that the Second UN Development Decade had just been launched. But he still trusted the courage and wisdom of the people who were already resisting the development enterprise and were trying to reclaim their own sensible paths. Today, almost 40 years later, climate change and global misery and injustice make evident the price we must pay for the path not taken. Today, however, in contrast with the dominant conditions in the 1970s, millions of people, perhaps hundreds of millions and even billions, are mobilized to stop the horror. The so-called anti-systemic movements express everywhere a new awareness, full of vitality and ingenuity, challenging like never before the powers that be and the dominant institutions and paradigms. What started as a financial meltdown in the United States is not just the beginning of an economic recession or depression, but the expression of a cultural revolution, like the one carefully described and anticipated by Illich: people liberating themselves from the tyranny of illusions, the false promises, and unreal expectations of the supposedly universalizable American dream. A new hope now looms on our horizon, surprising us with grassroots creativity that laughs at the apocalyptic randiness of pundits and politicians still trying to educate us in the obsolete slogans of Education & Development.

Professionalism (San Pablo Etla, Oaxaca, México. September 2016) When I was a child, the word “need” had only one practical application: shitting. My mother used it when she told us: “Once you arrive at your uncle’s house, ask him where you can hacer tus necesidades (relief yourself, necesidades translates to needs)”. We made the ‘”needs”; we did not have them. This way of talking applied to everything: our “needs”

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were defined by our own capacity, our tools, the way we used them, and they were strictly personal, imponderable, and incommensurable. No one could measure or define my relationship with my dog, my reactions to the first novel I read, my physical and emotional condition when I got a headache, or what I wanted to learn. Thus, in my lifetime, all current needs were created, and we all were transmogrified into needy, measured, and controlled people. Professionals defined the needs themselves, and we were classified according to our needs. The ironic observation: “as perfectly professional as the mourning of an undertaker” (Lowell 1871: 408) became an accepted standard. Professions and professionals rose to prominence in the first twenty years of my life. I was urged to become one of them, as the only way to be “someone”—a very strange expression I heard time and again, implying that I was surrounded by “nobodies” and I should not be one of them. When I was a child, people were talking to me. Words were symbols, not representations or categories, and only one of every ten of them addressed me as an undifferentiated member of a crowd. As I grew, words became terms, and I was addressed as an individual member of a class of people: children, skinny, underdeveloped… according to our “needs”: education, nutrition, development… If you are classified as underdeveloped, your “deficiencies”, your “lacks”, are identified: since you lack the goods and services associated with the American Way of Life, you need development that will satisfy those needs. To be underdeveloped is, of course, very humiliating. You can no longer trust your nose because you need to trust the nose of the professionals that will guide you to development. You can no longer dream your dreams because they are already dreamt: to be like them, like the developed, and to dream their dreams. But development also comes with fascination. In the 1940s, going to the movie theater was the new entertainment. We rushed every weekend to see the last movie shown. And every week, Hollywood provided pictures in which the American Way of Life was the closest thing to paradise. After disqualifying us as underdeveloped pariahs, President Truman offered to share with us all their scientific and technological advances to catch up with them. To develop, to enjoy that kind of life became more than a fantasy or a goal; it was a need. The “awareness” of such a need came along with the advanced knowledge of the professionals that will define and satisfy it. In the early 1970s, recognizing that the development enterprise was causing hunger and misery everywhere produced the Basic Needs

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Approach. It became evident that it was unfeasible for every person on Earth to consume as much energy as the Americans: the planet would explode for ecological contradictions. Other traits of the American Way of Life were equally unreachable. The goal became thus to satisfy at least a package of “basic needs”. There was no consensus about the definition of those needs. However, such orientation still characterizes most development efforts of international institutions and national governments… and shaped the UN Millennium Goals 50 years later. In common parlance, professional is today an adjective to indicate that something is well done and a noun to allude to a person certified to provide specific services. A professional is a person that can transform any situation into a “problem” and offer a “solution” in which he is usually included. These uses of the word hide the nature of professions, professionals, and professionalism in the contemporary world. In the past, many different organizations and trade associations determined how particular works shall be done and by whom. Professionals added to this the command about what to do, how it should be done, by whom, for whom, and how their decisions will be enforced. They prescribe what is right and have the power to define who must be subordinate to their will and follow their instructions. Most professions got such power from elites whose interests they promoted or supported, but they often began controlling even those elites. Once a need professionally defined is assumed, sooner than later, it becomes a right; once a right is established and guaranteed by law, power and resources are concentrated in the professionals and institutions that will provide the services associated with the right—education, health, jobs…,—and will also rule the whole field. The “liberal professions” were born in the “liberal era”, in the nineteenth century, when freedom was recognized as the supreme value of individual and collective life. The “liberal state” was celebrated as the political regime committed to guaranteeing individual rights before political power through political representation. Before I was born, “liberal professions” enjoyed social prestige and provided ethical backing for their members, who were selling their services to the best bidder and presented themselves as competent and humane people ready to support their clients. The term itself carried both a religious imprint, from the time in which “to profess” was to take vows of religion, and a commitment to freedom and independence, associated with an open, tolerant, and generous attitude and with the arts of free men. However, in the

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1940s and 1950s, the word “professional” suffered an important transformation. The religious and ethical aura of the liberal professions was used to give legitimacy to the new class of professionals, claiming control over human needs. From the very beginning, at the end of the eighteenth century, the idea of modern democracy was perceived as risky business. Madison and Hamilton, the fathers of the American Constitution, were afraid of giving common people the power of government; the American Union may dissolve, they thought, because a demagogue or its enemies would manipulate the people. They thus reserved for a small minority the main threads of power in the design of a Republic, not a democracy, but included a system of representation through which ordinary people will express their will. Such a republic was later called democracy and became a universal model. Checks and balances and many other tools were created to soften and hide the despotic nature of this political regime. In the last part of the twentieth century, such despotic nature of representative democracy and of the “liberal state” became entirely evident. The professions made democracy impossible: society became organized as a juxtaposition of professional dictatorships. Professionals assumed legislative, executive, and judiciary powers in their field. Professional catastrophes, produced by professional intervention, gave more power to the profession: economic crisis, created by policies conceived and implemented by economists, forced the appointment of more economists to solve the crisis; whenever a bridge fell, due to mistakes of the engineers constructing and implementing the construction, the high commission of engineers created to address the problem recommended more engineers to implement and supervise the construction of bridges… Democracy as a government of people, of ordinary men and women, was no longer possible; they lacked enough professional knowledge. And this system, as Occupy Wall Street pertinently denounced, operates for the benefit of the 1%. Whatever influence ordinary people had on public affairs and the government in modern democracies was softly dissolved through professionalism. Professionals assumed all government functions beyond any formal system of representation or accountability. They, and only they, have the knowledge and competence to define norms, apply them, and punish their violation. The popular saying, “Entre abogados te veas ”, “see yourself among lawyers”, alluded to a curse: to be in the hands of lawyers was a serious predicament. People did not need them. To fall into the hands of lawyers was a curse because those in economic and political power hired them to

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use the law for their own benefit and against the people. We all live today under such curse, we live among lawyers. The very traditional way of solving or transforming conflicts, often through the friendly and gentle intervention of a person accepted and even loved by both parties in conflict, was transmogrified into a legal affair when the litigious society took hold. The United States is today the supreme model: seven of every ten lawyers alive operate in that country. Almost everything can be transformed into a lawsuit, and all kinds of behaviors and institutional rules are currently defined and practiced in terms of potential liabilities… requiring the intervention of lawyers. The United States has today 25% of the prisoners on Earth, and they have become a very profitable commodity: private corporations build the prisons and administer them with public resources, and put to work the prisoners for their businesses. In 1973, Ivan Illich rigorously documented and denounced the professional control of health by both conventional and alternative health professionals, generating both the main pathogenic agent today—the pursuit of health—and iatrogenesis—the disease caused by health professionals, treatments, or institutions. His book, Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health, produced intense debate and enormous interest, offering solid proof of the counterproductivity of health institutions and professionals. Today all this is conventional wisdom, and there are statistical proofs of what Illich observed. But “health”, defined by the medical profession, is still perceived as a need and is increasingly subordinated to the health industry, the pharmaceutical companies, where other professionals conceive, design, and produce medicines and treatments. Some friends of mine have already abandoned the profession they loved. They tell me that they can no longer tell their patients the truth, what they really think about their condition. They must apply the prescribed medical standards, even when they think they are inappropriate for a specific patient or in general. If they use their own opinion and something happens, they are exposed to a legal process ruining them. The combination of legal and health professionals is increasingly counterproductive and even catastrophic… but ever more powerful, precisely for the kind of mess they had already created: it is assumed that only the professionals had the knowledge, capacity, skills, and power to overcome it. The professional ascension to power and control has been facilitated by the scientific religion: the generalized belief that the modern scientifictechnological system is the best way of knowing humanity could produce.

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Serious scientists know well the limitations of their trade; they know well that they only produce provisional hypotheses, usually constructed after taking away from reality the phenomena they study. All scientific “facts” are constructed and subjective, associated with the subjects constructing or adopting them. However, scientific “truths” are accepted as dogmas in the real world. Laplace’s ability to accommodate the changing political circumstances of his time is well known. Napoleon was 16 years old when he took math classes with Laplace. As soon as he was crowned emperor, Laplace gave him the first two volumes of his work and asked for an opportunity to present his new astronomic theories to him. Once he concluded, Napoleon expressed his surprise: God was not included in them. “Sire, I don’t need such hypothesis”, would have answered Laplace. It is irrelevant if the episode actually happened or is mere legend, as Stephen Jay Gould suspects. But the famous phrase, usually included in textbooks in primary schools, is an effective way to describe the changes in the time of Laplace and Napoleon. At the end of the eighteenth century, the Church was no longer in control of what could be thought, but God was still at the center of the general explanation of the universe. In the time of Laplace and Napoleon, science displaced God. It was finally possible to proudly affirm the explanatory power of science. As a substitute for God, science took a religious, metaphysical aura. The word of science occupied the place of the word of God. As Alexander Pope wrote: Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night: God said: Let Newton be! – and all was light. (Pope 1730)

Scientists often used ordinary words to name their categories and experiments. Those words, transformed into terms, had a virulent colonizing capacity when they returned to ordinary language and generated a confuse, profuse, and diffuse faith. The everyday use of the word “energy” illustrates the case. It is rarely used with its original meaning, which probably led Helmholtz and others to use that specific word for their scientific constructions. Most people using today the word “energy” cannot define it but are convinced that professionals can do that with precision. When they heard that it is mc2 they will be disconcerted: it is not what they wanted to say in discussing the cost of gasoline or renewable energy. For

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most people, “energy” is a mystery they must believe even if they cannot understand it…like religious mysteries. Professionals operate as the bearers of scientific knowledge and, with that capacity, perform their most dangerous activity: disabling people, disqualifying, and, whenever possible, forbidding the use and application of people’s knowledge, skills, wisdom… Dispossession is the precondition for a need. The enclosure of the commons transformed the commoners into people in need of shelter, food, and jobs after they were dispossessed of their commons. We do not need air unless we are deprived of it. People need professionals once they are dispossessed of their own capacity, that is precisely the operation performed in the last 50 years, establishing professionalism in the law, in practice, and particularly in the general conscience. We are living, as Illich warned, in the Era of Disabling Professions. In 1972, the Rome Club proposed limits to economic growth, given the damages to the environment that the production of material goods would do. Illich suggested that professional services would be even more harmful to culture and identified some silent minorities resisting professional dominance and its insidious nature, how it undermines the social fabric, and disable people’s capacities to live in their own way. In the same years, Foucault observed the insurrection of subordinated knowledge. For him, the question was not changing people’s consciousness—or what’s in their heads—but the political, economic, and institutional regime of the production of truth. He also observed that the juxtaposition of erudite and empirical knowledge generated historical knowledge of struggle. In the early 1980s, there was increasing awareness of the damages and failures of the development enterprise and the foolishness of adopting a universal definition of the good life. The idea of post-development started to circulate: people everywhere were reclaiming their own, feasible ways of living well. In the 1985 conference of the Society for International Development in Rome, invited to discuss the future of development studies, I suggested it lay in archeology: only an archeological eye could explore the ruins left by development. I saw development in my past, not in my present, and even less in my future. With an archeological eye, I had been exploring those ruins in my own world, at the grassroots, a world of campesinos , indigenous people, and urban marginal. In that world, the footprint of professionals was entirely evident and most devastating. All our beautiful villages showed the signs left by engineers and architects: unfinished houses where the people could no longer sleep half of the year because they became like an oven in the

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hot season, or houses collapsing in an earthquake because their adobe walls were “reinforced” with cement pillars, and so on. If I were in a village discussing an agrarian conflict with the neighbors, the elder would bring from his hut an old document given to them by the Spanish crown that they could not read since they are illiterate; I could not read it either, since it was written with juridical jargon of the seventeenth century, but the Mexican government recognized it, and now the villagers were forced to call a lawyer to fix a problem that in the past required some conversations and a fiesta 8 … In many villages, midwives and other traditional healers often became clandestine: the medical system forbade them to practice, despite their wisdom and expertise… The rebellion of the 1980s took full shape in the 1990s. In these times of global fear, the Uruguayan poet Eduardo Galeano observed, “Whoever doesn’t fear hunger is afraid of food”. Despite the technical capacity to feed every person on Earth, almost a billion people go every night to bed with an empty stomach; hunger is again among us as a plague. And there is increasing awareness that our bodies have been infected with the toxins embedded in the food we buy, even if we try to avoid what is properly called junk food. People now know that they cannot expect that governments and international institutions, which created the current mess, will overcome it. Even less can they expect that the CEOs of Monsanto or Wal-Mart will soon have a kind of moral epiphany and instruct those corporations to do the opposite of what they are doing. So people increasingly feel they need to take that matter into their own hands. And that is precisely what they are doing. Via Campesina is the largest organization in the history of humankind. Hundreds of millions of people in a hundred countries are actively defining what to eat and producing it by themselves—as they redefined food sovereignty, thus opposing professionally defined and produced food. And the fact is that small farmers, mainly women, feed today 70% of the people on Earth. Agribusiness, owning or occupying more than half of the world’s food resources, provides only the other 30%. Since more than 60% of the people on Earth live today in cities, they cannot be fed only with rural production. The urban production of food is becoming epidemic. Cuba demonstrates its potential: today, people in La Havana produce more than 60% of what they eat. Good examples are everywhere. The Urban Homestead is located on a typical urban lot, in Pasadena, California, with only 1/10 of an acre of land to grow food. It produces 6,000 lbs. of produce annually, over 2,000

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eggs, 25–50 lbs. of honey, and over $75,000 in savings. Jules Dervaes, a collective co-founder, considers that “growing food is one of the most dangerous occupations on the face of this Earth because you’re in danger of becoming free”. This feeling is shared by the thousands engaged in arrangements between urban consumers and farmers, which apparently started in Japan, became popular in Germany, and constitutes today a kind of epidemic in the United States and Canada. People are “healing from health” everywhere; that is, they are breaking their dependence on the health system of their countries and resisting the dictatorship of the medical profession and pharmaceutical companies. Everywhere, more and more people are abandoning the use of nouns defining needs: food, education, health… Instead, they are using verbs again: eating, learning, healing… thus reclaiming agency to conceive by themselves what is to live well… and do it. This is not fundamentalism or sectarianism but strict realism on the path to emancipation. Everywhere, for example, an increasing number of people, millions, probably billions, are practicing the freedom to learn after experiencing the limitations, frustrations, and failures of the systems created in the name of the right to education. Luis Arévalo learned his trade as a shoemaker with his father, in Tepito, a barrio in downtown, Mexico City. At a young age, he left the family house to work in one of the biggest shoe factories in Mexico. After many years, he reached the position of Shoemaker Master, which was even more important in the factory than the general manager: there are many people who can perform the functions of management, but very few know the art of shoemaking. Despite the prestige and high income derived from that position, Luis abandoned his job to create the Free Shoemaking Shop of Tepito to share his skills with young Tepiteans and regenerate the art of shoemaking. Invited by the Zapatistas as an advisor in their negotiations with the government, Luis shared his ideas and agreed to collaborate with them. He supported the establishment of 17 workshops to produce shoes in Zapatista communities, often bringing young Zapatistas to Tepito to learn the trade. He was recently invited to the inauguration of the 18th— in which he did not participate. “The seed is there”, he said; “now they know not only how to produce shoes but also how to multiply and enrich the art of shoemaking”. The Zapatistas currently produce all the shoes they need for different purposes and selling some in the local market. The best example of the Post-professional Age is perhaps the Zapatistas. For more than 20 years they have been constructing their

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autonomous way of living. They don’t get any funds from the government, and this allows them to be free of professionals. Their children are learning freely in what they still call “schools”, but there is no Zapatista education system. They have magnificent clinics, with X-rays and ultrasound equipment, which are currently visited by non-Zapatistas more than by Zapatistas, because they don’t need them: 20 years of autonomous prevention, the support of traditional healers and healthy lives make it unnecessary to visit the clinics. They are basically selfsufficient in producing food and most of what they require for their delight in living. In their autonomous system of government, ordinary men and women, some less than 20 years old, occupy the highest position of the government, where they “govern by obeying” and operate a sage system of justice. The Zapatistas have openly broken the chains of professionalism and are a living demonstration of how important it is to eliminate all shapes of professional dictatorship on the path to emancipation. My father died when I was 16 years old. I began to work as an office boy in a bank to sustain my family. At the same time, I began to study a new profession. I was promised to be at the center of the development epic, contributing to cooking the cake and distributing it: delivering good services to the community, conditions to the workers, and profits to the stakeholders. I had a very successful career. I became Personnel Manager in Procter & Gamble before I was 20 years old, the youngest executive ever for IBM a little later, and got excellent income and prestige in my own professional bureau. But I was fired from Procter and IBM because I refused to do what they asked me to do. It was clear that I was not at the center, but on one side, and not the best side; I could not have a decent life in a private corporation. So I abandoned my profession when I was 24 years old. Trying to be myself became the most serious challenge of my life. The profession is not only a collection of skills and specific knowledge; it shapes you. To deprofessionalize is not only to de-learn what you learned to become a professional; it is a kind of suicide: you need to dissolve your own self, in order to clean it from all the attitudes and behavior associated with the profession. To deprofessionalize myself required a lot more time that the time I spent in becoming a professional. And decades later I can still discover in my daily live some gestures or attitudes that come from that phase of my live.

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Yes, the time has come to deprofessionalize our lives, our societies. Enough is enough. It will not be easy. The professional cartels occupy powerful economic, technical, and political positions, and many people are still entirely subordinate to their norms and instructions. They may feel in a state of complete neglect if they don’t have the “protection” of professional services, through public or private insurance. They may feel disoriented if they don’t get appropriate professional guidance in their work, their daily life, their predicaments: how to be parents, or get a baby, or heal, or write a poem, or sow a tree… But the millions who share a common rejection of professional services and resist all forms of professional dominance continually surprise them. They are becoming a very active political force. As Ivan Illich observed 50 years ago, the advantages of self-chosen joyful austerity evidenced by these people will acquire political form and weight only when combined with a general theory that places freedom within publicly chosen limits above claims for ever more costly packages of “rights”. (“Disabling professions”, 1977: 359-370). The post-professional society has already born. Free men and women have been creating it, in the womb of the old. They use contemporary tools “respectfully constrained”, as Ivan suggested. You can find among the Zapatistas cellular phones, computers, bikes, radio stations, ambulances, and many other industrial products. But they know how to limit their use. Instead of an economic, industrial society, they have been able to construct a society organized around the premise of sufficiency instead of scarcity; use-value instead of exchange-value; freedom instead of rights; and ontonomy/autonomy instead of heteronomy.

Struggles for the Freedom to Learn (San Pablo Etla, Oaxaca, México. June 2021) John Holt remarked, “Birds fly, fish swim, people learn…. Learning is the experience of being alive. It is an expression of vitality. We only stop learning when we die”. When asked which word he would use instead of education after publishing his books Instead of Education he said none. When forced to answer by the interviewer, he replied, “I would use the word live”. To be alive, to live, means, quite precisely, to be learning. And when we do so, when we live without depending on education, we can live building a society that dissolves privilege and discrimination.

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Freire and Illich became close friends as soon as they met; however, they followed entirely different paths. While Freire sought all his life to improve the education system he had so effectively criticized, Illich devoted himself to describing and challenging the society that attempts to educate all its members: a modern, capitalist, patriarchal society. His critique, which targeted all modern institutions, sought to write the epilogue to the industrial mode of production and lay the foundations for a convivial reconstruction; to leave behind society as we know it. It is not easy to escape education, whether in practice or in how we envision our lives and ourselves. Parents send their children to school convinced they will have a better life or at least fulfill the necessary requirements to be accepted into modern society. Although most children express some resistance toward school, few manage to escape its domesticating effect or resist its charm. The general conviction is that schools are a place where something useful is being consumed and that increasing the dosage as much as possible will always be of benefit. In the following pages, I reflect instead on the harm that education causes and on what constitutes one of the most significant social movements in the world: today’s struggles for the freedom to learn. Beyond an Educating Society According to conventional perception, education is synonymous with equality. The main objectives are to obtain it and for everyone to have the same opportunities to access it. But education produces just the opposite. In fact, it is one of the primary sources of inequality and injustice in today’s society. Schooling has become a means to separate and divide most people and can even mean a lifetime label of disqualification. According to UNESCO, 60% of children currently entering the first grade will never reach the level of schooling considered mandatory in their countries. Without a diploma, a document used to “legitimize” social status, these individuals will face some form of discrimination for most of their lives. With this, we can see how education legitimately becomes an instrument of social discrimination used against most of the population. In recent years, it has become more apparent that the few that actually make it to the top of the educational ladder are facing increasing alarm and frustration. While those with diplomas generally do earn higher incomes than those without them, the myth that a good diploma guarantees a good job has been dispelled. No diploma can truly validate a specific

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skill set. A diploma from the best law school in the world does not ensure that the person who holds it is a good lawyer. Moreover, there are good professionals without a degree and many degrees without a professional: those who don’t know how to do exactly what their diploma says they can. It is increasingly recognized, particularly by employers, that diplomas certify a certain number of “butt-hours”, i.e., the number of hours a person had their butt glued to a chair listening to another person speaking in front of them. A good diploma only says: “this person managed to accumulate 15,000 buttock-hours”, which is undoubtedly a great merit but does not ensure any competence nor guarantee finding a good job. This is particularly evident in those denied entry into so-called higher education. The curriculum is designed to prepare students for further study. Starting in pre-school, children are prepared for the following year’s classes. This culminates in high school, designed to prepare students for university. If they are rejected at that stage, all that “preparation” is basically useless… though at the very least, they will have learned how to bow their heads to authority and commodify their desires. Today, awareness of the limitations and harms of the education system is becoming increasingly widespread. It is now common knowledge that our education system does not prepare children and youth for life and work; for many, it uproots them from their places and cultures. Yet, education remains the most sacred of cows worshiped on the planet, and diplomas persevere as an untouchable ritual. Since the 1990s, people everywhere began to recognize the crisis in our educational systems. This crisis can be defined by two key but distinct elements: • the majority of people are not receiving an education or are obtaining it in clearly insufficient doses; • those who are educated to a satisfactory level can’t find work in the areas they studied. Global education reform—supposedly designed to overcome these limitations—has another purpose. On the one hand, since no country will be able to continue paying for the costs of education and health care, the educational system is now being “reformed”; in other words, being placed at the mercy of educational budget cuts that end up deepening the exclusion already caused by the system itself. On the other hand, modifications

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in educational content and orientation seek to adjust what is taught to the conditions of a labor market that will have increasingly inferior and scarce jobs, with the exception of a strict minority of highly qualified individuals. Reform has been met with resistance everywhere, albeit without much success. The struggle for more and better schools, to protect public schools from privatization, and to expand educational opportunities continues. Parallel to these mobilizations are efforts to mitigate the damages the educational system produces, both from within and by creating alternative forms of education. Around the world, projects that consider education as part of the system of oppression and that attempt to escape it are proliferating. Instead of using education, a noun which establishes dependence, projects and groups are recovering the verb to learn; in doing so, they create spaces and conditions in which one can learn in freedom, without imposition from others. Initiatives such as Shikshantar9 and Swaraj10 in India have a similar essence to the multiple Unitierra’s—described below—and to similar organizations scattered throughout the United States and Canada, as well as in Europe and Latin America. Several initiatives have emerged to offer a pathway forward for the countless wise and competent individuals who are often not recognized or acknowledged as legitimate citizens because they lack an advanced school diploma. These initiatives offer full social recognition to those who can demonstrate specific competencies, skills, and knowledge, regardless of how and where they learned it, and help to prevent them from being overlooked, humiliated, and discriminated against throughout their lives. There are outstanding examples in Colombia, where the Universidad de la Tierra in Manizales and various collectives combat this obsession with diplomas. There is also the Andean Program of Peasant Technologies (PRATEC11 ), which has been celebrating traditional knowledge in Peru for decades. In Mexico, Don Efraim Hernández Xolocotzi—who in the 1940s abandoned the work of the Green Revolution when he anticipated what it would entail—paved the way for us. For many years, he dedicated himself to what he called huarache 12 technology, demonstrating the superiority of campesino (peasant) knowledge by working alongside the wise people of the countryside who he celebrated. Autonomous ways of learning and doing what we want to do on our own terms and conditions are multiplying and gaining strength. This is an essential step in preventing a world in which “big brother” (the elite, corporations, etc.) educates us all as it sees fit. This scenario leaves

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the majority in a subservient social status. Autonomous learning spaces have the potential to create a new social environment in which the act of growing and learning neither recognizes nor produces social classes. Many people are beginning to say “No, thank you” to formal education. At the same time, they engage in processes that regenerate the art of learning and declare “Enough!” to this form of oppression. Not strictly a question of deschooling society; these alternatives are about circumventing the educational system altogether. The “need” for education was created artificially by force and/or propaganda. This need then became a right and has since turned into a form of social addiction, reinforced by bureaucratic imposition. It is time for us to come together and resist it. From experience, we know that a good part of what the education system offers is essentially junk. Just as we know that certain junk foods do not nourish us in any way and that we must avoid being part of the throw-away culture that floods us with waste, we also know that much of what is taught at school or on the Internet is nothing but garbage: it makes no sense to acquire it and much less to hold onto it. Education isn’t more than the reformulation of the act of learning under conditions of scarcity. When this free act is confined to the school’s walls or its equivalents, scarcity is immediately produced: there are not enough schools, teachers, or knowledge packages for everyone. By not depending on education, we recover our autonomous capacity to learn and thereby rediscover a new kind of self- and/or collective-sufficiency. If we were truly free, with resources available to all, we could learn as much as we need and as much as we desire; there would be no scarcity whatsoever. To this end, it is essential to know what constitutes knowing: it is a relationship with others and with the world, not the consumption of a commodity, of packages of knowledge. Consuming these packages of knowledge implies obtaining information about the world in the best of cases. On the other hand, knowing implies learning from the world by relating to it, to others, or to nature through our own experience. A Couple of Oaxacan Experiences: The Communal Middle Schools and Unitierra The teachers’ movement in Mexico began in 1979 as a struggle against a particularly authoritarian and corrupt cacique 13 of the Sindicato Nacional

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de Trabajadores de la Educación (National Union of Education Workers), the largest union in Latin America representing more than one million teachers. To carry the struggle forward, the National Coordinating Committee of Education Workers (CNTE) was created within the union, expanding its base to include more than a third of the country’s teachers. In 1989, they succeeded in replacing the cacique, only to see another installed in its place. Throughout the years, they have persisted in their struggle, pushing forward union demands and developing pedagogical alternatives. Since 2013, efforts have been concentrated around a well-founded and very active opposition to educational reform.14 In 1995, Section XXII of Oaxaca, the most combative section of the CNTE, began the Pedagogical Movement. This movement has been implementing important innovations, some very radical, within the heart of the official system. For example, they have organized ten communal middle schools where all subjects, classes, and grades have been eliminated. In groups of two to five, boys and girls develop community projects in dialogue with their elders, community authorities, and the community at large. Projects are carried out over the three-year school term. The teachers, paid by the Education Department, mainly function as shields for the children against bureaucratic impositions, although they also support them in realizing their projects. Examples like this show that even within the rigidity of the educational system, it is possible to innovate alternative programs when immersed in the context of meaningful social struggle. The indigenous peoples of Oaxaca make up most of the state’s population and periodically express their views at the State Indigenous Forum. In 1997, they publicly presented a long-considered and discussed statement in which they affirmed that school had been the principal factor in the dismantling and destruction of indigenous cultures. Their statement recovered a historical truth: in Mexico, as in most of the world, the educational system was established with the explicit purpose of “de-Indianizing the Indians”. This was achieved to a significant extent as millions of indigenous people’s schooling has meant erasing their ways of life. The Oaxacan Forum recognized this fact and sought to confront it. The fact that certain communities decided to close their schools and fire their teachers caused quite a scandal. The front page of the newspapers declared that children would be condemned to ignorance, stating that this is not what the autonomy of original peoples should look like.

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Despite external pressure, some communities persisted. Two years later, an anthropologist wanted to teach parents a lesson by comparing, through specific tests, the knowledge of children who went to school with those who did not. To their surprise, the “unschooled” children had not only learned practical skills relevant to life in their communities but were also better prepared to read, write, and count. They were actually better prepared in most standard school subjects, such as history and geography, too. Children in the regular school system had only one advantage: they knew how to sing the national anthem. Communities that had shut down their schools demonstrated what UNESCO has long known: anyone can learn to read in no more than three weeks or a month if they acquire that skill alongside another person, but not in a group and through their own interest, but not by obligation. Today, there are still children in the official system who can barely read the diplomas they are given after six years of schooling. Later, a group from one of these communities approached us with their concerns: What would happen to the young people interested in learning something unknown to their community? Without diplomas, they would not be able to access certain fields of study. In response to this concern, and together with a coalition of indigenous and non-indigenous organizations, we created the Universidad de la Tierra (University of the Earth) in Oaxaca: a space without professors, classrooms, curricula, or buildings (except for a small rented space in Oaxaca City)15 where one learns by doing; by doing whatever it is that they want to learn. One of the founders of Unitierra, a Zapotec intellectual and composer, named the space, pointing out that this university should always have its feet on the ground, be rooted in the earth, and hold Mother Earth as its principal priority. From the very beginning, our idea was to keep Unitierra small and intimate, but sometimes ideas take on a life of their own. The idea began to multiply, both in small communities (such as Unitierra Huitzo, a small pueblo outside of Oaxaca city), and in other Mexican states (Chiapas, Puebla), or even other countries (Canada, Colombia, Catalonia (Spain), United States, Japan). These initiatives are entirely autonomous and completely unique. In its early days, Unitierra had a few specific fields of study, each with its own components and particularities, as if it were a curriculum. But it was the students themselves who dismantled this structure. Through their learning process, they discovered what they were most drawn to and

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what they felt was their vocation and ceased to be interested in the other areas of the field. Since then, learning has been built around what each person wants to learn, without any prior design, and takes place alongside someone who is already doing it. At Unitierra, we understand learning as an aspect of daily life that can and should be cultivated and studied as an autonomous and joyful exercise of free people. When we realized that many young people could not travel to the city of Oaxaca, we began to work with communities and organize ways for young people to learn what they were interested in through visits, workshops, and other practices. At the heart of Unitierra is the notion that anyone can propose a study group on any topic of interest and thus begin cultivating the respective learning process with others. To offer an idea, in 2017, the following study groups were active: • Beyond Patriarchy. • The Insurrection of Subdued Knowledge: Relearning knowing; Responses to the exhaustion of constituted knowledge and its methods. • Communitarian Formation: Hosting the otherness of the other, on the road to intercultural dialogue. • Critiques of Education and Learning in Freedom. • Criticisms of State and Democracy. One of the outcomes of the study groups has been the creation of a virtual seminar which began in January 2017. “Other political horizons: beyond the nation-state, capitalism, democracy, and patriarchy” is held monthly with the participation of collectives from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, the United States, and Paraguay, as well as from ten Mexican cities. Each collective meets beforehand to reflect on the topic at hand and appoints a spokesperson to share their discussion with the larger group. As a space, we are deeply immersed in social and political change processes and are dedicated to exploring political, technological, and cultural alternatives. We adapt to the interests and concerns of diverse individuals and groups. In addition to our regular activities in Oaxaca City or the communities we work with, we organize learning exchanges for groups visiting us from various parts of Mexico and the world. We also craft personal learning and study programs for those who wish to

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learn specific skills, explore a field of knowledge and action, or conduct research. A central theme we are committed to is the construction of autonomy. At Unitierra, we adhere to the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN). We believe, like the Zapatistas, that no real solution can come from above, where the powerful only spread contempt, dispossession, exploitation, and repression. This is why we seek to rebuild society from below, engaging in the constant exercise of recovering our verbs—eat, learn, heal, inhabit, play— which is to say, our autonomous capacities to live with dignity and build a convivial way of life. We are conscious that affirming our dignity and our relations with one another and with nature represents a challenge to the prevailing dominant systems. Our approach to learning is based on the following principles: • To learn from the world rather than about the world: to learn by doing the activities that constitute what one wants to learn, as apprentices, of those who are already engaged in them. • To learn to transform reality and serve others, particularly one’s communities and regions of origin. • To place learning under the control of the learner, at their own pace and working/learning style, not under the control of tutors, teachers, or bureaucrats. • To learn by oneself: to master the methods of continuing to learn what one wants or needs. • To learn with others: in study circles, workshops, seminars, or conferences. • To learn “reflection in action”, as we call our research activities. We define them as rigorous, disciplined, documented, and public exercise. They are not personal, capricious, improvised, superficial, or private interpretations. On the contrary, the idea is that anyone who repeats the exercise based on their own rules should arrive at similar results. • Our main working tools are observation (as a relational experience), dialogue (dialectical and dialogical), systematic reflection (with emphasis on commentary), and documentation (written and audiovisual).

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At Unitierra, we understand that there will be fewer jobs in the future; yet this is of little relevance to us. We are not looking to learn what will give us access to jobs. We are trying to learn socially useful knowledge and skills that will allow us to earn a dignified income while serving our neighborhoods and communities. We are directly involved in forming cooperatives of young people who seemed condemned to migration—increasingly more dangerous— or delinquency because they could neither continue studying nor find employment. They are now producing mushrooms, chocolate, embroidery, ecological wood,16 radio programs, plays, books and pamphlets, medical remedies, healing methods, and alternative forms of construction, among many other things. At the same time, they continue to learn about what they are interested in, at whatever level, and from those already engaged in the field, craft, or area. Immersed in social movements since its inception, Unitierra has participated in collective learning experiences. Particularly noteworthy are those it has organized for the defense of corn (the exhibition “Sin maíz no hay país ”,17 organized in Mexico City, had a million visitors and triggered a process that many other groups have since adopted), and the meeting “America Profunda,18 “el mundo de los pueblos originarios en el continente americano”,19 a relational experience that lives on today as a widespread network. Since October 2016, Unitierra has been actively involved in activities related to the National Indigenous Congress and the EZLN’s creation of an Indigenous Council of Government (formed on May 28, 2017). This has been followed up with subsequent organizing actions in communities and neighborhoods. For us, these are the most radical political actions formulated in the face of the horrors we live in today. Yet, we believe that they swing open the door to hope. Rebuilding a Convivial Society (San Pablo Etla, Oaxaca, México. June 2017) In 1967, at the time of the march on the Pentagon, Ivan Illich wrote, together with friends, A Call to Celebration, a call “to face facts, rather than deal in illusions; to live change, rather than rely on social engineering”. It was a call to celebrate our capacities and potential to challenge

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the dominant political and economic systems and craft a new era to end privilege and control. In September of 1971, Illich began exploring his hypothesis that we needed a common roof to foster social life; this could be achieved by means of social control of technology, by imposing limits on certain technical dimensions in the means of production of goods and services. He considered that there was still a need to establish social ownership of the means of production and social control of the distribution mechanisms. Given the new phase that technology was entering, however, it was necessary to add political control of the scale of the technological characteristics of industrial products and of the intensity of professional services based on “the community agreement on the self-limitation of certain technological dimensions” (Borremans 2006: 761). Ivan Illich was well aware of the varied connotations that the word he chose to articulate his thinking holds: conviviality. While Brillat-Savarin20 coined the term in his Physiology of Taste in 1825, Illich picked it up in Mexico years later, where the term was given a different meaning, one that resonated with Illich. In any case, he would come to infuse the concept with new significance. For Illich, conviviality designates a new mental framework, a new kind of society. Conviviality is now the expression of personal freedom in a technically mature society that can be called post-industrial. It must be distinguished from the fraternal and solidarity-based co-habitation of intentional communities and other isolated initiatives, such as that of those who gradually alienate themselves, with reluctance and frustration, from consumer society. Conviviality refers to a social alternative made possible by the full maturity of industry. “I call convivial society”, wrote Illich, “those societies in which modern tools serve the individual as part of the community, rather than serving a body of specialists. A convivial society is one in which [the people] control the tool”. Illich calls convivial “a society in which modern technologies serve politically interrelated individuals rather than managers”. After acknowledging his debt to Brillat-Savarin, Illich specifies that “(…) in the somewhat novel meaning that I attribute to the adjective, convivial is the tool, not the [person]. I call austere the people who find their joy and balance in the use of convivial tools”. Austerity, he clarifies, does not imply isolation or seclusion but the foundation of friendship; it is a virtue that only excludes pleasures that degrade or destroy the personal relationship. “Austerity is a complementary part of a virtue that is more

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fragile, that surpasses it and encompasses it: joy, eutrapelia,21 friendship” (Borremans 2006: 374). He goes on to say that “it is the fruit of an apprehension that things or tools could destroy rather than enhance eutrapelia (or graceful playfulness) in personal relations”. I think these are not three distinct elements of the virtue Illich refers to, an idea he could not find one word or name to describe. Such a virtue would encompass all three of these components and eutrapelia, with its multiple resonances, would qualify joy and friendship, making them moderate, temperate, and sober. Half a century later, Ivan’s ideas remain a useful guide to understanding what is happening in the world. More and more, governments have come to function as mere administrators of private corporations while ordinary people continue to respond emphatically and energetically, at times in the name of strict survival, at others in the name of ancient ideals. People’s initiatives are becoming widespread and radicalized. Some have come to take on the shape of an insurrection and resist the deadly tidal wave devastating the environment and cultures. Reconstruction, in terms very similar to those anticipated by Illich, is already taking place. The Zapatista communities of southern Mexico are one such example. The illuminating path and clear political definition embodied by these groups of everyday people over the last thirty years is in line with Illich’s thinking and the terms he presented in 1971. They have been and are completely restructuring their society. They have been able to build the common roof that Ivan referred to after establishing social ownership of the means of their production and social control of their mechanisms of distribution. They are not a political or religious sect, nor a group of millenarists living in isolation, disconnected from the world. Considering the number of books, essays, articles, and web pages written about them, and their presence in mainstream and alternative media for over twenty years, they are the most visible social movement in history. Some of the world’s best-known thinkers, such as Noam Chomsky and Immanuel Wallerstein, consider them “the most radical and perhaps the most important political initiative in the world”. Anti-globalization and anti-systemic movements beginning with the WTO Seattle protests in 1999 recognize their uprising as a wake-up call. Ivan Illich was able to anticipate the profound and underlying tendencies of society. He foresaw the eventual demise of the counterproductive institutions upon which modern society is built and the way people would respond during moments of crisis. A radical critic of economic society, both capitalist and socialist, he devoted much time and attention to exploring ways to restructure society and gave new meaning to words

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such as vernacular, convivial, and austere in order to shape a path toward transformation in accordance with common law traditions. Had he lived ten more years, he would have been able to visit Chiapas and experience a society that fully incarnates what he had envisioned. Today, as we witnessed during the Zapatista escuelita,22 the word freedom reigns supreme in Zapatista communities. Freedom is a daily practice on display in the convivial reconstruction of their autonomous territory. Those who began the movement in 1983 and organized the 1994 uprising were peoples who had been stripped of everything but their dignity. In the 1970s and 1980s, they were dying like flies of hunger and curable diseases, oppressed by a primitive and violent power structure. Many of them worked in slave-like servitude on private ranches or as servants in the cities. “There were few children in the villages”, Subcomandante Marcos once remarked, as “they were all dying”. Since 1994, they have been perpetually exposed to harassment, physical and psychological aggression, paramilitary assaults, and a strict siege. Despite this, they have built a new world from scratch, against all odds and without government funds, public works, or social services. They built everything with not much more than their bare hands and the solidarity offered up by people and organizations from Mexico and around the world; but perhaps most importantly, by staying rooted and true to their seven principles, their revolutionary laws, and their conviction to learn from everyone, everywhere, all the time. There is no official Zapatista education system. However, they still refer to their autonomously managed community learning centers as schools. These centers are run by education promoters, young people from the communities themselves with specific training. They organize, together with the children who attend, how learning will take place outside of any universal curriculum. Furthermore, the children who attend do so freely, with enthusiasm and of their own will. The Zapatistas are a learning community. Everyone learns, all the time, through vastly diverse methods and from considerably different sources and people. They practice what can be called an original and effective civic pedagogy. Following the Zapatista example, in indigenous communities in countries around the world and in neighborhoods across industrialized countries, people are beginning to practice rational and political acts of abolition, expressions necessary for the recovery of their own autonomous capacities and the creation a convivial society. However, exercising productive freedoms within agreed limits cannot go very far if these limits

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are not applied to everyone. This can only be done through procedures that harmonize contrasting and varying conditions amid a world in which many worlds fit. Half a century ago, when Illich formulated his prophetic foresights, only a small dissident minority was aware that environmental pollution was rendering the Earth incapable of sustaining human life and that individuals were becoming increasingly unable to survive outside a controlled artificial environment. While awareness of the environmental crisis still encounters resistance, it is becoming more widespread. In addition to creating growing political pressure to impose general regulations, this awareness has, more importantly, stimulated behavioral changes: personal, family, and communal austerity to responsibly set limitations around the tools used and recover the freedom of movement and action through autonomous spaces. “The loss of legitimacy of the state as a holding corporation does not destroy, but reasserts the need for constitutional procedure”, wrote Illich (Borremans 2006: 479). Such a procedure cannot be entrusted to the political parties, who have lost all credibility, nor to the institutions built out of them, which are increasingly incapable of dealing with today’s challenges. The crisis can lead us to a lasting social contract, either to surrender to techno-bureaucratic despotism and ideological orthodoxy or build a convivial society. The path toward the social agreements that can establish the new shape of society seems clear: constituent power will be exercised on a local scale, on a daily basis, until it leads to agreements in communities, neighborhoods, districts, and municipalities that will give shape to the social and political abolitions needed in each place. This, in turn, protects autonomous initiatives beyond the market and state apparatuses. Each locality—perhaps inspired by the defining principles of the Zapatista’s “command by obeying”—can determine its own assembly structure and draft proposals that regulate personal, family, and communal limitations, to progressively build toward the full expression of personal and collective freedom and establish the principles of an autonomous government. This autonomous social fabric, regenerated from the social base, could constitute a true form of agreement between different peoples, communities, and pueblos, through some kind of parliamentary mechanism that could adopt a structure similar to that of the National Indigenous Congress:

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“We are an assembly when we are together and a network when we are separated”. This is the general rallying cry. The Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy has put it beautifully: “The other world is not only possible, it is already on its way. On a quiet day, one can hear it breathing if one listens carefully” (Photos 2.3, 2.4, and 2.5).

Photo 2.3 Francisco Alejo Lopez, Gustavo Esteva (right 2), Cesar Gonzalez, Antonio Ruiz, Mexico City, 1982

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Photo 2.4 Mexican Society of Planning, Mexico City, 1982

Photo 2.5 1988

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Notes 1. San Pablo Etla is a Zapotec community and municipality in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. 2. Governor of Oaxaca from 1986 to 1992. 3. The sixteen indigenous nations that inhabit the state of Oaxaca. 4. Mexican politician who was president of Mexico from 1970 to 1976. 5. This is not a sweeping, hyperbolic statement. For most people on Earth, the combination of “climate change” (wide areas are suffering dramatic climatic catastrophes, severely affecting their crops and ways of life), global injustice and misery (100 people owns more material wealth that the rest of the population in the world, and more than a billion people are struggling to survive with less a dollar per day) and the “financial meltdown” (the current economic crisis), represent a catastrophic condition: the world falling apart. 6. Welcoming words by the Comandancia of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), at the First Intercontinental Encounter for Humanity against Neoliberalism, spoken by the respected major Ana María, on July 27, 1996. The Zapatistas 1998, 24. 7. Unless indicated otherwise, all the quotations of the Zapatistas come from Zapatista communiqués of July and August 2003. 8. Celebration. 9. See: https://shikshantarschool.com/. 10. See: https://www.swaraj.org/. 11. To learn more about PRACTEC, visit https://pratec.org/. 12. Huarache refers to traditional leather sandals commonly used by campesinos when working in the fields. 13. A cacique generally refers to a political-social boss, chief, or leader that serve as an intermediary between society and the systems of power. Caciques have existed throughout Mexico in varying context and degrees, from indigenous chiefs to revolutionary caciques. Today caciquismo, which refers to the phenomenon itself, “is a central part of oligarchic, highly pyramidal political systems, dominated by a heterogeneous elite in which the local power of the cacique is used to meet the objectives of those who control power at the national level” (Meyer, Lorenzo. “Los caciques: Ayer, hoy ¿y mañana?”, Letras Libres, 2000. https://www.letras libres.com/mexico/los-caciques-ayer-hoy-y-manana). 14. The 2013 education reform was part of a larger package of neoliberal structural reforms proposed by the president at the time, Enrique Peña Nieto. An affront on public education, the reform was met with great resistance as it was, was devoid of any pedagogical proposals or true educational content and at the same time, set out to strip workers of basic rights and funnel them into a punitive system of technocratic evaluation.

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15. This fact highlights how different the Unitierras are; that is to say, their autonomous operation. In Chiapas, Mexico, the Unitierra has twenty hectares of splendid forest where the students themselves have built the facilities to house a hundred people, to learn a wide range of trades, and to host large-scale events for over a thousand people. These facilities are now used by Zapatistas. The Unitierra of California, in the United States, has no facilities and carries out its activities in varying locations. The Manizales Unitierra in Colombia is a tapestry of collectives, each with very diverse facilities. The small community Unitierra of Huitzo, in Oaxaca, Mexico, has its own facility on a small piece of land donated by a neighbor. 16. An ecological “log” made from a mix of regional dry leaves and recycled paper that was later compressed and used to cook on ecological stoves as a replacement for wood. 17. Without Corn There is No Country. 18. Guillermo Bonfil (1987) proposed in the 1980s the hypothesis that two civilizations were confronting each other in Mexico: that of the imaginary Mexico, formed by the westernized elites, and that of the deep Mexico, formed by those who shared a non-western matrix of civilization. “América Profunda” was an event that attempted to explore this hypothesis in the American continent as a whole, resulting in the creation of a shared platform and a series of activities. 19. Deep America, the world of the original peoples in the American continent. 20. Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (Belley 1755-Paris 1826) was a French jurist who wrote the first treatise on gastronomy. 21. According to the Royal Spanish Academy, eutrapelia means a) virtue that moderates the excess of amusements or entertainments; b) urban and harmless jocosity or finesse; and c) innocent speech, play, or activity, which is taken by way of honest recreation with temperance. Of temperance it says: moderation, sobriety, restraint; it consists in moderating the appetites and the excessive use of the senses, subjecting them to reason. 22. In early 2013, the Zapatistas invited several thousand people to attend the first level of the Escuelita, held in August of that year, under the motto of “La libertad según las y los zapatistas” (Freedom according to the Zapatistas). Participants were guided and accompanied by a votán (a “guardian” from the community), in very small groups, to Zapatista communities of all shapes and sizes. Sharing day-to-day life with the Zapatistas, they learned from them and from the textbooks provided which included interviews from a diverse range of people and communities. Most of the participants then attended a second level. They had the opportunity to experience firsthand what the Zapatista way of life consists of and how they are building a new world.

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References Aries, Phillipe. 1962. Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. New York: Vintage. Baschet, Jerome. 2017. Podemos gobernarnos nosotros mismos: La autonomía, una política sin el Estado. [We can Govern Ourselves. Autonomy, Politics Beyond the State]. Chiapas: Ediciones CIDECI Unitierra Chiapas. Bonfil, Guillermo. 1987. México profundo: una civilización negada [Deep Mexico: Reclaiming a Civilization]. México: CIESAS/SEP. Borremans, Valentina (Ed.). 2006. Obras reunidas I [Collected Works I]. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Cayley, David. 1990. Ivan Illich in Conversation. Toronto: House of Anansi Press. Esteva, Gustavo. 2000. “Introducción” [Introduction]. In Experiencias organizativas de la sociedad civil en Oaxaca, Centro de Encuentros y Diálogos Interculturales. México: CEDI. Esteva, Gustavo and Suri Prakash, Madhu. 1998. Grassroots Postmodernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures. London: Zed Books. Falbel, Aaron. 1993. “Learning? Yes of Course. Education? No Thanks”. In Deschooling Our Lives, edited by Matt Hern, 71–72. Gabriola Island: New Society Publishers. Gibson-Graham, J.K. 2006. A Postcapitalist Politics. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Hernández, Luis. 2003. “El zapatismo, fuente de inspiración para los movimientos altermundistas” [Zapatismo, a Source of Inspiration for Antiglobalization Movements]. La Jornada 1, 29 diciembre, 11–12. Illich, Ivan. 1972. Celebration of Awareness: A Call for Institutional Revolution. London: Marion Boyars. Illich, Ivan. 1974. Tools for Conviviality. London: Marion Boyars. Illich, Ivan. 1977. Disabling Professions: Notes for a Lecture, Contemporary Crises, 1, pp. 359–370. Amsterdam: Elsevier Scientific Publishers Company. Illich, Ivan. 1996. Deschooling Society. London: Marion Boyars. (First published in 1972). Klein, Naomi. 2002. Fences and Windows: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Globalization Debate. New York: Picador. Kozol, Jonathan. 1992. Savage Inequalities: Children in America Schools. New York: HarperPerennial. Lopes, Ramón. 2004. El espejo y la máscara [The Mirror and the Mask]. Madrid: Ediciones del Caracol. Lowell, James Russel. 1871. My Study Windows. London: Walter Scott. Maldonado, Benjamín. 2000. Los indios en las aulas [Indians in the Classroom]. Oaxaca: Centro INAH.

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Neill, Monty. 1997. “Towards the New Commons: Working Class Strategies and the Zapatistas”. http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/3849/com mons_paper. Ponce de León, Juana (Ed.) 2001. Our Word Is Our Weapon: Selected Writings of Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos. New York: Seven Stories Press. Pope, Alexander. 1730. Epitaph: Intended for Sir Isaac Newton. Schumacher, Ernst F. 1973. Small Is Beautiful. London: Blong & Briggs. Solnit, Rebecca. 2004. Hope in the Dark. New York: Nation Books. The Mahabharata. 1902. Calcutta: R.M.Sircar. The Zapatistas. 1998. Zapatista Encuentro: Documents from the 1996 Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism. New York: Seven Stories Press. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 2002. “New Revolts Against the System”. New Left Review 19, November–December, 29–39.

CHAPTER 3

Development Gustavo Esteva

Introduction Wendy Monserrat López Juárez. (Oaxaca, Mexico) Translated by Carlos Tornel. Gustavo knew how to see hope in the face of collapse. In daily life experiences with communities and in the insurgency of neighborhoods and cities, he identified the responses of people who organize themselves to confront threats, ruptures, and conflicts. From the 1985 earthquake in Mexico City, the uprising of the Zapatistas in 1994, through the Oaxaca commune in 2006, the reconstruction of the Isthmus in 2017, and the regeneration of our own ways of life on the margins of the pandemic, Gustavo recognized the emergence of a new world, the reaffirmation of our life beyond development. Today’s generations have grown up in the era of capitalism and development. Still, it is not necessary to live another decade or even another year in this context to realize that we are heading toward a lost place.

G. Esteva (B) Oaxaca, Mexico © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K. C. Lau et al. (eds.), Walking on the Edge of the Abyss, Global University for Sustainability Book Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2325-0_3

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Development brought with it the denial of our own ways of life, the illusion of the American dream and way of living. Development has been the promise that never comes, the race to become prosperous, but on the condition of allowing the use of our human and natural resources, as Harry Truman put it around 1950. In the name of development, the rich countries have multiplied their profits at the expense and the impoverishment of the countries of the South. Since the 1980s, Gustavo foresaw the end of development, he invited us to speak of its archeology: that is, to place development in the past, from where we had learned that the destruction of the Earth was and it’s not worth a lifestyle based on industry, dispossession, and extractivism. Since then, business owners and governments have struggled to find new ways to reclaim development, ways in which this imposition would appear friendlier. They have called it an alternative, sustainable or green, but today we know that these are euphemisms for continuing the destruction of life and land. Gustavo suffered the promise of development, and he often recounted that, at age 13, after Truman’s 1949 speech, he suddenly knew that he had acquired an unworthy condition called underdevelopment. It was necessary to change that situation, so he belonged to one of the first generations in Mexico to study business administration. On the other hand, to escape underdevelopment and belong to the model of a society founded on the Mexican nation-state, many families did their best to erase their indigenous past. Gustavo’s family was no exception; his Zapotec grandmother had to enter the house through the back door. However, in his childhood and youth, Gustavo enjoyed visiting Oaxaca with his grandmother, there he met a different world, not the one Truman called underdeveloped, but the world of mutual help, festivity, tradition, joy, reciprocity, happiness, and community; a world outside the economic promises of development. The world of everyday life, and not the world of abstractions or theorizations, was what led Gustavo to abandon the empty promises of development. He decided to build his own path, learning from the Zapatista experiences, from community organization, and allying himself with close friends, such as Iván Illich, with whom he strengthened the hope based on friendship as a force for social transformation. Thinking beyond development and globalization implies recognizing scale, escaping from abstract categories to return to the concrete world, recovering our power of action in everyday life, our collective power, overcoming individualism and the arrogance of those who believe they are capable of transforming the world by imposing a single, homogeneous

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vision. To overcome single thinking, it is essential to recognize diversity and look at the alternatives to development emerging in different contexts. At the end of the 1990s, Gustavo and his partner decided to settle in Oaxaca, in a Zapotec community close to his grandmother’s village. The events he experienced after this decade led him to experience the regeneration of the common spheres. For Gustavo, one of the keys to action was to move together with the other; the commotion led him to connect with grassroots movements in communities and cities, promoting community regeneration initiatives. In 2006, he witnessed the commune in Oaxaca and supported the reconstruction of Ixtepec after the 2017 earthquake that affected various localities in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. These are some of many experiences from which Gustavo identified characteristics of popular initiatives and the emergence of an era beyond development. During the pandemic, his suspicions were confirmed: communities all around the world were able to live on the margins of the collapsing health systems, reaffirming their own forms of healing even before the arrival of vaccines. These collective forms of organization also came together from the margins of the food system, prohibiting the entry of junk food and canned products, subsisting by planting and exchanging local products. As Gustavo had thought, the pandemic crisis was experienced as such in those sectors that were and still are most dependent on the conventional systems of nation-states and public and private institutions. All over the world, neighborhoods and communities are emerging, and, in the process, they are defining a good life based on their own terms from the common and the collective. From the perspective of development, these communities might seem marginal because their life choices are based beyond capitalism. Instead, they focus on mutual aid and actions, such as the tequio, the faena, or the guelaguetza. They seem beyond development because they choose a life of dignity based on sufficiency and not on scarcity. Beyond colonialism and the nationstate because they existed long before the conquest and have survived violence and dispossession. From these commons, we continue to defend our existence and our territories; today, our ways of life are alternatives to destruction and dispossession. For some time now, we have been facing the civilizational and climatic collapse resulting from a system that wanted to impose a single way of life. However, in the face of the current situation, Gustavo invites us to recover hope. By organizing and rooting ourselves in everyday life and

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in our local environment, he invites us not to become sectarian but to link up and weave with communities and neighborhoods that are already living in the post-development era. As Gustavo thought, very much in line with the Zapatistas: other worlds are already possible.

Unlearning the Pretension to Be God (San Pablo Etla, Oaxaca, México. February 20, 2016). I was fully educated in the conviction of being underdeveloped. I was thus fully domesticated in the religion of scaling up. Unlearning was not easy. In the 1970s, as I participated in the international debate on peasantry organized by The Journal of Peasant Studies, I intuitively began to suspect the fragility of my dogmas. With some friends, for example, we initiated some experiments reversing some principles associated with economies of scale. We observed that the cost advantage that arises with increased product output becomes a disadvantage beyond a certain scale. We thus included the idea of maximum size, not only minimum size, for optimization in our designs. But we were still trapped in an economic mentality. We did not know how to escape from it. (And even the idea of escaping that trap did not come to our minds, so rooted we were in the economic frame of mind.) Four lucky encounters, almost at the same time, changed my mind. The first was Leopold Kohr, Schumacher’s teacher. I am not talking of his great works but of a very small article prepared for El Mundo, in Puerto Rico, as far back as 1958. It came mysteriously into my hands in 1992. Kohr explains in it that economic fluctuations after the end of the Second World War “are no longer caused by the system but by the scale which modern economic activities have assumed”. The situation “had begun to outgrow all human control”. And he had a proposal. Instead of centralization and unification, let us have economic cantonisation. Let us replace the oceanic dimensions of integrated big powers and common markets by a dike system of inter-connected but highly selfsufficient local markets and small states in which economic fluctuations can be controlled not because our leaders have Oxford or Yale degrees, but because the ripples of a pond, however animated, can never assume the scale of the huge swells passing through the united water masses of the open seas. (Kohr 1992)

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I was astonished… Kohr produced a severe crack in my mental universe. A little later, when I was still navigating my perplexity, a conversation with Teodor Shanin helped me to abandon my Marxist religion with the teachings of the late Marx. Among many other things, Shanin described the consequences of the Soviet obsession with size: the bigger, the better, once they adopted development, instead of justice, as the core of socialist ideals. And then, Ivan Illich. I got from his desk, in the early 1990s, a thesis he elaborated twenty years before in Cuernavaca with Valentina Borremans to discuss in his seminar with a group of young Latin Americans, mainly socialists. The discussions became Tools for Conviviality. “In the phase in which we are since the 1960s”, Borremans and Illich observed, “the social definition of a maximum, in relation with some basic characteristics of the products of a society, should be the most important political goal” (Borremans 2006). Borremans and Illich acknowledged that in the first phases of industrialization, the social control of the means of production and the social control of the mechanisms of distribution was the priority, but “what today is necessary is the political control of the technological characteristics of industrial products and of the intensity of professional services”. For them, “the social control of systems of production is the basis for any social restructuring”. This new politics consists in the search for a community agreement on the technological profile of a common roof under which all the members of a society want to live, rather than the construction of a launching platform, from which only a few members of the society are sent to the stars. This new politics is a voluntary and communitarian self-limitation, the search of maximum limits in institutional productivity and the consumption of services and commodities, in accordance with the needs considered, within that community, satisfactory for each individual. (Borremans 2006)

Borremans and Illich sowed the seeds to resist the technological imperative that peculiar modern pathology compelling people to do whatever is technologically possible. I discovered the nature and conditions of such imperative and the alternatives in the pages of Wendell Berry, the poet, farmer, and philosopher who incarnates the marvels of scaling down magnificently.

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A turning point came when Berry observed that properly speaking “global thinking is not possible”. Those who have “thought globally” (and among them the most successful have been imperialist governments and multinational corporations) have done so by means of simplifications too extreme and oppressive to merit the name of thought. Global thinkers have been, and will be, dangerous people… Unless one is willing to be destructive on a very large scale, one cannot do something except locally, in a small place. No doubt, industrial man failed in his pretension to be god. The time has come to reclaim our real condition, as mere mortals, and adjust our behaviour to our own scale. (Borremans 2006)

And so, under these radical thinkers’ guidance, I could unlearn what I knew about almost everything. I must confess, however, that they opened my mind. However, my heart was still closed until I began to listen to the voices I have been hearing for a long time, at the grassroots, the voices of campesinos and urban marginals, always disqualified, the people that should be civilized, evangelized, educated, developed…always described for what they are not, for their lacks…invisible, subordinated, silenced… Most of those marginalized by the economy live their lives in the present and are placed. Their horizon is their place. For many of them, particularly the indigenous people, a “we” is the first layer of their being: they are a community, not a collection of individuals. And they cannot separate the human “we”, family, friends, and neighbors, from the non-human “we” of place. In Western languages, the word “world” has no subject or object. The equivalent in Zapotec is labsa ba yu, a composed word that means: I/we, in this place; my horizon, that is, the circle that my eyes can reach around me; the other side, what is beyond my horizon. So the real “world” is everything within my visual horizon, my place, my “we”. The rest is a mystery. I have been told that there is in Yucatán, in the south of Mexico, a very peculiar construction, built more than a thousand years ago. It has a hole that goes down the earth for more than 100 meters. The building and the hole are oriented in such a way that the sun penetrates the end of the hole only one day every year. That day marks a grand fiesta, a celebration. On that day, all the campesinos begin their agricultural work. Like most indigenous people, it is well known that the Mayas had amazing

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astronomic knowledge. They knew how to observe and follow the sun and the stars and organize their lives according to their movements. They never dared to conceive the idea of controlling them. Plato warned us. He said an abstraction implies taking away from reality an aspect or quality and putting it in our minds. We must put it within brackets to avoid any confusion: it is not reality. Many names have been used to allude to the condition of that “it”: an image, a representation…whatever, but not reality. In time, however, we lost the brackets. And later, even worst, we started to think that our senses can cheat us but what we have in our minds, our abstractions, are the true reality, the real reality. And we started to assume that we were really living in those abstractions. Our language reflects this attitude. We assume that we live in a specific city, a certain nation, planet Earth…in spite of the fact that no one can live in abstract entities like a city, a country, or a planet. Or we think that we are lawyers or engineers, catholic or Buddhists, students or teachers, assuming as our being the abstract category in which we can be classified. And we orient our thinking and our behavior not in terms of our real world, our place, where we can really do something. If you want to see where you are—says Wendell Berry—you will have to get out of your space vehicle, out of your car, off your horse, and walk over the ground. On foot, you will find that the earth is still satisfyingly large and full of beguiling nooks and crannies (Berry 2013). If we think locally, we will do far better than we are doing now. The right local questions and answers will be the right global ones. The Amish question “What will this do to our community?” tends toward the right answer for the world. Suppose we want to put local life in proper relation to the globe. In that case, we must do so by imagination, charity, and forbearance, and by making local life as independent and self-sufficient as possible—not by the presumptuous abstractions of “global thought”. In 1988 we had in Mexico City the illusion that we had the city in our hands. After the fiesta of autonomy revealed by the earthquake of 1985, a massive movement emerged, articulating most organizations of the barrios, the neighborhoods. At one point, we created a kind of alternative government. “We have been very irresponsible”, said the leader of one barrio at the beginning of our conversations; “we concentrate all our efforts in our place, but after all we live in a city. Now that we have the city in our hands, let’s see what can we do for it”. For several months thousands of us discussed what to do. Ultimately, we reached a

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solid consensus: the city does not exist. Only a pathological mind will try to conceive and treat this monstrous settlement of 15 million (25 million now) as one thing, one reality. We are very different. We are thousands, millions, of ideas, ideals, realities, imaginations, projects… We must not be treated as if we were the same. But that is exactly what happens to us every day. Both the market and the state treat us as if we were the same… The time has come to stop this destructive foolishness, which risks the very survival of the human species. Yes, it is time to scale down and behave like the simple mortals we really are.

Toward Post-Developmentalism (Toward Post-Developmentalism?: A Search for Alternatives: A Conference at Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. April 18, 1998). The word development lacks today any specific meaning. It has no specific denotation at all. But it is full of connotations, usually implying escaping from a vague, undefinable and undignified condition, and it is still the emblem for an enterprise that destroys both environments and cultures worldwide. Well advanced the nineteenth century, development still denoted, in Spanish, to unroll a scroll. The precise denotations it has in Spanish or other languages were used by philosophers, theologians, and scientists to open new fields of knowledge. However, the excessive proliferation of this metaphorical use of the word impoverished its meaning. An encyclopedia of 1860 annotated that the concept was already applied to almost all that man has and knows. Eucken, in 1878, marked that the word “has become almost useless for Science, except in certain areas”. These technical uses of the word felt like debris in the ordinary language and made it insignificant. It became equivalent to a grunt, a cipher, an algorithm, deriving its meaning from the words associated with it, from the tone used when it is pronounced and from the context in which it is applied. By the end of the century, books were published in English, whose titles alluded to the development of the idea of God, the soul, the English novel, or the transportation system in the United States. Soon the word applied to a housing project, the logical sequence of thought, the awakening of a child’s mind, or the budding of a teenager’s breasts.

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On January 20, 1949, President Truman substantially changed the word’s implications by introducing its counterpart: underdevelopment. Seldom has a term been accepted all around the world, like this word, on the very day of its political coinage. Truman used it to diagnose a particular misery affecting most human beings and communities outside the United States. He used a name that even anti-Yankees would recognize as an undesirable condition. Since then, from one day to the next, four fifths of the world population were attributed the undignified condition of being underdeveloped. Soon development theories and definitions proliferated, but as they became more varied and contradictory, its connotations became stronger. Development meant to have started on a road that others know better, to be on the way toward a goal others has reached, to race up following a one-way Street. As a substitute for the sacrification of environments, solidarities, traditional interpretations, social experiments, and customs, in the altar of ever-changing expert advice, the social majorities were offered a magical formula to escape from the condition of those-who-are-not-yet-but-will-be. Rostow construed for it a fantasia-like glamor, offering them step-by-step progress to become full-fledged economic insects. They were dazzled by that light (Rostow 1960). For a couple of decades, they adopted an ambivalent reaction toward the prospect of becoming developed homines oeconomici, fully inserted in the world market: they sometimes resisted development, trying to protect their environments and to strengthen their modes of living; other times, having been lured by the developer’s promises, they clamor for their “incorporation”. In this contemporary connotation, exclusive to the postwar era, development was born as aid. It consisted of “making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas”. It was also born in the context of the cold war. The United States, that amazing productive machine which in 1945 was responsible for half of the registered world production, had just inaugurated its brand-new economic hegemony with the Marshall Plan when it launched Truman’s “bold new programme”. His speech reveals an acute awareness of Mao’s emergence and the urgency to propose evolution as a substitute for revolution. He was explicitly looking for the predominance of the American way of life, as a democratic and equalitarian ideal overcoming the communist threat by closing the gap between industrial and “underdeveloped” countries.

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And it was born as a reaction to the initiatives of the colonized world, which were challenging again the Western dominion. The others—the social majorities of the Earth—were looking to put an end to a history of marginalization and submission, which transmogrified them in barbarians, less than men, for the Greeks; infidels and pagans, a threat to faith, for Christian Europe; savages, a threat to civilization, for Enlightened Europe; self-sufficient natives, a threat to economic expansion, for industrial and capitalist Europe. Kipling synthesized this Western perception in a phrase expressing the illusion of all colonialists: “By a strange design of Providence, India’s destiny lies upon the shoulders of the English race”. But by the middle of this century, the “natives” were awakening. They seemed determined to change the nature of their resistance to evangelization, civilization, and education in the needs of the market, imposed on them for almost 500 years. Gandhi epitomized a movement that would triple in 10 years the number of National States, leading most of them to take a distance from both industrial East and West. Behind this threat, the worst ever posed to the project of the Western nation of the world, a new colonizing tool entered the world scene: underdevelopment. Truman succeeded in what was impossible for Churchill: prolonging the colonial yoke. Socialist Nehru became his main ally: he transformed Gandhi into an impractical mahatma, without substitute to forge the nation but unable to help in its construction and development. As a result, the “natives”, everywhere, transformed into “underdeveloped”. Their imagination and dreams, full of energy a few years before, were progressively dismantled and reduced to the illusion of sharing the American way of life. In the 1980s, however, in the so-called lost decade for development, the real nature of the myth became entirely evident. The social majorities, for whom development was always a threat, affirmed it for the first time. It finally became clear that underdevelopment is not a naturally occurring human condition but a creation of the development enterprise itself. Only by rejecting the enterprise, its effects will be removed. And the enterprise appeared in all its nakedness: a malignant myth whose pursuit causes the continual destruction of environments and cultures; a world experiment that miserably failed in the experience of the world’s majorities. For a long time, development was protected by a taboo: professors from Right and Left, supported the contention of politicians that the suffering of the poor majority is the inevitable price they must pay for their ultimate good. And this “good” was redefined, since Truman, as

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the need to close the gap between developed and underdeveloped countries for the latter to reach the living standards of the former ones. Time, more than rhetoric or awareness, violated this taboo. The development enterprise indeed changed the face of the world, but in an opposite sense to what was promised. In 1960, the countries of the North were 20 times richer than the Southern; in 1980, 46 times. Far from closing, the gap is growing. And any extrapolation of the Northern standards of living to the Southern conditions shows that, if the illusion were materialized, the Earth would explode by its contradictions. The so-called poor already know that. But far from being discouraged or frustrated, like their counterparts left behind in the North, they react to this awareness with relief and a rich variety of initiatives. The deacceleration of development and the Progressive reduction of international aid does not mean a catastrophe for them, as Left and Right—or the governments—continue to proclaim, but an exceptional opportunity for regenerating their commons. They confront severe restrictions and resent threats from every kind of developer—whose impetus is weakened but not dead—but are not looking for charity or affluence. They only ask for the restoration of that which development has denied them: an opportunity to create their own livelihood, establish and regulate their own commons and live in dignity. For the so-called poor, underdevelopment is not the opposite of development, but a pejorative disqualification, based on the simplest assumption of the unilinear evolution of societies. The opposite of development is hospitality: to accept that the other exists and his/ her existence in his/her own way, with his/her gods and hopes, should be respected. Keeping their traditional hospitality despite bad past experiences, the so-called poor are now walking on their own roads, trying to regenerate their own dreams while attempting to rebuild their new commons when the world seems to fall apart after the collapse of old paradigms. Was it not Nietzsche who said, in 1886, “Development does not look for happiness, but only for development and nothing else”. In my experience, radical hope is the essence of popular movements. People share inspiration and action because they share desires and hopes. I will present my own articulation of people’s hopes. I speak on my behalf. I represent nobody. But I use a cultural “we” here, like the one used by women or dark skin people to affirm their identity. I speak as a voice well rooted in a small Indian village in the south of México, which knows that it is part of the social majorities of the world, the Two/Thirds World—if it is to be called anything. I assume, as my own, the views of the leftovers

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of development and modernity; the uneducated, the undereducated, the dropouts; those without access to health or sanitation Systems, or even potable water, dying of curable diseases or malnutrition; those that have never been on a regular payroll; the so-called poor or underdeveloped. They do not constitute a homogeneous universe. They are a pluriverse of peoples and cultures, each with its own definition of a good life and unique cosmovision. My articulation attempts to capture the richness of their shared hopes, before forces affecting all of them. I hope that in the future development will be seen with an archeological eye: exploring the ruins left by this monstruous experiment that miserably failed in the experience of the world’s majorities. Social goals will be defined, in every society and culture, by their own, differentiated definitions of what a good life is after burying all universal meanings of the good life: development, basic needs, and human rights, formulated in the name of any cross or sword. New social movements will proliferate; their juxtaposition, rather than their pyramidal hierarchization, will be able to change the very nature of political action, giving new meaning to local, regional, national, or global governance. I hope that a world where many interacting worlds can harmoniously exist and flourish will finally come to life. In that world, global governance will mean rooted hospitality toward the otherness of the Other and shared rules for mutual respect and harmony. Our current social praxis, beyond development, poses profound theoretical challenges. Among them: 1. Beyond the economy. We are leaving behind the reign of needs. We are not organized according to the premise of scarcity: the assumption that our ends, our wants, are unlimited, but the means scarce. To organize our lives and activities, we adopt the opposite assumption: our ends dance to the tune of our means, which we try to improve. We are marginalizing the sphere of the economy, still in operation for the globalized minorities. But how to organize our coexistence? How to go beyond both the myth of the self-regulated market and the illusion of its bureaucratic control? Beyond both free trade and protectionism? How to conceptualize a post-economic society? 2. Beyond formal democracy. Instead of a System of government (e.g., government of the people, by the people, for the people), we understand democracy as people’s power, a historical project. In

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the reconstitution of historical subjects, we deal with challenges like the redefinition of civil society; the political nature of our new commons (heteronomy/autonomy/ontonomy); the politics of “no” (one “no”, many “yeses”); the new coalitions of discontents; the reconstruction of society from the bottom up; and the International of Hope. 3. Beyond the individual self, the rule of law and human rights: the path to radical pluralism. We are not individuals. We are persons: knots in nets of relations, interwoven in our new commons. In our own atmosphere of reality and realization, personal and collective, we dissolve the relations of force, of economic or political power, preventing them from reappearing among us and keeping the spheres of politics and the economy at our margin. Inside our new commons, we give to the undivided society a contemporary form. The affirmation of dignity and autonomy of every man and every woman within the social majorities challenges all established regimes and brings about the end of privilege and license. Coercive power and authority may thus cease to be requisite to keep the social order. People are becoming capable of giving a political and juridical form to their resistance to the apparently all-determining forces and structures of the industrial age. New institutions are being created. Diversified worlds of convivial new commons are thus emerging, carrying with them the revolutionary force of connecting desires and realities. People can thus focus their actions in what is positive and multiple, in the difference, in flows and mobile arrangements, instead of uniformities, unities, and systems. We no longer believe that the world’s coherence can be achieved by pushing along a common path toward some distant promised future. Instead, we look for coexistence in the context of the present. The conviviality reigning in our new commons has been an actualization of the present, taking the place of a future alienated by ideologies. But it exists in isolation, against all odds, exposed to continual erosion and disruption by the intrusion of the market or the State. My hope is that, at the turn of the century, the limits to the industrial mode of production and the new “democratic umbrellas”, at national and international levels, will allow the new convivial commons to flourish and endure.

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The Challenges of Mutation (Mexican conference on Social Development and Poverty. Policies for Social Participation and Community Organization: Advances and Prospects, Mexico. 1992). I am presenting in this document the hypothesis that the current formal categories are useless to examine the restructuring of the social life of the last years because it is a mutation, a qualitative change in social life, including an epistemological rupture. Thus, we need to reformulate our analytical categories, avoid mere extrapolation (since the future can no longer be proposed as projection of tendencies), and explore with new analytical tools the sociological and political novelties that seem to have emerged. Policies being applied for social participation and community organization are still tied, in general, to previous inertia, thus tending to contradict people’s initiatives and to be inefficient, if not counterproductive and harmful. Declassification of Society The formation of social classes characteristic of economic societies has evidently entered a crisis, both as a social mechanism and an organizational principle. While theoretical and practical boundaries of classes and class strata are getting blurred, the organizations representing them weaken or disappear. An accelerated process of dis-classification of society is thus appearing, which obviously does not imply the extinction of class conflicts but its reformulation. Such a process implies, on the one hand, the accelerated substitution of “class” organizations for others in which individuals get together for purposes alien to class interests. Unions, parties, and other class organizations have lost political weight and social importance in almost every society. Their place is occupied by organizations rendering services to their members (clubs, professional associations, etc.), those articulating or promoting general claims (ecology, consumer protection, etc.), and those associated with a place or a specific struggle. On the other hand, traditional forms of social existence and action which have no organizational expression—in the modern meaning of the word1 —are becoming more relevant and prominent. They are not “inorganic” forms; they often are more solid and stable than the “organizations”, but they can be

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distinguished from these because they are not guided by reasons, ends, purposes, but by motives, customs, rooted habits. The apparent impact of this social restructuring consists in more disorganization: dispersed (individualized) forms of social action are proliferating, and conflicts of every kind (ethnic, religious, etc.) have been intensifying among the reconstituted groups. But its more profound impact could represent the opposite: the creation of a new, more organized social order. The “dis-classification” of society reconstituted the social majorities. Its social composition changed, and the conditions of the so-called poor were substantively modified. Some of them suffered the turbulence of the times as severely as the impoverished middle classes. Still, others are better than before: they seem to have found the occasion to foster their initiatives and regenerate their ways of life in the crisis. This paradoxical situation can be observed among those who could resist the lethal intrusion of development into their lives and never became “economic men”.2 But it also appears, more and more, among those who became individualized and urbanized and were fully incorporated into a middle-class living condition, mimicking the American way of life. The crisis brutally reduced the amount and level of income of the middle classes; their lifestyle, which for some time tended to be adopted by more and more sectors of society, started to flow back and ceased to operate as a general model. With their “privileges” lost and thrown into “informality” by the crisis, middle-class groups were forced to react: some are crowded, like a mass in panic, in the closing doors of the condition they lost, but others are joining forces with those who learned to become “common men”. The Mutation Only one of every six men on earth is “developed”. The other five have been ambivalent about “development”, the campaign launched by President Truman the day he took office on January 20, 1949.3 Sometimes, they firmly resisted development projects dissolving or destroying their traditional modes of living; at other times, fascinated by development promises, they struggled to be included and incorporated in the economic society—to have access to schools, health centers, roads, jobs… After several decades of experience in that ambiguous struggle and observing that development destroyed or damaged their environments but was unable to incorporate them to the “developed” world, they started to

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react with sociological imagination. What they invented is as distant from “traditional men"—a way of being which they abandoned in the process of “developing” themselves—as it is from “economic men"—a form of existence into which development was unable to transform them. They created, in fact, a new kind of man, which I will call “common man”, in the absence of a better name. Born in the interstices of society, the “common man” was for many years invisible. When his number and activity made unavoidable the recognition of his existence, he was baptized with concealing names: marginals, informals, social sector, underground economy… Nobody seemed to notice the sociological invention which had taken place. And even today, the idea that the “common man” is a new human species is still rejected. Some see him as a puppet of the economy—the market or the plan—and believe that he is dancing to its tune. Some others consider that he is a remnant of the past, thus defining his spaces as the last frontier for economic arrogance, the last frontier for conquest, and the last opportunity for capital expansion. The ingenuity and creativity observed in the “poverty pockets” that “common men” inhabit, or the potential of their initiatives, can be gladly conceded by everyone. But he is still described by what he is not: not salaried, not formal, not included in the national accounts, not developed, and not organized… Almost no one dares to see him on his own terms, as a man of a species who appeared recently on the planet and who is not marching toward the land promised by the economy but advancing in another direction. Social majorities transformed the failure of the attempt to give them the status of “economic men” into the opportunity to regenerate their own social spaces and give them historically innovative traits. They thus created a form of existence beyond development. It does not represent an impossible return to traditional conditions but an advance toward a postmodern condition. The “common man” has succeeded in creating spaces shaped in his own image and likeness, in contrast with the mirror of the economy where the “economic man” is a resident. Regenerating the Commons Conviviality has ceased to be a futurist utopia. Fully realized or not, it has become part of our reality. “Convivial actualization of the present has replaced a future alienated by ideologies” (Steger 1984). An uncertain era has started, after the foundations of our blind faith in some futures

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have collapsed (Mires 1992), but “times of hope” have also started (The Ecologist 1992). Day after day, documentation is being accumulated showing proof of the successes in recovering the commons, in every case, after an intense struggle. “Globalization” poses real threats, but people’s initiatives transform it into an opportunity. True, the internal strength of the new commons seems fragile when confronted with the destructive impact of economic forces. Such forces are not only promoted by their own inertiae and by those benefiting from their operation. They are also promoted by masses of “economic men” or “men-in-the-process-of-becoming-economic”, still fascinated by the illusions of progress. They are promoted as well by “common men”, compelled to it by their own economic position and who, tired of their Sisyphean effort, are surrendering to the economy, thus weakening the still fragile new commons that they helped to build. But it is also true that conditions have been created for forming new citizen coalitions, which can give feasibility to the political inversion of economic dominance. The new social movements emerged from a struggle to protect their commons and were consolidated in creating new ones. Their present struggle seems to articulate the transition from the consensus of social majorities of homogenized individuals (characteristic of the previous regime, organized in “administered” classes or strata) to the political agreement among autonomous groups, which promotes a legal order imposing tighter limits to the political sphere and subordinating to it the economic sphere. The new social movements of “common men” are not based on a utopian design or a universal political proposal. Instead, they come from concrete and immediate experiences, with which they try to give specific shape and reality to old dreams. This way, they invert the usual pattern of political mobilization of the social majorities, based on other’s dreams to reshape people’s reality—with well-known results. Such dynamism of the new social movements tends to lead to confrontations with almost all parties and governments and be in open rebellion against the dictatorship of the professionals and institutions, part of the dominant power. Exposed thus to continuous erosion, they have been forced to multiply their defense organizations. They are now trying to advance toward general agreements among broad citizen coalitions, define a new political orientation, and abandon the propensity to present claims and compete.4 People know now that by consuming more goods

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and services, they neither live better nor are they less poor. And they also understand that the modernization of poverty constantly elevates its monetary threshold, as new industrial products are presented as basic needs and remain outside the reach of the majorities. They also know that economic growth, as a remedy against poverty, now fulfills the role of a drug: it compels us to pay more to enjoy less. In the neighborhoods, villages, and communities, new spaces of freedom, in which people are fully practicing their autonomy and art of living, are now emerging. It could be very interesting for those still immersed in the center of the economic societies, fascinated in their dependency on the market or the plan, to approach and observe their experiences and dare to listen to them. They could corroborate that the people are not going back to the Stone Age—which rather appears as the natural destiny of the economic societies. They are concentrated on a constant and free enriching of their lives, in the daily materialization of an autonomous hope. What they do is not a “survival strategy”, even though sometimes they confront difficult predicaments. Nor is it “mere subsistence”, an expression synthesizing the prejudices about the mode of living in the margins, which assume that autonomy and selfsufficiency make impossible “modern comfort”. Even those accepting that popular initiatives may be better than “development” or “poverty wars” to improve people’s living conditions or overcome their predicaments refuse to consider them a good prospect for everyone. There is no point, of course, in idealizing misery. We must also recognize that “common man” lives under extreme restrictions. Their living conditions are not a model to follow or a living ideal. However, they probably constitute an radically postmodern opening, that is, a sociological and political innovation that could inaugurate a new era. The spaces being created offer sound opportunities for a comfortable life, which actualizes tradition and inherits modernity. They were conceived in an era in which all that men and women need for their delight in living can be provided for, given the technical means available. They have also been conceived for an era in which the non-economic way of providing for everything needed would allow men and women to look freely for what they want with dignity and wisdom. They leave behind an era in which the explicit goal of unlimited growth and the periodic wars against poverty served to disguise the concentration of privileges and to impose every kind of suffering on the social majorities for their own good.

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The New Orientations of people’s Initiatives The people’s initiatives now have the following characteristics: Relocalization. Social majorities are rooting again in their own physical and cultural spaces, not limited by frontiers but by horizons. Sometimes such spaces seem to be inverted ghettos (created by their own members), but they correspond to an original notion of sovereignty, which does not divide territories but define new conditions for the practice of liberty. Autonomous production of truth. If truth is not constituted by true statements, but by statements through which people govern themselves and others, and thus the power structure is associated with the institutional regime of production of truth (Foucault, 1977), what could be happening is an institutional inversion which allows and promotes the autonomous production of truth. The bankruptcy of the ideological paradigms that dominated the twentieth century produces dangerous vacuums in wide social strata, especially in industrial societies. It could have a liberating impact among the social majorities, stimulating the reformulation of “truths"—the principles with which people guide their behaviors. Their experiences with “development” could be driving them to trust again their traditions, and their historical experience. This reformulation could be modifying the internal regimen of social control, the shape of power practices, and the relationships with external forms of power. It could represent a transition from the notion of the universe which has been imposed to the more traditional of pluriverse. Redefinition of the good life. Development succeeded in presenting as a general aspiration, capable of trapping the world fantasy, the definition of the good life associated with the American way of life, typical of economic societies. The commons’ regeneration could now imply the recovery of the autonomous capacity of defining, locally and culturally, what the good life is. In this redefinition, some elements are prominent: --The marginalization of the economy. In contrast with the industrial society, which put the economy at the center and reorganized the whole society around the principle of scarcity, reducing politics more and more to the administration of the economy, the new commons are attempting to put the economy at the margin, eliminating its autonomy, and re-establishing the political and cultural character of the center of the social life.

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--The reorganization of the social struggle. In the real world, people struggle, not classes. The theoretical contribution of class analysis became a formidable obstacle to social struggle when it was translated into an organizational principle. Benefiting from the experience and lessons of the past, people in the new commons have been reformulating the terms and conditions of the social struggle, to localize them—associating them with specific physical and cultural spaces—and opening them, at the same time, to comprehensive citizens coalitions. In these coalitions, each group keeps carefully its autonomy, to avoid dissolution of its identity, as in the past, in the “class masses”, which precipitated bureaucratization, paralysis, and counterproductivity in the organs of representation and struggle of the social majorities. --The redefinition of political activity. In the new commons, what seems to be emerging is a reaffirmation of political activity as the immediate and direct interest of the people in their common affairs, in the polis, in a polis that the members of the group recognize as their own and in which they can have a direct intervention. At the same time, an ambivalent and ambiguous relationship with conventional politics is now being deepened and clarified. On the one hand, the struggle for improving a regime of formal democracy, helping to remedy the damages done by development and respecting the new commons, is being intensified. But, on the other hand, the radical distrust in the power macrostructures is being deepened, according to the conviction that they cannot offer solutions for the daily predicaments of the people and the consciousness of the unbearable risks of giving them the power to try. --Renouncing maximalism. The bankruptcy of dominant paradigms implied, among other things, the abandonment of the maximalist principles of the political struggle, which required, as a premise, a clear conception of the desirable regime for society as a whole. The rebellion against the tyranny of the globalizing discourse has made it possible to recognize that the “society as a whole” can only be a premise under very authoritarian assumptions. In the concrete social struggle of the new commons, “the society as a whole” appears more and more as a diffuse horizon, which should be constantly seen as the result of communitarian ventures, exposed to a democratic interaction which should constantly modify and move that horizon away, as if it was a rainbow.

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--Revaluating the crisis. The peculiar experience of improvement, when everything fell apart, led the social majorities to reconsider the meaning of the crisis of “development”. Trapped for some time in the dominant discourse, which claims that the recovery of economic dynamism will satisfy conventional demands, many people’s initiatives have been translating the crisis into opportunity and could be interested in prolonging it, if it could be defined as a conscious movement rather than as an unexpected and chaotic catastrophe. It has started to be possible, for example, to propose louder the advantages of a negative rate of economic growth. --The option for liberties. The social struggle concentrated on rights, following the principle of equality, multiplied in the real world the bureaucracies and deepened injustice. Consecrating the rights of all did not provide them. Still, it consolidated the bureaucratic and professional power of the apparatuses in charge of enforcing such rights, redefined as services associated with them (in education, health, and housing). This redefinition of human needs, which created dependency on services, undermined the basis of people’s autonomous and differentiated satisfaction, which is now being rescued when the social struggle concentrated itself on the practice of liberties in the new commons—inside them and in the relationship with the society.

The Prospect “Popular participation” was an expression that sought to grasp, in the 1970s, the meaning of a wide variety of social movements attempting to get the hitherto excluded to participate in the decisions affecting their lives. Dominant establishments, however, which looked with great suspicion on popular participation at the beginning, transformed it, in the 1980s, into a new slogan and a sociological tool to widen their control. The term describes today, basically, an administrative procedure to involve the people in the decisions, programs, and actions that the professionals still promoting development have decided “for them”. The dominant establishments refunctionalized as well a good number of NGOs, which in the 1970s emerged as an option to the conventional apparatuses of social struggle (unions, parties, etc.) and to the governmental service institutions. Perceived at the beginning with distrust

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and irritation, they were rediscovered and even recreated by the institutions promoting development, which now use them to do their work at lower cost and with greater effectivity. They are particularly useful to promote forms of “community organization” fitting well in the goals of development and adjusted to the requirements of the institutions, which dismantle the autonomous structures of traditional or contemporary commons and contradict or refunctionalize the organization these create for their protection or to promote specific initiatives. As a consequence, “social participation” and “community organization” still promoted by NGOs, private corporations, governments, and agencies of international cooperation are, in general, in contradiction with the present people’s initiatives, which resist with increasing strength all alternatives of development, to creatively promote alternative to development: real options of living, conceived and implemented by people themselves, based on the recognition and reaffirmation of cultural diversity and of the vitality of differentiated traditions. On behalf of people’s dignity: an argument for resisting the indignity of being developed. (“Lessons from Experience” seminar of the symposium “From Cancún to Vienna”. September 13–14, 1992). I am scared. We have been invited to reflect on good international governance and a “truly global” world economy. But by pretending to be like Gods thinking on the scale of “the whole Earth” we will lose our human contact with the soil right under our feet; focusing on globalization, we will betray people’s rootedness in their immediate, local communities, their present drive for relocalization, for the regeneration of their dignity brutalized by the indignities of development. In the South of Mexico, Oaxaca is a province of 2 million people, most of whom are Indians. Six years ago, for the first time in a century, the strongest candidate to be the next governor was an Indian. His political campaign started with a meeting that assembled representatives of the 16 Indian nations of the province. After all of them made their statements in their own languages, without translation, an older man came forth in the name of all. He approached the next governor with his simple urging in Spanish, “We want you to be for us like the shade of a tree”. In their first contact with their future Indian governor, these representatives of 16 nations did not do what modern governments expect of the people. They did not succumb to prevailing political pressures to ask for schools, hospitals, roads, and other development fads. Instead, they urged

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the government to be like a tree rooted in the people. Firmly in place, it should contain itself in a space known and recognized by the people. It should faithfully remain there, where everyone can look for protection and support in the case of significant calamities or difficulties. They expressed no desire for a government governing them all the time, everywhere, even against their will. The ceremony revealed a subtle warning to those capable of hearing it: What complete arrogance to pretend to govern the lives of all of them when nobody can even understand all their languages, the very essence of their identity! What an offense it is to formulate a “development plan” for the good governance of the whole province if you are reduced to using the language of colonizers to speak with those supposedly being governed democratically. Please accept this story as an allegory for my argument. I am here to plead for explicit resistance to all globalizing schemes, including those that shaped Cancún. Global thinking is impossible at best, ruthless, and wretched at worst. Those who think globally, like imperial governments and multinational corporations, use simplifications too extreme and oppressive even to merit the name of thought. Global thinking does to the globe precisely what a space satellite reduces it to: a mere bauble. But we are not a bauble. Vienna, we hope and urge, will avoid such dangerous simplifications. Somewhere between Cancún and Viena, we have woken up. Cancún clearly looks now like the last euphemism for colonization. Cooperation and dialogue were cosmetics liberally applied there to hide yet another renovated project of domination. Nobody there blushed in shame while renovating all the development promises on the threshold of the very decade that was witnessing its bankruptcy. Instead of a failure, as it is fashionable now to say, Cancún symbolizes once again the triumph of optimism over reality. It became the prelude for many of the endeavors in the 1980s: like the Brundtland Commission and the Stockholm Declaration, taking with them to Río the morbid eagerness for prolonging the agonies of those being developed. For we can now say louder than we have dared to before what development really means. Now we see under a new light the momentous day in which Harry Truman called, in his inaugural address as US President, for a “…bold new programme for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas”. Underdevelopment was politically used then for the first time to launch a well-intentioned global project for

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peace and justice, freedom and equality. Seldom had a new term gained such rapid acceptance or more thoroughly transformed how significant elements of human society perceive themselves. From that day onwards, most people on Earth were slavishly reduced to struggling to escape from their new, undignified condition of being, not real people with real cultures but merely underdeveloped citizens who economists and educators would transform with their magic wands into real people, developed people. Yet development’s constant thrust for economic efficiency in a resource-scarce world has produced only one commodity in abundance: people turned into useless, unemployed, and unemployable garbage, for whom the economy has no need and, therefore, to whom it assigns no value. Four of every five people on Earth are sacrificed in the name of development; systematically and ruthlessly destroyed are environments, solidarities, traditional interpretations, and customs that have given our lives meaning. They are pushed into taking place on a road that others know better toward a goal that others have reached. None of these wellintentioned development plans has meant the alleviation of poverty, only its modernization: a devaluation of skills, values, and experience in favor of a growing dependence on guidance and management by bureaucrats, technocrats, educators, economists, and other development experts. I am speaking here on my behalf. I represent nobody. I am using the cultural “we” of blacks, women, peasants, “marginals”, or deprofessionalized intellectuals like myself. More and more, for us, the terminology and constructs of development are inherently destructive of nature and culture. And we know now that underdevelopment is not a naturally occurring human condition. It is the creation of the development enterprise itself. It is best removed only through the rejection of that enterprise. Those attending Cancún knew very well what development meant. They were fully aware that the Trumanian promise of catching up was increasingly unreal. In 1960, the Northern countries were 20 times richer than the Southern; in 1980, 46 times. Instead of imagining a turning point after these figures, Cancún called for persisting in the venture. In the 1950s, the UN estimates heralded that countries like Mexico or Brazil would require 20 or 30 years to be developed. The calculations for Cancún postponed that goal. For Vienna, the more recent estimates suggest that a country like Mauritania will need 3 224 years to “develop”, to catch up.

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It is ridiculous, if not profoundly offensive, to read here the invitation to focus on the speed of the advancement in that path instead of challenging the path itself. We discover that some Southern countries have “taken off”, others have “turned the corner”, and some others are running slow; they are “fast-track”, “intermediate track”, or “slow-track” countries. It becomes outrageous to hear that the present critical question is to get a sustained acceleration through the development track. To be in line with the contemporary ecocratic mindset, it should also be sustainable. The ideals compelling Bruno Kreisky to convene Cancún need a radical reformulation. The ideals of justice and cooperation, to which he devoted so much time and energy, need to be reoriented toward a direction opposite to the one that he, as all the other politicians of his generation, considered feasible and convenient. Instead of cooperation for fostering development, tied to the Trumanian paradigm for the pax Americana, we need openings for a new era. We need to go beyond any and all forms of development, making room for the era of radical pluralism. The need in Cancún was not “unblocking global negotiations”, as the Southern governments uselessly demanded, but reorienting and redesigning them. We needed a rooted tree, not of an uprooted, abstract, global frame. It is deplorable to keep Vienna trapped in the same illusions and euphemisms. Today’s world is not Cancún’s world. A decade of changes has finally woken us up from the nightmare of development and sustainable development. All of Kreisky’ ideals, in fact, need reformulation. Human rights, for example, was one of his lifelong endeavors. Development changed their meaning. Conceived as protection against power abuses, the slogan of “human rights” today promotes unprecedented abuses. Redefined for every facet of development, “justice”, “equality”, “human rights”, “education”, and the “right to health” have been finally reduced to the right for development itself, and the promotion of all the privileges, bureaucracies, pollution and injustice that it brings. Modern, alienated individualism is inherent to development’s abstract, uprooted, and uprooting formulation of human rights. The enactment and promotion of human rights have become the latest variety of colonialism, dissolving our communities while stimulating individualism and subordinating our rich pluralist cultures and traditions to the monocultural logic of economics. In our experience, the legal and political

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triumph of human rights in Mexico, now incorporated into the Constitution, didn’t mean an improvement for the social majorities but precisely the opposite, legitimizing outside interventions affecting our lives and freedom. • Redefined as the right to schooling, our autonomous transmission of customs and traditions has been transmogrified into a compulsory ritual promoting professional injustice. • Redefined as the right to medical services, our own healing capacities have been sacrificed in the altar of a system creating lacks and increasingly counterproductive dependency. • Redefined as the right for housing, our creative settling and dwelling have become an illegal, repressed activity, to be substituted by the dependency on scarce “human” storage houses. We don’t want human rights handed out by the dictatorship of professionals: pedagocrats, biocrats, ecocrats… In struggling to retain our freedom, autonomy, and dignity, protecting ourselves from the theory and practice of human rights, we have been forced to conceive legal principles and practical mechanisms that respect both the legal order and the freedom of communities to govern themselves. Kreisky knew, first hand, the humiliating experience of unemployment. He never ceased in his struggle to cure this modern plague, representing an unbearable affront to personal dignity and collective morality. But the ideal he served faithfully has been radically reformulated by reality. The Director of ILO now considers it irresponsible to continue speaking about full employment. The development era of salaried jobs has ended, which became both an ideal and the organizing principle of modern societies. There will be fewer and fewer jobs in the future. Most new investments are presently reducing the total number of jobs, and such a tendency will be more accentuated every day. Thus development is putting millions in the undignified condition so repugnant to Bruno Kreisky. At the same time, it has created an excellent opportunity for us, for the social majorities: for those who never could get a job or got only marginal or transitory jobs; for those who never became permanent, salaried workers; for those who were chronically unemployed or underemployed and belong now to the category of the unemployable. We can share our expertise for creative unemployment

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with those previously included in the payroll. And, who knows!. Perhaps societies may once again be forced to modify their organizing principles, thus respecting and even supporting our ways of life instead of treating us like outlaws or marginals of development. Each and every ideal of Kreisky requires reformulation. Perhaps we must start with the one he cherished the most: the North–South dialogue, as the key to good international governance, for the South is but the more recent label of the “other” as a colonizing object, the last frontier of arrogance. We were barbarians for the Greeks, less than fully man, aliens to be suppressed or rejected. We were a burden for the Romans, to be used or disposed of. We were pagans for Christian Europe, or infidels, a threat to the faith, to be evangelized. We were a threat to Enlightened Europe, savages to be civilized. We were natives, a threat to economic expansion, to be educated in the needs imputed by Industrial Europe. Modern history synchronized all those attitudes. “By some impenetrable design of Providence”, said Kipling in 1889; like the Spaniards, said of America 300 years before, “India has been placed on the shoulders of the English race”. Modernization became the emblem of that synthesis; Development, the latest version of the modern myth. Finally, once a very strange sense of geography used East and West to focus world attention on the contortions of conflicting Western ideologies, it seemed only natural to use North and South for a distinction no longer credible in terms of development. In the maps, the North is on the top; the South is on the bottom. I am affronted by labels reducing all the richness of our diversity into a uniform rank whose only common denominator is to be placed at the bottom, struggling or bargaining with those on the top…so that we can become like them. All these years, the South has been used as a timely relay for “development”. And it reached its culminating point as an emblem, supported by an illusory and fantastic slogan of a political campaign manipulating world opinion: our debt. The campaign succeeded in making every Latin American feel that a kind of unavoidable curse or punishment had fallen over us: since the day we are born, every one of us carries the burden of a thousand dollars in debt, a sum representing several years of income for most workers. So educated, we have been forced to take every kind of foolish remedy and deadly doses prescribed by the IMF. The campaign has also had an unexpected consequence: it revealed to the world the exploitation of our people. What only experts or politically

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active minorities knew before has now public knowledge: every Austrian student, occasionally listening to TV news, knows now that there is a constant flow of financial resources from South to North and that the poor countries export capital to increase the economic wealth of rich countries. This is a historical novelty. The service of the debt does not constitute a fundamental economic problem for Latin America. It is my contention, my hypothesis, that the debt does not represent more spoliation of our countries, but perhaps the opposite—a kind of relief. I suspect it implies a net reduction of the rate and the mass of exploitation. The commissions charged by the banks were exorbitant. But the rates to be paid now are usually lower than the rates of the “classical colonizers”: those who took away our gold, our oil, or our raw materials; or those charged by modern colonizers, investing in our countries, trading with us, or, worse yet, aiding us. Since the North will now buy less, sell less, and invest less in our countries, it might exploit us less. In fact, the onerous service of the debt may be a low price to pay if it frightens away aid, trade, and investment from the North. The debt has not caused our predicaments, although it provided a convenient context for many of them. The debt did, however, make visible the very nature of the links between North and South. Just a decade ago, at the time of Cancún, it was almost impossible for our friends in the North to share our views—as it presently is for our governments. They considered rare or ideologized our statistics and our arguments. They assumed that our obsessions against imperialism prevented us from seeing the benefits of foreign investments, international trade, and development aid. Only ten years ago, no argument or documentation was persuasive enough to convince a Northern audience of our views on these matters. In Vienna today, however, we are in a completely different position. People don’t understand as yet why trade, aid, or investment are so damaging to us, but everybody knows now the exploitation to which we have been exposed during the five development decades. Such awareness is a radical novelty. Classic colonization was conceived as a heroic endeavor, in the name of God, civilization, or democracy. Lord Lugard formulated, for England and France, the doctrine of the dual mandate so cherished by the kings of Spain and Portugal: a desirable economic benefit and, overall, the responsibility of elevating the “coloured races” to a higher degree of civilization. For the first time in history, today it is common knowledge that Western societies are looting us. They still refuse

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to associate this with our forced coming to work in the North; thus, their violent, unilateral measures to stop such migration do not run parallel to the measures necessary for stopping the looting. But the awareness of the nature of the link, preventing illusions and euphemisms, may open a real, sincere dialogue among our peoples. Mexico is a good example for studying the real nature of debt. Nobody seemed to care for our debt of 20 billion dollars in 1977 when we were importing some oil and paying with non-oil exports. Since 1978, our oil income has been more than enough to pay for the debt service. During all these years, Mexican international accounts have been better than ever— given the oil income. But we have been exhibited as a country falling apart because of the debt, and the debt has been constantly used to further impose on us policies dedicated to dismantle all the development of the previous 30 years…for the sake of our development. For Mexico, the 1980s was not the lost decade for development. It was the decade in which we were offered the hope of finally pushing development off our shores forever if we were lucky and prudent enough. If we can get rid of development, we will also be capable of giving up the globalizing project. We are opening ourselves to other cultures, other communities, and other peoples. We are dissolving all the bureaucratic barriers that in the name of economic protectionism, promoted privileges and injustice. Free trade may be one step toward freedom. But in doing so, in opening our society and our culture to others, we need to recognize our limitations and resist the temptation of governing others or letting others govern us. At this time, we especially need to remind ourselves of the experience of Moctezuma opening his arms to Hernan Cortés. In Vienna, we must resist the very idea of global governance and global ruling. To have a responsible knowledge of the planet, we would need to intimately know all cultures, communities, and localities for a responsible planetary government. But nobody can ever have enough knowledge of the planet to engage in legitimate, responsible “global thinking”. Therefore, we urgently need to oppose those who pretend to have it; all those who think themselves authorized to formulate global proposals, all those who are as arrogant as they are dangerous. Cancún is a soundproof of it. That is the main lesson of the Cancún experience. I hope that our increasing awareness, strengthened by the dignity derived only from walking on our own feet, will prevent the social majorities from falling into the fifty years old trap of development—even if today it hides behind a new, green, human, and compassionate mask. And I

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hope that our friends among the minorities of the world will be able to follow this argument. If they are ready to abandon the development idea—as the quintessential form of colonialism; if they really do want to escape from the blind, imperial paradigm of “one world” and “global thinking” along with their evolutionist assumptions; if they are able to consciously avoid the reduction of the “other” to universal labels while respecting their existence, then and then alone we may perhaps embark on a fruitful cross-cultural dialogue among neighbors. Then we may even nurture the friendship necessary for good intercultural governance.

Cross-Cultural Perspectives for the Post-Development Era Day after day, the global monoculture of development is being imposed on the whole world. Yet, day after day, people’s cultures resist and affirm their own lifestyles. They are looking for the regeneration of their own notion of a good life, protecting it from its degeneration in the development’s discourse. What people at the grassroots are doing is not equivalent to the contemporary search, now fashionable, for “alternative lifestyles”. It is neither the approach looking for more sensible political controls over some aspects of the prevailing lifestyles in the North. Their position rather reflects a new search for freedom, justice, and radical pluralism. It claims, for the peoples constituting the world’s social majorities, what has been denied to them during the last 500 years: respect to the autonomous paths for conserving and changing their unique, locally rooted lifestyles.

The New Mood of People’s Movements Critiques to development, deeper, better documented, and more abundant than ever, are continually refunctionalized in both official and alternative fora, reducing them to the critique of specific development models or strategies. “New”, “alternative”, “humane”, “green”, and “sustainable” styles of development are being applied as deodorants against the stench of development. The people themselves, on their part, in their practices, if not in their discourse, are saying no to development. They are challenging the adoption of a universal emblem for social change, expropriating people’s dignity, their trust in themselves, their own dreams, and weakening or

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disabling their capacities and skills. Twenty years ago, it still looked possible to give a new meaning to development. Now it is too late. The emblem is absolutely inept for shaping people’s hopes and defining their paths with the autonomy and dignity they are today claiming for since it implies, for four of every five people on Earth, the notion of being underdeveloped, the perception of oneself as someone who-is-not-yetbut-will-become and is thus in need of the advice and guidance of those who already are. People are thus looking for alternatives to development, dreaming their own dreams, and implementing their ways of changing. New popular initiatives are redefining the agenda and the political emphasis all over the world: to effectively tackle hunger in Africa, after the failure of every conventional and unconventional strategy (Wangoola 1991); to lead the massive flourishing of NGOs and other “alternative” people’s organizations in Latin America (Esteva 1987); to reorient the non-party politics emerging in India and other Asian countries. Some movements have received international attention after their originality and impressive successes: the Chipko movement, for example, is now the favorite quote of both scholars and politicians for telling their audiences that they are going with the times. But many more unnamed movements are proliferating everywhere. And they are increasingly revealing a postmodern, well-rooted critique of progress. Traditional men and women were strongly attracted by industrial technology, whose fascination shaped the twentieth century worldwide. The development experience, however, allowed them to see the counterproductivity characterizing industrial technology. They have not translated this experience into Luddite fundamentalism nor folkloric conservationism, but in increasing awareness of the implications of technological change. They are, in fact, involved in a very complex process of reappraisal of both traditional and industrial techniques to identify the cases of obsolescence of the former or dangers and counterproductivity of the latter. Many peasants already know that their formidable technology of slash and burn is often inappropriate for the limited spaces they have to sow. But they also know that industrial fertilizers and agrochemicals, in general, may be very harmful to their own health and that of the soil. They are now creatively combining their ancient knowledge of microclimates with the more recent innovations of agronomy so as to adopt more sensible patterns.

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The practice of recycling industrial products and of bootlegging has taught valuable lessons to those who undertake these activities in the grassroots barrios within the cities, not only because of the opportunity they have had to master the technological secrets of industrial gadgets, but also because they have been able to keep their distance from them, demystifying the magic of the wrapping, brand and make, and their supposedly fantastic advantages. Both in dreams and in their practice, common people increasingly incorporate a careful selection of the industrial technologies that may be utilized, often after reformulating their use or design, as well as the constant creation of technical or techno-logical novelties. They are trying to avoid the mere addition of consumer products or damaging, disabling tools, and appropriate, in their own terms, what they find useful.

Relocalization of people’s Movements To say “no” to development conveys an attempt to root and localize people’s thinking and action, contradicting the ongoing process of globalization of the economic logic. In the name of “universal values” and “world interests”, governments are actively promoting a “global approach” and the corresponding policies and institutions; slogans like “one world or no world”, “our common future” or “think globally, act locally” found an audience among those who critically accepted the illusion that we live now in a “global village”. People at the grassroots are vigorously resisting such promotions. Prominent thinkers and social critics are articulating the arguments and reasons for resisting. For example, Wendell Berry warned against “global thinkers”, whom he considers very dangerous. “Properly speaking”, he says, “global thinking is not possible”: Those who have ‘thought globally’ (and among them, the most successful have been imperial governments and multinational corporations) have done so employing simplifications too extreme and oppressive to merit the name of thought… Global thinking can only do to the globe what a space satellite does to it: reduce it, make a bauble of it. (Berry 1991:61)

Berry, Carson, Commoner, Jackson, Khotari, Leopold, Shiva, Worster, Wright, and many others have elaborated on ways and means to assume cultural and ecological responsibility for the soil, air, and water everyone

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depends on. Inspired by them or based on their own experience, many people’s initiatives, culturally as well as bioregionally rooted, are now burgeoning. Various vernacular grassroots movements, sprouting today all over the world, are engaged in the struggle to reclaim lands and cultures destroyed by the Green Revolution and other development projects. “Alternative”, “postmodern”, and multicultural initiatives, like those of Bill Mollison, Fukuoka, Margarita Botero, César Añorve, Wes Jackson, Robert Rodale, Kirkpatrick Sale, Luis Arévalo, and many others, may be seen as a few drops in the oceans—since they are isolated, limited endeavors which rarely reach mainstream thinking or action. But those initiatives are increasingly entering in contact with those of the social majorities all over the world: the grassroots movements, emerging after “the lost decade for development”, are now dedicated to the regeneration of their spaces. These postmodern initiatives teach us that rootedness must be the key defining metaphor for a sustainable way of life. But, unfortunately, this rootedness is incompatible with the forces that fostered the global environmentalism of last spring’s Earth Summit with its sophisticated technofixes, operated by the professional ecocracy now engaged in “global resource management” and “ecological systems engineering”. These forces, whether supporting our glamorous monoliths of food production or environmental cleanup, pose the most potent impediments to rootedness which occurs in and through those ordinary local loyalties and attachments that keep culture, place, and soil alive and flourishing. What is now needed is to bring down to earth (metaphorically and literally) and give concreteness to the abstract principles of the “ethics of care”, through the regeneration of communities without which virtue cannot flourish (MacIntyre 1981). What is needed is a search for a philosophy of soil, Illich’s “earthly virtue of place”: As philosophers, we search below our feet because our generation has lost its grounding in both soil and virtue. By virtue, we mean that shape, order, and direction of action are informed by tradition, bounded by place, and qualified by choices made within the habitual reach of the actor; we mean a practice mutually recognized as being good within a shared local culture which enhances the memories of place… For Plato, Aristotle and Galen (to speak about soil) could be taken for granted; not so today. The soil on which culture can grow and corn be cultivated is lost from view… We offer resistance to those ecological experts who preach respect for science but foster neglect for historical tradition, local flair, and

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the earthy virtue of self-limitation. Therefore, we issue a call for a philosophy of soil: a clear, disciplined analysis of that experience and memory of soil without which neither virtue nor some new kind of subsistence can be. These are not abstract, marginal, or academic calls but very concrete expressions of what the people at the grassroots are doing. They can be seen as descriptions of generalized behaviors adopted by many people “in the margins” during the so-called crisis. Today, grassroots movements are abandoning the nineteenth-century paradigms for readopting ancient traditions and constantly renewing and enriching them. The more advanced techniques of organic agriculture, well tested by Rodale, can now be found in peculiar blends with local practices in Africa or Latin America; in Tanzania or Mexico, they are no longer experimental or “pilot projects” but extensive practices regenerating both the land and the culture. Luis Arévalo, and his Free Shoe Workshop of Tepito, in downtown Mexico City, created in 1988, gives a peculiar, highly creative form to an increasingly generalized phenomenon: the mechanism to recover old forms of apprenticeship and “integral” education, clearly associated with the real, concrete life, well rooted in their own urban or rural contexts. When David Orr alludes to these kinds of initiatives, he finds that: like the English ships before the Spanish Armada in 1588, their strength lies in their flexibility, autonomy, vision, and creativity. Despite substantial differences in size, orientation, and purpose, they share common concerns including: (1) ecological sustainability; (2) appropriate scale; (3) cultural and ecological diversity; (4) reevaluation of the goals and directions of industrial society; and (5) justice, peace, and participation. (Orr 1992)

The people’s Discourse Today, the challenge for grassroots groups involves, on the one hand, avoiding the devastating forms of communal violence now endemic everywhere. But, on the other hand, it involves opening up new political goals, articulating differently their experiences for protecting the practice of forms of governance rooted in indigenous traditions, radically distinct from the abstraction called “the nation-state”. The new people’s discourse has started with an argument against the prejudice of equality, for the law of the weakest. They now dare to

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denounce the reactionary character of this ideal, in whose name the worst forms of discrimination, injustice, and accepted violence are constantly implemented. They are revealing the illegitimate hierarchy embedded in a “society of equals” to open the debate for alternative schemes of social order (Esteva 1991). Grassroots movements are also formulating an argument against the prejudice of democracy for the rights of the ghettos. The final consecration of democracy as the political regime for the whole world has been accompanied by progressive cynicism toward the ballot box: fewer and fewer citizens are participating in the electoral processes in more and more cases, except to say no to specific policies or politicians or to create blurred and weak coalitions, thus changing the very nature of modern political power. These tendencies do not express the people’s preference for more authoritarian regimes, simple apathy, or lack of civil consciousness. Instead, they are expressions of the growing conviction that the required changes will not be produced within the existing political structures: by electing this or that politician or political party. When one after the other, the peoples were given national dreams, their previous concrete and local hopes, rooted in a specific place and a well-defined tradition, were transformed into abstract expectations: jobs and comfort for everyone, education and health, equality and social justice, a new role for the country—each country—in the world. These illusory development goals were proffered in the language of “people’s rights”. In their new political mood, many grassroots groups are looking for liberties rather than for rights and learning to see the ballot box in formal democracy as a mere umbrella for real, direct democracy. No genuine consensus is possible when abstract, national plans or dreams replace people’s real hopes: always concrete, localized expressions of their cultures. A new ethos has been burgeoning in the 1980s. Very diverse and strictly pluralistic initiatives and movements began creating ephemeral and issue coalitions, to get what they wanted, without falling into the trap of the bureaucratization and corruption of massive, huge organizations or federations. Those flexible coalitions have the capacity to fully respect the autonomy of every organization, their deep pluralism, and their differentiation, accounting for the practical possibility of their effective control by the people themselves. At the same time, they have the qualities needed to have an effective impact in the “power” centers, for changing policies and politics.

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Grassroots groups are also formulating an argument against the tyranny of the globalizing discourse for science by people. In the process of building autonomous cultural nuclei and advancing toward the progressive autonomization of their needs and capacities, the autonomous “production of truth” (Foucault 1980) plays a critical role both locally and regionally. The theoretical production, at the grassroots, has not required a system of common standards to affirm its own validity. It does not mean obtuse empiricism—both naive and primitive—nor it falls into equivocal eclecticism, opportunism, or permeability into any theoretical undertaking (following the fashions). It is an act of creation that does not take concrete reality as the departure point for speculation and interpretation but is based on it and remains to stick to it all along its discourse. The coupling of “scholarly knowledges” (histories, the systematization of experiences) with local memories (the knowledge of people) is now allowing for the constitution of what Foucault has called the “historical knowledge of struggle”. Thus, the struggle against the tyranny of globalizing discourse and of “scientific” hierarchy of knowledge has started (with its intrinsic power effects), for the reactivation of local knowledges. People are now confronting the challenge defined by Foucault, which is not to change the people’s awareness or what they have in their heads, but rather the political, economic, and institutional regime of the production of truth. (Foucault 1980). In the construction of the reticular structure—both heterogeneous and multi-shaped—where the decentralized cultural nuclei operate, the hypothesis of innate egoism must be discarded (the key for the illusion of perfect competence), with the same vigor as the hypothesis of the innate altruism (the key to the perfect cooperation illusion). In turn, the continued need to invent, to create, and to re-create cooperation and reciprocity as a form of relationship must be put forth. The degrees, levels, and forms of cooperation would constantly change. The correction of asymmetries—the inevitable consequence of heterogeneity in the knots of the reticular structure—is a complex interaction under a new sense of the exchanges that cannot be subjected to a program nor exist under the impossible assumption of an altruistic, unilateral flow from the “strong” to the “weak” nuclei. Emulation will probably be the fundamental condition of these interaction schemes, which have not disregarded the need for collective and concerted efforts.

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Bringing the Margins to the Center Humanisms propose to change ideologies without transforming institutions. Reformisms, on their part, intend to modify institutions without altering the ideological system. What grassroots are suggesting now, in theory and practice, is to simultaneously change ideology and institutions in favor of a plurality of options, the effective freedom of choosing them, and the real autonomy for intercultural or inter-group contact or encounter and cross-cultural fertilization. The challenge, as seen from the grassroots, is to co-move. The social movements of common people are opening passages from the consensus of a majority of homogenized individuals to different forms of political agreements among autonomous groups. By shaping such agreements, common people are fostering the enforcement and formulation of new legal orders, imposing astringent limits upon the political sphere while subordinating the economy to new politics. According to the rumor roaming around in barrios and pueblos, the new dynamics of common people do not yield utopian designs or political proposals for universal, global generalization. On the contrary, a careful reading of the meaning and orientation being adopted by the new social movements of common people’s citizens’ coalitions reveals them as sociological novelties actualizing tradition and reappraising modernity. They have been conceived in an era in which all that men and women need for their delight in living can be provided for, given the available technical means. They have also been conceived for an era in which the non-economic way of providing for everything needed would allow men and women to look freely for what they want with dignity and wisdom. They were created to leave behind an era in which the explicit goal of unlimited improvement was the smokescreen for the concentration of privilege and the license to impose every kind of suffering on the social majority for its own good. The routes remaining uncharted beyond those shoals lack the grandeur of the universal global monoliths heralding progress during the four development decades. No maps of all the other humbler alternative routes exist, and perhaps there will never be accurate ones. But on the horizon clearly looms the multiplicity of cultural shores that can be reached once the sinking development ship is finally abandoned (Photos 3.1 and 3.2).

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Photo 3.1 La Realidad, Chiapas, Mexico, April 1996

Photo 3.2 Gustavo Esteva (right 1) at the Forum on Indigenous Peoples and Constitutional Reforms, Mexico City Congress, 19 January 2001

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Notes 1. “An ‘organization’ is a system of continuous purposive activity of a specified kind” (Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, New York: The Free Press, 1947, p. 151). 2. There are several explanations for this paradox: many of them can increase their income faster than inflation, in contrast with the salaried, who sank at the same pace of their buying power; almost all can diversify quickly their activities, a flexibility which salaried also lack; often they can generate their own means, and thus do not depend, like the salaried, of the luck of the market or the institutions, so bad at the present. Such partial explanations get full meaning when the fundamental counterproductivity of development and its institutions is properly recognized. 3. The critique of development have established a clear distinction between the previous uses of the word and the one it acquired in 1949, when Truman politically coined the term “underdevelopment”, which modified the denotations and connotations of the expression, which since then is clearly associated with the postwar experiment, emerged as an exercise of American hegemony. (See bibliographic appendix.). 4. This is, in fact, the most radical dimension of the new social movements and one that governmental and non-governmental organizations hardly accept, since they are still trapped in their claiming inertia. People seem less and less interested in widening their right of access to the goods and services defining the lifestyle over the “poverty line” and are concentrated instead in generating, by themselves, comfortable living conditions, in which autonomy and self-sufficiency allow to avoid the concentration of privileges generating “poverty”.

References Berry, Wendell. 1991. “Out of Your Car, off Your Horse”. The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, January 3, 2013. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ archive/1991/02/out-your-car-your-horse/309159/. Berry, Wendell. 2015. Revolution Starts Small and Close to Home. Yes Magazine, Spring. Borremans, Valentina (Ed.). 2006. Obras reunidas I [Collected Works I]. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Esteva, Gustavo. 1987. “Regenerating People’s Space”. Alternatives XII, no. 1, 125–151. The Ecologist. 1992. “El tiempo de la esperanza” [Time for Hope]. Opciones, 25, supplement of El Nacional, December 26.

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Esteva, Gustavo. 1991. “Development”. In The Development Dictionary. A Guide to Knowledge as Power, edited by Wolfgang Sachs, 6–25. London: Zed Books. Foucault, Michel. 1980. “Two Lectures”. In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977 , edited by Colin Gordon, 109–133. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel. 1979. Microfísica del poder [Microphysics of Power]. Madrid: La Piqueta, 1979. Kohr, Leopold. 1992. “Size Cycles”. Fourth World Review, no. 54. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1981. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Mires, Fernando. 1992. “El tiempo de la incertidumbre”. Opciones, 25, supplement of El Nacional, December 26. Orr, David. 1992. Ecological Literacy: Education and the Transition to a Postmodern World. Albany: SUNY Press. Rostow, Walt Whitman. 1960. The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto. Cambridge University Press. Steger, Hans-Albert. 1984. “Conviviality”. In Alternatives in Education, edited by Hans-Albert Steger. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag Munchen. Wangoola, Paul. 1991. On the “African Crisis”: Peoples Popular Participation and the Indigenous NGO’s in Africa’s “Recovery” and Development. Nairobi: African Association for Literacy and Adult Education.

CHAPTER 4

Autonomy Gustavo Esteva

Introduction Rivas1

Gilberto López y (Cuernavaca, Morelos, Mexico. September 9, 2022) Translated by Rafael Escobedo Autonomy is a central theoretical and political concept in Gustavo Esteva’s thought and life. His presence in the dialogue between the Mexican Federal Government and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN), which culminated in the signing of the so-called San Andres Accords on February 16, 1996, was key during the debates of the group of advisors and guests. Esteva frequently fulfilled the task of transcribing, writing, and systematizing the dozens of interventions of those who formed, due to their ethnic, socio-political, and sectorial representativeness, a sort of constituent congress at the table of Indigenous Rights and Culture.2 For Esteva, precisely, the rebellion of the Mayan Zapatistas on January 1, 1994, marks a historical watershed of planetary scope, and the resulting

G. Esteva (B) Oaxaca, Mexico © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K. C. Lau et al. (eds.), Walking on the Edge of the Abyss, Global University for Sustainability Book Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2325-0_4

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resistance movement he considers “the most radical and important political initiative in the world”, highlighting its extraordinary contributions in the articulation of movements of resistance to globalization and neoliberalism, as well as in the liberation of hope and imagination from the chains of political and intellectual oppression. Esteva analyzes in depth the parameters of Zapatista autonomy which, based on their ways of thinking and understanding the world, their cultures, and traditions, are establishing or strengthening emancipatory social relations, rejecting public funding and the presence of political parties, and in conditions of military encirclement of penetration and war of attrition, transforming their resistance into liberation. All this “Without using an abstract doctrine, a political manifesto, or a hierarchical guerrilla structure. Instead, they try to weave, with the peoples themselves, a program to continue the struggle, now explicitly directed against capitalism”. The autonomous processes studied by Esteva are multiple and present in varied geographies and rural and urban contexts. One of them, which he highlights, is in the state of Oaxaca, an entity with 16 indigenous groups and a majority indigenous population, where in 2006, the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca, APPO, was organized from a unique popular, peaceful, and democratic uprising against a “psychopathic, corrupt and authoritarian” governor. During the months that the movement lasted, and despite the toll of dead, wounded, disappeared, and arrested, the APPO established a horizontal, assembly-based, participatory, government based on radical democracy, without leaders, that revealed itself with vitality and creativity product of the accumulation of experience of many struggles rooted, principally, in indigenous traditions. Esteva reiterates that this type of autonomous initiative, which takes place in many parts of the world, does not imply isolation and autarchy and even incorporates various ideas and technologies, as the Mayan Zapatistas masterfully show.3 One of Esteva’s analytical bases to support his complex autonomic perspective is his radical critique of globalization from the perspective of indigenous, peasant, and marginalized peoples, where he chose to live and work as one more of the communal collective. Globalization is considered “as the emblem of a cultural and economic project that seeks to transform every man and woman on Earth into a homo economicus , the possessive individual born in the West. It has a political dimension in formal democracy and an ethical pretext in human rights”. His critique goes hand

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in hand with that of another emblematic substitute: development , which alludes, in turn, to another interconnected phenomenon: the internationalization of capital and the global integration of the media, all of which are causing cultural and environmental devastation around the world, and an increasingly exponential number of people considered disposable, “mere waste”. It is for this reason, Esteva points out, that on January 1, 1994, a group of those considered the most expendable and disposable of Mexico’s human beings, from the perspective of power, assume their dignity as a banner and proclaimed ¡BASTA YA! against the dominant oppression. “Entrenched in their autonomic practices, those dispossessed by modern society are limiting, and even dismantling (…) the institutional and legal mechanisms that deny or prohibit their autonomy”. From these and other rich experiences in mega-city neighborhoods, such as Mexico City, Esteva posits what he calls postmodern ethos, that is, the way we choose to live as men and women who have decided to liberate themselves from the oppression of economic society, recovering or creating a sense of community, in every rural or urban space. From his experience of more than a decade immersed in the indigenous-peasant world and in his condition as a “marginal and deprofessionalized” urban intellectual, as he described himself, Esteva considers that the articulation of the hopes of the peoples intensifies and multiplies the forms and spaces of political action, “allowing people to juxtapose their efforts and initiatives, without losing their autonomy. It does not mean uniting and totalizing them, as politicians and merchants do”. At this point, Esteva sharply criticizes what he calls the “bureaucrats of the revolution” and “servants of truth”, scientific or otherwise, who substitute themselves for the social subjects they purport to represent. He proposes renouncing the myth of the selfregulating market and the illusion of bureaucratic control, advancing the reconstruction of the communitarian, and forging a new consensus based on the affirmation of the dignity and autonomy of every man and every woman. Esteva raises the meaning and agenda of anti-systemic movements in a moment of change that, following Andrés Aubry, is at a crossroads, and the way forward must be established from below and not from above, in times of a new era, “which is the one we want, not the one we fear”. Esteva sees the current transition, in which anti-systemic and emancipatory movements are developing, as characterized by the end of the US

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empire, in terms of a decline in production and other economic and political indicators. He argues that, while still capable of capturing the minds and hearts of small minorities, the United States has lost the cultural hegemony it once held on the world stage. Likewise, he thinks that the old state-party regime that reigned in Mexico for more than 70 years has come to an end, while Latin America is returning to the statist visions that prevailed in the era of the so-called welfare state. In some controversial and, consequently, debatable paragraphs, Esteva diagnoses that socialism, sustained by some ideologues who want to rescue it from oblivion and, like all historical phenomena, has also reached its end. He believes that the problems of socialism and its deviations arise not only from its implementation but also, and seriously, “from the theoretical and philosophical tradition itself"—concluding: “At the end of the day, socialism is one more variant of the economic society that will die with the era that is passing away”. This is neither the place nor the time to enter into one more of the polemics that, during the interminable sessions of the San Andres dialogue, we held with Gustavo Esteva, who, by the way, always listened calmly to the arguments of his opponents on this and other issues, on which there was no consensus. Accepting the necessary and correct criticism of the failed experiences of bureaucratized socialism that even led to phenomena such as Stalinism and processes such as the disappearance of the USSR and the implosion of the socialist camp, it is not possible to ignore the multiple efforts of currents of critical thought, which explore and deepen the scope of Marxism and socialism, applied to the study of the current coordinates of militarized and criminal capitalist globalization. The positions of the so-called ethnomarxism in the autonomous processes of indigenous peoples have been useful in articulating and complementing the factors of class, ethnicity, gender, and age groups in the analytical matrices of processes such as the Zapatista.4 Esteva investigates the mutations of social movements in the transition, describing the necessary localization as an alternative to localism and globalization, and recognizing the real plurality and differences shared by the different forms of self-governments, and in practices that interrelate forms of struggle of formal democracy, radical democracy, carried out by movements that maintain contacts with the state and the market. Esteva identifies ways and paths to confront “progress” and “development”, individualism, the nation-state, and conventional ways of doing politics, with Zapatismo being a permanent source of inspiration, giving order and meaning to a world marked by uncertainty and turbulence,

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giving struggles a sense of direction, learning to be together even if we are different, detaching ourselves from the obsession of taking or exercising power of any kind, always remaining at the bottom. Esteva ends his extraordinary text by reiterating that it is not possible to continue tolerating the current regime that destroys land and culture alike, defining, in practice, the meaning of a new era. In these brief reflections, it is impossible to highlight all of Gustavo Esteva’s contributions to the conformation and strengthening of critical thinking, the type of thinking that the Zapatista Mayans summon us to practice. Nevertheless, the reader will feel challenged by Esteva, provoked, forced to reflect on his own theoretical and political certainties, and questioned by his life example, always congruent and polemic. In this way, he will have succeeded in fulfilling his community tasks and his emancipatory mission. They Are Coming (San Pablo Etla, Oaxaca, Mexico. 2007) The Rumor What if…? A rumor has roamed around barrios, pueblos, clubs, neighborhoods, and towns… Born in Villa Salvador, Lima, in Barrio Espino, San Juan de Puerto Rico, in Tepito, México, and a thousand other places, the rumor was also heard in Virginia Street, Berkeley; in Port la Galére, France; in Hebenhausen, Germany; in Okinawa, Japan. The media did not know how to deal with it. It was a rumor expressed in gossip, jokes, half-words, winks, and smiles, a rumor you could not spell out. What if…? (Esteva, 1992: 45). In the 1980s, this rumor reached us everywhere. It nourished our conversations and dreams. In Berkeley, Lee Swenson, a pioneer in the movement against the draft, celebrated with friends every Wednesday the freedom to talk and think together after reading Nietzsche, Paul Goodman, or Huck Finn. For ten years in the tertulia of the Centro Cultural El Disparate, in México City, Jean Robert, Guy Rozat, José María Sbert, and other 15 or 20 deprofessionalized intellectuals met every Thursday to discuss some ideas—before they took their proper shape, as they later recognized. For more than ten years, Ivan Illich gathered in

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State College, every year, a group of friends who discussed with him alternatives to the industrial mode of production or the role of friendship in the creation of new commons. Like seminars and conversations organized by Ui Jun in Japan, Majid Rahnema in France, or Sigmar Groeneveld in Germany, all these peculiar gatherings found inspiration in the rumor from the grassroots. We were asking ourselves if the so-called marginal were adopting mere survival strategies or something else. For many years, they were seen as remnants of the past, firmly advancing toward their extinction, or else, as the ugly face of modern cities, eliciting both compassion and repugnance. They were the classical target of wars against poverty that have been for so long waged against them. But suddenly, amid the challenges of the electronic era, they got new visibility. Some discovered them as a “solution”. Others found in them the last frontier of arrogance, the last territory to conquest. Still, others insisted that they were the last refuge of pure joy and candid freedom but also feared that it was only a refuge and that it would not last long. Globalization will eliminate them from the planet (Mangin 1965, Tumer 1968, Peattie 1980, Esteva 1983a, 1983b, Illich 1980, Robert 1992). But still, some asked themselves, what if…? In 1992, what was a kind of timid whispering in the 1980s got a different shape. The commemoration of 1492 could not get a legitimate, universally recognized name. Discovery of America? The encounter of civilizations? A civilizatory enterprise? How to call an operation in which nine of every 10 inhabitants of the “new” territory died as a consequence of their interaction with the “civilizers” and “evangelizers”? The surprise was not the debate itself but the vigorous and articulated emergence of Indian groups in the whole continent. They used the commemoration to affirm their autonomy and cultures at odds with the dominant system. So the rumor began to take another aspect. In the same year, 1992, the Earth Summit took place in Rio. It doomed itself to irrelevance since the first preparatory meeting, as the British journal The Ecologist timely reported. Instead of focusing its attention on the “free market environmentalism”, the philosophy that transnational corporations imposed in Rio, the journal’s team visited marginal areas all around the world. Time and again, they heard the same rumor. They “saw” it, incarnated in the most diverse experiences, in neighborhoods of Bangkok, as in the Philippines, Java, or Laos; among lobster harvesters in Maine or certain forest communities in Finland;

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in the Krenak tribe in Brazil or the peoples of the Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation of Ontario; or in Torbel, Switzerland… The team found a common trait in all those very diverse experiences, apparently incomparable. They were commons. “For many people in the West”, the team recognized, “the word ‘commons’ carries an archaic flavor: that of the medieval village pasture which villagers did not own but where they had rights to graze their livestock. Yet, for the vast majority of humanity, the commons is an everyday reality” (The Ecologist 1993: 7). In publishing their findings, they started to give a public voice to that invisible reality. The rumor ceased thus to be a rumor. The Uprising On January 1, 1994, thousands of Indians armed with machetes, clubs, and a few guns occupied four of the main towns of Chiapas, a State in the south of México neighboring Guatemala. They called themselves Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista Army for Nacional Liberation) and declared war on the Mexican government. Their ¡Basta ya’. Enough! after 500 years of colonization and 50 of development quickly spread throughout the world. For many hours, CNN presented Zapatistas in their sky masks and peculiar stand, different from any known guerilla. A librarian from California began the tradition of translating the communiqués to circulate them in electronic networks a few days after the uprising. It was a personal and independent initiative. In a decentralized, autonomous style, personal, or collective initiatives of that kind continue to spread. There are now thousands of Web pages, and the references on the Web number are now in the millions. All globophobes of the last ten years recognized the Zapatistas as the pioneers: they were a source of inspiration and awakening, the first to realize that the Emperor had no clothes. Zapatismo is nowadays the most radical and perhaps the most important political initiative in the world. No contemporary political or social movement has attracted as much public attention as Zapatismo has, in both quantitative and qualitative terms. None the Zapatista rebellion, Immanuel Wallerstein wrote recently, “has been the most important social movement in the world, the barometer and alarm dock for other anti-system movements around the world” (La Jornada, 19-07-05). Despite their amazing visibility, the Zapatistas continue to be a mystery and a paradox. They have no interest in seizing power. Their army tires words and civil disobedience and Champion non-violence. They are

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profoundly rooted in their local cultures and their ancient Mayan traditions but have a global scope and are immersed in contemporary ideas, problems, and technologies. They have explicitly argued that they are not a guerilla, described by Mao or Che Guevara as a fish that swims in the sea of the people. The Zapatistas are the sea, not the fish: hundreds of communities took the collective decision of the uprising. It was their last resource. They tried every legal and political way to present their claims, but nobody heard. They were dying like flies. They thus preferred a dignified death to the docile march of sheep to the slaughter. The mountain told us to take up arms to have a voice. It told us to cover our faces so we would have a face. It told us to forget our names so we could be named. It told us to protect our past so we would have a future (The Zapatistas 1998: 22). In celebrating their 10th anniversary, I recently suggested that the Zapatistas challenge every aspect of contemporary society in words and deeds. In revealing the root cause of the current predicament, they tear to tatter the framework of the economic society (capitalism), the nationstate, formal democracy, and all modem institutions. They also render conventional ways and practices of social and political movements and initiatives obsolete. In reconstructing the world from the bottom up, they reveal the illusory or counterproductive nature of changes conceived or implemented from the top down. Their path encourages resistance to globalization and neoliberalism everywhere and inspires struggles for liberation. They also contribute to articulating those struggles (Esteva 2004: 9). I also observed that nothing about the Zapatistas is more important than their contribution to hope and imagination. Thirty years ago, Ivan Illich argued that “the Promethean ethos has now eclipsed hope”. And he warned: “Survival of the human race depends on its rediscovery as a social force” (Illich 1996: 105). This is exactly what the Zapatistas have done, liberating hope from their intellectual and political prison. A net of plural paths, which some call Zapatismo, is now getting visibility everywhere. The Zapatistas are still a source of inspiration for those walking along those paths. But they do not pretend to administer or control such a net, which has its own impulses, strength, and orientation. We all are or can be, Zapatistas. Behind our black mask, behind our armed voice, behind our unnamable name, behind what you see of us, behind this, we are you. Behind this, we are the same simple and ordinary men and women who are

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repeated in all races, painted in all colors, speak in all languages, and live in all places. Behind this, we are the same forgotten men and women, the same excluded, the same ostracized, the same persecuted, the same as you. Behind this, we are you (The Zapatistas 1998: 24). It is Zapatismo that communities make their decisions at odds with the dominant regime, governing themselves “according to their own ways of thinking and understanding, according to their interests, taking into account their cultures and traditions” (EZLN, La Jornada, 10-08-04). What the Zapatistas have organized is not a liberated territory ñor a utopian commune. Neither is it the experimental laboratory of absurdity or a paradise for an orphaned left. On the contrary, it is a rebellious territory in resistance (EZLN, La Jornada, 2-10-04). The Lacandona Commune is a practice, a test-bed for new social relations, and a return to earlier aspirations of self-emancipation movements: liberation should be the work of those it benefits, there shouldn’t be authorities over the populace, and the members of the social order should have complete control over their own destinies. They are the living embodiment of new politics rather than the manifestation of moral nostalgia (Luis Hernández, La Jornada, 7-9-04). On January 1, 2006, the Zapatistas started The Other Campaign, an initiative putting at risk everything they have achieved in the last 12 years, including their amazing, consolidated autonomy in the area under their control, where they reject all public funds or the presence of political parties and are still surrounded by 40 000 troops. They will try to articulate their vision and experience to the thousands of organizations and millions of people serving in the discontented ranks, transforming their current resistance into liberation. They will not use an abstract doctrine, a political manifesto, or a partisan hierarchical structure. Instead, they will try to weave, with the people themselves, a program to continue the struggle, now explicitly addressed against capitalism. The Puzzle Oaxaca is a neighboring State of Chiapas, where most of the people are Indians of 16 different peoples. From June to November 2006, there were no police in the city of Oaxaca, the capital of the State, not even for traffic control. This town of 600 000 inhabitants had been “governed” in those months by the people themselves, organized around the Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca (Popular Assembly of the Peoples

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of Oaxaca) (APPO), after a peaceful, democratic uprising against their psychopathic, corrupt, and authoritarian governor. A human rights organization reported that in those months, there were fewer deaths, injured, or assaults than in any similar period of the last ten years. Despite terrible repression during November, which implied many deaths, disappeared, injured, and more than 500 arbitrarily arrested, the movement continues and reveals surprising vitality. It is a movement without leaders; the people themselves organized in their own way. Like many other current movements in the world, APPO is the product of a slow accumulation of forces and many lessons gathered during previous struggles. Like most movements, APPO is a radically new, contemporary creation, well rooted in the past, in the Indian traditions of Oaxaca. Like many other initiatives, which apparently define an epic now evolving at the grassroots all over the world (Esteva and Prakash 1998), the people involved in APPO are returning from the future. Instead of hanging their lives from a design of the future or a certain ideology, they are packing both past and future in a present of transformation. Local and regional APPOs define new forms of government where the people experience new forms of freedom. At the level of the State, they are trying to subordinate the struggle to improve representative and participatory democracy to the struggle to affirm and extend radical democracy. Like the Zapatistas, APPO is not trying to seize power but to reorganize society from the bottom up. They are bringing their commitment to the common good (what they call politics) and their spirituality, nourishing their ethical principles, to the center of social life. In nourishing new social relationships, beyond the logic of development and capital, they are looking for conviviality, which is no longer a utopian construction but a practice deeply ingrained in their courageous initiatives. In the Zapatista area, in Chiapas, or the APPO area in Oaxaca, as in many other places in the world, what was a rumor in the 1980s and an uprising in the 1990s is today a political reality. The New Perspective Twenty years ago, when I first heard the rumor roaming around in villages and barrios, I was already established in the post-development age—an expression then fashionable. In 1985, I assumed that the future of development studies lay in archeology: only an archeological gaze can explore

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the ruins left by development. I saw the myth in my past, not my present, and even less in my future. After three years of discussing with Ivan Illich and his friends what is to be beyond development, we shared the outcome of our conversations in a book edited by Wolfgang Sachs (1992). In it, I presented an invitation to celebrate the appearance of new commons, creatively opened by common men and women and heralding an era that ends privilege and license. I also presented a call for political action—to create political controls protecting those new commons and limiting the economic sphere and also to foster public debate on the post-economic initiatives appearing everywhere. Such initiatives, now flourishing around the world, do not imply isolation or autarchy. They can use contemporary ideas or technologies, as well as money, trade, etc. But they exist beyond the realm of scarcity— the field so defined by Walras in 1874 in which the laws of economics relate subjects (possessive, invidious, genderless individuals), commodities, and institutions within an environment in which the commons have been transformed into resources (Illich 1982: 19). After experiencing how economic value disvalued our own forms of social existence, transmogrifying our autonomous activities into needs whose satisfaction requires the mediation of the market, we tried to reembed our wants, skills, hopes, and interactions with one another, and with the environment, into our new commons, into our own cultural ways. We are benefiting from the fact that capital could not transmogrify us into full-fledged economic insects. As “underdeveloped” and “marginal”, we were put in the condition of those-who-are-not-yet-but-will-be. We are now convinced that we will never become homo economicus. We will be ourselves. And dissident vanguards, coming from the other extreme of society, those enjoying the “privileges” of development in the economic societies, are now joining us in the exploration of convivial paths to give meaning to their lives and escape from the sordid dessert of consumerism and individualization. What I am experiencing today at the grassroots is that the people are increasingly aware that the world is falling apart. They have been taking away their trust from the individuals, institutions, and ideologies to which they surrendered their will in the past. And they are now taking in their own hands the political initiative… at a human scale, in communities, barrios, neighborhoods. The rumor I am now hearing at the grassroots is that the time has come for the end of the economic era. Development, once a hope of eternal life to economic societies, has instead dug its grave. Evidence of a

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new era, appearing everywhere, is still perceived as anomalies of the old. The old one, in turn, looks stronger than ever, and the death it carries is still perceived as a symptom of vitality. Suppose people are fooled by such images, disguised with the slogans of the period, and are blind to the evidence of the new era. In that case, the economy will continue to dismantle and destroy its own creations and nature to the point of collapse. There is an option. Now is the time for the option. People by the millions, among the social majorities, are taking it.

Regenerating the Place: The Case of Disposable Children (International seminar “Niños y niñas en situación de calle” [Boys and Girls in a street situation] Puebla, México. September 23, 2002) “The truth is”, said Jerónimo, staring into the camera, “I am doing pretty well. Shining shoes here in the plaza, I can make all the money I need in a few hours. Then I go with my buddy, the blacksmith, to keep learning more from him. I play with my friends, whatever we feel like, and I have a great place to hang out at night in good company. The only bad thing is school; it’s so boring and pointless, but I’m going to get my elementary school diploma so that people will stop saying things. When I finish, I will hang out more often with the blacksmith. He’s promised that he’ll help me set up my own shop, and that’s what I want. I can always decide later where to go from there”.

In Oaxaca, we call children “muchitos ” (from ‘muchachitos’ which means little boys and girls). Ten years ago, we were making a series of TV programs for the local station called “Muchos Muchitos ” (Many little children). We spoke on this series of children and adolescents working, some at home or in the corn fields with their families, while others were in a “street situation”. They loved being on TV and let out everything as they talked to the camera, speaking without reservations about their situation. That’s how we ran into Jerónimo, a shoe shiner in the central square of Oaxaca. He soon became a star of the program. He arrived in Oaxaca with his family when he was four years old. The desolation that reigned had cast them out of their Mixteca community. Two years later, after his parents and siblings died in an accident that

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Jerónimo can’t or won’t describe, he was left to be looked after by a neighboring family. This family decided to return to their native community when Jerónimo was eight, and he didn’t want to go with them. The night before the trip, he ran away and has been classified among the children in a “street situation” ever since. At first, he took refuge with friends, from whom he learned what has been his primary source of income: shoe shining. Soon he made arrangements with different families for food and lodging, and he broadened his circle of friends until he found the vocation he loved: blacksmithing. Then, by his own decision, he started school “to prove that I could do that too” and “so they wouldn’t call me stupid”. He has advanced quickly, making two years of school in one, and soon he will finish elementary school. He looks healthy and happy, whole. There are no visible tracks of his tragedies. He no longer dreams of visiting his hometown or what might remain of a family he can’t quite remember. Full of energy, he celebrates his vigorous thirteen years, forging a place for himself in the city he has made his own. I use this story to point out my topic, although Jerónimo doesn’t precisely fit into the subject. I want to talk about disposable children; he is not one of them. In Oaxaca, there is only one organization focused on to tending to children “in a street situation”, and it has great difficulty in first getting and then keeping customers. In Oaxaca, children are not disposed of. However, in this state, classified among the poorest of the country by conventional indicators, we may find some inspiration for other areas where the modern category of childhood has been firmly established and in which a part of those children so classified are treated as waste. The difficulty I face here as I touch on the subject became clear to me after that series of programs. It won an award from Deutsche Belle in Germany, and when the producer went to accept the award, she didn’t know what to do with it. She didn’t even know whether to accept it or refuse it. They were awarding how a serious social problem had been denounced, while she, as we all, believed we were celebrating a situation where this problem could not appear. The Modern Creation of Waste The word garbage is a variant of the action of sweeping. It alludes to what we wish to separate from our sight and can move with a broom. Although

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we apply this word to many other things now, I would like to distinguish it from the word waste clearly. Perhaps all societies and cultures have identified and disposed of some kind of garbage with whatever means they possessed. Waste is a strictly modern creation. Exploring its origins may help us clear up the context of the concern that has brought us here. Twenty years ago, a commission sent from the upper levels of the Japanese government visited the Mexican president to make him a juicy proposition. Japan would take charge of a good part of the external debt and make heavy investments if Mexico agreed in return to create a million places for the elderly citizens of Japan. Japan would build a city to house them with Japanese personnel to attend to their every need. As they died, they would be replaced by others. One condition of the arrangement was that the Mexicans would not enter this space. The Mexican government had to turn down this attractive offer, as it was politically impossible to implement. The president knew that the Mexican obsession with national sovereignty would make it impossible to convince the country of the financial and practical advantages of the operation. I understand that the Japanese government did manage to create some of these places for human waste in Brazil and was about to do so in Peru. The elderly occupy a central position in Japanese culture. As in many other cultures, they are of great importance for cultural continuity. What I would like to explore here is the social condition in which they can be perceived and treated as waste to be dumped. There are many ways to grow old and die. The elderly of Inuit communities near the Arctic say goodbye to their loved ones one day and go off alone into the snow to live out their last moments on earth. When they feel their hour has come, they leave—peacefully, full of dignity. No one there would see them as waste, something better off dumping and swept off to a faraway country. That notion is strictly modern. Professor Ludolf Kuchenbuch of Hagen, Germany, has been working on the history of the concept and its name. His studies show that it was born in the middle of the nineteenth century, representing a radical innovation without precedent. Moreover, it defines a condition that enabled the modern economy to emerge. The concept studied by Professor Kuchenbuch is not that which we identify with industrial garbage—getting rid of that which society has not yet found an efficient enough broom for. We are familiar with the trash that floods the environment, and it allows us to speak about the hole in the ozone layer or the dark red cloud that has extended over Asia.

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We know that the air in Mexico City is full of amoebas and salmonella waiting to be breathed in, along with all sorts of other impurities. We are irritated daily by the fact that all the streets, roads, and even the houses have become garbage bins. Some ecologists condemn McDonald’s, not for the junk they serve, but for the excessive amount of garbage they generate. Others are more concerned about atomic waste, which, according to scientists that help produce it, will maintain its polluting effect for hundreds of thousands of years. No technological broom can sweep it from a planet that is more and more burdened by the piles of scraps that are continually produced. I am approaching waste as an economic concept. To isolate it from other types of garbage, both past and present, I must use the ugly technical word disvalue, coined by Iván Illich. Disvalue is the condition through which economic value can exist and accumulate. It does not refer to the waste generated by the frantic production of commodities that we don’t know how to sweep up because it is found before an economic process begins and not as a result of it. Instead, it constitutes the condition that makes it possible for the economic process to exist at all. Modern economy presupposes the devaluation of culturally determined behavior patterns. The mass production of goods, services, and images presuppose cultural wilting through disseminating disvalue. Modern society, constructed on standardized devaluation of traditional cultures, is the matrix necessary for accumulating economic value (Illich 1986: 4). Only through disvalue can economic value be created. It is the only way for the modern economy to settle in and reproduce itself. And disvalue must be constantly generated to keep this economy in operation and expand it, which is a necessary condition for its existence. Marcos Sandoval, a noted Triqui Indian, alluded to this process a few years ago in his speech upon hosting the King and Queen of Spain, who had come to visit Oaxaca for the first time in 500 years: From the occidental viewpoint… they keep imposing on us… their civilization… denying all the knowledge generated by our peoples. We domesticated our corn… and are always improving it… (but) an agronomic expert always comes and tells us that numbered corn, produced in their research center is better than ours; if we build a house with our own knowledge and materials, an architect comes and tells us that to live with dignity, we must build it with industrialized materials; if we invoke our

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ancient gods, the priests come and tell us that our beliefs are superchería (superstition). Marcos emphasizes a well-known fact which began in the colonial era and has been accelerated today in the name of development and globalization. But he doesn’t take his analysis to the point where this devaluation of all culturally determined behavior—so removed from modern economic production—becomes indispensable to an ever higher and broader degree in order to make economic production possible. The so-called globalization has brought to light a phenomenon that started in the development era. The rich and powerful countries require less and less the raw materials, human labor, and markets of other countries. While the colonial governments were concentrated on exploiting resources from the colonized countries, the new economic powers began to use them as garbage dumps and depended more and more on them to export disvalues, which are indispensable for continuing with their frenetic economic accumulation. In this phenomenon, we find the juxtaposition of the familiar notion of garbage, as an undesired byproduct, with the new of disvalue. There is a physical transference of industrial garbage from rich countries coming south in increasing volumes. They send us ordinary garbage that should be buried in special sites or products that are forbidden to be distributed in their own countries, such as poisonous insecticides. They also bring here their polluting factories when their own citizens succeed in closing them to prevent the continued pollution of their environment in their countries. They thus pollute our environment, taking advantage of the fact that here there are no regulations to control their operation. All that waste is flooding us. But the most important thing, the true innovation of modern society, is the generation of disvalue. This operation first consists of removing the social value from the culturally produced goods among us and then obstructing their production to create a need for commodities of economic value. The continuous and progressive devaluation of culture, environment, and the human person operates as a condition and as the engine of economic production. And so, a new type of monopoly is established. No longer is it the commercial monopoly where a brand or company displaces, inhibits, or suffocates others, as when for example, a transnational brand of soft drinks or cigarettes eliminates the local brands. Neither is it simply a technological monopoly by which a company prevents the operation of other companies that do not produce the same type of commodity but compete

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in their field with goods and services that constitute an alternative. For example, by acquiring train and bus lines, which they then paralyzed and left to decay, North American automobile manufacturers imposed their product as the primary means of transportation. This type of monopoly is now growing in the field of informatics. In addition to these monopolies, which are still getting their way despite the laws and mechanisms that try to regulate or deactivate them everywhere, a new one has arisen. It is what Illich calls the radical monopoly: it devalues and restricts those activities that do not depend on economic products. It is, for example, the monopoly of tires over feet. Many people can no longer cross those huge avenues that crucify Mexico City, especially the elderly, and so their walks on foot have been sacrificed on the altar of the automobile. It is the medical monopoly over the autonomous ways of dealing with suffering and death or the education monopoly over the autonomous ways of learning and studying. Once the devaluation has been generalized, when it begins to constitute a general or predominant mentality, it radically inhibits the alternative: first by legally prohibiting it and then by using public force to prevent it. Once, the need has been created for a good or service transmogrified into a commodity, which will soon become an addiction, it is transformed into a right—everyone must have access to it—and finally, it is granted an exclusive patent, which inhibits or cancels any alternatives (Illich 1986). Disvalue, as the economic concept of waste, is not mere devaluation. Something that previously had economic value can be devaluated, for example, currency, stocks, a beauty queen, real estate, or a work of art. Various circumstances may contribute to it losing the economic value it once had. Generating disvalue, on the contrary, means discarding and getting rid of something that never had economic value so that the latter can exist. In communities and cultures that are not ruled by the principle of economic value but rather by the idea of the good, especially the common good, among people and groups who still deal with their own lives, according to their own definition of what they consider to be a good life, the operation consists of destroying the fundamental basics of their existence, dissolving their social fabric and making them dependent on and needy for commodities. That is disvalue.

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Taking Them Away The action of sweeping is performed to remove from our sight and the space around us what shouldn’t be there; that which is useless, left here, and the presence of which makes us uncomfortable. For thousands of years, throwing this kind of garbage to the ground of the surrounding area was not an expression of concern for cleanliness or comfort, as it is today in modern life. It was instead an element of the ordinary cycles of daily life. The leftover food fertilized the soil or was eaten by the animals raised for different purposes. This traditional attitude explains the growing garbage accumulation in many villages. The people still follow the pattern of throwing things outside the house and leaving the leftovers on the ground. But now, far from nourishing the earth, this garbage unavoidably contaminates it. Plastic and other industrial garbage arrived in these villages before the institutional arrangements for taking care of it. Modern society slowly created these arrangements to dispose of the industrial garbage that had begun to overwhelm it. Collective brooms with advanced technology were organized. To keep it at a distance, garbage collection services were established. They took this garbage as far away as possible from the settlements to garbage dumps that were slowly transformed until they became modern sanitary landfills. The urban poor were born together with the cities. They were part of the new social fabric and circulated freely through the crevices of these new types of settlement. They performed different functions in which the children of poor families often took part. As their numbers grew and their condition changed, along with modern society, the perception of them also changed. In the sixteenth century, one already heard of sweeping them up, of disposing of them as if they were garbage. But a long time passed before they became a form of waste. Different social arrangements protected the poor, guaranteeing them their “right to life” and taking care in some way of their subsistence. The perverse effects of the subsidies for the poor established in the Law of Speemhamland in 1795, in England, the most advanced country at that time, produced their derogation in 1834. The institutional arrangement that made it possible to create the modern labor market transformed the poor into waste. During the same process, the notion of being poor, until then considered a virtue and the opposite of “powerful”, not “rich”, acquired its modern humiliating connotation (Rahnema 2001, Illich e Illich y Rahnema 1997).

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During the second half of the twentieth century, a common reaction to the disposable children who hung out around the streets of the big cities was to sweep them up: get them out of sight, get rid of their uncomfortable presence, and confine them in faraway, isolated places. A general pattern of modern life to cope with collective predicaments was so adopted to deal with these children. The British lavatory can be seen as a general metaphor for this. As the chain is pulled—or as the modern toilet is flushed—we remove what we perceive as dirt from sight. Apparently, we have resolved our problem, disposing of it comfortably. But we create a much greater predicament, and it doesn’t take long for it to bounce back against us, creating, among other things, a radical dependency on a centralized public or private bureaucracy. We have become accustomed to living life spitting against the wind. With the same counterproductivity of all modern institutions, which produce the opposite of their explicit purposes (Illich 1986), sweeping up the disposable children became a more significant predicament and was the object of well-founded criticism. But, as with other garbage, this expeditious mechanism is going out of use. Recycling The ingenuity of dissident vanguards and the growing social concern over the accumulation of industrial garbage brought about the invention of recycling. Technology capable of converting waste to valuable products was invented and displayed. Alternative sects disseminated it and are still trying to extend it. The industry quickly discovered a promising line of business in all this activity and began to operate on a grand scale with very profitable results. However, the initial success, potentiated when some industrial recyclers started to pay for their raw material and thus gave an economic value to garbage, began to have an unexpected counterproductive effect: it increased garbage generation. Garbage recycling became a stimulus for producing it, or at least inhibiting the initiatives oriented toward stimulating more sensible behaviors that would slow down waste generation. Although it is undoubtedly a useful field of application, this option is increasingly being challenged. Among other things, it has a socially counterproductive effect, monopolizing recycling materials that large groups of society use for their own purposes, or making them more expensive. In a congress that took place some years ago in Medellín, Colombia, to examine alternatives for the disposal of human feces, one

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of the participants fittingly summarized the predicament by tossing in an old Colombian saying: “When shit is worth silver, the poor will be born without assholes”. Recycling disposable children is probably the main form of disposing of them in modern cities. Public institutions and civil agencies have been increasing the actions intended to capture or seduce them first, and then process them in establishments set up to normalize them, meaning adjust them to the prevailing social norms for children of the same age range, for example through hygienic boarding schools. As integral recycling is very costly, several initiatives attempt to recycle them partially, concentrating on aspects such as health, education, or occupation. However, recycling disposable children seems to be having counterproductive effects like other industrial waste. Some innovations, which in updating old traditions transmogrify them, have elicited a scandal. The adoption of disposable children, intensified by the new attitudes regarding procreation in affluent sectors of modern society, arose as the ultimate solution. With the children once again becoming part of a family, their adoption seemed like a radical way of remedying the original predicament, at least for the adopted children. However, the arrangement has not been devoid of difficulties, such as the professional and institutional treatment that the parents often have to resort to for their adopted children, who tend to behave outside the established norms. The tensions that both the adopted children and the families face cannot always be easily overcome, although there is no lack of affection and good intentions on the part of all involved. We have recently become aware of conditions that prompted the transformation from this humanitarian arrangement to a new economic operation based on the kidnapping, trafficking, and exportation of children, disposable or not. In any case, in recent years, the failures and limitations of conventional methods of recycling have led to the introduction of other important innovations. Those who deal with disposable children in public institutions or civil organizations have discovered unexpectedly that the children under their care have their own point of view and an autonomous capacity for action. They have begun to perceive them as subjects of their own attention. In the tradition of Freire, by means of methods that often adopted his conscientization style, they concentrate on giving the children support so that they can be the authors of their own recycling. Educators, collaborators, or acompañantes of children and young people have been

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busy bolstering their educational and labor normalization and political participation. The prompt and very promising results in many places are causing these experiences to be transformed into a new model of recycling disposable children, a task in which they become the main protagonists. These innovations have been widely supported within the framework of the campaigns over the last few years, which defended the rights of children and adolescents with increasing energy, especially their labor rights. These campaigns consolidate and deepen the social construction of the category of childhood, thus reducing a substantial part of the members of society—at times the majority—to a condition that homogenizes them into an abstract category that can be attributed with a consubstantial disability that demands their forced, universal and dependent institutionalization. The rights attributed to them are inevitably subordinated to the institutions responsible for satisfying those rights, and those institutions must concentrate social resources to be able to do that. Within the framework of promoting human rights, this sets in motion the transmogrification of the people into individuals to make them fit into the mold of the homo economicus , which is the fundamental base of modern society. “Human rights” thus operate as the Trojan horse for recolonization, disseminating individualism among peoples and cultures whose own sources of morality cannot be reduced to the ethical catechism of homo economicus. Despite the promising results of some specific experiences, the recycling of disposable children is always unable to cope with their increasing numbers and the deterioration of the conditions of their existence. One of the reasons for its fundamental counterproductivity is that it generates the sensation that an effective answer has been found to the predicament, thereby weakening or confusing the awareness of the need to face it at its source and preventing it from appearing at all. This awareness, however, is constantly strengthened at the grassroots. In addition to their sources of vigor, it is stimulated by the frequent broadcasting of well-identified cases of disposable children who cannot be the object of any form of recycling because they have suffered such physical and mental damage that there is no possibility of rehabilitating them, much less propitiating that they be protagonists of their own transformation. This condition causes paralyzing perplexity and rage but also stimulates a new awakening, especially when the context is considered. A friend of mine, a nutrition expert, made a comprehensive study on the situation of Mexican children. He now suspects that perhaps half of

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the children born in the 1990s in Mexico will be incapable of becoming whole men and women due to the physical and mental damage that the lack of good nutrition had caused before they were born or in the first months of their lives. Some of them will be condemned to a parasitic life; the others will have to be recycled for subordinate and dependent functions. Human recycling appears in all of its horrors, just like industrial garbage. It sometimes produces defensive indifference: How can one bear the burden of its magnitude and depth? It also causes despair. But it is simultaneously a source of initiative for those who celebrate its having awakened them from the general nightmare. The Path to Localization It may be evident by now that I have nothing much to say about “boys and girls in a street situation”. I have no suggestions or recommendations for what to do. I know that valuable experiences will be examined here by those who dedicate all their energy to doing something for these children. I wouldn’t want my point of view to be interpreted as a disqualification of those efforts and all that is being done in many parts of the world by people who refuse to remain paralyzed before this magnitude of the horror. In contrast to the experiences of disposal or recycling of disposable children, I want to share with you what I observe around me, in these times of globalization, within the world of Indian peoples, peasants, and marginal, where I live and work. First of all, I want to allude to the perception of globalization itself. We see it as the emblem of an economic and cultural project that attempts to transmogrify every man and woman on earth into a homo economicus, the possessive individual born in the West. It has a political dimension: formal democracy, and an ethical pretext: human rights. Globalization is new wine in old bottles. The old Western ideal of One World took an economic shape during the last 300 years. It became a world project under the lead of capital. After the Second World War, the United States used its hegemonic power to mold it to its own image and likeness. On January 20, 1949, the Cold War was declared, and the US launched the emblem of the North American era: development. At the end of the Cold War, after four decades of failed development, that country introduced an emblematic substitute: globalization.

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An emblem has no meaning or content. It is a symbol. Although it symbolizes North American hegemony, globalization alludes to interconnected phenomena, such as the internationalization of capital and global integration of the media, which are causing cultural and environmental devastation worldwide. Capital perhaps has a larger appetite than ever, but it doesn’t have the stomach to digest all the people it attempts to control. As it takes many off the payroll, it closes the doors of the globalized market to millions of small producers. A growing number of people are becoming disposable human beings, mere waste. And those who fall under the control of capital are torn from their cultural and physical roots and reduced to a modern form of slavery. In a consumer society, if they don’t become prisoners of addiction, they become prisoners of envy. The project takes violence to levels and forms without precedent, encouraging and deepening authoritarianism. There is no economic figure on destitution, no sociological or anthropological description of the misery, no picture of damaged environments that can give suitable witness to the violence that today generates such radical desperation in millions of people. It is difficult to conceive. The majority of those who are suffering this profound desperation now, however, do not become rebels or terrorists. Instead, they are condemned to living with their desperation and even passing it on to their children. Cynicism becomes an extreme form of violence. The obscene concentration of wealth is portrayed as the secret of prosperity for all. A structure of domination, more and more closed and rigid, is advertised as democracy. Universal human rights, based on legal systems imposed by a few over everyone else, are predicated as a new universal ethic, which disqualifies and attempts to be a substitute for the normative systems and the sources of the morality of the peoples and cultures that flourish on the margin of the Western matrix. The global project is generating reactions everywhere. Their promoters are still enclosed in the market fundamentalism guiding them, but dissenters start to increase even among their own ranks. At the grassroots, all over the world, people are reacting with a behavior radically different from globalization and localism. Localization, as we call that behavior, can be seen as an emblem of the current struggle by those who are more and more in their own physical and cultural spaces, open to broad coalitions of the discontented. They impulse an epic at the grassroots. Ordinary men and women are learning from one another how to challenge the

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very nature as well as the fundamentals of the global project (Esteva and Prakash 1998). With boldness and creativity, they are reclaiming and regenerating their own definitions of the good life, marginalized by development and globalization. They are reembedding food into agri-culture and regenerating their capacity to produce their own food. They escape from education to regenerate their own learning art, thus avoiding the oppressive class division between the educated and the subeducated or uneducated. They heal from health, escaping from the dependency on health systems that have turned into a new pathogenic agent. They regenerate their autonomous capacity to stay and feel well, supported by different medical traditions. Instead of becoming mere residents or commuters, they reclaim their ability to settle and mold their own places in the shapeless space built by the Market or the State. They are reclaiming and regenerating their own traditions of exchange. Others like them produce eighty percent of what they consume. Instead of an abstract market in the hands of large corporations, they organize millions of differentiated markets where people who know each other control their own exchanges, for example, through local currencies. Free trade implies subordination to multinational corporations, international institutions, protectionism, and bureaucracies. They trust neither. They escape this false disjunctive and try to bring investment and commerce control to a local level, where the people themselves can define what they want and don’t want. They use representative democracy as a political umbrella under which they can create a new regime of radical democracy where people govern themselves. They express their art of living and dying in their local places and reformulate nations as political horizons where their cultures can coexist harmoniously. Instead of One World, as conceived in the West, they have conceived a pluriverse where many worlds can be embraced. They know that changing the status quo on a global scale is very difficult, if not impossible. But they can create, in their own places, where they are well localized, a new way of being in the world that is economically feasible, socially just, and ecologically sensible.

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Regenerating the Place In the world of Indian peoples, peasants, and marginal, childhood is constructed daily, and those classified in that category are inserted in the institutions created to normalize them. Many of the children constructed in this way are disposed of. But this phenomenon, embedded in the illusions of development, is encountering growing resistance. The focus in towns and barrios is put on regenerating the place. They look down persistently at the soil, aware that they stand on it, not on earth. They observe around them where the so-called moderns have lost their grounding in both soil and virtue. By virtue, they call that shape, order, and direction of action informed by tradition and bounded by place. Virtue is identified and qualified by choices made within their habitual reach, by practices mutually recognized as good within a shared local culture that enhances a place’s memories. They find that this virtue they take care of and nourish is found in labor, craft, dwelling, and suffering supported, not by abstract earth, environment, or system, but by the particular soil these very actions have enriched with their traces. At some point, many of them were torn from their bonds to soil—the connections that limited action, making practical virtue possible. Modernization insulated them from plain dirt, toil, flesh, soil, and grave. The economy began to transmogrify them into interchangeable morsels of population, ruled by the laws of scarcity. Purely on their determination to survive or moved by a profound impulse emanating from their original commons, with which they never stopped having a strong connection, they began to reclaim and regenerate both their homes and their commons, even in the middle of the large urban settlements where they had been taken. Commons and homes are barely imaginable to persons hooked on public utilities and garaged in furnished cubicles. Bread is a mere foodstuff, if not calories or roughage. To speak of friendship, religion, and joint suffering as a style of conviviality—after the soil has been poisoned and cemented over—appears like academic dreaming to people randomly scattered in vehicles, offices, prisons, and hotels (Groeneveld et al. 1990). For them, however, for those who make up the Mexico profundo (deep) identified by Guillermo Bonfil, those who have not adapted to the Western matrix nor share the project of Mexico imaginario conceived by the elite who have governed the country since its foundation, for those

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who are still themselves, despite colonization and development, and who may even still be the majority of the population, life cannot be conceived without homes and commons (Bonfil 1996). They are not individuals—they are persons: knots in nets of concrete relationships (Panikkar 1995). The word person originally alluded to the masks worn in Greek or Roman theater. That meaning is still there. In the communities and barrios, under the individual mask of a recognizable physiognomy breathe persons who are the bearers of that world of relationships. They are what their relationships are. They live in communality. They resist with increasing energy the pressure to be reduced to individuals, mere juxtapositions of atoms of abstract categories that define roles and forms of thinking and behavior for the masses of consumers, voters, passengers, and affiliates of social security… They can fit themselves into those individual molds when they need to interact with modern institutions that are incapable of dealing with persons. But this fitting in is not exempt from tension, and even in these circumstances, they retain their condition of being persons, although they may be forced to disguise it temporarily. A few hours after the North American Free Trade Agreement took effect, a group of the most expendable of the disposable human beings of Mexico unfurled their dignity like a flag of rebellion and proclaimed “Enough!” against dominant oppression. Millions of the discontented asserted themselves in their own dignity and took on the initiative again. Aware that in a world of globalization, all the localisms will be razed to the ground, they transformed their old resistance into a struggle for liberation. Standing firm in their own places, in the autonomy that they had managed to maintain against everyone and everything, they opened up to broad coalitions of others as discontented as they were to participate in the epic of transformation that is taking place at the grassroots. Large numbers of those who were, at different times, participating in this transformation were disposable children. Some managed to reintegrate into the families and communities that had cast them out but whose slow but firm regeneration has allowed them to be taken in once again. Others participate in the creation of new commons that are appearing all over, even in downtown Mexico City. Still, others are weaving new threads of communion with others like themselves, equally disposed of and of the same age, and to build new dreams and realities among themselves.

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I want to take the analytic approach I’ve used to its logical conclusion. In some countries, such as Germany, and at the grassroots everywhere, more and more people are now aware that there is no technology for the disposal or recycling of waste effective enough to overcome the current predicament. The only sensible option is to stop generating it. We already have massive experiences demonstrating that this approach is not radical ecologists’ romantic or utopian claim but rather a feasible commonsense formula with all sorts of advantages. The ecological dry latrine and other devices for transforming human excrement into valuable compost have now been legitimized as effective alternatives to the flush toilet and its sequel of sanitary, ecological, social, and political evils. They have flowed out to all parts of the world through contagion and co-motion, even into the heart of industrial societies. Just as the British flush toilet can be seen as a metaphor for modern society, in which supposed technological solutions disguise problems at the price of aggravating them, the dry latrine can be appreciated as a metaphor for the epic now evolving at the grassroots. In the same way, instead of recycling disposable children and adolescents, which is essentially counterproductive, the people in villages and barrios are concentrating on resisting the process that transmogrifies a growing number of persons, regardless of their age, into waste. Instead of normalizing the conditions of some of them, adapting them through different procedures to the prevailing educational and labor standards, they are challenging these norms, as well as the logic has gone mad and out of control at whose service they were established. They are totally aware that the transmogrification of the human condition that converts children and the elderly into an economic load and, under the assumption of their inherent disabilities, makes them the object of impersonal and abstract institutional services is not something written in the stars. It is a historical phenomenon, clearly delimited in time and space. It had a beginning, and it could have an end. They think we are living at the beginning of its end, and they are ready to carry out whatever effort is needed to bring the new era to fruition. “We don’t want to return to normality” said the earthquake victims that shook Mexico City in 1985. They opposed a reconstruction that would only give a new appearance, in shining modern buildings, to the state of things that had existed before the earthquake. With their initiative, they launched the movement that made up what we now call civil

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society, to whom the Zapatistas directed their “Enough!” in 1994 (Esteva 1986: 2000). In the new context now woven at the grassroots, emerging predicaments are as new as they are unexpected. In many villages, for example, one may observe a new invisibility of young people. The custom of getting married at an early age used to mean that the sons and daughters of the family, whose position in the communities were defined as children of a family, were transformed into family heads early on. As young people are postponing the marriage age due to various factors, and as they become independent in some of their activities, they can no longer be seen as the children of a family, nor are they yet heads of families. Consequently, they are not seen. They do not fit well in either the traditional structures or the modern ones. Some, as a result, begin to languish like parasites or join more or less delinquent gangs, giving them some kind of identity. Many others, though, have started to participate in the movement of transformation, making a new position for themselves with their own effort, a position that affirms and consolidates the striving for autonomy from an early age. It would be criminal to idealize misery. A while back, the public became aware of the existence of a group of disposable children in Mexico City. They had built their common refuge under a network of sewers in conditions that were impossible to describe. Some of them showed signs of inalterable physical and mental destruction. This case is not exceptional. The conditions in vacant lots and other refuge sites are not much better. At the same time, surveys reveal that the number of disposable children rises continuously in all cities and that their conditions are constantly deteriorating. Faced with this horror, there is only silence, which is also a commons. It is an ineffable horror: you cannot say a word about it. Only a shared, prolonged, and general silence can be heard by everyone. All the evils that escaped Pandora’s box are now springing up in the world, but hope stays inside. Ordinary men and women rescued it from the box, nourishing their extraordinary behaviors and the creativity of their discontent with it. Hope, the essence of people’s movements, is now spreading at the grassroots, despite everything. And this hope, as Vaclav Havel said, is not the expectation that something will turn out well but the conviction that something makes sense, regardless of what happens. Those who have been disposed of by the economic society, which marginalized them; those dispensable for the globalizers, who cannot use them even as recyclable raw material; those persons are now marginalizing

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the economy, putting it on their side and becoming its limit. This is not as much of a paradox as it would seem. Disvalue can only be established when the economic mentality has become not only dominant but general. By affirming themselves with dignity in their own ways of being and thinking, those devalued by the economic society to generate economic value are preventing the generation of disvalue. Entrenched in their autonomous practices, those disposed of by modern society are limiting or even dismantling, within their coalitions of discontent, the normalized system of economic individuals—both the institutional arrangements and the legal mechanisms that deny or prohibit their autonomy. What I observe, in sum, in the world of peasants, Indian peoples, and marginal in which I live cannot be seen as caring for or recycling disposable children. On the contrary, the people concentrate their effort on preventing both the disposal of children and the transmogrification of persons at any wage into disposable human beings. They are fully aware that it is impossible to change the conditions that dispose of children and adults in society and the world in the short term. But their own experience shows them that it is feasible to achieve that change in their own places, where they practice their autonomy. David can always win over Goliath if he tries him in his own territory. Every day, we accumulate proof that this is not another illusion. It is always difficult and unattainable in some cases, but it is a feasible endeavor in most cases. As they advance in the regeneration of their place, they are successfully coping with the enormous challenge of reclaiming their disposed of children, giving them back the position and dignity they lost. Several professionals who came to Chiapas to offer their help, inspired by the Zapatista movement, were surprised and frustrated by the reaction they found. “If you come to help a group of poor Indians who are struggling against a bad government”, they were told, “we thank you, but we don’t want your help”. Some left, convinced that they were up against the close-mindedness observed in other rebels and that, for no reason, the Zapatistas prevented them from sharing with the people in the villages their voluntary services that they considered intrinsically beneficial to them. But others wanted to stay and listen. They wondered what was prompting this reaction, which at first sight seemed fundamentalist and authoritarian, as well as backward. Why did these communities refuse to receive all the services of the government and even reject the actions of health or education that were offered them with generosity by those who wanted to commit themselves politically to them? And they soon found

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another answer. “If you think our struggle is also yours”, they heard, “don’t stop coming because we have a lot to talk about”. This spirit of those who have continued to speak to each other, explains perhaps what was said by the participants at the First Intercontinental Encounter For Humanity and Against Neoliberalism, convened by the Zapatistas in 1996 and held in La Realidad (Reality), in the rebellious heart of Selva Lacandona: The rebels search each other out. They walk toward one other. They find each other, and together they break other fences. In the rural areas and cities, in the states, in the nations, on the continents, the rebels begin to recognize themselves, to know themselves to be equal and different. They continue on their fatiguing walk, walking as it is now necessary to walk, that is to say, struggling… (EZLN 1998: 43).

Reembedding Food in Agriculture (Culture and Agriculture, Volume 13, Issue 48, December 1994) https:/ /doi.org/10.1525/cuag.1994.13.48.1 I don’t know how to say what I want to say. It is something radically new. It has been said time and again for centuries. I am not trying to justify pouring old wine into new bottles, but, instead, to illustrate my perplexity and the very nature of the predicament I want to discuss here. We need to articulate in a convincing discourse a wide variety of initiatives being experimented now, by people at the grassroots, all over the world. Well rooted in tradition and local culture, peasants, urban “marginals”, and other social majorities are apparently departing from modern thinking and behavior. They are not attempting to go back to any lost paradise; nor are they falling into nostalgia or revivalism. In fact, they are dissolving the historical break imposed by modernity. This search for continuity gives them the spirit of the old wine. But they are not merely new bottles. They are coming from different grapes; the wine is different. These initiatives are so new, in fact, that we have no words to express their initiatives in an articulate manner. Our formal categories are irrelevant or useless. Even our simple words, doors of our perception, are not accurate. That is my predicament. In a sense, what I am trying to do is impossible. These experiences are so well rooted in local spaces and cultures, that any attempt to

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reduce them to a single, global discourse is both impossible and preposterous. But they have in common their radical postmodernity, which is not only something that comes after modernity, but something that happens against modernity: they are reacting to a social condition that has reached a world scale. After modernity, we may have the flourishing of a thousand different lifestyles, redefining what a good life is in local, rooted terms. Hopefully, we will not have a universal, unique truth nor global certainties, of the kind now promoted by globalists: “think globally; act locally”, the conventional or alternative managers of the development discourse. A thousand different truths, different perceptions of the world, and different cosmic visions conceived at the local level will emerge from the ruins left by modernity. But the differentiated responses, we are now observing are also against modernity; they are reactions to a common enemy—shaping the struggle itself and its basic thrust. Grasping the commonality of those diverse experiences in a single discourse does seem thus possible. Inventing that discourse seems urgent, badly needed. For all these thousands of local struggles will be able to challenge the gigantic forces and institutions created by modernity, only if they succeed in joining forces against the shared enemy. Their discourses are emerging from the world’s social majorities: one of the main sources of their strength. This strength, however, will only be effective if it is articulated in a unifying discourse—one capable of shaping the coalition of all the disperse and diverse struggles, each of them focused on a different head of the modern Hydra. And this is how I come to define my puzzlement. Because they are radically postmodern struggles and experiences, we cannot express them in modern terms. But we have not, just yet, the terms, the words of the new era. How to bury the pestilent corpse of modern times if we cannot yet see, touch, and smell the postmodern ones? We can learn from our ancestors when confronted with similar circumstances. But we remain unable to bring from the past the words that we need to say now what we want to say. That is why I don’t know how to explain myself here. Allow me then to do what I do, in my daily life, for a living: to tell you a few stories, to bring to this room a few images that perhaps may evoke in you clues or hints or premonitions, from your own experience, around which we can

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construct a kind of dialogical dialogue, inspired in the radical pluralism to which Raimón Panikkar constantly invites us. What I don’t Want to Do Before that, however, allow me to tell you what I don’t want to do here. That I know very well. I don’t want to tell you another horror story about the implications of the Green Revolution. That story is by now so well documented, so extensively examined and described, that one needs to be blind or very rich, very stubborn or very immoral, to ignore the destructive impact of that monstruous experiment. Since the pioneering research of Andrew Pearse and the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development in the early 1970s, thousands of pages have been written to describe and explain, in full detail, every and all aspects of this dark chapter of human history. Technically speaking, what seemed to be the culmination of millennia of agricultural knowledge and experience happens to be just an extremely ephemeral, unsustainable productive regime, transmogrifying agriculture into agri-business, and destroying both nature and culture. I cannot be of any help for those who refuse to see these facts, now well constructed. Neither do I want to join the forces of Naderism and participate in the world campaign for healthy food, natural products, organic coffee, or holistic diets. I am affronted by those who have transformed a legitimate claim of millions of people against the junk now delivered to their tables, into the last, fashionable extreme of palate industrialization. “Health food” has become another turn of the screw of economic society. The struggle against obscene corporations has been refunctionalized and transmogrified into another contortion of the system. The otherwise admirable struggle to protect consumers has rooted even more deeply the very idea of consumerism. There is nothing like good consumerism. Consum-ere, the Latin root for consuming, means to take up completely, make away with, devour, waste, destroy, and spend. The first meaning mentioned in the OED for “consume” is “to make away with, use up destructively. Said chiefly of fire: To burn up, reduce to invisible products, or to ashes; also of any similar destructive or ‘devouring’ agent”. “Consume” is also “to destroy (a living being, or more usually a race or a tribe) by disease or any wasting process”; “to decompose”; “to spend wastefully”; “to waste one

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‘substance, ruin oneself”; “to swallow up in destruction”; “to wear out of use”; “to exhaust right of action”; and “to waste away, decay, rot, perish”. All those historical meanings of the active verb “consume” are now condensed in our daily practices of consumption. Naderism simply extends and legitimizes our impulses to destroy, to ruin ourselves and our environments, to waste away our natural and social inheritance, and to produce decay and rot. I don’t want to associate myself with such an endeavor. I want even less to talk about any “back to the land” campaign, both the peaceful, soft, courageous, but still too embedded-in individualism of the “Back to the land” movement of the Sixties or the violent, authoritarian way for dismantling the cities, promoted by Pol Pot or Abigail Guzmán. I am back in the land of my ancestors. Like many thousands of Mexicans, I abandoned the beautiful city in which I was born, a city of a million inhabitants. It is now the most polluted human settlement on earth, where 16 million pile up over each other and thrive on the destruction of the whole central region of Mexico, depriving it of water, food, and landscape in the most unsustainable way. I am living in a small town, in the South of Mexico, where I am learning to use my hands, a few kilometers away from the place where my Zapotec grandmother was born. However, unless the God’s bulldozer pays a visit to Mexico City more boisterous that the one it paid in 1985, or another Pol Pot seize the power in my country, I cannot imagine the quick dismantling of our cities, where 80% of the population, the experts say, will live by the end of this century. I cannot support or celebrate such events—no matter how much I am horrified by the present situation or the perspective. I would like to go beyond the explosion of the myth of scarcity, as proposed by Joe Collins and Frances Moore Lappé, in their pioneering work to criticize the Green Revolution and put Food First 20 years ago. But their explosion focused on redistribution. In the tradition of Amartya Sen, they talked about “rights of access” and described rigorously how we are now producing more than enough food to adequately feed every inhabitant on earth. Sen documented how, during every great famine of this century, food exports continued; and that the people were dying of hunger when the tables of the industrialized world were full of food coming from their lands and countries. They offer a good argument against the irrationality and immorality of our food system. But instead of going “beyond the myth of scarcity”, as they pretended, they were

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rooting even more the principle of scarcity, by suggesting better ways for organizing the production and distribution of the modern commodity called “food”. I don’t want to talk here about the Green Revolution, healthy or good consumerism, Back to the Land movements or Food Aid and Redistribution. But I don’t know how to say what I want to say. Beyond Reminiscences A few weeks ago, preparing myself for this talk, I was revisiting in my mind one of the most beautiful towns I have ever known. It is San Andrés Chicahuaxtla, in the Northern mountains of Oaxaca. There is fog most of the day, most of the year, in this town, because they live literally in the clouds. It is cold there. They are Indians, of the Triqui nation. All the women wear magnificent huipiles, with horizontal rows of red and white in creative, very personal designs, and conceived and woven by each of them. They have magnificent stories. They love to tell of the time when a terrible pest of enormous grasshoppers devastated a whole area of Oaxaca and came to San Andrés. The pest ended there. They eat grasshoppers in a thousand forms and are experts in capturing them. The kids, particularly, know how to skillfully play the hat in the grass to capture them. An expert will complaisantly agree that grasshoppers are rich in protein, but anyway, they are very tasty. When the pest of grasshoppers came to San Andrés, the Triquis ate them all. They now have a prayer begging for the pest to come back. I was remembering when I first met doña Refugio, the mother of a friend of mine, who invited me to visit him. Her husband, don Marcos, was the town’s leader for many years, since the Forties. He first brought peace to it, wisely conciliating with its neighbors all conflicts about limits and leading the yearly march during which the whole town dances, sings, and celebrates, not to build walls but to peacefully remember and affirm the agreements in a joyful encounter with the neighbors. When development came to Oaxaca, the fantasies of the Triquis, like the fantasies of most of us, “underdeveloped” people, were captured by the promises of development. At that time, don Marcos conducted a successful struggle to bring a road, a school, a health center, and all the other development “marvels” to his town. And don Marcos four sons and his daughter followed the pattern of the times to attend the ritual of “superior education”.

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After completing or abandoning the university, they all resigned from their urban careers and returned to the town. For many years, in constant struggle with the educational authorities, the school departed from the official curriculum and concentrated on forms of apprenticeship of skills locally needed in agriculture, carpentry, craftmanship, and other areas. One of the sons of don Marcos was responsible for this venture. No doctor appeared in the Health Center, thus protecting the town from the usual medical intervention, disabling their healing capacities. The very modern building of the Center became a House for Guests. When another son of don Marcos finished his studies as a doctor, he succeeded in getting the commission to work in it. But he respected the area for guests, thinking that no “hospital beds” were needed, as well as the local traditions. He transformed the operating room, for example, to facilitate that the women kept their traditional squatting position when giving birth and asked other women to be there, helping those in labor while he was just around, to be called when needed. Rarely was he called, but in fact he became famous in the region for his success in assisting births. Marcos, the third son, was selected to give the main speech to the King and the Queen of Spain when they came to Oaxaca. Full of respect and hospitality, he welcomed them to this old land, “where we conserve”, he said, “we live together and we resist, in our own ways of life, those created by the wisdom of our ancestors that we continue recreating”. And he added: “We use this occasion to tell the Western world that our way of life has been essentially communitarian, solidarian, with a profound respect for the land, our mother, which protect and nourish us; that is why our heart suffers when we see how it is damaged, destroyed by greed and ambition, when it is denied to their ancestral owners, when its natural equilibrium is broken with so many industrial products”. “We have been observed with the eyes of the Western perception, in its different forms, but we have not been understood; it is still imposed on us the Western form of development, its civilization, its way of seeing the world and relating to nature, thus denying all the knowledge generated by our different peoples. We have domesticated the corn, that sacred plant which gave us existence and we continue improving it. But even so, whenever an agronomist comes to our towns, he tells us that the corn numbered and produced in his research center is better; if we build a house with our

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knowledges and materials, an architect comes to tell us that a dignified house can only be built with industrialized products; if we invoke our old gods, someone comes to tell us that our faith is superstitious”.

During my visit, we were recalling these and other stories when the time for the meal came. We entered the warm domain of doña Refugio, the mother, where she squatted at the center of the room, attending her cooking place on the floor. We sat there, chatting with her and her sons, for more than two hours. She gave us, hand-to-hand, a delicious soup of guías de calabaza, one key element of the traditional milpa. Other elements of the milpa followed as we sat chatting and exploring why Dona Refugio remained in her small, quiet town. She had refused to ever move out of San Andrés, except for short visits to the neighboring village of Tlaxiaco: a place of 5 000 people, defined by her as a big city. Her sons insisted on giving her a gas stove and other “conveniences” of modern kitchens and houses. She refused. She also rejected a Lorena stove. We were asking ourselves why she did not want to leave. What were her reasons for refusing so many “comforts” she was offered? That morning, she offered us many reasons to do precisely that. All her reasons revealed how her whole world is embedded-in agriculture. Some of her reasons seem rare. She said, for example, like other women in the town, that Lorena stoves are bad for the back, for they force you to be on your feet to cook. I don’t know if she is right. Other women adopted the Lorena stoves precisely for the reasons rejected by her. But if you can imagine doña Refugio in her place, perhaps you can start suspecting why she said that, why she says there is no reason to leave if she has everything she wants here. And more… That fire is at the center of the warmest room of the house. And doña Refugio is there, every day, at the very center, surrounded by her whole family, talking with all her sons or her husband, discussing personal difficulties or the predicaments of the community. That fire and doña Refugio are the center of the conversation, and in fact, the very center of family life, and family life is the center of the community. The whole community’s life is organized around such fires, the center of kitchens, and the source of comida. The very essence of the milpa is here, and not in the corn emerging in the fields—the only element of the milpa perceived by the experts, the agronomists. It is precisely here, around the communal fire, in the very heart of the family.

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In remembering the reasons of doña Refugio, when I got that glimpse of her life, I began to reenjoy again every minute of my stay in San Andres. At the same time, a kind of uneasiness came to my mind. Was this a good story to bring here? Since that experience is so present in my skin, in my soul, I can easily share with you all the joy and wisdom I found there. I can describe with precision the incredible talents of these people and how wise they have been in handling all the challenges posed to them by modernity. I can go for hours telling stories about San Andrés. But in doing so, here and now, am I running the risk of alienating you from my argument, militating against my own cause? Everybody knows stories of this kind. And many of you, I am sure, love them, enjoy them, and admire them: they are so rich and beautiful and thought-provoking. Everyone can recognize that these people have a magnificent lifestyle— but only magnificent for them, out there, and far away; it is good for those Indian cultures that should be protected, kept alive, and whose human rights deserve full respect… Nothing in them, however, for you, for me, for us. The telling of such stories, then, becomes counterproductive, portraying my position as that of a utopian, another dreaming prophet, campaigning for going back in history. What seems good for traditional societies, usually perceived as a mere reminiscence of the past, seems to say nothing to modern man and woman, except to some fundamentalist freaks, searching in ancient cultures or religions the spirituality they can no longer find in their own social contexts. Is this really pertinent for us, here and now, in the kind of reflection you are expecting from me? A World Where Scarcity Cannot Appear Some time ago, I proposed to use the word comida to differentiate doña Refugio’s reality. We must reserve the word alimento for professional or institutional use. To eat, to care for comida, to generate it, to cook it, to eat it, to assimilate it: all these are activities that belong to non-modern men and women and are, in general, gender activities; almost the whole life of dona Refugio in San Andrés Chicahuaxtla can be described around those activities. Alimentarse, in contrast, is to purchase and consume alimentos (edible objects), designed by professionals or experts, while being produced and distributed through institutions. I can make this distinction in Spanish. I can find in the reality of dona Refugio, as well as in all peasant groups, differential behaviors that

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correspond to both conditions. I can document that comida, among many peasants, still refers to a very complex cultural relationship with the earth and with the milpa, which is not equivalent to the technical activity of producing maize, as the milpa is usually described. I can document the differences between their attitudes and behaviors and the ones of a middle-class student in Mexico City. He must be alimentado, he consumes alimentos and is completely dependent on the institutions that give or sell him these alimentos. It is difficult for him to understand what comida means, except when he uses the word with reference to the alimentos he gets. There are other languages, like German, in which I can make the distinction, but the corresponding words do not represent a differential reality of the same kind. I may offer, in contrast, a lot of examples, in the South, where the word is enriched by others that describe cultural practices connected with it. I cannot make this distinction in English. Food is alimento, not comida. Meal, nourishment, and other words of the family are referred to only as food. Meal is a cultural word, like comida; perhaps it originally meant comida, like mahle, in German, of the same root. But now, it seems to refer only to the time and condition of taking food. Nourishment is a technical word—like nutrición, nutrition, nourriture, and nahrung —which refers to food contents, as defined by professionals. There is no English word for comida. It is not easy to explain why and thinking of that make me feel sad. Perhaps I must recall that the Anglosaxon world was the cultural space in which the industrial mode of production was established first and foremost. There, vernacular activities related to comida have been constantly suffocated or suppressed. Those who have recently tried to regenerate them have confronted great difficulties. This situation has institutionalized permanent scarcity of comida. I am not referring here to overfed or underfed minorities in the First World, nor to malnutrition, the technical expression that enroots the idea of a “recommended diet”, established by institutions, professionals, or alternative sects; I am not referring to food shortages after a bad crop or to depleted reserves. I am talking about a general and chronic condition of industrialized societies, where people must be fed and remain totally dependent on private or public institutional apparatuses that create lifelong addictions to food services… assumed as magnificent conquests of civilization. In this “civilized” world, capacities and needs are delinked from each other; in radical contrast with dona Refugio’s comida, where

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they are inextricably linked. Industrial eaters’ capacities are no longer associated with the skill or talent of autonomously creating comida. Instead, such skills and talents are reduced to the economists’ conception of “buying power”. “Civilized” peoples’ needs can no longer be expressed in personal, communal, or cultural terms; rather, they are sunk in the myths of “preference curves” or “consumer sovereignty”, in the marketplace, where the corporations create, shape, and dictate the “needs” of consumers—homines economici trapped in the illusion that such needs are their own creation. The resulting homogenization is constantly masked with the myth of differential consumption and ideological “freedom of choice”, thus hiding the hunger for cultural differentiating autonomy which can offer real freedom to choose. The worst, perhaps, is that this “advanced world” blinds people from perceiving the absolute lack of comida in their lives, in addition to their naivete about the chronic scarcity of food. They eat daily the illusion of abundance. In the common perception, hunger—the absolute lack of food—can only appear in backward countries like Ethiopia; in America, as President Reagan used to say, only ignorants can suffer hunger. Some people have identified hunger in many Americans (20 or more million, they say), associating it with everything but ignorance. My question, however, goes beyond both these opposed interpretations of scarcity, which rely on the market or the state for the proper allocation of food resources, successfully hiding the existence of modern, chronic scarcity—when “scarce” resources relate to infinite ends. My question alludes to the very fact that nobody ever seems here to feel the lack of comida. How can I describe to you an experience about which you have not even a word to name it and perhaps no element, in your daily living, to relate to it? When I mentioned the tasty grasshoppers of San Andres, I was not trying to compare them with an American steak, reducing them, like an expert, to the number of proteins they have, or suggesting to try them as an exotic delicatessen. I cannot but remembering how much we laughed when a man of the Sonora dessert came to town, after a long walk, and was offered a chicken soup with a sauce that we rejected before because it was very thick. “Disgusting”, he said; “too wetty”. His reaction belongs in fact to the same category of events compelling many Americans to go to MacDonalds in Moscow, Peking, or Mexico City: they are eating their food, what they know, what their palate recognize. They do the same, by the way, when eating “cultural” or “ethnic” food, Chinese food, Thai food, and Mexican food, whatever food of the world… in America.

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They usually reject that same food in the corresponding countries, for very legitimate reasons. But for Americans and other “industrial eaters”, the abundance, richness, and diversity of ethnic and other foods hide the simple fact that they are eating only American food, the same standard food—frozen, industrialized, and “chemicalized” food… This illusion of both abundance and diversity prevents any possibility of perceiving or feeling the lack of comida. To have grasshoppers in a “Mexican” restaurant of any industrial country is like inviting a penguin to this room. It will be so rare, so out of context, that it will surely inspire curiosity, interest, and even affection. But we cannot live with it. This is not its place. How can we recover the very notion that comida cannot be dis-placed? How can we see that you cannot reproduce or imitate the fire of dona Refugio? That “food” may travel 2 000 miles or 20 000 miles but comida never moves out of the very place it was born? To eat “Thai food” in the best restaurant of America, assuming that it is Thai comida, is like being the proud owner of the hole of a magnificent gothic window… If comida is something like food-in-context, we need to be fully aware that this context cannot be defined by the “local color” of the restaurant, the quality of the food itself, or the genius of the cook. The context is necessarily the social context; the whole human world which comida embeds, the very soul and heart of comida. If you ever go to República Dominicana, please try to visit Monte Bonito, a beautiful small town in the Northwestern part of the country. My friend Erik Duus discovered it for me. He is a Norwegian anthropologist who lived there for years. He was fascinated by an extended women practice called impostura, studied many of its forms and wrote a very interesting but still unpublished essay on the matter. He never attempted to define impostura. It has a symbolic meaning and is, at the same time, “an informal contractual relationship, where the partners make an implicit promise to each other to exchange part of their meal with each other. The woman’s ability to seal such a partnership with another woman, without the interference of the males, seems to depend on how consistently activities and responsibilities are kept separate. Locally, the responsibility of the man is to provide for fresh food and the responsibility of the woman is to prepare the meals. Many women would go as far as saying that what goes in the kitchen is none of her husband’s business, as long as he is served his meals at the table. However, there is no absolute division between men’s work and women’s work when it comes to direct tasks. Men can commonly be observed

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peeling manjok and preparing meals, and women can be seen carrying the machete to the fields, to take part in the agricultural tasks. The main characteristic of the relations between the sexes within and outside the household seems to be that men behave and relate to other men in their attempts to comply with their responsibilities, and that women relate to other women to solve theirs. Said differently, men and women rely on different networks of social relations. These networks are only partly segregated. Just as men support each other with labor and often with raw food, the majority of the women help each other with cooked food or prepared meals on a regular basis. Some women might have developed this to the point where they give each other some part of everything they prepare, from coffee in the morning and throughout the three daily meals. However, it is most common to pass only the comida, a meal that ideally should consist of rice with cooked beans or peas and, preferably, a small piece of meat” (Duus 1982). But my friend soon discovered that impostura is a matter of complex interpretations and acts and gestures and that it dives into the creation of meanings and symbols in social interaction. With his anthropological training, he collected a long and wide variety of expressions used by women to talk about impostura. Let me quote three of his examples: (1) “To me, impostura means affection… For example, you and I we have affection for each other. You send me your comida and I will send you mine. But in this no one is looking for any advantage… only affection. Because, perhaps you will send me your comida now, before mine is ready, and I will eat it and take away my hunger, you see? But perhaps there will be days when I can send my comida also to you, when you are hungry. This is what we are searching for”. (2) “Impostura means togetherness and that we treat each other good in the neighborhood… Impostura is having good friends and being considerate each day as poor people”. (3) “Impostura we use here like perhaps one day I do not have anything to give my children, and then one impostura arrives, and I will be able to fill them… that is impostura. The impostura is something we got used to as friends and neighbors, you see?… that’s how it is – that if there are neighbors, we like to believe that if we have impostura we shall treat each other better” (Duus 1982: 16).

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Erik Duus elaborates on these expressions very beautifully. He perceives the three main issues about impostura in them. Giving away food, he thinks, is understood beyond the act itself, to express social sentiments of unity, consideration, togetherness, and kindness. Such solidarity is partly a question of economic position; it can express the social identification of groups of people as poor. “But it is also related to the female world of responsibility and solidarity. As mothers and women who are responsible for bringing up the children, they emphasize collectivity and mutual help to secure this” (Duus 1982: 19). Duus also observed that there are many acts similar to impostura: gifts of food are made in many different occasions, in marriages, births, etc. “Impostura has a reserved meaning where it becomes identified as being different from these other quite similar acts”. In the whole range of uses and meanings of the word, impostura may reflect an act as abstract as a “custom” or the very particular piece of meal prepared. It is thus very difficult to make a distinction between impostura and those other acts that look so similar. However, a kind of uneven reciprocity which cannot be quantified and whose basic rules are not evident or stable in time and space seems to be a built-in component of impostura. Duus illustrates this point through a short conversation with a woman: A. “I find that if I give you today, tomorrow, the day after and so on forever, and you do not give me because you cannot afford it… no, that has nothing to do with impostura. Q. But what if I give to you a big plate every day and you only give me back one small one, is that impostura? A. Yes… oh, yes, that is impostura. Because you give me a lot because you have a lot, and I will give you just a little, because I have just a little” (Duus 1982: 19). For a hundred pages, Duus continues carefully examining the world of impostura in many of its highly complex nuances. I cannot bring to you here all the richness of his stories. Before elaborating on them, allow me to present one more description of impostura: “Look, when God gives me one pound of rice and there won’t be enough to portion it out with a ladle, I will take one of the tin spoons, one of the smaller spoons, and give everybody a little. The idea is that I live sharing… That is how we poor people live. (I would say) Oh God, how

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hungry I am. Then immediately people will arrive, and the woman over there will cook her pound of rice and she will send me a little, perhaps she over there will also send me a little, tha’s two and my stomach will start getting full, but then the woman over there will also send me a little, then I am getting filled up, and then, when Juana sends me her part, I am already satisfied. When you arrive, I can therefore say: Look, mister, you have this little meal. God gives to me and to everybody” (Duus 1982: i). The whole social context of Monte Bonito supports these attitudes: Agricultural activities are the backbone of the village and the community economy… Commuting by foot or donkey is a daily affair… The major crop orientation in the peasant agriculture is that of rice, manjok, plaintains, sweet-potato and other roots for direct consumption, while peanuts, peas, and beans are often cultivated as cash crops. This does not mean that the peasants of the area make a clear distinction between cash and subsistence farming. It is quite common to retain a rather large proportion of the beans and peas for personal consumption in the period of the harvest. On the other hand, it is fully accepted for one to sell parts of the rice, manjok and other roots in the market. (Duus 1982: 9)

Duus also observed that the present emphasis on subsistence cropping and production for domestic consumption must rely on a combination of both cultural and economic perspectives. On the one hand, one can detect a certain reluctance to seek more market-oriented agricultural engagements. Peanuts, the most secure crop, give only marginal economic benefits in terms of labor input. The production of peas and beans is very risky, with little prediction for success or failure. These peasant households can therefore not to be characterized as having completely ‘withdrawn’ from a more market oriented production. On the other hand, one must understand that the production of rice, plaintains, manjok, sweet potatoes, and other roots belong intrinsically to their way of life. These products are virtual symbols of self-reliance and autonomy; they are products that greatly ‘liberate’ time for other purposes and play an important part in the local exchange system. With manjok in the ground the men have complied with one of the basic household responsibilities and are ‘free’ to participate in social and public life in a ‘proper’ way. (Duus 1982: 13)

I am telling this story to talk about scarcity. Food is a word immersed in the economic world, the world of scarcity. Comida alludes to a normal

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practice in a world where “scarcity”, in the economists’ construction of social reality, cannot appear and which frequently has mechanisms to prevent it from appearing. The scarcity I am talking about is the one whose meaning was clarified by Iván Illich ten years ago. Illich notes that: “scarcity defines the field in which the laws of economics relate (1) subjects (possessive, invidious, genderless individuals—personal or corporate), (2) institutions (which symbolically foster mimesis), and (3) commodities, within (4) an environment in which the commons have been transformed into resources, private or public. Thus used, scarcity should not be confused with (i) rare birds of interest to some ornithologists, (ii) a meager or niggardly diet on which camel drivers have lived for centuries in the dessert, (iii) a deficient diet, as diagnosed by a social worker who visits a family, (iv) the last reserves of wheat in a typical eleventh-century French village—in which case custom or violence would assure that all get some, however small amount”. In this text, Illich pertinently adds that “the fading of gender and the growing intensity and variety of scarcities are two sides of the same process of Westernization” (Illich 1982: 19). We can see, in Monte Bonito, that impostura does not relate “possessive, invidious” subjects but affectionate people, linked in solidarity, connected not through institutions but through personal bonds, rooted in a long tradition, in a world where commodities play a marginal role, and the environment is largely occupied by the commons. But to bring here this story about impostura in Monte Bonito is just a pretext to tell my real story: the fact that I have been finding, during the last ten years, many forms and shapes of impostura, of comida, at the very heart of Mexico City. In Monte Bonito, you can see impostura as the natural continuation of a long established tradition and it can be treated as a reminiscence, what has survived from the past, an interesting but marginal practice in rural, “primitive” towns. In Mexico City, you need to deal with the question of how and why these kind of practices are becoming standard once again. You need to ask if the present flourishing of such practices in one of the most modern and populated cities of the world, in that gigantic settlement overurbanized, are also reminiscences, a step back, a form of underdevelopment, or strictly postmodern practices.

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Giving up Scarcity Tepito is a barrio in downtowm Mexico City: 72 blocks occupied by 120,000 inhabitants. In 1945, it was one of the worst places to live in Mexico. Its houses were really ugly: they were in fact rooms, not houses, of 13 to 25 square meters, each one built around dusty yards, without sanitation facilities and made of very poor materials. Ten, twenty, or fifty of these “houses” constituted a vecindad.5 Only delinquents of every kind accepted living there, giving the place additional handicaps. After World War II, the government of the city “froze” the rent of low cost housing. The people did not perceive this measure as temporary, since they struggled for it. As a result, the arrangement subsisted for many years, in spite of countless attempts by lawyers, politicians, and developers to eliminate it. Those living in Tepito enjoyed thus a kind of economic privilege compelling them to remain. The very low quality of their houses put the rent among the cheapest in the city. So the Tepitans conquered spaces with ingenuity. They got a second floor by building one in the interior of their houses. The houses serve as workshops during the day and as homes at night. Patios are common spaces with multiple purposes. Step by step, the Tepitans invaded the streets, transforming them into places for workshops, trade, and recreational activities. All of Tepito was transformed into a creative and recreative space. The trade of used clothes flourishes next to that of new clothes produced in Tepito. Shoe repairmen prosper next to workshops to produce new shoes. Tepitans have remade, remodeled, and transformed a thousand mechanical and electrical gadgets thrown by their rich or middle-class owners. The quality of the objects reformulated by them is now famous. With the earthquake, in 1985, 40% of their weak houses collapsed. A whole struggle started. Lawyers and developers saw this as their opportunity to get rid of the Tepitans, while the Tepitans fought to stay there and rebuild their houses. An obscene trade of charities developed soon, with churches, political parties, and NGOs attempting to capture a portion of the victims to “help” them. Since our group had been active in the area for ten years before the earthquake, we were fully involved in the struggle. A month after the whole thing started, my friends of Tepito asked me to go to America and Europe to campaign in their name. Other friends organized my trip through eleven countries and got for me appointments with key officials, in the governments, the foundations, and the media.

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Everybody hosting me assumed that I was coming to beg for funds. They were ready to open the pocket, replenished by the horrifying pictures of the earthquake and the calls to help the victims. It was a great surprise to them to discover that the purpose of my trip was to stop the flow of funds. Since it was impossible to convince them with reasoning, I used a standard story in my presentation of the argument. It is the following. Twenty-four hours after the earthquake, the FAO representative in Mexico received a call from Rome: “You have a million dollars to help the victims. You must spend the funds in the next three months”. The representative immediately created a commission with French, German, and Chilean experts, who happened to have a ready-made aid project, to establish in Tepito a hundred popular restaurants, selling to the victims subsidized food and using the opportunity to educate the Tepitans in how to consume a balanced diet. The Tepitans were profoundly offended, angry—and concerned. First, they said, “30 years ago we used to eat escamocha: leftovers of friendly restaurants, given for free to poor people. We cooked everything in enormous pots in the streets and shared the final product, escamocha”. “We don’t want industrial escamocha now”, they added; “we eat very well, everything we want, in our own way, thanks to our organization and to the cultural space we have created”. And they are right. You can find in Tepito every kind of comida, in the most diverse styles. In the streets, you can see thousands of children who look dirty, because they are playing and fooling around and working all the time, but they also look healthy and well; no social worker will ever find what they call malnutrition. But the Tepitans were especially concerned with the FAO project because a third of them make a living in producing and selling comida. Many of those dedicated to such activity could be ruined by the competence of subsidized, industrial food. Like all development aid, this aid project could be counterproductive. Tepitans wanted to oppose the “food aid” in the same vein by which they previously opposed the development of their spaces. My trip itself was extremely counterproductive. It was a great success in the media. My message was so peculiar, in the time in which the campaign to move the pocket of everyone was at its peak, that newspapers put me in the front page. Every official listened to me with concerned interest. But instead of following my argument, they asked all their representatives in Mexico to talk with me, assuming that I was the ideal person to help them to spend their money. But that is another story, illustrating the kind

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of prejudices and inertia that blind the eyes of those making decisions in our world food system. The story that I want to highlight here is that the event allowed me to enter more deeply in the world of comida of Tepito. Those establishments producing and selling comida were not only another line of business or an income generating activity of the Tepiteans. They were but the top layer of a far from frozen, extended web of very complex activities. Something like impostura was there, but it was a thousand times more complex that in Monte Bonito. My friend Erik Duus would, like others, find it near impossible to capture the complexities of Tepitean impostura. Many Tepitans, for example, maintain close connections with the rural communities from which a large proportion of them first emigrated and use these connections to operate the channels for a constant flow of people and goods in both directions. This “trade” has been a key element for the regeneration of the rural communities and has kept alive a very active web for mutual help and solidarity. It is not a mere “commercial operation”, looking for profit or trying to benefit from a kind of “comparative advantage”. It is in fact a system to modulate migration, in both directions, to host people in both extremes of the web and to get proper support for all the members of this cluster of communities occupying multiple spaces, in both rural and urban areas. Inside Tepito, the exchanges are made in the most fantastic, complex, and efficient forms. In the vecindades, a kind of impostura, comprising a lot more things than comida, frequently prevails. Out of the vecindades, there are literally hundreds of associations—by street, by line of activity, and by trade or skill. Since many families are most of the time in the street, for their trade or work, they have no time for cooking at home. They have therefore created special arrangements with “establishments” where friends or relatives are producing and selling comida, which in their time have other arrangements with the workshops, the market, and most Tepitans. If we trace, in Tepito, all the aspects and shapes of comida, we may find that it embraces perhaps the whole range of human activities— from rituals and prayers to the milpa to dancing or to electronic gadgets. But that is only a clue for what I discovered. Similar patterns are being followed, created, and recreated in all the popular barrios of the city. And now, with the blessing of the so-called “crisis”, the world has turned upside down. The “marginals” and low middle-class employees complementing their income and enriching their lives through comida are now sharing the ten thousand tricks that the “poor master so well for

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a living, with the members of the middle- or high- middle-class, who were previously a role model for the ‘poor’, but who lost part or all of what they considered the ‘privileges’ of development”. While the ex-engineer or ex-salesman is now driving a taxi, his wife is cooking some pastries and sending her college children to sell them, perhaps in one of the “street markets” now booming in Mexico City—next to the ultramodern malls that still disseminate the illusions of development. After a period of frustration, humiliation, and rage, the ex-middle classes are rediscovering a new kind of freedom, where their talents and skills can be fully applied, and some solidarity and personal bonds can be regenerated. And so I started to understand why we have not killed each other in that monstruous settlement of 16 million inhabitants, in the middle of what the experts call the worst economic crisis of the century in Mexico. It is not an accident. It is perhaps defining some extended phenomena and trends, if we believe two great surprises that the last Census in Mexico, in 1990, brought to the experts’ desks. First, the population of Mexico City: where the experts were predicting 20 million, they found “only” 16. They said that this was because of previous mistakes in the estimates or the very poor quality of the 1980 Census. Many of us suspect that, in addition to serious miscalculations in previous population projections, we had a net emigration. The 1980s, the “lost decade for development”, the so-called crisis, timely assisted by the earthquake of 1985, stimulated many people to come back to the communities they had earlier abandoned. Many more, like myself, decided to escape from foolishness. And this brings us to the second surprise. Oaxaca is a province of 3 million in the South of Mexico; 70% are Indians. They were dying during the development era. Thanks to the “Mexican miracle”, when we had an annual rate of economic growth of 6%, one of the richest natural areas of the world started to look like a moon landscape. In Mexico City, in the Northwest of our country or in Los Angeles, whole new colonies of Mixtecs, Zapotecs, or Mixes started to appear. For 30 years, we had no demographic growth in Oaxaca. People were massively abandoning their land, their sacred places, and their communities. But then we had the blessing of the crisis development stopped. Developers were weakened, if not died. The communities came back to life, and with patience, effort, and ingenuity, people started to regenerate their traditional spaces. The 1990 Census registered the phenomenon: we had an increase in population.

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I strongly believe that we will have more of these “surprises” in the coming years, in spite of the Trade Treaty and the recent symptoms of improvement of economic growth. And I am putting the best of my hopes, for my people, in such perspectives. But I cannot imagine how this movement will be so quick and extended, as to dismantle our present cities. Or, even more, to do it without destroying our rural culture: I cannot see how we can smoothly host 60 million destructive urbanites in our small rural towns. The point is that if we cannot discover or invent a sustainable alternative for our urban settlements through feasible changes, we will be inviting a political and natural disaster. Perhaps our urban impostura, the way we handle comida among the social majorities in our cities, is not as stable, culturally rich and beautiful as it is in the rural communities; it cannot prevent scarcity from appearing here and there and hunger frequently emerges. But it also has the seeds for other radical changes, of postmodern nature, which seem promising and enduring. Regenerating the Art of Living and Dying Reembedding food in agriculture is not about crops, stewardship of the land or organic agriculture, even though all of that is included in the endeavor. It goes beyond the movement for regenerative agriculture after the Green Revolution. It is about the way we live. And again, it is not about healthy food or improved consumption patterns for ecological or economic reasons. It is about people, about recovering a sense of community, about creating new commons—in every urban or rural settlement. I am talking about a postmodern ethos—that is, about men and women who have decided to liberate themselves from the oppression of the economic society. This has nothing to do with suppressing money or stopping trade. What modernity did, the political design establishing modern societies implied excising from society and culture an autonomous sphere, the economic sphere, and installing it at the center of politics and ethics. That brutal and violent transformation, first completed in Europe, was always associated with colonial domination in the rest of the world. Postmodernity will not really exist, unless we succeed in recreating our commons, reembedding the economy, to use Polanyi’s expression, into society and culture, thus subordinating it again to politics and ethics and marginalizing it, putting it at the margin—which is, precisely, what the “marginals” are doing.

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But what is what we are marginalizing? It is not creating or exchanging material things or even money. It is scarcity, a principle, a logic. It is not rarity, shortage, restriction, want, insufficiency, or even frugality. The sudden shortage of fresh air during a fire is not a scarcity of air in the economic sense. Neither is the self-imposed frugality of a monk, the insufficiency of stamina in a boxer, the rarity of a flower, or the last reserves of wheat mentioned by the Pharaoh in what is the first known historical reference to hunger. The “law of scarcity” was construed by economists to denote the technical assumption that man’s wants are great, not to say infinite, whereas his means are limited though improvable. The assumption implies choices about the allocation of means (resources). This “fact” defines the “economic problem” par excellence, whose “solution” is proposed by economists through the market or the plan, the state. We are giving up that assumption. Just that, an assumption and a belief, a statement through which modern people continue oppressing themselves and others. Marshall Sahlins and Pierre Clastres, among others, have given detailed and well-documented accounts of cultures in which non-economic assumptions govern the lives of the people, who reject the assumption of scarcity whenever it appears among them. It is my contention that this is not something in the past, something to remember, but a contemporary, daily practice among the social majorities of the world, who see it as the very condition for their survival. They are suffering, of course, all the damaging consequences of economic foolishness. They are not living in some fantasy world outside the planet. Their world is still ruled by economic assumptions. They are fully immersed in the economic world, and they need to struggle, day after day, with the economic mind; with the economic invasion of their lives— frequently supported by bulldozers and the police, always at the service of development; with the thousand and one personifications of the homo economicus, surrounding and frequently attacking them. But they can find support in their tradition as they continue to challenge economic assumptions both in theory and practice. During the last few years, I have been following with fascination the movement for Community Supported Agriculture. I have been told that there are now as many as 5 000 experiments of CSA’s operating successfully in America. They have courageously constructed their own networks for the exchange of experiences. They also now have their newsletters, their associations, and their national conferences. I cannot but admire

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the extraordinary dedication and commitment of these new, wise farmers, recovering old agricultural practices, abandoning the use of chemicals or machines or even tillage, and finding alternative markets for what they produce in the community supporting them. Many of them are putting into practice the dreams of the late Robert Rodale for regenerative agriculture. I suspect, however, that the basic force behind too many of them is just another form of consumerism organized around some economic principles. “Smart” consumers are finding another source of healthy, fresh, and organic food; “smart” producers are finding an alternative market to get stability in their income and better conditions. I have painfully observed the weak social echo found by some of them when they try to transform their activities and proposals into a sociological tool for rebuilding community. Brick walls seem to separate these farming partners and their neighbors. The personal bonds created through this trade cannot be extended to other areas: everybody is too busy with their own affairs, too absorbed by their professional endeavors, and too committed to the abstract institutions defining their lives. I am afraid that the movement will be doomed to be absorbed by the system or to keep its present marginal condition unless they develop their potential, radically departing from the conditions allowing them to exist and changing their endeavor’s very nature and orientation. I hope that it is clear by now that in urging comida I am not advocating squatting women around the fireplace everywhere in the world. Comida cannot be removed, dis-placed, and replaced. On the other hand, abundance a la Lappe, through mere redistribution of foods and rights of access or through land reform, no matter how promising it may look for preventing hunger or empowering the poor, will never bring back the world of enoughness, the richness of comida, nor will be able to prevent the present lacks. Neither am I saying that comida is a bed of roses. I deeply admire the central place dona Refugio has in San Andres. My desirable society also has women at the center. But I know very well that matriarchy can be as oppressive as patriarchy. If you ever see that Mexican film full of comida, “Like water for chocolate”, you will see all the oppressive dimensions of matriarchy. But you will also see that real men and women can always change such modes of oppression. For in a world of comida, all predicaments, good and bad, are on human scale. I cannot see how we will win over the five giants controlling 85% of the international trade of grains…

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except if we seriously renounce eating kilometers, in order to regenerate, in our own spaces, our own comida. Every postmodern group looking for sustainable agriculture and enduring living has to rediscover its own ideal of comida—in their own cultures and pasts. In that adventure, they may find monotonous and sad, in fact the very image of deprivation, which is now advertised as the prototype of abundance; they may thus be forced to abandon hopes, tranquilizers, and even social struggles that they perhaps cherished for a long time. But they may also rediscover everywhere, even in academic desserts historically conceived for the most extreme, irreversible dependency; they may rediscover everywhere many secret, hidden stocks of a still unknown class of comida. Perhaps, who knows, as long as they are not looking for industrial comida, a contradiction in terms. And this is the end of my talk. As you can see, I was unable to say what I wanted to say. That is my predicament. I hope that by now it is also yours.

Hope from the Margins: A Future of Convivial Polities (Conference at Hague, Netherlands. August 1997) I am sharing here the hunches, premonitions, and hopes I have smelled and experienced at the grassroots, particularly during the last decade, both in my own world—a world of Indians, peasants, urban “marginal”, and deprofessionalized intellectuals like myself, in México—and in some other worlds with whom I have been in contact in this period of my life. In my experience, radical hope is the essence of popular movements. People share inspiration and action because they share desires and hopes: both hope about specific outcomes and the hope that their actions will make them real. I am trying to articulate those hopes: to make them explicit in clear, intelligible, and simple terms, and to assemble them distinctly. To fit into this Conference, I accommodated my articulation into the horizon of the following decades. My story is dated in 2020; it alludes to the present in the past tense. I use the present tense to describe what I see as the outcome of the transformations in the following years. Articulating people’s hopes intensifies thought and multiplies the forms and domains of political action; it allows people to juxtapose their efforts and initiatives without losing their autonomy. It does not mean to unify

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and totalize them, as politicians and merchants do, to carpetbag with them. It does not define trends, plans, or blueprints for the future, like those conceived by bureaucrats of the revolution and the civil servants of Truth (scientific or other), to substitute people’s hopes for a destiny they define. It cannot be reduced to technical designs or social engineering. It does not transmogrify hopes into expectations. It resembles one of the uses of the word prophecy when it was synonymous with poetry (vates ) and was associated with inspiration. The word once alluded to lucid gazing into the present reality to reveal what is hidden from ordinary perception. Such inspiration can be seen as foretelling, as predicting, not because it implies knowing or controlling the future, but because it increases the possibility that what can happen—because it is already contained in the present—really happens, thanks to revealing it and thus stimulating the proper action. If utopia is what has no place in the world, my articulation is ambiguously utopian: it alludes to realities of a new era that are already there, but have not yet found their place in the world. My articulation of people’s hopes is shaped here like a rainbow: it has brilliant and diffuse colors, but you can never reach it. My hope is thus a call to live the future, with the awareness that we can make our life today the shape of tomorrow’s future. I speak on my behalf. I represent nobody. But I am telling my story in the first-person plural, as the volee of a non-existent “we”, the “we” of the Two/Thirds world. I am using it in a cultural sense, like the “we” used at times by women, black people, etc., to affirm their identity or belonging. I am assuming, as my own, the views of the leftovers of development and modernity; the uneducated, the undereducated, the dropouts; those without access to health or sanitation systems, or even potable water, dying of curable diseases or malnutrition; those that have never been on a regular payroll; the so-called poor or underdeveloped. That is: the views of the world’s social majorities, the Two/Thirds world. My hope, shaped by such views, is that in the future, development will be seen with an archeological eye: exploring the ruins left by this monstrous experiment that, in the experience of the world’s majorities, miserably failed. Social goals will be defined, in every society and culture, by their own differentiated definitions of what a good life is, after burying all universal definitions of the good life: development, basic needs, human rights… formulated in the name of any cross or sword. The new social movements will proliferate; their juxtaposition, rather than their pyramidal hierarchization, will be able to change the very nature of political action,

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giving new meaning to local, regional, national, or global governance. I hope that a world where many interacting worlds can harmoniously exist and flourish will finally come to life. In that world, global governance will mean rooted hospitality toward the otherness of the other and shared rules for mutual respect and harmony. To Be Ourselves: A Story of Hopes We now live in peace, freedom, and harmony in our new commons. We flourish and endure in them, according to our own, diversified notions of what good life is. Here, we govern ourselves. Our authorities, which we designate to coordinate the collective efforts or to fulfil specific functions, command by obeying. We can substitute them at any time. The norms ruling our lives come from our cultural traditions and are not in codes. We all know them, even our children, and they constitute the substance of our life in society. They are not trusted to a professional or institutional apparatus. We are thus ontonomous: ruled by our own cultural being. When we feel that such norms become maladjusted to our reality or dislike them, we use one of our best traditions: the tradition to change the practice autonomously. By its mere enforcement, our autonomous decisions slowly become incorporated into the ontonomy constituting us. We follow those norms for the administration of justice. We don’t represent justice as a blindfolded woman; we want her with her eyes wide open. We know that every offense, every departure from the norm, needs, first of all, understanding and consolation. Once you understand how it could happen, it does not call for punishment but compensation for the victim and mediation of the conflicts. Trials, courts, and jails no longer have any meaning for us. Those norms also rule over our stewardship of the Earth, the land, and nature. The conceptions provided by the autochthonous civilizations that see it as our Mother have taken root among us. We cannot own it, but we share a common responsibility to protect and conserve it, to get what nourishes our life from it. The principle allowing us to have access to it, for our family plots or the commons, also applies to our tools—both the instruments and the institutions, as well as the wisdom, knowledge, and skills to use them. We can thus handle them, liberated from the servitude many of them were imposing upon us.

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We have reestablished and regenerated the commonality which defines us. There are no individuals among us. We are persons: knots in nets of specific relations, interwoven in our new commons. And there, in our own atmosphere of reality and realization, personal and collective, we dissolve the relations of forcé, of economic or political power, preventing them from reappearing among us and keeping the spheres of politics and the economy at our margin. We have given the undivided society a contemporary form in our new commons. We are leaving behind the reign of needs. We know that we don’t need air when breathing; we desperately need it only when drowning. Need is the consequence of deprivation, not a natural condition. When the new technical means made it possible to overcome deprivations imposed by nature, they came with social deprivations, transmogrifying most of us into destitutes. Through the reappropriation of those means, by changing the social relations implicit in them, we ceased to need almost everything required for our sustenance; it now exists, among us, in the form of atmosphere or sea. We are not organized according to the premise of scarcity: the assumption that our ends, our wants, are unlimited, but the means scarce. How to conceive of unlimited ends, if they are but the other side of our means, necessarily limited? We adopt the opposite assumption: our ends dance to the tune of our means, which we try to improve. We have a difficult, sometimes intense relationship, with the sphere of the economy, still in operation for the globalized minorities, who continue to be ruled by the assumption of scarcity. The economy no longer occupies the center of our social life but its margin: it exists outside our new commons as a reality, which we wrestle with to prevent invasion or disruption into our lives. Still unfinished, one of our most difficult struggles focuses on our liberation from the myths enveloping the new technical means. We adopted as our own those myths: the magic of hybrid seeds, schools, jobs, or health centers, the magic of development. Our survival instinct compelled us to bypass the restrictions imposed by all the institutions created in their name to satisfy “basic needs”. For a long time, we claimed our rights to all those marvels we were “lacking”. Rarely, we succeeded in such a struggle, which often divided us: it created segments of “privileged” in our ranks. A lot of time and frustration passed before we realized that those “needs” were but imposed redefinitions of the good life. After recovering our own way of defining what it is to feel well, following our up-to-date traditions,

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we could easily resign to all those “needs”. We no longer need education, health, housing, and jobs…; even less of development or progress. No one has any longer the idea of claiming them as rights. We refuse to render our will to ecocrats, biocrats, and all professional groups that in the past disabled us and tried to rule over our lives. In our new commons, we gave up all forms of “education”. There are not, among us, “packages of knowledge” that can be produced and distributed; that some people transmit to others following professional, commercial, or institutional procedures, formal or informal. We also eliminated all forms of certification of the ownership of such “packages” or anything that can be called “knowledge” (wisdom or skills transmogrified into commodities). We learn here in freedom by doing what we want to learn. We have forms of training for some specific activities, nothing like a school. Our “universities” are free spaces for research, reflection and debate among peers; in a way, they prolong the intense use of our libraries, some of which use the Internet and other contemporary means. Both are open windows to what others know. Some of our friends describe the movement fostering what we did as the insurrection of subjugated knowledges; both learned and empirical; its juxtaposition produced the historical knowledge of struggle, allowing us to recover autonomy in the generation of “truth”: the capacity to formulate in our own terms the statements through which we govern ourselves and rule our social and natural relations. We are healing from health. We are not longing for such an illusory goal. We heal by ourselves, autonomously coping with the aggressions of the environment, supported by remedies coming from a great variety of traditions, including the scientific one. We suffer fewer diseases thanks to improving our living conditions and socialized ways of healing. Instead of continually jumping between “medical knowledge” and “traditional” or “alternative” therapies, as some of us did for some time, we demedicalized our new commons: we liberated them from professional control and regenerated our art of living and dying. Those who have the “gift to heal” among us, coming from a professional school or a traditional community, can joyfully practice it here; they would not know how to transmogrify it into a commodity or a professional practice. We don’t need housing. We regenerated our settling traditions in the cities and the countryside. We are still trying to improve our houses,

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built by ourselves, in family and community: family homes and common buildings. We create our lives by ourselves, without the mediation of the market or the State, through occupations in which we can apply our skills and learn new ones. In our communal enterprises, we produce things together for our own use and generate surpluses for our exchanges. But some of us, particularly in the big cities, are still forced to have a job, even temporarily. We obtain some of the tools we use here outside our new commons that perhaps we never will want or be able to make by ourselves. Therefore, we are cautious in selecting them: we acquire those that enhance our capacity to do, not to consume if they come with the proper codes of operation to prevent our dependency on using them. We also obtain some products or services for consumption that interest or attract us— some food, medicines, and books—but our lives are not dependent on them. There is one exception: energy. We have advanced a lot in our self-sufficiency of some requirements of energy for mobility, illumination, telecommunication, comfort, etc., which are relatively low. But we still need to get some from outside. Perhaps soon, we will be able to eliminate that need. The changes registered, parallel to ours’, among the globalized minorities, the One/Third World, have been of great help to our autonomous construction. After trying to assault it through migration, as we did years ago, it was tough to confine it within its limits. It became possible because, at the end of the twentieth century, a new awareness of the need for self-restraint took root in those societies. Their citizens succeeded in inverting the previous trends and started to limit their consumption. They generally did it through technical changes, without a radical modification in their lifestyles. Some of those societies adopted goals for the first half of this century, to reduce their “consumption of nature” to a 10% of the level they had in the 1990s. Such changes reduced the pressures on us to use our “resources” or plug us into their way of life. There are still forms of individual existence in those societies, and the economy thus occupies the center of their social life. However, some drastic measures taken after the instability and turbulence of the 1990s propitiated meaningful changes. The ownership of many industries was socialized; in some cases, their workers became the owners. Initially, they operated as business as usual, in the name of competitiveness; but in time, those industries’ very orientation and meaning started to change. At the same time, the dissident vanguards and the coalitions of discontents of

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those societies succeeded in generating new social consensus to dismantle the neoliberal illusions and, later, the social-democratic promises. It was thus possible to find among them allies for our endeavors. With their support, we gave up the myth of the self-regulated market and the illusion of its bureaucratic control. The liberalization and the privatization of the 1990s had an unexpected outcome: they made evident the measure in which we were disposable for that pragmatic design, thus stimulating our awakening. Development, which for some time trapped our fantasies and became an accomplished threat, ended as a bad joke. The critique of liberalization interested us, but we did not embrace its new protectionist arguments: protectionism never protected us; it only transferred to the bureaucrats’ decisions equally hostile to us. The dismantling of public apparatuses that never were at our service got no opposition from our part. Still, their privatization neither satisfied us: their very nature, alien to us, was kept in its private form. We were left but with our own strengths and ways. We used them, first of all, to resist the mortal swell of Neoliberalism. The “Enough!” of the Zapatistas, on January 1, 1994, rapidly became epidemic. It brought us, in 1997, to the creation of the International of Hope. Through its new, creative and intense use of cyberspace, it was possible to relate better our dispersed initiatives. We thus strengthened our politics of “NO”, giving political effectiveness to our rejections while affirming our diversity. In articulating our new social movements, and establishing limits to economic and political turbulence, we forged new social consensus to advance toward our emancipation. Third, we used as much as we needed juridical and political procedures in the frame of existing regulations to generate new legal and institutional “democratic umbrellas” to protect our own spaces and pave the way for our initiatives. We counted our blessings in our reclaimed commons: what we still had despite colonization, modernization, and development. We still counted on our commonality; our solidarity webs; our own definitions of the good life, and embedded-in conceptions about the relations between us and nature within horizons of intel1igibility outside the matrix of western civilization. In reclaiming them, we reestablished politics and ethics at the center of our new commons. We started to contaminate with them the thinking and behavior of the globalized minorities of our own countries. It was thus possible to generate a new social consensus to reconstitute and reorganize our societies from the bottom up, at their roots.

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Time is giving us a better perspective of what happened. We can see with greater clarity the key role of some elements in the transformation we are now celebrating: the marginalization of the economy through self-sufficient “dikes” defining the shape of our new commons and our regional spaces, combined with our reappropriation of the tools, gave us a new sense of political freedom in our new commons. That helps to explain how we dealt with some issues puzzling us: demography, human rights, and the State. The old campaigns for birth control were offensive and meaningless to us. Combined with those of the feminists, they confused us or encouraged our resistance without modifying our basic beliefs. No statistical fact, like the decrease in infant mortality proclaimed by experts or politicians, affected our convictions. Our population kept growing beyond our capacities, with it, every kind of social evil. However, the political freedom allowing us to assume full responsibility for our new commons, defined as a vital horizon, gave us a new sense of security. It stimulated the use of technical means allowing both men and women to change their attitudes toward their sexual practices. It was not fear of poverty, a promise of improvement, an ideological argument, or an immediate economic benefit what moved us to adjust our number to our capacities and desires. We were moved by the joy of life, based on a fundamental trust in ourselves, in our new commons, offering us a prospect of prosperity, to which we gave again its original meaning as prospere: according to hope. In the 1980s, we learned to use the doctrine and practices of human rights against the power abuses of our States. Of course, the very creation of those States and their laws were in themselves a power abuse. In the name of human rights, we were struggling against the abuse of the abuse. But we soon observed an increasing contradiction between the enforcement of human rights and our own conceptions. We discovered that such catechism was operating as a Trojan horse, introducing the virus of individualism among us under a magnificent cover. It was not easy to struggle against that doctrine. But the political freedom we started to enjoy in our new commons, when the enforcement of our norms ceased swimming against the tide of the dominant regime, helped us clarify the issue. We learned that human rights are a product of western reason, institutionalized through covenants among the governments of the nation-states. They had no other foundation. Therefore, they cannot be considered universal: most of us do not share that reason and have not been part of those covenants. So why tie us to them? We

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could use the thousand moral resources-of our own cultural traditions against the horror: evils from a distant past, those brought by modernity, and the evils starting to appear inside our new commons. In the 1990s, the nation-states lost their main function: to administer national economies. The trasnationalization of the economies took it away from them. They were confronting a two-pronged challenge: from the top, the transnational corporations and multinational or international institutions; from the bottom, our autonomous initiatives. Their weakening propitiated a chaotic situation, stirring up conflicts among us. Sometimes they took a highly vicious “ethnic” form and continually exposed us to outside intervention, usually enveloped in humanitarian purposes and the ideology of universal human rights. We revalued the constitutional procedure to avoid the open cliff before us and the dead end in which we could fall if our new commons became isolated refugees. Inside our new commons, in the freedom of the undivided community, mechanisms to keep the social order or protect us from chaos were already in operation; there was no need for a State. In the whole of our societies, however, division, domination, and exploitation still prevailed. A State should be established but it did not have to take the shape of the nation-state, whose design could not contain our new commons. We then used the adversary procedure inherited from the common law. We appealed to ordinary language and the formal procedure, first to denounce the hypertrophy of the body politic and the economy (their structural impossibilities), and later to establish their limits. After restricting the tooling of the industrial mode of production for the whole of society, it became possible to advance in reconstructing the new commons and forge new social consensus. Those advances were potentiated when we were able to organize new political bodies, at a human scale, in which the people themselves could make the decisions affecting their lives and be in control of their authorities. The new States took highly differentiated forms according to diverse traditions and circumstances. In general, they inverted the procedure constituting the nation-states. It was not a minority, an elite, after elections or revolutions, who seized the political power and established general norms, reserving basic functions for the State and defining as residual the sphere of the society. Society itself was in charge. The new commons conceived and implemented the new regional or sectorial political bodies. They consciously used regulatory procedures, recognizing

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the conflict of interests, giving value to the precedent, and attributing executory character to the decisions of ordinary men, recognized by the new commons as their representatives. Some general functions, defined as residual (what could not be absorbed by those political bodies), were attributed to the new States. Principles and norms based on the experience of the new commons are now applied to them. None of those States is entirely stabilized. Some already have a ritual character to keep unity and harmony rather than to fulfill the general functions formally attributed to them. Some others are still trapped in the inertia and structures of the bureaucratic apparatuses they substituted. Their predicaments partially come from the problematic relationship they maintain with the industrial countries, still shaped as nation-states. A world that can host many worlds finally came to life. Since the 1990s, the view of history dreaming in “One World” integrated under the rule of reason and welfare was already ripe enough to be in a museum; universalism was under siege. That dream was made possible by the expectation of unlimited progress, which started to crumble in those years. When it became possible to intellectually and practically assume an attitude beyond progress, the world’s coherence was no longer sought for by pushing through a common path toward some distant promised future, but in the present world, in all its diversity. Such enterprise required three conditions: the regeneration of the particular image of a good society that is present in each culture, the unilateral self-constraint to avoid any economic or environmental burden pushed onto other countries which would constrain them in choosing their own path, and the dialogue of civilizations. The generalized emergence of the new commons met the first condition. The awareness of the limits to growth, first denounced by the Club of Rome in the 1970s, became acute and general at the end of the 1990s, stimulating selfrestraint. The dialogue of civilizations finally started, at the turn of the century, after learning the lessons left by the missed opportunity of 1992 (the 500-year commemoration of the so-called discovery of America). Experiences with intercultural dialogues at the national level, inside the new States, nourished the international scene. Many countries advanced in the construction of juridical pluralism—impossible in the nation-states. Their methods harmonized the juridical regimes of the new commons with the statute law for the whole country.

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All this was possible because the new social movements successfully challenged, through the International of Hope, the emblem of globalization, which seemed dominant in the late 1990s. The world ceased long ago to be a dream, a prophecy, and a project. It became real. Cultural isolation belongs to the past. At a world scale, a kind of web made inevitable interactions, inter-penetration, and interdependence. The old propensity to unify and homogenize the world was thus intensified, no longer through ideology but through production: the global farm, factory, and market. The new transport and communication systems created a novel sensation of belonging to the world—a form of common existence-captured in the emblem of the global village. Corporate transnationalization, what the experts called the internationalization of capital a few decades ago, created the illusion of full integration, of deep and complete subsumption of one’s being in a globalized reality, confirmed by empirical experience: everywhere, the same jeans, the same cigarettes or refreshments, the same soap operas, the same gossiping, music, and fashion. We succeeded, however, in making it evident that the emblem of globalization was hiding what was really happening: the increasing marginalization of the social majorities from the globalized mode of living. We also revealed that we were aware that most of us would never get university diplomas or fancy cars; we would neither check in a Hilton for the annual holidays nor travel first class to an eco-sustainable resort. The globalized will deplete the world’s resources well before that could happen. We also proclaimed that, before the globalization of our marginality, we were affirming ourselves in our own spaces, locally rooting our initiatives and giving them a new meaning: instead of continually trying to be incorporated into the promised world that we knew unfeasible we were starting to walk on our own path. We denounced that “thinking globally” is impossible. Only by knowing well and experiencing our concrete reality can we think with awareness, compassion, and wisdom, and no one can know well but a minuscule portion of the planet. “Global thinking” is, at best, an illusion and, at worst, a threat. We revealed that all “global forces”, the World Bank and Coca-Cola, can only have real existence in their local incarnations, representing specific force balances. And there, in that territory, we could challenge and defeat them: in that space, David can defeat Goliath.

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Dismantling the emblem of globalization was made possible by our extended coalitions. Local struggles potentiated their political effectiveness through the systematic application of the politics of “NO”, bringing together those who share a rejection of the same evils. Instead of a “global conscience”, we manifested a very effective pluriverse of thought, reflection, and action. Such a pluriverse juxtaposes cosmic, open views, revealing the parochialism of the “global proposals”. It challenges globalism and universalism without falling into cultural relativism by affirming itself in radical pluralism. Some modest but spectacular victories in the late 1990s showed to the world that the Emperor wore no clothes; he had clay feet, ordinary men and women had the strength to defeat him. To traditional politics competing for power, we opposed our decision of not surrendering our will: we refused to give it to a charismatic leader, an enlightened vanguard, an ideological or party platform, a church, or a popular candidate or singer. No government could resist such a decision once it became generalized. In the social majorities, the affirmation of dignity and autonomy of every man and every woman challenged all established regimes and brought about the end of privilege and license. Coercive power and authority ceased to be requisite to keep the social order. People became capable of giving a political and juridical form to their resistance to the apparently all-determining forces and structures of the industrial age, thereby creating new institutions. The articulation of the new social movements redefined civil society, which became directly and immediately political, when it was possible to conceive, with renovated sociological imagination, institutions adjusted to the talent of ordinary mortals. We thus liberated democracy, hijacked by the parties and the media, and restored it as a historical project of common men and women. We brought it back to its place: the space where the people live. Diversified worlds of convivial new commons thus emerged, carrying with them the revolutionary force of connecting desires and realities. People could therefore focus their actions on what is positive and multiple, in the difference, in fluid and mobile arrangements, instead of uniformities, unities, and systems. And that is how we arrived here. The conviviality now reigning in our new commons was since the 1990s an actualization of the present, already

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taking the place of a future alienated by ideologies. But it existed in isolation, against all odds, exposed to continual erosion and disruption by the intrusion of the market or the State. Finally, at the turn of the century, the limits to the industrial mode of production and the new “democratic umbrellas” at national and international levels allowed the new convivial commons to flourish and endure. Thanks to the timely decision of the citizens of the globalized minorities to decelerate their meaningless race, we were left in peace, as we wanted. Furthermore, they accepted to learn, like us, new terms for our dealings; together, we discovered many new forms of mutual enrichment. In the late 1990s, we defeated the intolerance then reappearing, both among us and among the globalized. The tolerance which crystallized at the turn of the century was not enough: it was but a more civil form of intolerance, barely hiding the rejection of the Other. Step by step, however, a new attitude took root: hospitality, the attitude assuming the otherness of the Other, its difference, without feeling it as a threat or submitting it to impossible comparisons. The world finally started to be a hospitable place. We hope it continues to be so. At the end of the twentieth century, social engineers, futurologists, lay or learned, and public or private, intensely disputed in the machine room while the ship sank. They debated around charts and maps to find a route out of the storm; they engaged in controversial discussions about how to fix the damaged engine; or fought to put a hand on the rudder. But the ship continued to sink. The people on the deck, noticed everything. Their small boats and canoes looked ridiculous before the immense mass of the ship. But many of them landed on beautiful beaches. They were carrying people’s lives and new hope. There was no need for a captain to surf the waves in the boats. And they applied that lesson to their new ventures. This is the end of my story. I am now asking myself if it can be heard by the people of the globalized minorities. I know that they cannot see themselves reflected in it: in this sketch, I am alluding to a condition familiar to me, which is alien to their reality and concerns. They may be forced to feel it as something unreal, whether they like it or not. On the other hand, the experts, and the decision-makers, national or international, public or private, the politicians, the scientists, the technicians, or the business people, in whose minds and hands seem to be the future of humankind, can do almost nothing with this stuff. At the end of this century, it seems to be a greater awareness that the futures, whatever they are, will be built with more people’s involvement.

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There is a generalized feeling that they should be more democratic at national and global levels, both in their conception and implementation; they should be the product of negotiations, agreements, and new social consensus. If we take seriously such a prospect, it should be pondered that the themes now defining the agenda of the world debates on global futures have no meaning for most people on Earth. Exposed in their technical terms, translated into ordinary language, or packed in the deleterious magma now prevailing in the public discourse, they are radically alien to the reality and concerns of ordinary men and women. The reform of the United Nations (whose very existence most people ignore) or global regulations (which for them seem unthinkable or threatening) is for them less real or interesting than Star Trek or the landscape of Mars. The proposal that they will take part in such designs or measures for the democratization of global futures, may look for them offensive or ridiculous. If such an intention exists, their own agenda, concerns, and means should be considered. Populism? Those trying to educate the people about the neoliberal futures, including democracy, human rights, and happiness for everyone in their promised lands, are the populists. The social-democrats, offering less of the same and attributing to national and international bureaucracies the will and the might to amend the neoliberal disasters, are also populists. The pragmatism of the first and the realpolitik of the latter only apply to their own interests, barely disguised in the virtual realities shaping their minds and pompously presented as public policies. And those looking for sensible alternatives to those dead ends have failed in escaping from their mined territory. All of them, anyway, neoliberal, social-democrats, or alternatives, speak of course in the name of the people and dedicate to them their discourses. In 1820, Hegel warned that the people could not govern themselves. Of course, this is a banality, a tautology, in the horizon of the nation-state. The principle, anyway, was explicitly assumed by both liberals and Marxists and became the premise, the foundation, for most political theories and practices. If the people cannot govern themselves, someone has to do it—an elite. There has been an endless dispute about how to constitute it, who should be part of it, and how to control it or substitute it, always under the premise that, for the people’s own good, for their good government, someone should have the power and exert it. But elites corrupt.

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All elites have corrupted themselves. Despite the correctives continually introduced, they keep corrupting and systematically taking decisions opposite to the opinion of most of their peoples. Is there a solution? To cease to be an elite? To open it to the people? That the masses govern? When the masses can express themselves democratically, they make ethically, aesthetically, and philosophically unacceptable decisions. You can think that it is so because they have not had the opportunity to make decisions and are continually pushed up and down. They need time and opportunities. They need to be educated. But that is populism. And populism did not function; even the best populism. That is how we arrived at the present disastrous vacuum. Is there an option? I have the gut feeling that the people at the grassroots perceive what is happening. I hear a rumor expressed in gossip, jokes, half-words, winks, and smiles, and a rumor I cannot spell out. What if…? Survival strategies? Mere subsistence? Sometimes invisible, sometimes seen as a “problem”, for a long time the ugly face of modern societies, useless hand-me-downs of nothing and nobody, sterile remnants of the past, the classical target of wars against poverty that for so long have been waged against them; suddenly, in the midst of the challenges of the electronic era, they got new visibility. Some discovered in them a “solution”. Others assumed them as the last frontier of arrogance, the last territory to be conquered. Still, others insist that they are the last refuge of pure joy and candid freedom but fear that it is only a refuge and will not last long. But, what if…? What if the current turbulence is really the opportunity? My impression is that the people increasingly take away their trust from the individuals, the institutions, and the ideologies to which they rendered their will, freely or by force. And that they are taking the initiative. The people are not focusing their interest on the issues concerning the elites, alien to them, or beyond their knowledge. On the contrary, whenever they are consulted about some of those issues, they participate with reluctance and become surprised or disenchanted with “their” statistical “decision”. But they are increasingly making decisions about whatever affects their daily lives in their own places, which they know better than anybody else. They commit mistakes, no doubt. But the consequences of such errors have a human scale, and it is in their reach to amend them. That is what they are doing. The people also learned that they could not stop themselves there. They learned to organize broad coalitions of discontents and to use the

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adversary procedure for political purposes: the capacity to transform their discontent, the rejection shared by many, into decisions that nobody needs to teach them and can be translated into social and political facts; sometimes it becomes the capacity to limit the mortal swell; other times it might be used to organize legal protection for their spaces and initiatives. For a good reason or without it, despite or thanks to the catastrophes caused by all elites, from all the positions of the ideological spectrum and in the most diverse regimes, a new hope seems to be emerging. What if…? What if the bankruptcy of the ideologies and the dead end of the pragmatic, the source of all kind of turbulence, have finally created the opportunity for the ordinary people? What if…? Anyway, the world is falling apart. The time is ripe to come with new ideas. Nobody is in good shape: for a hundred years, no one did his/ her homework, while everyone was trapped in an ideological dispute. It is a peculiar situation when you need to examine the past to be able to see the future. And the people themselves, the social majorities, the Two/Thirds World, the leftovers, and those without a face and without a voice seem to be doing precisely that better than anybody. You can see the Zapatistas and the reach of their communiques: thanks to their cyber friends, millions of people are finding in them inspiration and a new source of hope. It is time to listen to them. Their voice is increasingly vigorous. Just for a change, at least, the time is ripe to follow their agenda, interests, concerns, and initiatives. The new commons, now emerging everywhere, are not forms of survival or just opportunities to ensure mere subsistence. On the contrary, they are contemporary ways of life, sound spaces for comfortable sustenance and living, a sociological novelty bringing up-to-date traditions and reappraising modernity. They have been conceived in an era in which all that men and women need for their delight in living can be provided for, given the technical means available. They have also been conceived for an era in which the non-economic way of providing for everything needed would allow men and women to look freely for what they want with dignity and wisdom. They were created to leave behind an era in which the explicit goal of unlimited improvement was the smokescreen for the concentration of privilege and license to impose every kind of suffering on the social majorities “for their own good”. When its time comes, every era dies. However, suppose people timely recognize the episode and dare to be surprised by the emerging historical events. In that case, the old era dies with dignity and peace, and the new

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one flourishes with joy and passion. Otherwise, dying becomes a chronic condition, all kinds of pests spread around the unburied corpse, and the new era must be built on the ruins of the old. But people fear death and prefer to believe in every promise of eternal life, every disguise of threatening agonies. Before dying, every era spends its remaining life cosmetizing its actual condition. Images of rise and splendor allow people to interpret every symptom of decadence as transitory anomalies proper to maturity and success. The last pharaoh, the last king, or the last czar died with the illusion of leaving behind an everlasting empire. The time has come for the end of the economic era. Development, once a hope of eternal life to economic societies, has instead dug its graves. Evidence of a new era, appearing everywhere, is still perceived as anomalies of the old. The old one, in turn, looks stronger than ever, and the death it carries is still perceived as a symptom of vitality. If people are fooled by such images, disguised with the slogans of the period, and are blind to the evidence of the new era, the economy will continue to dismantle and destroy its own creations to the point of collapse. There is an option. Now is the time for the option. My sketch reveals that people by the millions, among the social majorities, are taking it. I wonder if the global minorities will be able to escape from their grand obsessions and give it serious consideration.

Bibliographical Clues For my own articulation of people’s experiences and hopes, I have found particularly useful the contributions of some radical thinkers, like Jacques Ellul, Michel Foucault, Paul Goodman, Iván Illich, Leopold Kohr, Teodor Shanin, and others. For the critique of development, see Sachs, Wolfgang (Ed.). 1992. The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power. London: Zed Book, and Rahnema, M., and Bawtree, V. (Eds.). 1997. The PostDevelopment Reader. London: Zed Books. For the critique of power, see Foucault, Michel. 1980. Power/ Knowledge. New York: Pantheon Books, and the preface of Deleuze, G., and Guattari, Félix. 1993. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. For the critique of democracy, see Lummis, D. 1996. Radical Democracy. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.

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On conviviality, see Illich, I. 1973. Tools of Conviviality. New York: Harper & Row, and Steger, Hans-Albert. 1984. “Conviviality”. In Alternatives in Education, edited by Hans-Albert Steger. Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag Munchen. On radical pluralism, see Panikkar, Raimón. 1993. “La diversidad como presupuesto para la armonía entre los pueblos”. Wisay Marka (Barcelona) 20, 15–20, and Panikkar, Raimón. 1995. Invisible Harmony. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. On the new commons and the social movements reclaiming them, see The Ecologist. 1993. Whose Common Future? London: Earthscan. I have elaborated on the themes of this essay in 1980. Economía y enajenación. México: Universidad Veracruzana; 1987, January. “Regenerating People’s Space”, Alternatives XII no. 1, 125–152. Frankfurt: Fiesta–jenseits von Entwicklung, Hilfe und Politik; Brandes and Apsel/ Südwind. 1993, Spring. “A New Source of Hope: The Margins”. Interculture XXVI no. 2, 119; 1994, May/June. “¡Basta! Mexican Indians Say ‘Enough”. The Ecologist 24 no. 3; 1994. Crónica del fin de una era. México: Posada; 1996. “Hosting the Otherness of the Other”. In Decolonizing Knowledge: From Development to Dialogue, edited by F. Apffel-Marglin & S. Marglin. Oxford: Clarendon Press; 1997. “Der Zapatismus als Aufstand der Gesellschaft”. In Der Wind der Veränderung, edited by H. Mittelstädt & Lutz Schulenburg. Hamburg: Nautilus.

The Meaning and Agenda of Anti-systemic Movements (First International Colloquium in Memory of Andrés Aubry, “Planet Earth: Anti-systemic Movements”. San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico. December 13–17, 2007) History, said Andrés Aubry, is not a teacher of life. How could it be when so often it reeks of immorality and scandal? But history, he also said, is the mother of commitment because it opens one’s eyes and rekindles one’s memory. That’s why it fascinated him. And that’s why the history and stories he shared were able to fascinate us. Barely two years ago, Andrés adopted the point of view that now brings us together to construct a working agenda for Chiapas. He reminded us that the only way to change Chiapas is to change the world. And since this is very difficult, perhaps even impossible, what we need to do, as the Zapatistas say, is to create a new world instead.

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In the guidebook he left us, Andrés shared his reading of the present, which he undertook to discover the signs of what will come. As was his way, he was able to make this examination of the past interrogate the present, knowing we’re living in one of those peculiar moments in which we have to explore the past to discover the paths toward what awaits us because this moment is a moment of change. In his guide, Andrés reveals the peculiar position of Chiapas as a hinge that receives all the winds of the world and encapsulates in this place the material memory of the planet. We find ourselves in a moment of choice, Andrés points out, at a crossroads. But the path forward must be established from below, not above. And it is the responsibility of Chiapas to do so. Nothing less, in the words of Juan Bañuelos that Andrés reminded us, the responsibility is to weave the clothes I’ll wear tomorrow. The commitment to give meaning to change. The Turning Point In every era, difficulties and crises come into being, all of which are surpassed in a day or a hundred years. But when crises appear that can’t be resolved in terms of that particular era, the necessity of a new era arises, and a chasm opens for passing through it. This is where we are now. The era that Wallerstein has called the capitalist world economy is now ending. Another will take its place. But the nature and characteristics of the new era are not written in the stars. This bifurcation has been formed by not only distinct but opposed possibilities. We need to read them in the present, as Andrés taught us to do so that we can be able to choose so that the new era is the one we want, not the one we fear. The End of the American Empire Two elements of this transition have already taken place and have created new possibilities. The first is the end of the American empire. The elite of the United States has dared for the first time to speak of empire in talking of its projects… now that their empire has reached its end. This isn’t as paradoxical as it seems. In their agony, all the empires of history have employed their last resources to pretend that they are at the height of glory. But this only hastens their end. In 1945, the United States was a formidable productive machine. It produced half of the recorded world production. Europe and the Soviet

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Union had been devastated by the war. Japan was occupied. The countries of the so-called South were mere European colonies or didn’t count, neither economically nor politically. The United States possessed significant autonomy. Its imports and exports represented a mere 4% of its production. They could lower the curtain, and nothing would change in their everyday life. The United States was creditor to the world. This is why Bretton Woods allowed the dollar to be the world’s reserve currency, and why all countries, except one, had to submit to its new rules. The United States had political hegemony. It imposed upon the charter of the United Nations the form of its own constitution. And it had cultural hegemony. It was the heyday of Hollywood when the cinema we all rushed to watch portrayed the “American Way of Life” as the closest thing to paradise. On January 20, 1949, President Truman inaugurated this new empire. By declaring that “the old imperialism no longer fits into our plans”, he gave an active role to the United States in dismantling the last European empires. Truman also established the emblem of the new imperialism: development, an emblem of American hegemony adopted blindly, without realizing what they were doing, by even the most adamant anti-imperialists. By coining the term “underdeveloped” and thereby underdeveloping two billion people, Truman gave new meaning to the term. A theoretical and philosophical proposition of Marx packaged American style as a struggle against communism and serving the hegemonic design of the United States, permeated the popular and intellectual mind for the rest of the twentieth century. But with the new century, the American empire has reached its end. The United States today produces less than 30% of world production. It is among many other economic actors, some larger than it is. It is a debtor to the world. The dollar is now being abandoned as a reserve currency. The United States needs two billion dollars each day to continue operating. That is, the country is sold to the highest bidder for two billion dollars every day. Its external commerce represents more than one-third of its economy. As a result, it has become entirely interdependent. And although it is still able to capture the hearts and minds of small minorities around the world, it has lost its cultural hegemony.

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Its current imperialist pretensions try to sustain itself in its indisputable military power. This is the attitude of amateurs who lack historical and political knowledge. Two hundred years ago, when other amateurs wanted to use the unrivaled power of Napoleon’s armies to similar ends, it is said Napoleon told them: “Bayonets are good for many things, except sitting on”. With this chilling metaphor, he made them see that though you can destroy a country with an army and a police force, you can’t govern it, as the United States is now learning in Iraq. The United States no longer has the imperial capacity it once had. The army can’t give that to the country. Restoration is impossible. One can’t reverse the course of history. As Marx once noted, the second time around, a tragedy becomes a farce. This farce could indeed turn tragic again, among other reasons for the irresponsible cowboy mentality of the current American president. But it cannot reestablish what has already ended. The End of the Old Regime in Mexico Here in Mexico, we can demonstrate the second element of the era’s end: the liquidation of the political regime that existed in Mexico throughout most of the twentieth century. However, since political parties have tried to convert this transition into a dispute among themselves, and since the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) is dedicated to imitating the Partido de la Revolución Institucional (PRI), it might seem we are still under the old regime. Thus, it is helpful to keep in mind those facts that allow us to see the contrast. When President Miguel de la Madrid inaugurated the neoliberal period with a coup d’etat in 1982, the public sector represented two-thirds of the Mexican economy, which had been almost entirely closed, that is to say, in the hands of the bureaucracy. Twenty years later, the public sector has been reduced to just a fifth of one of the most open economies in the world, an opening that means its evolution is no longer determined within its borders. The contrast is even more acute in the political realm. It used to be that the president controlled his government, his party, Congress, and the judiciary powers. Successive presidents modified the Constitution more than 500 times. The president held political control in every corner of the country through a mafia structure permeating all of society.

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President Fox, by contrast, couldn’t control his government, his party, Congress, or judiciary powers. As a result, he couldn’t carry out any of the legal reforms that seemed so important to him. In Mexico, we still debate the nature of this political transition, precipitated by the Zapatista insurrection of 1994, because the neoliberal approach persists, and the shell of the institutions of the PRI regime is maintained. In some states, the political classes have created perverse imitations of the old regime. But the regime is quite dead. Since we didn’t seize the moment to organize its funeral, the unburied corpse still emits stenches of all kinds. But the insistence upon its restoration is as ridiculous as it is sinister. The Reactionaries The end of an era is a source of instability and chaos. It always generates immense uncertainty. In addition, comes the confusion created by a new wave of reactionaries: people and groups that, confronted with this uncertainty, react by moving backward, trying to return to known territories where they feel safe. This attitude shrouds our point of view and causes all kinds of difficulties. Among these reactionaries, one finds, above all, religious fundamentalists who search for the certainties they have lost in the foundations of their faith. The worst among them is the market fundamentalists, as George Soros calls them. We live with the shame of Mexico being probably the last country to adhere blindly to the so-called Washington Consensus, which defined the political package known as neoliberalism. This consensus has broken. The last report of the World Bank, which was one of the Consensus’s principal promoters, explains why it happened and announces another route. So one by one, this church’s believers have left it. Today, they speak of the Washington Post-consensus. But none of this seems to reach the current Mexican government, still tied to policies as obsolete as they are foolish. What it’s doing implies a particularly dangerous attitude. When Felipe Calderón, formally the president since 2006, spoke of the monopoly of power, he revealed his anxious confusion. His lack of political power led him to imagine that he could find a substitute for it in the monopoly of violence that the law reserves for the State. He needs urgently to listen to Napoleon’s warning: with arms, one can do much damage but cannot govern.

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Here and there among the reactionaries appear a few fascists who want to recover that peculiar form of authoritarianism that arose in the twentieth century. They appear even in the most unexpected places, but until now, they have not been able to gather much influence. The statists are returning to Latin America. They argue that neoliberalism was disastrous and desired to return to the good old days of the “patronage state”. Some of them want to rid neoliberalism of its “harshest edges”. The phrase belongs to the Mexican leftist López Obrador, but the same could have been said by Brazilian president Lula or by many other Latin American leaders. Others want to replace the neoliberal model with one with a greater social orientation in the tradition of European social democracy and its welfare state. They want to protect what remains of it after the devastation of neoliberalism. And still, others have been rescuing the word socialism from oblivion. They don’t seem to have perceived that socialism, like all historical phenomena, had a beginning and is reaching its end. Its problems and deviations arose not only in its implementation but also, and gravely, in the theoretical and philosophical tradition itself. At the end of the day, socialism is just one more variant of the economic society that will die with the era passing away. Some groups in this circle follow a line that could be called populist Stalinism. They talk of a supreme leader, a single party, and a vertical structure, but instead of repression they believe in incentives for the masses. Other groups talk vaguely of participatory socialism or dream of pure and strict Stalinisms without populist designs. None of these currents will go very far. They still cling to the terms of an era in agony, which will die along with it. But their presence—confused, rampant, and widespread—aggravates the uncertainty and captures the attention of many people. Mutations in Social Movements Contemporary social movements were born within the terms of the passing era and must face the political fauna still attached to that past. They are not always able to uncover the present situation’s nature and convert themselves into anti-systemic movements responding to this reality. Two characteristics seem to accompany them in this transition.

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One is “localization”, an alternative to both localism and globalization. Many communities and villages confined their resistance to colonialism and to development in their own places, deeply entrenching themselves. They have tended to fall into localism, even fundamentalism. Under the current circumstances, all localist movements will be wiped from the map. This is why, without falling into modernity’s uprooted forms, the discontented now assert themselves more than ever in their own places, but at the same time, open themselves to others who are like them and, by doing so, create broad coalitions. This is localization. If a local movement explores its difficulties deeply enough, it becomes directly and immediately global, with enormous reach. In addition, these movements are increasingly adopting the politics of one “NO” and many “YES”. In contrast with politicians and parties, always searching for general affirmations to sustain empty promises, the people unite around common rejections: a dam, a highway, a policy, a governor, and a regime… But they recognize the real plurality of the world, the differences among those who share that common “NO”, the value of their multiple “YES”, of their diverse affirmations, ideals, and projects for a different life. In doing so, they anticipate a central characteristic of the world they are creating: a world that fits the many worlds we are. There is a growing awareness that neither nature nor society can endure the current regime for many years. People realize there are no options within this regime: no conceptual or political resources can deal with its increasing difficulties. And so arises, step by step, the anticipation of the era’s end. Contemporary social movements become anti-systemic through their own dynamic when they can give depth to their efforts and discover in practice the systemic nature of the obstacles they face. The Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) I would like to use the case of Oaxaca to illustrate this argument. It began with a conventional struggle: the economic demands of a union. When this struggle was repressed, a coalition formed immediately, grouping hundreds of organizations together in what became a collective rejection of Ulises Ruiz, who had been placed in office through fraud and whose corrupt and authoritarian administration generated mass discontent.

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In just a few weeks, this coalition became a convergence of numerous social and grassroots movements, with the politics characteristic of one “NO” and many “YES’s”. The APPO quickly synthesized local political culture elements: popular assemblies, teacher unions, indigenous communalism, municipal and regional-based organizations, religious social services, the radical left, ethnic diversity, and youth libertarian networks. Very diverse movements participate in APPO. Some have been around a long time, like those of the indigenous peoples. The situation brought others into being, like the popular urban movement. This plural composition gives the APPO many paths in parallel. Among the efforts that appear to converge the most, a few democratic struggles demand special attention: • There are those who still struggle for formal democracy, sick of the pigsty that has always characterized Oaxacan elections. • Diverse groups struggle for participatory democracy practices, including popular initiatives, the referendum, plebiscites, recall of elected officers, participatory budgeting, public audit, transparency, and social accountability. • The main challenge is to subordinate these two struggles to a third, which is, in all likelihood, the most widespread and seeks to enact what we call radical democracy. Instead of focusing on the established powers, this struggle is oriented toward reorganizing society from the bottom up toward what the people themselves can accomplish. From another angle, innovative movements that are already clearly antisystemic coexist in the APPO with a variety of conventional struggles: economic struggles which strive to get certain gains from capital or from the state or those that seek to conquer the state, either through the ballot box or by force, to reorient the dominant policy or to impose a socialist variant of governance. The primary characteristics of the APPO, as a convergence of movements, arise from its experience: • It has no leaders. We have learned from the struggles of the twentieth century, in which all leaders failed. Even those that seemingly triumphed did not achieve what they set out to achieve.

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• We have also learned to criticize socialism, although we maintain some of its ideals. We reject, like most socialists, private ownership of the means of production. Still, we defend and support communal property and want to reserve the concept of collective property for only certain exceptional cases. The means of production should be in the hands of the people, not in those of a plutocracy that supposedly administers them for all the people. • We have learned to criticize formal and participatory democracy and to affirm ourselves in our communities and neighborhoods, thereby practicing a democracy that can only exist where the people are, on the ground, in our autonomous assemblies. • We are aware that capital has a larger appetite than ever but not the stomach to digest everyone it seeks to control. This is why unemployment rates will rise. The social pact, in which workers generate profit for the capitalists in exchange for employment created by the capitalists, has been broken. We have learned to challenge capitalism beyond rhetoric and to form social relationships that escape the logic of capital. Our anticapitalism does not consist of simply declaring a rhetorical war with the bourgeoisie but rather organizing an autonomous environment that directly undermines the existence of that regime. • We have learned to challenge “progress” and “development”, affirming ourselves in our own varied definitions of the good life and adopting our own paths toward building it. • We have learned to question modern capitalism’s individualism and affirm ourselves in our community settings. Instead of the atomized and homogenized individual of modern societies, we uphold the person, a knot in a net of real relations that form a community. • We have learned to challenge the nation-state with its formal democracy, which is nothing but a structure of domination based on violence. As a result, we now adopt other political horizons. • We have learned to challenge the premise of conventional politics, which asserts that the people cannot govern themselves and which reduces politics to determining who will govern them. We have another notion of power. We can govern ourselves with appropriate political bodies, those we are now building.

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The Zapatista Inspiration and Our Present Tasks Given that it deals with these matters themselves and seems to define antisystemic movements, at least in their tendencies, Zapatismo continues to be our main source of inspiration. Chomsky and Wallerstein uphold Zapatismo as the world’s most radical and perhaps the most important political initiative. People in the barrios and villages might not say the same thing because they do not know enough about other movements outside of Mexico or even within Mexico. But what they do know about Zapatismo is enough to inspire them. They know what it means to command by obeying. They practice it in their own communities and now want to extend it to the rest of society, as in our own way, we put it to the test in the city of Oaxaca in 2006. Step by step, with the Zapatistas, we are learning to recognize the tasks at hand: • It is ours to bring order and meaning into the turbulent disorder that prevails. • It is ours to think everything anew. With a sense of urgency, we must think about what we have not thought about for over one hundred years, trapped as we were in ideological disputes. • It is ours to clear our personal and collective gaze and invent the paths we will travel. • And it is ours to act with a sense of direction. These tasks can be formulated in simple terms: • Channel the general discontent, transforming protests and denunciations into viable initiatives and changing resistance into liberation, starting by articulating existing pockets of resistance. • Formulate new political horizons beyond the nation-state. • Subordinate the struggles for formal and participatory democracy to the construction of radical democracy. • Learn to be together, though not the same. • Come back from the future and from ideologies to root ourselves in a transformative present.

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• Abandon obsessions with state power to see the people themselves as the central actor and subject of transformation while substituting the conquest of rights with the defense of liberties. • Construct autonomous forms for organizing social life beyond development, globalization, and the logic of capital. In our present circumstances, we need to stop looking up toward institutional powers and uproot our obsession with taking power by means of any kind. We must abandon the state as the exclusive horizon for political theory and action so we can venture into the world of plurality and construct new perspectives within it. Moreover, understanding politics as a common good implies leaving obsolete notions behind, like national sovereignty or US imperialism, in order to confront the new imperial logic of transnational capital. We need to renounce socialism seriously recognize that it has come to its end, and firmly face the consequences. To assume that the future is not predetermined and that capitalism is not followed by socialism but rather by something yet to be invented may be disquieting for those of us who have been formed in the socialist tradition and have dedicated a good part of our lives to struggling for its ideals. But to give a sound theoretical and practical foundation to this conviction is an urgent task. How can we dissolve the old debate over power? Power is spoken about as a thing that some have, and others do not, something we need to redistribute. The World Bank made fashionable the ugly term “empowerment”. It wants to empower women, children, Indians, and the poor…. We need other words to talk about that which is not the opposite of power (that which resists it), but something radically different, neither its reflection nor its opposite. It is found in something else. It is a relation. And it is called dignity. Humanists and revolutionaries from the entire political spectrum propose modifying ideologies without changing institutions. Reformists want to change institutions without altering ideological systems. This amounts to changing everything so that nothing will change. What must be done instead is to change the institutional regime of the production of truth, that is, the statements with which we govern ourselves and others. This requires a simultaneous transformation of ideologies and institutions, articulating a historical knowledge of struggle

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that expresses the autonomy of our independent cultural nuclei articulated in a web. It is about con-mover (moving-with), not pro-mover (promoting). Conmover is a beautiful word. It suggests moving with the other, as in a dance, and doing so with everything one has: with the heart, with the stomach, with one’s entire being, not only with the head. It operates through contagion. On the ideological level, we need the courage to renounce the discourses of globalization to reinvent our speech, languages, categories, and systems that produce the statements by which we govern ourselves. We need to abandon scientism and realize that humanism is more and more openly totalitarian, a provocation that prostitutes thought. Its paradigmatic figure is the professionalized and institutionalized technocrat. On the institutional level, instead of reforming or combating institutions in decline or taking them into our hands, we need to dissolve them, that is, eliminate the assumed necessity for their existence. It is no longer about decentralization, the simple transfer of functions from the center to the periphery for the purpose of efficiency. Instead, it is about reconfiguring the center… by dissolving it. This is the step from decentralization to decentralism. Dismantling the state apparatus that defines power starts with dissolving the professionalization and institutionalization of the needs and capacities of the people. It is not about taking over the apparatus, since they already have an alien and alienating pattern—the virus of power and the logic of capital—but rather making them irrelevant at their roots through the articulation of other ways of thinking and doing. Instead of institutions that are more and more openly counterproductive (schools that produce ignorance, health systems that sicken), each of which is a mechanism of domination, we must put other tools into use, tools that can truly be in the hands of the people and which express in real terms their activity, their ability, and their creativity. The modernization of the political machine makes it more and more impotent, owing to its fragmented and feudal character and the rigidity of its norms and thick windows. Under these conditions, any initiative from above to below falls into a social vacuum, and from below to above, into an institutional vacuum. To stop looking upward, to abandon the obsession with taking power does not imply carelessness. We need to be alert to the illegalities and

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absurdities woven into institutional powers to impede them and employ existing juridical and political procedures and institutions as a framework for transition. We need to take all political power out of all the apparatus of the state and leave only the administrative functions of coordination and service. We must resist the false dilemma between electoral politics and armed struggle as if these two were the only options. On the contrary, our tasks contain a deep commitment to non-violence, which is neither passivity nor pacifism, but a way of life that affirms dignity. To carry out all these tasks, we need alliances and coalitions. But we must be conscious that a total alliance is impossible. It is not simply that we have different interests and styles of organization but that we may walk in opposite directions with different motives, reasons, and purposes. It doesn’t seem possible to propose seriously the convergence of all organizations that wish to place themselves on the left of the political spectrum. But this does not imply accepting division and falling victim to the craze of converting a friend into one’s principal enemy. The circumstances demand that we remain on the ground and look at what stands at our side. That implies that we learn to listen to the people and recognize where they are and where their aspirations lie; that we can let ourselves go with them, trusting in their good judgment; that we let ourselves be guided by their inspiration and strength, rather than by our ideological manias and intellectual constructions; that it is really their dreams, rather than those frozen in obsolete vocations, that we now dream; that we learn to take part seriously in the politics of “NO”: one “NO” to capital and to the state, and many “YES’s”, the many and diverse affirmations that emerge from a common negation; that we organize our path in radical pluralism, together though not the same, as the actions of the APPO and the Other Campaign were woven. Then it will be possible to do the work that needs to be done. The era that could follow if the inertia of existing powers persists contains horrors that only the imagination of certain authors, like Orwell, has been able to capture. Although we can start to observe its signs in our present reality, they are but a pale suggestion of what may lie ahead. However, as John Berger has said, in a world more and more desperate, naming the intolerable is itself the hope. If something is considered intolerable, then something must be done. That is why hope is the essence of popular movements. In rediscovering hope as a social force, the possibility for change opens.

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Hope is not the conviction that things will happen the way one expects. It is the conviction that something makes sense, no matter what happens. For that reason, pure hope resides first and mysteriously in the capacity to name the intolerable as such, a capacity that comes from afar and makes politics and courage inevitable. We have been able to name the intolerable. We can no longer tolerate the present regime that destroys both land and culture. And we are not willing to tolerate the regime that could install itself in its place, in a new era. Instead of waiting around or depositing our hope in new illusions, we have put ourselves into movement, unplugging ourselves step by step from the systems that enslave and mutilate us, so that we can construct freely a new world, in which fit the many worlds that we are. We are thus defining, in practice, the meaning of the new era. This is what I believe anti-systemic movements are about.

Notes 1. Professor-researcher, Titular C, of the National Institute of Anthropology and History, in Morelos. 2. See: “La autonomía de los pueblos indígenas en los Acuerdos de San Andrés”, in: Gilberto López y Rivas, Nación y Pueblos indios en el neoliberalismo. Mexico: Plaza y Valdés, Second edition, October 1996. 3. See: Gilberto López y Rivas, Autonomía de los pueblos indios y zapatismo en México. Mexico: Ocea Sur, 2014. 4. See: Gilberto López y Rivas, Antropología, etnomarxismo y compromiso social de los antropólogos. Mexico: Ocean Sur, 2010. 5. Barrio and vecindad have no direct translation. A barrio is more than a neighborhood. It is a collection of neighborhoods, like the developments of a modern city, but it is not a development. It is more in the tradition of the French quartier, in which the common traits defining the place and distinguishing it from others come from the inside, from the soul of the barrio, and not from the frontiers established by developers or officials. Vecindad is a kind of neighborhood, but not defined by the mere vicinity of the houses but by the kind of conviviality existing among the neighbors who happen to live there.

References Bonfil, Guillermo. 1996. México Profundo: Reclaiming a Civilization. Austin: University of Texas Press.

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Duus, Eric. 1982. Negotiating Reciprocity: Food Exchange in a Rural Community of the Dominican Republic. Oslo: Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo. Esteva, Gustavo and Suri Prakash, Madhu. 1998. Grassroots Postmodernism: Remaking the Soil of Cultures. London: Zed Books. Esteva, Gustavo. 1983a. “Los tradifas o el fin de la marginación” [The Tradifas or the End of Marginalizaiton]. El Trimestre Económico L, no. 2, April–June. Esteva, Gustavo. 1983b. The Struggle for Rural México. South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey. Esteva, Gustavo. 1986. “En la hora del encuentro”. In Aún tiembla: sociedad política y cambio social: el terremoto del 19 de septiembre de 1985, edited by Adolfo Aguilar Zinser et al. México: Grijalbo. Esteva, Gustavo. 1992. Fiesta - jenseits von Entwicklung, Hilfe und Politik [Fiesta - Beyond Development, Aid and Politics]. Frankfurt: Brandes & Apsel/ Südwind. Esteva, Gustavo. 2004. Celebration of Zapatismo. Penang: Citizens International. EZLN. 1998. Zapatista Encuentro—Documents from the 1996 Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism. New York: Seven Stories Press. Groeneveld, Sigmar. 1990. Hebenhausen: Declaration on Soil. Hebenhausen: Kassel University Press. Illich, Ivan. 1980. “The New Frontier for Arrogance”. Development XXII, no. 2–3, 96–101. Illich, Ivan. 1982. Gender. Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books. Illich, Ivan. 1986. “La alfabetización de la mentalidad: Un llamamiento a investigarla” [The Alphabetization of the Mind: A Call to Research]. Tecno-Política, 87-04. Illich, Ivan. 1996. Deschooling Society. London: Marion Boyars. (First published in 1972). Mangin, William. 1965. “Latin American Squatter Settlements: A Problem and a Solution”. Latin American Research Review 2, no. 3. Panikkar, Raimón. 1995. Invisible Harmony: Essays on Contemplation and Responsibility. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Peattie, Lisa R. 1980. Research, the Advocacy of Policy and the Evolution of Programs for ‘Marginal’ Settlements in Developing Countries. Brookline, MA: MIT. Rahnema, Majid. 2001. “Poverty”. In The Development Dictionary. A Guide to Knowledge as Power, edited by Wolfgang Sachs. London: Zed Books. Robert, Jean. 1992. Ecología y tecnología crítica [Ecology and Critical Technology]. México: Rompan filas, Fontanamara. Sachs, Wolfgang (Ed.). 1992. The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power. London: Zed Books.

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The Ecologist. 1993. Whose Common Future: Reclaiming the Commons. London: Earthscan. The Zapatistas. 1998. Zapatista Encuentro: Documents from the 1996 Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism. New York: Seven Stories Press. Turner, John C. 1968. The City in Newly Developing Countries. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

CHAPTER 5

Interculturality Gustavo Esteva

Introduction Elías González Gómez (Guadalajara, Mexico. September 19, 2022) Translated by Carlos Tornel The more I read the first of the texts selected for this magnificent anthology by Gustavo Esteva, the more the lines that passed before my eyes echoed in my memory. The opening text of this fourth and final part seemed extremely familiar, even to someone who has intended to study the life and work of Gustavo Esteva. I am honored to introduce these three texts, which seek to express the author’s thoughts on one of his vital themes par excellence: interculturality. I will try to formulate the following paragraphs not from an abstraction that presents the concept of interculturality in Gustavo Esteva, but, along the same lines of the encounter with Juanito in the second text, I will talk about the concrete person with whom I interacted. It is deeply

G. Esteva (B) Oaxaca, Mexico © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K. C. Lau et al. (eds.), Walking on the Edge of the Abyss, Global University for Sustainability Book Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2325-0_5

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meaningful for me to write this introduction, because interculturality was the beginning and the vehicle of my entire relationship with Gustavo. I first heard Gustavo speak when I was a student. I attended one of his talks and was moved by his words. Some years later, I was invited to present a paper in the city of Puebla at a conference on interculturality. I accepted when I saw Gustavo Esteva’s name on the program. It turned out that we were staying in the same hotel. Our friendship began through some informal conversations in the lobby and from listening to our respective papers at the conference. By then, I had devoted myself more to interreligious dialogue, while he was focused on intercultural dialogue. We were both inspired by the ideas of Raimon Panikkar, whom Gustavo met and got to know in person. However, in the years that followed, I learned from Gustavo a whole new radical approach to interculturality. Interculturality is one of those terms that have practically been taken away from us. As governments or official educational institutions define themselves under the banner of interculturality, it quickly becomes clear that the word begins to lose its critical power. However, the reflections and above all, the praxis of Gustavo Esteva, both fabulously expressed in the three texts selected for this last part, allow us to refresh the intercultural horizon by overflowing it with a radicality perhaps never achieved by other authors. Gustavo tells us that interculturality is a no man’s land. He also says that there is no such thing as an intercultural language because no culture can position itself transculturally in relation to others or to itself. Therefore, the only possible language for such a dialogue is listening. But this listening goes beyond the horizon of rational knowledge, the mere logos, to enter the intimate paths of mythos. Every culture is the mythos or horizon of meaning of a people, making this mythos non transmissible by any other means than the direct experience of cosmovivencia (Cosmoexperience). In other words, cultures are alive, and only by living them can they be “understood”. The big problem with modernity is its pretentious character of universality. Gustavo’ s most worked example of this note of modernity is development, which has already been discussed in depth elsewhere in this anthology. The opposite of development would be hospitality, the capacity to accept the radical otherness of the other and welcome him/her as he/she is, without this implying that I/we stop being who I am/we are. At the same time, hospitality does not mean impermeability or impossibility in communication either. Hospitality is

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almost always fruitful and enriching, but only when there is an authentic dialogue in mutual listening, not modern homogenization. However, Gustavo is much more radical than Panikkar and other authors concerning the otherness of the other. He went so far as to propose1 to go beyond the dialogue of knowledge proposed by authors such as Boaventura de Sousa Santos to arrive at what he called the dialogue of vivires (lived experiences), that dialogue that arises from the impasse where cultures cannot communicate due to the incommensurability of their paradigms, so that the only thing left is to assume the otherness of the other hospitably and try to build another world together. This is perhaps one of the great contributions or characteristics of Gustavo Esteva’s intercultural thought: radical pluralism taken to the concrete world of social resistance and struggle. The radical pluralism of which Esteva speaks does not elucidate the ontological plurality of the world or the metaphysical level of diversity. Although it is clear that his political thought has implications that concern the order of the very constitution of reality,2 Gustavo does not limit himself to offering an abstract pluralist philosophy criticizing dualism or monism. On the contrary, Gustavo shows how the various community networks are either recovering their old ways of life that the modern project has violated, or reinventing themselves communally, sometimes from scratch. Gustavo called this the “ongoing insurrection”: ordinary people rebuilding their lives in the midst of a civilizational catastrophe. As a result, we have an interculturality that is lived out in the day-to-day practice of thousands upon thousands of people around the planet. These struggles to create “a world where many worlds fit”, as the Zapatistas say, are not only the real manifestation of radical pluralism and interculturality but also its builders in the concrete. In the post scriptum to the Mexican edition of Ivan Illich’s Los ríos al norte del futuro, Gustavo proposed reading Illich’s life and work as an intercultural imperative.3 This hypothesis of reading Illich’s work, while opening up a fascinating interpretation of the Austrian thinker, reveals so much more of the deprofessionalized Mexican intellectual. As Gustavo himself shares in the texts that will be read below, the intercultural imperative is an intimately personal issue that challenges him directly. At the end of the 1980s, he decided to leave Mexico City and go to live in a village on the outskirts of Oaxaca City, a few kilometers from where his Zapotec grandmother was born. There, in Oaxaca, he founded CEDI, the

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Centre for Intercultural Encounters and Dialogue, and later the University of the Earth Oaxaca. His involvement with Zapatismo is in line with his commitment to radical pluralism. He also opened up to intercultural research following Panikkar’s term “homeomorphic equivalents”, trying to trace equivalents (not synonyms) of certain notions such as “right” in different cultures. One of the most important investigations was the one that led him to realize that “peace” is not something universal and that among the Zapotecs the closest thing would be something like what in the West is known as “friendship”.4 It was friendship that finally helped me to identify the first text of this last chapter. In 2016, I invited Gustavo to an interfaith dialogue meeting in Guadalajara, organized by the North American Interfaith Network and the Carpe Diem Interfé Foundation, in which I was involved at the time. Gustavo gladly accepted the invitation. His keynote lecture corresponds to the first of the texts presented here. I still remember his words when an American approached him after the lecture to ask him why he had accepted the invitation to participate in the meeting. I was less than a meter away, so I could hear his words perfectly: “because Elías invited me, and I trust him”. Interculturality for Gustavo, it is clear to me, was a matter of friendship. Finally, I would like to mention that the reader will find two other texts in addition to the first text. The second deals with decoloniality and the third deals with intercultural exchange between students. While some themes are repeated between the three texts, they also complement each other magnificently, with the first being more direct in its approach to what interculturality is and the other two being more practical examples of the implications of this horizon. It can be seen, moreover, how Gustavo’s interculturality was never a separate reflection from the rest of his issues: radical uncertainty, the end of an era, indigenous and peasant peoples, ongoing insurrection, development, new political horizons, and so on. I hope that this selection of texts will encourage the readers to take up the still urgent reflections and praxis of interculturality in an increasingly diverse, but also increasingly violent world. Let us hope that we can make our own the words that Robert Vachon said to Gustavo: “He told me one day that perhaps a pluralist myth was formed within me, without me realizing it… I do hope so”.

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Horizons of Interculturality (San Pablo Etla, Oaxaca, Mexico. July 2016) Translated by Kathryn Dix The Disease of Underdevelopment My Zapotec grandmother was not allowed to enter through the front door of my house in Mexico City because she was “india” or indigenous. Like many other people in her generation, my mom assumed that the best thing she could do for her children was to radically separate us from our indigenous past so that we would not suffer the discrimination she had experienced. “Indios” were not just ignorant and backward but bad: we were instructed to run in the other direction if we ever saw one, lest they harm us somehow. In my house, within a patriarchal structure, we lived and breathed the aristocratic nostalgia of my father and his “criollo” roots. But I loved my grandmother, and I used to ask to spend my vacations with her in Oaxaca, where she had a stall in the market. I grew up in that kind of conflict and confusion until January 20, 1949, when Truman rescued me by politically coining the word “underdevelopment” on the day he took office. I was one of the two billion people who became underdeveloped. Being underdeveloped is very humiliating. You can no longer trust your own nose; you have to trust the noses of the experts there to guide you to development. You can no longer dream your own dreams; they are dreamt for you because it’s all about trying to be like them, including dreaming their dreams. Underdevelopment also comes with a certain fascination. During the 1940s, cinema was the newest form of entertainment, and people flocked to see the latest movie every week. All of them, made in Hollywood, presented the American Way of Life as the closest thing to paradise. President Truman offered to share all of the United States scientific and technological advances so that we could be like them. Like everyone around me, I wanted development for myself, my grandma, my family, and my country. But, I want to emphasize that we were not underdeveloped. Gandhi, in India, cautioned that Western civilization was a curable disease and that he did not want to nationalize British domination but rather Hind Swaraj, for India to govern itself on its own terms. In Mexico, President Cárdenas cautioned that, given the

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effects of the last capitalist crisis, we should dream of a Mexico made up of “ejidos” and small industrial communities, with electricity and sanitation, and where machines relieved men of heavy jobs rather than being employed in the name of overproduction. In the 1980s, we began to know what it was really all about. Truman’s first promise was that of catching up to them, of being able to be like them. In the 1950s, a great statistician estimated how long it would take for us to develop. Countries like Mexico or Brazil would need 25 years; if we were sluggish, it would take 50 years. In the 1980s, the World Bank prepared a new estimate, which delayed the process to 400 or 500 years, which is to say never. Truman’s second promise was that of a certain equalization by bringing the underdeveloped towards development. In 1960, the rich countries were 20 times richer than the poor ones; in 1980, 20 years later, thanks to development, they were 46 times richer. That is how we knew that development was a great enterprise for rich countries but horrible for us. The situation incited rage and frustration in many. Why did it appear that we were condemned to always be waiting in line? Some of us reacted in an individualistic way by joining the “developed” minority. For many others, it was a revelation. Development was based on a universal definition of the good life, that of the American Way of Life, which wasn’t viable and had all sorts of negative consequences. But we still had our own definitions of what it means to live well, and they were clearly attainable for us. The whole enterprise of development is an intercultural affair. It’s built on a universal definition of a good life that is immensely destructive. It imposes upon everyone a way of being, thinking, living… The Intercultural Question Around 1983, I finally removed the development tinted lens that defined all the categories I had been educated in for various reasons. At first, I had a dazzling sensation, like when one comes out of the darkness into the light. But finally, I was able to use my own eyes to see my world. Two things happened in my life under those circumstances. First, I began to remember lessons from my grandmother, from when I was with her during vacations; I pulled those memories from the back of my head, where development had confined them. The second thing that happened was that I met Ivan Illich. But, before that encounter, I want to emphasize two things that I’ve said thus far: that talking about interculturality is, for

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me, a strictly personal issue, a profound life experience, but the confusion I’m speaking about, on the other hand, is not personal, it persists as a general phenomenon. In the 1970s, Ivan Illich was at the peak of his fame. All the world came to visit him at his “Centro Intercultural de Documentación” (Center for Intercultural Documentation), CIDOC, which was 60 kilometers from my house. For us, however, among the Marxist left, he was just a reactionary priest. He wasn’t worth reading, much less visiting. We knew he critiqued schooling and health, and we recognized that they didn’t work in the context of this capitalist society, but we thought they could work in the context of the Socialist society that we wanted to build, as was the case in Cuba. In 1983, Rodolfo Stavenhagen invited me to a seminar that Illich would be at; I was fascinated and barely listened. A mutual friend invited us to dine, and I began my relationship with him. I immediately began to read all of his work. I felt that in it I had found the discourse of the people, their ideas. Ivan explained that a prophet is not someone with a crystal ball but rather someone who knows how to read the depth of the present. Ivan was a prophet. Not only did he anticipate at least half a century in advance what would happen to institutions, but also how people would react. Anytime I comment on Ivan’s ideas in towns and “barrios ” it produces “aha!” moments as if people already knew about it, but they had never had the words to articulate it in that way. Ivan was born in the middle of Europe in a very traditional world in the midst of the Nazi regime. He was a polyglot at the age of seven. His childhood is clearly multicultural. Identifying as Jew in Nazi Vienna, he decided, at the age of 13 in 1939, that he wouldn’t bring another creature into the world. He went to Rome to train as a Catholic priest. After a few PhDs and a brilliant presence, they offered him a career in the Vatican, in a high position in the Curia. The next day, he flew to New York. He radically renounced power. He tried to become an erudite, studying the manuscripts of Alberto Magno that were in the University of Princeton. One day he went by a parish that serves Puerto Ricans, and when he entered to pray, he observed with horror how they treat the jibaritos.5 He immediately asked Cardinal Spellman, who was his protector, for the Parish, and he inaugurated a pluralistic approach open to all people. Those who saw him still remember his immense devotion at Mass. They also remember his last mass. They had named him the vice-rector of the Pontifical Catholic University in Ponce, Puerto Rico, and 30,000 Puerto

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Ricans went to bid him farewell since they had learned a new way of approaching the church alongside Ivan. In Puerto Rico, he learned about the critique of education with Everett Reimer and traveled to the island’s furthest corner to speak with people. When he was forced to leave due to differences with the Bishop, he headed to Brazil. There, with Bishop Helder Cámara, he learned not only of Brazilian and Latin American authors, such as Paulo Freire, who he met personally, but he also learned to walk Latin America. The Bishop sent him to the favelas, dirt roads, and pueblos as he would later walk many countries’ favelas, roads, and pueblos. When the Pope and President Kennedy agreed to send 10% of all priests and nuns from the United States to Latin America, Ivan was the obvious choice to train them. To this end, he created the Center for Intercultural Formation with the University of Fordham and chose Cuernavaca, Mexico, as the location for this candidate training center. He then founded his Center for Intercultural Documentation. During this period, he gave his famous speech that is still subject to study across many parts of the world, especially among those who want to go help countries different from their own: “To Hell with Good Intentions”. The speech began with the affirmation that this was a theological proposition. He tried to explain why sharing something that one considers good is not necessarily good and can actually be really harmful. It is an old tradition. Thoreau cautioned that if you saw someone approaching you with the intent of doing you good, you should run for your life. Illich’s main works, which he wrote at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, are the fruit of an ongoing dialogue with people from various cultures. As a result, he learned more languages to the point where he mastered over a dozen. He thought about going to live in a Chinese village in his quest to see the West from the outside, but he realized that even there, he would still be a Western Illich. Thus, he began to look backward in the history of the West to see how and when the modern certainties that comprised him had come to be. In the final 20 years of his life, he tirelessly repeated, corruptio optima quae est pessima, the corruption of the best is the worst [of all]. Although he applied this principle to many things, he primarily directed it at his church, which he loved as a community and rejected as an institution. According to him, the best had corrupted the message of Christ. And he expressed this best tirelessly, this message, through the parable of the

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Good Samaritan. According to him, the entirety of the Christian message could be reduced to that expression of love. The parable answers the question: who is your neighbor? My neighbor—says Christ—is he who chooses love, beyond their own clan, their own ethnos, their own group. The message is corrupted when love is institutionalized and expressed as service. Therefore, the central message of Christ is an intercultural one. Having established this foundation, I can now say what I want to say: Interculturality is no man’s land. No one can be there. However, we are all immersed in one culture. We see and experience the world from there. We need to seriously acknowledge the otherness of the other, recognizing that they are radically other. As such: we admit that we cannot understand each other. We have different rationalities, conceptions, and ways of living and experiencing the world. We cannot even assert the diversity of cultures: this would imply placing ourselves above them using a supracultural criterion that is impossible. We can suppose or assume so, making it a foundation of our thought and behavior, but we cannot confirm its existence. We can suspect that through love and practice, we will be able to harmoniously coexist with the other…without understanding them. As the Zapatistas say, it’s about building a world that allows for many worlds. I will try to clarify each of these points. The Cultural Backdrop I have been using this word “culture”, but it’s essential to recognize that it has burst open. It is still charged with connotations but has lost all precise meaning. It has become a hodgepodge vessel in which various elements of different natures are tossed in. Each time we use that word, we need to define precisely what we mean. All “culture” has aspects that are manifest and wholly visible: customs, languages, arts, food … These are its morphological aspects. It also has structural aspects, partially visible, which a person from another culture can discover through time and observation but are entirely familiar to those within the culture. For example: if I arrive at a community and I see that they are gathered in assembly, I can see that they are gathered in assembly, but I am unfamiliar with the rules of its functioning, which I discover over time since they are not evident. In all “culture”, there is also a deeper level that determines the others: it is the realm of myth.

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I am not asking you to accept a definition of culture. For the purpose of our conversation, however, I propose using Raimón Panikkar’s notion: culture is the encompassing myth of a society or group in a moment of given time and space. The world myth alludes to legends, stories, and traditions. For Panikkar, myth is the horizon of intelligibility in which our perception of reality acquires meaning. It is like faith, which according to Antonio Machado (Spanish poet), is neither seeing nor believing in something but believing that you see. Myth is what gives meaning to meaning without being contained in the meaning. It allows one to see, like light, but like light, we cannot see it. We can see each other because there is light, but we do not see the light. Myth is like that: it offers a framework in which our perception of the world is inscribed. It is what allows and conditions any of our interpretations of reality. It is the fountain of meaning, the horizon of intelligibility, and what we sometimes call spirituality or the root of knowledge. Culture is not objectifiable, having an objective basis: we can only approach culture by participating in its myth. What we can see of a culture from outside of it, from another culture, is not enough to understand it. Each culture is a galaxy that houses the experience and perception of the world based on which one’s understanding of oneself and others is formed; it houses one’s knowledge of the reality surrounding us. Culture is not special, apart from others, like a person, an orange, a mountain or a theory, arithmetic, logic… Culture is somewhat like temperature: a state of the community, of atmosphere, that certain objects, traits, or characteristics take on in a certain place, for a certain group, in a certain time period. It is not a property or wherewithal of certain individuals or institutions. Culture is the atmosphere of goods or goods in a state of atmosphere or of the ocean, says Juan David García Bacca (Spanish-Ecuadorian philosopher). By thinking and living, we are irrevocably rooted in our culture: we think and live from inside of it, from the cultural background that we share with other members of our culture and not with those from other cultures. There can’t be supracultural criteria that can compare or judge different cultures from an exterior or neutral perspective. It always depends on our language, our concepts, and our point of view; these are all culturally rooted. So we can’t establish a hierarchy among cultures or try to apply the values of one to another.

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Each person can appreciate their own culture or disparage others from their own culture—but they should recognize that they are making judgments of other cultures from the outside, applying their own criteria and perceptions to something that is entirely distinct. We can identify human invariants: we all breathe, think, feel, or prefer some things over others. But each person perceives all of that in a different and distinctive way and in that way makes up different configurations of the human invariants. There are no cultural universals. All cultures have their own values, but they are not absolute or universal; they can’t be applied across the board. This is not cultural relativism, the approach where everything is valid out of respect towards others and which lends itself to fundamentalist approaches. This is cultural relativity: every cosmovivencia, each affirmation, each notion, is relative to its context. No one from any culture has a perspective that can encompass all of them. Interculturality An intercultural situation arises when people or groups from different cultures enter a relationship of any kind. When one imposes one’s self on the other, through force or persuasion, as is the case with the colonial condition, it incites resistance, a form of isolation or retreat into one’s own culture. Otherwise, it generates transculturation or acculturation, whether due to vocation or survival instincts: one abandons one’s own culture to “relocate” to the dominant culture and install oneself in it. Sometimes there is a combination of these two reactions: resistance and partial assimilation or absorption simultaneously. A culture can enrich itself this way, taking advantage of a trait that many of them share: the tradition of changing traditions in a traditional manner. This gives them historical continuity: it allows them to change without dissolving. No indigenous culture in the Americas is as it was 500 years ago, they have changed continuously, but they still are who they are. I call interculturality a condition that assumes an approach that is different from the ones I mentioned above, an approach that does not impose one culture on the other. In my understanding, interculturality alludes to the dynamic situation where one becomes truly conscious that there are other people, values, and cultures. Interculturality recognizes that isolation is not possible and it doesn’t seek to renounce one’s own

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culture. This consciousness admits the limitations of all cultures and the relativity of all things human. Instead of hiding within it and trying to isolate itself and distance itself from the other or trying to suppress it, it interacts with the other from a place of recognition of its radical otherness. Today, like never before, we are forced to adopt a stance regarding the presence of the other. Avoiding mutual interaction, interdependence, and interference has become impossible: the world is throwing everyone in the arms of the other. In this novel situation, we can no longer escape; we feel and suffer the incompatibility of different cosmovivencias with growing intensity. I’m not referring to moments where we have different opinions, perspectives, or approaches. In these moments, one can apply a democratic process that offers those in the minority a consolation prize and the hope that their position will change in the next round. It is not nothing. It is better than fighting. It might be the best or only peaceful option in many ongoing conflicts. But the democratic process does not resolve confrontations between different cosmovivencias. Contact or conflict between cultures cannot be resolved through the victory of one side, whether it is provisional or transitory. This inevitably brings us to the question of pluralism. In the face of that pluralism, inherent in reality, which elicits confrontations on an unprecedented scale, the only approach left is pluralism. Intercultural Dialogue What is required today is opening up a dialogue among cultures that goes beyond a mere conversation or democratic encounter. There is no such thing as an intercultural language. There are no intermediate spaces or bridges of communication. The words and concepts of one culture only have meaning, their meaning, within that culture. Each culture determines its criteria for truth and signification. A conversation can refer to a simple dialogue. It referred to an exploration of understanding between two or more people based on common reason and shared concepts and abstractions. How can there be a dialogue between those who do not share rationality? The word dialogue originally meant going beyond logos , beyond reason, beyond understanding, transcending them. A dialectic dialogue, like the one that should be practiced in relations between cultures, explores interaction through symbolic perception, transcending the plane of logos, the plane of mere reason, but

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without renouncing it altogether. It involves using reason but not limiting oneself to reason. It is not a mere logical, conceptual, reflexive, epistemological, objective, or subjective consciousness. Neither can it be reduced to a sign, representational metaphor, or image…it involves advancing the elements that lend transparency to the discourse, to what it said. It is about managing to see what is being said, even if we cannot see what it reveals. It is not only the myth underlying a pueblo, but also the mythical universe we live in, the horizon of intelligibility in which all our experiences or interpretations of reality acquire meaning. The key to this intercultural dialogue is listening. Carlos Lenkensdorf has rigorously demonstrated the contrast between original peoples or pueblos and Western or Westernized peoples. In the latter, “talking and speaking are emphasized at the expense of listening” and “ listening is the doorway to dialogue, that simultaneously is a foundation of convivir [or cohabiting]”. “By beginning to listen, we start a transformative process: we want to listen to understand who they are and, in that way, find out who we are”. Dialogue is not possible if those dialoguing don’t listen to each other. “Other culture… are interrogations for us if we open ourselves to listen to their questions. At the end of the day, Lenkensdorf emphasizes that to approach the otherness of the other, it is necessary to imagine more than a cosmovision; one needs to conceive of a cosmoaudition; indeed, one needs to conceive of a cosmoliving. The dialogical dialogue involves a mutual openness to preoccupation with the other. It is about sharing a lead, suspicion, inspiration, ideal, or any elements that both parties can share and neither controls. It is an art as much as knowledge, techne, and praxis, gnosis and theory. We ought to try to make it real, even when one party is resistant to doing so. In the face of the very real and immediate prospect of unprecedented catastrophic genocides and culturicides, we are obligated to put this option into practice: an intercultural dialogue based on an understanding of the radical otherness of others, of difference. Raimón Panikkar was the son of a Catalan mother and an Indian father. The origin of his vocation transformed him into a globally recognized figure in the areas of intercultural dialogue and interfaith dialogue. He stated firmly and clearly that he could be a catholic priest and a Buddhist monk, both of which he was, without living in contradiction. He knew

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what he was talking about. His fascinating body of work is a steady guide for the adventure we are nowadays forced to embark upon. Guided by his influence and that of Ivan Illich, my teachers, I founded the Center for Intercultural Dialogue and Encounters (CEDI) 25 years ago in Oaxaca. As a result, we have had an infinite number of encounters with people from very different cultures, many from the United States and Canada, but also from Japan, Finland, Tanzania, and Turkey, not to mention the 16 indigenous cultures of Oaxaca, the state with the largest concentration and diversity of cultures in Mexico. We are continuing to learn how to dialogue in that place. We can’t say we know how to do it, even though we’ve been trying for a quarter of a century. But, we can show how and why we have failed while trying…and also why we feel that we have achieved it when we manage to do something with the other, be it a he, she, or they… We created the Center because we thought the intercultural dialogue was the central question of the twenty-first century. More so than financial, economic, social, political, or technological crises, the relationships between people of different cultures would define our century. The violence that characterized the twentieth century continues in the twenty-first century, but it has relatively novel characteristics: there is an unprecedented emphasis on the confrontation between cultures. For diverse reasons or pretexts, people from different cultures who had coexisted for a long time are now ferociously facing off. Nowadays, we speak of the “clash of civilizations”, or we fret over the “Yugoslavia syndrome” when those who had been neighbors for centuries begin to kill each other. But unfortunately, we are beginning to see this phenomenon everywhere… although it is not yet universally widespread. The First Intercultural Dialogue? When attempting intercultural dialogue across the world, reference is often made to what is now considered a classic, the first registered intercultural dialogue. It took place between 12 Franciscan friars who had arrived in New Spain in 1524 and some tlamantinine, a Nahuatl word for wise indigenous people, who had survived the invasion. The dialogue was recounted years later by Friar Bernardino de Sahagún. The friars were sent by Pope Adriano VI and Emperor Carlos V to convert the indians. The friars were convinced they should only do this through dialogue and peaceful confrontation. So they resolved to invite

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and attract them “like the rain and the snow that falls from the sky, without violence or haste, gently and softly”. As soon as they arrived, they began peacefully, gently starting these conversations with infinite politeness. The priests used an inspired and educated approach, carefully conceived for their audience, to tell the indigenous people that they weren’t trying to convert them due to their own initiative and for mundane reasons. They were sent by God himself, through their vicar, for the sole reason or motive of saving their souls. They showed how the doctrine they brought was the divine word, deposited and guarded in a sacred book they had brought with them. They also described, in beautifully colored detail, all the virtues and powers of God, as well as the wretchedness of the devils. They attributed to the devils the indians perverse illusion that they were gods. Because the gods the indians adored were devils, despicable devils punished by God. They weren’t to blame for adoring them because they hadn’t had access to the Word of God. But the time had arrived for them to abandon their beliefs for their own good and for the salvation of their souls. The response of the main indigenous figures was brief, or at least what we have written down is brief. With extreme courtesy, they recognized that the priests were divine messengers, the incarnations of God even. They accepted them as the voice and word that gives life. They accepted that they were facing God himself. And God was asking them to negate their own gods, and their ancient ways of living. What could they say? How to react in the face of this appalling demand? They saw themselves as people trained in divine mysteries: they were in charge of interpreting them for the common people. But they also recognized themselves as humans, small, limited people who belong to the earth. And these people tell the pueblos, using exquisite courtesy and using the best words in their language, while still being firm (“even if we offend you”, “do with us what you will”) that they can’t take everything they say as the truth. They said this under the assumption that this was the word of the divine itself since they accepted that the priests had brought it. The gods are the source of command, dominion and prestige. They owe their lives, births, and growth to them. They had an established way of life, transmitted from one generation to the next. “We”, they said, “we will not destroy the old rule of life, because in our hearts we understand that life is responsible for life, responsible for birth, responsible for growth and development. This why we invoke the gods, why we beseech them”… “Dear Sirs, don’t do

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something to this pueblo that will bring shame upon it. We don’t want the gods to get angry with us, or to incur the wrath of their rage”. Having said that, they appealed to common sense, to prudence, to wisdom: “And let it not be because of this that the pueblo rises up, or that because of this”. And lest because of this, before us, the people should rise up, lest because of this we should be in an uproar, lest we should be disinclined if we should thus say to them: let’s not invoke the gods anymore, let’s not make supplications to them”. And they present a conclusion: “It is enough that we have left the command, that we have lost, that the command has been taken away from us. If command and power have been lost, let us at least preserve the ancient rule of life, the way to be close to the gods”. “Do not grieve, our beloved”, said the fathers, “do not take our word for an evil omen, which we have told you, how, in what manner, none of your gods is true, of all those whom you worship, to whom you go about beseeching”. And afterward, they gave a lengthy and loving explanation of the Christian doctrine. As you can see, this so-called first intercultural dialogue in history did not exist. There was no dialogue. The Current Dialogue I want to contrast this against an experience taking place in our times. I had the great fortune of meeting Ricardo Robles, El Ronco, in 1996, in Chiapas, where we were both serving as advisors during the San Andrés Accords with the Zapatistas. Once in 1963, he told me that when he went to the Tarahumara mountain range in Northern México to complete his mission, he was convinced that he would evangelize them. That was his task. He was to bring the word of God, a universal good, to them. He sought to convert them, if necessary, or at least to strengthen his faith and his Christian practices. “What happened”, el ronco said, “was that they evangelized me. After living with and like them for a while, I discovered that I was not there to help them. If someone asks me today what or who God is, I immediately reply: it is how these rarámuri compañeros related amongst each other”. The same year I met him, he wrote a noteworthy text. He recounted how he began to experience culture shock when he had been in Norogachi 33 years prior.

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While learning the language, he writes, I made a plan to go live in a family’s home for a week to learn how to live, not how to talk. It was a limited plan. It was premised on arriving and doing what the people were doing. They knew everything about their world and I didn’t know anything. To think that we thought we were coming to show them how to live! What was really going on is that we came to complete a mission and to instrumentalize the indigenous people. We don’t know how to respect them.

He described several experiences and described how it changed the meaning of faith. He found himself needing to reformulate many things. He said: When one least expects, one is already becoming different. Being in contact with the culture can last a long time. All of the sudden one begins to understand many things that are heard or lived within it.

“The rarámuri live their faith”, he writes. They don’t need to formulate it in concepts. We can’t know it through asking the rarámuri. You need to live it. There is no other way to learn it. It takes time. Sometimes, one wants to place the experience of raramuri faith in one’s own theological framework. But it is not about that. One must sniff out how they see and live, rather than seeking to translate how I see and live to impose it on them. It may be that indigenous theology scares certain ecclesiastical hierarchies. It is what it is. But it is necessary to open the heart and trust these people.

Sometimes, when I was with El Ronco, I thought I was listening to Illich, making that analogy inevitable. In New York, Illich stumbled across the drama of interculturality, or rather, with the negation of interculturality manifested as a type of colonial imposition stemming from religion. El Ronco found it in the Tarahumara Mountains.

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Humanity? There is currently a growing consensus about the necessity of abandoning one of the West’s most beloved and fundamental concepts: the premise of total identity of “human beings”. The very idea of “human beings”, the basis of all “humanist” waves (the West’s best face), has a clear religious origin in the Christian tradition. Still, it was constructed during the formation of modernity. It takes as a given that there is a strict similarity between all human beings; they are assumed to be identical. Even if this premise is occasionally employed in the name of protecting “the others”, as was the case with Bartolomé de las Casas, the approach inherently contains the seeds of all forms of colonialism. As Panikkar has noted and as I mentioned earlier, it is possible to identify certain human invariants, traits that differentiate our species from others, but there are no cultural universals: we speak, think, and experience the world from the perspective of a culture, our own culture. That is why we say that the field of interculturality is no man’s land. Whoever occupies it will have done so from his own culture. Therefore, it won’t have been “intercultural”. The dialogue between cultures accepts the premise that there is no total identity, but it also assumes that there is no total difference because if there were then, there would be no means whatsoever for communication. Pluralism Dialoguing parties’ openness to something beyond logos constitutes a philosophical and practical adventure, a historically novel territory. Yet, it has become a fundamental requirement of the time we are living in. Globalization intensifies interactions. It is a time of great violence where old colonial patterns are reborn or new ones are generated. The pluralism we speak of today is not a goal, design, proposal, or dream but rather an immediate imperative as a dignified and courageous personal and collective response in the face of this violence. Talking about pluralism today does not allude to the plural or plurality. The plural condition refers only to numbers: it stands in opposition to the singular and indicates that there is more of a thing, two or more. In philosophical terms, pluralism stands against monism without falling into the traps of dualism. “When I say… that the truth is pluralist”, says Panikkar, “I don’t

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mean to say, in any way, that there are many truths; I’m saying that the truth is neither one nor many and that it cannot be quantified in any way”. Pluralism does not imply allowing the most diverse flowers to flower in my garden, my field, my land, my country, or my global order, regardless of how much tolerance it introduces into this space of mine. Pluralism means recognizing my own limits, the limits of my truth, of my being, of my culture, and of my way of conceiving the world and existing within it. And that acknowledgment of my own limits implies stopping at the gateway of a mystery: in the face of the radical otherness of the other, I dare to recognize that I cannot classify, order, or abstract it within my system of abstraction without engaging in unbearable violence. I dare to acknowledge that I cannot reduce the other to my world and that the world cannot be mine, not in my head nor in reality. I dare to acknowledge that it is not possible, strictly speaking, to conceive a world because a world comprised of many worlds is not one; I dare to admit that radical diversity, in its most profound sense, is a necessary starting point for harmonious coexistence, free of violence, between persons and peoples. In this modern national state, founded upon the supposed homogeneity of all of its constituents, diversity is easily recognized across the board. However, there are specific rules (limits) set regarding tolerance for foreigners, who are denied some of the rights that national citizens are granted and who are allowed to participate in the general coexistence of the state if they follow certain formalities and abide by those rules. In this regime, diversity is processed via the “democratic pluralism” that I mentioned earlier, with the configuration of majorities and minorities. Today’s challenge cannot be addressed in the confines of democratic pluralism, and it overflows uncontrollably across nation-state borders. The reason is simple: subjugated cultures, those that were until recently homogenized and reduced by the nation-state, a behavior central to its existence, have begun to rebel. They demand modes of coexistence in which they can be, think, and behave without reducing themselves to philosophical, moral, or legal categories that have been imposed by one of the intermingling cultures. When we understand culture in its strongest sense, we can immediately dispose of the notion of having a common system that allows for homogenizing simplification, a fruit of rational reasoning, because life is not solely a function of rational reasoning and because each type of rationality

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exerts reasoning in its own realm and cannot escape it. Moreover, the rebellion of subjugated cultures manifests within the reasoning of many different subjugated cultures, determined to confront the homogenizing and discriminatory treatment they have been subjected to. The tension we are now facing is that of recognizing that difference and diversity cannot be integrated into a single unit or unity. We must recognize that harmonious social order, in a family, in a group, or in society, cannot be based on an abstract principle of homogeneity. We must recognize that the social order need not be based upon the reduction of everyone to a common denominator, established by a specific cultural mode of rational reasoning, but rather through consensus, harmony, and attunement to each other that arises from the heart, rather than from understanding, but from the heart. The approach I’m describing here corresponds to a common experience, and there is no difficulty in living it fully. Two friends or two lovers do not make up a unit. They are not a unit of diverse elements. Their friendship or love fully respects differences and can even be based on them without reducing them. The challenge today, which necessarily happens through intercultural dialogue, consists of elevating that common lived experience to a principle that guides the social order. This is the path that juridical or legal pluralism, which is more than just the study of juridical pluralism, passes through. While plurality belongs to the realm of logos, pluralism lies in the realm of myth: real pluralism overcomes both conceptual and ideological dominance…pluralism occurs when one has transcended logos as the sole and defining arbiter of reality, without disregarding or undervaluing its influence. Pluralism is a testament to the fact that one has gone beyond absolutism without falling into agnostic relativism. Pluralism merely assumes that there is a radical relativity underlying all human constructions and on the very basis of reality itself. The challenge today is to fully come to terms with the personal attitudes and political initiatives that are consistent with this awakening. They should not be inhibited by the fact that they do not fit into the framework of the nation-state, even in its advanced and progressive form. Nor by the equally intimidating fact that, until now, it has not been possible to conceive of the form that a state based solely on pluralism would take. Whether personal or collective, initiatives need not be reduced to the realization of any ideal or subjected to the tyranny of globalizing discourses

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that postulate the future forms that society should adopt. Moreover, in these instances where the result will necessarily be the fruit of the interactions between cultures, it is impossible to postulate it from within any of them. Therefore, the challenge is to open oneself up to surprise with the same enthusiasm that love or friendship can arouse. The failure of the dominant ideologies that dominated us implies abandoning the state of alienation to which they condemned us, the state in which they made us alien to one another. Nonetheless, dis-alienation can lead to self-absorption. This can be seen in many parts of the world and it produces consequences in Orlando as well as in the Middle East, or in several corners of Mexico City. To escape alienation, without falling into self-absorption, it is necessary to surrender to enthusiasm, a word whose etymology we can betray to make it say that it is the feast of the encounter with the you. From Tolerance to Hospitality, Friendship, and Surprise Opening up to tolerance sounds like a good thing in these times of immense intolerance. But we must remember that tolerance means suffering something patiently. Whoever tolerates something, perceives that the other is not as they should be—they don’t have the right skin color, the right god, the right behavior. But they feel generous enough to tolerate it, to suffer it patiently. Moreover, the person tolerating something often loses their patience and thus their tolerance; we must recognize that tolerance is just another type of intolerance. Goethe said that it was an insult and that it should be a strictly transitory approach, even if it is gentler and more discrete than intolerance. On the other hand, hospitality is an acknowledgment, an association, an entirely different way of reconnecting. One is able to recognize the pluralism of reality by being hospitable. One “hosts” the other, even if they disagree with their arguments or with their versions of the multiverse that is the real world. Being hospitable does not mean following the other, adopting their views, or denying them. It simply means that one opens one’s arms and heart to the other and accepts their existence in the place they have. These days we are feeling and suffering from the incompatibility of diverse cosmovivencias; it is the impasse implied in all kinds of violence.

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The question of pluralism is urgently imposed on all of us; the current situation throws us all into each other’s arms. Will we open our arms with hospitality or will we begin to arm ourselves against each other? This is not an esoteric matter. It is already happening, and it is already demanding, for example, that we define the limits of non-violence. In the case of self-defense, in many places, people who are deeply committed to non-violence feel that they must react differently when they are attacked at home or their loved ones. There is no problem believing that one’s culture is superior to others. Nor is the desire to share one’s blessings with others. The problem is the pretension of imposing on others a specific good, the one you have, for your own benefit. That is colonialism. Others - barbarians, infidels, savages, natives, underdeveloped, or under-democratic—have been seen as persons or peoples in need of evangelization, civilization, economization, development, or democracy—always for their own good. Some think they can and should choose others to share their blessings with. Often, they end up bombing people to accept those gifts. Under the assumption of the universal character of the good thus predicated, it is imposed on all. Any means is good for that end. Investments, aid, bombs, or terrorism are legitimate means. The sacrifices and obvious destruction thus imposed on the social majorities and their environments appear as the inevitable price they must pay for their own good. The pigeons that send food or medicine and the hawks that send bombs belong to the same species. The present hell is, as always, paved with good intentions. If fear, weakness, and hatred packaged in a belief system are fertile ground for violence and terrorism, we need the opposite. By expressing hope, strength, and love, we create fertile ground for neighborliness. But how to be good neighbors, how to extend hospitality, how to embrace the other? Our political struggle needs to be oriented to the protection of our own place—the place that cannot be reduced to the formless, genderless space defined by any ideology, belief, or national identity. The place of politics, like the place of democracy, has to be the place where people are. There, in our own places, we can express our will and our point of view, and recover common sense, the sense that is held in community. No matter where they are, ordinary men and women can form coalitions of discontents that can undermine the base from every place;

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ordinary men and women can form coalitions of discontents that undermine the very base of all constituted powers, coming together from time to time to celebrate each other and express a common refusal. In this way, our common pain can be a source of hope. It is time to evoke friendship. Applied to nation-states or abstract entities, it becomes their negation: it defines allies in the face of a common enemy and is a pretext for defining a shared enmity. At home, in community, we can express affection, and mutual sympathy. It is time to seek out our friends and embrace them. It is difficult, if not impossible, to change the world. But it is feasible to create a new world in which many worlds fit, a hospitable world, not a tolerant one, a world localized and put on the ground under our feet, not globalized and projected into space with the simplification of the blue bubble, a world of common sense and a sense of proportion. According to Illich, the situation demands that we renounce several things. One of them is the radical renunciation of the future, which he saw as a monster that devoured men. “I will not allow”, he used to say, “the shadow of the future to affect my perceptions of what is and what has been”. Or as (Giorgio) Agamben says, we need to return from the future…because the future no longer has a future. It’s about really installing ourselves in the present, the only one we have, while constructing a new society, today, among ourselves, without sacrificing it on the altar of the promised land. Hope is the opposite of expectation. I know nothing of the future except that it doesn’t exist and won’t exist for me. We need to recover hope as a social force while being conscious that hope is not the conviction that something will turn out a certain way but rather the conviction that something makes sense regardless of what happens. When a campesino plants on the prescribed day according to his location, he is not fueling the expectation that there will be a harvest in a few months. He knows that many things could happen that might get in the way. He is harboring hope that the conditions will be benevolent and that what he is doing makes sense regardless of the outcome. +++ Allow me one final reflection. I am not Western. I achieved what Ivan was not able to: dismantling the Western configuration of my being with which I was formed. On the other hand, I know a lot about the Zapotec world. I live in a small Zapotec village, 8 kilometers away from where my grandmother was born.

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I’ve held public positions in my pueblo. I have a house made from adobe and thatch, like those around me, and I cultivate and harvest my milpa. I could pose as Zapoteco. But I know that I am not. I don’t know what I am. I know now who I am: I can see myself in the eyes of my friends. But I don’t know what I am. Perhaps Robert Vachon, my friend who created the Intercultural Institute of Montreal 50 years ago, the first dedicated to this theme, was right. He told me that perhaps one day, without me realizing it, a pluralist myth would form within me…I hope so.

Beyond the Self: Regenerating people’s Selves (Conference “Decolonizing our minds: Redefining knowledge”, Temple University, Philadelphia, USA. March 18–19, 1995) Last year, Claude Alvares brilliantly expressed what must be said about the theme of our conference. I quote: “The entire intellectual system that underpins the present political order reflects the interests of Western culture and can never represent ours”. Five-sixths of the world already are “as badly demolished as the Iraqis after the war, with options increasingly limited, their creativity crippled and deeper forms of economic, political and cultural serfdom looming on the horizon”. They have been suffering “the demolition of the mind”.

And he added: There is no such creature by the name of globalization, only the proposal to extend one culture’s hegemony to the rest of the planet, submerging and suppressing the others. There is nothing about this culture that is in any way universal or so compelling that it has to be given the primacy of ranking. Neither has it any compelling logic, reason, or science that makes it reasonable to desire. Its science is its science, one ethnoscience among many, nothing beyond that. (Alvares 1994)

I want to present some elaborations on his ideas and bring to our discussion some reactions of the people being demolished. But I have no hope that you will understand what I am going to say. I am not suggesting that you cannot grasp the meaning of my ideas because they are too complex or you are ill-prepared. What I am saying is that I will not solicit your understanding, but something else. Reason cannot offer guidance in this

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venture. As in the adventure of living, reason is not a guide or a motor, but a veto, critical awareness. After soliciting your critical awareness, I will present my plea for something more. Decolonizing our minds means resisting the pressures of being shaped as the owner of a mind, as an individual self. In my world, a world of indians, peasants, and other marginal, we are regenerating ourselves, not our selves. I have not a self, a body, a mind. I do not see myself as an individual. I know that modern men cannot conceive facing each other except as individual selves. But I can no longer tailor myself as an individual self, to face you, and that is why I am taking the risk that you will not understand what I will say. But I hope you will be able to follow my exploration to discover and recognize my intention. Seeing with the Eyes For many years, the fact of not being able to express what I was experiencing in barrios and villages, with peasant and urban marginal, was for me, a permanent cause of perplexity. One day I discovered that such an experience was always shaped by the formal categories in which I was educated: trying to see through those glasses was conditioning my reading of the experience. It was puzzling to also discover that those glasses, constructed to enrich my vision, were in fact, preventing me from seeing. I thus tried to use again my own “eyes”. That is how I discovered a whole new world, which renovated my hopes about the so-called poor, the “marginal”, the excluded. Rather than being leftovers of the epic of development, as my previous glasses told me, they appeared as people beyond development; rather than being the dark side of this era, they were bringing some light about a new era. When I tried to share that experience with others, however, I entered a new predicament: my friends and colleagues could not follow me in the adventure. They believed my stories but assumed that my “new world” was not another form of perceiving our shared reality but, at best, identifying some exceptions, anomalies, remnants of the past. A friend of mine, who shared my hope and felt equally inspired by those experiences, could not trust them: “It would be beautiful if the world really were like that”, he said. I thus started to construct images. My hope was to put myself in the hands of the imagination of others. But I failed again. My audiences were getting a wrong picture, and I was not able to stimulate their imagination.

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Their eyes, their educated, literate eyes, were no longer windows through which the world came to them or the gate through which things entered their soul but instruments by which images were imprinted in the texts that have occupied the place of their soul. Since I had no intention of printing anything in those texts, and my pictures did not fit well in their typographic style, I renounced to my trick. I will display before your eyes a few stories, in the way a dealer puts the cards on the table, for you to play with them. Beyond the Text I want to talk here about a space that is topologically beyond the alphabetic mind, the mind shaped by the alphabet, the textual mind, as well as its successor: the cybernetic mind. I am not a pre-text man. I was not born in an oral culture. I am not speaking or seeing the way oral men do. Or did: I suppose that no one is still alive. I can only imagine how they were. Both literate and illiterate people live now in the reign of the alphabetic mind (Illich 1986). I often find myself in a village of illiterate people, villages where nobody knows what the alphabet is. But if we discuss their land conflict with a neighbor, the elder of the village runs to his hut and he produces the deed they obtained from the Spanish Crown and the Mexican government legally recognized. Their relations with their neighbors are no longer based on words, mutual trust, and traditions but on a paper, a text. They cannot read, but they are subordinated to a text, an alien text. If you ever come to my beautiful adobe house in a small village in the South of Mexico, you will discover that it is flooded with books. You will perhaps recognize some of them, of Western origin. I have not followed the wise advice of Claude, of burning them all. I find there some of my best friends, and we have regular encounters. I enjoy my excursions to the island of the alphabet. At the same time, I can no longer describe myself as a text man. But to introduce myself here as a post-text man, I need to step back a little. I mentioned before that modern men cannot conceive facing each other but as individual selves. Western men, even more, assume that the image of the individual self they inherited is not only fundamental but a great advance, a conquest of mankind. I can no longer share that conviction. I am struggling to dissolve my individual self. I react with anguish and

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confusion whenever I discover that a trace of my old self, the self in which I was educated, reappears in me. But I want to immediately separate myself from other post-text men. I have encountered among my contemporaries some young people bred on electronic text composers. “Text” means for them something entirely different: rather than a collection of sensible symbols, it means for them a collection of binary bits. Their eyes are trained to compete with Word Perfect’s search command in interface with show; their gaze is a form of scanning (Illich 1994). I can no longer talk with those people in the same way I am talking with you. And I stop myself before imagining what kind of transmogrification is occurring in their beings to create digital men. It looks like an unbearable, unspeakable horror that I do not want to see. Perhaps I must allude a little to my own saga, to share with you my present condition. The Trouble of Being Eight years ago, I wrote a piece called “Regenerating People’s Space”. I described there some of my troubles: the trouble of being a “we”, and the trouble of being a “self”. Allow me to quote myself: During the 1970’s, the Mexican peasants concentrated their efforts on rebuilding their organizations at the local level, and on the regeneration of their local spaces. And people coming from the other extreme of the educational scale then began to join them in a new way. It was not to get affiliation to a political party or ideology, or to give the peasants technical assistance or charity. It was to explore new life projects, side by side with the peasants. We were some of those middle-class professionals looking for another path. We were disenchanted with development and its institutions, with political parties, and bureaucratic or academic careers. We tried to participate in building new and diversified forms of social institutions that flourished at the time. Highly decentralized webs of heterogeneous organizations proliferated before our eyes, transforming us into deprofessionalized intellectuals. And now, an expanding circle of ex-economists and one time sociologists or industry managers that we are, we find it increasingly difficult to make our former peers grasp that we learned near the grassroots, namely, that no indicator can reflect the pain caused by the loss of local self-reliance, of dignity and solidarity which is inevitably theshadow of any measurable progress. Similarly, no indicator can tell the

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story of human remediation and profound joy that “we” are finding in the more hospitable world to which “we” have started to belong. I cannot use indicators to describe the process, but it is perhaps useful to offer some landmarks. In the mid-1970s, “we” were no more than a collection of individuals unified both by our involvement with the peasants and by frustration with our ambivalent institutional success: the higher up we were in the hierarchy, the more distanced we were from the peasants and from what we wanted to do. We felt the need to create an autonomous space for our activities. To begin with, we created a couple of non-profit organizations offering some support and professional services to peasants. We built in them democratic representative bodies, managerial hierarchies, and coordination centers to render our professional services. However, we soon discovered that the organizations were not as autonomous as we wanted them to be. In the process of earning our living, on the one hand, and “giving” our services, on the other hand, we were practicing a form of hidden paternalism. We also perceived that our institutional design was blocking initiatives and inhibiting vital and creative impulses. We were probably just imitating the managerial scheme we were used to. Such scheme can be useful as an exogenous intervention in peasant life—for their good, of course. It seemed inappropriate, however, for projects looking to autonomy and endogenous action. Gradually, we changed our institutional form and started to build webs. Networking was fashionable at that time, and we liked the idea behind the image of a web: it provided a pattern for building institutions while at the same time avoiding an internal or external center (political, ideological, or administrative). A web can be constructed through horizontal linking and by creating linkages that only linked adjacent “points”, thus also avoiding the need for linking everyone with everyone else. But after some time, we started once again to feel uncomfortable with the web design. We resented the “integrative” principle, which appears as a tendency within any web, because it implied homogenization and heteronomy, and invited adhesion, affiliation, belonging -the opposite of what we wanted. We discovered that the webs—as fishermen and spiders know very well— are designed to trap. But we were not trying to trap or catch anyone or anything. So we started to use the image of a hammock to represent, metaphorically, our vocation. Like a web, the image of a hammock holds the idea of horizontality and lack of a center (except for its center of gravity). But it opens other possibilities. The hammock is there, where it is placed: one is not inside

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it, nor part of it, nor a member of it. It can be used or not used when necessary, and for whatever purpose. One can change its location and carry it along when traveling. The hammock, above all, has the quality of adopting the shape of its user. “We” are not a web nor a hammock. “We” have a hammock: a flexible construction that “we” use when “we” need or want. But who are “we”? Usually our answer is that “we” are several hundred groups of peasants, urban marginal and deprofessionalized intellectuals. “We” know what “we” are not: an organization, a party, or a social movement (if we assume that a movement requires some kind of political stirring towards common goals). The stuff that keeps the stability of relations between and among all “our” groups is friendship and trust. These remain even if “we” do not see or deal with each other every day—as in any friendly relationship. Obviously, this does not mean that everybody is friends with everybody else. (We are speaking here of a lot of people.) It means that the members of a group are friends with those of another group, and some of these are friends with a third group, and so forth. Thus, “we” are intertwined through links of friendship and trust. “We” meet each other along the way and became friends, compañeros. “We” decided first to build organizations, formalizing our ties, but when “we” saw that they limited and hindered us (and sometimes damaged our friendship), “we” abandoned such design and “we” build webs. But “we” had not advanced much in that road, when “we” realized that the web naturally tended to become too formal, to rebuild organizations. That is when “we” build a hammock, which does not stand between one another; it is there to be used when needed by any friend who needs it. But who are “we”? That problem still remains. “We” have not representative bodies that can speak in the name of all. Nobody expresses a unique and all-encompassing voice. Isolated representatives of some of the groups that are the “owners” of the hammock cannot represent the others. I cannot speak in the name of the hammock. It is inappropriate for me to do so. It may be that some of the deprofessionalized intellectuals who use the hammock identify themselves with my discourse more than other users. But I can only speak on my behalf even when, for practical purposes, I assume my formal affiliation: the position I have on the boards of some of the non-profit organizations embedded in the hammock, or even on the board of the coordinating space of all these organizations,

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where most of the deprofessionalized intellectuals living in the hammock or using it are working. “At the same time, I know very well that I am not just expressing my personal views or presenting my own experience. The “we” that I use is a very diffused one. It is not a majestic “we”, like the Pope’s. It is not a rhetorical “we”, like a populist politician’s. It is not the formal “we” of anyone invested with a formal representation or mandate. It is analogous to the “we” used by members of a cultural group (blacks, women, the Inuit, the French, neighbors, etc.), but the analogy is imprecise. I hope that the inability to explicitly define “we” will not be an unsurmountable obstacle for telling the story I want to tell here. “I had also troubles with being a self”. I was born and brought up in Mexico City, in a middle-class family. I was brought up with the idea that I was an individual member of my father’s family. I can remember my efforts to give concrete meaning to the abstraction of a 200-year old genealogical tree. I was also led to believe that I belonged to a homogenized physical and social space—Mexico City, Mexico, human kind—which I could acquire after my affiliation with “concrete communities”: my neighborhood, my school, my class, my creed, my party… One cannot be a real member of the most populous city in the world. By the same token, one can avoid communion with the people living in the same place or sharing a similar role or function (school, neighborhood, etc.). One can and must choose a “community” if one wants to belong. For a long time, together with my friends—now deprofessionalized intellectuals—we applied this constructed perception of the world and the conventional lenses of formal categories of social science to understand peasant actions and reactions. We failed time and time again. Then we began to suspect that conventional wisdom inevitably reduced the peasant world to a mechanical structure and, in the process, lost the keys to understand that world. So we started to trust our own noses, more than the expert’s scientific analysis, and thus we smelled another possibility. Could it be that we were standing face to face with an entirely different mode of perceiving things? My mother’s mother, a Mexican-Indian, was supposed to be hidden from my father’s sight when she visited us in Mexico City. I do not know why. But the fact established two clear-cut worlds during my growing-up years.

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At home, in Mexico City, I used to go to the store around the corner, and later, to the supermarket or to Sears & Roebuck. When on holiday, I asked to be taken to my grandmother Dolores’s in Oaxaca, where her family tended a stall in Oaxaca’s traditional market. I played around the marketplace with other kids. Since I was a well-mannered child, I could not ask my grandmother to buy me a lovely knife displayed at the market, which I admired day after day. One morning, my grandmother said to me: “I will buy you your knife”. She took me by the hand to exactly the place, and started a long conversation in Zapotec with the stallholder. Then we just left. Of course, I could not say anything. The next morning, after another long conversation with the man, now in Spanish, she said: “My grandson wants his knife”. “Good”, he answered, as he placed my cherished knife on a table by his right. And once again we left without the knife. Morning after morning, during that holiday, my grandmother chattered with the man. But I did not get my knife. One year later, on my second holiday in Oaxaca, my grandmother took me by the hand exactly to the same place and told to the stallholder: “My grandson has now come for his knife”. The man took the knife from the table, where it had remained for one year, my grandmother paid the price apparently settled the year before, and finally I got my knife. I still have it. Obviously, I had been looking at this event through the eyeglasses of my schooldays. So, I saw my grandmother’s world as an illustration of the premodern mind described by conventional wisdom. It was, for me, but an “insufficient conscience”. She just lived in her underdeveloped world—one that I respected and loved, but which I rejected for myself and for my children, and for my country. It was a world which needed to be “developed”—or so the logic went. As I have said before, “we”, the restricted “we” of the now deprofessionalized intellectuals, failed to understand the peasant world through conventional wisdom. But the smell of another possibility brought me back to my childhood. I tried to remember the mystery of that time, and also tried, for the first time, to unveil it. I took this as a challenge, a venture of discovery, not as something new, but as something that I could reduce to my conventional perception. I was challenged both by the mystery itself, and by the miracle of its persistence. Was it not possible that we were standing face to face with a real mystery, that is, something that we cannot see through the lenses we were conditioned to use? I wondered. And then, just for a change, I took the glasses of. I suddenly saw my grandmother again and was able to realize that I had seen her

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before, with these same eyes, but that I was forced to suppress or forget that vision of her. I know now that I cannot see simultaneously with and without the conventional lenses. My eyes and the lenses give me completely different pictures. I cannot reduce one to the other. Everybody knows what is seen through the lenses of conventional wisdom, since they are constructed in such a way that everybody sees the same picture. (Some even think that by using them one can only see the lenses, not through them.) It is useless, then, to say here what “we” saw through those lenses, though for a time “we” felt very happy with our contributions to the literature which “we” considered original theoretical insights. This is why my story, in contrast, talks of what “we” actually saw with our own eyes. “With this new vision, ‘we’ found, for example, that the Mexican peasants continue to be people born in a concrete, collective space, both physical and cultural, to which they belong and which belong to them. Their spaces are localized—located in a specific place—but without defined limits. They travel a lot. Some of them settle for years in another town or city, or even in another country, but they always keep, as a point of reference, that commons to which they belong and that belongs to them” (Esteva 1987). Beyond the Self I apologize for such a long quote of myself. But how I told my story in 1987 is part of my story today. Iván Illich wrote, more or less at the same time, a piece called “Lay literacy”, which helped me to deal with those troubles. Lay literacy is something completely different to the ability to read and write. It is a symbolic leftover of the use of the alphabet in Western cultures, a frame of mind defined by some certainties disseminated in the kingdom of the alphabet during the late Middle Ages. Those certainties shape the mental space of Western cultures, both among literate and illiterate people. It is a new kind of space inside which social reality is re-constructed: a new kind of fundamental assumption about what can be seen or known. In that piece, Illich presents a plea for research on lay literacy. He warns us that the self-made in the image of the text is fading, together with the self-destruction of the text (Illich 1986). This kind of research helped me to perceive myself as a construct, not as a natural expression of my being alive, and to see the behavior of my

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friends in the villages or the barrios with other eyes. They were no longer underdeveloped, as my colleagues affirmed, people-that-are-not-yet-butwill-be, or mere remnants of a distant past. On the contrary, they were something different and radically new. Cultures can be seen as memories. The way to recall may establish the difference between two cultures, even when they recall the same substance. For a long time, in all cultures, memory was an art associated with personal training. Memory was alive and changing. The alphabet, the book, and the text modified this situation, particularly in the West. In my world, our situation was also modified, but in a different way. We tend to forget that the alphabet created the words. I have been told that the Greek language originally had no word for “a word”, singly identified. Talking was not pronouncing a collection of words in a specific order. And for the Greeks, as Plato stressed, “living recall is superior to memory based on the reference to dry letters which cannot protest when their sense is twisted around by the reader” (Illich 1994: 40). The memory associated with those “dry letters” of a book suffered in the West a profound transformation around the twelve century when it was assumed that the light emanating from the page helps the reader to recognize himself. For some time, that self was still deeply embedded in a religious cosmos: the new sense of individuality could be interpreted only through its organic insertion in that mental universe (Congar 1973). But the modern, possessive individual was already born: it was born when the text was created as an object, something distinct from the book, and the book transformed from a pointer to nature to a pointer to mind. “The book was no longer the window into nature or God; it was no longer the transparent optical device through which the reader gains access to creatures or the transcendent… Instead, out of the symbol for cosmic reality had arisen a symbol for thought. Rather than the book, the text became the object in which taught is gathered and mirrored” (Illich 1993: 119). And the individual self itself became a text, which needs to be read in order to recall. What was puzzling me, in my world, was the fact that many of my friends were not tailored as individual selves, even when they were using those clothes to deal with contemporary persons or events. They were something else. They were no longer leaving the mindset of the neighborhood, within which identity comes from the way others have named and treated me, in order to discover their individual selves in the loneliness of a long road (Illich 1994: 23).

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If a man is introduced to me in the modern world, he will perhaps offer me his card, with his name, his institutional affiliation, and his position. Then, in the conversation, he will offer me some additional clues for his identification as an individual: he will tell me that he is a French economist who studied in Paris Vème and teaches in Berkeley. He is interested in new forms of knowledge and has been twice in Mexico. And we will perhaps laugh together about some postmodern thinkers. If I am with a friend in a village and someone unknown to me joins us, my friend will start something of this kind: “Here is Juanito, the man who speaks with the plants by their name. Oh, you know what he did last week? He was puzzled by a herb growing in his milpa that he had never seen before. He took a handful of it and walked to the next village to consult his uncle, who is a very old, wise man who once stopped a feast just with his eyes. He cannot sleep if he does not know the name of a plant. Juanito is following his steps. He named his daughter Gardenia; he says that he heard about that beautiful flower but never had seen one, and his daughter was, for him, as surprising and mysterious as an unknown flower. Oh, this Juanito, he is such a good chap… And I will hear during our conversation many other stories about Juanito that he himself or my friend will tell me. They will not offer me any list of the abstract categories into which Juanito can be classified and identified as an individual: a man, a peasant, a father, or a friend. In the end, I will retain a vision of a very concrete person, not a collection of juxtaposed abstract categories. As such, an individual has no flesh, no concreteness. A person, in contrast, is always concrete. He or she is a knot in a net of relations; this knot, not any other knot. To know that someone is a citizen of a specific country, a passenger of a specific flight, a member of a specific profession, a consumer of a specific collection of products, a reader of a specific set of books, do not tell me anything of substance about he or she, this concrete person. I will only have an abstract approach to his or her concreteness: I will have a collection of abstract categories in which he or she can be classified. And anyone pretending to be an individual, that possessive individual constructed in the West, can only describe him or herself through the “individualization” and juxtaposition of those abstract categories. After my conversation with Juanito, I will not know much about the categories in which he can be classified, but a lot about the concrete shape of this specific knot and this specific net of relations. We can thus become friends.

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In my world, we are now rediscovering the nets in which we are knots, that is, the many relations crossing through us. We are thus trying to repair the painful and damaging transmogrification we suffered when being individualized in the course of colonization and development. In recent years, we started to include, among the activities to regenerate our spaces, some others to regenerate ourselves, abandoning the fundamental assumptions of the alphabetized mind. We refuse to construct ourselves as individual “selves”. I do not know if we have succeeded at all. But we are trying hard. And we suspect one can believe one is an individual and think and behave like one, but one cannot be an individual. That construct can only exist in the real world, incarnated into a concrete man or woman, into a person who is a knot in a net of relations. This reflection now nourishes our hope of regeneration. Losing and Recovering Memory and Reality Like any modern man, I had a memory. To have a memory is best described by conceiving it as a storehouse and the person having that memory—any “I”—as its appointed watchman. You can bring out that memory and read it whenever you need it. Sometimes I think I still have something of that kind somewhere, but I cannot deal with it in the same way I did in the past. Now I experience ways of recalling that cannot be described as a memory. When I come back now to the story of my knife, I can see that my grandmother did not print in my text, my memory, or my mind, a lesson to be learned. Instead, she opened a window to her world, through which I have been watching since then many different landscapes that cannot be frozen into a text. If any of us allude, in a family meeting, to that intense discussion we had at Christmas ten years ago, every family member will represent it differently. But there will be someone who will restart the fight, trying to establish what really happened. His memory, for him, is a kind of written text, and he is absolutely sure that he really knows what happened. He assumes that he knows the truth, that his version is the objective record of the experience. Some others will have a similar reaction, and the whole evening will be spoiled. In our villages, we can never have a dispute about what really happened in the last feast. Each one describes what he or she remembers, we share different views, and we recognize the living memory of that feast as a

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common experience, that will change every time we recall the event. It is not a text. There is such heteronomy between these two experiences that I do not think that we must use the same word, memory, to allude to them. However, if we want to keep the word for our memory as modern men and women, we need to use another to call that changing and collective way of remembering. I am not arguing here against mnemotechnic tools or the use of written memory for different purposes. I am using here my privilege of having had access to the history of the text, written by Iván Illich (1993), at the very moment in which I was at a dead end, puzzled by experiences in my world which seemed heteronomous to the dominant mental space. That history throws some light on a specific transformation I smelled among the people of that world. In their process of regeneration, they seemed increasingly concerned with both the need to revalue their living recall and to take a distance from abstract memory, coming from a text or written in the mind. We are thus keeping the parenthesis when we use abstractions: being fully aware that they separate things from reality and sequestrate them, putting them in brackets, we allow ourselves to avoid confusion in our daily life. In a sense, without renouncing to abstract thinking, we are just trying to behave as if reality really existed. “Reality”? What kind of “reality” am I talking about? What I am saying is only possible after renouncing to one of the fundamental assumptions in which I was educated: the presumption that “there is some originative and independent source of order that, when discovered and understood, will provide a coherent explanation for the human experience” (Ames 1993: 46). I was educated in need to seek for the “real”, stable structure of the changing world, as well as in the adoption of some of those “realities” as my own point of reference to orient myself in the adventure of living. I assumed that I was living in two worlds: the “real” one—a “structure” or “principle” both cosmogonic and teleological—and the world of “appearances”, in which the “real world” manifested itself one way or the other. I assumed a theory (about that “structure” or “principle”) as a guide for my practice. “My soul”, “my mind”, were but the expression, in a discrete individual, of the “structure” or “principle” defining the order in the cosmos. Through them, through reason and revelation, it became possible to have access to the higher, enduring “world”. I had thus a claim to knowledge. I could know the world, the “real” reality.

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My experiences with peasants, Indian peoples, and other marginal offered me another insight. Rather than assuming the very existence of “two worlds”, I smelled the assumption of one continuous concrete world as the source and locus of my experience; I assumed that change and continuity are equally “real”: reality is both changing and continuing. But to be able to say it, or even to think it, I was forced to first renounce the perception of myself as an individual self, a mind, a text and my soul as an expression, in a particular person, of a higher reality. And I started to behave as if the “reality” I had before my eyes, previously assumed as a mere “appearance”—as if it was not really real—really existed. We were invited here to reflect on redefining knowledge. In preparing myself for this conference, I was immediately tempted by the idea of exploring with you the origin of the words we are using. Their etymology can give us a taste of the historical transformations we need to examine to deal with our subject. In Latin, cognoscere is “to know by the senses”, and its implicit meaning is familiarity, experience, communion, and recognition; scire is “to know by the mind”, and its implicit meaning is separating, dividing, splitting. To know, conocer, or knowledge, conocimiento, in English and Spanish, come from cognoscere, but the original meaning has almost disappeared, and the content of scire, “to know by the mind”, now predominates. The roots of mind, in turn, are associated with memory, remembering, and thinking. Memory is the first meaning of mind according to the Oxford English Dictionary. You can easily see my point. By forgetting to know by the senses, we fell off into a form of knowledge that separates, divides, splits, ignoring or forgetting what we are doing. We lost the precision of the Greeks, which recognized in abstract analysis an operation that separates the idea from reality, but kept the brackets, as I said before: they kept the awareness of the sequestration of reality that we practice when we are abstracting. The dominant mode of knowing and thinking nowadays identify reality with abstraction. For example, the lucid abstraction of class and class struggle, which illuminated our perception of modern society, became an active organizing principle. We assumed that we had discovered the real nature of people and society, and tried to create accordingly class organizations. We thus forgot that classes do not struggle: people struggle. The point here is not to discuss the counterproductivity of such an effort or its concrete value for specific struggles but to reveal our predicament—how we can forget the brackets we impose on reality when we produce abstractions.

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Tools redefine and reshape the human condition. Modern tools have transformed their users into operators of the machine. And no other tool seems to have had a more profound impact on the human condition than the alphabet. It transformed men and women, during a long historical process, into texts—unisex texts, I must say. And our young contemporaries are now being transformed into a screen. These kinds of reflections seemed to me a shortcut to explaining myself at this Conference. But after I walked through them, they looked rather as a deviation. I cannot make my point by applying new doses of the medicine identified as the cause of the disease. Allow me then to tell a story, and please do not try to understand it. When the Word Became the Verb In January 1st, 1994, two hours after North American Trade Agreement entered into force, a small Indian group, poorly armed, hoisted in the South of Mexico its dignity and said Enough! to 500 years of oppression and 40 of “development”. The insurrection of these thousands, militarily irrelevant, changed in a year a country of 90 million which, according to former president Salinas, was ready to enter into the First World. The vicissitudes of this movement have been a matter of concern everywhere. In the US, a book has just been published, including the main documents of the group and a very good analysis (Autonomedia 1994). There are similar books in other languages. In Mexico, three dozen books and thousands of essays and articles have been published. The issue has been on the front page of the papers every day for more than a year. I will not tell here a story full of tension and events which has just started and is now in one of its most critical moments. But I want to elaborate on some of its traits and implications. The dominant view at the end of 1993 was that nothing could stop Mexico from its accelerated incorporation into the globalized economy. It was a mortal swell that was devastating entire cultures and environments with dramatic violence. Words stopped it. The Zapatistas never posed a military threat to Mexico’s national security. The guerrilla warfare to which the government had wanted to doom them may cause severe turbulence, but it cannot modify the course of Mexican society by itself. Neither can the solid social and political organization of the Zapatistas, confined to a few hundred indian communities in the South of Mexico. The word, shaped as Verb, did it.

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No other declaration or gesture of the Zapatistas had the impact of their initial emblem: Enough! With that word, they brought forth a latent attitude in millions of Mexicans. What many felt but did not dare to express or even think found immediate articulation in one word. Today it is an epidemic. It is constantly repeated in everyday life, both nourishing political positions of many forces and giving expression and guidance to a wide variety of unbearable incidents of daily life. Enough! has been incorporated into the colloquial language to define unacceptable situations. It articulated an almost unanimous rejection of the current condition of life in Mexico, which included even those who have derived from it great benefits. For many, Enough! defines now an existential attitude. The Zapatistas and his speaker, Subcomandante Marcos, had made masterly use of the words. They did not use them to build a political or ideological platform, looking for affiliation, but to give voice to the unheard and to articulate deep and generalized feelings. We have many examples of this, but no one as clear as the way they reverted, literally with one stroke of the pen, a stratagem of the government to nullify their movement. Ten days after the uprising started, both national and international pressures forced the government to declare a unilateral cease of fire. President Salinas took immediate decisions to recover the initiative, including an amnesty law, conceived to force the Zapatistas to surrender and give an image of generosity and humanity to the government, acutely challenged by rough violations of human rights during the uprising. A few days later, Marcos sent a communique that has traveled around the world. He challenged both the motives and the subjects of pardon: Up to today, January 18, 1994, the only thing we have learned is that the “pardon” which the government offers to our forces has been made official. What do we have to ask forgiveness for? What are they to “pardon” us for? For not dying of hunger? For not accepting our misery in silence? For not humbly accepting the huge historical burden of disdain and abandonment? For having risen up in arms when we found all other paths closed? For not heeding Chiapas’s penal code, the most absurd and repressive in history? For having shown the country and the whole world that human dignity still exists and is in the hearts of the most impoverished inhabitants? For having made careful preparations before beginning our fight? For having brought guns to battle instead of bows and arrows? For having learned to fight before having done it? For being Mexicans, every one of us? For being mostly indigenous? For calling the Mexican people to fight, through whatever means, for what rightfully belongs to

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them? For fighting for freedom, democracy, and justice? For not following the leaders of previous wars? For refusing to surrender? For refusing to sell ourselves? For not betraying one another? Who should ask for forgiveness and who can grant it? Those who, for years and years, sat before a full table and satiated themselves while we sat with dead, as such a daily factor in our lives that we stopped even fearing it? Those that filled our pockets and souls with declarations and promises? The dead, our dead, who mortally died “natural” dead, that is, of measles, whooping cough, dengue, cholera, typhoid, mononucleosis, tetanus, bronchitis, malaria, and other gastrointestinal and pulmonary diseases? Our dead, who died so undemocratically of grief because nobody did anything to help them, because all the dead, our dead, would simply disappear without anyone paying the bill, without anyone finally saying “Enough!” Those who give feeling back to these dead, our dead, refuse to ask them to die over again, but now instead ask them to live? Those that denies us the right to govern ourselves? Those who treat us as foreigners in our own land and ask us for papers and to obey a law whose existence we ignore? Those that torture, size, and assassinate us for the great crime of wanting a piece of land, not a big piece, not a small one, just one on which we could grow something with which to fill our stomach? “Who should ask forgiveness and who should grant it?” “The president of the republic? the secretaries of state? the senators? the deputies? the governors? the municipal presidents? the police? the Federal Army? powerful businessmen, bankers, industrialists, and landowners? political parties? intellectuals? the media? students? teachers? our neighbors? workers? campesinos? indigenous people? Those who died useless dead?” “Who should ask forgiveness and who should grant it?” The impact of the communique was immediate and general. It doomed the amnesty law to slow agony and complete political failure. Those words suddenly eliminated the effects of the anesthesia distilled by the media at all levels of society. It immediately added, to the national political agenda, the claims of indian peoples and affiliated to the movement all those finding in these words a beautiful and complete expression of their own discontent or felt invited by them to abandon their indifference or apathy. In a recent communique, the Zapatistas revealed their awareness of the role of the words. They said:

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“After January, 1994, we stopped the war against the forces of the government. True, we have shot thousands of words telling our truth (that is what the government resent). Our truth is not the truth of everyone; we are the first to recognize that. The words do not kill, but they can be more lethal than the bombs. The government is afraid of the words, not the guns, of the Zapatistas”. The King Wears no Clothes Perhaps the Mexican experience of this period will be studied to reveal the nature of modern political power, that is, the measure in which it depends on general perceptions. The operation of power is associated with the institutional production of truth, truth being statements through which people govern themselves and others, no matter if they are true or false. Power changes with the changes in those statements. Power transformation thus depends on the institutional regime of the production of truth rather than on the changes of political and administrative appearances (Foucault 1980). The events in Mexico in 1994, deeply affected that regime: a good number of “statements” governing the Mexicans ceased to exist. The Zapatistas and Marcos articulated with genius general intuitions. Well rooted in tradition, in the land, their words became Verb. True, the Zapatistas had been very effective in dissolving existing statements and constructing new ones. There are not yet new statements to govern the Mexicans. Consequently, power structures are increasingly empty and will continue falling, as the Berlin wall, until new statements may shape new institutions. The Zapatistas know their limitations on this matter. And celebrate them. They do not want to be an enlightened vanguard, an elite, making decisions for everyone. They never attempted, like all guerrillas, to seize Power up there, to establish the regime or the ideology they preferred. “We know that our truth”, they say, “is not the truth of everyone”, while at the same time are ready to die in dignity for their truth. “When the river is in spate”, said an old man, “it is because water has been accumulating up in the mountains”. The Zapatistas were living in the mountains; they saw the spate coming. But they did not seek to control it. They avoided any temptation of leading or controlling the social forces they activated. They refuse to change the very nature of their movement, to become, for example, a political party. “Nothing for

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us, everything for all”, they say. This is not a slogan, but a very effective political style, allowing the Zapatistas to nourish the coalitions of discontents inspired by its action continually but avoiding ideological and political rivalries and sterile polemics. They want all the peoples living in Mexico to express themselves, to transform the nation-state structures, constructed for domination, into a common space where all those differentiated peoples can coexist in harmony under a kind of democratic umbrella. How to materialize this dream? If people can express themselves democratically, most of them will vote for things that good socialists will call petit-bourgeois preferences: a little more pornography and sports, more TV than reading. Both socialists and liberals have thus accepted the need for an elite to guide the people and make decisions on their behalf. But elites corrupt themselves. All elites had been corrupted. After the bankruptcy of state socialism and all the variants of the populist, liberal, or welfare state, the authoritarian option is now open: to govern by force and with the market is the new name of Apocalypse. Mexico is now at the edge of falling into it. Since the state naturally tends to be unjust and arbitrary, there is a need to stop it and limit it. That seems to currently be the point of departure of any valid political position. Many people have been looking for alternatives to apply such control, such limitation in the proper way. Some of them can no longer put their trust in the democratic bodies: they also corrupt themselves. The communities have emerged as an option to that dead end. True, they appear as an alternative because there is no other to control the power of the state. In Russia, people talk of capitalism and the market as the only way to limit the power of the state; that means that they have not understood a thing. But the communities also appear as an alternative out of the conviction that the future will be, one way or the other, a communitarian fact. Socialism carried a message of communitarianism, but it was translated as collectivism, statism, and self-destruction. However, even those accepting the value and potentialities of communities do not think that they can simultaneously confront the forces of transnational corporations and the modern nation-state. How to resist the blind and abstract logic of modern power, which seem to have escaped from any possibility of human control? Modern societies abandoned the tradition which derived Power from Heaven, but not its structure and imagery. The transition from the Pope

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or the monarch to a president or a prime minister eliminated church intermediation as a source of legitimacy, but not the location of Power. People’s power has been reduced to the faculty of depositing it in some one, up there. Since political parties have sequestrated democracy and political life is increasingly a media event, this regime has become a mechanism to concentrate power in an elite dedicated to reproducing itself and protecting its own interests. The notion of Power which pretends to construct it as a pyramid but shapes it as a mushroom, is still valid. On the other hand, the emptiness of Power paraphernalia is increasingly evident. Power is but the power of doing something, but the powerful can less and less, every day. The powerful still have economic, military, or political force, but no longer the Power they had, in spite of their continual use of the media to conserve or increase that power. The story of the Wizard of Oz is perhaps the best parable for modern power. After crossing all the paraphernalia protecting the Wizard, the little dog of Dorothy discovered a small, timid man trembling with fear. And he softly explained that Dorothy’s friends were asking for what they already had: courage, intelligence, compassion. A few years ago, I was examining political alternatives after the victory over Somoza with five of the nine Sandinista commanders. I used this insight in my suggestions. They saw me with compassion: “That Power that you think is illusory”, they said, “is precisely what we now have in our hands. And we will use it for the benefit of the people in our revolution”. What is what they had in their hands? Somoza’s Power was threefold: the United States, the National Guard, and Somoza’s money. When the Sandinistas entered the Somoza’s bunker, the American government was no longer supporting them, the National Guard had been dissolved, and Somoza’s money was in Miami. While they were stubbornly trying to rebuild it, to put it at the service of their ideology, people took away from them the trust with which they could have constructed another form of power. That is now Mexico’s challenge. The Zapatistas revealed that the king was naked, thus precipitating the fall of the political regime. But they refused to put all their hopes in the illusion of changing the composition or orientation of those at the top, in the government, or in business and started to explore alternative power designs capable of expressing the real power of people and condensing it strategically. They expressed the need to invent a new regime, to juxtapose a conventional democratic power, constructed from the top down, with a style of power structure

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constructed from the bottom, in which you command by obeying, as the Zapatistas say. Is this possible? Is it not trying to have the cake and eat it too? Oaxaca is a state neighboring Chiapas, with 70% of indian population. In 1988, for the first time in a century, an Indian was postulated as a candidate for governor. The day in which he launched his political campaign, he met with representatives of the 16 Indian nations living in Oaxaca. For several hours, they spoke in their own languages, without interpreter. At the end, an old man crossed the immense hall and told the candidate: “We want you to be for us like the shade of a tree”. Surprised, as everyone, I asked them about the meaning of their ritual. “How he can pretend to govern us”, they said, “if he cannot even understand our languages, the supreme expression of our cultures? how, if to talk with us he is forced to use Spanish, the language of the colonizers? But we are not rebelling against Mexico or Oaxaca. We want a governor, and better to have one of us. But we want the government to be in a specific place, recognized by everyone, like a tree; we don’t want a government trying to govern us all the time, everywhere, even against our will. And we want a government which can offer us protection and support in case of calamity or conflict; a government that can be for us like the shade of a tree”. The governor they helped to elect did not follow that mandate. He had too many development obsessions. But his intimate knowledge of Indian people forced him to hand over to them many spaces of freedom, inside which they consolidated their initiatives and forms of government. Activated by the Zapatistas, in 1994 they pushed their struggles to a new stage. The new governor, clearly concerned by the extension to Oaxaca of the Zapatista revolt, accepted to negotiate with them a New Deal, New Agreement, for their self-government. There is increasing opposition among the bureaucrats, political parties, and local power structures, but the process is advancing. If the governor fails to fulfill the commitments that he already accepted, his government will become a nightmare. In Mexico, agreements of that kind, to govern events and behaviors with the citizens and by the citizens could only be properly concerted with Indian peoples. Only they fully have the communitarian identity and ability for self-government and self-determination. Only among them power is not, like in a democracy, an executive function to order and command; who has the authority, among them, is like the Shu-tashá of the Mazatec people, “the man who serves the people” and perform his function in obeying them. (The symbolic meaning of that word is: a flower

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that walks in the hands of the people.) Only the Indian people can wisely and effectively deal with their own justice and security, the conciliation of their conflicts, and the guidance of the collective efforts towards the common good for the creative practice of the art of living and dying. But it could be possible to learn from them. There are in the country many groups, both rural and urban, still constituting real commons. All of them reject the current situation while affirming themselves in their differentiated initiatives and the rich diversity of their cultures. They could advance, together, towards the articulation of new political options. And they are advancing in that direction: a wide coalition of people’s organizations have now convened a national dialogue, arguing that the dialogue is both a right and a pleasure. Rethinking the Size of the World The world ceased to be a dream, a prophecy, a project. It has become real. Cultural isolation no longer exists. There are no peoples, cultures, or societies lacking “contact” with the “outside”: there is intertwining among them. A kind of web, at a world scale, make inevitable interactions, inter-penetration, inter-dependence. This stimulates the urge to unify and homogenize the world, now with the catechism of production: the global farm, the global factory, the global market. The new systems of transport and communication create a new sensation of belonging to the globe—to a form of common existence—represented by the emblem of the global village. Transnational corporations foster the illusion of full integration, of complete and profound subsumption of the being into the globalized “reality”, which would be confirmed by empirical evidence: people use the same jeans everywhere and smoke the same cigarettes (or stop smoking by the same campaigns). A Mexican soap opera now has record audiences in Russia, and everybody knows the last gossip about Lady Di. This description, however, fails to grasp what is happening among the social majorities. Globalization represents for them a threat but not a reality. Far from being globalized, the daily life of most people on earth is being marginalized from any global form of life due to several structural impossibilities. Social majorities will not, now or in the future, have access to global patterns. They will not eat in McDonald’s, check in a Sheraton or have a family car. Those already “globalized” will deplete the world’s resources long before such a thing can happen.

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Some of these marginal are still struggling to be part of the globalized minorities and to avoid their present exclusion. But many of them have abandoned such an illusion. After frustration and rage, they started to rediscover culturally specific definitions of what a good life is, which are feasible in their own local spaces. While sieged by global pressures, generating incertitude, violence, and social disintegration, they ceased to be dazzled by global solutions to their concrete, local predicaments. By renouncing universal notions of the good life, like the American dream, imposed everywhere through world economic development, they started to protect themselves from the threats of modernity, re-rooting more firmly their lives in the soil of their own commons—spaces that belong to them and to which they belong. Even the most superficial observation of what is happening among the social majorities, particularly in the South, allows the proliferation of localized initiatives rooted in the concrete world shaping the daily life in the communities. They are not ignoring “global phenomena”, which continuously invade their lives, but delinking themselves from programs that marginalize them from the global economy while trying to plug them into it. They escape from the globalization of their marginality through localization. Their attempts have demonstrated that “global” forces can only have concrete existence in their local incarnations. In struggling against a specific restaurant, it would be foolish to ignore the implications behind the fact that it is a McDonald’s. It is not the same to struggle against a dam promoted by a local landowner, than against a project supported by the World Bank. But real struggles are given only at the local level, and David can win over Goliath at that level. The very logic of globalizers forces them to abandon a place in front of a stubborn local opposition. Relocalization is far from parochial: it represents a proper answer to contemporary predicaments. Leopold Kohr warned us, since the 50s, that the real problem of the modern era is a problem of size: the scale acquired by many human creations. Rather than opposing those “global forces” through civic or governmental controls equaling their devastating scale, the time has come to reduce the size of the political bodies in which simple mortals can operate. In other words, said Kohr, “instead of centralization or unification, let us have economic cantonization. Let us replace the oceanic dimension of integrated big powers and common markets by a dike system of interconnected but highly self-sufficient local markets and small states in which economic fluctuations can be controlled not because

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national or international leaders have Oxford or Yale degrees, but because the ripples of a pond, however animated, can never assume the scale of the huge swells passing through the united water masses of the open seas” (Kohr 1992). Rooting Again Our Lives The present trend to localization is manifested in several planes: Affirmation of autonomous thinking. People are thinking again by themselves, trusting again their own noses, seeing with their own eyes. The failure of the promises of developers, the bankruptcy of dominant ideologies and the adverse impact of modern techniques protected by the prestige of science, allowed many people to dream again their own dreams. They thus started to affirm their own definitions of a good life and of the natural and social reality, and to renovate their patterns of thinking and action with which they want to govern themselves. Communal religiosity. The new religious attitudes deny both the premodern centrality of the church (religion as an organizing principle of social life, through churches transmogrified into mechanisms for political control), and the modern privatization of religion (religion as an individual option, freely chosen, which can be or cannot be practiced in a community). It is possible to observe, in the villages and barrios, the reaffirmation of communal forms of religiosity, which gives back to it its original sense (re-link men and women, foster their communion), but avoiding both institutionalization and secularization. Re-appropriation of politics. Many communities are reorganizing their political life. They are renovating their own ways to reach consensus, challenging the parties’ monopoly of political activities and creating new spaces for their initiatives and self-government. Marginalization of the economy. The “law of scarcity”, that is, the relation between scarce means and unlimited ends, is the organizing principle of social life in modern societies, where the economy has become an autonomous sphere of reality. But the “law of scarcity” is but an assumption, which many communities are now rejecting. They organize themselves according with their means; if these are limited, how the ends can be unlimited? They try, of course, to improve their means. They do not define their past as destiny, and know that they cannot control the future. They are thus reaffirming the sensible and virtuous attitude of defining what they want according with what they can and have,

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and rejecting envy (the desire for what the other has) as the motor for personal and collective behavior, which keeps chronic scarcity in economic societies. Re-appropriation of techniques. If modernity, as Jacques Ellul affirms, is defined by la technique, that is, the human condition in which the instrument shapes and defines its user, many communities have started to be beyond it. They are reestablishing a critical awareness about technology, about the logical nexus (the sociopolitical relation) embedded in the technique, the tool. They are being carefully selective to define the size, kind, and scale of their tools, both traditional and modern or postmodern, trying to define their limits. Conviviality. The road chosen by many communities can be described as the path towards a convivial society, in which the autonomous determination of the good life is affirmed; tools strengthening the ability to do (rather than the capacity to consume) are preferred; political control over the instrument, instead of subordination to it, is established; limits to private property, distribution of the fruits of the collective effort, and the scale of personal and social action are defined; and radical pluralism is consciously organized, to go beyond democratic pluralism. The inner strength of the new commons looks fragile when confronted with the disturbing impact of the economic forces still in operation. But new, extended coalitions have emerged, making the political inversion of economic domination feasible. It would be criminal to idealize misery. The new commons are often suffering extreme restrictions. But it would also be criminal not to recognize their innovative quality. They are not forms of survival or to ensure mere subsistence. They are contemporary forms of life, solid spaces for a comfortable life, and a sociological novelty that actualizes tradition and revalues modernity. They were conceived in an era in which all that men and women need for their delight in living can be obtained, given the technical means available, and for an era in which the non-economic form of providing what is needed will allow men and women to freely look for what they want with dignity and wisdom. They were created to leave behind an era in which the explicit goal of unlimited improvement concentrated privileges and imposed all kinds of sufferings on the social majorities in the name of their own good (Illich 1971). In the current endeavor, there are, of course, more questions than answers.

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People are rooting themselves in their own spaces. They do not feel limited by frontiers, with signs of no trespassing, but by horizons. Their new commons sometimes seem like inverted ghettos, created by the people themselves, where they want to be free like the wind. How to articulate their claims in a world defined by frontiers, in which even men and women are separated by the frontiers of their individual selves? How to say what the people want? When Indian peoples claim their autonomy (a word that does not exist in their languages), they dream of self-determination, but the determination of each of them is different. Each one has a different gaze. So how to weave them, if they have not a common word? The communities dismantle, day after day, the “truths” coming from outside and the regime producing them. They are now weaving their own truths, using some of the treads they already had, coming from the past and some contemporary ones. But in the meantime, all the “truths” inherited from the nineteenth century have fallen and a dangerous vacuum has appeared. How to fill it? People are now living in a transition from a universe imposed on them to a more familiar pluriverse. But not everyone accepts to wait, in the vacuum. New universes are emerging, more simplified and aggressive, trying to control the state and redefine its function. True, both transnational corporations and communities are dissolving the nation-state; it can no longer remain in the form of homogenizing national projects. But how to transform it into a space to coexist in harmony and prevent it from falling into the authoritarian hands of those reinventing racism and nationalism to control it? How could it become a protective umbrella for the rich and vigorous pluriverse being born? Needs are becoming localized verbs. Instead of education, learning; instead of health, healing; instead of housing and urban services, settling; instead of food and nutrition, eating. People localize their struggles, root them in their immediate spaces, and at the same time, open them to extended coalitions with other of their kind. They have escaped from the extravagant idea that political struggle requires, as a premise, a clear conception of the desirable social regime. In rebelling against the tyranny of globalizing discourses, which impose an authoritarian vision of “the society as a whole”, they assume the latter as nothing but a diffused horizon produced by a myriad of personal and communitarian initiatives, which are continually interacting and moving away that horizon, as if it was a rainbow. They reject any “normality” and abandon the

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equalitarian struggle for rights, which only created bureaucratic apparatuses by redefining them in terms of services. They now rescue the autonomous satisfaction of their needs, liberated from a definition that translated them into a dependency on those services, and thus concentrate in fully exercising their freedom in their new commons. I see all that, and I do not know how to say it, how to take it out of its abstract jail and transform it into a new lucid and shared gaze allowing for the institutional inversion needed. I am still struggling to escape from the opaque vision of conventional thinking and the frozen language of formal categories and old ideologies. To live in this world, not only to understand it, I need to think everything again. And I know very well that I, and the restricted “We” of all those sharing that attitude, are just starting in that immense, incredible task.

The Meaning of the Global Crisis and “Recovery” for Study Abroad: What Are We Preparing Students for?6 (San Pablo Etla, Oaxaca, Mexico. August 2010) There is universal consensus that we are at the end of an historical cycle. But the consensus vanishes when you try to identify the corpse: we can no longer accept that it is just another business cycle, as the pundits still proclaim, but neither can we blindly assume the end of globalization, neoliberalism, capitalism or the modern era, as many critics currently argue. Raised with a promise of infinite prosperity beyond business cycles, at ‘the end of history’ after the marriage of capitalism and liberal democracy, our students have suddenly entered an era of decreasing expectations and increasing uncertainty. How to reformulate their hope, any hope? How can they be inspired by what people are doing, all over the world, when they take again in their hands the control of their own lives and destinies, reclaiming their own definition of the good life?

New, Dark Expectations Hard times loom over us. Global fear grows geometrically. Denial operates its standardized shield, masking despair with “business as usual”. At the other end of the spectrum, prophets of doom indulge in apocalyptic randiness, announcing the collapse of poor Mother Earth and

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a generation sinking in a “slow-motion social catastrophe” (Peck 2010: 56). Beyond globalized optimism or pessimism, we sense our world is in turmoil. This is not the world for which we prepared our students. Most of them were raised with scientific and social promises of eternal prosperity. At the end of the cold war, experts and pundits celebrated the end of business cycles. The marriage of liberal democracy and capitalism was presented as the culmination of human progress, ensuring stable prosperity forever. A caricature of Fukuyama’s complex thinking became the motto of the day: we were not only living in a Panglossian world, the best possible world, but we could not even think of something better; this was the end of history.7 Despite experts’ conviction that booms follow recessions, as days dawn at nights end, however, such expectations recently vanished. While some experts excitedly celebrate any and all signs of recovery, others humbly confess their sinking sense of shaky foundations. “We know that the situation is very serious”, they candidly confess, “but we don’t know how serious it is and even less what to do” (Zimermann, Director of the German Institute for Economic Research, 2008). Robert Solow, the Nobel Laureate in Economics, acknowledges: “No one can possibly know how long the current recession will last or how deep it will go” (Solow 2009: 4). George Soros, the well-known Wall Street protagonist, declares: “We are dealing not only with the collapse of a financial system but also with the collapse of a worldview” (Bradley et al. 2009: 4). “What we face now could in fact be worse than the Great Depression”, thinks Simon Johnson, former chief economist of the IMF (quoted in Zackaria 2009). A year ago, the broadest figure for unemployment and underemployment reached the highest level since the 1930s. Half of all American families had experienced a job loss, a reduction in hours, or pay cuts in the last year. Many experts, including those in the IMF, are calmly assuming that this pain may last forever… (Peck 2010; Krugman and Wells 2010; IMF 2009). It defines a new normality: the rich countries may never recover the rate of unemployment they had before the current crisis.8 The current crisis marks not “just” another business cycle. Instead, it is a turning point. This point of turning, however, is not written in the stars. Instead of the certainties in which they were educated, our students are now entering a world of radical uncertainty. A few weeks ago, Ben Bernanke, president of the Federal Reserve, warned that we are before

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“unusually uncertain perspectives” (The New York Times, July 20 and 21, 2010), and Robert Zoellick, president of the World Bank, observed that the recovery is still “fragile and uncertain” (http://www.msnbc. msn.com/id/38354388/ns/world_news-americas) (http://www.chinap ost.com.tw/business/global-markets/2010/07/23/265790/markets/ 2010/07/23/265790/World-Bank.htm). This short-term uncertainty is compounded with another, clearly affecting our students. A whole generation of young adults “is likely to see its life chances permanently diminished by this recession” (Peck 2010: 46). A month ago, the New York Times illustrated the situation through the eyes of Scott Nicholson, 24, a brilliant graduate of Colgate University. His grandfather is encouraging him to go abroad—to “go West” so to speak, given the decline of the American economy. His elder’s urging startled the unemployed grandson. As the weeks pass—reports The New York Times—Scott Nicholson, handsome as a Marine officer in a recruiting poster, had gradually realized that his career will not roll out in the Greater Boston area—or anywhere in America—with the easy inevitability that his father and grandfather recall, and that Scott thought would be his lot, too, when he finished college in 2008.

Scott knows that at least a third of young adults like him are unemployed. “I don’t think I fully understood the severity of the situation I had graduated into”, Scott said. And then, he veered into the optimism that, polls show, is persistently, perhaps perversely, characteristic of millenials today. “I am absolutely certain that my job hunt will eventually pay off”, he said. (Uchitelle 2010)

Perversely, this may define the contemporary victory of optimism over reality. Mere whistling in darkness? Surely, Scott will find a job. But he may never find the job of his dreams and educated expectations. Finally, the reality he rejects may force him to accept one of the jobs he is now deliberately refusing. Like millions graduating, Scott has entered a world of radical uncertainty.

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The End of an Era There is an almost universal consensus that we are at the end of a historical cycle. But when the time comes to identify the corpses—to define which cycle is ending—the consensus vanishes, and we enter into highly controversial territory. These years mark the fact that Wall Street is no longer the financial center of the world…one element marking the end of the hegemonic power of the United States (Wallerstein 2003) and neoliberalism. We are seeing the end of both the neoliberal policies, which started in the 1970s, and their expression in the Washington Consensus, in the early 1990s (Williamson 1990). The World Bank, one of the main promoters of this orientation, pronounced its obituary in its Annual Report of 2007 soon followed by the Latin American presidents in El Salvador, President Obama—the day he took office—and Prime Minister Brown and the G8 two months later. Of course, the neoliberal ghost is still there, and there are many zombies pretending it is still alive (Esteva 2009). Prominent scholars like Wallerstein think that we are living during the final phase of capitalism (Wallerstein 2004). Others, like David Korten, offer us hope of a good “life after capitalism” (Korten 1999). Still others, like Alperovitz, urge Americans to protect their values by going beyond capitalism (Alperovitz 2005). Other prominent thinkers invite us to celebrate the end of the modern era. The philosophical pillars of the Enlightenment, defining the rationalities of the last 200 years, crumbled and were completely undermined. In a conversation with Chomsky, Foucault explains why we can no longer use them to understand the current situation and even less to create a new society. In the 1960s and 1970s, Ivan Illich described the counterproductivity of modern institutions and anticipated their decadence. During the last years of his life he observed that “there is a generalized sense now that the future we expected does not work”. We are in front of an “epistemic break”, “a sudden image-shift in consciousness in which the once unthinkable becomes thinkable”. It was simply “not thinkable that a king could be beheaded up until the French Revolution. Then, suddenly, there was a new way of seeing, a new form of language that could speak about such things” (Illich 1989: 2). For Illich, what was emerging in the place of the old era could only be described as the distopic horror that the literary imagination of George

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Orwell presented in 1984. This is the world our students are entering into. They are forced to think the unthinkable… lacking the tools to do it. Bill McKibben mourns: “The Earth that we knew—the only Earth that we ever knew—is gone” (Stern 2010: 35). We can now imagine that, “as Samuel Beckett once said, ‘this earth could be uninhabited’” (Illich 1989: 2). Environmental prospects render intolerable more development and industrial growth as progress to be avidly pursued. But do we, or our students, know how to creatively imagine alternatives to progress? Giorgio Agamben, the Italian philosopher, describes the emergence of a new totalitarianism, of the kind anticipated by Illich and Orwell, in which a declared or undeclared state of emergency (“state of exception”) is transformed into a civil war against entire categories of people: those that cannot be integrated into the political system. The state of the law is then progressively abolished (2005). These lenses can be used to examine Arizona’s new law, contested by President Obama but supported by half of the Americans. “The state of exception is not a dictatorship…but a space devoid of law, a zone of anomie in which all legal determinations… are deactivated” (p. 50). For Agamben, as we advance towards global civil war, “what the ‘ark’ of power contains at its center is the state of exception—but this is essentially an empty space, in which a human action with no relation to law stands before a norm with no relation to life” (p. 86). If we really are at the end of an era, in that period of uncertainty in which our old concepts and paradigms can no longer support our perceptions and ideals, but new ones have not yet been formulated, our students are graduating into very muddy territory—a space devoid of direction and sense. It is not only the era of decreasing expectations. It is a time in which no expectation stand on solid grounds. “Common sense is searching for a language to speak about the shadow which the future throws” (Illich 1989: 2). Our students suddenly confront a catastrophic break with industrial man’s image of himself…at the edge of an abyss. From the Bottom-Up Seasons of darkness and despair offer us the most compelling invitation to cultivate hope. The virtue of hope is strengthened not by the certainty that everything will turn out just fine…as we are taught to expect. Instead, the cultivation of hope calls us to search for what is right, good, and

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appropriate, what makes sense—even though we cannot predict its consequences, personal or social. Instead of diving into despair by the experts’ dire prognosis or into denial, guided by the pundits, I invite you to join me in diverse worlds at the grassroots, where most people on earth live and learn in search of work that offers dignity, fun, and beauty. These are what I imagine and enjoy when my gaze is not trapped at the top but immersed in my own world, at the grassroots: worlds of common men and women seeking to regenerate their commons through the cultivation of “commons” sense. In Latin America, neither our common sense nor our hope derives anything from the unholy alliance9 of transnational capital and the leftist governments now dominant in the region, launching today a new era of capitalist expansion and conventional development with unprecedented environmental destruction, injustice, and authoritarianism. My hope comes from the social movements actively resisting each and every one of such unholy alliances, still associated with the emblem of development. According to Salvatore Babones (2010), “most thinking on development today can be categorized into one of three approaches”, which he calls “the three Sachs’s”: • Goldman Sachs: Development as savage capitalism, 60 years back, to the time in which President Truman coined the word underdevelopment and development was nothing but economic growth and the search for private gain, long before ideas like “social development” or other attractive faces of development were brought to the public arena. This is perhaps the consensus approach. “While we in academia argue over definitions and goals”, observes Babones, “Goldman Sachs pursues development in the guise of its commodities trading desk, its infrastructure finance unit, and its sovereign debt markets division… (This) view is absolutely hegemonic. The highest form of development is an oil platform located at least ten miles offshore and thus relatively free of obstruction from locals”. (BP and the world are currently learning what this really means.) • Jeffrey Sachs: Philanthropic capitalism, 40 years back, to the time in which the damages of development were acknowledged. Recognizing that it produced hunger and misery, the World Bank promoted the Basic Needs Approach—in order to continue the promotion of development (and capitalism) but finding ways to satisfy at least the basic needs of the poor, of those affected by

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development and capitalism (see ILO 1976; Ghai et al. 1977; García Bouza 1980; Richards and Leonor 1982). Estimates for such strategies, with better knowledge and precision than those of Jeffrey Sachs (2006), were prepared at the time. In the 1980s this orientation transformed the NGOs into organizations that in many senses represented the opposite of the original, subversive NGOs created in the 1960s and the 1970s: they became GONGOs (Governmental Non-Governmental Organizations, supported by the governments and international institutions), BINGOs (Big Northern Non-Governmental Organizations), etc. The ideas behind this line of thinking were described as “elusive development” by Marshall Wolfe (1995). Jeffrey Sachs is the most prominent proponent of this approach, but Bill Gates and many others adopt it. For Babones, “it stands for a chicken in every pot, a net over every bed, and a condom on every penis”…while capitalism continues producing the miseries they try to alleviate. To be sure, “no one endorses starvation, malaria, and AIDS-not even Goldman Sachs”, but this consensus among humanitarians refuses to associate those evils with development and capitalism. • Wolfgang Sachs: No to development (and capitalism), 25 years back, when the idea of post-development became fashionable and the Development Dictionary, edited by Wolfgang Sachs, was published (1992). For Babones, “the Wolfgang Sachs approach is to promote active and healthy human life, which can only be realized within active and healthy communities and societies”. Today, millions, perhaps billions of people, are saying Basta! Enough! And resist every and all kinds of development—conventional development, big development projects, humane development, sustainable development, etc. The struggle for land still characterizes peasant life in Latin America. Sometimes, it takes the shape of a relatively silent, almost clandestine, reoccupation of land, like the recovery of a million hectares in Peru. Other times it becomes a spectacular struggle, with mixed results, like the one waged by landless peasants of Brazil.10 In recent years, it experienced a political mutation and a conceptual shift: it became territorial defense. The Colombian minga has been paseando la palabra, taking the word for a walk and exemplifying such new, postmodern grassroots initiatives. Indigenous and peasant peoples are weaving their knowledge

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and resistance for the defense of their natural resources and territory and to oppose the big development projects,11 redefining agrarian reform.12 In addition to the land, a specific form of relation with it is claimed. It expresses a sovereign practice of collective will, openly challenging faculties of the government. The political form of this claim is usually presented as autonomy, a notion actualized by the Zapatista uprising in 1994 and adopted by many other social groups (Esteva 2003, 2005a). Last April, 35,000 people from 142 countries came to Cochabamba for the people’s summit on climate change. In his message to this conference, Eduardo Galeano observed that times of revolution and change are now open. “Human rights and nature rights”, he observed, “are two names of the same dignity” (Galeano 2010: 3). The voices of the Summit will be heard next December in Cancún, when the governments will try to remedy the failure of Copenhagen. It may perhaps express that there is a new alliance between those who struggle to preserve the biosphere and those who oppose a lifestyle based on a monopoly of commodities over activities. “The one value shared by all currents within this alliance is the attempt to recover and enlarge, in some way, the commons ” (Illich 1982: 17–18). Initiatives to reclaim and regenerate the commons is what the team of the prestigious British journal The Ecologist discovered all around the world, in the time of the Earth Summit, in 1992. The enclosure of the commons, marking the beginning of industrial society and capitalism, became the trademark of all forms of predatory colonialism and today defines the operation of the dominant economic forces. The Ecologist brilliantly described peoples’ contemporary resistance to their enclosures, struggling to recover and regenerate their ancient commons while continuing to create new commons (The Ecologist 1993). No word can fully express the diversity of the struggles currently creating, everywhere, new ways of life and government. For more than 20 years, Ms. Olstrom has been calling attention to them (1990). Her Nobel Prize in Economics hopefully will offer them more visibility and legitimacy among professionals, state functionaries, and other bureaucrats. Called the revolution of the new commons in the 1990s (Esteva 1998b), they were recently baptized as commonism (Dyer-Witheford 2007).

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El buen vivir (Living Well) If one expression could capture the main meaning of these new commonist social movements, it would be buen vivir, living well.13 The recovery of verbs illustrates the meaning of buen vivir. Instead of nouns like education, health, and shelter, generating dependency on entities satisfying those “needs”, verbs like learning, healing, or settling allude to the recovery of personal and collective agency and enable autonomous paths of social transformation. • Eating. Cultivating food in the cities and establishing new arrangements between farmers and urban consumers define today a vigorous trend. Called Food Sovereignty by Via Campesina, the biggest peasant organization in history, it expresses the freedom to define autonomously what you eat and the capacity to produce it, beyond the market or the state (viacampesina.org/main_en/ index.php?option=cum_content&task=view&id = 47&Itemid=27). More than half of the food eaten in Cuban cities today is produced in them. Nine hundred community gardens in Detroit, the very image of the decline of industrial development, illustrate the vitality and extension of this movement. • Learning. The educational system is not delivering: it does not prepare people for life or work and marginalizes the majority. While many people still struggle to “get education” and to reform the school, practices of free and autonomous learning are increasingly popular. They go beyond the institutional framework, recover ancient traditions of apprenticeship, and introduce contemporary technologies in learning and studying as free leisure activities. • Healing. The health system is inefficient, discriminatory, and increasingly counterproductive. Many efforts attempt to improve it, but new notions of health and perceptions of body and mind nourish autonomous healing practices, recovering traditions marginalized and disqualified by the medical profession and enabling healthier behavior and more humane treatments well-rooted in families and communities. • Settling. Social and ecological disasters usually associated with public and private housing developments are still common and stimulate the proliferation of homeless people. At the same time, many initiatives support, consolidate, and recover autonomous settling

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practices, now enriched with contemporary technologies, particularly those inspired by environmental concerns. • Knowing. New centers for the autonomous production of knowledge, out of research centers and universities, are emerging everywhere. They generate new technologies and theoretical innovations, reformulating perceptions of the world and introducing methodologies challenging dominant paradigms. Initiatives in all areas of daily life, expressing new attitudes well-rooted in their physical and cultural contexts within new political horizons and institutional arrangements beyond dominant ideologies and conventional patterns, are getting increasing visibility in the midst of the crisis: they offer creative survival options in hard times and effectively resist the megaprojects still promoted in the region. There are strong movements to improve formal democracy and to introduce participatory democracy, with tools like referendum, recall, participatory budgeting, and others. But the main effort attempts to put those struggles at the service of radical democracy (Lummis 1996; Calle 2008). Instead of social engineering, they look for what people can do for themselves: to transform social relations and living conditions for commonism, common sense, and postmodern commons. Such struggles abandon all obsessions for “seizing power”, through elections or armed uprisings. Instead, they cultivate the common sense for regenerating commons that dismantle the state apparatuses (Holloway 2002). Radical Pluralism When our students study and directly experience such realities, they are often exposed to terms like postmodernity and postmodernism: challenging all the certainties of the modern world into which they were born and educated. Postmodernity is not just what follows modernity but an epoch in which the value system of the era preceding it remains relevant for that epoch. Newtonian physics, Cartesian reductionism, the nation-state of Thomas Hobbes, and the capitalist world system define the modern paradigm. Postmodernity is not equipped with a similar paradigm. The word describes a state of mind for those disillusioned with the great truths of the previous epoch, unable to find a substitute. This is experienced as

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a loss of values and orientation or as the insight that there cannot be one truth (Dietrich 2010:1). We can understand postmodernism as a particular way of forming knowledge. Postmodern thinking is a method. Before the loss of the basic truths of modernity and the insecurity it creates, social sciences attempt to elaborate a new way of interpreting social reality (Dietrich 2010: 2). Postmodern thinking does not stand for arbitrariness.14 It defines a mental and social opening implicit in the theme of this symposium and explicit in many of our programs. “Unlike modern thinking, postmodern thinking will never attempt to dissolve plurality, it will instead demand respect for and coexistence with difference”. Postmodernism “embraces concepts which are located beyond universalism and the civilizing process, beyond the modernist belief in the objective truth of scientific stock-taking, and beyond the belief in the solvability of conflicts” (Dietrich 2010: 3). All this, presented here in a crude simplification, is a source of confusion and perplexity for our students: they are exposed to radical critiques of all the beliefs in which they are educated, but they don’t get appropriate substitutes for them or even clutches to support them in their journeys through the worlds they are currently discovering. A new attitude observed today in many social movements offers a way out of such confusion. It implies abandoning conventional universalism without falling into cultural relativism. It expresses in practice, based on local traditions and ancient experiences of resistance and liberation, what Raimón Panikkar (1993, 1995) has conceptualized as radical pluralism. This position acknowledges the existence of human invariants but not cultural universals. In accepting cultural diversity as a precondition for harmony among peoples and recognizing that no person may represent the totality of human experience, cultural relativity (not relativism) is assumed, which means that every view of the world is relative to its context and no one can hold a complete and absolute view of reality. The Intercultural Dialogue Since 9/11, I have heard many sensible calls to tolerance, stimulated by unacceptable violence wrought by intolerance. But despite the olive branch proffered by tolerance, we cannot ignore its thorny prick that stings and wounds. Tolerance fails to fully embrace the otherness of the other.

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Tolerance merely suffers difference with patience. The person who tolerates perceives the other as someone who has not the right color of skin, the proper God, or the correct behavior. He feels the generosity of tolerating the other, of suffering him with patience. Though more gentle or discreet, tolerance is merely a different form of intolerance. “Toleration”, Goethe observed, “ought, in reality, to be merely a transitory mood. It must lead to recognition. To tolerate is to insult”. Hospitality, on the other hand, is rooted in recognition, an association, a coming together of an entirely different sort. Being hospitable, we learn to recognize and embrace the pluralism of reality. We open our hearts and minds to hosting the otherness of the other; even when we are disagreeing with his arguments, his versions of the multiverse of the real world. Hospitality does not compel us to follow the other, to adopt his views, to affirm or negate him. Hosting the otherness of the other simply means opening our arms, our hearts, our doors for him to honor and accept his forms of existence in his own place. In our many worlds brought close by technologies like never before, we are now compelled and invited to take a stance in the presence of the other. The reality of our daily life makes it impossible to avoid mutual intertwining. No action or choice stays confined to one group or territory. With intermeddling, conflicts emerge. What we directly suffer, the impasse now implicated in every kind of violence is the incompatibility of differing worldviews. The question of pluralism is thus urgently posed to every one of us: the current situation throws us into the arms of one another. Are we going to open our arms hospitably or arm ourselves? This question poses as much a moral challenge as it does THE political challenge of our times fraught with radical uncertainty. How do we learn and teach the creation of mutual openings in our concern for ourselves and those we call “other”: those with whom we don´t share ideas, concepts, beliefs, or even words? How do we look for and find elements to share something that offers guidance, inspiration, light, ideal, whatever both parties acknowledge and neither party controls? How do we re-enact and engage in dialogues, transcending the logos of both parties of our conceptual systems? These are questions for shared meditations, reflections, and choices that lead to actions for buen vivir for all; and not just for some privileged minority. What has been and continues to be our challenge is the pretension associated with imposing on others a particular good, your own good,

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for their benefit. This is colonialism. “The Others”—barbarians, infidels, savages, natives, underdeveloped, or undemocratic—have been seen as peoples in need of evangelization, civilization, economization, development, or democracy. Always for their own good. Some people even “seem to believe that they always may, should, and actually can choose others with whom to share their blessings. Often times, they end bombing people into the acceptance of gifts” (Illich 1971, 19). The doves sending food, medicine, or developers, and the hawks sending bombs, belong to the same species. The current hell is paved with good intentions. “I am here”, said Ivan Illich in 1968, in a speech that many in this room know by memory, “I am here to entreat to use your money, your status, and your education to travel in Latin America. Come to look, come to climb our mountains, to enjoy our flowers. Come to study. But do not come to help” (www.swaraj.org/illich_hell.htm). These phrases are always a source of intense debate with the students. It is easy to understand why the National Society for Experiential Education uses the speech for its students. If fear, weakness, and hate packed in a set of beliefs, ideologies, and educational curricula are breeding grounds for terrorism, we need the opposite. In the expression of hope, strength, and love, we seek to create and nourish neighborliness through intercultural exchanges and conversations. As we consider the plural world as a place in which many worlds can be embraced, it is imperative that we re-consider the friend-enemy distinction now reigning as the insane frame for political life (Schmidtt 1996). We must come back to our senses and look again for the common good, the very essence of political acts. Instead of the destruction of the constructed enemy, our political struggle is more appropriately oriented towards protecting our own place—that place which can never be reduced to the shapeless and genderless space defined by any ideology, belief, national identity, or transnational engineering like the North American Free Trade Agreement, the WTO, and the like. The place of politics, like that of democracy, best belongs to where people know what they live in the daily-ness of their relationships. There, in their own places, known, understood, loved, and cared for, can common people offer freely expression of their own free will and views. This is the moment for recovering good sense, common sense; the sense one has in community. With common sense and a hospitable spirit, we need to bring back home the initiative to our own territories of

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meaning. Only in our own places the field of social and political struggle is transparent, natural, and therefore understandable. In their places, real, ordinary men and women can occupy themselves with the common good, drawing upon their common sense. From there, coalitions of discontent can undermine the very base of all formal, constituted powers while meeting from time to time to celebrate each other and to express our common rejection to the globaphiliacs. In real places among real peoples, our shared pain and suffering can become a source of hope that is fully rooted and grounded in reality. Only at home can we be hospitable to the radical otherness of the other. Only at home can we define ourselves in our own terms rather than from within the mirror of constructed enemies. Only at home can we regenerate our arts of living and dying, of suffering and enjoying. Only at home can we deal with our own grief and find, below our feet, our grounding in both soil and virtue. Yes, it is time to evoke wild, uncontrollable, non-managed friendships at the grassroots, among those who stand ready to abandon fearing and mis-labeling “the other”. When applied to nation-states or abstract entities, friendship becomes its negation: a flag defining allies before a common enemy, a pretext to define enmity. At home, in our own places, it is time to express affection, mutual sympathy within immediate neighborhoods as well as embrace distant places. It is very difficult, next to impossible, to change the world as it is. We can instead dedicate ourselves to creating a whole new world, a world in which many worlds can be embraced. A world embracing hospitality, not mere tolerance. A world localized and placed in the soil under our feet, not globalized and spaced in the simplification of a blue bubble. A world where hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the conviction that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. A world of common sense, the sense you have in the community and give to it its proportion, the portion and proportion of every one of us.

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Back Home “I hate travels and explorers”, wrote the tireless traveler Claude LévyStrauss at the beginning of Tristes Tropiques (1955: 1). Dedicating most of his life to exploring other worlds, his final confession expresses humility in recognizing his inability to discover or understand the mysteries of the otherness of the other. Complementing this humility with wisdom, he appreciates how much “the other” has helped him to better understand himself and his society. Here lies our hope in our students going abroad to explore other worlds. On returning to their own places, while healthily puzzled about the mysteries or intricacies of Gujarat or Oaxaca, they seem unable to fully share with their families and friends the otherness or estrangement they experienced in those distant lands. Our hope with all those we host is that they will leave with a richer, better understanding of themselves, their position in the world, the role of America today, and how they can share their genius in doing their best work in their own places. This is how, anyway, I cultivate hope in myself and those I work with, locals or visitors from distant lands. Two decades ago, I left the big city to root myself in my ancestors’ small Zapotec village in the South of Mexico. International indicators dismiss my immense privilege, in my beautiful ancestral paradise, as underdeveloped and poor, for clearly, my life here is marked by seven of the eight indicators defining Mexico’s international poverty line: no connection to state potable water or sewage, no access to official health care, social security, or pension for life… Seeing all these “deprivations” from our own cultural lenses, Zapotecan and others, I cannot but celebrate with you our beautiful crying rock in the mountain behind my house that brings me fresh, clean water with a pipe of 800 meters. In the same spirit of radical cultural pluralism, I celebrate our magnificent zero-flush dry toilet… liberating my intestinal tract from being plugged into miles and miles of city sewage leading to highly toxic treatment facilities. Eighteen years ago, I got a call from Teddy Goldsmith, who was in London. He wanted me to give a lecture to a group of American students coming to Mexico. I accepted these International Honors Program students full of uncertainties, especially since he wanted visits to our Indigenous communities. My friends also accepted hosting Teddy’s students with some uncertainties, and our experiment started. It continues to offer us many surprises and endless reasons to celebrate

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growing hope in our diverse exchanges with our students. Instead of the centuries-old dismissal suffered by our people, looked down upon or dismissed as superstitious, backward, or plain poor, our students were celebrating their rich natural and cultural worlds. The contrast was startling. Enjoying more and more the hope that attends these transformations year after year, when our students celebrate these communities instead of dismissing them, I was easily seduced by Joan Tiffany into being a country coordinator for the International Honors Program, currently a division of World Learning, or by Bill Stone, to collaborate with the School of International Training in Oaxaca. When asked by students why I spend so much time with them, despite my growing age and commitments, I honestly confess: “You have become one of my most important sources of hope. Your sensitive antennas teach me much about how each passing generation is learning to avoid the stakes and hubris of those who came before five or ten years ago. This source of hope is further strengthened by what you teach me about rerooting your hopes in your own native soils on your return”. Three years ago, in a colloquium in Chiapas, I had the honor of sharing the podium with Subcomandante Marcos and Naomi Klein. She described herself as a journalist embedded in movements resisting corporate domination and explored the romantic perspective of the foreigner mentioned by Marcos: that gaze is limited to seeing only what is convenient or inspiring. And Naomi talked about the new-age miners. True, she said, “the old miners are still here to drain the veins of Latin America extracting gold, silver, copper, oil.”. Others are now extracting hope and inspiration. “In spite of ourselves, we are miners of inspiration”, she confessed while warning about the dangers of this new export. For “exported hope cannot last. It rots… If North Americans want something more than ephemeral hope…(they) need to cultivate it locally”, she said. She also observed that today, in Latin America, we suffer from peak hope rather than from peak oil (Klein 2009: 284–286). My urgings and invitations today keep clear of those of hope miners. Our peculiar trade enriches us all when our students discover mines of totally endless and contagious hope and inspiration during their stay with us; and, once back, begin creative forms of local cultivation for reciprocating in ways generous and mutually nurturing. Such stories of mutual crianza grow happily with each passing year.

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Two weeks ago, I got a letter from a brilliant young man who recently ended his journey around the world in one of our programs. He was here last Monday. I have been experiencing—he wrote—a whirlwind of chaos and confusion having just finished college. After a lifetime of preparation, I have been dropped, naked, vulnerable, and unskilled, into a lonely pit of social pressures to pursue a career, to have my life figured out, and to make money. None of these things, however, are my priority. Instead I am seeking personal fulfillment, excitement, knowledge, and work that support and develops my values.

Millennials repeatedly reciprocate our hospitality and hope with such vast varieties of gifts, each time they confirm our experience that people who graduated from high school in the last decade “dislike the idea of work for work’s sake, and expect jobs and career to be tailored to their interests and life style” (Peck 2010: 48). Inevitably, in their search for fulfilling work, they are offered jobs that seem boring, ugly, and undignified to them. Instead of seeing this attitude as a problem, however, instead of asking them to take jobs they hate, as the President of the University of Connecticut urged his students in the commencement of 2009, we cultivate hope in their creative searches to birth new worlds rather than merely seeking the security of fitting into the prefab boxes that industry multiplies mindlessly. Michael Sacco, a young Canadian, came to Oaxaca seven years ago. Confused by the processes of his graduation, brimming with energy and talent but lacking clear direction or meaning, he combined some low-tech Canadian inventions with local Oaxaca genius to produce solar arrays: our first intercultural technology. Discovering our gift of cacao, he returned to Toronto and began with other young people a creative production of chocolate with no fossil fuel. Michael, nicknamed chivo in Oaxaca because of his peculiar beard, discovered that chocolate is very nutritious—you can live on it—and produces a strange, healthy kind of intoxication when you take a lot of it. He thus started to organize chocolatadas. 200 or 300 young people come together and participate in vibrant political discussions, listen to lectures, and generously share the delicious chocolate produced by chivo and his friends. Their intense and enlightened debates, minus any fights, full of poems, music, and dance, have brought far North many elements

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of our great Mexican fiestas. Enjoying such experiences together, we find ourselves writing a book: “Reclaiming chocolate: a political manifesto”. It celebrates dignified work that combines beauty and leisure with abundant enjoyment. Instead of boring, ugly, and undignified disappearing jobs, our political manifesto, born out of creative grassroots intercultural initiatives like the chocolatadas reveal endless opening for regenerating life, work, and leisure in our own places in ways that amaze and delight. Last Monday, when a group of IHP alumni came to Battleboro, two of them gave me a great gift. They shared with me the information that they are creating chocolate cooperatives in Burlington, Haiti, and Nicaragua, articulated to cooperatives in Chiapas and Oaxaca. “Do you feel a kind of reciprocity in what you are doing?”, I asked, following the conversations of that morning in this Symposium. “We don’t know”, they said. “For us reciprocity is now a way of being, not really an attitude or something that we consciously do”. How can I stop before bringing William into our midst? He rooted himself in The Aprovecho Institute, in Oregon, and came back for a few weeks to Oaxaca, to share with the women of Teotitlán who had offered him Oaxaqueña hospitality during the program what he now knows about ecological stoves. Finally, I feel compelled to invite Tom, a brilliant philosopher, into our midst as a necessary ending. At the end of the program ten years ago, Tom returned to India to learn Tamil. He has now published two books on Tamil poetry, and lives near Seattle. After staying for a while in Oaxaca and mastering Spanish he needed to translate into English a book of one of our best writers, he wrote to me recently with a most fascinating petition: now seeking to make connections in Argentina. Why? Because he now wants to write a novel that can only exist in that country. His passing comment: To earn a little money, I am working again as a magician. But now with a great difference. No longer is it a question of mere tricks; but, instead in offering and creating metaphors for poetry. Such metaphors were for Illich vital, authentic expressions of human aliveness.

To witness such metaphors for aliveness, I invite you to visit Tom on www. thepoetmagic.com. Performing on this site, Tom reveals to us neither just a show of tricks nor a simple talk about poetry. “The poet’s magic combines poems with the art of illusion to explore the hidden possibilities

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of daily life. It is a performance as much about the magic of words as about the wonders we discover when we see the world as a poem. There’s nothing in all of magic quite like it”. While my heart urges me to share endless tales of hope offered by our graduates, the obligations of time compel me to end by reiterating our conviction about our students genius and ingenuity for discovering and creating unimaginable, whole unexplored frontiers for innovation in our troubled times. Their experiences abroad could be sources of inspiration for all of us. Once back, collaborating and creating afresh with friends and kindred spirits sharing their concerns and challenges, they will continue to sow and reap hope in their own places; rediscovering ancient wisdom that assured us that hard times are also times of immense creativity. Instead of trying to follow a pre-defined path to achieve a prescribed destiny, now in jeopardy, they may attempt to reinvent themselves and the world. Not far from here, and not so long ago, our beloved Howard Zinn revealed revolutions not of great leaders or violent social quakes. Zinn’s history celebrated and rescued from obscurity “the innumerable small actions of unknown people which produce the greatest social changes”. He knew that “even marginal gestures can become the invisible roots of social change”. He wisely urged us to see social, revolutionary change as something immediate, as close to us as the palms of our own hands: It is something that we need to do today, right now, wherever we are, where we live, where we work or study. It implies to begin right now to get rid of all the authoritarian and cruel relations, between men and women, parents and children, between different kinds of workers. This is not an armed uprising. It happens in the little corners which cannot be reached by the powerful but clumsy hands of the state. It is not centralized or isolated: it cannot be destroyed by the powerful, the rich, the police. It happens in a million places at the same time, in the families, in the streets, in the neighborhoods, in the work places. Suppressed in one place, it reappears in another until it is everywhere. Such revolution is an art. That is: it requires the courage not only of resistance but of imagination.

Confronting courageously our current overwhelming challenges, Zinn’s wisdom guides us towards recovering our sense of reality with serenity. His wisdom helps us to escape the crutches of today’s dominant paradigms and systems of education. His hope in common people invites

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us to find the joy and passion needed to walk in freedom; on our own feet, on our own paths, dreaming our own dreams. Instead of trying to find, in a dark room, a black cat that does not exist, lets escape yesterday’s promises of old, dying worlds. Instead, let’s enjoy reinventing our traditions while creating a whole new world; a world in which many worlds are embraced and enjoyed in celebrations of abundancia. Abundance of hope, abundance of friendship, abundance of commons sense. See Photos 5.1, 5.2, 5.3 and 5.4.

Photo 5.1 Gustavo Esteva (right 1) with Carlos Monsiváis, San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, July 1996

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Photo 5.2 Gustavo Esteva (left 3) with Barbara Duden, Bremen, Germany, 2008

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Photo 5.3 Gustavo Esteva (right 1) with Grimaldo Rengifo (left 1), 2014

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Photo 5.4 Gustavo Esteva (left 1) with Don McCarthy, University of Toronto

Notes 1. Gustavo Esteva, “The Path Towards the Dialogue of Vivires (Lived Experiences)”, in Gustavo Esteva. A Critique of Development and Other Essays (New York: Routledge, 2023) 132–154. 2. For more on the philosophical dimension of Gustavo Esteva’s thought, see my article Alberto Elías González Gómez, “La insurrección en curso. El pensamiento filosófico-político de Gustavo Esteva”, in Revista de Ciencias y Humanidades, Vol. IV, No. 9, July-December 2019, 119–138. 3. Gustavo Esteva, “Post scriptum”, in Iván Illich, Los ríos al norte del futuro. Conversations with David Cayley, (Mexico: Aliosventos, 2019) 71–85. 4. Wolfgang Dietrich, Josefina Echavarría, Gustavo Esteva, Daniela Ingruber and Norbert Koppensteiner, The Palgrave International Handbook of Peace Studies: A Cultural Perspective (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 5. Refers to Puerto Rican peasant farmers. 6. Keynote address in Fostering Multicultural Competence and Global Justice: An SIT Symposium, Battleboro, VE, August 9–11, 2010.

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7. In his famous article of 1989 (Fukuyama 1989), Francis Fukuyama argued that liberal democracy may constitute the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” and “the final form of human government”, and as such constituted “the end of history”. Assuming that history is not a cycle but advances in a certain direction, towards a goal, Fukuyama affirmed that the goal of the human society “liberal democracy, had finally been reached” (Fukuyama 1992a: 1), and that we cannot even imagine something better: “the ideal of liberal democracy cannot be improved on” (1992b, xi). Francis Fukuyama is a very sophisticated thinker and we must avoid any simplification of his thinking. He was elaborating on Nietzche’s critique of Hegel and his image of the “last man”, the one without passions or prejudices, who does not want to seriously take risks. “He is a fearful gregarious being, a beast of consumption” (1992a: 10). This can be a very fruitful line of reflection. But a caricature of his complex thinking about the end of history became conventional wisdom and was incorporated one way or the other into our students’ soul. 8. See the study presented by Carmen and Vincent Reinhart in the annual conference organized by the US Federal Reserve with the directors of central banks in Jackson Hole, August 27, 2010. 9. ‘ If Christ came here and Judas had the vote of any party, he would have called him to negotiate a coalition’, said president Lula to Folha de Sao Paulo on 22/10/09 (La Jornada 23/10/09, p.25). 10. The Movemento dos Trabalhadores Rurais sem Terra (MST), is in fact a very important movement in Brazil and a leading force in Latin America. It has been in continual tension with the government, in a country where 1% of the population own 46% of the arable land. In October, 2009 the powerful agribusiness sector forced the creation of a Congressional commission to investigate MST. 11. The “Foro Nacional Tejiendo Resistencia por la Defensa de Nuestros Territorios” (National Forum Weaving Resistance in the Defense of Our Territories), organized on 17-18 April, 2009, in San Pedro Apóstol, Oaxaca, México, illustrates well what is happening. Representatives of more than 20 Indigenous and peasant peoples expressed in their final declaration that they came together “to weave collectively our efforts, knowledge, and resistance in the defense of our natural resources and territory”, to oppose “the big ‘development’ projects”, and to deepen “the processes of local and regional organization”. (http://www.oaxaca libre.org/.../ind.php?). 12. In October 2009, the International Commission for Integral Agrarian Reform, in the framework of the Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform organized by Via Campesina, said in their Declaración de Quito that they came together to examine “the situation of the agrarian reform and the territory”, blamed the Green Revolution and trade policies for the

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current food crisis and climate change, denounced how the big corporations pollute rivers and privatize the access to water and explained that the peasants are now united to struggle for the agrarian reform and to defend their territories. (http://www.viacampesina.org/.../index.php?). 13. This expression is usually complemented with crianza mutua (mutual nurturance) (Apffel Marglin 1998; América Profunda 2007; Chuji 2009). 14. The dis-illusioning insight implies that the one truth can no longer be found in the premodern/Christian/occidental sense or in the enlightening/civilizing sense of modernity. But instead of arbitrariness, such insight calls for a definition of difference, after acknowledging a plurality of societies and pluralism in societies and their truths, often contradictory and incompatible.

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Index

A Agamben, Giorgio, 223, 254 American Way of Life, xxii, 47, 48, 187, 205, 206 Andean Program of Peasant Technologies, 59 Aries, Phillipe, 15 Aubry, A., 119, 185 autonomy, xv, xxii, 3, 8, 56, 61, 64, 83, 89, 94–96, 102, 107, 110, 111, 113, 115, 118, 119, 122, 125, 142, 144, 145, 155, 159, 168, 172, 179, 187, 196, 228, 249, 257

B Borremans, V., 66, 67, 69, 81, 82 buen vivir, 258, 261

C campesinos , 52, 72, 82, 240

capitalism, xxii, 26, 34, 63, 77, 79, 118, 124, 125, 193, 195, 242, 250, 251, 253, 255–257 Club of Rome, 177 colonialism, 79, 101, 106, 191, 218, 222, 257, 262 comida, 152–157, 160, 162, 163, 165, 167 commons, xiv, 3, 14, 15, 25, 26, 29–32, 36, 40, 52, 79, 87, 89, 92, 93, 95–98, 122, 123, 127, 141, 142, 144, 160, 165, 170–177, 179, 183, 185, 232, 245, 246, 248–250, 255, 257, 259, 269 conviviality, xvii, 8, 66, 89, 92, 126, 141, 179, 185, 198 cosmovivencia, 202, 211

D deschooling, 21, 24, 26, 60 Deschooling society, 22, 24, 35

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 K. C. Lau et al. (eds.), Walking on the Edge of the Abyss, Global University for Sustainability Book Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2325-0

287

288

INDEX

development, xiii, xiv, xx, xxii, 2, 15, 18, 25, 29–32, 36, 45–47, 52, 55, 77–81, 84–88, 91, 92, 94–109, 111, 113, 115, 119, 120, 123, 126, 127, 132, 138, 140–142, 147, 150, 151, 162, 164, 166, 169, 171, 174, 184, 187, 191, 193, 195, 198, 202, 204–206, 215, 222, 225, 227, 235, 238, 244, 246, 254–258, 262, 273 disposable, 37, 119, 128, 129, 135–139, 142–145, 174 Duus, E., 156–159, 163

E Echeverría, L., 18

F fiesta, 53, 82, 83 Foucault, M., 52, 95, 112, 184, 241, 253 Freire, Paulo, 30, 57, 136, 208

G Galeano, E., 53, 257 globalization, 31, 34, 36, 37, 67, 78, 93, 98, 108, 118, 120, 122, 124, 132, 138–140, 142, 178, 179, 191, 195, 196, 218, 224, 245, 246, 250 grassroots, xiv, 16, 18, 23, 25, 28, 29, 31, 32, 40–42, 46, 52, 79, 82, 106, 108–113, 122, 126, 127, 137, 139, 142–144, 146, 168, 182, 192, 227, 255, 256, 263, 267

H Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 181, 273 Holt, J., 23, 24, 56 homoeconomicus , 118, 127, 137, 138, 166 Hospitality, 202, 221, 261

I Illich, I., xiv, 2, 7, 8, 12, 14, 22, 24, 25, 31, 32, 35, 37, 42–46, 50, 52, 56, 57, 65–67, 69, 78, 81, 109, 121, 122, 124, 127, 131, 133–135, 160, 184, 185, 203, 206–208, 214, 217, 223, 226, 227, 232, 233, 236, 248, 253, 254, 257, 262, 267, 272 impostura, 156–158, 160, 163, 165 individualism, xv, xx, 9, 78, 101, 120, 137, 149, 175, 193 industrialization, 81, 148 interculturality, xxii, 4, 201–206, 211, 217, 218

K Kohr, L., 80, 81, 184, 246, 247 Kozol, J., 17 Kreisky, B., 101–103 Kuchenbuch, L., 130

L Lappé, F., 149, 167 learning, xiv, xvii, xxii, 2, 7–10, 13, 14, 21, 23, 24, 26, 27, 29, 30, 39, 54–56, 59, 60, 62–65, 68, 78, 111, 121, 128, 133, 139, 140, 149, 177, 188, 194, 217, 249, 255, 258, 265 Lévy-Strauss, C., 264 localization, 120, 138, 191, 246, 247

INDEX

M Maldonado, B., 17 Marx, K., 29, 30, 44, 81, 187, 188 Mexico, 2, 4, 33, 36, 38, 40, 42, 54, 59–61, 63, 65–68, 72, 73, 77, 78, 82, 83, 98, 100, 102, 105, 110, 119, 120, 130, 131, 133, 138, 141–144, 149, 154, 155, 160–162, 164, 185, 188, 189, 194, 198, 201, 203, 205, 206, 208, 214, 221, 226, 230, 231, 234, 238, 239, 241–244, 264, 272 mexico profundo, 141 Mixe Indians , 16 Molt, E., 13 muchitos , 26, 27, 128

N Naderism, 148, 149 National Coordinating Committee of Education, 61 needs, 3, 4, 16, 20, 46–49, 54, 64, 81, 86, 88, 94, 97, 103, 112, 127, 148, 154, 169–171, 183, 187, 189, 196, 197, 213, 222, 229, 233, 250, 255, 258 neoliberalism, 118, 124, 189, 190, 250, 253 North American Free Trade Agreement, 36, 142, 262

O Occupy Wall Street, 49

P Panikkar, Raimón, 142, 148, 185, 202–204, 210, 213, 218, 260 Plato, 83, 109, 233 Pluralism, 218–220

289

Polanyi, K., 165 Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca, 118, 126, 191, 192, 197 R radical democracy, 118, 120, 126, 140, 192, 194, 259 Ramírez, H., 16 recolonization, 137 relocalization, 98 Robert, J., 121 Robles, R., 216 S Sachs, J., 255 Sachs, W., 3, 127, 256 Shanin, T., 81, 184 social classes, 28, 60, 90 Stavenhagen, R., 207 Subcomandante Marcos, xvii, 31, 33, 44, 68, 131, 132, 150, 151, 239, 241, 265 T Technology, 135 Tepito, 54, 110, 121, 161–163 Truman, H., 3, 47, 78, 85, 86, 91, 99, 115, 187, 205, 206, 255 U Underdevelopment, 99, 205 United States, 42, 46, 59, 62, 63, 73, 84, 85, 120, 138, 186–188, 205, 208, 214, 243, 253 Universidad de la Tierra, 9, 59, 60, 62–65, 73 V Via Campesina, 3, 53, 258, 273

290

INDEX

W Waldorf, 13, 17 Wallerstein, I., 32, 40, 67, 123, 186, 194, 253 Washington Consensus, 189, 253

Z Zapatismo, 32, 40–42, 120, 123–125, 194, 204 Zapatistas, xv–xvii, 2, 32–42, 44, 45, 54, 56, 64, 68, 72, 73, 80, 117, 118, 123–126, 144–146, 174, 183, 185, 194, 203, 209, 216, 238–241, 243, 244 Zinn, H., 268