GUSTAVO ESTEVA

In his reflections on decolonization and post-development, Gustavo Esteva

forged a unique synthesis of critical theory and political economy.
This book presents more than half a century of “reflection in action” in
the form of essays, books, and interventions in national and international
forums and newspaper articles—most published here for the very first time.
It showcases Esteva’s evolving thought on economic theory, social change,
revolutionary subjectivity, transition, development, the challenges of a new
era and personal and communal autonomy, all associated with the challenges
and advances in the construction of a new society. Through this translation,
Esteva’s writings engage with many of the important cultural and political
debates of the present day and retain their power both to provoke and move
the reader. Readers will see a thinker at work, formulating local, grassroots
alternatives as they are emerging in Mexico and Latin America, with a keen
sensibility to what happens in other regions of the world.
Gustavo Esteva: A Critique of Development and Other Essays offers a lucid insight
into the climatic and sociopolitical collapses we face and will be of interest to
students and scholars of critical theory, post-colonial and de-colonial studies,
and post-development studies.

Gustavo Esteva (1936–2022)† was a grassroots activist and “deprofession-

alized intellectual”. He was the founder of the Universidad de la Tierra in
Oaxaca, Mexico. As one of the best-known advocates of post-development,
he held that the whole concept and practice of development is a ref lection of
Western-Northern hegemony over the rest of the world.

Kathryn Dix is a Guatemalan-American translator and former external col-

laborator at the Universidad de la Tierra, Mexico.
Decolonizing the Classics
Edited by Bernd Reiter, Texas Tech University

The critique of colonialism and post-colonialism has by now been broadly

disseminated and understood. The logical next step in moving beyond colo-
nialism in thought, research, and academic practice is to engage in decoloni-
zation efforts. This is currently occurring. However, most of these efforts are
still based on the critique of Western centrism and its universalist claims.
Instead of adding another layer of critique to Western and northern intel-
lectual domination and epistemological hegemony, Decolonizing the Classics
actively inserts non-Western voices from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the
Pacific into the canon of classic and seminal works currently taught around
the globe.

Changó, Decolonizing the African Diaspora

Manuel Zapata Olivella, Translated by Jonathan Tittler

Colonial Slavery
An Abridged Translation
Jacob Gorender, Edited by Bernd Reiter, Translated by Alejandro Reyes

The Critique of Coloniality

Eight Essays
Rita Segato, Translated by Ramsey McGlazer

Gustavo Esteva
A Critique of Development and other essays
Gustavo Esteva, Translated by Kathryn Dix

https://www.routledge.com/Decolonizing-the-Classics/book-series/DC
GUSTAVO ESTEVA
A Critique of Development
and Other Essays

Gustavo Esteva
Translated by Kathryn Dix
Cover image: @ Mark Mawson, Getty images
First published 2023
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2023 Gustavo Esteva
The right of Gustavo Esteva to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this title has been requested

ISBN: 978-1-032-20219-8 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-032-20223-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-26274-9 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003262749

Typeset in Bembo
by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
CONTENTS

Series Editor Preface vii

Obituaryxi
Acknowledgementxiii

Introduction 1

1 Re-thinking Everything—a Conversation with

Teodor Shanin 4

2 Beyond Development 20

3 The Protagonists of Social Change 36

4 Reclaiming Your Own Path 53

5 Back to the Table 76

6 The Radical Otherness of the Other 104

7 The Path Towards the Dialogue of Vivires

(Lived Experiences) 132

8 The Awakening: The Art of Rebelling 155

vi Contents

9 The Festival of Dignified Rage 170

10 The Oaxaca Commune 183

11 The Ongoing Insurrection 198

12 The Convivial Path 233

13 The Day After 245

14 Friendship, Hope and Surprise—The Keys for

the New Era 268

Index280
SERIES EDITOR PREFACE

This anthology represents the scholarship, vision of the world, and political
arguments steadily developed by Gustavo Esteva over the span of six decades
of dedicated theoretico-political work. Its importance stems not only from
Esteva’s enormous contributions to a diverse set of fields of scholarship—from
critical development and post-development studies to social movements, polit-
ical economy, and globalization studies, also including poignant analyses of
modernity, marginality, and liberalism—but also from what it says about some
of the most fundamental issues with which humanity is confronted at present,
such as the impact of modernity and capitalism on all societies and the Earth;
the multiple forms of resistance and mobilization arising in response to it; and
the necessary and actual responses to the ongoing social and ecological dev-
astation being given, or that should be given, by groups of people all over the
world committed to the defense of life and their territories. The author sum-
marizes eloquently the thrust of his life’s work in his brief Introduction when
he writes about “how to change a reality that is unbearable, how to dismantle
a regime capable of continually destroying both the planet and the social fab-
ric, how to transform a reality which maintains increasingly intense forms of
confrontation and violence as a new status quo.” His is indeed writing “that
joins commitment, will, and action to recover radical hope” at its very best.
Gustavo Esteva was one of Latin America’s clearest voices, warning us,
advising us, prompting us to change our ways. Us, here, refers to all of us; to
humankind. By taking on this role, Gustavo Esteva does something we have
already heard from native, first, and Indigenous people of the Americas. They,
too, have been warning us, trying to guide us, pointing out that if we keep
going the way we are now, we will soon reach the end of the road and fall
down the cliff. There is a real risk, today, that humans are destroying the very
viii Series Editor Preface

bases of their survival. We are swiftly eroding not just our soils and poisoning
our waters in irreparable ways: we are also eroding our social and cultural fab-
rics, commodifying human interaction and connection and instrumentalizing
friendship and community for the sake of profit. At the root of such situa-
tions is the dream of “development”, which has become an obsession in many
lives and societies around the globe—even in formally socialist or communist
states. Gustavo Esteva has been the most sustained, lucid, and visionary critic
of this dream, which has progressively turned into a nightmare.
History teaches us that our thinking and inquiries need to reach beyond
the capitalism–socialism dyad, as they both lead down the same road, towards
the same cliff, even if on different roads. Economic growth and development
are essential to both these regimes. Neither of them has a place for genuine
community, for culture to socialize and teach, not just entertain and indoc-
trinate, and for true freedom. Neither of them offers a program of long-term
species survival, freedom, equality, equity, harmony, tolerance, and autonomy.
We need new visions, new utopias, new practical experiences to inspire us, and
new ways of thinking about the world, people, society, culture, the economy,
and politics. Or maybe, as Esteva reminds us, instead of looking for new visions
on the horizon, we can look back and finally learn to appreciate and valorize
the knowledge, wisdom, and experience of Indigenous, First, and native people
worldwide. Some of them have practiced harmony, equity, and tolerance among
themselves and between them and nature for ages. Their practices contain phi-
losophies, epistemologies, and ontologies of peace, democracy, and ecological
soundness—even if most of them have not spelled them out the way Western
self-promoting “thinkers” and social scientists have.
To learn from Indigenous people, we need to learn to listen in a different
way, as much of their wisdom is not written down. However, at times we get
the opportunity to find someone who can translate this wisdom into a for-
mat that becomes accessible to those trained in the Western tradition. There
are some books now available written by Indigenous authors and there are
books written by people like Gustavo Esteva, who are in-between people, able
to translate forth and back between Indigenous and Western worlds. Being
in-between has proven to be of great heuristic value. Gloria Anzaldua has
explained her own positionality in this way, as someone able to see and under-
stand multiple worlds, permanently inhabiting the border, both physically
and analytically. As a result, her reflections are richer, more informed, and
more engrained with local realities than the work of others who do not have
this divided and fragmented positionality and epistemology. Albert Memmi,
author of The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957) is another example of some-
one inhabiting the spaces in-between, in his case the French colonizer and the
Tunisian native, allowing him to see more and to understand the depths of
heuristic entanglements resulting from colonization most analysts simply miss.
Gustavo Esteva is a member of this club of border thinkers. His positionality
 Series Editor Preface ix

allows him to move forth and back between Indigenous and Western worlds,
living side by side, and often clashing, in contemporary Mexico. More than a
translator of Indigenous thought and praxis, he is an interpreter of this reality
and a creator in his own right. He speaks to us from southern, Indigenous
Mexico, from Oaxaca, where he created the Universidad de la Tierra (University
of the Earth) and from where his message grows and flourishes. And he speaks
as someone who once was deeply ingrained in the development apparatus—a
former practitioner.
His voice is never imposing. It is never only critical. He sees through and
helps us decipher the facades of this Brave New World of development and
Western modernity. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to find a Latin
American scholar who has accomplished so much across such a range of topics
and fields as Gustavo Esteva. From his early days as an economist in Mexico
until recently, when he continued to illuminate paths towards post-development
and post-patriarchal transitions from the Universidad de la Tierra, he vastly
demonstrated his profound understanding of the intertwined dynamics of
economy, culture, politics, and the environment in the contemporary world.
In doing so, he developed a solid reputation, widely shared in Latin America
and the Caribbean, as the continent’s leading critic of modernization and
development, the most astute commentator on Zapatismo, and one of the most
inspirational writers on hope, insurrection, and radical social change. Gustavo
Esteva was Latin America’s premier critical thinker on many of these themes,
and a source of inspiration to many generations, including, most importantly,
today’s young people, eager for ideas that give them tools to navigate the com-
plexities of contemporary life with a grounded sense of understanding and
hope. His writings of the 1980s on development were likely the most influen-
tial of the decade and shaped the post-development agenda of the decades to
come, to this date, including on topics such as the Green Revolution, peasants,
agriculture, informality, and aid.
The collection at hand constitutes an excellent introduction to Esteva’s
thought and a well-chosen anthology of his entire oeuvre. The essays com-
prising it reflect most of his main theoretical–political preoccupations (from
deconstructing the economy and development to theorizing grassroots alter-
natives, from providing fresh visions on peasant and urban marginals to the
commons, from civilizational crisis to revolution, and from Zapatismo to the
contemporary environmental crisis, among others). Little of this vast body of
work is known in English, despite Esteva’s highly regarded reputation in the
Anglo-American academic context. The few works of his already available in
English have given him a well-regarded visibility in the US, the UK, and the
larger English-speaking world. It was high time, then, for a more comprehen-
sive volume of his work, and we are glad that this is now happening.
The book summarizes well Esteva’s approach as “reflection in action”,
correctly describing him as a theorist of transformative alternatives as they
x Series Editor Preface

are emerging in Mexico and Latin America, with a keen sensibility to what
happens in other regions of the world. To sum up, throughout the pages of
this anthology, English-speaking readers will find a compelling and gener-
ous invitation to seriously reimagine our modes of being in the world and
of constructing societies and economies. What Esteva imagines, in the last
instance, is a tangible possibility for the emancipation of life from the shackles
of the modes of thought and practice associated with extractive global modern
capitalism, a model of existence that has brought about the civilizational and
ecological crisis in which we are engulfed at present. Esteva is one of those
essential thinkers enlightening us on the necessary transitions to an era in
which humans finally relearn to coexist with each other and with the planet
in a mutually enhancing manner. He is on a par with critical thinkers of the
twentieth century such as Ivan Illich, Raimón Panikkar, André Gorz, Franz
Fanon, Gloria Anzaldua, Albert Memmi, Albert Camus, Hannah Arendt, and
Noam Chomsky who, without being in the limelight of the philosophical
landscape and perhaps because of that, have been the most radical and illumi-
nating dissenting imaginations of our time.

Arturo Escobar and Bernd Reiter

OBITUARY
Gustavo Esteva

Gustavo Esteva died on March 18, 2022. He was 86 years old. A fundraiser
was organized by his children to cover his hospital bills. He was a true “depro-
fessionalized” intellectual in word and deed, not having accumulated enough
resources and protections for his own life—and his death. It seemed that, despite
his advanced age, death was not in his mind. His mind was firmly set on the
future—a better future. The title Gustavo originally proposed for this collection
of essays was “Against Fear: Hope.” This was his motto in life. Offering hope
to others, in a self-less, one might say a “self-forgetting” way. Of all the people
I have been able to work with over the years, Gustavo was among the most
generous, the humblest, the most self-reflective and self-critical—a far cry away
from other academic celebrities whose egos drip from the pages they write, even
if brilliantly.
Gustavo’s life was dedicated to supporting and protecting others. He con-
sidered himself a part of the indigenous peoples with whom he worked and for
whom he advocated, even if he was not indigenous himself. When I sent him
the draft of our prologue for this book he replied:
xii Obituary
Debo confesarte que me sobresalté cuando
me clasificaste como “in-between” y por
un buen rato pensé pedirte que eliminaras
el argumento y la comparación. Muchos
años de empeño me permitieron tomar
distancia de mi occidentalización. Empecé
a verla ‘desde afuera’: dejar de ver, como si
fuera mía, con la mirada occidental;
recuperar sentimientos, pensamientos y
comportamientos propios, abiertamente
no occidentales. (Muchos de los anti-
occidentales son típicamente occidentales).
Al mismo tiempo recuperé el orgullo de
mis raíces ancestrales, de mi abuela
zapoteca, y me veía inmerso en esas
comunidades, viviendo con ellas y por
ellas, instalándome, por 30 años ya, en una
comunidad zapoteca donde he tenido ya
cargos y funciones. Vibrando y sintiendo
con la gente de acá...en una dimensión
más profunda que la que siento y pienso en
relación con los zapatistas y otros grupos
indígenas...o los tepiteños y los marginales
urbanos y demás... Y sí, pensaba, sentía, al
leer tu texto, que no estaba yo en medio,
‘in between’, sino adentro. Pero me seguí
pensando. Tomar distancia de ‘Occidente’,
no ser ya un occidental/occidentalizado,
no me hizo zapoteco. Conozco a fondo la
cultura zapoteca, creo que muy poca
gente la conoce tanto como yo en términos
teóricos y prácticos y como experiencia
vital. Pero sé bien que no soy uno de ellos.
Nunca lo seré. Quizá me ha ido tan bien
en el pueblo en que vivo, funciono tan
fluidamente aquí, porque ellos saben que
yo sé que no soy uno de ellos, que sé los
límites que debo respetar. Hace años,
comentando este predicamento con
Robert Vachon, sugirió que a lo mejor se
iba formando dentro de mí un modo
pluralista de ser. Me encantó la idea...pero
no sé si lo lograré. Por lo pronto, Bernd,
no hay problema: ¡déjame ‘in between’!
(Private email correspondence with Gustavo Esteva, December 8, 2021)
There hardly ever was a humbler and more self-critical scholar than Gustavo
Esteva. I will forever miss his gentle ways, his humility, and his grace. It was
the grace of an intellectual giant who had surpassed the limits of the self.
I must confess that I was startled when you
classified me as “in-between” and for a
while I thought about asking you to remove
the argument and the comparison. Many
years of effort allowed me to distance
myself from my westernization. I began to
see it ‘from the outside’: stop seeing it as if it
were mine, with the Western gaze; recover
feelings, thoughts, and behaviors, openly
non-Western. (Many of the anti-Westerns
are typically Western.) At the same time, I
recovered the pride of my ancestral roots,
of my Zapotec grandmother, and I saw
myself immersed in those communities,
living with them and for them, installing
myself, for 30 years now, in a Zapotec
community where I have already had
positions and functions. Vibrating and
feeling with the people here...in a deeper
dimension than the one I feel and think in
relation to the Zapatistas and other
indigenous groups...or the Tepiteños and
the urban marginal and others... And yes, I
thought, I felt, when reading your text, that
I was not in the middle, ‘in between’, but
inside. But I kept thinking. Taking distance
from ‘Occidente’, no longer being
Western/Westernized, did not make me
Zapotec. I know the Zapotec culture in
depth, I think that very few people know it
as much as I do in theoretical and practical
terms and as a life experience. But I know
well that I am not one of them. I never will
be. Perhaps it has gone so well for me in the
town where I live, I function so smoothly
here, because they know that I know that I
am not one of them, that I know the limits
that I must respect. Years ago, discussing
this predicament with Robert Vachon, he
suggested that perhaps a pluralistic way of
being was forming within me. I loved the
idea... but I don’t know if I’ll make it. For
now, Bernd, no problem: let me be ‘in
between’!
Bernd Reiter
May 2022
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The Publisher would like to thank Jose Rafael Escobedo for reviewing the
copyedited text and the page proofs following Gustavo Esteva’s sudden passing.
INTRODUCTION

From the age of 13, I have known a deep love for writing. Yet, writing would
never be my first or most important love or commitment. Dedicating myself
to activism, to work, and collaboration, I have stolen moments—evenings and
weekends—to write what I wanted to share. The texts appearing here were
written with urgency and in haste, all in such stolen moments. Most were writ-
ten for public presentation, and in response to a particular moment of experi-
encing my distinct reality.
In March 1994, for example, just three months after the Zapatista insurrec-
tion jolted the world awake, I wrote Chronicle of the End of an Era: The Secret
of the EZLN. Fragments of those chronicles written in a hurry are included
in Chapter 8. These apply one of the Zapatistas’ most important principles
of social and communal change: “Asking, we walk”. In the decades since
the Zapatista uprising, I have come to realize how radically I too have been
changed. Learning along with the Zapatistas, this book is the account of my
listening … listening again and again … then writing, “asking and walking”
the radical (to go to the root) path of transformations.
In the late 1950s, the largest and most vigorous popular mobilizations of the
century were registered in Mexico; Fidel entered Havana; Che was a source
of inspiration across Latin America. I experienced my first “awakening” in
that period. Reflecting the spirit of the sixties, people like us across the world
wanted to follow this path—to change everything. During the seventies—
recovering our “common sense”—we began to listen carefully to peoples and
communities on the ground; launching grassroots initiatives. It was a joyous
experience to live with them; to learn with them; while baffled by their great
break free from everything that defined my “certainties”.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003262749-1
2 Introduction

The eighties awoke repressed childhood memories, giving me back my

Indigenous roots. New grounding for radically re-envisioning democracy
became inevitable…
In 1983 I met Iván Illich. A radical turn in my theories and practices began
unfolding, opening me up to surprise. Thanks to Iván, new friendships and col-
laborations with Teodor Shanin, Raimón Panikkar and many others offered
introductions to perspectives that transformed how I understood and acted within
communities and neighborhoods. Seeing, “asking and walking” in ways I could
not have imagined before, I rooted myself within deep interactions with people
and communities whose cultures were very different from mine.
Since the 1970s I have been inspired by Foucault’s thinking. More recently,
my understanding of what is happening around us has benefitted from authors
such as Agamben and Kurz and Jappe, from the German group, Krisis.
All the writings presented here are difficult to summarize. Suffice it is to
indicate that they extend my learning while offering radical critiques of dom-
inant ways of thinking in very diverse fields. Abandoning prejudices, illusions,
and ghosts, my central endeavor has been the pursuit of answers to the following
questions: how to change a reality that is unbearable? how to dismantle a regime
capable of continually destroying both the planet and the social fabric? and how
to transform a reality which maintains increasingly intense forms of confronta-
tion and violence as a new status quo? Most of the book is made up of accounts
of my asking and walking, in which I attempt to combine the theoretical and
analytical foundations of my observations with my own perceptions of those
conditions and struggles.
Much of my inspiration is drawn from the Zapatistas and their commitment
to a “world in which many worlds flourish”; in which a recognition of the
inherent dignity of all peoples, along with the tradition of changing tradi-
tions in a traditional way offer pathways beyond all our contemporary horrors.
Recognizing the chaos and nightmares that were upon us, three decades ago
the Zapatistas began clearly warning us of the spread of violence, the reemer-
gence of hunger and misery, the exacerbation of inequality and of authoritar-
ianism, with horrific impunity. Today, the syndemic intensifies the myriad
tensions and challenges overwhelming most people on the planet while forging
a climate of fear and despair.
What, then, has become of hope?
Perhaps it is unwise to embrace hope in a world in ruins when the insti-
tutions and truths that we hold on to are falling apart around us. Yet, as the
Promethean ethos has appeared to eclipse hope, I believe (along with Ivan
Illich), that the survival of humanity and even more the flourishing of all
beings truly depends on our ability to rediscover hope as a social force. Hope
is the thread weaving these chapters organically.
Since their first communiqué, the Zapatistas have never wavered in sowing
seeds of hope, in both words and in deeds. As I write now, the Zapatistas are
 Introduction 3

in Europe weaving new threads of the “International of Hope”, first proposed

in 1996 [during their “Intergalactic” Encounter for Humanity and Against
Neoliberalism]. Their resolve demonstrates that none of us can afford to stand
still or wait. Instead, together we must act with creative deliberation and com-
mitment. Theirs is the conviction, inspired by Havel, not that something will
happen in a certain way, but with the conviction that something makes sense,
regardless of how it turns out.
In my own awakening, I have immersed myself in traditions that consider
it unthinkable to live without hope. Our traditions view hope as the anchor
that roots us in the world.
Without such hopes, we scatter and disperse like leaves in the wind with
nothing to hold on to. Alongside peoples in southern Mexico with whom I
have joined my life, alongside those with whom we weave a Global Tapestry
of Alternatives, I gather in this book writings that join commitment, will, and
action to recover radical hope.
San Pablo Etla, November 2021
1
RE-THINKING EVERYTHING—
A CONVERSATION WITH
TEODOR SHANIN

I had this conversation with Teodor Shanin during his stay in Mexico in 1992. There
are two reasons I’ve chosen to use it at the beginning of this anthology. I would like to pay
tribute to a person who recently died—on February 4, 2020—and who had a decisive
influence on my life. Additionally, the themes we discussed in this conversation illustrate
the main themes of the book.
An inveterate activist for social transformation and the struggle against injustice,
he made a surprising journey of his life. He was born in Vilnius, a Russian Jew. A
strong advocate for the creation of Israel and an intensely active member of the Marxist
movement and the socialist party, he ultimately could not support the path chosen by
the country he helped establish, and exiled himself in Manchester. There he completed a
formidable academic undertaking, which transformed peasant theories and, among many
others, sociology, and the assessment of Marxism. His book, The Late Marx and the
Russian Road, which Latin-American editors refused to publish for many years, foretold
the misfortune of “real socialism” far before its time and revealed a new Marx, the Marx
who retired from political activism at 60 years old to finalize his research and publish
it … yet he didn’t publish a single page in the following ten years! Shanin dedicated
himself to exploring that silence and demonstrating its causes: a radical revision of theory,
which the bureaucrats of Marxism proceeded to bury over the next one hundred years.
While passing through Mexico in 1992, Shanin gave a brief cycle of conferences and
bestowed on participants several hours of fascinating conversation. He was, clearly, in the
eye of the storm. Perestroika allowed him to return to his country and from that moment
on he orbited between Manchester and Moscow, in constant activism focused on the
transformation of perception, on the renewal of thought. On the one hand, he completed
an unprecedented exploration of the reality of peasant life in what was then the Soviet
Union, and he wrote about its history in the twentieth century, removing it from the

DOI: 10.4324/9781003262749-2
 Conversation with Teodor Shanin 5

shroud of darkness it had remained in for half a century. On the other hand, he set up a
peculiar sort of “university”, open and creative, which began to forge the minds that could
understand and perhaps lead the ongoing processes.
A little before the coup against Gorbachev, I asked Shanin, who was very worried
about his country, what was the worst-case scenario he could conceive of. “That noth-
ing happens,” he told me. “That things remain as they are. That they freeze for the
remainder of the century. The subsequent catastrophe is inconceivable.” This scenario
didn’t come to pass. Other scenarios arose in its place. Shanin’s vigorous voice continued
to express what he saw, the catastrophe.
Thirty years after our conversation, Shanin appears to be speaking about the current
moment, here, among us, reflecting on what we are discussing today—although the
conversation took place before the arrival of Zapatismo, which would have taken this con-
versation in an entirely different direction. His foresight was as impressive as his lucidity.

Gustavo Esteva (GE): Teodor: One of the most intense discussions during the
process of democratization that we are embarking upon in Mexico is with
regards to the political styles we should adopt. Perhaps due to a lack of polit-
ical imagination, we have been slipping into an elemental imitation of the
American styles, for example, by copying the structure of primaries to elect
candidates. What we are most worried about is the impact of democratization
on rural communities. First churches and then political parties are arriving
more frequently than ever and their interference results in divisions that dis-
arm communities and frequently leads them to violence.
For many years the lack of democracy, due to the monopolizing predomi-
nance of one party, was the primary facilitator of caciques (local bosses) which
limited the expression and practice of people’s autonomous will. The process
of democratization appeared to be an opportunity for communities to liber-
ate themselves from these caciques and to reaffirm their autonomy. Instead of
that, they are entering into a new type of dependency, one that is even more
dangerous than its predecessors. The intensity of internal conflicts sparked
by the activities of political parties could be transforming them into mere
appendages of external decisions. In this way “democratization” will lead to
a new form of despotism.

Teodor Shanin (TS): This phenomenon is very similar to that which has been
occurring in India. To get votes, large national political parties need villages,
but they don’t attribute any importance to their political expressions. The
Congress party for example, would go to villages and examine the existing
factions within them. Then they would support a faction; ideally, they would
support two factions such that they would be left fighting amongst themselves,
but both in favor of the party, so that the party could not lose. In recent years
the mechanism lost its efficiency, which partially explains why the Congress
party began to lose power in many areas, but that’s how it was operating for
6 Conversation with Teodor Shanin

many years. During this process, the leader receives some public resources,
help for one thing or another, opportune support in the form of actions and
repressions…

GE: How can one conceive of something different? You have carried out
comparative studies of political processes in rural settings across very different
countries. How can one, in a country like Mexico, conceive, and try to build
a different framework? If it is about supporting the real initiatives of people,
of their organizations, and political parties are not capable of engaging these
initiatives and responding to their impulses, what can we do? Based on your
experience, what political line of action could we follow? What experiences
do you consider useful to clarify our positions and to dispel our doubts?

TS: I think the crucial point is that those experiences don’t exist. For two gen-
erations we allowed the radical critique of the existing system to degenerate,
under certain socialist assumptions. Not only did we lose the capacity to influ-
ence real politics; we also lost two or three generations of thought. We have a
gap in ideas, in conceptual work.
This began, perhaps, with the rise of German socialists, a situation that was
defined by them holding the primary claim to the interpretation of the type
and contents of the transformation required to create a better society. Shortly
after came the intervention of “science”: a scientific socialism arises, which
declares that all other socialisms are not scientific, that they are prejudiced and
belong to the past.
This resulted in a massive, logical, and ever-bigger model of development
that manifested into two main forms. On the one hand, the democratic form
of the benefactor-State, under which it’s appropriate to take care of people
within a multi-party democratic system. At its core is the idea that people
need rights, not those that emanate from individual struggles to obtain them,
but rather rights that society is responsible for ensuring. On the other hand,
the Bolshevik approach, under which development must be obtained under a
non-democratic system because it is faster and there is no time to lose, given
the existence of other systems. When there is no time to lose, democracy—
which is very time-consuming—is expendable.
The situation was such that both sides of scientific socialism left a blank
space: there wasn’t a debate about what should have been discussed; they didn’t
examine whether or not the realization of scientific socialism required the
democratic system, [or] the multi-party system. The heart of the matter faded.
The discussion about what constituted proper socialism was abandoned and
consequently, socialism was equated to development, to scientific develop-
ment. Pursuing more development, faster, that’s what socialism is. And why is
socialism better than no socialism? Because it is more scientific and more pro-
gressive. It doesn’t get any better in the social democrat realm. In that realm,
 Conversation with Teodor Shanin 7

it’s about acquiring more and more development and correctly solving a series
of problems, but the most important thing is overlooked. In my opinion, the
basic element, the thing that was lost, is that socialism is about justice, not
about development.
To exist, socialism needs to concern itself with maximizing justice. From
the beginning, socialist critique focused on that purpose: not on the produc-
tion of services, but rather on the production of justice. Once this principle
is lost, the path becomes increasingly obscured. I think that led to the defeat
of socialist critique, the socialist movement, the collapse of Eastern Europe
in 1989, and the disasters [that followed] also created a huge conceptual void.
That’s where we are today. That is the crux of the matter. We must get going
to try to understand what we can do now, because otherwise we won’t get
very far.
The only way to pursue a discussion about socialism is to start with the
assumption that socialism might have come to an end. It is a historical phenom-
enon: it had a beginning and has an end. We are at the beginning of its end. We
have to take our thinking to that conclusion and talk about it. Most socialists
cannot go that far, because psychologically they cannot accept the failure. If
they accepted it, then what did they spend their lives on? Therefore, there is a
generation in which only a few people are willing to break with their past in
that sense. Most of them are so prejudiced that they believe there are no prob-
lems in Cuba, or in socialism, because their literacy rate is higher than that of
Costa Rica or of many industrialized countries or because their health system
is as good if not better than that of the United States. In reality, there are severe
problems in Cuba, but to understand them you must move away from positions
on development and towards positions on justice: it is not a society in which free
speech and justice prevail. Those were the things socialism was built for, but it
produced something else.

GE: Part of the problem is how many people reacted, especially intellectuals
and politicians, in the face of a critique that appeared to be the equivalent
of staring into the abyss or leaping into the void. The very moment you say
socialism has come to an end, people immediately ask themselves: then what’s
next, if so, then what. On the surface, what immediately comes to mind is the
market, American democracy, and neoliberal thought. That’s all rubbish for
many of them, and they can’t follow the argument as a result. It is not because
they don’t accept your criticism, or because they disagree with the basic prem-
ise that socialism is about justice, but rather it is…

TS: …about what we can do…

GE: The point is that there is no longer an answer, there is not even a debate.
For a century the discussion was capitalism vs. socialism.
8 Conversation with Teodor Shanin

TS: Of course, of course, and if one follows those parameters, then they’re
headed hopelessly into emptiness and disaster, intellectually speaking. I would
like to add something that is very important to me because it is a dilemma
without a solution that is central to my own definition of the problems, when
exploring the future, the present, and the past.
I brought it up once with Paul Sweezy. It was no accident. In a sense,
Sweezy is a teacher, my teacher, because in those days I was not sure of how to
get rid of the aforementioned Marxisms. He demanded that I do it, insisting
that I could remain a Marxist and a socialist even after I did. We disagreed
on many things, but we tended to agree on many others, and in any case, I
had fewer disagreements with him than I did with others. Once when I was
visiting Manchester and spending a lot of time with him, I raised the question
with him, in part because I had known for years that I was heading into this
conceptual disaster and wanted to see if he had anything to say about it.
I formulated the problem as follows. When given the opportunity to
express themselves democratically, the majority of people tend to vote in favor
of things that good socialists consider petty-bourgeois preferences regarding
well-being; some pornography, some sports—more or less what appears in a
popular newspaper, which gives a rough picture of what people seem to want—
more television than reading and so on. The solution chosen by socialists, at
least in Europe, was for an elite to lead the people towards a better understand-
ing of the problem. Such an answer seemed satisfactory and was appropriate
for simple and concrete matters, to decide things in one fell swoop. But for
other matters, the elite inevitably become corrupted. The only way to control
this corruption is to stop being an elite, to be open to the people, but then the
people bring unacceptable ethical, aesthetic, and philosophical approaches to
the decision-making regime. How do we escape from this cycle?
Many, many years ago when I was young and beautiful, I, naturally, had
a solution. An anecdote illustrates this well. I was on my way back from the
front lines of the war for Israel’s independence, a war the Palestinians call
“the catastrophe”—an appropriate duality regarding the subject—and I had a
few free days to spend in Tel Aviv. I went to visit a family. The daughter was
two years older than I was at the time—which was 17—and she was with her
boyfriend, who had a good heart and a military uniform. I had the stars of a
commander and we were talking about how I had gotten them. I didn’t real-
ize that the girl was looking at me with admiration in her eyes and that the
more she did, the angrier her boyfriend became. He then began to say that
several unit commanders were communists and that many of them worked to
be commanders exclusively to exercise their desire to control and their capac-
ity for manipulation and deceit. I didn’t respond to these aggressions, but he
did say one thing in particular, very severely, to which I did respond and
then he said: “Executioners are made of people like you.” I replied immedi-
ately, staring straight into his face, with something that seems relevant to the
 Conversation with Teodor Shanin 9

dilemma I have raised: “Those who are willing to die for a cause, have the
right to hang others.”
That is one way to solve the problem. The elite is granted absolute power:
they take care of people’s well-being, they are granted the power to do what is
necessary for the good of the people, and they must use this power to solve all
problems. For many years that was the apothegm of the socialists.
But we now know that all elites are corrupted, that there has not been a
single instance of a socialist elite that has not been corrupted. So, does the
solution consist of not having elites? Letting the masses take over? I do not
know the answer.
The answer could be that we don’t really understand the majority of peo-
ple, that they all hold seeds of societal transformation within them, which
will flower once they are allowed to live according to their own volition for
long enough, without being pushed around. But this, like all things, must be
taught—it can be a general belief, but it has to be taught: pure populism, the
best populism. But populism did not work, not even the best populism. This is
how I think we ended up in a disastrous void. We got bogged down.
That is one point. The other pertains to the reality of current conditions:
the world is falling apart and maybe it is time to come up with new ideas. We
are not in a great condition, because we didn’t do the work for several years,
as a collective, but this might be the time to promote the introduction of new
ideas. The interesting thing is that, given that we are letting go of our rela-
tionships with science, progress, and power, we are faced with a very peculiar
situation in which we are looking to the past to find answers about the future.
I’ll give you an example. The historical studies we are conducting in the
Soviet Union, to find out what happened, aren’t motivated solely by the need
to assess the tragedy of collectivization, but also by our inability to understand
the present and conceive of the future with regards to Soviet agriculture.
That’s why we’re looking at the past.
One day I was present at a conversation between Hobsbawm, who was a
member of the British Communist Party for many years—until he finally left—
and who was representing the intellectual left, and some young Malaysian stu-
dents, who had accidentally encountered him and begun to question him. They
asked him why he was a member of a party as conservative as the Communist
Party. If he really was a communist, they said, then why do you maintain an
affiliation with such a conservative party? He didn’t deign to give them an
answer and left. When he left, I tried to help them understand, telling them it
was his life’s story and that they should look at what he’d done and that sort of
stuff before they attacked him. The students listened to what I said carefully and
quietly and told me that that wasn’t an answer; that it would only be one if he
had lived in the nineteenth century.
These sorts of things still bother me. It is not that easy to get rid of some-
thing like that. It is not an individual affair. It is as if all of a sudden one found
10 Conversation with Teodor Shanin

things out about the family that were unbearable to them. People don’t get
rid of their family because of this. It is difficult to withdraw. One still belongs
to the family. It is an objective matter. It is important to understand that most
people who go through this experience find it almost impossible to make
critical departures until they are completely out of it: it is akin to destroying
the meaning of their own life. I don’t think that is the case for me. I don’t
think that looking at the beginning of things will destroy the meaning of my
life. But I understand that a lot of people go through this when they are faced
with a similar experience and I understand that most of them find rupture
difficult.

GE: I think that issue is very relevant now. It is in the air, among us all. I
would like to explore some elements of the response.
Firstly, I think there are some parallelisms between that discussion and the
one we’re having regarding development. Many people are trying to define
a new type of development, arguing that the known disasters can be attrib-
uted to specific development models and strategies, or problems with imple-
mentation, but not with development itself, which is an idea or project that
shouldn’t be tossed out—at the risk of throwing the baby out with the bath-
water. With those people, before engaging in an academic discussion about
which type of development could be the best, it is necessary to underscore the
significance of the fact that over two-thirds of the world’s inhabitants have
been considered underdeveloped for several decades. For most of the world,
development is simply about escaping an undignified and vague condition
called underdevelopment, and that necessarily implies following the pioneers,
the leaders, those who arrived first to that one-way street that would be
development. Deep down, that means giving up one’s own dreams, one’s
own decision-making capacity, one’s own path. I, for one, cannot accept that
position: one where the majority of the world accepts a form of fundamental
subordination associated with the qualifier “underdeveloped”. And they will
do it, by accepting a notion of development, any of the ones currently availa-
ble in the political market, which qualify us by disqualifying us.
When we talk about socialism, we find ourselves in a similar situation.
Talking about socialism implies talking about more than a century of strug-
gle for justice…on the wrong path. We can’t separate the idea of socialism,
the word socialism, from a real historical process, from a real struggle, asso-
ciated with a specific evolution. Incidentally, when we speak like this, we
immediately start approaching a type of discussion that’s almost religious,
between sects. What is the correct socialism, what is the truth, who is a true
Christian, the one who believes what? Is a good Christian one who believes in
the Virgin Mary? What is proper socialism? The one who follows Marx? Rosa
Luxemburg? Trotsky? Who is right? Who has the truth? And all this is related
to the basic meaning of socialism today.
 Conversation with Teodor Shanin 11

I still have a third argument related to the theoretical critique of socialism.

In our past, in our tradition, that of socialists across the world, the relationship
between socialism and the economy is such that there cannot be socialism
without an economic manifestation. If one wishes to remove economy from
the center, there can be no talk of socialism. There can be some dialogue with
young Marx, but not with the adult; not even with the late Marx, the Marx of
his last years. Once Marx developed his thinking he became an economist and
stopped being a philosopher or politician. Perhaps our mistake was that, in the
face of Marx’s obsession with capitalism, we began to universalize and project,
even more than he did, his criticism and his perception of a specific system.
We transformed it into a general theory, which applied to the past, present,
and future. I’m not sure Marx was completely convinced that Capital was a
general theory of humanity, but we transformed the book into that general
theory, with economics at its center.

TS: I think this is a question that can be narrowed down more precisely, and it
is important to do so. It is a technical history, the history of socialism. It can be
clearly established that this matter is limited to Kautsky, Plejanov, and Engels.
That trio formalized this as socialism; they formalized it as dialectical materialism.
Plejanov made a crazy hodgepodge of words because materialism cannot
be dialectical. The idea that materialism can be dialectical or that dialectic
can be materialistic is one of the greatest stupidities that humanity could have
produced, and nonetheless, millions of people repeat it out loud like idiots and
memorize it, all over the world.
The notion of a dialectical idealism is equally meaningless, but some mate-
rialists practiced it enthusiastically. Dialectic is dialectic. The only way dia-
lectic can exist is as dialectic. In any case, these authors are responsible for
transforming it all into economic science and what they did was then inter-
preted it as absolute truth for Russia. In this sense, it is a Marxism that could
not escape the traps of its own thinking nor improve it: it remained static.
Regarding the social democrats, the issue becomes even more concerning.
They take some phrases from here and some from there. The age of the trans-
formation of the nature of socialism begins. The most impressive feat is how
this transformation managed to unite socialists. Before the transformation, if
one mentioned anything about socialism, you became a member of one of the
sects of socialism. This was quickly left behind. That current [of transforma-
tion] seized the meaning of socialism and left very little outside of it, by virtue
of the scientific nature associated with it. It was a sect that acted quickly and
efficiently.
Secondly, I want to clarify another matter. Of course, you are right, there is
no socialism without economics. But there is another component of socialism
that I want to highlight. Socialism is, by necessity, collectivist. The essence
of socialism, as opposed to anything else, is that it constitutes a collectivist
12 Conversation with Teodor Shanin

creed. That is something that all socialists accept. But what does it mean to
be a collectivist creed? The issue remains unresolved in the most convoluted
way. A collectivist creed, the simplest interpretation of a collectivist creed in
the world of the twentieth century, is a state-based society. Since the collective
cannot manage itself, somebody has to do it. And that someone must be the
State, a democratic State. Do not forget: one must be democratic.

GE: Nobody is against the idea of being democratic.

TS: But being democratic is one thing and collectivity and collectivism are
another, where are the rights of the individual within a collectivity, and that
sort of thing. With that in mind, we must deal immediately with another issue,
which is that of freedom. By the way, some articles I recently read mention
the virtue of debate, the virtue of not destroying one side of the debate and
constantly keeping the debate alive. Liberalism is clearly associated with this
belief—a type of debate revolving around the rights of the individual. There
is merit in this, which always seemed like the next step. The socialists under-
stood there was virtue in it, that something had to be done to incorporate it
into collectivism. I actually think that based on the rhythm of Marx’s think-
ing, socialism should have become the last development of liberalism, it should
have been the consolidation of what the liberals achieved, socialism should
have critiqued what the liberals achieved to move towards a world where…

GE: Please, let’s pause for a moment. What did the liberals achieve? I do remem-
ber that Marx thought about getting further than the liberals, not by taking a
different approach, but the same approach. But what did the liberals achieve?
What was the substance of their advances? What can we retain from them?

TS: Two things: parliamentary democracy and the [European] Convention on

Human Rights. A very individualized parliamentary democracy, the English
type, in which people select one person in one district, a man that people
consider democratic, and that person goes and sits in Parliament and talks and
those sorts of things. It is an expression of a certain type of maturity in societal
functioning, even if it has severe limitations.
The second is the Convention on Human Rights. It really is surprising that
they didn’t enact it.1 They accepted it as a sort of moral, ethical agreement, a
gentleman’s agreement.
People in England really know how to live. The English eat fish with a
special knife. They don’t use an ordinary knife for that. In other countries,
they can do it differently, but not in England. It just is that way. And therein
lies one of the most interesting points: there are things they cannot do. They have
the power to do it, but they don’t do it. There is a kind of self-restraint that is
very important.
 Conversation with Teodor Shanin 13

The Convention on Human Rights was in its essence a way to establish the
principle of self-restriction. There are countries, like the United States, that
legitimated it. The individual has rights. One person can stand before everyone
and say: “All of you want me to do this, but no thank you, I don’t want to do it.”
And it is not possible to force them to. I think that is mature. It’s dangerous,
but mature.

GE: How could we distinguish between “negative” rights and “positive”

rights? Some of us have begun to fight against the rights that are enshrined in
the Constitution, which we fought for for a long time. They became a threat
to us, due to the weight of immense bureaucracies, despotism, and all sorts
of regulations that affect the daily practice of freedom, arbitrariness and all
sorts of regulations that affect daily exercises of freedom. Instead of moving
forward, we went backwards. Now we want to regain freedom.

TS: The question is who has rights: the individual or the community.

GE: There is no doubt about our aim, given the type of struggle we’re engaged
in: the community. But it would seem we are struggling for “negative” rights:
those that establish what should not be done, speaking at a national scale; and
that we speak of “positive” rights, what can be done, when we’re talking about
a community scale.

TS: It is important to examine this dilemma, which is essentially the dilemma

that has been fought over in all parts of the world. We could say that the
individual stands against the communal, that it blocks the very existence of
the community. We must constantly repeat the truism: individualism dis-
solves community. The future must be, in some way, a communal endeavor.
Socialism clearly conveyed a communitarian message. The problem was that
it was translated into collectivism, statism, and self-destruction.
I think it is extremely important, because of this dialectic we were talk-
ing about and because of these types of attitudes, to keep in mind something
that communitarianism tends to forget: that the best community can seem
relatively stupid to an individual who is there. It could be the individual who
stands up and yells, and they would destroy him if their customs allow it.
Socrates wasn’t poisoned by accident. And all the Socrates are perpetually
poisoned. What does this mean?
Above all, we now aspire to better freedom, not better society. This is one
of the things that emerges at the end of socialism. As a socialist, I was able to
ask myself about a better society—and that is what seems to be wrong, or per-
haps there is something in that that is fundamentally wrong.
Let me look back to examine this in perspective. When I returned from
the army, I thought that was the end of my political career. I had done my
14 Conversation with Teodor Shanin

duty. I wanted the people’s freedom; I had fought for it and I had triumphed.
We had an independent state. I experienced something that does not happen
often to human beings: I left [the army] due to peace; I left after triumph. All
the generations before me had fought for the Zionist creed. My father was a
Zionist his entire life. But he was not fortunate enough to defeat the Germans
and march through the streets of Tel Aviv in the final victory parade. I was. I
was a lucky guy. But I left it there.
Afterwards, I began to venture into the social world. I went to poor areas
and was shaken. Upon my return, I thought something should be done about
it. I sat down to read, write, read, and write endlessly, for myself. I read all
the alternatives to Marxist socialism, which I had hated with all my heart
because it represented the opprobrium of my childhood in Vilnius and my
disastrous experiences, and I wrote a small summary that I regret not keep-
ing because it was the first time I approached my own work seriously. I
didn’t save it, but I know what it said. I reached the conclusion that even if
the Soviet-style regime wasn’t appropriate for me, it seemed to be so for the
majority [of people]. It was my duty as an honest man, committed to the
cause of justice, to act according to what the majority seemed to desire, even
if that seemed unfortunate to me. I gave in due to that, joining the Marxist
movement. I joined the socialist party, the United Workers Party. This is
how I understood my union with them [the majority]. And for a year, I
became aggressively active. No one seemed to notice I had put together that
recapitulation, those reservations, because my natural aggressiveness made
me seem very sure of myself. In fact, however, I had joined under a very
limited and limiting assumption.
That is the problem with the right of man. Saying: I should do something;
it’s cruel, I don’t like it, but I’ll defend it.
And since we can’t seriously aim for the best society, we must think about
the best freedom. But the best freedom is impossible because communities
have conservative prejudices within their structures. That [best freedom] is
hardly natural. Communities are not progressive—they can’t be. And that isn’t
necessarily bad. They cannot begin to rashly and irresponsibly trade in their
past for some future. The problem is who to bestow rights on.

GE: Who is going to accomplish what? Based on my experience, having

watched the internal functioning of communities for years, in the city and in
the country, it’s necessary to limit powers in a community. Communal power
can be terribly threatening to people.
Corporate decision-making, the precise expression of a collective desire,
or the most effective democratic decision-making can all be wrong. It’s true
that when they make a mistake, they can make course corrections: they make
their own mistakes, they learn from experience. That type of learning doesn’t
happen when others decide for them. But they can become the worst dictators
 Conversation with Teodor Shanin 15

through their decisions. That is why we must limit communal power. The
question is: who will do it?

TS: This is where we are stuck. Who will judge the judges? The Bible says
it well. Who judges? And how do you reconcile collectivism or the socialist
creed with the personal lives people want to have, assuming they don’t want
to label others?
If we manage to get past the current circumstances, of the most difficult
moment of state socialism in the negative sense, we won’t have arrived at the
solution. Perhaps we need to discard the word socialism: not only is one type
of socialism over, but its very reality is also. And then we need communism,
which appears to be a natural response to our predicament.
If we assume that capitalism is a type of individualism, with all the negative
implications it brings for us, for you and me, then we also must accept that
State socialism is a mode of socialization that [conditions men to accept that]
the State controls everything. There are people that don’t let you manage
your own life, because they are always discussing how to manage it for you.
If you don’t argue, if you don’t defend yourself, you are subjected to a brutal
imposition. And if you do [defend yourself ] you are subjected to it regardless.
My way of being and your way of being are both set against both the State
and capitalism. We’re looking for the answers to come, trying to sniff them
out in social movements and in people’s perspectives. And that is important in
a world that is so confused. To be able to seriously consider this exploration,
so it’s not just another turn of the screw, another rhetorical game, another way
of protecting old dogmas, the first step is to recognize that we don’t have an
answer in sight. We had one for many years. It’s not there anymore.
Our belief—I’m speaking for both of us—is that there are no alternatives,
and when you don’t have alternatives, you must create them. Socialism was
a magnificent guide even for those who weren’t socialists: it showed a path, a
possibility, it provided a rigorous critique of what was already there. Other gen-
erations could use it as a compass to navigate a path towards a precise horizon.
They had an alternative, but that is not our case. Some still think an alternative
can be found within capitalism. They will become disillusioned soon. Progress
didn’t produce well-being. On the contrary. It’s peculiar to observe how cynical
capitalism has become. A few years ago, it had to be much more reserved, it had
to conceal the disasters it caused. Not anymore.

GE: Perhaps we must accept that not only have we seen the end of state social-
ism (and there is no other socialism in the real world), but also of real capi-
talism, in a very concrete sense: capital can no longer govern a country. The
nation-state was an ideal space for capitalism, for it to preside over its empire
within it. But its own strength, its transnationalization, has deprived it of its
natural habitat, of the arena where it was able to dominate. Real societies,
16 Conversation with Teodor Shanin

which still take the form of nation-states, can no longer be governed through
capitalism. (They never were really. But that’s another story). A good exam-
ple is the period of President Reagan, during which he tried to put capital in
charge of everything, with the most aggressively and neatly capitalistic rheto-
ric of the last few decades, and also what I think was the largest public sector
in the history of humanity.

TS: Thatcher did exactly the same in England—the same rhetoric and the
same results.

GE: If one followed neoliberal thought strictly, if everything was left in the
hands of the market, nobody would survive—especially the government
which claims it does. This creates an opportunity, as well as a threat. If you
cannot accept state socialism and you cannot govern with capitalism, then dic-
tatorship remains an option. Governing by force and with the market: that’s
one of the new names for the Apocalypse.

TS: Communities appear to be a solution to this problem we’re discussing.

We do look to them for alternatives because we don’t see others, because we
haven’t discovered what alternative type of power could restrict the power of
the state. In exploring alternatives, we have been looking for modalities that
can exert that control, that limitation, in an appropriate manner. Given that
the state naturally tends to be unjust and despotic, we must stop it, restrict it:
this is the starting point of any valid political position. And that is how com-
munities are revealed to us. People in the Soviet Union talk about capitalism as
if it were the only way to restrict State power. And this means that they don’t
understand anything.

GE: I saw it, Teodor, I was just there. I saw it on the street, on people’s faces,
they have no idea what they’re talking about. You’ve been to Moscow fre-
quently during the last few years. Have you noticed a real decline in people’s
conditions?

TS: It’s incredible, because every time I go, I come back with the feeling that
it couldn’t get worse. But when I return it’s even worse. Let me give you an
example: there is something Moscow has never experienced: bread scarcity.
The Russians eat a lot of bread, which is very cheap and there is plentiful grain
to avoid scarcity. Nonetheless, the last time I went there were long lines to
buy bread. People started saying there would be no bread and that prompted
a panic, but it had nothing to do with the amount of available wheat in the
country. It was a total failure of the distribution system.

GE: A sudden failure?

 Conversation with Teodor Shanin 17

TS: They allowed the decline to happen over the course of the last 20 years,
and that decline is now causing hunger. Thirty years ago, the solution was for
each district to have its own small bakery, step one. Step two, they decided
to have a factory, and that led to bread companies. Then they created a large
bureaucracy, step three. The people no longer had to stay on top of the [bread]
issue because that’s what the scientific technocrats were there for. But they were
beaten down by the passage of time. The machinery is getting old. One factory
shutdown is all it takes to leave an entire region without bread. The system has
simply stopped working.
We must consider that this was the best agricultural year the Soviet Union
had had in a long time because everything in the soil grew. There will be
very serious difficulties next year because they didn’t take advantage of this
year to improve the current conditions in the field because years that are this
climatically beneficial do not repeat themselves easily. And everybody knows
it because people are smart enough and the newspapers are providing the
information. The mafia, which is an effective system of government for any
practical purpose, now wants to control the market.

GE: What is this that you’re calling a mafia?

TS: It’s groups of people who make their income illegally. The Russians call
them “racketeers”. When they say mafia, they’re generally referring to the
black market. And “racket” is a group of people that live in the mafia, control
the supply, and resort to threats or violence to obtain money. They have a huge
quantity of weapons in their hands. The quantity of weapons in Moscow is
incredible. Since this group has a large reserve of money, there’s nothing they
can’t buy. They have the loyalty that’s characteristic of the mafia and their
members. Like in the mafia, they can’t leave the group once they’ve joined, so
they become more and more involved.
They practically control the entire vegetable market in Moscow. Previously
they controlled the lines of those waiting for visas outside of the British
Embassy. They’re innovative, intelligent, and very persistent in the maximi-
zation of their profits. Plus, they use violence in a very prudent manner. They
don’t start civil wars in the streets of Moscow because that would work against
them. Some of these groups are made up of people with the same ethnic ori-
gins. They keep to their own class. And some are so large and organized that
they have representatives in different parts of the city.
The ordinary police are incapable of doing anything because their salary is
so low: they can’t afford to act. They can’t maintain a sustained state of control.
Additionally, the corruption of political bodies increases by the day.
The whole economic dimension of what’s happening is based on two
things: the collapse of the supply and distribution system and the decline in
18 Conversation with Teodor Shanin

productivity. The level of productivity and production itself has decreased each
year, which is partially due to increased problems with supply and decreased
numbers of youth.

GE: What perspectives do you see? You were saying the worst-case scenario
was for nothing to happen. That’s already happened.

TS: I can’t see any possibilities for the current political generation…The
imminent collapse of the system is accompanied by the collapse of people’s
responsibility and in the nation’s capacity to manage state affairs.

GE: That same type of collapse might be happening in the United States, at
a terrifying scale. What will happen when collapse arrives? Let’s explore the
issue a little more. When you say, like you did the other day, that the United
States must have a global strategy for domination, what are you referring to?
Dominating what? Resources? Ideologies? Dreams? What is their strategic
end? Competing with their economic rivals?

TS: As a nation, I don’t know. As a ruling group, as a ruling elite, [the stra-
tegic end is] doing what elites want to do with everything: have it in such a
way that they can get whatever they want or might want in the future. I think
you are mistaken to look for long-term strategies that motivate the desire to
control the Middle East. I think there is no long-term strategy. The strategy
is to have control. Why? To get whatever they want. At this time, the goal is
to ensure that their web remains intact, despite the crisis. In the long run, it’s
about being able to do whatever they want.

GE: Even at the end of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the
twentieth, the United States was thinking about expansion. Latin America
was the territory they wanted to control. When the Soviet Union appeared as
the enemy, that became the justification for control. It was no longer expan-
sion. They weren’t thinking about colonizing, after the Second World War,
but rather about preventing the encroachment of the enemy.

TS: “We must stop the Soviet Union.” I think there is some rationalization
and some fetishism in it. We live in a society where you have to rationally
explain everything you do logically and scientifically. If you don’t have to
explain it to others, you must explain it to yourself. If you do something irra-
tional, you immediately come up with a rational explanation.

GE: And so, if the Soviet Union no longer poses a threat to United States
citizens what is the point of control now?
 Conversation with Teodor Shanin 19

TS: Because control has a logic of its own. I don’t have any other explanation.
If the point was to prevent these countries from becoming communist, that’s
already done. But there is a political machine that lives in control and the
members of this machine control automatically. This machine is much more
powerful than people’s opinion.
Given that State Socialism is over, and capitalism cannot really govern a
society, we could be moving towards new types of dictatorships. Experiences
with military dictatorships have shown their growing incompetence. And
now there is a movement that looks like democracy, but it is not. It is a move-
ment, outside the realm of military dictatorships, that approaches a type of
bureaucratic dictatorship combined with inertia. Think of the two compo-
nents: bureaucratic control and inertia, as a system. And the fact is that inertia
facilitates the survival of this system because it’s based on neutralization, a very
effective mechanism to manipulate masses of people.

GE: As effective as it is eerie.

TS: They aren’t going to voluntarily relinquish privileges and permissions,

because the group of politicians needs to not be affected. In Europe, for exam-
ple, there will be national governments for a long time. A political elite needs
a place to be political. They aren’t going to abandon their powers and privi-
leges. The person who most acutely attacked the expansion of the European
Economic Community was Ms. Thatcher, a master politician. The group she
received the most support from was the non-unionists, non-politicians—the
Parliament. They understood her when she said: “We aren’t going to aban-
don or cede the powers of Parliament because that would mean the end of
England”. At the same time, this movement can teach us one of the greatest
lessons of human history: most of the things that are really relevant, the big
changes, take place in parliaments—those of today, or their equivalents in the
past. That is what we must take into account. The rest is less important.

Note
1 The rights enshrined in the ECHR were later enacted into domestic law under the
Human Rights Act in 1998.
2
BEYOND DEVELOPMENT

I was one of the two billion of us who became underdeveloped on January 20,
1949, when President Truman coined the word “underdevelopment” and began the
campaign to develop us. Twenty years later, having already suffered the horrors that
accompany this enterprise, many of us recognized that its goal—to make us like the
developed countries, to adopt the American way of life—was clearly impossible…
and very damaging. Since 1976, after the famous ILO report, it seemed sensible
to take on the more modest goal of at least satisfying the basic needs of the entire
population. Universal agreement was never reached on the definition of these needs
and the way to satisfy them, but the idea has been guiding all official development
policies, even though our governments maintain the pretense that they are still seek-
ing the original goal.
In our countries, the discovery of the illusory and destructive nature of development
gave many people the opportunity to recover their own ways of living, which seemed
attainable and satisfactory and allowed them to avoid the ecological, social, and politi-
cal damages inevitably associated with the development enterprise. By the mid-1980s,
both an academic school of postdevelopment and a grassroots movement openly resisting
development projects were in full swing. Today, the word “postdevelopment” is still used
for different purposes but not among people who are already following their own path.
In Glasgow, in November 2021, while the COP 26 Conference was trying to survive,
15 Indigenous women from the organization Local Futures were sending a very clear
message from the streets: “We don’t need development. We know how to live well in
our territories.”
In this chapter, I am including two short texts, based on my proposals at the XVIII
Conference of the Society for International Society, held in Rome in July 1985.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003262749-3
 Beyond Development 21

I. Development: Metaphor, Myth, Threat

Introduction by Ivan Illich
On Thursday, September 19, at breakfast time, Mexico City, a city of 18 million
inhabitants, suffered an earthquake. The damage spread over several square
kilometers, affecting 10% of the city’s surface, especially in its historic center.
An hour later, people were already mobilizing. When the official rescue teams
arrived, most of the people trapped under the rubble had already been freed.
Almost all those who lost their homes made their own improvised camps
or were sheltered by neighbors, cousins or in-laws, godparents, or strangers.
With shovels and machetes, the rescuers took risks bordering on heroism.
Others gave everything they had. Doña Lupe, a mestiza, walked to Tepito,
five kilometers from where she lived. When she found her ex-husband safe,
she gave all her capital, 30,000 pesos, to an unknown woman so she could
bribe a policeman: she wanted to bury her son herself, she did not want the
body taken to the morgue.
The government did not understand the impressive fortitude of the solidar-
ity rekindled by the earthquake. Officials on the television seemed obsessed by
one need: to insist again and again that the government had everything under
control. In the North American mass media, the images seem even more dis-
tant from the reality people saw on the streets. The press created the impression
that Mexico had been battered to the point of being maimed and helpless.
They did not report that the damage was limited to a defined area, nor did they
report the extent to which the conmoción (co-motion), the movement of the
people affected by the earthquake, constituted the most important source of
aid and support for the victims. Journalists saw displays of individual courage,
relatives mute with grief, and individuals complaining about the inefficiency of
the emergency and fire departments. They overlooked the effective, creative,
and consoling solidarity.
The decisive role of solidarity in the existence and survival of Mexico
City has been underestimated, not only by journalists, but also by scientists.
Without it, Mexico would indeed be on the brink of the “destabilization” that
American observers have predicted for the past several years. The earthquake
brought to light the informal network of solidarity that many of Mexico City’s
poor rely on. The earthquake revived it, but now threatens them. It seems to
legitimize greater bureaucratic control—even as the new degree of central
power is presented as a tool to decentralize.
Sixty hours after the first earthquake, leaders of organizations in Tepito began
to worry about the imminent threat. Tepito is a densely populated barrio of colo-
nial buildings in the center of the disaster zone, on which several of the tall
buildings fell. In the last ten years Tepito has also become the shining example of
a tightly intertwined moral economy, which has adapted to the electronic age.
22 Beyond Development

On Saturday night it seemed that Tepito had physically disappeared.

However, the demands of the neighborhood councils were already taken for
granted when Doña Pilar began to dig through the rubble: people did not accept
that the earthquake was God’s bulldozer, now needing only a little help from
American demolition companies to get people out of the center of the city,
along with the rubble. Doña Pilar Menéndez complained about the space taken
from her family by the “development” agency that fell on her two rooms. The
councils of neighbors refused to accept the ruling to demolish their homes and
demanded the right to rebuild the houses and stores with their own hands.
People refused to be stored in garages in other areas or in housing built for them
in the city center. “Morally and legally, what people are demanding makes
sense, but it also makes sense from an economic perspective,” stated Gustavo
Esteva, a recognized advocate for Tepito’s concerns. He is a distinguished intel-
lectual who received the National Prize in Political Economy, the editor of
a very articulate Sunday Supplement of El Día (called El Gallo Ilustrado) and
the leader of a national network (ANADEGES) that links some 450 rural and
urban organizations or cooperatives. According to Esteva, the response given
to the people of Tepito will symbolically decide the future of Mexico. If the
government recognizes the primacy of Tepito’s wishes to protect its network
of solidarities, it could become the model of a country modernizing based on
autonomy. If instead, professionals obtain the power to decide what the people
of Tepito really need for their own good—a power that architects, police, and
educators have long sought—the clean and safe district that will emerge in the
area where Tepito once stood will be the symbol of a Mexican society based on
self-destruction and on a deepening abyss.

Text by Gustavo Esteva

For the past decade, my immediate world has been made up of deprofession-
alized intellectuals and by the peasants and marginalized urban-dwellers of
an extended network of grassroots organizations that we have formed. In this
world, development has always been a threat. During the “oil boom” or during
some other brief periods, the threat was hidden behind various illusions. In the
current decade, however, currency devaluation and unemployment have laid
the threat bare. Now the word “development” only circulates as a joke in the
world I move in. In Mexico City, you need to be either very rich or very insen-
sitive not to realize that development stinks.
Most peasants are aware that development has undermined their liveli-
hoods by dissolving former diversified farming regimes. The slum dwell-
ers know that development has rendered their skills redundant and their
education inadequate. If they manage to organize their community life in
their neighborhoods built “by hand” in abandoned buildings, bulldozers or
policemen—at the service of development—will relocate them. They all
 Beyond Development 23

know what it means to be pushed, centimeter by centimeter, until they sink

into the cash economy.
At the other end of the educational scale, a growing number of ex-
economists, ex-sociologists, or ex-managers, working with grassroots com-
munities, find it almost impossible to share with their former colleagues
the sensation they have learned to feel: there are no statistical or empirical
indicators capable of reflecting the suffering caused by the loss of autonomy,
dignity, or solidarity, that immeasurable shadow of quantifiable progress.
Until recently, development had been protected by a taboo. On the left
or the right, academics supported the politicians’ claim that the suffering of
the majorities was the inevitable price to be paid for the welfare they would
eventually obtain. But then there was the fall in oil prices, the growing debt,
the implementation of an austerity regime, the transformation of Mexico
into a free zone, where transnational capital installs automated factories to
produce Volkswagen buggies for export to Germany. Thus, the corruption
of politics and the degradation of nature—implicit in development—can
finally be touched and smelled. A new establishment of experts will establish
the causal connection between the deterioration of the environment and the
loss of solidarity previously perceived only by the poorest. We are thus in a
better position to confront conventional wisdom. Even university students,
trained to trust expert opinion more than their own noses, now know that
development stinks.
In my world, the word “development” has always been aligned with
other words, such as arriba, adelante, revolution and structural change, which
Mexicans are accustomed to repeat with a hint of irony. Some of us who
work with grassroots communities, however, have recently been tempted to
consider that what we do is also development. A new establishment, which
has emerged in recent years, travels around the world under the banner of
“Alternative Development”. It has a strong preference for certain themes:
“popular participation”, “self-help”, “holism”, “networking”, “decentraliza-
tion”, “local control”, “low energy consumption” techniques. I am offended
by those who want to mask the stench of “development”, here or abroad, and
use alternative development as a deodorant.
For a whole generation, my generation, “development” was sacred and
sacrosanct. It was the common idol of sects pursuing a common goal with
incompatible means. The time has come to recognize that it is development
itself that is the evil myth whose pursuit threatens all who live in the world I
have been associated with, the world of the majority. We need to oppose the
additional life expectancy that the new establishment dedicated to the pro-
motion of “alternatives” wants to give to development. We cannot expect this
to be taken care of by UN bureaucrats or the new Alternative Development
crusaders, who derive their own dignity and income from promoting devel-
opment. We must have the courage to demonstrate that the three “decades for
24 Beyond Development

development” were a gigantic and irresponsible experiment that, based on the

experience of majorities around the world, has failed miserably. The “crisis”
in Mexico allows us to dismantle the goal of development.
In recent years, the Rural Bank ceased to have sufficient funds to force
campesinos to grow sorghum. As a result, in many places they are return-
ing to the traditional intercropping of corn and beans banned by the World
Bank—which not only improves their diet, but also restores their community
solidarity—freeing up money available for other things.
Formal or informal production cooperatives are sprouting and thriving in
the very heart of Mexico City, thanks to the declining purchasing power of
wage earners. Workshops for repairing electrical appliances and household
utensils are multiplying; merchants are involved in the open imitation of
imported goods that they sell as if they were contraband. I have even seen that
certain “marginal” products insert their name and address on the product to
inspire greater confidence in their customers. Many barrios have revived and
“corner stores” are also multiplying. Street vendors and their street markets
have returned to places from which they disappeared years ago. In the midst of
inflation, devaluation, so-called unemployment, and the decline of the gross
national product most people in the world I am in contact with are better off
than before.
One of the factors contributing to this sense of well-being is the narrow-
ing of the gap between those who were harmed by high development rates
and those who got for a time some benefits from economic growth. Already
50,000 government employees have been laid off and another 100,000 will
lose their jobs later this year. They can hardly be seen as “unemployed”; many
of them will never be able to return to the payroll. While they belonged to
the so-called workforce, they were trained to check a card, execute orders, and
fight for a promotion. Those who were sidelined by development are now in a
privileged position. They know they are better prepared for a situation like the
current one. They take it upon themselves to square the circle, cashing in on
modest revenues in the gray markets or making a few sales in the black mar-
kets. Surprisingly, the number of those who are benefiting, in relative terms,
from a collapse of the development myth is far greater than the number (still
great) of those who are losing job security. Some of us argue that, thanks to
the crisis, Mexico’s political stability has increased.
Even among intellectuals, a growing number applaud the liquidation of the
development myth and help to detoxify the official policymaking process. As
long as we continue to pursue development, we will never reasonably settle
the debt problem. Even the most astringent exchange controls are unable to
stop the net transfer of dollars to the United States. While the government
prides itself on paying up to $15 billion a year on our $100 billion debt, it
is well known that $20 to $40 billion more is leaving the country, against
the government’s explicit intentions, but with its help. The industrial and
 Beyond Development 25

commercial enterprises that contribute the most to generating the dollars

needed to pay the foreign debt are subsidized with the so-called “controlled
dollars”, which are quoted at 60 to 70 percent of the “free” price, and export,
legally or illegally, up to two or three times the foreign currency we obtain.
In other words, our economy has been adjusted to pay the foreign debt, by
multiplying it repeatedly. And this is happening in a country that imports
2.5 billion dollars of food: if this money were used in Mexico, it could gener-
ate food self-sufficiency in most of the country in a year and a half.
The crisis has created a public mood in Mexico in which development
can finally be recognized for what it is. And saying this is useful not only for
Mexicans. Never before have I addressed so many people who, in the best of
good faith, are trying to erect a new mirage, heralding an alternative struc-
ture on the shaky foundations of development. They seem to not realize that
they are building in a swamp. To prevent energy-efficient technology, locally
driven goals, cooperative management, and other key aspects of the regener-
ation of our solidarity from sinking into the development nightmare, I would
like to present some observations on its miasmas.
Development is now a gelatinous term that can be used to describe a hous-
ing construction project, the logical sequence of thought, the awakening of
the infant mind, or a new swell in a 15-year-old girl’s breast. But development
always connotes at least one thing: a person’s ability to escape from a vague,
inexpressible, unworthy condition called underdevelopment—a term coined
by President Truman on January 20, 1949, in the speech outlining what would
become known as the Point Four Program. Rarely has a word been so uni-
versally accepted on the very day of its coining as this one was. Truman used
it to diagnose a specific calamity affecting most human beings and most com-
munities outside the United States. It is a word that even anti-Yankees might
recognize as an undesirable condition. He used it to designate a social condi-
tion that almost everyone is capable of bringing up, without having to identify
with the strain it imposes on the majority it describes. It became a term capable
of producing an abundance of unstoppable bureaucracies.
After Truman, theories of development have followed one after another,
at short intervals. However, as definitions of development have become more
varied and contradictory, its connotations have become stronger: to develop,
from underdevelopment, means to start on a path that others know better,
to be en route to a goal that others have reached, to travel a one-way street
that others have already traveled. Development means sacrificing environ-
ments, solidarities, interpretations, and traditional customs on the altar of
ever-changing expert advice. Development promises enrichment. For the vast
majority, it has always meant the modernization of their poverty: growing
dependence on others’ management. Mexico’s predicament, which others call
a crisis, is for us an opportunity. It is our opportunity to share with others who
have lost their jobs forever, the thousand and one tricks that allow us to use
26 Beyond Development

and abuse modern techniques. It is our chance to de-couple well-being from

development. It is our chance to regenerate autonomy.

II. Myths and Decoupling

Intellectual contributions today should be prophetical to become pertinent.
Instead of a promise, a model, or a path (for creating the “vanguard” or for the
society as a whole), they have to offer a lucid perception of the present (that
is prophecy), whose utopian suggestion is made up of a strategic codification
of sites of resistance (a revolutionary commotion comprising the simultaneous
modification of ideology and institutions).
If we want our reflection to really be autonomous, we need to challenge
its hypocrisy (its critical insufficiency), questioning the myths that have con-
stituted it as its ideological prejudices. Among them, the following stand out:

The Myth of Underdevelopment

The idea that underdevelopment is a real state of affairs has been taken for
granted. As has the idea that this state of affairs must be modified and that it is
feasible to effect this change if the appropriate strategies are employed.
The debate focused on the causes of this situation, on the goals of change
or on the strategies to achieve it. It thus contributed, hypocritically, to con-
solidate the myth.
The hypothesis of the existence of underdevelopment ideologically sup-
ports a thesis of domination. Underdevelopment can be defined or described
in a thousand ways, but all of them allude to an unworthy condition: that of
trying to be like those who are more advanced in a one-way road.
The “other” began by being just a barbarian, a foreigner, among the Greeks.
He became a burden to the Romans. He was an infidel to Christian Europe,
savage to civilized Europe, and native to capitalist Europe. It was necessary to
impute to him and impose on him a faith, a condition, certain needs. At the
time in which Gandhi was already postulating the moral and cultural autono-
mization of the “natives”, radically challenging that otherizing tradition, they
were framed as underdeveloped.
The elimination of the word and the idea of underdevelopment is a prereq-
uisite for the construction of one’s own thinking.

The Myth of Development

Development is today an amoeba-word that is applied indiscriminately to almost
anything. It is just an algorithm whose meaning depends on the theoretical con-
text in which it is used. Its predominant denotation refers to the capacity to escape
from the vague, ineffable, and unworthy condition called underdevelopment.
 Beyond Development 27

The era of development, as a word and thesis, is that of underdevelopment, and

takes place in the post-war period.
It has, of course, precedents. For a hundred years, the attempt to give it a
technical meaning in certain disciplines failed, but the history of its meanings
unmasks its character.
“To develop a parchment” was probably the first vernacular use of the word.
It alluded to the action of restoring its original form to a parchment for it to fulfill
its function. The parchment was not developed in its original form; to develop it
one had to roll it up, giving it a form of existence that was not its own.
The vernacular expression was used metaphorically, in certain disciplines,
to allude to the process through which the “potentialities” of an object or
organism unfold until it reaches its “natural” or “foreseen” form. This form
is archetypal in Greek philosophy or medieval scholasticism: the passage from
potency to act defines an ineluctable destiny; it corresponds to a pre-defined,
pre-determined, pre-visualized form. (This is the reason for the polemic on
free will). When the metaphor is applied in biology, it retains the quality of
the archetype (the terminal form is genetically contained) but admits the
probabilistic and random character of the outcome (the genetic program may
not be fulfilled). When applied in the social sciences, the archetype is placed
in the future (even if the potentialities are given) and thus becomes a project
(history becomes a program), endowing it with a subject (the proletariat in
Marx, the entrepreneur in Schumpeter). Later, the responsibilities for the
fulfillment of the program are assigned: to the State and capital, some, or to
the State and the party, others.
In the eighteenth century, biology used development to refer to the process
that releases the potentialities of an organism that reaches its natural form.
In the social sciences it alluded to a process of gradual change, synonymous
with evolution. Around 1800 it became a reflexive verb and self-development
became fashionable. Marx put the notion that Hegel had placed at the center
of his philosophical system on its feet and gave the word a scientific aura that
soon exploded into a thousand pieces. A German encyclopedia stated in 1860
that the concept of development applied to everything that man does and
knows, and it became almost useless for science.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the term became widely used
and has since then alluded to a specific way of reformulating the cities. In
these years Schumpeter tried unsuccessfully to restore the importance that
Marx gave the term in economic science, by emphasizing entrepreneurship.
The British Government’s Colonial Development and Welfare Act of 1939
gave new meaning to the relationship between development and colonialism.
By identifying the level of civilization with the level of production, the dual
mandate was merged into one: development.
During the last 150 years, the terminal modality implicit in the hypothe-
sis of development is the industrial mode of production, in economic terms,
28 Beyond Development

and communism or liberal and national democracy in political terms. This

modality appears as a terminal or in any case necessary and desirable stage
of social evolution, whose potentialities were already contained in Neolithic
man (as essence), although they only came into existence during the Industrial
Revolution.
The hypothesis of development ideologically sustains the universal subor-
dination to industry, that is, the heteronomous imposition of work, as well as
the predominance of the economic (which is ideologically affirmed as law),
in the market form or in the State form. It condemns to permanent scarcity,
due to the unlimited nature of economic ends.
The elimination of the word and the idea of development and those that
make up its semantic constellation (e.g., planning and industrialization) is a
requirement for the construction of autonomous thought.

The Myth of Power

The destruction of the monarchy did not dissolve the myth of the sovereign as
an interpretation of power, which prevails to this day. Power is still thought of
as something found in a certain place, something possessed by certain persons,
elites, or classes, something that can be reached, taken, conquered, snatched.
Consequently, attention is focused on the seizure of power, by military, legal
(electoral), or revolutionary means, as well as on its ideological definition
(republican or class) and in setting limits to it (legal or practical).
A rich and varied critical tradition that tends to discard the myth of the
sovereign as an interpretation of power has come to an end through the con-
tributions of Michel Foucault. Power is omnipresent, says Foucault, but not
because it is all-encompassing, as authoritarian thought believes, but because
it emanates from everywhere. It forms and flows in constantly changing net-
works of power relations and is, in the end, the name given to a complex
strategic situation, in a given society, in order to stabilize those changing net-
works (which is only occasionally necessary).
The conventional perception poses the problem of power, in modern soci-
eties, as a question of electoral or class representation. Through electoral,
insurrectional, or bureaucratic means, the aim is to ensure that power is con-
stituted as a representation of the predominant or majority interests and that
it is exercised under the terms of the respective mandate (representation). For
Foucault, in contrast, the problem of power consists in knowing how people
govern themselves and others, through the production of truth, which does
not consist, for him, in the production of true statements, but in the ordering
of domains where the practice of the true and the false can be both regulated
and relevant.
Renouncing the myth of power is a pre-requisite for the construction
of one’s own thinking. Instead of continuing to search for generalizable,
 Beyond Development 29

universally applicable truths (models, policies, strategies, organizational for-

mulas), it is necessary to explore the preconditions for the autonomous produc-
tion of truth. In this sense, the most viable and vigorous strategic codification
currently seems to be concentrated in the field of the negative as a mode
of breaking boundaries to allow spaces of freedom to flourish. One of these
boundaries is the thesis of de-coupling.

III. How to Bury the Myth?

Development was, without a doubt, a great mobilizing myth. It ignited the
popular imagination, and politicians of all persuasions were able to rally their
clientele around it. The left and the right continually argued about the mean-
ing of the process or its explanation, but the myth itself remained untouchable.
It was taboo, if not a sacred cow, both in academia and in politics.
Today, it seems clear, the myth does not mobilize anyone. Mexicans now
know that Mexico will never be a second Sweden. The goal of being like the
others, the developed ones, is constantly moving away in time, and the gap
between one type of country and another is growing wider and wider, instead
of closing.
Inertia, however, persists. The rigorous presentation of the limits of growth
is still seen as a politically reactionary position that seeks to deny the right to
development of those who have not yet achieved it. Since the ideological defense
of the myth, demanding blind faith in it, is no longer sufficient, the discussion
diverts to the “models” adopted, attributing the vices in conception and imple-
mentation to them. When evidence is offered that there is no single development
strategy that has proven effective in the real world, transitioning a country from
underdeveloped to developed, the argument shifts to the ideals or goals of the
“model”. Proposals for “other” development, “human-scale” or “alternative”
development, then emerge as slogans to synthesize new goals or ideals and new
ways of achieving them.
The bureaucrats who derive dignity and income from it cannot be expected
to dissolve the myth. Nor those who, after sensibly recognizing its illusory
and malignant character, give it new life through their alternative formulas.
Already teetering on the edge, due to the effects of the so-called crisis, perhaps
a cheerful blow may precipitate its fall. The time has come to have enough
public courage to stand up to it once and for all and bring it down. Its time
has come.

The Obsession with Growth

Plants grow, hair grows, the breasts of a 15-year-old girl grow. Joy, love, life, or
the planet do not grow. How did the biological metaphor invade our thinking?
Why the obsession with growth?
30 Beyond Development

Economic growth produces the opposite of what it pretends to achieve. This

fundamental counterproductivity is no longer just an intuition: it is possible to
document it. Studies on the impact of the green revolution have shown how
increased food production can cause hunger and malnutrition, and that the same
effect can be caused by increased food aid. Evidence has shown that the expan-
sion of medical services can weaken health and that the growth of transporta-
tion services paralyzes people. It has been sufficiently documented that the only
growth that economists and politicians are interested in, the only growth they
can register and care to promote, the growth of the formal economy, restricts,
blocks, or destroys the activities of the “informal”, who form the majority of
the population, causing deterioration, rather than improvement, in their real
living conditions.
A short time ago, Fernando Rello summarized the counterproductive
impact of development in the following terms: “The coexistence of economic
growth and the impoverishment of large social groups is a combination that
neither economic treatise nor government plans foresaw” (Rello, 1987).
Between 1950 and 1975, the underdeveloped countries experienced a sub-
stantial increase in per capita GDP growth rates, but this did not mean a rise
in the majority’s standard of living, as postulated by development theory. On
the contrary, in the “decades of growth” low levels of employment, income,
food, education, and health persisted and even got worse. Development theory
was able to identify the determinants of output and income growth, but it was
mistaken in thinking that this would lead to greater welfare for the majority of
the population. They also predicted sustained economic growth in underde-
veloped countries and today those countries are home to a panorama of food,
financial, technological, and commercial dependence.
Awareness of the limits of growth prompted, in the North, the proposal
for zero growth. The recognition that growth not only faces precise limits,
but that it is also counterproductive, prompted the proposal for negative growth,
that is, a selective contraction of what had been made to grow. More than just
a hypothesis, it is now an experience. The so-called crisis made it evident that
an effective contraction of what economists measure (the formal economy)
creates space for the vital initiatives of those working in the “informal” econ-
omy, many of whom, according to abundant empirical evidence, may now be
much better off than during the “boom”, when they had to spend much of
their time and resources shaking off the blows dealt to them by the growth
of the formal economy.
Learning from this experience, however, should not consist in the mere
substitution of statistical indicators, so that the growth rate adequately reflects
“positive” types of growth (in the “informal” sector, for example) and discards
“negative” growth. It is imperative to radically dissociate the idea of economic
growth from everyday life, from people’s projects and hopes. Most of the things
that really matter and that can be effective indicators of favorable or adverse
 Beyond Development 31

conditions, for individuals as well as for society, are things that cannot be meas-
ured and whose growth or decline is irrelevant. No technical or intellectual
contortion can make it acceptable to measure dignity, friendship, peace, or
justice or, in more concrete terms, to measure smiling, walking, learning, heal-
ing, tasting, speaking … Nothing that matters in everyday life, nothing that
involves genuine satisfaction, can be reduced to quantification alone.
What about population? This is where the compulsion to grow seems to
have found its last stronghold. The demonstration of the harms of economic
growth, for some, or of its limits, for others, seems to stop at the doorstep of this
argument. Population growth appears first as a fact to be verified, beyond any
discourse in its favor or against it, and if the population grows it seems logical
that the economy should grow as well. The failure of family-planning programs
that emphasize fear of poverty rather than the joy of living may offer the key
to understanding the fallacy implicit in this mechanical association between
population and economy. For most Latin Americans, even today, the arrival
of a new child becomes an “economic burden” only when he or she is inserted
into the world of goods and services associated with development and taught
to depend on them. But such insertion is not inevitable and is not even typical
of the situation of most Latin Americans, who are certainly affected by the
economic world, but not entirely dependent on it. The logic that links the two
abstractions, “population” and “economy”, mechanically adding to the latter
what grows in the former, obscures the issue, instead of clarifying it.
The hypothesis that makes the so-called “demographic explosion” depend
on the experiment called development is well founded: as always happens
when sorcerer’s apprentices act, changes were unleashed without foreseeing
the consequences. In any case, there is nothing more inadequate than repeat-
ing doses of the same medicine yet emphasizing the loss of control over one’s
own actions. To control fertility, if that is what it’s all about, or to learn to live
in societies where most of the inhabitants are younger than 15—as is currently
the case—it’s imperative to consolidate the popular knowledge that facilitates
taking control of one’s own life back into one’s own hands. Resorting once
again to myth, assigning the task of directing processes to the hidden forces
of planning or the market who have manifestly lost control of those processes,
will only aggravate the underlying tensions and conflicts.
The time has come to separate all individual and collective efforts from the
rate of economic growth, except to weigh using the appropriate information,
the selective reductions that can make healthy contributions to the regenera-
tion of social life.

The Deconstruction of the Myth

The idea of development is at the heart of the prevailing worldview of our era.
(Furtado, 1984: 105)
32 Beyond Development

The problem of economic development is, according to a widely held opinion,

the most acute and important problem in the world today.
(Barre, 1966: 9)

I have randomly selected, among a thousand others, these two phrases written
10 and 30 years ago respectively, by two distinguished contemporary political
personalities. They are two splendid platitudes that still circulate as evidence
everywhere.
Since it is a question of dissolving the myth, nothing is more important
than examining the process of its construction. How did this peculiar vision
of the world come to be? In what way and for what reasons did this opinion
spread, such that it is now generalized?
Almost 30 years ago, Ivan Illich predicted that President Kennedy’s campaign
would be an Alliance for the Progress of poverty.
Illich insisted that: “underdevelopment as a state of mind occurs when mass
needs are converted to the demand for new brands of packaged solutions which
are forever beyond the reach of the majority” (Illich, 1971: 164). In this sense,
underdevelopment is growing rapidly, even in countries where the supply of
classrooms, calories, cars, and hospitals is also increasing. These institutions
provide services that meet international requirements for a minority of the
global population. But once they have monopolized everyone’s demand, they
can no longer satisfy the majority’s needs.
These phrases can be taken as a prophetic description of what happened in
Mexico during the last quarter century. In the same way that Mexicans lost
the possibility of defining their needs by themselves and acting accordingly,
assuming limits and empowering real capacities, they were also increasingly
unable to satisfy their requirements, both in terms previously defined by
themselves and in terms imposed on them as a standard definition of what
they needed. No material or technical “progress” achieved in these years
can compensate for the brutal loss of dignity and initiative that the country
has suffered.
The notion of “being like them” represented, by itself, a radical devalua-
tion of one’s own dreams. By allowing individual and collective dreams to be
processed through the mold of international standards that designed both “sat-
isfiers” and “needs”, people’s capacity to dream and the value of their dreams
were brutally disregarded. Three decades later, once this foreign dream has
been assumed as one’s own, what has been devalued is one’s own being, one’s
own initiative, confidence in one’s own capacities, autonomy in thinking and
doing. Far from getting closer to “being like them”, the country is moving
farther and farther away from that possibility, which now seems impossible, so
that it seems to have no destiny other than that of an ever more accentuated
and dependent inferiority.
 Beyond Development 33

This is not a new phenomenon. Mexicans are used to witnessing the con-
struction of new temples on top of the ones they built for their gods. The
West has always felt that it has the right and obligation to intervene in the life
of the “other”, for its own good, to build it in its own image and likeness. It
intervened in the lives of “pagans”, to lead them along the path of “the true
faith”. It intervened in the lives of “savages”, to incorporate them into “civi-
lization”. It intervened in the lives of “natives”, to reformulate their needs in
terms of “industrial progress”. Mexicans are well versed in this kind of inter-
ventions that evangelized, civilized, and industrialized them. Gonzalo Arango
has recorded all this in magnificent terms:

We were kings and they made us slaves

We were sons of the sun and they consoled us with tin metals
We were poets and they set us to reciting beggarly phrases
We were happy and they civilized us
Who will refresh the memory of the tribe?
Who will revive our gods?
May the wild hope always be yours, dear indomitable soul.

And that hope was ours in the thirties. Other winds were blowing through the
world and Mexico had carried out the first social revolution of this century.
While the impact of the crisis was felt throughout the world, the natives stood
up: they wanted to stop being the “other”, they wanted to embark upon their
own path once again and to rely on their traditions to make their own dreams
come true. It was Gandhi’s hour. In Mexico, President Cárdenas was begin-
ning to give shape to a different project of his own. These were some of the
most radical threats that the “other”—us—had ever posed to the Western—
Christian, civilized, industrial—world. Before the project could go forward, it
had to be stopped in its tracks, in the womb of its gestation. Instead of priests
and soldiers, they employed ideologues capable of capturing its dreams. In his
inaugural address, Truman led the way:

“We must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our
scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement
and growth of underdeveloped areas. More than half the people of the
world are living in conditions approaching misery. Their food is inade-
quate. They are victims of disease. Their economic life is primitive and
stagnant. Their poverty is a handicap and a threat both to them and to
more prosperous areas.
For the first time in history, humanity possesses the knowledge and
the skill to relieve the suffering of these people.
The United States is pre-eminent among nations in the development
of industrial and scientific techniques. The material resources which we
can afford to use for the assistance of other peoples are limited. But our
34 Beyond Development

imponderable resources in technical knowledge are constantly growing

and are inexhaustible.
I believe that we should make available to peace-loving peoples the
benefits of our store of technical knowledge in order to help them realize
their aspirations for a better life. And, in cooperation with other nations,
we should foster capital investment in areas needing development.”
(Truman, 1949)

Never has a proposal achieved such widespread and immediate acceptance.

The idea of development captured the global imagination. During the follow-
ing decades, the industrialized countries “helped” others “to become aware of
their aspirations for a better life”; in other words, they put the citizens into the
mold of an affluent society’s designs.
“Underdevelopment”, said Illich 20 years ago, “is a result of rising levels of
aspiration achieved through to the intensive marketing of ‘patent’ products”
(Illich, 1971: 166). Instead of using technical knowledge to raise awareness of
other, new levels of human possibilities and of other unexplored ways of using
technological knowledge and creative imagination—like Cárdenas wanted—
the myth of development succeeded in making the social conscience capitulate
before monopolies capable of imposing prefabricated solutions. The examples
are innumerable: we were taught the steak religion, we became world cham-
pions in per capita consumption of Coca-Cola, we were educated in the need
to be transported by vehicles which we don’t have access to. Our capacities
for learning or healing were nullified in exchange for limited access to edu-
cational or welfare services that mutilate skills, damage health, and produce
disposable brains.
Only for a few, however, is it an irreversible path. The failure of develop-
ment, its paralysis during the so-called crisis, has created a choice. The dignity
of the majority was not lost completely, and many of them never had access
to the patented “solutions” to the “problems” that many of them never even
faced. The “middle classes” advanced for 30 years towards the materialization
of the dream in which they were trapped, and are still ideologically attached
to, but upon seeing it fall to pieces they called upon their old capacities of
resistance and many of them have begun to take up the patterns they had
recently abandoned. That majority and this relatively privileged sector have
been finding within themselves the capacity for practical initiatives to navigate
the situation, as well as the powerful capacity to laugh at those patented “solu-
tions”. They are now reshaping their demands, their projects, their dreams.
Alongside the dramatic shadows of the real damage caused by the bank-
ruptcy of development or the trails of destruction left behind by its past tri-
umphs, alongside the bitter frustration of those who refuse to give up the dream
even though they increasingly recognize the impossibility of its materializa-
tion, alongside the anger of those who attribute all of this to real or invented
 Beyond Development 35

internal or external culprits, a liberating wind seems to be shaking the depths of

Mexican society. The time has come to courageously celebrate the resounding
collapse of the development myth.

Bibliography
Arango, Gonzalo. 2020. La Salvaje Esperanza [The Savage Hope]. Accessed November 29,
2021. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pJp3Dbo3ZI/.
Barre, Raymond. 1966. El Desarrollo Económico [Economic Development]. México: FCE.
Furtado, Celso. 1984. Cultura e desenvolvimiento em época de crise [Culture and Unwinding
in Times of Crisis]. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Paz e Terra.
Illich, Ivan. 1971. Planned Poverty: The End Result of Technical Assistance. Celebration of
Awareness: A Call for Institutional Revolution. London: Calders & Boyars.
International Labor Organization. 1976. “Employment, Growth and Basic Needs:
A One World Problem, Report of the Director-General of the International
Labour Office”. Geneva: ILO.
Rello, Fernando. 1987. “Miseria del desarrollo” [Development’s Misery]. Nexos 10,
no. 110 (Feb 1, 1987): 65–71.
Truman, Harry S. 1949. “The Inauguration of our 33rd President – Harry S. Truman”.
Accessed November 29, 2021. https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/movingimage-
records/mp76-37/.
3
THE PROTAGONISTS OF
SOCIAL CHANGE

In the 1970s there was an intensification of the debate on a question inevitably associated
with Lenin’s “What to do: with whom?” The central question for those interested in
social change when they find society unbearable, is that of the protagonist of change. Who
can take charge of the task? Even in the Leninist version, in which twelve well-organized
intellectuals could lead the masses, the question remains. For a hundred years the answer
was clear: the industrial workers would lead the other classes in the revolutionary strug-
gle. By the 1970s that answer was no longer acceptable for many of us.
A great international debate on the nature and logic of peasant reality, based on a
text by Teodor Shanin, began in 1972. In Mexico, it veered off in a particular direction.
It took place mainly among Marxists. One of the schools of thought, headed by Roger
Bartra, defended the thesis that peasants lived in a pre-capitalist mode of production
articulated to capitalism, according to the academic school that Roger brought from Paris.
Those of us who explored the class condition of the peasants, within capitalist society,
adopted different positions. Ernst Feder classified as peasant-ists—those who considered
that peasants had a key role in social transformation—proletarian-ists—those who saw
the peasants in an accelerated transformation towards the condition of agricultural work-
ers, about to become extinct as peasants—and deproletarian-ists—Feder himself, who
thought of their physical disappearance.
These discussions had run parallel to those on the notion of “marginality”, about the
specific features that the urban explosion had taken in Latin America. While the debate
on the subject stagnated in the region, it intensified with regards to Africa, leading to
the replacement of the term “marginality” with “informality”, which is still used today.
In 1983 I proposed the term “direct workers of the social factory” (TRADIFAS) to
characterize as a class the peasants, the so-called urban “marginal”, the Indian peoples
and a variety of social sectors hardly taken into account in the debate or in reality. They
had no salary, but capital exploited them through different mechanisms. What interested
DOI: 10.4324/9781003262749-4
 The Protagonists of Social Change 37

me, based on this characterization, was to explore their role and potentialities in the
transformation.
I am including in the anthology the main elements of my proposal in spite of the
fact that it was entirely ignored in academia. In the real world, in my view, until very
recently my characterization defined the condition of the majority of people on Earth.
The crisis of capitalism, since the 1990s, created the opportunity for an increasing
number of people to liberate themselves from the subordination to capital. They can no
longer be called workers—a condition associated with capital. I describe their evolution
in the following chapters.

I. At First It Was the Ideology: The Discourse

of Marginality
The term “marginal” was born during the Great Depression to refer to the
difficulties of migrants and minorities in adapting to North American soci-
ety. It alluded to the psychological conflict of those who were in the midst
of cultural encounters (Park, 1928; Stonequist, 1935). The current concept of
marginality came about later, when a group of people acquired visibility in the
context of the post-war in Latin America (DESAL, 1969). To explain the new
circumstances, scholars adopted two interrelated hypotheses: dualism (Lewis,
1954; Hirshman, 1957) and linear evolution of societies (Harrington, 1963;
Rostow, 1958). Under the influence of those paradigms, the term “marginal-
ity” was used and became widespread in Latin America in the 1960s.
The expansion of the Latin American economy in the fifties was accompa-
nied by a dramatic demographic and urban explosion. The phenomenon was
not due to the vegetative growth of the population or to its transfer from the
countryside to the city. The transition from small to large urban centers, and
above all else the metropolization of societies, were the main factors.
This process was linked with the “explosive” appearance of irregular and
dispersed housing settlements in almost all Latin American cities. To explain
the quantitative and qualitative novelty of the phenomenon, it was first sit-
uated in space: the new realities were marginal relative to the urban center
because they appeared on the peripheries of cities (Nun, 1969a). Hence the
misleading use of the term “ecological” in the early treatment of the subject.
They were conceived as obstacles to economic development and the harmoni-
ous growth of the system (Tovar and Negretti, 1974).
Another approach focused on the phenomenon’s potentialities. Instead of
“barrios of desperation”, it saw them as “barrios of hope” (Stokes, 1962). The
English architect, Turner, put himself at the head of this movement, which
saw the “marginal” settlements as a creative response to the problems of devel-
opment and claimed that the construction of housing was a strategic vehicle
for social change (Mangin, 1965, 1967, 1969; Turner, 1965, 1966, 1967, 1968;
Peattie y Aldrete, 1980). Although this approach greatly influenced researchers
38 The Protagonists of Social Change

and policymakers, these ideas were approached suspiciously by both conserv-

ative and radical mentalities.
At the beginning of the 1970s, people began to explore the physical and
economic aspects that were used to identify “marginality”. Institutions were
faced with a challenge: “marginals” didn’t participate in political, juridical, or
other institutions. DESAL (1969) applied the hypothesis of economic dualism
to culture. Because of the dangers to social stability, people sought to incor-
porate the “marginalized” into established institutions.
In the 1960s, the Latin American theory of marginality took its final
form. It described the marginalizing character of economic development
in Latin America due to its linkage with the hegemonic countries (Nun,
1969b; Quijano, 1970). Various hypotheses and characterizations were
offered, and people advocated for special categories to designate the phe-
nomenon, such as the “marginal mass” or the “marginal pole”, considering
that the “marginals” were dysfunctional for the system, since they did not
constitute an industrial reserve army and were related to it in a fragmentary
and unstable way.
In the 1970s, on the other hand, the increased social and political visibil-
ity of peasants led to various theoretical characterizations. One approach saw
them as a system of production and life with its own characteristics, exploited
“from outside” by capital and its agents (Warman, 1973). Another current
considered that peasants were in a pre-capitalist mode of production, articu-
lated to the capitalist one (Bartra, Roger, 1975). One position identified peas-
ants as a class in formation, proletarian in nature (Esteva, 1975, 1977). The
debate not only covered the nature of the peasant economy. It also contributed
innovative conceptualizations, which viewed peasants as an active social sub-
ject and characterized them in terms of their relations with capital.
During this decade, while studies on marginality stagnated in Latin
America, they intensified in Africa, under the sponsorship of the ILO, and
finally led to the notion of informality and to the generation of new approaches
to the issue (Peattie and Aldrete, 1980; Hugon, 1980).
In short, the processes broached under the label of marginality were treated
with political and theoretical approaches that denied their specificity or
sought to sterilize or absorb them in a manipulative and emasculating manner.
Marginality, therefore, tended to exist as a privileged form of the ideology of
domination that one must combat. This applies, in particular, to approaches
that address the issue within the framework of the discourse of misery and
unemployment, ideologically linked to the concept of population. What all
these approaches failed to identify was that the greater social and political
visibility of the so-called “marginalized” was the result of the mobilization
and organization of large human groups that posed a new social problem.
Ideological discourse prevented us from seeing the real characteristics of this
new phenomenon.
 The Protagonists of Social Change 39

II. Direct Work for the Social Factory

1. The Frame of Reference
The theoretical and political views that arose from the social processes referred
to here tended to freeze the processes into distorted extrapolations: their concep-
tualization in negative terms (the identification of human groups for what they
are not) and their ethnocentric reductionism (enclosing them within a physical,
economic, social, or political space). To formulate a conceptualization identify-
ing these human groups for what they are, first one must recognize that in their
generation and reproduction the whole of society is present, not only “part” of a
“sector” of it. The phenomenon is truly global, not only because it corresponds to
a “single” economic logic—in the sphere of the internationalization of capital—
but also because it comprises a variety of social and political aspects.
Because of the nature of the subject, the point of departure is the set of
elements generating economic relations that are constantly renewed. The issue
here is the historical process that defines the conditions on which the various
social actors relate, face, and agree with one another and, during the process,
acquire their changing substance and shapes (Worsley, 1980).
Likewise, it must be recognized that the characterization of a concrete
human group cannot be reduced to the description of its economic logic of
behavior or of its manifest attitudes, nor to the empirical definition of its con-
tacts (or lack of contacts), but it must also include the integrated grasping of
social relations that give existence to it as a dialectical interplay of needs and
determinations. The analysis needs to concentrate on the manner in which
global economic mechanisms are linked to the specific types of work organi-
zations and of social relations, including both the evolution produced by cap-
ital accumulation and the reactions to it. This implies the joint examination
of social relations which allow the dynamic of the groups under analysis to be
accounted for, generating new social relations, thus allowing for the study of
their forms of production within their dynamic and creativity (Hugon et al.,
1980). The results of the most recent research on the issue, starting with the
African context and ILO’s studies, led to the construction of a theoretical
point of departure conceived on these terms.
Before stating the descriptive and explanatory hypotheses of the human
groups involved—which we will do in the following section—we need to put
forth the social conditions for their emergence within the sphere of society as
a whole.

2. To Work for the Social Factory

Capitalism as a world system is no longer a tendency or a possibility for this
production regime, but a concrete reality: it has already settled itself as a world
system. The capitalist reality of our societies makes them appear to be an
40 The Protagonists of Social Change

arsenal of commodities which circulate in a market where producers and con-

sumers “freely” concur and relate to it through the exchange of equivalents
under monetary forms, and as a collection of factories, which make up the
productive spaces within which relations between commodity production
agents are initiated and concluded.
Social science has discovered under such appearance real social relations
involving the whole of society. Capital is a social relation, not a good, a social
relation of production. Capital accumulation, under whose logic our societies
function, is an accumulation of social relations of production of a capitalist
nature that manifest, under their personalized and economic form (a capitalist
hires the labor of a certain number of individuals), their real social substance.
A capitalist (a factory) is but a personification of social capital, and the value
purchased, to be valorized when consumed, is always labor, abstract work. For
this reason, only through the reification of capital into a given set of produc-
tion means can the universe of capitalist relations of production be reduced
to the one found within capitalist enterprises. For this same reason, only by
reducing the whole of society to the economy, and the complexity of real
social dynamics to the formalist simplification of the structure-superstructure
interplay, is it possible to attribute all social behaviors to a mechanical deter-
minism enclosed either within the logic of performance of the productive
regime or in the prepotency of capitalists.
Modern society must be seen as a social factory that produces for its own
reproduction (Cleaver, 1979). In this social factory, multiple and complex
social relations are expressed among agents, agents that have acquired original
rights of appropriation within society that constitute them as factors of pro-
duction, that is, established rights to a first share in the economic output of
society (Emmanuel, 1978). These relations are between two kinds of agents.
On one side are those who, freed from the ties of servitude characteristic of
pre-capitalist regimes, exercise individual political rights over themselves and,
hence, rights of ownership over the labor force they own. On the other side
are those who hire this labor force to valorize it within the productive process,
on the bases of the rights to private property over production means. Within
such relations exists the conflict of interests that explains the social dynamics
of the capitalist regime of production.
The reproduction of the social factory—reproduction of social relations
of production—is made in a privileged way in capitalist factories, in the
industry—but not exclusively. The dynamics inherent in the capitalist pro-
duction regime universally turn social life into a precondition and expression
of capitalist reproduction: that of capital itself and of the labor force; that of
those who are the “original” owners of both, and the relation between them.
Definitely, capital accumulation, on whose logic capitalist society is based,
cannot be limited to the sphere of industrial production, although it holds
the economic key to its reproduction.
 The Protagonists of Social Change 41

In the capitalist society, as an expression of this inherent dynamics, all

products tend to become commodities, becoming alienated from the direct
producer to acquire such nature. Once the objects that satisfy needs become
commodities, attending to needs universally becomes a matter of exchange: a
matter of acquiring the commodities that meet the need by paying a price, that
is, once overcoming the intermediation that separates the commodities from
whoever needs them. The conditions for the reproduction of labor force that
are created during the production process are finally realized in the market,
when workers turn their salary into commodities that meet their needs.
This is, however, a tendency. Commodities existing in society only par-
tially meet the needs of workers, either because not all the objects needed
exist as commodities or because the workers cannot pay the price for those
that do exist. For this reason, workers are forced to produce directly, through
their own efforts, various goods and services. By thus taking care of their own
reproduction as a labor force, they work directly for the social factory: they
reproduce for social capital. This activity requires no intermediation of capi-
tal and of capitalists, which is necessary in the portion of reproduction made
within the commercial circuit, by exchanging labor for money (the salary)
and the latter for commodities. For this reason, workers do not produce value,
but use, since they do not produce commodities, but the concrete being they
contribute to reproduce—their own life—may again become a commodity:
the labor force.
All these aspects must be considered when examining the conflict of inter-
ests between factors of production that gives dynamism to the system, within
the framework and under the conditions of the permanent process of nego-
tiation that allows for and prevents the reproduction of society within the
capitalist production regime.

3. The Contents of the Social Negotiation

While capitalists try to valorize labor force as much as they can (to derive
from it the largest surplus value possible), workers strive to increase their
own value as labor force to a maximum. The value of labor force itself is
determined historically, in correspondence with the level of development of
productive forces, because of a social dynamic derived from the interaction
of capitalists’ and workers’ opposed strategies with regards to their respective
interests.
The central subject of this conflict of interests is the workday. Since for the
capitalist the wasted time is the time of labor force not used for the production
process, he tries to put labor force to work as long as possible with no limit in
this attempt other than the physical resistance of workers. Since for the work-
ers the wasted time is the one during which they work for capitalists, they
impose a historical limit to such pretense through their social and political
42 The Protagonists of Social Change

struggle to reduce the workday (Cleaver, 1979). This conflict is dynamically

expressed in several contents:

i. The duration of the workday: the time during which the hired labor force
is directly applied to the production process made with the means of pro-
duction of the capitalist.
ii. The intensity of work: the labor force’s productivity and capacity to
valorize their own value for the capitalist.
iii. The duration of the reproductive day: the time during which the worker
contributes to his/her own reproduction through direct production.

In the final analysis, it is in these conflicts that the contradiction regarding the
value of labor force is expressed; this refers both to absolute level, within the limits
imposed by the degree of development of productive forces and by the historically
determined conditions of the relations between the factors of production, and
also to the terms of appropriation which are fixed within an opposition: valoriza-
tion of the value of labor force, on the part of the capitalist, and self-valorization
of labor.

4. The Sphere of the Social Negotiation

The various contents of the conflict between factors of production are expressed
in different spheres of the social negotiation: both in contractual relations
between specific groups and in class relations; both economically and politically.
The conflict over the duration of the workday, even in the earlier stages of
development of capitalism, went beyond the limits of contractual negotiations
within the enterprise. The confrontation led to the legal determination of the
maximum workday and to various forms of State intervention to guarantee
adherence to the legal provisions of this matter. The permanent confrontation
around the issue has had various expressions, among which the following stand
out: a) the constant social negotiation of the legal or maximum contractual
workday and procedures for its general enforcement, and b) the development
of relations between the factors of production that do not adopt the modalities
contemplated in provisions regarding the legal workday and, therefore, may
“legally” break them (for example: commercial or financial relations between
capital and labor which disguise the real nature of same and make legal stand-
ards on the duration of the workday completely inapplicable).
The strategic response of capitalists to the struggle for the reduction of the
workday has historically been technological innovation, to increase the inten-
sity of work. Thus, they reduce the value of the labor force, which induces an
extension of the workday (through the incorporation of other members of the
family to work and through other means), and a reduction of the relative mass
of labor force employed. Workers try to counter this trend through various
 The Protagonists of Social Change 43

ways: a further reduction of the legal or contractual workday; an increase in

the price of labor force; an improvement in working conditions; a deceleration
or blocking of the process of innovation, etc.
Both the struggle for the duration of the workday and the contradictions
inherent in technological development intensified the conflict within the sphere
of the duration of the reproductive day. The tendency to extend it constantly,
inversely proportional to the reduction of the workday, is countered by the com-
modification of the objects satisfying needs, as well as by the pressure of workers
to incorporate into the salary (through increases in cash or through fringe ben-
efits) the goods and services they would otherwise produce themselves.
The unequal development which is characteristic of capitalist expansion,
comprising both productive forces and the organization of social relations,
determines a division in social forces that fosters unequal results in the social
negotiation between the factors of production. In the production units where
value is fixed as a trend (those that are technologically more advanced), a
higher degree of organic composition of labor is required (Emmanuel, 1972)
and there are conditions fostering a higher degree of organization of the work-
ers. These two factors, together with the permanent opportunity to secure
large gains (given the product’s cost per unit which is lower than average
conditions), create favorable conditions for workers in these units to secure for
their labor force a price above the average. Thus, the value of reproduction.
At the same time, however, inequality is consolidated and accentuated among
those that keep the level of “biological reproduction” (which corresponds to
a previous historical stage). Particularly, a division of labor is established con-
centrating some workers in the workday (with a salary and duration of the
workday at the level of historical reproduction and with a greater work inten-
sity) and others in the reproductive day (with their own levels of “biological
reproduction” and less work intensity). Furthermore, the latter are to a great
extent at the service of the unproductive consumption of the former or of
capitalists, and often fall to working conditions of servitude.
The phenomenon, of course, is not produced as a consequence of produc-
tivity; it is not determined by the salary. The increase in productivity reduces
the value of labor force, it does not increase it. Rather, it is generated by the
fact that in the units with the highest productivity (where value is fixed as a
trend) an organic composition of work superior to the average usually pre-
dominates, which generally implies two things: a higher cost of reproducing
the labor force (because of the qualifications and intensity of work), and a
higher capacity to negotiate their market conditions (because of the greater
organization of workers and the scarcity of skilled labor).
This situation, additionally, creates the conditions for unequal exchange
both internationally (Emmanuel, 1972) and within the national sphere. Thus,
although all workers share the conditions of being “tradifa”, that is, all work
directly, to a greater or lesser extent, for the social factory and they all face
44 The Protagonists of Social Change

the tough reality of alienated work, that reality is not equally tough for all
(Emmanuel, 1972). This determines their different methods of mobilization
and organization in terms of their variety of needs and vital commitments.
Some of them have become an identifiable group, without losing their class
condition: they are direct workers for the social factory, the “tradifas”, that
from the common condition of all workers have made a reproductive system
and a road for the self-valorization of their labor force.

III. The Direct Workers for the Social Factory (TRADIFAS)

1. The Substance of the Tradifas
In order to perceive and identify a human group, in an act of recognition,
it is pertinent to first ask why social groups differentiate themselves from
other groups and make such distinctions. The answer requires an explana-
tion beyond the frame of “culturalist” theories of ethnicity, an explanation in
terms of interests (Worsley, 1980).
The negation that underlies the ideological discourse on marginality was a
mechanical reflection of the social denial and rejection practiced daily against
large human groups. When speaking of the functionality of the reserve army,
the implication seems to be that it is purposively produced to be used for the
depression of salaries and to contribute to reserve contingents. This is not the
case. Rather, real history indicates that capital discards the workers that are “in
excess”, rejects and “negates” those that cannot be employed, without wor-
rying at all about their fate (unless the expelled workers impose such worry).
The fact that later they are “found” on the way and employed, consciously
or unconsciously, for certain purposes, does not imply at all that they were
“created” for such a purpose.
Let us begin with peasants. As a general fact, the presence of capitalism in
agriculture does not correspond to an industrial expansion capable of produc-
tively absorbing the expelled population, those being deprived of all produc-
tion and living means. Peasants have always rebelled in the face of such a fact;
for example, the impressive history of the jacqueries all over Europe. Many
factors combined to disband them and to install the “classical” process. But
when this same sequence emerged among us, at a different historical time and
pace and on a different social sediment, the large human mass that seemed to
be placed in the face of a dead end succeeded in giving a new dimension to the
“classical response” (the inorganic and isolated revolt or migration): the mass
movement became a revolution. In 1910 Mexican peasants made an offensive
that they would later attempt time and again: to provide themselves with
means of production and of living, since capitalist expansion was unable to do
so. Those who did this were not peasants who no longer wanted to be peasants
(Womack, 1969). They were countryside proletarians that had stopped being
 The Protagonists of Social Change 45

what they had been and decided to recover and transform their history, so as
to take care of themselves and to face the structures of domination that only
reserved misery, oppression, and death for them.
The offensive did not fully succeed. Somehow, they were still fighting an
anti-historical battle: too late in a sense, and too early in another. The later
correlation of forces gave rise to a motley variety of forms of production that
somehow reflected “compromise solutions”: none of these were alien to capi-
talist exploitation, but the specific relation where they were manifested began
to be social inventions that resembled processes of the past, both national and
foreign, and reflected a variety of historical experiences but were not the imi-
tation of any.
From this frame of circumstances come the migration to the cities, where
they find no jobs. They occupy the cheapest housing, first at the center of
cities and later the outskirts (Lomnitz, 1975). So far, despite the apparent nov-
elty, there is no qualitative novelty. Any history of capitalist urbanization in
Europe would draw more dramatic pictures than those of Latin America as far
as misery, inhuman overcrowding, unhealthy conditions, exploitation is con-
cerned… But the men were different. And the times were different, too. For
some time, migrants continued arriving in a scattered and peaceful manner,
through some sort of inertia, a mixture of illusion and despair. But then, with
the illusion in agony and an intensified despair, activity began the offensive.
They mobilized again and they showed a surprisingly vital organization which
is a qualitative leap from their European ancestors, who also rose and mobi-
lized … until being expelled or absorbed.
Thus, the hypothesis may be put forth: these human groups differentiate
themselves from others, constitute themselves as a new social entity, through
a specific form of mobilization that is linked to the conquering of land (rural
and urban), and through their own form of organization resulting from the
mobilization that is permanently reconstituted and dynamized. All this seems
to be an expression of interests: those that identify the group as such (as a com-
monalty of interests). And not only material interests, although it may always
be necessary to accommodate to these.

a) The Conquering of Land

It is commonplace to relate peasants with the struggle for land. It is not so
common to differentiate the struggles of the past from those of the pres-
ent. In Mexico, peasants were deprived of their land during the nineteenth
century, and by the early twentieth century they stopped being what they
had used to be. Although their new struggle still keeps many aspects of the
previous one, it is qualitatively different (Esteva, 1979). Through it they are
constituted as a group emerging on the social map: a class-in-formation,
not extinct; a post-capitalist reality, not a pre-capitalist one that is produced
46 The Protagonists of Social Change

within capitalism; and in no way can it be seen as a remnant of the past

(Bettelheim, 1976).
In the cities there has been and there is the illegal occupancy of urban
land by individuals or families that “slide into” barren lost or abandoned
houses with the hope of not being discovered. But this is not the phenom-
enon that gave way to the discourse on marginality. The generalized fact
was the massive occupancy of land by groups organized for the purpose,
that were not only able to settle on a specific territory but also to remain
and keep an organization with multiple ends and capacities. This is a fact
recognized by all empirical studies about the “marginal” reality that always
refer to “spontaneous”, “irregular”, or “illegal” settlements. But these stud-
ies took the fact as a simple observation, without discovering the social
dynamics within it.
The significance of statistical figures can be stated only by starting with
this element: only thus can their magnitude be converted into a quality. The
shortening of the historical period thus acquires another meaning: it not only
implies an intensification of pressures within a given period, but also a modi-
fication of expectations since it is no longer a matter of recovering the past but
of opening a new prospect.
The founding of this human group (“modern peasants” and “urban mar-
ginal”) is made from a radically new mobilization (though it is actually very
ancient): its purpose is the collective appropriation of land, that is, a space
for living. Although it is devoted, as is often the case, to securing “pri-
vate” property, this is not an “individual” action, but a social movement.
Its nature is not simply derived from the agreement of individuals to form
groups—a necessary but insufficient condition—but from the overall phe-
nomenon that sets large human masses in motion, generating within them
similar forms of behavior and a commonality of interests. It is a profound
cultural fact that gives visibility to the group that invents it. By appealing
to direct action or to the organized force of the group to conquer means
of production and or living, pulling out of society the original rights of
appropriation, tradifas recover a qualitatively superior level. This strategy
established the original rights of workers over their labor force, regaining
control over their own bodies.
But it is no longer used to claim for the autonomous existence of the peo-
ple vis-á-vis the ruler to constitute individual guarantees, but to collectively
found the rights of ownership.

b) The Organization
The conditions of gestation of a human group need not be identical to those
of its existence and development. The struggle for the land made the group
 The Protagonists of Social Change 47

tradifa, but it is only constituted as such through the organization remain-

ing and evolving after the conquering of land that made their emergence
possible.
What is specific to a human group, what gives reality to the category of a
classification of individuals, is not their appearance or manifested condition,
but their organization. The specificity of being tradifa corresponds to a spe-
cific social structure, in which webs of exchange predominate and define how
the groups are organized. Those webs have a great economic significance for
large social sectors (Lomnitz, 1975).
It is an organization oriented to the production and reproduction of social
life that bases its vitality on endogenous forces, to guarantee optional forms of
relation with the adverse exogenous forces with the purpose of ensuring the
survival and development of the group.
Tradifas are not on the margin of the capitalist economy, nor do they func-
tion in a way parallel to the market: they maintain permanent social relations
of production with capitalists, under the most heterogenous forms: they may or
may not have a temporary or permanent salary, but this—or its equivalent—
cannot guarantee their vital reproduction. This historical fact, which has been
faced by workers since the beginnings of capitalism, has given way to a strategic
struggle to extract such guarantees from capitalists, indispensable in view of
the unlimited trend of expansion of the reserve army and of the periodical fall
of real wages. Without giving up in their struggle, which results in conquests
like the unemployment insurance or contractual guarantee of employment, the
tradifas have adopted, besides, the strategy of taking care of themselves: of exer-
cising a relative autonomy that may make reproduction and development of
individual and social life dependent on their own resources. (This is not just an
act of voluntarism or an accident, but rather a collective response to a social fact).
Such strategy is based on the social resources of the tradifas who relate
to one another based on solidarity built on trust that enhances reciprocal
exchange. This mechanism follows a specific social rationality that is different
from the capitalist one and has ways of functioning that are different from
those prevailing in the overall economy. Reciprocity does not operate like
the market exchange, but in a non-explicit and non-specific economic rela-
tion. This relation is always inserted in a social relation, which generates a
sui generis social organization that uses traditional social relations but is not
a remnant of primitive and obsolete modalities but constitutes a response in
the face of the extreme conditions of marginal life (Lomnitz, 1975).

c) The Permanent Reconstitution

Social groups are neither suddenly constituted, nor once and for all. What sep-
arates and distinguishes some groups from others is not an abstract logic: there
48 The Protagonists of Social Change

is nothing such as the group of short-nosed men with curly eyelashes, although
it may be possible to find these empirical attributes on a certain number of
subjects that, in this sense, are different from others. Men differentiate from
one another as a cultural fact; it is radical in terms of concrete interests that,
among other things, presuppose the recognition of differences both within the
group and outside.
Tradifas were not pre-constituted as a class from the fact of being work-
ers. Because of their objective conditions of existence, because of the sep-
aration of their labor force and their working conditions, they shared with
other workers the “potential” for organization and belonging, but they only
became constituted as a class—and within it, as a group or faction—when
they made the attempt to reintegrate those objective conditions, trying to
place under the direct and collective control of the group the working con-
ditions and the use of the labor force.
Nevertheless, this original foundation that is particularly clear in the
case of peasants, does not constitute a straitjacket, but rather a dynamic
base to face the changing conditions that define the existence and consol-
idation of the group. The attempt at reintegration is immediately exposed
to new forms of alienation, because the group is immersed in a capitalist
reality that has different laws of performance. This reality separates again,
through other ways, the working conditions from those of the labor force
and, whenever necessary, leaps over the limits of property. The land that
the peasant group has conquered, for example, as the stuff on which it
may exercise its productive effort in an autonomous way, becomes a virtual
property. The group cannot freely exercise its rights over the land because
it is subject to the social relations that impose the conditions of use, and
thus not only alienate the fruits of the productive effort but also control the
productive process.
Thus, land is no longer a necessary condition for the existence of tradifas. It
may continue to be the objective pretext for the cohesion of the group in some
cases, but it is no longer the substance of their condition. Tradifas are now
defined by the social factory to be certain specific modalities that operate as
guarantee for reproduction. On the one hand, belonging to the group operates
as guarantee of access to the conditions of reproduction, a situation like that
of some salaried workers’ organizations that have succeeded in conquering the
guarantee of employment. On the other hand, the fact that the reproduction
of the group is fundamentally based on the direct production for the social fac-
tory (although some of its members maintain relations with individual capital),
determines that the group will keep immediate contradictions with the social
factory that grow with the consolidation of the group itself.
The fact that the direct production for the social factory of tradifas does
not have as a necessary condition the intermediation of capital does not imply
that they are on the margin of the capitalist operation. In fact, their relation
 The Protagonists of Social Change 49

is more densely capitalist than that of other workers because their economic
contradictions are directly and immediately political: they are, by themselves,
class contradictions. They do not operate as disputes over value among specific
agents, but as contradiction with society “as a whole”, that is, with the cap-
italist establishment. Hence, they tend to be in contradiction with the State,
as the political instance that expresses class contradictions and correlations
of forces.
The essence of tradifas determines that they maintain their permanent
reconstitution. The recovery or renewal of age-old patterns of social relations
(what elicited the thought of “remnants”) or the extreme heterogeneity of
activities, behavior, and organizational forms (that jeopardized the existence
of a common constitutive substance of a social group) are characteristic condi-
tions for the existence of tradifas. There is no mystery about them once their
raison d’être is grasped as well as their meaning in the emerging and dynamic
reality that they constantly constitute and reconstitute.
Community is what defines man, not the other way around. By charac-
terizing tradifas in terms of their specific social organization, we simply rec-
ognize a form of social existence that is both ancient and new, which grew
among us without our being capable of perceiving its nature and meaning. We
were incapable, to the extent that we were prevented from seeing due to our
prejudiced eyeglasses that refused to know and recognize forms of existence
different from our own. Tradifas were unknown, both because of true igno-
rance and unconscious rejection, especially because of the perception—albeit
blurred—of the real or potential threat that this unknown reality could pose
to the established forms of social existence.
In the real conditions of capitalist operation, if the workers don’t take care
of their own survival, no one will do it for them. The tradifas know that and
have created many forms of organization that challenge the very existence of
the dominant system. That is increasingly their role, in a period in which the
old heroes—the industrial workers—seem too tired to take the initiative.

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4
RECLAIMING YOUR OWN PATH

In the mid-1980s, when I was fully involved in our critique of development, I was invited
to an International Seminar for Food Self-Sufficiency, organized by the Center for Third
World Studies (CEESTEM, Mexico) and UNESCO, on August 6–9, 1985. I dared
to suggest there that a very effective way to alleviate hunger was to cease aid and stop
development. Nobody seemed to listen, and it was, of course, a path not followed. With
development aid and projects, with neoliberalism and the postcapitalist mood, we started the
third decade of the new century with almost 50 million people suffering famine, an epidemic
of obesity (38% of the people in the US suffer from it) and generalized malnutrition. But
my argument in that time seems to reflect what an increasing number of people are doing
at the grassroots. The first part of this chapter includes my intervention in that Seminar.
A few months later I was invited by Ivan Illich to a small meeting in Boston of
a group associated with The Other Economic Summit, the group born in England
in 1984, which organized gatherings for many years that were a counterpoint to the
economic summits of the big and the powerful. In the second part of this chapter, I am
including my presentation to that seminar.
Both texts are dated, alluding to a path not taken…at the top. Our belief in gov-
ernments and the institutions vanished in the following years. But we have been trying,
since then, to give a theoretical foundation and a clear formulation to the experiences
already emerging at the grassroots. That is why these texts are included in the anthology.

I. Cease Aid and Stop Development: An Answer to Hunger

Development as the Source of Scarcity
In the first four sections of my presentation at the Conference, I described in terms
very similar to those used in Chapter 2: the construction and decadence of the myth
of development and the invention of scarcity—the logical premise that people’s wants
DOI: 10.4324/9781003262749-5
54 Reclaiming Your Own Path

are unlimited, but their means are limited, which undergirds the economic society and
economics. I also presented the argument that in the world where I live many people still
consider it foolish or immoral to have ends or wants beyond what you have.

“There is not enough wheat. We are short of food. Men, turned into thieves,
loot their neighbors. People want to run, and they can’t even walk. Children
cry. Young people stumble as if they were old. Their legs falter and they miser-
ably crawl. Their souls are empty, filled with air. It’s all over.” A few centuries
before Abraham, a pharaoh carved on stone his cry of desperation.
Such a dramatic testimonial has been used, with many others, to show
the ever-present hunger and scarcity, “old companions of men”. I intend
to dismantle this ideological operation. My contention is that the situation
of these men, who lived and died very close to today’s Ethiopia, has very
little to do with modern hunger. The habit of colonizing the past with our
present perceptions has cast a veil that prevents us from imagining the con-
ditions suffered by such men. That same veil covers and distorts our current
perceptions.
A century ago, economists succeeded in overcoming a similar challenge:
they refused to colonize the past, by applying to pre-capitalist societies the
categories and perceptions of an emerging capitalism. But they left scar-
city pending. It has been a task left for historical anthropology—against the
economists—to do what they did for their science.
Modern hunger and scarcity have a recent origin. They are the consequence
of the development whose promotion is proposed, so far, as the formula to
overcome them. In other words: the cause of the problem is still applied as
remedy, and this aggravates hunger instead of leaving it behind. To break the
vicious circle of ideology in which ideas and actions related to hunger and
scarcity dwell, at the pace of the development myth, we need to explore the
myth itself. Back from such exploration, we will be able to see that only if we
radically stop aid and development, will we be able to seriously face present
challenges, as I suggest in this essay.

Technological Intermediation
Tecné, art for the Greek, was a specific way to do anything. Poiesis, culture,
was the set of patterns that created and ruled over these ways. When human
activity is conceived in these terms, culture creates art and art creates culture.
The way for cultural creation, anastomosis, is also the way for technical and
artistic creation. Here, technique is a form of existence between one and the
other. Cultural patterns themselves establish modalities of behavior that allow
the individual or collective breaking away to be faced in normal or fortuitous
conditions.
 Reclaiming Your Own Path 55

This approach, which I illustrate from the Greek, seems to come from afar,
to have always been there, and to be present still. When tools emerged, such
conceptions gave way to those which came to be called democratic techniques:

The method of small-scale production that is based mainly on human

skill and on animal energy but that always, even when it uses machines,
is under the active control of the craftsman or the farmer, with each
group developing their own gifts through appropriate arts and social
ceremonies, with a discreet use of nature’s gifts. This technology has
limited horizons, as far as achievements is concerned, but, precisely
due to their wide diffusion and modest requirements, it has a greater
power to adapt and recover.
(Mumford, 1964: 3)

Around the fourth millennium B.C. the competition started between these
techniques and those that Mumford calls authoritarian techniques, and which
assume a new configuration of technical invention, scientific observation, and
centralized political control:

The new authoritarian technology was not limited by the custom of the
town nor by any human feeling: their Herculean exploits rested on mer-
ciless physical coercion, forced labor and slavery. Despite their constant
tendency to destruction, these authoritarian techniques were tolerated
and even welcome in their own territory, because they created the first
controlled economy of abundance: especially, the huge food harvests
that not only supported a large urban population but that also freed
a large minority trained to devote itself to purely religious, scientific,
bureaucratic or military activities.
(Mumford, 1964: 3)

This first version of authoritarian techniques, based on physical coercion over

armies of workers, was never able to overcome its inherent weaknesses: the
resistance of democratic economy in the rural towns that prevented, even under
the Roman Empire, 90 percent of the population from being inserted into
massive technology, confined largely to large urban centers due to the lack of
internal coherence of the centralized system, and especially, the deep irration-
ality of the myths on which it was based, with its severe hostility towards life.
A few centuries ago, this first version of authoritarian techniques was
demolished. However, the bright road of political democracy was proposed
with the illusion that it could be based on the “economic democracy” to be
created by industrial tools. The perverse nature of industrial tools was not
perceived in time, and they entrenched even more deeply the authoritarian
56 Reclaiming Your Own Path

centralization of the monarchy through their ability to combine coercion

with persuasion. The tool of submission and destruction—the authoritar-
ian industrial technique—can be now assumed to be something of our own
and for our own benefit, avoiding, therefore, the instability of the monarchic
scheme derived from its requirement of permanent physical coercion. Instead
of the incoherent monarchic myths, those of science emerged and were finally
enthroned in the role of the supreme court of human rationality, preventing
its criticism from a position of reason.
There is one trait of the modern version of authoritarian techniques that
makes them increasingly dangerous and harmful. In previous schemes, a total
break between capacities and needs was not possible. Though these bifurcated
into urban and rural patterns and the workers’ armies subjected to coercion exer-
cised their capacities to tend to the needs of others, it was required, for the sta-
bility of the centralized system, to keep a certain coherence between the “total”
capacities and needs. Real capacities, those available, continued to operate as
determinants of the needs that were thus enclosed within culturally defined
limits. Every time the paranoid requirements of the centralized system tended
to exceed the limits of these capacities, because of the wild inertia of a hierar-
chical definition of central needs, the system faced a radical bankruptcy: it was
possible to maintain it only when the gap opened by the clumsiness of its deci-
sion mechanism was closed. In the modern version of authoritarian techniques,
we have proceeded to define needs without considering capacities and we have
established for both, against all reason and experience, the need, compulsion,
and viability of their unlimited growth. The gap between capacities and needs
thus created, the dependence of both on increasingly centralized mechanisms
no longer subject to control or conscious steering, is unprecedented.
In the world where I live, the close relationship between capacities and
needs is a condition of survival. Some of us have lost the skills characteristic
of democratic techniques. Many of us have begun to be linked to the pre-
dominant system of authoritarian technology and must now face enormous
difficulties to disembed ourselves from it. We are also affected by the general
devaluation of our own definition for capacities and needs. It is difficult to pre-
vent the feeling of frustration and un-satisfaction produced by their compari-
son with the definitions that prevail in the life of certain groups or nations and
are socially proposed as superior to our own. In such conditions, the so-called
crisis has become a great opportunity for us. It has re-valued our skills and
behaviors, especially because of their adaptability and diversification. It has
showed, at the same time, the weaknesses of the production and consumption
patterns proposed as the promise for all. The “crisis”, finally, has re-affirmed
our conviction that we can only continue to build our lives if we keep our-
selves within the sphere of our own democratic techniques, and if we hasten
our disembedding, to allow for the viability and for the utilization, if neces-
sary, of the creation of the system that can be re-functionalized by us.
 Reclaiming Your Own Path 57

Institutionalized Hunger
Hunger has been the greatest business of the century. No other aspect of mod-
ern procedures for the destruction of human life illustrates, as well as this, the
perverse nature of the authoritarian technology of our times.
The counterproductivity of the so-called Green Revolution has been suf-
ficiently documented, as well as its harmful sociopolitical consequences. But
perhaps, attention has not been sufficiently drawn to the meaning of the techno-
logical transformation inherent in it. Let us take, for example, the case of seeds.
In the beginning, they were called miraculous seeds. Their performance
seemed to be astonishing. A review of scope led to a more moderate qualifica-
tion: they were only high yield seeds. New analyses intended to better charac-
terize the tool which gave them their present name: high response seeds. They
are seeds, indeed, capable of responding, with a high growth rate, to certain
stimuli: certain natural or artificial conditions of the soil or weather and some
industrial and institutional inputs. When these stimuli are not available, the
seeds cannot be what they are supposed to be and their physical and economic
results are evidently inferior to those obtained by the very miraculous native
seeds, capable of facing the most varied circumstances. In real life, we can only
maintain such stimuli in a very limited space of the planet. To redesign the land
and cultivation practices all over the world to adapt them to the requirements
of the seed is unfeasible and foolish. It is also foolish, as well as damaging, to
use the seeds out of the physical and social environments to which they belong.
And that is precisely what is being done. The highly centralized system for
their production and distribution, controlled by a handful of gigantic corpo-
rations, fosters their generalized use despite the multiplication of unfortunate
experiences. But this irrational expansion of the use of “improved” seeds is
seriously affecting the genetic stock of the earth and decreasing production in
large areas. In Mexico, we do not know the magnitude of the damage caused,
between 1980 and 1982, by the dissemination of “improved seeds” all over the
country, through the Mexican Food System, but it is foreseeable that areas of
catastrophe will proliferate when a bad weather year occurs.
Fertilizers seem to have no critics. All productive abundances of the post-
war period seem to credit them, and, alongside the tractor, they appear to be
the main heroes of modern agriculture. Insufficient attention has been drawn
to the curious displacement of the theory of humus with the theory of miner-
als a century ago, and how this theoretical and technical rupture subordinated
agriculture to industry. Only recently has the counterproductivity of fertiliz-
ers been documented, as well as the harmful addiction they created in the soil
(by making it first inefficient and then unproductive), and the economic and
ecological irrationality of their use in most of the arable land in the South.
Only in the past few years, partly as a reaction to the most destructive effects
of the industrial fertilization system, the democratic techniques of organic
58 Reclaiming Your Own Path

agriculture began to be the subject of serious scientific attention, demon-

strating how they have enriched knowledge on ancient peasant practices with
modern theoretical and practical contributions.
We could continue with our list, but the bulky documentation on counter-
productivity and irrationality of the accepted patterns pales in comparison to the
facts. Development has generated hunger in Africa in the past decade and has
made the U.S. a short-sighted exporter of some of the best lands and waters on
the planet. Development has generalized scarcity and tends to make it more acute
through aid. Weakened by the so-called crisis, development continues anyway
to be a serious threat hanging over us, subjecting us to constant wear and tear
and giving to our reactions a predominantly defensive nature. Allies are appear-
ing everywhere, inside the industrialized societies, but there is still conventional
inertia. Trapped in the existing contradictions, developers tend to abandon the
persuasive masks used in normal times and intensify the use of the coercive tools
of the predominant centralized system. They are demanding from political and
military instances of national societies the suppression of resistance to authori-
tarian technology. For this reason, we now need to launch a public initiative to
urgently stop development and aid.

The Agenda for Research and Change

It is neither feasible not advisable to suddenly stop aid and development.
The effort could be, in a way, just another turn of the screw of the central-
ized system and the opposite of what is needed.
One first reason for this is the existence of a substantive segment of the
population—what is equivocally known as the middle strata—whose ideologies,
interests, and aspirations are cast in the mold of development. In general, they
have lost the skills required for an autonomous way of life and would only pains-
takingly survive if they were suddenly disembedded from the mechanisms they
depend on. This segment has great influence over the dominating classes and pub-
lic opinion and often has great capacity for political mobilization to defend their
conventional interests. To make any attempt against them may be meaningless.
Second, the physical and social destruction carried out for the sake of devel-
opment is such that reconstruction requires an enormous effort, linked to
great sociological imagination. It is not only a matter of repairing what has
been destroyed, but rather of inventing forms to dismantle and utilize the tools
of the industrial mode of production, to reduce the economic and human bur-
dens that will be imposed by the transformation.
Last but not least, there is insufficient research on these and other aspects
of the changes that are required. The archeology of development could con-
tribute to clear the way, especially to allow for the critical awareness of the
situation of those who are ideologically or practically trapped in development
and to revalue other ways of living. But there are many other research needs,
 Reclaiming Your Own Path 59

especially regarding dismantling tactics that should be explored in the short

term. Rather than proposals, the following should be seen as exploration paths
that would be adequate to follow.

How to Stop Aid

It is obscene to confuse, as has been the case, charity with aid. As Prince Claus
of the Netherlands proposed at the 18th SID Conference, charity could con-
tinue to be amongst us, as always. It is even foreseeable that more human liv-
ing conditions will re-activate it and that it will again become the best of the
guarantees for the stability and access in cases of natural or social calamities.
Aid is something else. Aid is an economic and political operation that at
times cynically, intends to disguise itself under the cloak of charity. Aid is a
tool of colonial oppression. At present it tends to operate as the tool for the
promotion of development. It must be stopped.
We have an urgent plea: to organize silence around hunger in Africa and
elsewhere in the world. Obviously, it is not a matter of hiding information
or of disguising the consequences of development that must be, on the con-
trary, subject to the widest public discussion possible. It is a matter of rescuing
human dignity, hurt by the irresponsible behavior of global mass media, and
of respecting the human dignity of those who are suffering one of the great-
est tragedies in their history. It is immoral to exploit people’s guilt by faking
charity. It is immoral to use commercial music to fake charity. It is obscene to
discuss these issues within that sphere.
We need to dismantle aid institutions. All of them. National and interna-
tional. Those exhibiting religious or spiritual motives, as well as those based on
economic or political reasons. Besides being factors in the destruction of the
societies they are destined to serve—as has been sufficiently documented—
they also destroy the charity and dignity of their fund’s providers.
Charity, as is shown by the whole history of the Catholic Church, cannot
be practiced through institutional intermediaries. We may, grouped together
through silence, practice the only charity that there really is, the one which
occurs among people that are co-moved by the same human drama, moved
by the same vital impulse. If necessary, we may use the networks of contact
and exchange that, all over the world, may freely relate those who want to
become related. If we are dealing with any kind of struggle, in this field, it is
the struggle of the legal universal banning of aid and “charitable” institutions.
In this issue, there is no middle ground.

How to Stop Development

The word comida is a vernacular expression alluding to activities and interac-
tions of individuals among themselves and with their environments that allow
60 Reclaiming Your Own Path

them to generate, obtain, and assimilate the material elements they need to
procure their life as autonomous subsistence. Two words of the same cultural
family, drinking and breathing, refer to specific material elements—water and
oxygen; comida covers all the rest.
I propose that we use the word comida to place a distance with respect to
food and foodstuffs, terms which should be reserved for use by professionals
and institutions. To eat, to care for comida, to generate it, to make it, to cook
it, to eat it, these are activities of men and women. They belong to them. To
feed would imply acquiring and consuming foods (edible objects) conceived
by professionals and produced and distributed through institutions.
I can make this distinction in Spanish and find in my own reality behav-
iors that clearly correspond to it. I may document that comida, among most
peasants, comprises a complex cultural relation with the milpa where maize
is grown (and which is not equivalent to the technical activity of producing
maize), as well as with the multitude of activities and interactions in which, in
addition, gender may be clearly distinguished. I may document the differences
between their attitudes and behaviors and those of a middle-class university
student of Mexico City who is fed, who consumes food, and depends on the
institution that feeds him, and who hardly understands the meaning of comida.
There are other languages, like German, where I can still draw this distinc-
tion, though it does not reflect the differences to the same extent. I may offer
many examples, in societies of the South, where the word comida is enriched
by others that describe cultural practices that are complex and related to it:
impostura, for example, which in many towns of the Dominican Republic has
cancelled until now the possibility for a family or group of the population to
face scarcity in terms of comida.
I cannot make this difference in English. Meal, nourishment, and other terms
refer to food. There is no English word for comida. I cannot stop here to explain
why, but the reasons are explained in Chapter 5. But I do wish to use this
fact to explain the meaning of the initiative we need to take. The Anglo-
Saxon world is the cultural space where the industrial mode of production has
prevailed most clearly in this crucial dimension. There, vernacular activities
related with comida have been constantly suffocated, if not banned. Those who
during the past decade have attempted to regenerate them have faced enor-
mous difficulties. This has allowed for the institutionalization of permanent
scarcity of comida and hunger and to embed, together with classical hunger, all
forms of malnutrition. Though hunger in the U.S. has less mass media cov-
erage than in Africa, the media intensively stimulates the search for illusory
goals in the field of health or nutrition. By deeply tying American citizens to
the professional and institutional apparatus that will supply them with health
and food services, through conventional or alternative ways, they are being
prepared and trained for the most dramatic phase of their dependence on the
centralized system: the phase in which the institutional mechanism will not
 Reclaiming Your Own Path 61

only govern them through the “protection” of their bodies—by feeding them,
healing them, transporting them, etc…—but which will also take care of
their lives. (An extreme of the regulation associated with a centralized system,
which is the inevitable consequence of the issue of nuclear technology, the
authoritarian technique par excellence).
The issue at hand is about recovering the appetite and the comida, bringing
them back within the vernacular sphere when they are not there, and re-
integrating them to it when they are transferred to the food system. Therefore,
first, the issue is to utilize present restrictions to stop development from
encroaching upon the whole system of comida. To this end, besides autono-
mous initiatives, public policy measures may be of assistance: the progressive
legal banning of the production and consumption of junk foods and especially
and immediately, of advertising for these; the publicizing of existing knowl-
edge on the values and differential effects of comida and food; the cancellation
of subsidies and of supports presently channeled to commercial agriculture; the
decentralization and de-institutionalization of governmental services related
to agriculture and food, etc., etc.
None of this will suffice. We also can’t expect the efforts made by peasants
and urban “marginals” on their own account to succeed per se, even if a new
public policy should decide to respectfully support what they do instead of
banning or opposing it. Development has succeeded in destroying physical
and social spaces to such a degree that a collective, concerted, and continued
effort will be required to succeed in the reconstruction. Most of the inhabit-
ants of the most densely populated city in the world, Mexico City, for exam-
ple, where one-fourth of the country’s total population lives, is already unable
to generate its own comida: they must be fed. And in Mexico’s countryside
the scale of ecological and human damage is such that only through a global
and concerted effort can we face present challenges. Mexico could, during
the course of one single agricultural cycle, save for itself the additional two or
three billion dollars that it presently spends on food imports, without reducing
the value of its agricultural exports and by reducing, instead of increasing, the
subsidies presently channeled to agriculture and food. But even so in that case
it would be very far from the possibility of autonomy, in the sphere of comida,
for a good part of the population. It would still be necessary to feed them and,
at the same time, have a National Food Program, like the one we have now.
The need for the “national food strategies”, however, corresponds to the
need to make deep changes in institutional tools whose operation is usually
associated with the factors which cause hunger and scarcity. Such changes
will only be possible with a large population mobilization associated with the
strategy. On the one hand, it is imperative to build new transmission belts,
based on the democratic organizations of citizens, to replace traditional links
that characterize the centralized system. On the other hand, the actors of
the action, the citizens, should take into their hands the main activities and
62 Reclaiming Your Own Path

responsibilities in such a way that the State and institutional action will oper-
ate as a supporting resource, and not as the substitute for autonomous action.
In any case, the successful implementation of a “national food strategy” (to
continue using such a horrid military expression) must have as its successful
result its extinction and the elimination of any food program whatsoever. The
strategy is needed because of the extent of the damage and disarticulation we
presently confront. The concerted and collective effort is required to compen-
sate for the irreversible damage being caused, to regenerate what can still be
rehabilitated, and to support the autonomous and isolated efforts that are still
being made and that are presently exposed to all sorts of blocks. If this “strategy”
succeeds, or rather, for it to be wholly successful, it must translate itself into gen-
eral conditions to re-conquer autonomous subsistence, its existence would make
the formulation and execution of any national food program unnecessary. It is
a matter, in short, of standing and walking on two feet: on national programs
and multiple and de-centered efforts. These are parallel roads that are mutually
fed. The national and regional strategy expresses the need for the concertation
of the collective effort at the scale of the whole country that will only be saved
from the risk of becoming another mobilizing myth or another administration
entelechy if it remains at the service of the efforts for autonomous subsistence. If
these, on their part, do not adequately take into account the limits of the space
where they dwell and do not articulate themselves in networks at the local and
regional levels, mounted on the largest traces of a national proposal, they will
necessarily be exposed to the pressure of the factors that oppose them and will
suffer the consequences of the weakness due to isolation.
I have referred to what could be done in countries in the South, where there
are still ample spaces like those of the world where I live. In contrast to the
opinions of those who utilize the African drama to continue along conventional
lines, by alluding to the conditions of the emergency, it is precisely because of
these that the continent needs, more than anywhere else, to stop development
and aid and to start walking on a new road. As was eloquently expressed by
Marie-Angélique Savané at the SID’s conference, this is today’s agenda.
As to the internal environment of industrial countries proper, I have nothing
to say. I do not know what is to be done within them, besides showing them
why we do not want their aid or their development. But I think that if this
were the only thing we did, speaking to one another to understand each other,
conditions for charity and solidarity would emerge on both sides. And this is
also what we need.

The Challenge and the Option

The present challenge of change could be described as an effort to get the simul-
taneous co-motion of ideologies and institutions and the de-centralization and
de-centering of initiatives, in order to find appropriate ways for the construction
 Reclaiming Your Own Path 63

of a “historical wisdom of struggle”, in the autonomization of cultural nuclei

interconnected in a reticular fashion.
As is known, humanisms propose to change ideologies without trans-
forming institutions. (For example: to continue with the nationalizations and
bureaucratization of society under other political leaders of a different orienta-
tion or class). Reformisms, on their part, intend to change institutions without
changing the ideological orientation. (For example: the administrative decen-
tralization as a maneuver to re-affirm the control of the center on the periph-
ery). The present challenge is to simultaneously challenge both ideology and
institutions to establish a plurality of options, the freedom of choosing among
them and the real autonomy to contact or encounter other groups or cultures.
The challenge is to co-move; it is not to change, to develop, to raise aware-
ness, to trigger processes of change, to foster the awakening, to reform the
State apparatuses, to combat corruption, inefficiency, or counter productivity
of institutions, etc… It is not enough to use stronger terms—revolution, struc-
tural change—if the meaning has not changed. In the sphere of theory, what
we need is to abandon the general and generalizing discourse to re-invent
language, speech, categories, the regimes of truth production. In the sphere
of institutions, it is not a matter of reforming or combating them, but of dis-
solving the institutionalization and professionalization of human activities, by
eliminating the need for “protection” or “service” institutions, which reduce
and homogenize human needs (by pouring them into standard casts) and pro-
gram their satisfaction through the massive, standardized production of alien
and alienating objects.
Governmental decentralization does not consist of the transfer of power
and control from the center to the periphery, through standards and look-
ing for efficiency, under the terms of the Anglo-Saxon discourse (colonial in
nature), according to which theories and practices about “community devel-
opment” and “popular participation” were promoted. The decentralization of
governmental activities consists of re-shaping their center (the tactical aspect),
by opening it to the impulses emanated from the grassroots for them to func-
tion effectively and to thus substitute their extension (quantity) with their
intention (quality) (strategic aspect).
Simultaneously, there is a challenge in the capacity to respect and to sup-
port de-centered impulses, initiatives without any political or ideological
center. They organize themselves inside a reticular structure of perimeters and
tendencies, both undefined and self-limited, made up by the interconnection
of multiple centers of production of truth and of generation and strengthening
of their own autonomous cultural patterns.
This reticular, de-centered structure may be constituted within a frame-
work of increasing democratization of society. The idea is to improve represent-
ative democracy; this presupposes the consolidation of effective suffrage and
democratic polls, both at the political level (for positions of popular election)
64 Reclaiming Your Own Path

as well as inside all citizens’ organizations, until turning both elements into
usual and conscious practices of all the population. On the other hand, the idea
is to intensify the processes of construction of direct democracy. This implies
stimulating the practice of co-management and “popular participation” (as a
mechanism and instrument to induce behaviors that extend the intervention
of citizens in the issues that concern them, both to conceive and to program
and implement them). These tactical lines of the strategy get their meaning
through a strategy of opposing increasing organic integration (under demo-
cratic or authoritarian forms of government), which leads invariably to the
institutional integration of power, according to a heteronomous logic.
The strategic challenge(*), thus, is the construction of autonomous ways
of government. Changes cannot come from reforms inside the State appara-
tuses (though these might be necessary) nor can they be carried out without
the intervention of the State or against it, given the magnitude of the State’s
resources and the extent and quality of their affirmative or excluding presences.
The progressive autonomization of needs and capacities must correspond
to the creation and re-creation of units operating under the direct control of
groups that conceive and generate them. For that construction, autonomous
theoretical production will play a role both locally and regionally, not requir-
ing a system of common standards to affirm its own validity. This production
does not mean obtuse empiricism—both naive and primitive—nor does it fall
into equivocal eclecticism, opportunism, or permeability into any theoretical
undertaking. It is an act of creation that does not take concrete reality as the
point of departure for speculation and interpretation, but which is based on it
and remains with it throughout its discourse.
Such theoretical production may utilize, for its own enrichment, the work for
the recovery of historical contents buried or disguised inside functional coher-
ences and formal systematizations. This work is parallel to that of re-valuing the
knowledge of the people, considered incompetent or insufficiently elaborated
by the “scientific knowledge” that has operated as an instrument of domination.
The coupling of “scholarly knowledge” (stories, the systematization of experi-
ences) with local memories (the knowledge of people), may allow for the con-
stitution of the historical knowledge of struggle which would be incorporated
within the tactics to be used. Thus, the struggle against the tyranny of globaliz-
ing discourse and of the “scientific” hierarchy of knowledge (with its intrinsic
effects of power) could start through the re-activation of local knowledges. The
challenge, hence, “is not to change the awareness of the people or what they
have in their heads, but rather the political, economic and institutional regime
of the production of truth” (Foucault, 1980: 82).
Put forth in these terms, the challenge does not have as a reference the
whole of society. Far from being a minimum requisite to take initiative on the
local and regional levels, to project something towards the “whole of society”
imposes a maximum demand that can only be met through an authoritarian
 Reclaiming Your Own Path 65

design. The result of the action and initiative of the multiple processes gen-
erated by autonomous cultural nuclei cannot be conceived or described as
the “whole of society”. It rather corresponds instead to a physical and social
space whose configuration or limits are haphazard: it appears as the unforeseen
and unforeseeable fruit of unregulated interconnections of autonomous efforts
subject to self-imposed limits. What can result from this does not resemble
the “whole of society”. In the construction of the reticular structure—both
heterogeneous and multi-shaped, the hypothesis of innate egoism must be
discarded in any case (the key for the illusion of perfect competence), with the
same vigor as the hypothesis of innate altruism (the key to the perfect coopera-
tion 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 cor-
rection of asymmetries—the inevitable consequence of heterogeneity in the
knots of the reticular structure—is a complex interaction under a new sense
of exchanges, that cannot be subjected to program nor exist under the impos-
sible assumption of an altruistic flow of unilateral nature from the “strong” to
the “weak” nuclei. Emulation will probably be the fundamental condition of
these interaction schemes.
A model is not derived from these reflections. There is no map to guide
thoughts or actions. We do not offer for sale a new paradise, nor do we offer
a plan.
We simply suggest that we should reflect in a sense opposite to the teleo-
logical one. Prevision is not discarded, as a material force of great historical
importance, but its use is rejected as a tool for designing the future of “all”
placing a new decoy under their nose.
Here we do not disregard collective and concerted effort. Neither are we
suggesting that we put ourselves at the mercy of chaos, exposing ourselves to
the free individual or group initiative, or even less to the “market forces”. We
suggest that the concertation required should be the result of a strategic encod-
ing of the points of resistance and of autonomous initiatives which could be
the legitimate foundation of a plan. It is not a matter of promoting changes, of
moving people towards a pre-determined direction—any direction—defined
by somebody else: a charismatic leader, a party, a church, a corporation. It is
rather a matter of recognizing people’s mobilization, of learning how to foster
it, to disinhibit it, it is a matter of admitting that it should be agile as a gazelle,
charming as a bear cub, and rely on surprise like the tiger, because this is the
only sort of mobilization possible, not the one of demonstrations or parades.
And the point is to co-move with it. Because it is a matter of co-motion, of
removing and transforming, simultaneously, ideologies and institutions.
And if this is what it’s all about, the peasants have much to say. Most of their
experience is associated with the modalities of autonomous subsistence. They
have been historically capable of co-moving—among themselves and with
66 Reclaiming Your Own Path

respect to others. They know what it is all about and they are theoretically and
practically capable of acting in this direction.
The new agrarian issue that peasant movements have put forth will have
to be considered within this framework. If the crises we presently live in are
not—as is now being admitted by many—the disorder of the transition to
another phase of the same, but rather the agonizing stertors of an era that is
about to end, conventional hypotheses may be necessary but insufficient.
Our world is undergoing a transition, an acute process of change, but its
nature is not yet identified. And the questions are there, firmly riding on the
storm of a series of crises that theories in vogue were unable to foresee and
cannot explain because of a pattern they do not know how to leave. What is
this all about? What are the lines of reflection and action around which we
could advance to start on a new road? In the face of the increasingly gener-
alized rejection of predominant models and of the violence that accompanies
their confrontation, what sort of critical examination should we embark on to
recover a sense of direction? If an era is over, what is dying with it?
Written on our reality, these questions are rejected, at times, because they are
thought to be irrelevant: against them rises the shelter of conventional lenses that
facilitate the continuation of the illusions of development and of the benefits of
world trade. But at other times, they are taken seriously, truly, and in addition to
thinking of the answers, hands and arms start working to put them into practice.
Here we are not dealing with academic speculation. Social and political forces
of all sorts of conditions are firmly committed to both attitudes mentioned
above. On the one hand there are precise, analytical, and clearly prescriptive
formulations: the religious-like versions that endlessly repeat the catechism of
decades, of course, considering themselves the owners of the truth. They watch
with surprise, fury, or tenderness those who find the courage to question them.
On the other hand, there are all sorts of uncertainties. There are no banners or
consecrated references, and instead of promises, limits are defined. There are no
militants or promoters offering these as a decoy to trade with people’s hopes.
Under normal conditions, there would be no hesitating if we asked who is more
capable of enthusing the people, or which proposal could gather more adher-
ents, or which side of the balance of history would be inclined to.
But we are not in “normal” times, and it seems they will never return. And
this, the option created by the crisis, is what may leave the game open.

Bibliographic Clues
Most of the ideas expressed stem from my frequent dealings with peasants and
urban “marginals” for the past 15 years. I was able to shape them as they now
are because of my conversations with Ivan Illich, Jean Robert, Uwe Pörksen,
Valentina Borremans, Lee Svenson, and other friends in the past few years.
My reading of their texts and those of Juan David García Bacca, André Gorz,
 Reclaiming Your Own Path 67

Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebre, Gilles Deleuze, Harry Cleaver, and others
was decisive for my theoretical construction.
The critique of the industrial mode of production which explicitly doc-
uments the alternative lines of thought and action may be examined on the
seminal books by Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, Beacon Press, Boston,
1957, and Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality, Harper & Row Publishers, 1973.
Literature of the last decade on the subject is well represented in the
Reference Guide to Convivial Tools prepared by Valentina Borremans (Library
Journal, Special Report no. 13), which includes close to one thousand titles
with comments.
Jean Robert suggested to me the use of the idea of colonizing metaphors
by Uwe Pörksen to examine the issue of development; for this purpose, I
exploited the paper by him: “Richness”, “Purity” and “Splendor”: Analytical
Instruments and Criteria of Language (mimeo). He also put me on the look-
out for Victor Turner, Drama, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human
Society (Ithaca and London, 1974, Cornell University), Max Black, Models and
Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca, 1962, Cornell University
Press), Robert Nisbet, Social Change and History: Aspects of the Western Theory of
Development (London, 1969, Oxford University Press).
Regarding subjects of Power and power, see, especially, Michel Foucault,
La volonté de savoir (Gallimard), L’usage des plaisirs and Le souci de soi (Gallimard);
Microfísica del Poder, Madrid, La Piqueta, 1978.
The papers presented at the 18th Conference of SID in Rome, in July of this
year, were of specific use to me. Particularly the contributions of Ismail-Sabri
Abdalla, Poona Widnaraja, Wolfgang Sachs, Lee Svenson, Marie-Angelique
Savané, Orlando Fals-Borda, Prince Claus of the Netherlands, H.R. Clausen,
and others.
A good view of the status of conventional literature on development may
be found in Leading Issues on Economic Development, 4th edition, Gerald M.
Meier, New York, Oxford University Press, 1984.
A good synthesis of the notions that rose during the 70s and which were
assumed by the international community was prepared by I. Alechina for a
meeting called by the United Nations at the onset of the Third Development
Decade (I. Alechina, “Contribution du Systeme des Nations Unies a l’elab-
oration de nouvelles conceptions theoriques de developpement”, Paris,
UNESCO, 1980, Reunion d’experts sur le role de nouvelles conceptions the-
oriques dans le processus de developpement).
On the idea of a unified concept of development and elusive development,
see Rapport sur une conception unifiée de l’analyse et de la planification du devel-
oppement, UNRISD, Geneva, 1974; Social Development and the International
Development Strategy, UNRISD, Geneva, 1979; An Approach to Development
Research, UNRISD, Geneva, 1979; The Quest for a Unified Approach to
Development, UNRISD, Geneva, 1980; Elusive Development, M. Wolfe, jointly
68 Reclaiming Your Own Path

published by UNRISD and the Economic Commission for Latin America,

Budapest, 1981.
At the beginning of 1984 the Sociedad Mexicana de Planificación organ-
ized a round table discussion at its VIII Congress to examine the present
situation of Mexican critique of the conceptualization and strategies of devel-
opment. Discussions produced a book by Gustavo Esteva with David Barkin,
Rolando Cordera, and Jacobo Schatan, El desarrollo: la larga agonía de una cate-
goría imposible, presently in print. A summary of the critique of development
and the meaning of alternative proposals may be seen in G. Esteva, “Opciones
verdaderas sobre el desarrollo” in Econosomex, no. 2, August, 1984, Mexico
and El Gallo Ilustrado, no. 1178, January 20, 1985.
See also: Frank Hinkelammert, Ideologías del desarrollo y dialéctica de la his-
toria, Ediciones Nueva Universidad, Universidad Católica de Chile, Buenos
Aires, 1970; Osvaldo Sunkel and Pedro Paz, El subdesarrollo latinoameriano
y la teoría del desarrollo, Siglo XXI Editores, México, 1970; Enrique Oteiza
(selection), Autoafirmación colectiva, una estrategia alternativa de desarrollo, Fondo
de Cultura Económica, México, 1983; Enrique Ruiz García, Subdesarrollo y
liberación, Alianza Editorial, México, 1973.
On the dissolution of the myth, see, particularly, J. Attali, C. Castoriadis,
J-M Domenech, P. Massé, E. Morin, and others, El mito del desarrollo, Editorial
Kairós, Barcelona, 1980; Jacques Attali, Les trois mondes, pour une theorie de l’apres
crise, Faynard, Paris, 1981, H.W. Arndt, The Rise and Fall of Economic Growth, a
Study in Contemporary Thought, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1984.
On the limits to development, see William L. Oltmans (comp.) Debate sobre
el crecimiento, Fondo de Cultura Económica, México, 1975.
On the issue of needs, see Gustavo Esteva, “Tecnología, enajenación y
necesidades sociales” in El Estado y la Comunicación, Editorial Nueva Política,
México, 1979, and Economía y enajenación, Universidad Veracruzana, México,
1980. Also, the texts by Paul P. Streeten, “The Frontiers of Development
Studies: some issues of development policy”, Journal of Development Studies,
October, 1967, and “Industrialization in a Unified Development Strategy”,
World Development, January, 1975, with the attempt at quantifying with res-
ervations, and the text by Illich, mentioned above, on the history of needs.
Regarding technique, I especially refer to the work by Lewis Mumford,
particularly the article “Técnicas autoritarias y técnicas democráticas”, in El
Gallo Ilustrado, no. 1190, Mexico, April 14, 1985 (“Authoritarian and Democratic
Technics”, Tecnology and Culture 5, no. 1, Winter 1964: 1–8), and Art and Technics,
Colombia University Press, New York, 1952; Técnica y civilización, Alianza
Editorial, Madrid, 1971; and Technics and Human Development, The Myth of the
Machine, vol. 1, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., New York, 1967.
On the sociopolitical consequences of the Green Revolution, see, particularly,
The Social and Economic Implications of Large Scale Introduction of New Varieties of
Foodgrain: Summary of Conclusions of a Global Research Project, UNRISD, Geneva,
 Reclaiming Your Own Path 69

1974; Hewitt de Alcántara, Cynthia, Modernization without Development: Patterns

of Agricultural Policy and Rural Change in the Birthplace of the Green Revolution,
Geneva, UNRISD, November, 1974; and texts by Andrew Pearse, published by
UNRISD, Seeds of Plenty, Seeds of Want, Oxford, 1980; Technology and Peasant
Production: Reflections on a Global Study, Geneva, 1978.
On the production and distribution system of seeds, see David Barkin’s
text, El fin del principio, Ediciones Oceano, México, 1983; and “Las semillas
mejoradas y el SAM” in La Política Alimentaria mexicana: en busca de la autosu-
ficiencia, presently in print. An alternative approach to the problem, which
examines the construction of economic and agronomical theory and its impli-
cations for the selection of technologies, is found in the various papers by Ivo
Dubiel which circulate as working documents in UNAM, Cuautitlán.
On impostura in the Dominican Republic, see, Svein Erik Duus, (mimeo.)
Negotiating Reciprocity: Food Exchange in a Rural Community of the Dominican
Republic. A complete examination of a theoretical and practical alternative that
examines aspects related with comida, health, shelter, and culture is found in
Programa de cambio social en la Cañada de Huamuxtitlán, Gro, Part I, Theoretical
and Methodological Framework. A partial version of this approach was pub-
lished in El Gallo Ilustrado and in Econosomex, mentioned above.
On the invention of scarcity, see the text entitled “La inveción de la escasez”
by Susan Hunt, in El Gallo Ilustrado no. 1190, April 14, 1985, and in Tranet,
1985, as well as the following texts she mentions in the bibliography: C.B.
McPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke,
Oxford, New York, Toronto, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1962; Elie
Halevy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism, London, Faber & Faber Ltd., 1972;
Marshall Sahlins, Stone Age Economics, Chicago, Aldine, 1972; John McKnight,
“The professional problem” in Resurgence 2, no. 1 (March-April, 1980) and
in Institutions, 2, no. 9, September, 1979; Paula Dubeck and Zane L. Miller
(eds) Urban Professionals and the Future of the Metropolis, Port Washington, New
York, Kennicat Press, 1980; Ivan Illich, Toward a History of Needs, New York,
Pantheon, 1977, 1978; Ivan Illich, The Right to Useful Employment, London,
Marion Boyars, 1978; Robert A. Scott, The Making of Blind Men: A Study of
Adult Socialization, New York, Russell Sage Foundation, 1969, New Brunswick,
New Jersey, Transaction Books, 1981; Paul Dumouchel and Jean-Pierre Dupuy,
L’enfer des choses, Paris, Seuil, 1979; George M. Foster, “The anatomy of envy:
A study in symbolic behavior”, in Current Anthropology 13, no. 2, April 1972:
165–202; see also, by the same author, “Peasant society and the image of limited
good”, American Anthropologist, 67, no. 2, April, 1965: 293–315; R.A. Gauthier,
Magnanimité: l’ideal de la grandeur dams la philosophie paienne et dans la theologie
chretienne, Paris, Vrin, 1951; Michel Mollat, Etudes sur l’histoire de la pauvreté
(Moyen Age-XVI siecle), XVI, vol. 8, Serie “Etudes”, Paris, Publications by
the Sorbonne, 1974: 487–503; Mikkalil Bakhtine, L’oeuvre de Francois Rabelais
et la culture populaire au Moyen Age et sous la Renaissance, Paris, Gallimard, 1970.
70 Reclaiming Your Own Path

2. Trying to See with Our Own Eyes

For many decades Mexico was lauded in the international scenario as a success
story in the implementation of development strategies. In the eighties, this
story came to an unhappy end, but even then, Mexico was recognized inter-
nationally as the world champion in implementing a policy aimed at rescuing
indebted countries and protecting the international financial system.
This conventional image of Mexico seems very strange to peasants and
marginalized urbanites. In their perspective, development was a “mobilizing
myth” that threatened them. That poor majority, furthermore, soon fell into
ambiguity. At times they resist development endeavors, which ravage their
lands and their cultures directly. At other times, they abandon resistance to
enter the gates of the paradise promised by development.
This perception was turned on its head with the arrival of the so-called cri-
sis in the 1980s. The first generation of “North Americans born in Mexico”—
the label the writer and social critic Carlos Monsiváis used to allude to the
new middle classes—rapidly lost the “advances” and “achievements” they had
acquired over several years. They were no longer able to practice the rituals
of the steak religion in which they were educated, nor maintain their levels of
junk food or electronic gadget consumption. Some of the new arrivals to this
social class couldn’t even meet subsistence needs.
With the fall of oil prices, the growing national debt, and the transfor-
mation of Mexico into a maquiladora, it was finally possible for everyone to
see, touch, and smell the political corruption and environmental degradation
implicit in development.
The policies adopted during the “adjustment process” paved the way and laid
the groundwork for the creation of a new public awareness, constantly fertilized
by the fact that economic certainties became increasingly embroiled in contra-
dictions. Indeed, it does seem strange to do the opposite of what has been done
for forty years…without changing the desired outcome (achieving economic
development). Mexicans must now reduce their GNP for the sake of their future
growth. They should dismantle the industry they built during the Mexican
Miracle…to promote development by re-building it all again. They must reduce
the “effective demand” created by development, cutting salaries to create better
conditions for development. They should reduce the budget for social services
to increase their capacity to provide those services. They must increase prices to
combat inflation. For many, this policy of not-developing-to-develop is akin
to projects that pretend to successfully square the circle, but it is very effective
for deconstructing the myth.
The so-called crisis has provided more than just an opportunity to publicly
denounce development as a perverse myth. It has also been an opportunity to
regenerate the lives and hopes of the poorest. Contrary to popular belief, many
peasants and marginalized urbanites have taken this period as an excellent
 Reclaiming Your Own Path 71

opportunity to remedy the damages caused by development. They are regen-

erating their soils and their cultures, and their initiatives are flourishing in the
cracks left behind by development.
I am sure that members of The Other Economic Summit (TOES) won’t be
surprised by our gleeful contempt in the face of economic collapse, nor by our
ability to benefit from the paralysis of development. Our experience seems to
align with TOES critique of conventional policies. Two years ago, for exam-
ple, we felt supported when we read a report from the 1986 conference of
TOES and came across Edward Goldsmith’s declaration summarizing Michael
Redclift’s and Jonathon Porritt’s analysis: Environmental degradation in the
Third World is the inevitable consequence of current development policies,
and the people of the Third World are not poor, as is commonly believed,
because they are undeveloped, but rather because they have been impover-
ished by previous development because they have been displaced from their
means of subsistence by development practitioners.
We entirely agree with Redclift and Porritt up to that point. But only up
that point. What came after that inspiring comment left us as perplexed as
we were when the Dag Hammerskjöld foundation made a similar critique of
development ten years ago… to propose “another type” of development. Our
concrete experiences don’t fit the mold of prescriptions for “alternative” or
“sustainable” development, doing the same thing, but “in a different way”.
Apparently, we are condemned to a practical and theoretical limbo, given that
we share the critique of conventional wisdom by promoters of alternatives, but
don’t fit in with the framework they are building.
We have read that some members of TOES are trying to develop a coherent
theory of human needs—the means required to optimize human satisfaction.
They say they’re aiming for economic policies to focus on needs. We know
something about endeavors like that. Twelve years ago, we were impressed by
Paul Streeten’s reflections, which gave way to the ILO’s Basic Needs Approach.
Streeten examined development experiences across the world and concluded
that the success of development strategies, not their failure, was predicated on
the creation of hunger and poverty. He insisted that pursuing development
requires a special parallel strategy focused on alleviating hunger and poverty
by satisfying the basic needs of the dispossessed in developing countries.
This approach was adopted in Mexico and in other countries, albeit in a
reticent and delayed manner. One of its consequences was the Mexican Food
System, commonly referred to as SAM, an innovative strategy that for the
first time in the post-war period discarded the concept of effective demand
to quantify the population’s basic food requirements. In 1980, after adopting
some international norms regarding the identification of these needs in terms
of calories and proteins, the Mexican government officially recognized that
half the population didn’t have access to minimum food requirements. This
new strategy forced society to produce and distribute enough food to meet
72 Reclaiming Your Own Path

these needs. During its three-year lifespan, the strategy was a brilliant eco-
nomic success. Production and productivity increased. The food supply and
distribution improved. But with light, came shadow. Because this strategy
subsidized certain economic links of the supply chain, it created dependency
and scarcity. By supporting the development process, it also prompted the dis-
solution of peasant regimes of subsistence. By making improved seeds available
at attractive prices, the reserves of peasants’ local seeds were destroyed, and
traditional organic fertilization and natural soil regeneration practices were
abandoned.
When the supply of improved seeds and fertilizers was insufficient to meet
the addiction created by the strategy, peasants were confronted with a double
scarcity: a scarcity of native and improved seeds, and of chemical inputs and
natural cycles. This economic policy “focused on needs” transformed subsist-
ence activities into “satisfying needs” and into the “production of consumer
goods”, thus creating hunger, deprivation, and scarcity.
This experience made us understand the sterility of approaches focused on
“needs”, basic or not. We know through experience that we must see initi-
atives like that through a historical perspective. There is no history of needs
except for during the last two hundred years. Before the XVIII century, there
is only a scattered collection of discontinuities. In many different languages
and cultures these words have different meanings that are completely unre-
lated to the modern one. The Latin word necessitates, for example, indicates the
fatality of death, its necessity, or an unavoidable familiar relationship. Besoin,
the French word for necessity, originally referred to what modern English
calls business and both words have the same root. Needs are a modern inven-
tion. In our ejidos, the word the Spaniards used to describe our traditional
communities, we faced the threat of dissolution during the same period as
the Law for the Enclosure of the Commons in England. Based on our experi-
ences during colonization and development, when community spaces become
resources, men and women are reconstituted as well. They stop being active
members of their community spaces, full participants of the commons that they
belong to and that belongs to them. They become individuals with needs,
devoid of gender and belonging. They become a passive and dependent part of
an economy that defines their shortcomings and their rights under conditions
of scarcity—that logic premise that assume that people’s wants or needs are
unlimited, but their means are limited.
Conventional wisdom associates our current predicament with the inten-
sification of scarcity. The combination of fewer resources with growing needs
implies, almost tautologically, more scarcity. In our experience, it’s actually
the opposite. Since the developmentalists can no longer legitimate the idea
of scarcity among us, we have the opportunity to regenerate the tradition of
sufficiency. Our elders taught us to live under severe restrictions and they told
us about how they resisted the creation of scarcity when they were younger.
 Reclaiming Your Own Path 73

Throughout our lives, we have been constantly exposed, like the individuals
in industrialized countries, to the pressures of a society doomed to chronic
scarcity, full of frustrated homines oeconomici candidates. Crisis is an opportu-
nity to count our blessings. Even if our predicaments are severe, we are han-
dling the restrictions well and trying to prevent scarcity from regulating life
in our communities again.
From our perspective, scarcity is a concrete historical creation that coloniz-
ers and developmentalists tried to impose on us. Recognizing that scarcity has
a historical beginning gives us hope that it can have an end. We can oppose
its establishment in places where it hasn’t been established yet. Nonetheless,
every time I have tried to share this idea with a university audience I’ve been
met with shocked expressions, perplexed, and flustered. For example, when I
presented this idea to Paul Ekins, the director of TOES, he sympathized with
our position, but he explained that he couldn’t follow our argument about
scarcity. For me, he wrote, scarcity is an a priori condition that industrialized
society cannot renounce. He asked me if we could build a bridge between
these two modes of perception.
Our desires, hopes, and behaviors, in our way of life, don’t correspond to
what others call “needs” or to the pair of “needs and satisfiers”, which evoke
privation and scarcity. We have verbs to identify our activities, which simul-
taneously embody our desires and capacities. We oppose the mutation of these
verbs into nouns that allude to a condition (a lack, a need) and to a good or
service, which usually is a consumer good (the satisfier) linked to the market.
We are not just talking about words and perceptions: we’ve experienced this
mutation. In the name of development, our skills have been transformed into
lacks. To produce the need for education and with it the scarcity of schools,
our ways of learning and our social process of legitimation of knowledge were
first devalued and then forbidden. Our autonomous ability to deal with the
environment—similar to how René Dubos defined health—was mutilated to
generate a need for medical services, and thus, their scarcity. Our autonomous
mobility was discouraged to create the need for scarce means of locomotion:
transportation. Our learning and healing abilities, or just walking, which
express our opportunity to live satisfactory lives embodying our wants, were
permanently endangered by its mutation into lacks, envy, and frustration. In the
same way that breathing is discussed in terms of scarcity of clean uncontami-
nated air, which can now be commercialized, our dreams and abilities—which
are embodied by activities designated by verbs—are constantly endangered by
attempts to divide and dissolve us through economic relations.
The world I live in doesn’t consume calories or hospital beds. Although
many of us have learned to consume standardized meals, including junk food,
or to advocate for access to a health center that makes us sick, these demands
haven’t generally been met, even less so these days given budget cuts. This
allows us to continue defining our lives on our own terms, trying to adjust
74 Reclaiming Your Own Path

ourselves to our actual limitations. After repairing the damages caused by

development, we hope to overcome many of these restrictions to enjoy a more
comfortable lifestyle. In this respect, I want to distinguish our argument from
Marshall Sahlins’ position when he says that “human material wants are finite
and few, and technical means unchanging but on the whole adequate”, and
as a consequence “a people can enjoy an unparalleled material plenty, with a
low standard of living” (Sahlins, 1968: 86). We share with him the convic-
tion that human material wants are finite and few. The opposite idea, vener-
ated by economists, that man’s desires are many, if not infinite, never seemed
very convincing to us and we almost believed it was the byproduct of mental
illness. But that’s not our main point. We aren’t advocating for a “voluntary
simplicity”, nor are we preaching austerity, although we recognize that aus-
terity is a prerequisite for freedom. We have limited means. How can we con-
ceive of unlimited ends? We reject the dissociation between one another. We
reject the mutation of our activities, our ways of life, into fragmented entities
that the market may or may not connect, under conditions of scarcity. Based
on our experience we won’t survive if we assume the schizophrenic condition
of separating means from ends, having needs or lacks over here and things that
satisfy the needs over there, resources in one place and consumer goods in
another, in the market. We don’t want to be genderless needy people, some-
times playing the role of producers and at other times the role of consumers.
We want to continue being free men and women, acting autonomously within
our regenerated communities, our pueblos, and barrios.
With that in mind, we embrace the expression of popular self-sufficiency
used in the TOES conferences, bearing in mind that it is less than autonomy,
but still the antithesis of economic self-sufficiency, which in our perspective is
a paradoxical term. Likes TOES, we have examined the nature of work, but
we have also gone beyond the conventional perception that views it as work-
force, a factor of production, or a job. We see it as a tedious task imposed by
economic society, one that we’re trying to eliminate from our lives. We are
that “invisible sector” that is now acquiring visibility, a change that worries us
because invisibility had allowed us to survive on our own terms. We are par-
ticularly worried when a scholar or one of our friends from the world of alter-
natives describe us using the term “informal economy”, which we are not, in
an effort to make us more economically visible. Which is to say, to transform
our reality into the economic nightmare from which we are trying to escape.
All these differences between our perception and that of alternative thought
might explain why we vigorously oppose slogans like “think globally, act
locally”. As far as we know, no one can act more than locally, in the local-
ized place they find themselves in. The most global “act” I can remember
is the inauguration of the last Olympic games, where billions of individu-
als passively watched the same images on their television screens at the same
time. With regards to universal (global) thinking, we are under the impression
 Reclaiming Your Own Path 75

that industrial society imposes this as a conventional mode of thinking by

educating people to wear tinted glasses with supposedly universal meanings.
Everything is thus reduced to those tinted glasses, creating a particular type
of blindness. We’re going in the opposite direction. We’re trying to open our
eyes and to smell with our noses. This revitalized perception makes us hospita-
ble to the perceptions of others. I hope our open-minded and creative friends
at TOES are also hospitable to this argument.

Note
(*) All along this analysis, of course, we are considering that tactics is contrary to
strategy. Tactics and strategy can be the same thing in a populist discourse (which
turns hopes into promises) or an authoritarian one (that programs, shapes, or can-
cels hopes).

Bibliography
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.
Mumford, Lewis. 1964. “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics.” Tecnology and
Culture 5, no. 1 (Winter): 1–8.
Sahlins, Marshall. 1968. “Notes on the Original Affluent Society.” In Man the Hunter,
edited by R.B. Lee and I. DeVore, 85–9. New York: Aldine Publishing Company.
5
BACK TO THE TABLE

The Green Revolution and the agrarian revolutions in the North are still offered
as answers to hunger. But hunger itself became, with those and other strategies, the
best business of the twentieth century and a deep syndemic. Today, when trans-
national agribusiness owns or controls more than half of the resources to produce
food in the planet, the market is plagued with toxic food, a billion people go to bed
every night with an empty stomach and famines not seen since the Middle Age are
back. There is no lack of food in the planet, but unbearable waste and irrationality
generating all kinds of food crisis. Covid-19 has been actualizing the debate on our
ways of eating.
There is an alternative, flourishing at the grassroots. Small producers are feeding
today 70 percent of the people in the planet, while agribusiness, controlling more than
half of the food resources and causing immense destruction, feeds only 30 percent. At
the same time, urban agriculture is an existing expression of a massive initiative across
most cities in the world.
What I am presenting in this chapter is an essay first discussed in 1999, for a
forum in Mexico about food sovereignty and reformulated several times for publication
in Mexico, Peru, and Italy in the last ten years. It explores our current predicament
and the options constructed at the grassroots.

Whoever is not afraid of hunger is afraid of food.

Eduardo Galeano (1998: 54)

Everything that is eaten is an object of power.

Elías Canetti (1981: 130)

DOI: 10.4324/9781003262749-6
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We suffer hunger, once again. We suffer the absolute lack of anything to eat
or the slow agony called malnourishment, which means not eating enough or
eating what isn’t nourishing. At the 1996 National Forum on Food Sovereignty
held in Mexico City Dr. Adolfo Chávez, a famous nutritionist, shared his sus-
picions that half of the kids born in Mexico during the 1990s will never be full
men and women: they suffered irreversible damages even before birth. I’m not
sure if it’s an exaggeration. But even if his hypothesis is false, the inference reveals
a dramatic reality: a great number of Latin-Americans aren’t getting enough to
eat. Almost a billion people across the world will go to bed with an empty stom-
ach tonight. Women, girls, and boys are yet again, the most severely affected.
I don’t detail here the chronicles of the disaster, nor the memorial of the
ignominy. I don’t elaborate on the current state of things, which are still a
subject of intense debate, nor do I present a set of demands. This is not another
technical report on the “food” or “nutritional” situation in Latin America.
I’ve opted to present features of the landscape at the grassroots in the world of
the majorities, to which I belong, to present their ingenious and innovative
initiatives, despite the severity of some of their circumstances, as a perspective
that offers hope and possibility.1

Back to the Table

Rooting
The world has stopped being a dream, prophecy, or project. It has become
real. Cultural isolation is a matter of the past. There are no villages that are
not connected with the outside world: there is interlink amongst them. Inter-
action, inter-penetration, inter-dependence are all already inevitable. This
stokes the propensity for global unification and homogenization, no longer
through ideology, but rather through production: the global farm, the global
factory, the global market.
The new systems of transportation and communication create a new sense of
global belonging—a common mode of existence—that propagates the emblem
of a global village. Corporate transnationalization, what experts call the inter-
nationalization of capital, creates the illusion of full integration and of the
complete subsumption of the self into this globalized reality. This assumption
seems to be confirmed by empirical evidence: people use the same jeans and
smoke the same cigarettes (or stop smoking because of the same campaigns);
a Mexican soap opera reached unexpected audiences in Russia, and the gossip
about the English Royal family reached all of us.
Nonetheless, this description doesn’t capture what is happening among
the social majorities of the world, who are facing a growing marginalization
of “globalized” ways of life: they won’t eat at McDonald’s or check in at a
Sheraton or have a family car. The “globalized” masses will have exhausted
the planet’s resources long before that could happen.
78 Back to the Table

These majorities have begun to react. In the face of the globalization of their
marginality, they root themselves again in spaces that belong to them and that
they belong to. They localize their initiatives and give them new meaning:
instead of looking to be integrated into the globalized world, they demand
respect for what they are and have, and dedicate themselves to enriching it.
They recover their old commons, whose enclosure facilitated the birth of the
capitalist mode of production, among others.
These attitudes appear, primarily among those who managed to resist being
subjugated by developmentalists and avoided being objects of a transmogrifi-
cation into “economic men”. But these attitudes are also present among those
who integrated themselves into a middle-class condition of life: the normative
lifestyle of middle-class North America that the development enterprise trans-
formed into a universal ideal and whose “privileges” were lost due to the trans-
nationalization of the economy, which launched many people of this class into
the “informal” economy. Thus, while some swarm like a panicked mass in the
face of the increasingly narrow windows of access to the middle-class condition
they lost, others are joining forces with those who never participated in that
condition, and they mutually reinforce each other in the face of political and
sociological challenges.
Localization or relocalization, more so than globalization, could be the
defining tendency of the twenty-first century.
During the past few years, there has been a consolidation of the “globalized”
minorities, which probably make up a third of the population. Their ideas and
behaviors have been standardized and it isn’t easy to distinguish them from their
peers in industrialized societies. There aren’t major country-specific differences
in their features, except for the proportion of the national population they rep-
resent: while in Argentina they made up more than half the population during
the beginning of the century, in Bolivia and Guatemala they didn’t account for
more than 10 percent.
Among the social majorities, however, there is great heterogeneity. Beyond
their shared discontent, they barely have a common denominator. The fact
that they’ve rejected the Western project, or have chosen to interpret it differ-
ently, doesn’t imply that their civilizations share the same origins or the same
mythical systems. That being said, they are uniting through their reaction to
the same global phenomena, as I will try to show through the case of food.

Comida or Alimento?
Some time ago, I proposed the use of the word comida to refer to the world of
the majorities in Latin America, reserving the word alimento for professional,
institutional, or industrial use among the globalized minority. Procuring
comida, producing it, preparing it, cooking it, maintaining, and eating it, as
the center of daily activity: this is a commonality shared by social majorities
 Back to the Table 79

and usually exists in the reign of vernacular gender. Feeding yourself, on the
other hand, entails buying and consuming alimentos (edible objects), designed
by professionals and experts and distributed through institutions, through the
market or state, under the regime of economic sex.2
I can make this distinction in Spanish, since I can identify various differenti-
ated behaviors that correspond to both conditions across different social groups.
I can document that comida, among indigenous people and peasants, refers to a
complex relationship with the earth, which is not equivalent to the technical
production of alimentos. I can provide several examples in Latin America which
enrich the concept of comida by describing the cultural practices tied to it and
documenting the differences between these attitudes and those of a university
student in Lima or Santiago who consumes alimentos and is entirely dependent
on institutions to provide them.
This distinction can’t be made in English; since food is alimento, not comida.
Meal, nourishment, and other similar words basically mean food. In the past, Meal
was the equivalent of comida, like mahle in German, which has the same root.
But now, it only refers to the time and conditions under which alimentos are
consumed. Nourishment is a technical word—like nutrition, nutrición, nourriture,
nahrung—which refers to the content of the alimento, as defined by professionals.
It is not easy to explain why there is no word in English to refer to comida.
But perhaps it’s worth mentioning that the Anglo-Saxon world was the cul-
tural space that gave birth to the industrial mode of production that became
predominant and exclusive. In that space, vernacular activities related to food
have been continuously suppressed or eliminated. Those who tried to pre-
serve them or have recently tried to regenerate them have faced great difficul-
ties: permanent scarcity of comida has been institutionalized by the industrial
situation. The war against subsistence, which defines the capitalist mode of
production, and the enclosure of the commons, which started the war, are
particularly concentrated in the realm of comida.
As soon as I finished writing these sentences, I noticed that they contradict
a modern assumption that associates scarcity of alimentos with backwardness,
an African or Asian drama, or isolated irregularities in the industrial world,
which has naturally left scarcity behind. President Reagan maintained repeat-
edly that in a country like the United States, only the ignorant can suffer from
hunger and that it is a marginal issue anyway. In the present day, it is hard to
maintain Reagan’s level of blindness, and the hunger in growing sectors of
North American society is finally being clearly recognized, even if the preju-
dice linking scarcity with backwardness remains.
The scarcity I am mentioning here does not refer to undernourished people
or groups in the globalized minority, nor does it refer to malnourishment, a
technical term that refers to both the poor and the overfed and is grounded
in the idea of a “recommended diet” stressed by institutions, professionals,
and alternative sects. Neither am I referring to those missing food after a bad
80 Back to the Table

harvest in a peasant community, or to the depletion of food reserves in an

African country.
I’m referring to a chronic and general condition shared by the globalized
minority, in which people must be fed with alimentos and thus live in a state of
dependence on public or private institutional apparatuses, which foster perma-
nent addiction to the services they laud as grand achievements of civilization.
The globalized minority really struggles to see their own chronic lack of
comida. Although they easily recognize the insufficiencies and deficiencies of
modern alimentos, which is common knowledge, and the dubious quality of the
products sold in the market, or the unjust distribution of available food, they
are convinced that these hurdles can be overcome with technical and political
progress and consumer pressure. All without giving up what they perceive to
be the obvious benefits of the industrial system of alimento production.
The fact that industrial consumers’ desires for alimento distances them from
the capacity to autonomously produce food is seen as liberating. By completely
abandoning the “oppression” of cultivation, modern urbanites endeavor to
leave behind all of the “burdens” associated with comida. They eat out as much
as possible and enthusiastically accept the industry’s efforts to develop alimen-
tos that require as little domestic preparation as possible, often using femi-
nist arguments. Few things inspire as much fascination these days as cooking
gadgets that “save” time and effort, and the alimentos that can be prepared with
minimal effort, facilitating a shorter path between the supermarket and the
consumers’ mouths.3 Berry’s description of this situation cannot be outdone:

The food industrialists have by now persuaded millions of consumers to

prefer food that is already prepared. They will grow, deliver, and cook your
food for you and (just like your mother) beg you to eat it. That they do not
yet offer to insert it, prechewed, into our mouth is only because they have
found no profitable way to do so. We may rest assured that they would
be glad to find such a way. The ideal industrial food consumer would be
strapped to a table with a tube running from the food factory directly into
his or her stomach.
(Berry, 1990: 146)

“We do it all for you” recites a well-known publicity slogan of one corporation.
The globalized minorities seem to be convinced that the broad array
of options currently offered by the food market allows them to fully sat-
isfy their personal preferences. And although they don’t always have the
purchasing power to actualize these preferences, they’d rather overcome
challenges to acquire them than worry about directly producing and prepar-
ing their comida. If someone points out to them that “indifference curves”
and “consumer sovereignty” are unsustainable myths and shows them how
corporations dictate the consumers’ “needs”, they all assume they are the
 Back to the Table 81

exception to the rule and try to demonstrate that the general phenomenon
doesn’t apply to them. When I speak about this with urban consumers in
Río, Caracas, Buenos Aires, or Mexico City, we’re seldom able to examine
the absolute lack of comida in their lives: they’re daily consumers of the illu-
sion of abundance and they love it.
Fifty years ago, Orwell warned, “We may find in the long run that tinned
food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun” (Orwell, 1958: 90). In that
regard, will we someday be able to perceive the dispossession and deprivation
involved in the “luxury” of eating Mexican strawberries or African pineap-
ples during the European winter, or of eating “fresh” oranges year-round in
Mexico City? How does one acquire a clear awareness of what is lost? How
does one learn to see the limiting homogenization in this diverse and constant
assortment, which has nothing to do with the real diversity of eating season-
ally and locally? How can one combat or resist the inevitable fascination with
the food industry’s shiny packaging and impeccable appearance? How can one
dismantle the egalitarian illusions of a mode of production and of life that has
managed to capture the global imagination?
To synthesize, how can one recover the conception that comida cannot
be displaced, that it’s not possible to reproduce or imitate it? Alimento can be
transported 2,000 or 20,000 kilometers, but comida never leaves the place it
was born in. Ingesting alimentos from a Thai menu in London and thinking
that that is Thai comida is like imagining that visiting the zoo is the same as
going on a safari in Africa. If comida is “food in-context”, that context cannot
be defined by the color of the restaurant’s walls, the quality of the food, or
the genius of the cook—all of which might be imported like the ingredients.
The context is necessarily social, involving the entire human immersed in
comida, its heart and soul. As Barthes says, “[Comida] is more than a collection
of products that can be used in statistical or nutritional studies; it is also a “sys-
tem of communication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations, and
behavior” (Barthes, 2008: 29).

Comida as Social Fabric

Anyone visiting the Dominican Republic should not miss Monte Bonito: a
small town in the northwest of the country. My friend Erik Duus introduced
it to me. He is a Norwegian anthropologist who lived there for many years.
He was fascinated by an extensive practice of the local women called impostura,
which he studied profoundly and wrote an interesting essay about. It might
still exist even though it has been several years since he was there.
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” (Duus, 1982, in Esteva and Prakash, 1998: 60).
82 Back to the Table

My friend discovered that impostura is a matter of complex interpretations

and it roots itself in the creation of meanings in social interaction. Women
speak about impostura using expressions such as the following:

“Impostura means togetherness and that we treat each other well in the
neighborhood, that we’re friends.”
“The impostura we use here means, that for example, 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? … It’s something we
use as friends and neighbors…if there are neighbors, we like to believe
that if we have impostura we shall treat each other better.”
“To me, impostura means affection…. For example, you and 1, we have
affection for each other. You send me your comida and I will send you
mine. But no one is looking for any advantage in this … 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”.
“It’s like helping the one who can do the least. See my husband over
there was operated recently, there are days I can’t find a way to buy food,
but he ate: my neighbors brought food. It’s not out of interest or anything
like that. One day you can’t, and your neighbors provide the food.”
(Duus, 1982, in Esteva and Prakash, 1998: 61)

Duus reflects beautifully on these expressions. He thinks that giving comida

should be understood beyond the act itself, as an expression of social feelings of
unity, consideration, closeness, and gentleness. Alimento, on the other hand, is
a word immersed in the economic world, the world of scarcity. Comida alludes
to a normal practice in a context in which scarcity, as defined in the world
formulated by economists, cannot appear; and in which there are frequently
mechanisms to prevent it from appearing.
I have found many forms of impostura, of comida, in the very center of Latin
American cities. In Monte Bonito it is necessary to explain why the tradition of
impostura has been maintained; while, in the big cities, what requires explana-
tion is its appearance or, rather, its reappearance and the possibility of breaking
the discontinuity imposed by the developmentalists. The fact that there is now
comida in a big city, reveals that the society there is going beyond the era of
development, simultaneously leaving behind traditional and modern habits.

Beyond the Green Revolution and Development

Like many other previously colonized countries, Mexico attempted to follow its
own agricultural path in the first part of the twentieth century. A remarkable
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technical and research effort supported the priorities of Mexico’s social revolu-
tion, which modified the land tenure regime, forms of labor organization, class
alliances, and relations between peasants and the government. Agronomists drew
on the peasants’ millenary tradition and formed a vigorous thought collective,
which provided technical reinforcement for the general transformation effort.
The developmentalist frenzy that began in the 1940s quickly displaced
them. A new thought collective promoted the entry of other actors into the
industrial revolution banquet, to which the peasants were not invited. Based
in the Mexican Secretariat of Agriculture’s Office of Special Studies, financed
by the Rockefeller Foundation, a research project was set up in 1943 to con-
ceive in the lab the technology that would make the new model possible. The
country thus became a pioneer of the Green Revolution.
The shift in agronomic paradigms that displaced the “native” agronomists
and adopted ones from Wisconsin was but a variant of the one that occurred
a hundred years earlier in industrial societies, when the “mineral theory”
displaced the “humus theory”. Around 1850, the thought collective led by
Justus von Liebig launched the agronomic paradigms that have since dom-
inated research, at least until the genetic era, shaping the technologies that
increasingly subordinated agriculture to industry. These ideas were assumed
to be universally applicable, despite their manifest contradiction with many
local conditions. They quickly replaced the ideas of those who had shaped the
European peasant traditions through the “humus theory” 50 years earlier in
industrial Europe.
This displacement was not the result of one theory being closer to the truth
than another. The “new” ideas were accepted as true to the extent that they
better suited the interests of the emerging social actors in a specific context
that was transferred without difficulty to the United States, where the new
paradigm finally achieved in the twentieth century, its clearest technological
and industrial expression.
The uncritical importation of these ideas, assuming they were universal
scientific truths without considering their origin stamps, may contribute to
explaining the inertia in the face of many of the current agricultural disas-
ters in Latin America. The scientific and technical professionals who impose
certain types of agricultural operation are trained in a school of thought
and action whose validity they rely on to derive dignity and income. This is
how they maintain their attitudes, despite their experience and demands for
change, because they perceive that otherwise what they consider their main
endowment would vanish; and with it, the privileges and public recognition
they value so highly.
This procedure prompted a catastrophic marginalization of a wide variety
of knowledge systems.4 However, starting in the 1980s, new generations of
professionals began to boldly confront this situation. They rigorously doc-
umented the failures brought about by development and how it affected its
84 Back to the Table

supposed beneficiaries as well as documenting its novel initiatives. And they

were dazzled by the results.
Andrés Aubry, a historian who inspired and supported the research of the
Institute for Research of Anthropological Assessment for the Maya region of
Chiapas, writes:

On the date I’m writing this synthesis we are already working with the
children of the first partners of our agricultural experience; that is, with
those who were children when we started. The purpose of these pages,
then, is to systematize practices that are passing the test of a second gen-
eration of farmers. Rarely does a technical accompaniment last so long:
we saw the birth and death of plots of land, the tripling of the popu-
lation of villages, the transformation of landscapes, the emergence and
maturity of the crisis, the perpetuation of poverty in the countryside; we
witnessed the boom and the collapse of coffee, watching the enthusiasm
with which the first bushes were planted and the rage with which the
coffee plantations were destroyed with machetes.
We observed, noting down data: the climate during seventeen years;
geographic accidents that diverted rivers and modified soils; practices
that were either abandoned or survived, despite so many changes, and
new practices that were imposed upon custom. We measured our mis-
takes or ingenuity as consultants and gathered lessons: from popular
knowledge, from peasants’ flexibility despite their conservative repu-
tation, from our own experience, from what time inexorably erases or
surprisingly consecrates.
(Aubry, 1992: 11)

In the last 20 years, a new genre of research reports began to pile up on experts’
desks. Rockefeller funds that were used to finance the Green Revolution
are now spent on evaluating old agricultural practices, often receiving high
marks, thanks to the global sustainability craze. Thus, some researchers are
still trying to fit their “discoveries” into scientifically constructed pigeonholes
and to reformulate dissemination techniques to incorporate local knowledge
into “technology packages”. At the same time, a new expression of dignity has
begun to appear in the eyes of many old farmers: their wisdom is returning to
the center of the community.
They now support many young people who skillfully and carefully blend
techniques from different traditions and knowledge systems into their new
practices. It may take years for the soil to recover from the damage caused by
tractors and agrochemicals, and for the local culture and peasant way of life to
fully regenerate. However, the mere fact of starting to walk on one’s own feet
and trusting one’s own nose again is giving many farmers a renewed sense of
dignity and direction: new hope has begun to emerge on their horizon.
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A New Source of Inspiration

Grimaldo Rengifo, Julio Valladolid, and Eduardo Grillo were part of the first
generation of Peruvians of peasant origin to have access to university training.
They dedicated many years of their lives to the promotion of development in
the Peruvian countryside and experienced many of its phases and fashions:
community development, participatory development, appropriate technology,
sustainable development, and so on.
In 1987 they resigned from their brilliant professional careers and founded
the Andean Project of Peasant Technologies (Pratec). By then they shared
the conclusion that the problems they had encountered in their professional
practice stemmed from development itself. They already knew that this
package of practices, ideas, epistemologies, and ontologies of the modern
West was essentially alien to the indigenous peasantry and that, far from
bringing benefits, it was destroying it. Once freed from that ideological
and professional burden, and installed in their own niche, they began to see
differently the reality of the peasants, whose “development” they had been
trying to promote.
They discovered that their ideas and practices were not only appropriate to
their natural, social, and cultural conditions, but that they were undergoing an
intense process of transformation, full of vitality and potential. They observed
that the native natural agriculture and culture embodied a radically different
way of being in the world, of being a person, of relating to other humans and
non-humans, as well as different notions of time, space, and nature.
During its first ten years of operation, Pratec became a creative nucleus for
multiplying the regenerative capacities of Andean agriculture. Through its
workshops, practices, and publications, it continuously collected the ancestral
wisdom of Andean peasants as well as the ways in which it was enriched and
strengthened.
Eduardo Grillo says:

The Chacra [farm]—is the place where each family converses and recip-
rocates with others to which it is united by the minka or minga or ayni:
denominations that receive, in different places, the group of families
that collectively work the chacras that each one of them separately holds.
The chacra is a reinforcer for bonds of the human community; but, also,
the place of symbiosis between the human community and the sallga or
“nature” community. Based on the elements of the natural landscape:
soil, water, flora, fauna, climate, the human community “makes chacra”:
the singular chacra that is possible in that sense. No Andean farm is the
same as any other, each one has its own way of being, identity, person-
ality. That is why it is said that Andean agriculture is an agriculture of
86 Back to the Table

filigree. Finally, the chacra is also the time when the family and the
group of families with which it works collectively, perform rites of invo-
cation and of giving to the huacas. The communion of the human com-
munity with the huacas community takes place in the chacra.
(Grillo, 1993: 29)

By accompanying the peasants’ silent movement, Pratec members realized that

the knowledge they acquired at the university had little to do with Andean
reality and more to do with capitalist modernization. By deprofessionalizing
themselves, they escaped the academic disciplines’ limitations on thinking,
acting, and writing from an Andean point of view. The knowledge they now
produce is born of a prolonged and intimate interaction with the peasants and
is a collective way of knowing. They write about a world in whose creation
they are directly participating. They do not attempt to create objective knowl-
edge or design an alternative science: their knowledge is valid for specific
places and corresponds to the peasants’ interests.
For the members of Pratec, machines and “modern” techniques have been at
the service of capital and of a production pattern that in Peru, as in most of Latin
America, result in greater food imports, poisoned agriculture, phytogenetic ero-
sion, and generalized hunger for a third of the population.
All studies on peasant agriculture in Peru recognize two things: the first is
that peasant agriculture, which represents 80 percent of agricultural units, and
despite having only 15 percent of the arable land, produces more food per unit
area with its knowledge and techniques than commercial agricultural units
that use modern technology; and the second is that those who eat what they
harvest in rural areas are better fed than those who eat what they buy in the
market:

If at present the central problem in Peru is hunger, there is no reason to

perpetuate the unfair distribution of arable land in Peru, especially if it is
known that a peasantization of agriculture can relatively quickly facilitate
regaining the food sufficiency that we no longer have today. And peasant
production techniques exist in equal magnitude to the ecological and
ethnic density that we have […].
It is not a matter of inventing utopias, nor of discovering in the oral
tradition focal points around which to promote peasant mobilization to
seize power and thus achieve a harmonious combination between the
Modern West and the Andean. We have culture, the paths exist, what
we need to do is to see them and walk along one of them, so starting
there, and not the other way around, we can reciprocate on equal terms
with all the cultures of the planet.
(Rengifo and Regalado, 1991: 13)
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What Are Peasants Good For?

These kinds of endeavors, which extend throughout Latin America, enrich
soils, traditions, and cultures, and give rise to a new flourishing rooted at the
grassroots, which continues to stubbornly oppose the ruling minorities.
In February 1993, a few months before the signing of the North American
Free Trade Agreement, Mexico’s Secretary of Agriculture publicly stated that
it was his obligation to remove ten million peasants from the land to mod-
ernize Mexican agriculture and make it competitive. He confirmed that the
official goal was to halve the rural population within ten years. When asked
by a journalist what would happen to those who were expelled, he replied,
nonchalantly, that this was not his area of work. In 2000, a new Secretary of
Agriculture expanded the goal: he considered it his obligation to expel twenty
million peasants from the countryside.
The agro-industrial production complex has planned the extinction of
farmers everywhere, as well as of the soil they have tended for centuries.
The “landless” cultivation in Dutch greenhouses, where much of the vegeta-
bles sold in Europe are produced, illustrates the growing separation between
food production and agri-culture. The assumption that “there are too many
people in the countryside” has caused the largest migration to the cities in
history, and the flow continues. Some 60 percent of the world’s population
now lives in cities.
After redefining peasants as “food producers”, removing them from their
culture and placing them in the hands of the market, the agro-industrial
complex has declared them not only inefficient but superfluous: it is already
preparing to transform them into “landscape guards”, which could be useful
for the tourism industry, or even into ecological policemen, dedicated to
environmental protection. The “goal” of reducing the number of peasants
still remains.
This vision of the matter still conforms to the dominant prejudice, although
it is already showing deep fissures. The productive system perceived as an
admirable achievement of humanity and a magnificent expression of man’s
capabilities increasingly appears to be one of the greatest catastrophes of human
history. Thus, in recent years, options that combine the long experience of
industrial societies with the millenary wisdom of other peoples and cultures
have begun to flourish, such that the changes that are becoming increasingly
necessary will force the industrial world to make immense sacrifices.
Although Latin America has advanced considerably along this foolish path
(two-thirds of its population are already urban), it is still in time to learn
from the experience of others, since it still has an extensive peasant culture:
one out of every three Latin Americans is a peasant and another is the son or
daughter of a peasant. In other words, only one third belongs to the urban
culture, and the wealth of practical knowledge and life habits that the region
88 Back to the Table

still possesses makes it possible to recover sanity and adopt a different ethical
stance towards the countryside and peasants. Furthermore, doing so would
not be an immense sacrifice, but the most practical and effective way to escape
from many of the current predicaments.

Recovering Urban Appetite

Large cities are not sustainable. Like a modern plague, they have ravaged the
entire planet and continue to be a dangerous driver of the destruction of land
and cultures, but only a brutally authoritarian procedure could dismantle them
in the short term, to give them a reasonable scale. What are the options? What
can an urbanite who wishes to take ecological and social concerns seriously
do in practice? How can urban life be made sustainable? The big cities need to
be shrunk, no doubt. But what will those who stay behind do? And how can
we make displacement natural and voluntary, casting off the shadow of all Pol
Pots, in pursuit of a necessary transformation?
As a privileged expression of industrial society, urbanization imposed a
double dependence: on goods and services indispensable for survival and on
the mechanisms of access to them; in other words, dependence on the mar-
ket and on the institutions of the welfare state. The city was reconfigured
according to this logic, fragmenting it into specialized homogeneous spaces,
in which the city could fulfill the economic functions dictated by the logic
of dependence. Subsistence “on the margins” of this logic became virtually
impossible.
The process is complete in industrial societies: more than 75 percent of
their population is urban. A good part of the remainder is assimilated to the
same pattern. The invention of the “commuter” and the search for a better
“quality of life” have made it possible to halt the growth of large urban settle-
ments, but not the logic of their operation, which is still applied in the daily
life of the new homo transportandus. In the countries of the South, the process
continues: their urban population is growing at 4 percent per year. Nine of the
world’s ten most populous cities are there. In Latin America, the urban popu-
lation will soon reach and exceed that of the industrial countries.
These are deceptive phenomena, but perhaps a reverse trend has begun.
Moreover, the deceleration of the pace of apparent urbanization, already
observed in many countries, has been changing its nature.
The growth of the city has always been at the expense of the barrio. Its
diversity and multifunctional condition, tending towards self-sufficiency, was
in constant contradiction with the economic logic of urbanization. Entire bar-
rios were razed to the ground in order to replace them with specialized spaces
for: sleeping, working, buying goods and services, and interconnecting all of
this with fast roads that would allow urbanites to fulfill the functions that had
been pre-planned for them.
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But people began to react. Since urbanization in Latin America was effec-
tively fulfilling its destructive function but was unable to offer employment
opportunities or the goods and services of urbanism to its inhabitants, people
were forced to take care of their own subsistence. They called upon their rural
traditions, still fresh, to occupy the land, create settlements, and defend them-
selves. With remarkable ingenuity, they legally or illegally provided themselves
with the indispensable services, built their dwellings, and provided the spaces
that allowed them to use their skills to survive or to occupy the interstices of
economic society and profit from it. At the same time, they maintained effec-
tive interactions with their rural communities of origin to ensure the two-way
flow of people and goods.
The turbulence of recent years energized the social fabric and gave rise to a
twofold trend: the enrichment of rural settlements through the reformulation of
modern city techniques and the ruralization of the city, through the rebirth and
regeneration of the multifunctional barrio, in all its diversity. In the large urban
settlements of Latin America, the “modern” enclaves, expanded to accommo-
date the middle classes, are literally surrounded by a complex social fabric that is
inextricably linked to them; but which maintains, at the same time, a great deal
of autonomy. Although related to the market, it does not operate according to
its abstract logic of functioning.
The ruralization of cities, more so than urbanization, defines the direction
of social change in many regions of Latin America.
Wendell Berry writes:

Eating responsibly involves understanding and enacting the complex

relationship between the act of eating and the ensemble of activities that
precede it, the ones that make eating possible. And this implies partic-
ipating in food production to the extent possible: preparing one’s own
food; asking about the origins of the food one acquires and acquiring
those which are produced closest to the place one lives; learning as much
as possible about the economy and technology of industrial food produc-
tion; learning about what’s involved in the best farming and gardening;
and learning as much as possible through observation and experience
about the life histories of food species.
(Berry, 1990: 150)

In Latin American cities, recommendations of this nature often fall upon many
deaf ears. Globalized minorities will continue to line up at McDonald’s, continue
to stock up at their favorite supermarket—the shinier and more Americanized
the better—and feel comfortably immersed in modernity. To them, the choices
actively made in the barrios look provincial and nostalgic. They seem to them
like memories of “underdevelopment,” burdens they assume they have been
freeing themselves from. But they are, fortunately, a minority. These options
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are finding, in the social majorities, increasingly attentive and interested ears:
by remaking their multifunctional barrios, they are also regenerating their links
with their rural communities of origin.

Institutional Inversion
The idea of re-embedding comida into agri-culture does not refer to crops,
soils, or organic farming, although it includes all of these. It goes beyond the
regenerative agriculture movement that followed the Green Revolution and
is gaining momentum in many parts of the world. It is about the way we live.
It has nothing to do with a healthier diet or better production and consump-
tion patterns, for ecological, economic, and even political reasons. It is about
people, about the recovery of a sense of community, about the creation of new
spheres of community in any urban or rural settlement.
By enclosing the commons, modernity extracted an autonomous sphere
from society and culture: the economic sphere, and installed it at the center of
politics and ethics. Going beyond economic society implies regenerating old
commons or creating new ones, re-embedding the economy, to use Polanyi’s
expression, into society and culture, thus subordinating it again to politics and
ethics, and marginalizing it, putting it on the margin—which is precisely what
the “marginal” have been doing, or at least trying to do.
In the 1970s pigs and other animals were already treated as factory machines
in the assembly line. This was only the beginning. The factory farm was
designed based on the factory production line, but in practice it looks much
more like a concentration camp. The “wheat, livestock and durable goods com-
plexes”, as the technicians now call what they have done with agri-culture,
represent the culminating point of a sequence that suppressed particularities of
time and space to seek distance and longevity. Transnational agri-food capital
disconnected production from consumption and blurred the frontiers between
agriculture and industry, as the latter unified the former.
Extensive cattle and soybean production in the Amazon, intensive pro-
duction in Mexico, maquiladoras for canning meat on the Mexican border,
frozen hamburgers, and packaged steaks in supermarket refrigerators around
the world, or McDonald’s in Budapest and Hong Kong, are all part of the
same operation. And these interlocking “steak chains” intersect with parallel
“potato chains” and many other chains, from inputs to complex end products,
which are more or less arbitrarily considered “agricultural” (irradiated pota-
toes), “industrial” (frozen potato fries), or “services” (hot fries).
No matter how strong this structure appears before us (and the propa-
ganda invites us to view its ubiquitous Big Brother presence favorably), it
is built on fragile foundations. No elimination of trade barriers will work
the miracle of financing the international grain trade that created depend-
ence among importers and exporters, on subsidies that it will no longer be
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possible to provide. When contradictory tendencies of each “food complex”

are mixed, they combine in a way that makes their “administration” less and
less viable. The structural impossibilities of the system quickly combine with
political pressures to reconnect producers and consumers regionally, as an
expression of local ingenuity or in the name of ecologically sound land use
and health protection.
In Tlaxcala, in an area near Mexico City, farmers produced magnificent pota-
toes. After their failed attempt to break the commercial monopoly of Mexico
City to sell their produce directly, they acquired small equipment to transform
it into potato chips. Immediately confronted with an unequal struggle with the
industrial giants monopolizing that market, they decided to visit, one by one,
all the stores in the region. They offered the merchants a commission similar to
those of the giants, explained to them what the potatoes represented in the area
and informed them, gently, that they did not know what the people’s reaction
would be if they refused to sell their bags of potato chips, which were very high
quality to boot. No one dared to refuse. The giants later found themselves with
a small black area on their distribution maps. The struggle continues.
The “livestock complex”—from the Amazon or Mexico to McDonald’s—is
the supreme expression of the “food system” for the time being. In Mexico
it contributed like no other factor to the country’s ecological and cultural
destruction. Educated by the developmentalists in the “steak religion”, the mid-
dle classes became fundamentalists of its consumption. To meet their demands
or to make hamburgers and hot dogs for the United States, four-fifths of the
Mexican forests were sacrificed. In the late 1960s, the country was self-sufficient
in the production of corn and beans, staples of Mexican food, and produced
almost no sorghum for animals. Ten years later, it was importing a third of basic
foodstuffs, while it had become a major sorghum producer; thus, cows and pigs
ate more than twenty million peasants. In the eighties, the reduction of the
middle classes’ purchasing power restricted their meat consumption and turned
livestock farming into a disaster area. The government’s efforts to save it are
now preventing the establishment of the appropriate public awareness required
to avoid exports and modern irrational consumption and thus combat hunger.5
The struggle for self-sufficiency in national food production, which defined
the vanguard effort of the 1970s, has lost momentum. Some are beginning
to consider that goal irrelevant and are focusing their efforts on local and
regional autonomy. Buying the cheapest perishables in local markets, as the
poor always do, means getting the freshest and benefitting local producers and
our stomachs: seasonal fruits are regularly the lowest priced. By eliminating
grain tourism, we also reduce the energy consumption associated with food.
Only a quarter of what consumers spend on food goes to producers. If we
combine autonomous consumption with local and regional distribution, the
ratio is reversed, and we can begin to create the social environment that new
community spaces need to flourish.
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On October 30, 1997, in their “Lima Declaration”, the leaders of 200 flour
corporations stated the need to make it mandatory to fortify their products
with micronutrients. Two months later, the presidents of Mercosur (Argentina,
Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay) announced a vigorous policy focused on this.
The World Bank and the Inter-American Bank immediately endorsed these
statements. According to one expert, Latin America could be “the first region
in the developing world to control anemia” (Berg, 1998: 6).
The region has thus entered fully into the artificial micronutrients trend.
The industry that is the main cause of the current nutritional deficiency is now
trying to remedy the damage it continues to do. And governments, far from
learning from the experience, are reproducing it. Instead of promoting, for
example, decentralized food fortification, which is technically and econom-
ically feasible, they continue to support the destructive centralizing pattern,
which community-driven independent efforts must stand against.6
In contrast to that declaration, on January 22, 1999, independent civil
society organizations in Quito, Ecuador, issued a declaration rejecting the
invasion of transgenic organisms in Latin America—the area with the great-
est agricultural biodiversity on the planet and the second highest surface
area cultivated with these organisms. The declaration openly rejects genetic
manipulation and globalization. It denounces the risks of the operation and
its purely commercial motivation, noting that it is not justified in technical
or economic terms.
The declaration notes the existence of effective traditional technological
alternatives, which don’t have the risks of transgenic organisms and are com-
patible with biodiversity. While agreeing on vigorous political steps to stop
the invasion, the participants pointed out that all decisions related to the use,
management, and release of transgenic organisms must be subject to con-
sultation and informed participation of all sectors of society that might be
negatively affected, given that genetic manipulation risks unpredictable and
irreversible impacts (La Jornada del Campo, 1999: 73).
This Latin American Declaration on Transgenic Organisms is just one more
example of the initiatives that are proliferating in the region. They reflect, on
the one hand, an enlightened form of resistance to the global food system,
which has learned the lessons of the Green Revolution and is now trying to
anticipate its new manifestations. On the other hand, they show that along the
way, physical, technical, and social spaces have come together in which effec-
tive alternatives can be promoted. Everywhere, farmers are rejecting chemical
agriculture and employing methods that increase their yields while protecting
their soils and other aspects of the agroecosystem. And these are no longer
marginal experiments. To cite just one example: “Some 223,000 farmers in…
southern Brazil who use green manures and cover crops of legumes and live-
stock integration have seen yields of maize and wheat [doubled to 4.5 tonnes
per hectare]” (Pretty, 1998: 85).
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Today’s landscape of comida is certainly not a bed of roses. Some of the hard-
ships people have suffered are not acceptable to anyone. However, real men
and women in these communities can take concrete initiatives to change the
various modes of oppression they suffer from in a way that would be impossi-
ble to achieve on the scale of industrial society. In a world ruled by comida, all
predicaments, good and bad, are human in scale.
Throughout Latin America, groups interested in sustainable agriculture
and lifestyles are rediscovering their own ideals of comida and practical ways
of approaching it drawn from their own cultures and pasts. In that adventure,
the very image of deprivation, which is advertised today as the prototype of
abundance, seems monotonous and sad to them. They have begun to find it
difficult to share the conviction that spending half as much on video games as
they spend on food, even though it is less than a tenth of the family budget,
like people do in the United States, is not an achievement of civilization but a
reversible cultural loss.
They have been forced to abandon long cherished hopes, ideological reas-
surances that lifted their spirits in the midst of the day’s difficulties, and even
social struggles they were passionate about for years. But they have also man-
aged to recognize that industrial comida is an oxymoron and can begin to
rediscover, in their own contexts, many hidden, almost secret reserves and as
of yet unknown kinds of comida.

Political Mutation
The struggle for land continues to mark peasant life throughout Latin America.
Sometimes it takes the form of a relatively silent, more or less clandestine reoc-
cupation, as has been the case with peasants recovering a million hectares in
Peru over the last 20 years. At other times it is a spectacular struggle, with
irregular results, as was the case with the landless peasants of Brazil, who have
organized one of the most interesting social movements of the continent.7
In recent years, this ancient struggle has undergone a political mutation: it
has shifted to territorial defense.
The national forum Tejiendo resistencia por la defensa de nuestros territorios
[Weaving Resistance to Defend our Territories] on April 17 and 18 of 2009 in San
Pedro Apóstol-Oaxaca-México, illustrates what is happening. Representatives
from 20 or so indigenous and peasant pueblos signaled in their final declaration
that the objective of the reunion had been to collectively weave their efforts,
knowledge, and resistances in defense of their natural resources and terri-
tory, opposing “big ‘development’ projects and investment and public policies
that attack them and deepening processes of local and regional organization”
(EDUCA, 2009).
This statement, which expresses growing reservations about the “devel-
opment” enterprise, is redefining agrarian reform. In October 2009, the
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International Commission on Integral Agrarian Reform, in the framework

of the Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform promoted by Via Campesina,
stated in the Quito Declaration that they had met to discuss agrarian reform
and the defense of the territory, and that they blamed the Green Revolution
and commercial policies for the food crisis and for climate change. They
denounced how big corporations contaminated rivers and privatized access to
water, and they explained how peasants had united to fight for agrarian reform
and to defend their territories (Via Campesina, 2009).
The slogan adopted in Quito: “for agrarian reform, for the defense of land
and territory” contains an increasingly relevant conceptual shift. In addition to
the land itself, a specific form of relationship with the land is being demanded,
different from the one imposed by the public and private developers of the last
50 years. It expresses a sovereign exercise of the collective will, which does
not contain separatist impulses but openly challenges the role and authority
of governments.
The usual political form of this claim is defined as the struggle for auton-
omy, which has been updated and reformulated by Indigenous peoples,
especially since the Zapatista uprising in 1994, but is increasingly involving
many other social groups (Esteva, 2003). It has already generated de facto
institutional arrangements: a growing number of people, especially peasants,
effectively control their territory and govern themselves, in their own way
(Esteva, 2005).

Reclaiming the Commons

Since the 1980s, many peasants, urban “marginals”, and deprofessionalized
intellectuals have increasingly tried to disconnect themselves from the domi-
nant institutions and to prevent their links with these, which are still indispen-
sable, from excessively disturbing their ideas, hopes, and projects. This profound
social transformation has begun to be called the revolution of the new commons
(Illich, 1982 Esteva, 1998).
Commons is an old English word which referred to that part of the envi-
ronment which was beyond the individual’s threshold of and outside his pos-
session; but to which, nevertheless, the person has a recognized right of use,
not for the production of commodities but for the subsistence of his fellows.
Neither the wilderness nor the home is part of the commons, made up of that
part of the environment that customary law demands specific forms of com-
munity respect for. Those who fight to preserve the biosphere and those who,
rejecting a lifestyle characterized by the monopoly of commodities over activ-
ities, regain, inch by inch, the ability to exist outside the commodity regime
of scarcity, have recently begun to join in a new alliance.
The only value shared by all members of this alliance is the attempt to
recover and expand, in some way, the commons. This emerging and converging
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social reality was called the “archipelago of conviviality” by André Gorz dur-
ing one of these talks in the CIDOC in the early 1970s. A major intellectual
obstacle to the common articulation reclaiming commons is the continuing
tendency of philosophers, jurists, and social critics to confuse commons with the
public services of the industrial age. This may provide an appropriate theoret-
ical framework to examine what began to occur in the 1990s and was called
“communism” by Dyer-Witheford (2007).
The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio was the supreme consecration of the
Brundtland fad and the beginning of its end. As the gospel of “sustainable
development” was officially and universally adopted, the contradictions inher-
ent in it became evident. New initiatives also began to manifest themselves
in Rio. The team from the prestigious English magazine The Ecologist trav-
eled the world to identify and characterize them. They discovered that their
common denominator seemed to be the recovery and regeneration of the
commons. The team provided the appropriate historical frame of reference to
examine the phenomenon. It emphasized their enclosure, which marked the
beginning of industrial society and capitalism and was characteristic of every
form of predatory colonialism. They described how the dominant economic
forces of today follow the same pattern, with the concomitant destruction of
cultures and environments, and the ways in which people’s initiatives resist
enclosure and struggle to recover and regenerate their commons and to create
new ones (The Ecologist, 1993).
There is no single word that can appropriately capture the diversity of the
current social struggles in Latin America that are attempting to build, among
the social base, new forms of life and governance. In the same way that com-
mons is a generic term for a variety of social forms, community or community
spheres are formal expressions that the immense wealth of social organizations
included in these terms cannot be reduced to. The Spanish ejido is not iden-
tical to the English commons; nor to the pre-Hispanic communal regimes;
nor to the current Mexican ejido, invented in the 1917 Constitution, made a
reality in the 1930s, and reformulated since 1992. These terms are even less
applicable to contemporary novelties that have themselves begun to be called
new commons.
All these forms, some updated versions of ancient traditions and others
authentic contemporary creations, are beyond the threshold of the private but
don’t define themselves as public. They are the opposite of circulation spaces,
but they are not mere collective shelters or hunting grounds. They are not
types of property or land tenure. They are juxtapositions of men and women,
where the free encounter of ways of doing things, of speaking and living
them—art, techné—is the expression of a culture as well as an opportunity
for cultural creation.
Its precise limits (its contours, its perimeters), as well as its internal ties (its
straitjackets) are insufficiently explored territories, although they are acquiring
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increasing importance in initiatives that go beyond development (Esteva, 1991).

For two decades Ostrom has been trying to draw attention to these: her Nobel
Prize in Economics has given them greater visibility, although her arguments
and approaches may be counterproductive.

Radical Pluralism
The Zapatista proposal to build a world in which many worlds can be embraced
marks the direction and practices of many social movements. Instead of con-
tinuing to dissolve peoples and cultures to integrate everyone into a uni-
versal and uniform design, exploring forms of harmonious coexistence of
the different has become a priority. This new attitude points to a political
horizon beyond the nation-state, reformulating the meaning of democratic
struggles and recovering autonomous definitions of the good life that emerge
from autonomous centers of knowledge production. Even governments that
openly oppose the dominant paradigms, such as those of Bolivia, Ecuador, and
Venezuela, still adopt these catechisms and heretically repress the grassroots
movements that challenge them.
It does not really seem feasible that the nation-state regime will allow radical
pluralism, for the nation-state is formally constituted as a pact of homogeneous
individuals (not persons—nodes of networks of concrete relations—different
communities) that claims full sovereignty over all of them and is based on
violence (its monopoly through the government) and the universal validity
of legal norms. The constitutional reforms of Mexico, Bolivia, and Ecuador,
especially the last two, are undoubtedly advances in the right direction; but
they show their limits, given that the existing design of the nation-state does
not accept the juridical pluralism that is inherent in the recognition of cultural
plurality (Vachon, 1990).

Formal Democracy
Even in countries with the strongest democratic traditions, citizens are intim-
idated and manipulated during election campaigns and the elections them-
selves are full of defects. Many people fight for legal and institutional reform
to improve the system of representation.

Participatory Democracy
An ongoing specific struggle seeks to broaden citizen participation in pub-
lic affairs and reduce public officials’ discretionary powers, with instruments
such as popular initiative, referendum, plebiscite, revocation of mandates, par-
ticipatory budgets, social comptroller, and transparency and accountability,
among others.
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Radical Democracy
There is a serious effort to place the struggles of formal and participatory democ-
racy at the service of radical democracy (Lummis, 1996, and Calle, 2008). This
implies emphasizing what people can do for themselves to improve their living
conditions and transform their social relations, rather than focusing on social
engineering and legal and institutional reform. Radical democracy can use for-
mal democracy as a political umbrella during the transition and participatory
democracy as training for fully individualized urban sectors, but with the clear
purpose of reorganizing society from the bottom up. This struggle abandons
the obsession with the “seizure of power”, through democratic elections or the
so-called “armed route”, and instead seeks the progressive dismantling of state
machinery and the creation of new institutional arrangements (Holloway, 2002).
The recovery of verbs illustrates the meaning of buen vivir or living well. By
replacing nouns such as education, health, or housing, which outline a funda-
mental need and the consequent dependence on public or private entities to sat-
isfy it, with verbs such as learn, heal, or inhabit, personal and collective agency
is recovered, and autonomous paths of social transformation are enabled.
The practice of concerted arrangements between farmers and urban produc-
ers seems to have started in Japan. From there it spread to Germany and other
countries, but only in the United States did it become general practice. In the
last two decades, community-supported agriculture (community-shared agri-
culture in Canada) has proven to be an effective alternative to agribusiness and
the market. It is now complemented by an unprecedented boost in urban agri-
culture. “Backyard farming” is already a vigorous practice. It not only involves
the revival of old traditions and practices that not too long ago gave cities a
different look: only a century ago, Paris was exporting food. It is also a decisive
factor in community regeneration, as can be seen in many North American
cities or in Cuba, which is now the world champion in organic agriculture and
produces more than half of the alimento consumed in cities … thus beginning
to turn it back into comida.
Throughout Latin America, it is possible to find examples in all areas of daily
life of new attitudes, well rooted in their physical and cultural contexts, that
thrive within new political horizons, beyond dominant ideologies and con-
ventional patterns. Such initiatives are becoming increasingly visible in times
of crisis, as they offer creative survival options and effectively resist the meg-
aprojects still being promoted in the region. It is increasingly difficult to pin
the label of “development”, with any of its adjectives, on all these endeavors.

Vía Campesina
In 1993, a unique organization was founded in Mons, Belgium. Today it
formally brings together over 200 million peasants from 183 organizations
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in almost one hundred countries on five continents. As they say: they build
dreams, struggles, and revolutions. When commemorating twenty years of
the organization in Jakarta, the strength of its political heritage and ideolog-
ical cohesion of its conviction that the dominant model of food production
is a form of collective suicide was evident. As was the urgency of creating an
alternative.
Via Campesina introduced the notion of food sovereignty in 1996 in Rome,
during the World Food Summit of the Food and Agriculture Organization
(FAO). It was then defined as:

The power of each State to define its own agricultural and food pol-
icies in accordance with sustainable development and food security
objectives.

This implies the protection of the domestic market against surplus products
that are sold more cheaply on the international market, and against the prac-
tice of dumping (selling below production costs).
The new concept represented a break with the dominant policies and prac-
tices of markets and international institutions, which emphasize availability
of food regardless of where it is produced. In recent years, the notion of food
sovereignty has been used in another sense: the ability to define for ourselves
what we eat, and the ability to produce it ourselves, in varying proportions at
the family, community, regional, and national levels (which is linked to the
idea of self-sufficiency).
Via Campesina has adopted seven principles to achieve food sovereignty, as
it defines and practices it.

• Food as a human right: full access to sufficient culturally appropriate food

for everyone.
• Agrarian Reform: giving everyone, but especially women, full ownership,
and control over land.
• Protecting Nature: Sustainably caring for the soil, water, and seeds,
which requires secure land tenure, healthy soils, and reduced use of
agrochemicals.
• Reorganizing food commerce: to prioritize domestic consumption and
self-sufficiency. Importing food shouldn’t displace local production, nor
depress prices.
• Ending the Globalization of Hunger: It’s important to resist the actions of
multi-lateral institutions and speculative capital, which undermine food
sovereignty.
• Social Peace: All should be free from any type of violence. Food shouldn’t
be weaponized. Forced displacement and forced urbanization should not
be tolerated. Neither should repression, nor racism.
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• Democratic Control: International institutions and government should

democratize. Small peasants need to play a decisive role in decisions
that affect them. Rural women, in particular, should have the capacity
for decisive and direct action in all affairs related to food and rural life
(Windf hur and Jonsen, 2005).

Recovering the Commons

The enclosure of commons not only separated men and women from their
lands, from their means of production, but also from their social fabric of
sustenance. Those who could not be absorbed into the factories, or operate
as labor reserves, were treated as waste and many of them were forced to
emigrate.
In Latin America, enclosure had different characteristics. When it did
not enslave the population, it subordinated it to the demands of colonialism,
exploiting it without expelling it from its commons. And when the expulsion
advanced through schemes like the Green Revolution, the capacity to use it
was always limited, so that large groups of the population were left to their
own devices. Although there were constant displacements of people, they no
longer had a place to migrate to: they soon ceased to operate as a labor reserve
and became disposable human beings.
People reacted, often out of sheer survival. Some, who had managed to
resist the colonial imposition and developmentalists, began to dedicate them-
selves to the regeneration of their commons. Others, who lost them, struggled
to regain them, or created others in the countryside and in the city. In gen-
eral, they did not try to return to the condition they had before colonization
or development, since it was impossible. Thus, although they sustained their
efforts to promote their differentiated ways of life, they no longer understood
it as their destiny. Nor did they allow themselves to be carried away by the
ethos of industrial society and its arrogance in pretending to be able to control
the future. They avoided the expectations set by the principle of scarcity and
held on to hope, to pursue the full recovery of the present.
Individualization, in modern logic, implies reducing a person to the smallest
unit of abstract categories. The individual is an airline passenger, customer, stu-
dent, or worker in economic society; they are housewife or head of the house-
hold in its sexist regime; citizen or foreigner in the nation-state. Those who
were individualized in the abstract category of the disposable, of the unem-
ployable, could not resist that condition; but they still had, unlike those who
were constructed as individuals from birth and lacked a communal or social
fabric throughout their lives, the condition of concrete women and men, rooted
in the realm of gender: they were constructed in communality and still car-
ried it. They were not individuals, but persons: knots of networks of concrete
relationships.
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This allows them to regenerate and enrich their spaces to construct a con-
vivial society, which they no longer see as a futuristic utopia. Their actualiza-
tion in the present has taken the place of a future alienated by ideologies and
is beginning to bring new quality to their lives.
Destructive global forces operate today, in the name of free trade, as a
deadly tidal wave that dissolves or weakens nation-states and drives them to
seek political control in ever-larger macro-structures to moderate the blind
impulses of the market. Instead of following that impulse, which is increas-
ingly unable to contain the oceanic force of the new economic storms, people
are trying, from their commons, to return to their human-scaled political
designs and to build, within them, dikes capable of containing those forces.
Through these attempts they have discovered that these great global forces
only have concrete existence in their local incarnations and that there, in that
territory, the Davids can defeat the Goliaths.
Every day new evidence documenting their success appears, success
achieved after arduous struggles. Their failures and the new threats hanging
over them have also been documented. They face severe restrictions, and it
would be criminal to idealize the misery in which many of them live. They
have not yet created an ideal of life, but they are already living ideals of the era
that has just begun.
I conclude this essay by alluding to a challenge charged with hope, based on
the suspicion that the forces capable of overcoming it, despite its magnitude,
are already in motion. It is not about the triumph of optimism over reality. The
wave of dispossession and persecution sweeping the world and the atrocious
conditions imposed on the majority of people make any form of optimism
blind or criminal. But hope is well founded. Today, small farmers, mainly
women, produce the food for 70 percent of the world’s population; agribusi-
ness, which owns or controls more than half of the planet’s food resources,
feeds only the remaining 30 percent. The number of those who produce all or
part of their own food and continuously improve their productive capacities
is increasing every day.
It would be ridiculous to think that agribusiness corporations, with the full
backing of governments and agribusiness institutions, are giants with feet of
clay. But it is not ridiculous to recognize that David can always beat Goliath if
he fights on his own turf. And that is what is being done by a growing number
of people who are hungry or afraid to eat, as Galeano says, and who are becom-
ing increasingly aware of what the market and food trade are all about. They
have lost the illusion that someone, up there, will take care of solving the cur-
rent predicament, that governments will suddenly turn their policies around,
or that corporate leaders will have a moral epiphany that will make them do
the opposite of what they do. With their feet planted firmly in the ground, for
strict reasons of survival or in the name of high ideals, people are on the move;
they have taken matters into their own hands. That is the source of hope.
 Back to the Table 101

Notes
1 “Social majorities” and “social minorities” are two ideal types of groups of people. I
use these terms here as analytical instruments and windows to see the world, while
trying to avoid the reductionism that converts people into data points. I use them to
try to distinguish between groups of people whose lifestyles and conditions deter-
mine different modes of thinking and behaving. These ideal types are made up of
various social groups that share a common denominator. The “social minorities”
(which constitute a third of the global population) are groups from the North and
South that share relatively homogenous modern (Western) lifestyles and adopt the
paradigms of modernity as their own. They’re usually classified as the “superior”
social classes and are immersed in the “formal sector” of the economy. The “social
majority” (two-thirds of the global population) don’t have regular access to most
of the goods and services that characterize the “standard of living” of industrial
countries and they have their own definitions of a good life, molded by their own
traditions. They don’t assume that they own the Western project or they at least see
it differently. I use the first-person plural to allude to the social majorities in Latin
America, whose identities and interests I assume as my own and in whose world,
I live and work. (See Esteva and Prakash, 1998).
2 The distinction between the reign of vernacular gender and the regime of economic
sex is addressed by Illich (2008), as the transition from the former to the latter.
Illich suggests that the economic discrimination that women face wouldn’t exist if it
were not for the process whereby gender was abolished, and economic sex was con-
structed. Vernacular gender reflects the cultural association between the concrete,
material, and local conditions in which men and women live in traditional societies,
through which the tasks, spaces, times, gestures, language, and ways of perceiving
are different between the two genders. Moreover, it affirms that the first glimpses
of industrialization during the end of the eighteenth century and throughout the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries sparked the process through which vernacular
gender disappeared and economic sex appeared through the polarization of common
characteristics. He argues that this affected all humans and that it was the deciding
precondition that allowed for industrialized capitalism to establish itself definitively.
(Vega Pindado, 2004).
3 Ivan Illich coined the term “shadow work” to describe a variety of non-remuner-
ated activities imposed on people under the guise of saving them domestic work or
prompting their improvement (1981). In the same way that work contracts never
include paid time for time spent in transit from home to the factory or office—
which can be up to 50% of the time spent at work— the real cost in terms of time,
money, and effort required by the new technologies is actually much greater than
the time they saved. Salaried work and its shadow were born at the same time,
but while work continually decreases, the shadow increases, as the era of the end
of employment increases. Marx signaled that the quest to produce useful objects
leads to useless people. In reality, it’s possible that those left behind by industrial
progress might be more useful than the “productive workers”. The employment
crisis clearly points in that direction. This process is accompanied by a transmog-
rification of domestic work, which has established a new type of subservience for
women that isn’t comparable to the dignified burden they faced in the past. What’s
most concerning, as with the case of “underdevelopment”, is that this transforma-
tion is perceived as a liberation: shadow work remains obscured.
4 Some years ago, I explored this process. It was not a question of giving a monistic
or dualistic treatment to pluriformity, difference, variety, or diversity under the
assumption of radical pluralism. I tried a kind of dialogic dialogue among diverse
systems of knowledge that would replace the power games that some of them
engaged in, based on Raimón Panikkar’s hypotheses. See Esteva, 1996.
102 Back to the Table

5 Two out of every three people in the world still eat a vegetarian diet (Pimentel
et al, 1975). Although this figure has changed in recent decades and there is a great
deal of controversy about vegetarianism, to this day most of the population eats
mainly vegetables and only has access to meat or fish on special occasions. Meat
consumption is clearly concentrated in the high-income strata of the population,
and it is well known that, to combat hunger, the direct production of vegetable
protein is much more effective and viable than animal protein.
6 See Austin (1979) for a lucid reflection on the policy of “nutritional fortification”
of foodstuffs.
7 The Movemento dos trabalhadores rurais sem terra (MST), a very important
movement in Brazil and a leading force in Latin America, has been in continuous
tension with the government in a country where 1% of the population owns 46%
of the arable land. In October 2009, the powerful agribusiness sector forced the
creation of a congressional commission to investigate the MST.

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6
THE RADICAL OTHERNESS
OF THE OTHER

I was born in a multicultural world…but I could not see its nature nor how such blind-
ness hid its racist and sexist character. The obvious discrimination against my Zapotec
grandmother, in my home in Mexico City, was “normal”. I was educated in the illusion
that we all are “equally human” and belong to the same culture, but some are suffering
misery and ignorance. When I assumed that we were underdeveloped in 1949, I wanted
development for me, for my family, for my country…and of course for my grandmother,
for her to be like us.
In the late 1970s, when I was finally able to root my activity in rural and Indigenous
communities, it was impossible to keep my prejudices. Since I could not understand that
world, I started to frantically study all the social sciences. The more I studied, the less I
understood. In the 1980s, I was immersed in confusion. I was fascinated with what I was
seeing and experiencing in those communities, but I could not process in my mind those
experiences. They did not fit well in my mental framework.
Two things entirely changed my perception around 1983. First, almost unconsciously,
I began to remember some memories of my childhood. When I was a child, I visited my
grandmother in Oaxaca, and she shared with me her world. Recovering those memories
opened my eyes to a world I had resisted seeing…despite having lived in it as a child.
Remembering, with a different attitude, re-membered me at the grassroots. Almost at
the same time, I met for the first time with Ivan Illich, and I dared to finally read his
work and soon we became friends. With him, I learned what it is to fully assume the
multiplicity of cultures. Through my friend Robert Vachon, of the Intercultural Institute
of Montreal, I was able to also meet Raimón Panikkar, with whom I learned a lot about
intercultural dialogue and radical pluralism.
I was applying all those learnings to my experiences in communities, when in 1988
Fréderique Appfel-Marglin and Stephen Marglin invited me to a fascinating conference

DOI: 10.4324/9781003262749-7
 The Radical Otherness of the Other 105

on knowledge systems, which helped me to enrich my reflection and apply it to that

specific field.
In this chapter I am using some of those materials and others to illustrate what we
were trying to do in that time about what today is called decolonial thinking, which
begins once you acknowledge the radical otherness of the other.

We live in a world in which most people are continually discriminated against

and excluded in a thousand different ways. They are “the others”. At the same
time, the radical otherness of the other is continually denied: we are all the
same, we are equally humans.
In this essay, I am exploring this issue beyond the monistic or dualistic per-
ception of pluriformity, difference, variety, or diversity. To explore an inter-
cultural conflict, I am assuming radical pluralism in the terms suggested by
Raimón Panikkar:

[T]he way to handle a pluralistic conflict is not through each side try-
ing to convince the other, nor by the dialectical procedure alone, but
through a dialogical dialogue, which leads to a mutual opening to the
concern of the other, to a sharing in a common charisma, difficulty, sus-
picion, guidance, inspiration, light, ideal, or whatever higher value both
parties acknowledge and neither party controls. The dialogical dialogue
is as much art as it is knowledge, involves techne and praxis as much as
gnosis and theoria, and the difficulty is to re-enact it, even when one of
the partners refuses to enter into such relation.
(Panikkar 1979: 219)

What is presented even today as the first documented intercultural dialogue is

a solid demonstration of the lack of dialogue, and the conditions under which
the dialogical dialogue suggested by Panikkar is impossible.
In 1524 arrived at New Spain—as was then called what today is Mexico—
twelve priests belonging to the order of Saint Francis, sent by the Pope Adrian VI
and by the Emperor Charles V to convert the Indians. The priests were
convinced that conversion should only be attempted through dialogue, col-
loquy, and peaceful confrontation, inviting and attracting “like the rain and
the snow falling from heaven, without violence, not suddenly, with gentleness
and softness”. As soon as they arrived, the renowned priests started conversa-
tions with the Indian principals. A written record of those conversations was
kept. Forty years later Friar Bernardino de Sahagún, who for many years had
been trying to understand Indian thinking and culture, found that record. He
decided to give some order to the old papers and to put the text “in polished
Mexican language”, with the help of the best “Mexican scholars” he could
find. There is not much left of what Fray Bernardino did, but there is enough
to imagine what the encounter may have been like. It is the first written
106 The Radical Otherness of the Other

testimony of an attempted dialogue between Europeans and Americans, and

it is one of the first in the world between people of such different languages
and cultures. It was a dialogue among prominent persons, of both sides, which
proceeded peacefully and gently, with infinite courtesy.
In one of the pages we have of what Sahagún processed, the priests
explain in the gentlest way imaginable, in the most inspired and learned
way, that they were sent by God himself, through his vicar, and with no
other reason or motive but the salvation of the Indians’ souls. They show
how the doctrine they bring is divine word, deposited and kept in the
sacred book they have with them, and they describe in wonderful colors all
the virtues and powers of God, as well as the miseries of the devils. To the
latter they attribute the perversion of having created in the Indians the illu-
sion that they are gods. Because devils, and nothing but despicable devils,
punished by God, are the gods that the Indians adore. They are not guilty
for that, because of having had no previous access to the divine word. But
now that they have the opportunity to listen to the word of God, the time
has come for them to abandon their beliefs, for their own good and for the
salvation of their souls.
With extreme courtesy the Indians recognize the priests as divine mes-
sengers, even as the incarnation of God; they accept them as the voice and
the word of He who gives them life. They are thus confronted by God
himself. And God asks them to negate their own gods, their ancient rules of
life. What can they tell them? How to react to such an atrocious demand?
They assume themselves as learned in the divine mysteries: they are the ones
in charge of interpreting them for “the queue and the wing”—that is, the
people. But they recognize themselves as human, little people, and limited,
belonging to the earth. And these beings tell the priests, with exquisite cour-
tesy, with the best words of their language, but in all firmness (“even if we
offend you”; “Make with us whatever you want”) that they cannot take as
truth everything they are saying—even if they are the divinity itself, as they
are accepting, they are!

The gods gave command, dominion, and prestige. To them is owed life,
birth, and growth.
They have established a rule of life, transmitted from one generation to the
next,
We will not destroy the ancient rule of life,
We don’t want the gods to become angry with us, we don’t want to provoke
their fury, their anger.

There is a call for good sense, for prudence, and for wisdom:

You must not do something to your queue, to your wing [your people],
bringing disgrace to them, making them die.
 The Radical Otherness of the Other 107

A warning:

And let’s avoid that, because of this, the queue, the wing [the people] may be
aroused,
let’s not, because of that, we may become excited, we may be bewildered,
if we tell them so:
There is no longer any need to invoke, there is no longer any need to implore.

And a conclusion:

It is enough that we have left,

that we have lost, that we have been deprived, that we have been deposed
from
the mat, the seat of honor [the command].
If the command and the power have been lost, let’s preserve at least the
ancient rule of life, the road to go. nearer to the gods!

“Don’t be afraid, beloved”, answered the priests. “You should not take
for a bad omen our word, what we have said, how none of your gods
is the true god, none of those you are revering, none of those to whom
you are imploring.”
(León Portilla, 1986: 153–5)

And immediately afterwards they explained to them, copiously and with

words full of love, the Christian doctrine.
How to escape from this format? How can we, after acknowledging the
radical otherness of the other, engage in a real dialogue with him or her? To
approach that issue, I am exploring here the marginalization of a rich variety
of knowledge systems in the name of the Green Revolution. In alluding to the
relationships between traditional techniques and modern technological pack-
ages, I will carefully avoid the reduction of the knowledge systems generating
them. I will look for a dialogical dialogue among knowledge systems, as a
substitute for the power games embedded in some of them.
After 50 years of polemic, the discussion between the apologists and the
critics of the Green Revolution has become pretty nonsensical. I am not
examining the content, the impact, or the implications of the proposal and the
experience labelled as the Green Revolution. I will try to show that dialogue
in the relationship with the other, is not only possible but necessary. You can
host the other even when you are disagreeing with his/her arguments; his/her
versions. To be hospitable is not to follow the other, to adopt his/her views,
to affirm him/her, or to negate him/her. Hosting the other simply means to
open your own doors for him/her and to accept his/her existence in his/her
own place. Hospitality is the opposite of tolerance, which is just a more dis-
creet form of intolerance.
108 The Radical Otherness of the Other

The “Green Revolution” is the territory of my analysis. The positions and

versions involved are presented as I perceive them incarnated in Fidel Palafox,
Marte R. Gómez, and Efraím Hemández Xolocotzi, whose life stories I am
telling through some fragmented episodes, hoping not to betray the spirit, and
meaning of the actions and reactions I am describing.

Don Fidel’s Resistance

For more than eighty years, throughout the twentieth century, Don Fidel
Palafox worked the land. He spent half his life administering haciendas. As a
careful and patient observer of natural processes and peasant practices, he con-
stantly experimented with ways of enriching their interaction. Once he felt his
experience was mature enough to be useful for others, he started to write down
what he had learned. He was then 40 years old. Once his work was conc1u-
ded, however, he postponed its publication, despite the insistence of his friends.
Finally, in 1988, in the face of new warm pressures, he agreed to the edition.
I want to reflect on the historical sequence creating three different sets
of conditions: those fostering in Don Fidel the impulse for writing, those
creating his resistance to publishing his writings, and those finally forcing
him to accept their publication. In this way, I am building an impure model
of the transformations marginalizing one knowledge system while imposing
another, and later opening a dialogue among them.
Don Fidel’s book is a jewel of peasant wisdom, a brief encyclopedia of con-
crete knowledge. Told in simple language, through the pertinent use of local,
vermicular expressions, Don Fidel organizes and systematizes in it his life-
time’s observations and experiences. He describes carefully, with patience and
rigor, sensible agricultural practices for the region he learned to know so well.
Don Fidel uses, more than any other, the word “perfect”. He relies on an
attitude that searches for perfection in every aspect of agriculture or life. The
way he approaches the subject of forests illustrates his contention. Don Fidel
conceives of the exploitation of forests as a human way of helping to keep them
young and magnificent. Without the perfect exploitation of the forest, he says,
“[I]n time there will only be old and rotten trees”; without it, “[T]he trunk
will not generate the abundant and healthy sprouts which should come from
the well-pruned tree” (1988: 22). More than money claims Don Fidel, the land
needs “responsible men, with extensive knowledge, to work it”. “It is not a
mistake”, he insists, “to contend that the land asks for a little money and a lot
of knowledge” (1988: 50).
Don Fidel exposes explicitly some of the reasons behind his resistance to
publish. “[T]hose of us who know little”, he says with dignified and typical
peasant modesty, “resist teaching what we know to protect ourselves from
severe criticism.” In addition, he did not want to be misunderstood nor for his
book to be taken for what it is not. It is not, says Don Fidel, “an agricultural
 The Radical Otherness of the Other 109

treatise”. According to him, it cannot be: it is only “the result of the expe-
rience acquired during many years of working with the land”. And he adds:

1 will not use technical words or concepts, since 1 received my agricul-

tural knowledge not in a school but behind the yoke, preparing the land
for starting the cultivation. Given the affection 1 have always had for
this hard but sublime work, to which 1 have dedicated most of my life,
by making some trials as well as observing carefully the works done by
competent farmers, or by my elders, who were also farmers, 1 was able
to succeed in the agricultural labor in the farms which 1 had under my
control. 1 am profiting from this to give its form to this pamphlet, by
using words known by the peasants
(1988:8).

Don Fidel thinks that it is worthwhile to expose oneself to anything to help

“those who, even if they live and work in the fields, don’t know a thing about
it”. The proof that they don’t know, says Don Fidel, “is the terrible condition
of most of the land that was formerly excellent arable land” (1988: 20).
I am exploring Don Fidel’s resistance to publishing his writings. The pres-
ent confusion of personal and mercantile values, now invading every aspect of
daily life, is part of the story, In the new arrangement of the world, use values
disappear, they become old-fashioned and at the end lose their character. In
the “era of disabling professions” thus established (Illich, 1977), the profes-
sion underestimates use values and people like Don Fidel cannot publish an
agricultural treatise. But this is not enough to explain Don Fidel’s behavior.
Perhaps some other elements of the context will help to complete the picture.

Organizing Everything Wisely

Don Fidel Palafox belongs to the generation of Lázaro Cárdenas, the father of
modem Mexico. He was born just a few days before him, on 24 April 1895, in
the hacienda La Noria, in the county of Huamantla, of the estate of Tlaxcala,
a little province next to Mexico City, in the center of the country. Almost
the whole county is in a valley, in the southern portion of which appear the
foothills of the volcano La Malinche. The valley is sandy and the vegetation
scarce, but the area has good communications and is good for the cultivation
of cereals. The son of an indentured peon, Don Fidel lived in this condition,
in the hacienda where he was born, during the last years of the dictatorship of
Porfirio Díaz. He heard how the Revolution started, very near his home, in
the city of Puebla, when he was 15 years old.
Seven years later, by mysterious means that Don Fidel prefers to forget,
he appears as an administrator of the hacienda La Laguna, belonging to Don
Romárico González. He would be in that position for the next ten years.
110 The Radical Otherness of the Other

Don Fidel started his work the same year as the proclamation of the new
Political Constitution, defining the new legal order of modern Mexico. Thus
reformulated, the agrarian question, the challenge of redistributing the haci-
endas still dominating the rural landscape, was opened. During the next dec-
ade, around Don Fidel, in Tlaxcala as in many other places, there was much
ado about nothing in agrarian matters. Few peasants got land. The agrarian
policy of local governments was even more restrictive than the federal one.
True, anti-agrarian winds were blowing and resistance from the hacendados
appeared, but the factor determining that policy was the concern of the revolu-
tionary governments. In 1920 this was synthetized by President Obregón with
his usual frankness: “We should not destroy the large properties before creating
the small ones. Otherwise, we will create a productive imbalance which may
cause a period of hunger. I think we must be very cautious and must study these
problems calmly and thoroughly” (García Treviño, 1953: 48).
In accordance with this mood, the pace of the agrarian reform slowed
down as the decade proceeded, and activity was usually the result of local
dynamism. In Morelos, for example, the land of Zapata, the most important
peasant leader of the Revolution, agrarian reform proceeded fairly quickly;
in fact, it consisted of giving legal deeds to the Zapatista peasants already
occupying the land. In southern Tlaxcala, in the middle of an intense peasant
mobilization, many small plots were distributed. Where Don Fidel was, by
contrast, almost nothing happened. We have only limited information on the
peasant movements of the area, but the apparent paralysis of the peons of the
haciendas in northern Tlaxcala seems to be the consequence of impotence and
fear, rather than of passivity or lack of initiative.
In 1928 Don José Maria Cajica took Don Fidel to work on his hacienda San
Miguel in Huamantla. In 1931 Don Fidel moved to Acatzingo, Puebla, to admin-
ister the hacienda San Juan Macuila. He was found there by Don Alfredo Bretón,
who persuaded Don Fidel to come with him, back to Huamantla, to administer
his hacienda Santa Clara. Don Fidel worked there from 1938 on.
Mexico changed considerably in those ten years, and the rural landscape
took on a completely different face. Between 1935 and 1938, President
Cárdenas distributed more land than all previous revolutionary governments:
20 million hectares. The ejidos were no longer the spaces allowing the peas-
ants “to cut some wood” or “to get some water”, as President Obregón used
to say. Nor did they constitute a transitory institution for the peasants to sub-
stitute the gun for the yoke while small property was created, as Luis Cabrera
had proposed since 1912 and as many revolutionaries wanted. The ejido, as
a form of land tenure, was already established in half the arable land of the
country and became a permanent institution. In most of the ejidos the plots
were owned in common but allocated individually for the private use of the
ejidatarios, but in some places the ejidos worked collectively by ejidatarios were
also flourishing.
 The Radical Otherness of the Other 111

Hopes were also moving forward in a different direction. In 1935 Ramón

Beteta exposed the economic aspects of the Six-Year Plan (1934–1940) as follows:

We believe that Mexico finds herself in a privileged position to deter-

mine her destiny by observing the effects of the last crisis of the capi-
talistic world we think that we should be able to use the advantages of
the industrial era without having to suffer from its well-known short-
comings. We think that we should attempt to industrialize Mexico con-
sciously, intelligently avoiding the avoidable evils of industrialism, such
as urbanism, exploitation of man by man, production for sale instead of
production for the satisfaction of human needs, economic insecurity,
waste, shabby goods, and the mechanization of the workmen. We have
dreamt of a Mexico of ejidos and small industrial communities, electri-
fied, with sanitation, in which goods will be produced for the purpose of
satisfying the needs of the people; in which machinery will be employed
to relieve man from heavy toil, and not for so called over-production.
(Mosk, 1950: 58)

This is probably the best existing definition of “the road not taken”. Ten years
later Ramón Beteta, the official of the Cárdenas government presenting those
ideas in 1935, became the Minister of Finance for President Alemán, where he
brilliantly promoted urbanism, production for the market, and industrializa-
tion, ideas which have dominated official policies since then.
The educational system reflected the redefinition of hopes marking the
1930s. The goals changed drastically: the Constitution proclaimed that edu-
cation should be socialist and the Six-Year Plan promised to bring elemen-
tary education to all the peasants. Realities also changed: Peasant Regional
Schools started to appear everywhere, and cultural missions arrived in many
towns. Both modalities of education worked around three axes: agricultural
and industrial practices, the direct relationship with the communities, and the
involvement of everyone—the teachers, the students, the technicians, and the
institutions themselves—in the agrarian claims of the communities. In techni-
cal matters, the rural teachers or the agronomists of the cultural missions had
no agronomic credo to disseminate.
In El Mexe, Hidalgo, and Chamuxco, Puebla, not very far from Don Fidel’s
area, two Peasant Regional Schools were established in 1935. For the next year,
many community schools were incorporated into the “experimental circuits”
of the Regional Schools and were implementing the most diverse initiatives.
Don Fidel saw himself immersed in such a process. He perceived clearly
that those receiving land were not only real peasants or indentured peons of
the haciendas. Small merchants, artisans, or craftsmen, “who had never been
in contact with the arable land and its problems”, were also getting land. The
former, Don Fidel thought, had worked the land “physically”, but “they lacked
112 The Radical Otherness of the Other

administrative or directive knowledge” and did not know how to organize

everything wisely. The latter lacked both the “physical” experience and the
knowledge. But all of them were dedicated to exploiting their plots and to
cultivating the land mistakenly, neglecting edges and ditches, with the result
that a few years later, in the rainy season, the water runs everywhere and, since
there is no protection, carries away the organic layer of the land, leaving only
some sand that the winds carry away to the fiat fields, leaving small banks of
fertile land on the slopes, in the middle of great extensions of sandy land and,
in the fiat fields, great sand banks. This represents the terrible plague of soil
erosion that we all regret (1988: 19).
Don Fidel started to write. He was back in his place, with his people. He
thought he could be useful to them. He proceeded slowly, but with decision
and perseverance. When he accepted a post at the famous hacienda Zotoluca,
which he administered until 1951, the work was concluded. By then, however,
the country had changed again, and Don Fidel did not now dare to publish
his work.

The Agronomists Arrive

It was not so unusual that Don Fidel, an indentured peon son of an indentured
peon, became administrator of all those haciendas. The agronomists never rep-
resented a real alternative to the rural laborers when the question was how to
handle the haciendas, largely because the agronomists did not exist until the
end of the hacienda regime. This is no secret: the hacendados were not seri-
ously interested in the technical changes promised by the agronomists, nor did
these professionals seem to have the skills or knowledge to fulfill their promises
of improvement.
For most of the last century, only the peasants and the hacendados were
cultivating land in Mexico. Almost without exception, their activity was
based on a traditional knowledge system, which was not learned in school.
It was purely Indian techné, knowledge dating from past millennia transmit-
ted through differentiated cultural patterns. Or it was techné mestiza, Indian
techné exposed to the practices introduced by the Spaniards and mixed with
them. Both of them constituted an agricultural tradition, bearing a specific
knowledge system. Hierarchy born from the popular stock: the wise man of
the town, consulted for difficult decisions or in the case of calamity or predica-
ment, as well as foremen or administrators of the haciendas, who had emerged
from among the peasants, the peons.
How and when did things change? Don Efraím Hernández Xolocotzi
offered me an interesting clue:

“[T]he marginalization of traditional wisdom did not start with the

Rockefeller Foundation, in 1943, but with the creation of the National
 The Radical Otherness of the Other 113

School of Agriculture in 1854. It was based in the European educa-

tional system, to train supervisors for the haciendas, thus including only
technical careers. From then on the peasant knowledge started to be
marginalized.”1

The first formal institution dedicated to the production of agronomists, the

National School of Agriculture was founded in Mexico by a decree of President
Antonio López de Santa Ana, on 19 August 1853. It started to function in
February of the following year, in the ex-convent of San Jacinto. Twenty years
later it was languishing at the point of extinction: it had only 28 students,
because the hacendados still preferred rural laborers. The program and organi-
zation of the school militated against it: they suffered the dispersion and super-
ficiality common to almost all Mexican study plans of the time, thus reflecting
the weaknesses of the French plans they were trying to imitate. The Jesuits
clearly identified those deficiencies when they refused to adopt the pedagogic
fashions of the times, creating in the students the illusion of knowing a lot
when they were not learning much “Ex omnibus aliquid; in toto nihil: A little
of everything and nothing in substance” (Alamán, 1852: 911).
The period known as República Restaurada (1867–76) started with a firm
move to renovate the educational system, which had a major impact in technical
fields. The results, however, did not correspond to the hopes. In the case of the
National School of Agriculture, it confronted problems both of organization
and of perspective: “[T]he rich don’t want to come and the poor cannot find
a future.” The very limited expectations for employment or prestige did not
compensate for eight long years of study, with subjects like applied chemistry
and physics, botany, zoology, topography, and geometry (Cosío, 1956: 732–4).
During the dictatorship (1877–1910), the haciendas persisted in their exten-
sive exploitation of their immense endowments of natural resources, The
School was in very bad shape. Early in this century, however, because of the
observations he made during a long trip to Europe and the United States,
Lauro Viadas, then Director of the School, started an intense campaign to
publicize the agricultural backwardness of Mexico and to promote ways of
remedying it. He proposed a complete reorganization of the School to prepare
technicians to be employed by the government for promoting the transforma-
tion of Mexican agriculture. Once his plan was approved, Viadas brought to
the School European and American experts who helped in the establishment
of the first experimental fields existing in Mexico. The Revolution found
Viadas among the promoters of the agrarian reform. One of his main pro-
posals consisted of giving the land to “the best farmers”: those renting land or
coming back after working in the States, where they mastered more advanced
techniques. Viadas was not able to implement his plans fully, because of the
turmoil of the Revolution, but his ideas had enduring effects. They were car-
ried forward by one of his students, Marte R. Gómez.
114 The Radical Otherness of the Other

Marte Appears
Marte R. Gómez was 13 years old, in 1909, when he entered the National
School of Agriculture. The school was closed in May 1914, after a rebellion
involving both teachers and students, but in 1917 he graduated from the Ateneo
Ceres, which had been created to give those whose studies had been interrupted
an opportunity to conclude them.
Gómez soon acquired impeccable titles as a radical agrarist: between 1914
and 1916 he was part of the agrarian commissions organized by Emiliano
Zapata in Morelos and by Salvador Alvarado in Yucatán. After graduating,
he became assistant director of the National Agrarian Commission, where he
enacted Order 51, in which “the incompatibility between petty agriculture
and machinery” was assumed, thus postulating a kind of collectivization of the
ejidos sponsored and controlled by the government. (For many, that instruction
was the ideological embryo for the “bureaucratic-cacique dictatorship” that
has since characterized the situation in rural Mexico.)
Very early in his life Gómez acquired the twin convictions that the peas-
ants should receive the land and that they did not know how to work it. In
all the various high-level political and administrative positions he occupied,
he promoted a techno-productive revolution, parallel to the redistributing of
haciendas, which was to be implemented through scientific research and tech-
nology transfer. A phrase he pronounced in 1946, when he was at the height
of this political career, illustrates his position well: “Mexico is a country of
agriculturalists looking for both agricultural land and agriculture” (Secretaróa
de Gobernación, 1946: 189).
Don Marte left an enduring mark in the National School of Agriculture,
which he directed for two years starting in 1923. In 1925 he founded a
Regional School of Agriculture, in Tamaulipas, to support the agrarian policy
of Governor Portes Gil. By that time elementary agriculture schools were
being established in the whole country, to become centers of education, exper-
imentation, propaganda, rural organization, and agricultural credit. Marte R.
Gómez thought that his school should not be elementary: the rural population
of Tamaulipas knew well and even practiced the “agricultural techniques of
Texas”. He endowed his “intermediate” school with fields for selecting corn
seeds and experimenting with other crops and practices (Gómez, 1925: 78).
Gómez continued the promotion of his ideas when he became Minister of
Agriculture, between 1928 and 1930. He was forced to concentrate on urgent
agrarian affairs, but he was also able to deal with professional formation in
agriculture. He promoted it in many ways, such as the creation of nurseries
and pilot farms, which were the immediate antecedent of the experimental
stations which defined one of the main roads for research and extension in the
following years. He invited the Ministry, to work with him, the senior agron-
omists he knew well, but he also opened all the doors to the new generation
 The Radical Otherness of the Other 115

and supported them extensively. At the end of his term almost all the agron-
omists in Mexico had a job in one of the official institutions—this had been
one of Viadas’ dreams.
Immediately afterwards, Marte R. Gómez departed for a trip to Europe
which had an enduring impact on him: it reaffirmed his ideas about models
for agrarian and agricultural organization, which were always closer to those
followed in Denmark and Holland than to the United States, as well as his
convictions about the role of research and education for the transformation
of agriculture. These ideas matured over a long period and he tested some
of them while participating in the government of Tamaulipas, first as a sen-
ator and later as a governor (1937–40). When he again became Minister of
Agriculture, in 1940, under President Avila Camacho, his agrarist convictions
were as firm as ever, but he was convinced that the time had come for consol-
idation. The challenge was no longer on the agrarian front, but in the field of
production and particularly in technology.
For him, as for most Mexican agronomists of the time, there were no doubts
about the road to technical improvement: the priority was the transfer to the
peasants of new modern techniques, based on scientific research, professional
formation, and extension. Agronomic science should provide the models, the
instruments, and the technical creations. Appropriate academic centers should
train competent professional personnel to disseminate these techniques. The
institutions should create the conditions for the technicians to be able to per-
form their task.
Marte R. Gómez was loyal to the tradition of Lauro Viadas from the very
day he came back to the Ministry of Agriculture. He profited from the pres-
ence in Mexico of Henry Wallace, Vice-President of the United States, whom
he knew as a private entrepreneur in hybrids. Gómez tried to convince him of
the need and convenience for the United States to support Mexico in the field
of agricultural techniques. Wallace’s reaction was highly enthusiastic. Since
there was no aid agency in the American government, he looked for philan-
thropic organizations. In Mexico, the Rockefeller Foundation had already
had a successful involvement in the health field since 1918, when it had helped
the struggle against yellow fever. The Foundation showed clear interest in the
challenge: it fitted very well with its own plans for Latin America in the 1940s.
From then on, all developments proceeded in the same direction, leading
naturally to the creation of the Special Studies Bureau, in the Ministry of
Agriculture, to perform the activities that in time were filed under the label
“Green Revolution”. Neither in this operation, nor in the affair of the famous
Brazilian zebu cows which brought foot-and-mouth disease to Mexico, was
Marte R. Gómez guilty of treason of which he was unjustly accused in 1947.
The imperialism of the operation, which 1 am exploring, was the imperialism
of one knowledge system over the others, practiced in the name of science
by its personifications in Mexican and by foreign scientists to this day. It was
116 The Radical Otherness of the Other

not economic or national imperialism, as it has often been denounced for, in

connection with the Green Revolution.
At the start of his second term, Marte R. Gómez strengthened the
Agronomy Department, by encouraging the dissemination of information
and establishing the Experimental Fields Department to undertake research.
These field stations were no longer the experimental stations of the 1930s,
which, although they had used technically orthodox approaches, shared the
social commitments of the times and were, in some measure, at the service of
the peasants and the agrarian revolution. The fields now tended to be more
and more at the service of science, that is, dedicated to the production of
knowledge packages to improve the techniques of the producers.
Long before the scientific method for improving Mexican agriculture
showed its first theoretical or practical results, its predominance was well
established. Such was the force of the faith underlying it. It was, literally,
pre-dominant, based on prejudices. Well before pondering alterative and fea-
sible technical methods for reaching the desired results, even before includ-
ing in the analysis any ethical or social considerations, the final sentence was
pronounced.
In fact, no possible evaluation of the specific contributions of the Mexican
system of research, teaching, and extension up to 1940 could validly support
the decisions taken in that decade, which reformed, widened, and instituted
it as the main and only legitimate source of knowledge, and the fundamen-
tal purveyor of ideas for formulating policies and implementing public and
private plans and programs. The decisions taken were based on a series of
ideological premises that were almost never exposed to analysis, being, as
they were, established in the perception as a priori categories of conscious-
ness. Those premises still support the dominant knowledge system: among
them, particular1y, the conviction that so-called scientific research is the
only legitimate and acceptable source of knowledge and that only by starting
with it, through teaching and extension, is it possible to improve agricul-
tural practices.

Learning to Learn
In Mexico the critique of the predominant approach and the denouncing of
its blinkers are incarnated magnificently in the life and works of a prominent
native of Tlaxcala, born in 1913 in the village of San Bemabé, a few kilom-
eters from the area in which Don Fidel worked his whole life. When Marte
R. Gómez had just resumed from Europe, this man was ending his training as
an agricultural technician in the United States. He consolidated his studies in
agricultural sciences at Cowell University (1934–8). In 1939 he inaugurated
his brand-new diplomas in the job of assistant to the Regional Director of the
official rural bank in Villahermosa, Tabasco. He was then 27 years old.
 The Radical Otherness of the Other 117

In addition to his regular professional degrees from Long Island, Cornell,

and Harvard, Don Efraím Hemández Xolocotzi has received honorary doc-
torate degrees from various academic institutions, as well as national and
international prizes of many kinds. He has published several books and more
than a hundred essays and monographs. A member of 14 scientific societies, he
has presided over two of them. From time to time, he receives ardent homages
from Presidents of Mexico, Ministers of Agriculture, national or international
academic or research centers, or professional organizations connected with his
activities. All this dramatizes, to an extreme, the incredible marginalization
of his ideas and works, which are not taken seriously by those who formulate
or implement public policies or by those who orient and control academic
activities. The niches of education and research that he had succeeded in con-
structing through tenacity, prestige, and affection tend to operate in the form
of ghettos, as untouchable as they are isolated. He is always invited to debates,
seminars, and congresses as a necessary part of the analytical spectrum. His
absence is thus emphasized: through indifference or omission—the perfect
forms of intolerance—or even worse, through the offence of the fake incor-
poration, of a distorting synthesis, he is marginalized in the very places and
circumstances where he seems to be appropriately recognized.
Since the 1920s, the model for the creation of Mexican agronomists inc1u-
ded, almost without exception, a postgraduate degree from a foreign country,
preferably from the United States. As shown above, Don Efraím is not lacking
in diplomas: he has plenty to spare. But his path followed, in reality, the direc-
tion opposite to the conventional direction. Born in a rural school, where his
mother was the teacher, he completed all his studies—from elementary school
on—in the United States. The original attraction of the land should not have
been so great: as a child and adolescent he dreamed of studying other subjects.
He began to be interested in agriculture when he visited his native village of
San Bemabé, at the age of 19. From then on, he never abandoned this field.
The first thing he learned, upon his return to Mexico in 1938, was the
value of informal networks formed in the school to get a job in a country like
México. No contacts, no job. It took him one year to find a job. In the time
of Cárdenas, a regional director of the rural bank fulfilled the function of
organizing credit and marketing, as well as the ejido itself, and also of giving
technical assistance to the ejidatarios. For the young newcomer, such a task
posed quite a challenge:

“Fortunately”, remembers don Efraím, “I had the idea of leaving the

running of the cultivation efforts we promoted to the experienced farm-
ers, as almost no-one in the bank seemed to know how to develop these
efforts technically. Curiously enough, I came to the conclusion that the
experienced farmers were the ones who could best direct the works.”
(Hemández, 1984: 208)
118 The Radical Otherness of the Other

In 1942 Don Efraím had to face the frustrating experience of having been
hired to open a new experimental field—of the kind being created by Don
Marte—for which finance never arrived. He was still floating in that bureau-
cratic limbo when he was named as part of a Mexican-American commis-
sion to study and promote the cultivation of castor vine. The program failed
completely when pests invaded the promoted cultivations, but this allowed
Don Efraím to get to know firsthand a good portion of the country and to
meet many farmers. That experience was extended when the Special Studies
Bureau hired him to collect seeds. Don Marte R. Gómez approved his desig-
nation personally, and established a condition, illustrating very well his own
involvement in the activities of research and education: the condition was that
he must accept a job teaching botany in the School of Agriculture when the
person in charge of the subject decided to retire. Even in the middle of the
turmoil of the final year of his term, Don Marte found time to put agricultural
teaching on the right track and to leave the research systems well established.
During his postgraduate studies, in 1947–8, Don Efraím took a glance at
the latest advances in agricultural techniques and confirmed his old feeling that
the American model was not applicable in Mexico. This view, as well as his
continual insistence of the need to give a socioeconomic context to agricultural
research, seriously affected his relationship with Taboada and Limón, the two
pioneers who created the Department of Experimental Fields and headed the
Mexican groups in charge of research. He was never able to reach an understand-
ing with them. For him, they were too rigidly bound to a foreign model, both
in conceiving and in implementing research. Those in the field had to follow
strictly the instructions handed down from the center, often based on blackboard
schemes, such as the hybrids constructed mathematically by Taboada.
The Special Studies Bureau did not have the budget limitations or the
bureaucratic ties of the Department of Experimental Fields, nor the blinkers
of Taboada and Limón, but it did have its own dogmatic biases. Don Efraím
suffered them firsthand. He was hired by the Bureau to study alternative crops
around Tlahualilo, Durango, an arid zone with some irrigation, where the
reduction of the price of cotton was affecting the main crop. Don Efraím stud-
ied all the options suggested by the Bureau, but he also explored the idea of
breeding goats, suggested by local peasants. He found that, in the area, a par-
ticular grass called Russian thistle grew easily and in abundance. It is resistant
to salts, requires neither irrigation nor special care, and is a highly nutritive
food for goats. In the end, Don Efraím suggested taking that option. As a result,
he lost his job. Following previous decisions, supported by generous financial
appropriations, the peasants were induced to breed cattle, feeding them with
irrigated crops. The project finally failed. The incident is a good illustration of
bureaucratic stubbornness. What worried Don Efraím most, and worries me in
this work, is not bureaucracy but stubbornness, the fact that even after elimi-
nating the bureaucratic ingredient the stubbornness may persist.
 The Radical Otherness of the Other 119

Having been designed for the hacendados, although they never paid much
attention to it, after the Revolution, the National School of Agriculture was
left at the service of the agrarian reform. For Don Efraím, however, “the lack
of support continued to be the same and peasant knowledge continued to be
seen as something useless and worthless”. Things did not change much dur-
ing Cárdenas’s time, because the “researchers fell in the same trap, convinced
that the problem was technological and that a modernizing push would be
enough”. According to Don Efraím, they were perhaps right in technical or
economic terms, given the size of the population and the prevailing condi-
tions in rural Mexico at that time: a technical change could bring about an
increase in production capable of assuring the national food supply. But they
were never right in social terms, given the condition of all peasants. This was
definitely Don Efraím’s main objection in the 1940s, when the winds of the
Green Revolution began to blow. Before any ecological concern, due to seed
destruction or environmental damage, which only emerged in the following
decade, it was the social question that worried him, the fact that the techno-
logical proposal excluded the situation and prospects of most peasants from
the analysis.
Don Efraím acknowledges that the Special Studies Bureau carried out the
socioeconomic studies that Taboada and Limón refused to do. But those stud-
ies did not focus on finding out the peasants’ situation or examining their
opportunities for transformation within their own contexts; they just wanted
to “discover how the peasant could be induced to adopt the “modern” tech-
niques in the shortest time possible” (I984: 208). Don Efraím, by contrast, was
considering the peasant as a thoughtful being, who should be listened to:

It is not a question of just telling the peasant: “Look, you can do some-
thing like this”, but a process of collaboration in the solution of the prob-
lem, which in the first place should be defined and clarified by both, so
that both can be clear. One thinks: “I’ve got it”. But there is a need for
understanding so that the peasant may also say: “Well, you see it that way,
but you have not seen this or that”, and so on and so forth. Then, as we
have said, we want to understand the mechanism for achieving a collab-
orative effort between professional technicians and peasants in a common
solution for a specific area. That is, in my view, a work of divulgation. On
the other hand, I do not believe that this is the problem. The problem is:
why do we not get the results we expect? This is what generally happens.
(Hernández, 1984: 217)

All these expressions may seem familiar to those involved with rural work.
They seem to define an approach presently incorporated into conventional
wisdom. When presenting the Nobel Prize to Norman Borlaug, the presi-
dent of the Norwegian Parliament recalled that he was “a great admirer of
120 The Radical Otherness of the Other

the peasant” and he claimed, among other things, that “although the peasant
farmer may be illiterate, he can figure” (sic) (1970: 8). In his address after
receiving the Prize, Borlaug himself explained how all factors limiting pro-
duction were studied by an interdisciplinary team; how a system was organized
“to train a new generation of Mexican scientists” in the research techniques;
how the best were sent abroad for post• graduate studies, “in preparation for
positions of leadership in Mexican agriculture”, and how the research results
were put into practice: Farm demonstrations of new varieties and technology
were made by the research scientists, who had developed them. Indeed, the
revolution of wheat production in Mexico was accomplished before the exten-
sion service carne into being. This forced the research scientists themselves to
consider the obstacles to production that confronted the farmers. The same
philosophy and tactic were used effectively to bring researchers in contact
with the farmers’ problems in the early years of the wheat improvement pro-
grams in India and West Pakistan. Later, however, the extension services were
brought into the production programs in both countries (1970: 23–4).
The theoretical and practical principle of “listening to the peasant” is today
almost banal. His psychology and sociology are studied exhaustively, the bet-
ter to deal with him and to facilitate his participation. But 1 want to emphasize
the differences of perception and approach involved here. Don Efraím and
Borlaug appear to be doing the same thing when they are doing the opposite.
Don Efraím’s researcher knows he does not know, or at least that he does
not know everything. Through a dialogue with the peasant, he tries to pro-
duce new specific knowledge, which did not exist before the dialogue. When
the peasant says: “You haven’t noticed this or that”, he is not complaining
about the lack of accuracy in the observations; he is rather revealing differ-
ences in perception, in knowledge systems. He sees what the researcher did
not see, because he has a different field of observation. Don Efraím’s researcher
explores with the peasant, in order that they should find together specific solu-
tions for specific problems, jointly defined. Borlaug’s researcher expects com-
plementary information from the peasant, “field information”, which he gets
through the appropriate method. That information will allow him to identify
the problem technically. Afterwards he will persuade the peasant, through
another method, to apply the prefabricated solution that Borlaug will pull out
from his bag or produce in his laboratory.
Don Efraím’s researcher had old-fashioned qualities which have now fallen
into disuse: “perhaps those identifying the naturalists of the past, who looked
for their knowledge with curiosity, tenacity, and inexhaustible enthusiasm”
(Hernández, 1970: 20). For Don Efraím, for example, “ethnobotanic explora-
tion is an art based in several scientific disciplines … [that] should constitute
the intellectual and material bridge between the Indian agriculturalist and the
farmer, the agronomist, the ethnobotanist, the biochemist, the geneticist, and
the plant geneticist” (Hernández, 1970: 21).
 The Radical Otherness of the Other 121

Borlaug’s researcher is not an artist, but a militant soldier, rigidly instructed

to participate, as a leader, in the confrontation between two contending forces:
“the scientific power of food production and the biological power of human
reproduction” (1970: 10). The “vital scientific leadership” of production will
not only increase the food supply and protect it against physical and biological
catastrophes, but in addition it will “disseminate the benefits of science to all
mankind in the shortest possible time and at a minimum cost” (1970: 25).
Don Efraím disliked the foregoing when he read this paper. He felt that it
was unfair to Borlaug. “Borlaug was a great agronomist and a great scientist”,
he told me. “Through his personal commitment and hard work, he became
a model for many Mexican scientists, carefully formed by him.” Don Efraím
is right. Borlaug’s personal qualities should be explicitly recognized. But the
very core of the problem lies here: I cannot suppress the paragraph. The power
dimension of Borlaug’s knowledge system transforms him into a warrior for
the implementation of his scientific or technological discoveries. And he is
pretty dogmatic about imposing the changes scientifically diagnosed. Don
Efraím comments that Borlaug was fully aware of the social question; but “he
assumed it was something separate from his own work”. In fact, “he thought
that his work gave ten years to the politicians, to fix the social question”.
For Don Efraím, it was not his fault that they wasted that opportunity. This
is precisely the point here: the social and technological questions cannot be
separated. The life and works of Don Efraím may be seen as a permanent
commitment to put ethics and culture at the center of society, now occupied
by economy and technology.
After several decades of respectfully studying traditional agricultural tech-
nology, Don Efraím has identified, together with a prodigious store of knowl-
edge, an agricultural art that cannot be learned in a formal school. The manual
of the “venerable and learned Fidel Palafox” seemed to him a magnificent
illustration of the process of creation of traditional technology in agriculture,
clearly showing its value in rain-fed land. For him, Don Fidel’s work identifies
critical problems of both traditional and modern agriculture and reveals some
of the limitations of traditional technology, especially for the verification of
the knowledge obtained (Palafox, 1988: 5–6).
In mid-1945 Don Efraím was part of a research group studying agricultural
practices in an area of the state of Tabasco. During his research, he found an
oral calendar and map used to identify the low areas that flooded in spring,
to plan their planting. In these areas they planted in March and harvested in
June, using varieties of early maize and rice. This method allowed the har-
vesting of two tons of maize and beans per ha. annually, in some 6,000 ha.,
without using fertilizers or pesticides and harvesting by hand—a difficult task
but suited to the soil conditions. Developmentalists ignored all this to imple-
ment their decision to avoid flooding in the area by constructing canals and a
dam. As a result, the subterranean water level dropped, creating the need for
122 The Radical Otherness of the Other

irrigation; in addition, the lime level in the soil (previously brought with the
floods) was reduced, thus making the use of fertilizers indispensable. It began
to be impossible to plant rain-fed crops. According to the scientific-technical
criteria of the time, development plans for the area later required its deforesta-
tion: in the first year, machines razed 84,000 ha. of forest to the ground.
In 1955 Don Efraím was invited to comment on what the developmental-
ists were doing. He criticized the inexperience of the technical experts who
were participating in the project. He made them see that the traditional slash-
and-burn technique could be much more effective for clearing land, if clearing
was what was necessary. He showed them the negative consequences of the
forced collectivization of ejidos. These and other observations did not serve for
much. The moment arrived when there were more government employees
than farmers working on the project, but even then, the plans were not prop-
erly implemented. Their machines could not harvest the crops due to the soil
conditions. The dependence on fertilizers and irrigation ended up being as
expensive as it was useless. And the peasants were turned into passive observers
of a mechanized agricultural process, in which their only participation could
be to carry bags of fertilizers to the land. The project, which could be studied
now with an archaeological perspective to explore the ecological, social, and
productive ruins left behind, is a typical case of techno-bureaucratic clumsi-
ness. It also illustrates, in classic form, the marginalization of one system of
knowledge by another.
For several decades Don Efraím has worked from within a system of
research and education profoundly alien to him. He has succeeded in main-
taining a tension of dialogue that defines his very life. He has acted as an
intellectual bridge between the peasants, with whom he learns constantly,
and the scientists who claim to teach them. He masters the technique and
formalities of what today is called science, but he has not fallen into the temp-
tation of reducing the traditional technique-which he knows as few do, to
its scientific terms. He has resisted this “idol of the human mind” (Shanin,
1986: 307), conscious that simplification, necessary for any analytic effort and
for the pedagogic process in the transmission of knowledge, requires “eternal
vigilance” to avoid falling prisoner to the instruments of our work, to the
techniques that we design. For Shanin, reductionism is the most serious blow
inflicted upon itself by modern historical understanding. For Don Efraím,
if I have understood him correctly, reductionism is the core problem of the
Green Revolution, of the agronomic sciences in general, and of the systems
of research, education, and extension in agriculture. He is convinced that
Mexican research follows the pattern adopted by the Americans around the
year 1880—the land grant college system. He thinks that Mexican education,
according with the 1946 Law of Agricultural Education—another creation of
Don Marte—is adjusted to a European, basically French, scheme. Far from
being universal patterns, as is assumed due to their packaging as science (under
 The Radical Otherness of the Other 123

science’s universalist pretension) they are dated and localized approaches and
schemes. To work in a different context, a clear detachment from them is in
order. It is there, precisely at this threshold, that Don Efraím stands. That is
the theme of my exploration in this work; it is what he illustrates, for me, with
his life. But I feel we need to cross that threshold, to look into what appears
beyond it, on the other side.
Don Marte used to say,

“Science is not imported to a country as Scottish cod or olives from

Seville; science must be predigested; that is, it must be learned by
nationals who have a national intellectual preparation and a complete
knowledge of the environment, but also the adapting capacity to absorb
the best from the most advanced environment to which they are sent to
prepare themselves.”
( Jiménez, 1984: 240)

It is clearly paradoxical that a man without “national intellectual preparation”

or “complete knowledge of the environment”, such as Don Efraím, a man
who, on the contrary, was trained almost completely in the United States,
should have ended up being “the man of destiny” to “predigest” the science
that he learned and to put it in its place. In contrast, the system promoted
by Don Marte tends to operate like a shopping mall, controlled by manag-
ers, stock-keepers, and transit agents, who dutifully take care of the “pack-
ages of knowledge” that are produced and stored in the factories of diplomas,
papers, monographs, and frustrations into which all our centers of agricultural
research and education have been transmogrified. Don Efraím has tried to
keep open the dialogue between the two worlds that he knows so well. He has
felt it to be the path for creative rupture, to create a less sterile and harmful
option. But he has not yet had much success.

Don Fidel’s silence

How to dare, in the setting prevailing from 1940 on, to publish the Manual?
The peasant was no longer a source of knowledge. The careful observation of
natural phenomena and the trial-and-error method for generating knowledge,
as well as the art of carefully, lovingly, and efficiently applying the agricultural
practices learned, had been discarded. In the decades of 1940 and 1950, with
his Manual in hand, Don Fidel was left exposed—along with all his friends—
to the new wisdom arriving from the institutions and through the experts. His
own wisdom was transmogrified into ignorance. His abilities were converted
into deficiencies. He lacked the formal knowledge now required to practice
agriculture. Around him, the peasants were less and less capable of directing
their activities on their own, in their own plots. Public and private experts
124 The Radical Otherness of the Other

were now in charge, and the moment arrived when the peasants stopped being
involved heart and soul in their activities: the soul had to go somewhere else.
None of the damages attributed to the now bulky accounts of the Green
Revolution are comparable to the disvalue it caused. If technologies must be
appreciated for their meaning and not their content, as Ashis Nandy wants,
the Green Revolution should be evaluated for its contribution to the rooting
of economic values in rural reality. And to establish economic value requires
the devaluing of all other forms of existence and social interaction (Illich,
1978). This devaluing transmogrifies aptitudes into deficiencies, commons
into resources, men and women into marketable labor, tradition into a bur-
den, wisdom into ignorance, autonomy into dependence. It transmogrifies
autonomous activities (incarnating desires, skills, hopes, and interactions with
others and with the environment) into needs whose satisfaction requires the
intermediation of the market.
Don Fidel continued to trust his experience, but he no longer dared share
it with others. Sometimes even his own confidence was weakened in the face
of experts’ opinions, The self-sufficient regimes that he knew so well started
to fade away little by little. The peasants became completely dependent on the
market and its institutions. Scarcity emerged, even in the formerly abundant
valley of Huamantla, and began to dominate in all spheres of life. Don Fidel
also saw the progressive destruction of the physical and cultural spaces of the
communities. He was hurt by rural emigration, and quickly perceived what
the academics discovered much later: after the first dazzling years, when the
peasants went to the cities attracted by the prospects of a good job or by urban
fascination, the migrants abandoned their community because they could no
longer manage to continue living in it. The peasants were turned into the
cast-offs of development, and Don Fidel himself was turned into a kind of
relic of the past, an archaeological curiosity looked upon by the others with a
feeling of nostalgia which also began to invade him. Why publish the book?
Children were no longer interested in his stories, stuck as they were to the
television screen. The youth were just hunting for an opportunity to abandon
the rural world. The old had lost all hope. No, Don Fidel was not moved to
publish his Manual. Who would dare blame him?

The Consequences of Simplification

Rustum Roy has observed that for almost half a century the Americans have
been convinced that their science allowed them to win the war and impose
hegemony over the planet. This conviction filled the curricula of their edu-
cational system with “science”, thus sacrificing technological education. Only
one out of every thousand Americans knows that Japan surrendered before the
bomb was dropped on her territory, and that “it had surrendered because of
superior U.S. munitions production technology”. Less than one in a thousand
 The Radical Otherness of the Other 125

know that all the modern physics needed for the bomb had all been done in
Germany, and that “if science conferred any advantage, Germany should have
won hands down”. The very brilliant scientists—physicists and chemists—
who had been practicing amateur engineering at Los Alamos retuned to the
civil sector convinced that it was “American science (especially nuclear phys-
ics) which had won the war”. In the euphoria of victory, says Roy, “[N]o one
even bothered to challenge this utterly preposterous claim and the conviction
remained firmly entrenched among the Americans” (Roy, 1990: 3).
The merchandise called Green Revolution embraces an interpretation just
as foolish and harmful. All the science necessary for the Green Revolution has
been known in Mexico since the beginning of the century: many of the exper-
iments carried out in experimental stations in the 1930s were based on it. Like
the physics necessary for the bomb, the agronomy of the Green Revolution
was developed in Germany. But the transfer was incomplete: Marte R. Gómez
would have observed that it was not well digested. The American scientists, like
the Mexicans, did not appreciate the very serious reservations expressed by Von
Leibig in the last part of his life regarding the sustainability of an agriculture
based on his ideas. American agricultural science, on the other hand, had little
to do with the impressive advances in US agriculture in the first half of this
century. Those advances were, like the bomb, a techno-economic creation.
Lester Brown, one of the scientists who carne with the mission sent to
Mexico after the conversations between Marte R. Gómez and Henry Wallace,
later affirmed that the mission was meant to export to Mexico the American
agricultural revolution. The official report of the mission, for its part, iden-
tified certain specific technical problems for the solution of which American
co-operation could be offered. It excluded, however, the idea of co-operating
in the organization of an extension service—one of the subjects that most
interested the Mexicans—because there were few things to disseminate. Their
advice was to begin with a top-down approach, concentrating on research for
tackling the technical problems previously identified.
The mission was an impossible mission: revolutions cannot be exported.
In the field of agriculture, the Americans discovered this before anyone
else: the technical revolution of Jethro Tull, in the eighteenth century, did not
operate in America as it did in Europe. The force of rainfall, much higher in
America, created an erosion problem there that is today almost uncontrollable—
four billion tons of topsoil are washed away each year.
But the “American agricultural revolution” was a real fact, awakening great
interest in Mexico and other countries. To export it was impossible, but the
experience could have been taken advantage of. The history of agriculture in
all parts of the world is but the continual circulation of innovations and the
emergence of new ones through the extrapolation of experiments. Man has
been acting thus since the Neolithic era. A program of co-operation based
on the sensible and careful use of the American experiences applicable in the
126 The Radical Otherness of the Other

Mexican context would clearly have made sense and undoubtedly been of
use. But that opportunity was changed in the hands of those who tried to
make good use of it. Far from exporting the American agricultural revo-
lution to Mexico, as some proposed, or to apply modestly some lessons of
the American experience to Mexican agriculture, as seemed pertinent and
feasible, it was the monopolistic and pernicious dominance of one system of
knowledge over another that was exported to Mexico. The operation clearly
reduced the technical and social options of the country, introduced rigid-
ity and harmful simplifications in its productive structure and in its system
of agricultural research and education, dangerously constrained the techno-
cultural horizon of Mexico in midfield, and perniciously reduced the biolog-
ical, technical, and cultural diversity of the country, with grave damage and
risk to its ecology and society.
Norman Borlaug is the epitome of the transformation that took place. He
is also its most passionate defender. He affirms:

“1 am impatient. I do not accept the need for slow change and evolution
to improve the agriculture and food production of the emerging coun-
tries. I advocate instead a ‘yield kick- off’ or a ‘yield blast-off’. There
is no time to be lost, considering the magnitude of the world food and
population problem.”
(1970: 3)

Borlaug seeks an explosion. He wanted to share his prize with “the army of
hunger fighters”. His metaphors are warlike, because he considers himself to
be the commander in a great confrontation between “scientific and biologi-
cal powers”. He believes that he is winning the war: “Man has made amaz-
ing progress recently in his potential mastery of these two contending powers
thanks to ‘science, invention and technology’” (1970: 10). Despite all his critics,
Borlaug knows “of no alternative to the path that we have taken” (1987: 22).
When the expression Green Revolution was coined in 1968 by Dr. William
S. Gaud of the US Agency for International Development, it achieved imme-
diate and universal acceptance. The magic of the miracle seeds was already in
operation. By packaging it as science, it was possible to stress and consecrate the
universal character of the miracle: its strength and its tangibility. And Borlaug
became a publicist of such perverted perception. He never saw himself as a tech-
nician, as a plant geneticist: he is a man of ideals and action, but he sees himself,
first and foremost, as a scientist. He has never stopped insisting that the main
contribution of the Green Revolution is to have initiated a new era in which
the principles of modern science are successfully applied “to develop indigenous
technologies appropriate to the conditions of local farmers” (1987: 18). He is no
doubt a first-class scientific researcher, but the era he helped to initiate prevents
to this day the emergence of what he thought he was propitiating.
 The Radical Otherness of the Other 127

Apparently, the promoters of the whole experience were not fully aware of
the dangers of simplifying, in analytical exercises and research efforts, without
a clear notion of the limits and scope of such an operation. What resulted was a
dangerous form of reductionism: first, by abstracting certain aspects from their
context (after considering them not pertinent or beyond the researchers’ respon-
sibility); and second, by attributing a causal role to one disarticulated fragment
of a whole, in consequences that can only result from the overall dynamics.
Human reality is more diverse, more complex, and more contradictory than is
assumed in this case. It is necessary to recall, at each step, the ethical ends and
social contexts of the theoretical and analytical efforts—especially when they
are given a relation to science. “We should be on our guard”, wrote Einstein in
1951, “not to overestimate science and scientific method when it is a question of
human problems” (Shanin, 1986: 315). Don Efraím always noted the absence of
an ethical element in the theory and practice of the Green Revolution; that was
the basic source of his dissatisfaction with the experiment.
To attribute to science a triumph of a technological nature and to ignore
its social contexts may be viewed, at this point, as “egregious errors” (Roy,
1990: 1). They are, of course, but they are also something worse: they conceal
a simplified vision of the world that lacks both realism and precision. The
impact of this vision on reality, once translated into policies and behavior,
engenders a dangerous simplification of the world—with great harm to nature
and society. In the case of realities such as that of rural Mexico, it is much
more realistic to assume the existence of diverse versions of truth, diverse
systems of knowledge, the human creativity of alternatives, multi-direction-
ality of developments, and the multiplicity of the time and rhythm of diverse
social groups. In a context like this, the rigid division into cause and effect is
spurious: what is lacking is a conception of non-determinist, irreducible, and
dialectic approaches to take on the specific context (Shanin, 1986).
What is at issue here is not a comparison of two agricultural regimes, two
kinds of farmers, or two systems of knowledge, to evaluate their comparative
efficiency for different ends. It is a matter of realities that cannot be inserted
into the same measurement system. When Don Efraím, after prolonged
research, classified the traditional agricultural practices he had observed, he
included in his list the practices of soil preparation or the definition of the
agricultural cycle, just as he included the practices of prayer and rituals of grat-
itude. The logic of this inclusion is not only clear, in this system of knowledge,
but indispensable. The same inclusion, in a scientific list, would constitute an
unbearable anomaly. The traditional agricultural mentality has no problem in
including, in its cosmovision, outside anomalies: it is an inclusive universalism,
a kind of inclusive, hospitable ethnocentrism. Could the exclusive universal-
ism of the scientific mentality accept this dialogue? Could the scientist take on
a less rigid attitude when confronted with the otherness of the other? Could
he give up the idea of dominating and subjecting him, first in a theoretical
128 The Radical Otherness of the Other

transgression and then in the practical invasion of his territory and his life? His
science cannot: that is its limit and its incapacity. Could the scientist, being
its personification, acknowledge without arrogance his own limits, accepting
that the other exists and that his otherness should be kept as both a mystery
and a reality? Could he do that, particularly, when the time comes to change
that mystery and that reality, something that should be left to the other?

A Happy Ending for Don Fidel

For Don Fidel, as for many other Mexicans of his class and condition, the
so-called crisis of me 1980s—“the lost decade for development”—had ambig-
uous impacts. On the one hand, its troubling effects on the conditions of life
and the perspectives of most people created new predicaments and difficult
burdens to carry. But at the same time, unexpected opportunities appeared.
When the official bank could no longer finance the farmers, due to budget
cuts, many of them stopped planting the sorghum previously forced on them
by the bank and went back to the traditional intercropping of maize and beans.
At the end of the season, they found that their family ate better from their own
harvest, that the sale of their modest surplus left them with more funds than
the balance given to them by the bank for their sorghum harvest, and that
the intercropping improved their soils. The examples of concrete improve-
ments of this kind multiplied and brought a new awareness. The perceptions
and practices of most of the population, devalued and marginalized until that
point even by the “marginal” themselves, began to acquire a new meaning.
The crisis allowed them to recover confidence in ways of perception that they
had almost abandoned, ways that were second nature to them, so devalued
were they by the predominant views. They began to trust their noses again; to
believe again that their experiences and orientations made sense.
Don Fidel also discovered, in the 1980s, that even the experts and authori-
ties began to be interested in the knowledge and practices that they had previ-
ously ridiculed or discarded. For the first time in 40 years various government
strategies, such as the Mexican Food System and the National Food Program,
proposed the goal of self-sufficiency. They also recognized the key role of the
peasants in the efforts ahead. Some technicians and government promoters,
especially the younger ones, began to ask before giving orders.
The agrarian debates of the 1970s did not reach Don Fidel. They were too
academic, if not technocratic: they seemed alien to him. In the new discus-
sions, however, he had something to say. The time had come to publish his
book. When the new governor of Tlaxcala, daughter of one of his friends,
added her name to the list of names asking him to publish his book, he could
no longer resist. He accepted,
One of the things Don Efraím learned early on in his life was not to argue
uselessly. He has avoided the polemic against the Green Revolution: he prefers
 The Radical Otherness of the Other 129

the calm and the silence characterizing the center of the storm. (But not
always. Many fear the brief ironic comments he uses against those monop-
olizing conversations or seminars, the limits of prudence when rattling off
nonsense.) From time to time his works fall victim to the many temptations of
his contradictory life: he who seems to have the best intuition about the world
of traditional agricultural technology, a man who has developed a marve-
lous art for exploring plants and the relationship between man and the plants,
is at the same time an eminent emeritus professor of the greatest academic
center in Mexico for the scientific formalization of research and education in
agriculture. He has offered there, in addition, ample proof of his aptitude as
a researcher, easily fulfilling the highest norms and requirements of conven-
tional wisdom.
Don Efraím has always lived within that tension, enjoying or suffering it,
alternatively. From time to time he seems to be concentrated in an integrative
effort, like many of his colleagues, following opposed impulses. Sometimes
he looks as if he is incorporating traditional agricultural technology into the
world of science, to enrich scientific theories, the activities of the scientists,
or the professional formation of agronomists; at other times, he seems to be
advancing in the opposite direction, as if he would want to give to traditional
agricultural technology some formal technical tools, derived from science, in
order to enrich it and to overcome some of its classical limitations.
It is my feeling that Don Efraím’s path does not follow such directions. 1
have the suspicion that he discovered a long time ago that the world is not
monist, and that dualism is just a form of monism. He does not believe in
the discourse between two sectors, an analytical tool long since exhausted.
In clear contradiction with everything he learned in school and with most of
the beliefs of his colleagues, he suspects that the world’s essence is of a plu-
ral nature. He perhaps suspects that the radical diversity or pluriformity of
plants, which he found a long time ago, may be in the society of men in the
form of radical pluralism. Through corn, his main obsession, he obtained a
clear insight into a very wide and mysterious spectrum of radically different
attitudes toward the prodigious plant. I think that he finds it both silly and
dangerous to try to reduce all of them to only one vision, to one classification,
to only one parameter.
I am asking myself, with him, how can we facilitate an open, tense dia-
logue, with the creative tension of the real world, of concrete cultures, among
those now trapped in their sterile polemic. I am asking myself if we can
together cross the threshold of radical pluralism. The question is clearly posed,
because we are in a situation in which “praxis compels us to take a stance in
the effective presence of the other, when the praxis makes it impossible to
avoid mutual interference, and the conflict cannot be solved by the victory of
one part or party. Pluralism emerges when the conflict looms unavoidable”
(Panikkar, 1979: 201).
130 The Radical Otherness of the Other

In fact, we have the problem radically posed, if we seriously consider the

concrete practices to which we are exposed:

The problem of pluralism arises only when we feel—we suffer—the

incompatibility of differing worldviews and are at the same time forced
by the praxis of our factual coexistence to seek survival. The problem
becomes acute today because contemporary praxis throws us into the
arms of one another.
(Panikkar, 1979: 201)

It is not a question of situations in which different opinions, views, and atti-

tudes may operate in dialectical interaction, situations that may be solved,
politically, through democratic dialogue. Democracy offers only consolation
prizes to the minority, and the hope that one day it may become the major-
ity. It is something, and there are many situations in the present world where
that is perhaps the best or the only feasible solution. But it does not solve the
principle of confrontation, the implicit monism (masked as dualism or political
pluralism). We need solutions that are neither monist nor dualist. These are the
kind of solutions we are lacking, if the world, as many of us presently suspect,
happens to be of a plural nature.

Note
1 Except when a reference is indicated, all the quotes from Efraím Hernández Xoco-
lotzi come from conversations with the author.

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Independencia en el año de 1808 hasta la época presente [Mexican History from the First
Movements that Paved the Way for its Independence in 1808 until the Present
Day]. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
Borlaug, Norman E. 1970. The Green Revolution, Peace and Humanity. Oslo: Norwegian
Parliament.
Borlaug, Norman E. 1987. Accomplishments in Maize and Wheat Productivity: The Future
Development of Maize and Wheat in the Third World. México City: CIMMYT.
Cosio, Daniel. 1974. Historia Moderna de México: La República Restaurada [Modern
Mexican History: The Restored Republic]. Mexico City: Hermes.
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lutionary Agrarism and Bureaucratic Ejidalismo]. Problemas agrícolas e industriales de
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Hernández, Efraim. 1984. “Doctor Efraím Hernández Xolocotzi.” In Las Ciencias

agrícolas y sus protagonistas, edited by Leobardo Jimenez, 205–240. Chapingo:
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et al., 69–92. London: Marion Boyars.
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7
THE PATH TOWARDS THE
DIALOGUE OF VIVIRES
(LIVED EXPERIENCES)

In the 1990s, the amazing affirmation of Indigenous peoples in the whole American
continent, on the occasion of the commemoration of 500 years of colonization and oppres-
sion in 1992, and particularly the Zapatista uprising, in 1994, invited many of us to
learn many forms of dialogue through the interaction with Indigenous peoples of Oaxaca
and many people from other cultures coming to visit us. We created in the process a coa-
lition of Indigenous and non-Indigenous organizations, which founded, at the beginning
of this century, the Center for Intercultural Encounters and Dialogues.
In 2018 Stefano Sartorello invited me for a seminar in the Universidad Iberoamericana
Ciudad de México called “Dialogue and interepistemic conflict in the construction of a
common home”. He edited the papers presented in the seminar in a book with that name
(México: Universidad Iberoamericana, 2019). In my intervention I tried to show that
openness to the dialogue of saberes1 is certainly interesting, a great step forward, but some-
thing else is needed: the dialogue of vivires or dialogue between different lived experiences.

Liberating the Gaze

The End of an Era
The world we know is coming to an end. “It will be destroyed”, warned the
subcomandante Marcos at the beginning of 2011. “The world will no longer
be the same world” (Villoro, 2015: 101–2).
This is not an exaggeration or an alarmist call. Natural and social destruc-
tion has been worsening and we have entered a stage of radical uncertainty.
On the one hand, there is growing awareness of the threat commonly referred
to as “climate change”. James Lovelock, the maverick scientist who became
famous in 1965 for the accuracy of his predictions about what would happen

DOI: 10.4324/9781003262749-8
 The Path Towards the Dialogue of Vivires 133

to the climate, argues that it is too late to reverse the processes underway and
that the sensible thing to do is to prepare for the disaster that is coming (2006).
On the other hand, very diverse voices argue that the economic, social, and
political disaster we are suffering is even worse, as we move from a mode of
production to a mode of dispossession and slide into barbarism ( Jappe, 2011;
Baschet, 2015; Harvey, 2014).
We have solid reasons to reject the wave of “apocalyptic randiness” sur-
rounding us, but we must do it fully aware that the era in which we were
born, that we call modernity, is coming to an end. Postmodernity is not what
follows that era, but a state of mind of modern people who have had to let
go of the great truths of the previous era, having become disillusioned with
them, but who have not yet found a new unitary system of reference (Dietrich
and Sützl, 1997). They can no longer trust the truths that supported their
ways of being, thinking, and behaving. To believe, as Machado said, is not to
see something or to believe in something, but to believe that you see (García
Bacca, 1984). But the evident is no longer evident.
Anomie, that state of confusion and bewilderment described so well by
Durkheim in 1895, is common in these circumstances and it often leads to
fundamentalism, the frequently desperate search for “foundations” for thought
and action (1984). Confusion itself, however, can also be an opportunity to
open ourselves up to the pluralism that inspires this discussion.
The progressive dismantling of the pillars that supported modernity took
place in the same intellectual space that built them: Europe. It was primarily
Europeans who critically tore apart the theoretical, practical, and institutional
floors on which modern people walked. As the insurrection of subjugated
knowledge that Foucault anticipated 50 years ago intensified, the historical
contents buried in functional coherences or formal systematizations lost their
mask. The disqualified, marginalized knowledge, the knowledge of the peo-
ple, reappeared with immense vigor (Foucault, 1980, Class of January 7, 1976).
Armed with their saberes, the marginalized brought their questions. For
example, they asked if school and “science” are modern knowledge and the
people’s knowledge is ancient, or if it’s the other way around, the latter are
entirely modern or rather contemporary and what is archaic is school and sci-
ence, because they are useless for living. The knowledge, the wisdom of the
peoples, their life experience and their encounters are much more important
for the current challenges than the impractical texts or words and symbols
that are taught in the schools. Experience, they say, is not what you think you
know but what you have already felt.

The Decolonial Path

Since 2008 a network of activist thinkers addressed the ways and places in
which “the insurrections of subjugated knowledge […] are already cracking the
134 The Path Towards the Dialogue of Vivires

dominant pattern of knowledge/power and decentering and challenging the

academic system in its search for new methodologies, new epistemologies, new
ontologies” (Leyva et al., 2015: 26).
Once again, we began listening to Orlando Fals, that great Colombian
who anticipated the idea of a popular science in 1969: “[C]onstructing your
own path in action, science and culture includes the creation of a new sciencia,
rebellious and subversive to confront the science we have learned from others
and has established the rules of scientific endeavors” (1969: 6). We also began
to listen to a great Peruvian who has just died, Aníbal Quijano. He is consid-
ered to be the legitimate founder of decoloniality.
The decolonial school was born a quarter of a century ago as a collective agenda
of the work that needed to be done based on the historical experience of Latin
America. It is inscribed in the anti-colonial tradition of 500 years of thought in the
region, and is nourished by the decolonization movements of the mid-twentieth
century. It is also nourished by dependency theory and liberation theology and
is inspired by black Caribbean thought and indigenous and Chicano black femi-
nisms, as well as epistemic innovations such as those of the Zapatistas in Chiapas.
The decolonial proposal has updated all these traditions to promote an
epistemological revolution that embraces colonizers and colonized alike, call-
ing into question the modern colonial order in which we live. The founding
authors of decoloniality are of Latin American origin, or rooted in the sub-
continent, but decoloniality is currently being discussed on all continents and
in social movements that demand the decolonization of state institutions and
everyday life, as well as of minds and hearts. In this discussion, it is convenient
to distinguish between the decolonial current that is just an academic trend,
the one that derives useful analytical tools from it, and the one that uses it as
an instrument of struggle (Mignolo and Walsh, 2018).
The proposal of decoloniality does not seek its own space within European
modernity nor does it seek a non-European modernity, but rather proposes to
detach ourselves from that tradition and from the Western civilizing project. It
promotes epistemic, political, ecological, and aesthetic forms of autonomy and
the configuration of a horizon organized around the pluriverse. The challenges
of our discussion here can perhaps be defined in these terms, which explore the
coexistence in a common home of what belongs to you and what is foreign.

The Challenge of Diversity

Cultural diversity is a central premise of this discussion. It is useful to examine
its scope, under the guidance of Raimón Panikkar (1990, 1993a, 1993b, 1995).
Different cultures are incommensurable. When we think we are hopelessly
rooted in our culture: we think from within it, from the cultural background
we share with other members of our culture and not with members of other
cultures. There cannot be a supra-cultural criterion that allows us to examine
 The Path Towards the Dialogue of Vivires 135

or compare cultures from some external or neutral point, allowing us to deter-

mine from above and from outside, that they are homogeneous or diverse. We
cannot affirm that cultures are diverse, we cannot establish that; we always
depend on our language, our values, our point of view, all of them culturally
rooted. We cannot establish any hierarchy between cultures or apply values
from one to the other. Each person, from his own culture, can appreciate or
despise other cultures, but he does so from outside them, horizontally, apply-
ing his own criteria and perceptions to something entirely different.
We can identify some human invariants: we all breathe, think, feel, or pre-
fer some things over others and thus distinguish ourselves from other species;
we are not birds, manatees, or monkeys. But there are no cultural univer-
sals. Even the traits that mark us as a species, the fact that we all breathe, for
example, are perceived differently in different places and cultures. The per-
ceptions of the act of breathing in the Arctic, Himalayas, Mexico City, and
the Amazon have important differences. All cultures have their values, but
they are not universal, nor can they be absolute, they cannot be applied to all.
This does not imply relativism but relativity; every statement, every notion
is relative to its context. No one culture has an all-encompassing perception;
no one culture encompasses the totality of human experience.
An intercultural situation is established when people or groups from differ-
ent cultures enter a relationship. Within this relationship, when one of them
imposes itself on the other, through use of force or persuasion, as is the case
in colonial contexts, it can provoke resistance from the colonized, a form of
isolation, of withdrawal into one’s own culture. It can also generate transcul-
turation or acculturation as a matter of preference or as a survival reaction:
one abandons one’s own culture to move to the dominant one and settle in it.
Often there is a combination of these two reactions, resisting while also taking
on levels and forms of assimilation or absorption.
A culture can be enriched in this way, taking advantage of a trait that many
of them share: the tradition of changing tradition in a traditional way, giving
them historical continuity. In the last ten years, a large portion of the twelve
thousand indigenous communities of Oaxaca held traditional government
assemblies in which they pointed out that for centuries, perhaps a thousand
years, it was tradition that only men participate in these assemblies, but the men
decided that from now on women could also participate in the assemblies and
positions. This was not the result of a sudden moral epiphany of all those groups
of men. It was due to the women’s struggle and the experiences of the commu-
nities. For indigenous women, the combination of traditional patriarchy and
modern sexism is as close as it gets to hell. They have been revolting against it
and, in many cases, leading the social struggle for change. Because of that strug-
gle men changed tradition and they did it in their own way, not through outside
interventions. No indigenous peoples are the same as they were five hundred
years ago. They have been constantly changing; that is why they are still alive
136 The Path Towards the Dialogue of Vivires

because they have been able to adapt to the widest variety of circumstances,
but they have historical continuity because they have done it in their own way.
Along with Panikkar, I use interculturality to describe a condition in which
one culture is not imposed on the other. Interculturality alludes to a dynamic
situation where people become aware of the existence of other persons, other
values, other cultures, and recognize that isolation is not possible, even though
they do not want to renounce their own culture. This awareness accepts the
limitation of every culture, the relativization of everything human. However,
instead of taking refuge in one’s own culture and trying to isolate oneself by
distancing oneself from the other, reducing the “other” to an abstract category
or suppressing him or her, this awareness encourages interacting with him or
her based in a recognition of their radical otherness, from the recognition that
perhaps we will never be able to understand them.
According to Panikkar, when we begin to classify, we separate ourselves
from reality. All classification presupposes a common background and each
culture has its own, this is what constitutes it. “The classification of cultures is
an intercultural sin. Cultural diversity is not such diversity because we have no
background…in which to situate it.” (1993a: 17). And he adds:

It is not that cultures are diverse; it is that they are incommensurable.

Each culture is a world, each culture is a universe and not only a way
of seeing and living reality, it is another reality. And I do not see this
reality. It is the other who makes me see it, who reveals it to me when I
listen to him. And I listen to him only when I love him. And I love him
only when I know him. Everything is linked […]
There is tramp in interculturality, hidden in the ambiguity of the
word. It is obvious that we must open ourselves to other cultures, that
we cannot close in on ourselves, that we must open the small barriers
that limit each one of us. This is evident, but to think that I can be
supra-cultural, above all cultures, because I know more, because I am
“intercultural”, is to fall into the negative myth of interculturality.
Healthy interculturality is when through osmosis, assimilation, and
stimulation one is open to what it sees as positive in other cultures. This
recognition of the incommensurability of cultures is called pluralism.
(Panikkar, 1993a: 17)

Diversity would be an assumption, a mere assumption, not an affirmation, a

thesis, or a project. We assume that we are diverse and from that assumption
we seek harmony without dissolving differences.

The End of “One World”

How can one imagine a world in which many worlds can be embraced?
 The Path Towards the Dialogue of Vivires 137

The idea of “one world” is very old and has dominated for a long time.
It was adopted in the West as a moral obligation. The parable of the Good
Samaritan, who tore apart his ethnic boundaries to open himself to the other
with love and compassion, can be used as a foundation for this position,
although it is also used to illustrate openness to pluralism. By affirming that
all human beings had access to the divine gift of salvation, the apostle Paul
placed everyone on the same plane. The Enlightenment secularized this con-
viction, as the universality of human dignity, and forged the humanist creed,
downplaying cultural differences to emphasize the common denominator that
united all: their “humanity” (Sachs, 1991: 417).
Step by step this dream became a destructive and colonizing adventure that
sought to simultaneously absorb and dissolve all other traditions and forms of
existence on the planet. Historically driven by various manifestations of the
cross and the sword, the project is now being carried out under US hegemony,
which adopted the emblem of development in 1949 (Sachs, 1991; Esteva, 1991)
and that of globalization 40 years later, after the Cold War. Under the guise
of globalization, an almost universal culturicide, which often takes genocidal
forms, is being violently promoted like never before. It attempts to trans-
mogrify each person into a homo economicus, the possessive and competitive
individual of the Western world, which is the social basis of capitalism and
facilitates through this transmogrification the social relations that define it.
This economic project has a political facade (formal democracy), and an ethi-
cal one (human rights).
The Zapatistas’ call “Enough is enough!” was a reaction against all this.
For centuries, the “Indigenous”2 bunkered down in their communities, resist-
ing colonizers. Today’s Zapatista communities learned, through an atrocious
experience, that the era of globalization will erase all those localisms from
the map if they do not manage to prevent it; cultural resistance is no longer
enough. They also learned that, although capital today has a bigger appetite
than ever, it does not have a big enough stomach to digest all those it seeks to
control. Millions of people, most clearly Indian peoples, have become expend-
able. And they are being discarded.
The Zapatistas transformed their resistance into a struggle for liberation.
They have never been interested in “taking power” and governing the coun-
try, but they seek a new political regime that will fully respect their land, their
autonomy, their freedom, their radical democracy, and their difference. They
hope that this regime will establish the basis for the harmonious coexistence
of those who are different.
This position, which I reflect upon in the following paragraphs, chal-
lenges the assumption that all “human beings” are fundamentally similar. As
I pointed out earlier, this radical rejection of universalisms does not imply
surrendering to the risky adventure of cultural relativism, which usually leads
to fundamentalism and confrontation. It means courageously and intrepidly
138 The Path Towards the Dialogue of Vivires

embracing cultural relativity: the fact that no one person or culture can sum-
marize or represent the totality of human experience; that there is no one or
several truths (truth is incommensurable); that the only legitimate, coherent,
and sensible attitude in the face of the real plurality of the world is radical plu-
ralism. (See Panikkar 1993a, 1993b, 1995; Vachon 1993a, 1993b, 1995).
The Zapatistas resisted the secular, liberal temptation to “liberate” them-
selves from their own culture in order to adopt certain “universal” values or
ideologies. They know that in the present day every local reality is directly and
immediately global because it is inevitably exposed to interaction with global
forces and processes. Dealing with the local requires taking on the current
intertwining of everything and everyone, the interpenetration and interde-
pendence of all localities. Many groups dissatisfied with the neoliberal form
of the global project try to conceive alternative globalizations. The Zapatistas
resisted that temptation. Their localization is radically different from both glo-
balization and localism. They are committed to the articulation of all resist-
ances, to broad coalitions of the discontented, to the coming together of all
rebellions. They invite those who still seek change within the framework of
“one world” (even if it is “another”, different from the neoliberal one) to cre-
ate a new social reality in which many worlds can be embraced. It is an invita-
tion to go beyond a mere cultural resistance or an economic or political claim
(a dispute over slices of the existing pie), towards an epic feat of transformation
open to many cultures. It is an invitation, not an indoctrination.
The time has come to bury once and for all the dream of building “one
world”, which has been the pretext of all colonialisms and continues to nour-
ish extremely violent fundamentalisms. What is emerging in its place can be
expressed in the formula “One No, many Yeses”, a radical, common rejection
of the dominant system, which at the same time fully accepts the plurality of
the real world.

Abandoning the Gaze

It is not enough to re-cognize that there are different ways of knowing in
different cultures. We need to go further. We cannot talk about how we look
at the West because the West looks through our eyes. This form of coloniza-
tion became so profound because it took root in a discourse that is apparently
irrefutable, imperative, universal, that claims to be valid for every place, every
occasion, every epoch, every moment, a discourse before which there is no
choice but to bow our heads, a discourse before which there is no need to
reason because it is reason itself, the discourse of mathematics.
Emmánuel Lizcano, the great Spanish mathematician (2006), provides very
clear evidence that we have learned very local mathematics, but we were led
to believe they were universal. Lizcano allows us to remember how a strictly
local culture invented the universal, how it leaped from a concrete land, his
 The Path Towards the Dialogue of Vivires 139

land, to everyone’s land and how that leap became a tool of power and con-
quest. He presents a strong hypothesis:

Mathematics, what is usually understood as mathematics, can be thought

of as the development of a series of formalisms characteristic of the pecu-
liar way a certain tribe of European origins understands the world. Since
its first practitioners were inhabitants of cities or burgs, we could call
them the “bourgeois tribe”. And their mathematics, “bourgeois mathe-
matics”. That bourgeois mathematics in which we have all (perhaps only
almost all) been socialized reflects a very particular way of perceiving
space and time, of classifying and ordering the world.
(Lizcano, 2006: 189–90)

Lizcano successfully unveils the tribal character of Western science’s basic con-
cepts and denounces this universality for its particularly destructive effects on
others. As Michel Serres said, “[T]he reason that produces universal and global
mathematics comes from power, cruelty and death. It is a difficult and vain rea-
son, it covers the earth with corpses and spreads like the plague” (Serres, 1994,
in Lizcano, 2006: 21). It is unjust and dangerous, imperialist, and contagious
from birth. Finally, the great ethno-mathematician Lizcano shows us the dan-
ger of this profession, dismantling the illusions of bourgeois mathematics, but
also removes the ground beneath the feet of our ways of thinking and feeling.
It is now a matter of thinking about that which thinks us, which is in our
memory, in almost everyone’s memory in any culture. From the first years of
school, we learn to assimilate mathematical formulas and their logic, and our
head is structured by them: the way we think and construct categories, how
we distinguish between the possible and the impossible, the whole logical
architecture of the brain (Lizcano, 2006: 127).
We must look at it head-on. Everything that comes together in our heads is
sustained by something that needs no support, that sustains itself: mathematics.
Resistance can only begin when one mathematics is serenely confronted with
another. Suddenly, contrasting the two, identity makes sense. A strong and
hard notion, which we constantly project into reality, suddenly becomes jelly.
Identity exists only on the blackboard. In reality, no one is the same as another
one. No two apples are the same. Not even two bottles of soda of the same
brand, made on the same machine, are really identical. Let us take that path
seriously; let us adopt and enforce the diabolical artifice of ethno-mathematics.
The ethno-mathematicians have no problem in demonstrating the diverse
set of mathematics they found in their cultural immersions. They know that
each one belongs to a tribe and cannot be extrapolated to another. They know
that there are as many arithmetic methods for elementary operations as there
are imaginaries, ways of imagining and coherent metaphors for them (Lizcano,
2006: 133). They discover that some work for some things and others for
140 The Path Towards the Dialogue of Vivires

others, that in one tribe they count to infinity and in others they stop very
quickly, that some only want to work with the abstract and others do not want
to move away from the concrete…
Once we are on this path, when we dare to listen to the ethno-mathema-
ticians,3 the whole colonial edifice within which we have been formed, for-
matted, begins to collapse. It reveals itself as a huge shared lie, and the idea of
the modern and Western notion of truth loses all support as a representation.
This notion starts from the assumption that, out there, there is something real
that is discovered by looking at it, particularly with the scientific and mathe-
matical gaze, which allows one to conceptualize and represent it in our heads.
This intellectual earthquake can go a long way. It is important, for example,
to recognize that among the Greeks, sight is the fundamental sense, that their
mental construction revolves around the gaze. The word idea, in Greek, means
“I saw,” an idea is what one saw. For Aristotle, even more, a gaze can be rep-
resented as an erect penis penetrating reality. Western thought seems to be
built around the metaphor of light, associated with sight: the ideology of lights,
enlightenment, scientific observables, what is understood as evident, math-
ematical demonstrations, scientific discoveries. But other cultures emphasize
other things. For the Tojolabales, for example, hearing is the most important
sense, because the emphasis is on listening. They have no objects in their lin-
guistic construction, they are all subjects, there is no I and you, there is only we:
they spend their time talking to each other. To allude to others, in search of a
dialogue between cultures, we have accepted the Western term, “cosmovision”
or “worldview”. This combination of two terms in one reflects a certain way
of conceiving the world. What we have been calling “cosmovision” would be
“cosmoaudition” to the Tojolabales, and they and others would probably rather
think of “cosmovivencia” [cosmoexperience], and some would even question the
cosmos part (Lenkensdorf, 2008).
Let us take words from ordinary language, which appear to be spontaneous
and natural perceptions. Space, for example, is something strictly Western and
modern. It was born in the mid-seventeenth century with Cartesian analyt-
ical geometry. Spaces can be built, beltways or bicycle paths are designed in
space, they presuppose that where people move, breathe, shit, and sleep is an
abstract and homogeneous area that can be designed. Space cannot be smelled,
touched, heard, or tasted; it separates the senses. But such space did not even
exist in physics. Until modern times maps underlining those ways of inhabit-
ing could not be compared: there was place, the opposite of space.
Another such concept is speed. Eco-designers talk about “traffic calming”
(slowing down) and “traffic evaporation” (getting rid of the automobile); while
some advocate for fast food, fast cities, fast cars, the others advocate for slow
food, slow cities, slow movement. Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas knew about
movement; they did not know speed. In fact, it is not possible to know it,
although it can be measured. It is alien to the senses: it is a scientific construct:
 The Path Towards the Dialogue of Vivires 141

the relationship between spatium and tempus, the distance in time. Galileo
invented this fantastic notion, which relates two quantities as if they were
of the same species. Scientific blindness to the immeasurable is well known;
dividing meters by seconds and kilometers by days is as common sense as mul-
tiplying apples by worms. If one adopts speed as a point of reference, move-
ment becomes homogenized, reduced to something merely quantitative, and
one can compare donkeys with legs, and cars with cockroaches.
One more concept: need. When I was a kid, which was not as long ago
as it seems, the word need had only one use. When we would go to another
house, my mother would say, “When you get there ask your aunt where you
take care of your needs.” In Spanish, to shit is to “hacer tus necesidades”, to do
your needs. We did them, we didn’t have them; shitting was the only need.
That means that in the course of my life I have seen the birth of all conditions
or perceptions that today we call needs. The needy man is a very modern cre-
ation, born with capitalism and the industrial mode of production. It is based
on a very capitalist and modern assumption: that we are all the same thing, we
all have the same needs. Ultimately, needs are defined in terms of goods and
services, of the commodities that are offered on the market. Illich once said that
in the consumer society whoever is not a prisoner of addiction—the addiction
to consume certain objects—is a prisoner of envy because he cannot buy what
others buy (Illich, 1973: 56). A professional creates the need and its satisfaction.
Design, space, speed, and needs, the four shaky pillars upon which modern
dreams are built…dreams which have become nightmares. The time has come
to wake up.
Ivan Illich and Matthias Rieger (1997) showed us long ago how Bach
mathematized music. Rudolf zur Lippe (1985) showed us how modern lan-
guage was mathematized. We are mathematized in the Western way. The time
has come to rebel, to dare to use a mythical pluralist approach which can only
appear if we dare to listen to each other.
As we all know, democracy was born in Greece and took its modern form,
a universal model of democracy, in the United States, some 200 years ago.
These are two societies with slaves, formed by misogynistic and violent males.
That is why the very design of the democratic nation-state, the political form
of capitalism, is irremediably racist, sexist, and violent; it cannot exist other-
wise. It must conform to the original, modern pattern and constitute a patri-
archal instrument.
The same can be said of mathematics, starting with Pythagoras and his
Hermetics. Thus, we are saying with appalling audacity, that the foundations
of Western philosophy and civilization, as well as its most finished construc-
tions, such as the democratic nation-state, are racist, sexist, violent, and irre-
mediably patriarchal. In that vein we need to show the metaphors hidden in
mathematical teaching, in order to dismantle the Western construction of our
ways of being and thinking.
142 The Path Towards the Dialogue of Vivires

If we follow this path, we will finally be able to open ourselves hospitably

to the other, to really embrace the radical pluralism that the current circum-
stances demand of us and to challenge the dominant pattern of knowledge/
power to dialogue at long last with the other. This would not be an inter-
epistemic dialogue or even dialogue between saberes, as I will try to show.

From Tolerance to Hospitality

My Zapotec grandmother could not enter my house in Mexico City through
the front door because she was Indian. Like many people of her generation my
mother felt that the best thing she could do for her children was to radically
sever our ties to the Indigenous past, to our ancestors.
I use this experience as a metaphor for what I mean. It shows how my
mother surrendered to the dominant patriarchal mentality in and around my
home and chose subordination as a path of survival, seeking a form of incorpo-
ration that she never fully achieved. Therein lies the seed of my resistance. The
impossibility of dialogue in my home prompted me to seek it systematically,
throughout my life.
For millennia, the challenge posed by the otherness of the other had a
racist response. Because they did not speak a Greek language, the others were
barbarians to the Greeks, people who had to be educated in it or disqualified.
The others were pagans and infidels for Christian Europe, so they needed to
be evangelized. They were savages for Enlightened Europe; it was necessary
to bring “the” civilization to them, to civilize them. They were natives for
industrial Europe, people in need of education about the needs of the market.
They were underdeveloped for President Truman, people to be developed, to
be incorporated into the American Way of Life. The perception of the other
implied not seeing him: one only saw what he “lacked” relative to what he
should be.
Faced with the other, one sometimes resorts to tolerance. It is an attitude
that seems very appropriate in a time as intolerant as the present, but tolerance
is only the most civilized form of intolerance. Whoever demonstrates it is say-
ing: “You are not the most suitable way you could be, you are not like me, but
I can tolerate your presence”. Goethe said, “to tolerate is to insult” (1829: 507).
At most, it must be temporary or provisional. According to the dictionary, to
tolerate is to suffer patiently; tolerant people very often lose their patience.
Whoever tolerates accepts the presence of the other, without re-cognizing
him. He or she admits his/her permanence, as an expression of his/her own
flexibility or generosity, but from a place of disqualification: he/she is not like
he/she should be, like the one who tolerates.
Instead of tolerance, we should resort to hospitality. To be hospitable means
to have open arms, heads, and hearts to the otherness of the other. It does not
imply admiring other people, following them, imitating them, or even loving
 The Path Towards the Dialogue of Vivires 143

or understanding them. It means recognizing that they exist in their difference

and that they have the right to be who they are and to take their place.
The first global colonization project was probably that of the Church.
“Catholic” means universal: it was a moral imperative to bring the true God
to all. Las Casas defended the human character of the Indians to place them
under the protection of the Crown. But this humanist tradition, justified by
the desire to share the goods and blessings of the colonizer with the colonized,
has become increasingly totalitarian, as Foucault (1994) observed, and increas-
ingly intolerable.
The time for hospitality has arrived.

Intercultural Dialogue
The Risks of Abstraction
As Panikkar said,

One of the West manias, or to put it more elegantly, one of its bril-
liant inventions… is the discovery of classification. Open any university
or school textbook, and you will see how everything is classified. We
classify everything. Porphyry’s tree extends everywhere: living/non-
living, material/non-material … sulfuric-sulfurous-sulf hydric … We do
not know how to think without classifying. Better said, or rather much
worse: we believe that classifying is equivalent to thinking. Thinking
is no longer the creative act by which man knows, that is, identifies
with reality and thus modifies it. Thinking has become confused with
calculating, that is, with classifying. Logic has become class logic or has
degenerated into class struggle.
(1993a: 17)

This is due in part to what happened with abstraction. Abstracting, that formi-
dable human capacity, consists of taking something out of reality and putting it
inside the head. Plato had already warned us that we must be aware that what
we have put in our heads is not reality. We have to put it in brackets, clearly
separating out this thing that we have put in our head so that we do not con-
fuse it with the perceived reality. But something happened in the West. First,
the brackets fell off and it was no longer possible to establish a clear distinction
between what we had abstracted and perceived. Then a very strange argument
appeared. The senses can deceive us—there are optical illusions—we can be
confused by what happens in reality. On the other hand, this thing that we
have in our head, the abstraction, is the real reality. And so, the principle of
concordance and representation that the Greeks taught us was quietly applied
until we were convinced that what we have in our head, the abstractions, are
really reality, the reality really real. I cannot rely much on the senses, on what
144 The Path Towards the Dialogue of Vivires

I touch, on what I smell, on what I feel, but I should rely more on what I have
in my head that appears as reality itself.

The Limitations of the Respectful Attitude

We have been classifying cultures and attributing Western associations and
behaviors to them. And we believe that we should approach them with all
respect, restraint, and delicacy so that it is not an intrusion. However, no
amount of caution is enough. This is well demonstrated by what seems to be
the first intercultural dialogue of which there is written testimony, that of
1524 between twelve Franciscan fathers sent by the pope and the Aztec nobles.
Dialogue? Respectful? Was there respect in that? Was there respect there?
Are the Franciscans really respecting what the Aztec nobles tell them, even
if they are being gentle with their words? We respectfully approach peoples,
and at the same time, as it was done before with the Christian doctrine, we
impose on them school, education, and a global curriculum, among many
other things. With this device we want to shape, to format their heads and
their hearts with the die from which all horror was born, a die that cannot
stop producing horror.
Today, as never before, we are forced to adopt a position in the presence
of the other. It is impossible to avoid mutual interaction, interdependence,
interference. The world is throwing us all together, and there, in this new
situation from which it is no longer possible to escape, in which it is no longer
possible to seek refuge as many of our ancestors did, in this new context, we
feel more and more, we suffer with increasing intensity, the incompatibility
of different worlds.
I am not referring to situations in which different opinions, points of view
or attitudes interact: a democratic procedure can be applied in these situations,
which consoles those in the minority that perhaps during the next trick they
will be able to change the circumstances (as I mentioned in the previous chap-
ter). It is better than fighting. But the democratic procedure does not resolve
the situation between different worlds, of interculturality. Their contact or
conflict cannot be resolved through one side’s victory, even if it is provi-
sional or transitory. It inevitably raises the question of pluralism. Based on
this assumption that is deeply rooted in experience, that reality itself is plural,
pluralist conflict cannot be managed with mere democratic consent, in which
each side tries to convince the other and majorities and minorities are defined.
In the face of the pluralism of reality, which prompts confrontations on
an unprecedented scale, only a pluralistic attitude can be adopted. Today we
need to be seriously open to dialogue between cultures. Dialogue is neither
mere conversation nor a democratic encounter; there is no intercultural lan-
guage. Interculturality is no man’s land: there is no one there, no one can
be in the middle, there are no intermediate spaces, there are no spaces for
 The Path Towards the Dialogue of Vivires 145

communication. The words and concepts of culture only have meaning, their
meaning, within that culture. Each culture decides its own criteria of truth
and meaning. Dialogue between cultures must be dialogical, transcending
the logos of each culture, its conceptual systems, its reasons, and its values. It
implies a mutual openness to the concern of the other in order to share some
guide, suspicion, or inspiration, any element that both may share but neither
of them can control (Panikkar, 1993a).
This is art as much as it is knowledge, techné and praxis, gnosis, and theory.
We must try to make it real, even when one of the parties is reluctant to do
so. Faced with the real and immediate prospect of catastrophic, unprecedented
genocides and culturicides, we are forced to put this option to the test.
Intercultural dialogue starts with the recognition of the radical otherness
of others, of those who are different, and it attempts to create an authentic
pluriverse.
Many things can be called dialogue: a simple conversation, a dialectical
dialogue, or an exploration of understanding between two or more persons,
based on the exchange of reasoning elaborated on the basis of shared concepts
and abstractions. How can dialogue take place between those who do not
share rationality? The word dialogue originally meant going beyond logos,
reason, understanding—to transcend them. As Robert Vachon (1995) has
expounded upon at length, a dialogic dialogue, such as the one that needs to
be practiced in an intercultural relationship, explores that interaction based on
symbolic construction, transcending the plane of logos, of mere reason, but
without renouncing it. It implies using reason, but not only reason.
It is not mere logical, conceptual, reflexive, epistemological, objective, or sub-
jective awareness. Nor can it be reduced to a symbol, representation, metaphor,
or image. It implies accessing the elements that give transparency to discourse, to
what is said, in order to be able to see what is being said, even if we cannot see what
it allows us to see. It is like light, which allows us to see but cannot be seen.
In conventional perception, culture is reduced to a mere category, a con-
cept, the “logic”, the “philosophy” of a people or a human being. It appears
as a worldview, a life philosophy, and therefore includes an anthropology, a
sociology, a theology, an ontology, an epistemology, a science, a way of doing
things (know-how). One can even speak of a mythology and of a belief sys-
tem. Culture is thus approached from a reflexive logical angle, assuming it has
an essence to be defined (Vachon, 1995: I, 51).
For dialogue between cultures, we need to transcend this approach to
account for a deeper and more consistent layer that determines every culture.
It is quite real but invisible; it cannot be translated into thought, speech, or
logos. This dimension or stratum is the mythical, primordial, or autonomous
matrix, the unifying, integral, encompassing reality. It is the source of any sys-
tem of thought and belief and gives non-scientific coherence to all knowledge
and beliefs, not only within each culture but between cultures.
146 The Path Towards the Dialogue of Vivires

Using this approach, culture is not only the underlying myth of a people,
but the mythical universe in which we live. The key to this intercultural dia-
logue lies in listening. Listening is the door to dialogue, which, in turn, is the
foundation of coexistence because “in dialogue we are matched up through
the words we hear” (Lenkersdorf, 2008: 43). When we are ready to listen
“we initiate a transforming process in ourselves, we want to listen to find out
who they are and, in this way, find out who we are” (Lenkersdorf: 51). The
Zapatista comandante Tacho once said that to dialogue is not simply to hear
the other but to be willing to be transformed by the other. Dialogue is not
possible if the dialoguers do not listen to each other.
In 1963 Robert Vachon founded the Montreal Intercultural Institute,
which was the first institution in the world dedicated to research and action in
this field. He accumulated exceptional experience in theory and practice. He
systematically studied the ideas of Raimón Panikkar and applied them rigor-
ously in a continuous intercultural practice.
In the 1980s, Robert invited me to a long conversation in Montreal
between a kind Canadian official and a Mohawk, Haudenosaunee, chief. After
six hours of conversation, the official began to lose his patience: “Chief—he
said in a tense tone—you must understand that the Canadian government will
never accept the sovereignty of the Mohawk peoples”.
The chief jumped from his seat. Standing, he said: “Sir, that does not interest
us. When you talk about sovereignty you are immediately leaving footprints
on the ground that hurt Mother Earth and big signs that say, ‘Trespassing
forbidden’. For us, in our language, being sovereign means being free like the
wind. That is what we want.”
And that is exactly what the Canadian government has never been able to
recognize or grant the peoples: for them to be free like the wind.
Intercultural dialogue requires more than just respect and kindness, and
having the good intention of understanding each other is not enough. It is
necessary to listen.

The Dialogue of Saberes

We need to review all our words. Boaventura de Sousa Santos has been very
successful in his campaign to recognize the epistemologies of the South. We
share his path, but we must ask ourselves why we are referring again to the
Greek to express what we want. And if we persist in resorting to Greek terms to
refer to the various ways of knowing, to the extent that we are formed within
them, we can contrast episteme with techné. Epistemic knowledge is logical,
analytical, articulated, universal, cerebral, theoretical, verifiable, impersonal,
internally egalitarian and externally hierarchical. It is founded upon a set of
self-evident truths that function as axioms, which constitute the basis of all sci-
entific exercise and the Western way of knowing. Techné, on the other hand,
 The Path Towards the Dialogue of Vivires 147

implies intuition, integrity, implicit contextual, emotional, practical, personal,

internally hierarchical, and externally pluralistic forms. It is founded upon
the experience and authority of those who know (see Marglin, 2000). Since
techné seems closer to our ways of knowing, perhaps we should be thinking
that instead of textbooks we should have context books.
The current insurrection of subjugated knowledge can take us even fur-
ther. Foucault calls genealogy the coupling of erudite knowledge and local
memories, a coupling that allows the constitution of the historical knowledge
of struggle and its use in current practices. It is not a matter of returning to
positivism, but rather of anti-science. Nor does it seek to exalt ignorance or
to make experience prevail over saber. It is an authentic insurrection of saberes
(Foucault, 1980: 82–3).
I dwell on each word:

• Coupling, not fusion, integration or much less absorption and domina-

tion of some conocimiento (knowledge) by others; they are coupled, put
side by side.
• Erudite saber, that is to say, formal knowledge, the knowledge of texts.
• Empirical saberes, that is, those people have, with very diverse origins and
characteristics.

By coupling them together, historical knowledge of struggle is formed. The

historical element is not simply that they take place in time. It is recognizing
that there is not a unique permanent way, that knowledge is constructed and
discovered in each moment and context. There are no permanent models that
we can transplant from one place to another and preach in school as the truth.
We must always place ourselves in concrete contexts.
The idea of historical knowledge of struggle implies that in the present day
we cannot be neutral. The pretense of neutrality is a position ignoring reality.
We must recognize that we are at war and in a war no one can be neutral. I
am referring to the fourth world war, which Subcomandante Marcos warned
us about 20 years ago (2001).
It is not happening out there, somewhere far away. It is the first total war in
history. It is in the streets, in the plazas, in our computers, in our telephones,
in our bedrooms, and everywhere.
According to Panikkar (1994), there may be homeomorphic equivalents of
certain basic functions in different cultures. He uses the example of human
rights and shows that dharma, in India, fulfills the same function as human
rights in the West, although it is made up of obligations (Panikkar, 1995)
(Vachon, 1993b). Inspired by him, several friends set out years ago to cre-
ate something like a cross-cultural encyclopedia, identifying some homeo-
morphic equivalents in different cultures. We thought that a simple way to
start would be with the concept of peace, under the assumption that peace
148 The Path Towards the Dialogue of Vivires

is desirable in all cultures. It was a surprise. We soon discovered that perhaps

half of the world’s cultures lack words for peace or war and cannot express, in
their languages, the conditions we call peace or war. We began to learn what
is this that we call peace, and we learned that we cannot define peace. We are
not saying the same thing when we use that word.
For two thousand years, the notion associated with the pax romana predom-
inated in the West and indeed the whole world. In all the linguistic variants,
paz, paix, peace, pace, and so on, we’re actually referring to pax romana, which
is not a “normal” peaceful condition but a contract of domination. One party
tells the other that it will not destroy it if it agrees to do what the dominant
party states. We can see that this is what was called “peace” at the end of the
two world wars of the twentieth century; it is what the Americans established
in Iraq this century, and what is established when peace agreements are signed
between conflicting parties in some countries. We have been using the term
“peace” to describe a form of imposition. Peace would be, therefore, a violent
and colonial notion, a condition that occurs when one group or culture sur-
renders to the other.
Do we want to think about peace? It seems that we must think about other
things, not about what we called peace, not about that contract of domina-
tion. That was ultimately what we did for the encyclopedia. In its first vol-
ume, which turned out to be a handbook of sorts, we no longer talked about
peace, but about peaces (Dietrich et al., 2011).
For that book, I had to find out what peace was among the Zapotecs, and
it turned out to be a nightmare. I talked to my Zapotec friends, some of them
elders, people who knew the word in Spanish. When I asked them for the
Zapotec equivalent, they just shook their heads, worried, and told me com-
plicated stories that I didn’t understand. One of them, at last, in San Andrés
Yagavila, in the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca, told me: “Look, if you want to under-
stand what that peace thing is, it’s what you all on the outside call friendship”.
If we want to have intercultural respect in our common home, we cannot
talk about peace. We need to speak in the plural. And of many different things.

Rupture, the End of an Era and Political Options

In periods of epochal change such as the present, innovation is born of ordi-
nary men and women struggling for their survival. They only find it outside
the dominant framework because they no longer have any chance of existing
within it. They need to break it, sometimes without knowing that they are
doing so. It is what happens with artists who sense what is happening and use
that intuition as a source of inspiration for their creations, without appealing
to an obsolete logic.
The first bourgeois died without knowing they were bourgeois: they cre-
ated capitalism, the social relations of the capitalist mode of production, but
 The Path Towards the Dialogue of Vivires 149

their thoughts were still associated with the king, the court, the whole feudal
world. We cannot afford today that luxury. We need to recognize the ruptures
and ask ourselves how ordinary men and women are confronting the horror
by creating a new world.
Given the severity of the natural and social devastation currently taking
place, there is a growing interest in forging a new “world order” to replace
the one that prevailed during the Cold War. Building it with the unimpeded
functioning of the “free market” is still the predominant proposal, but there
are also calls for greater state intervention to regulate market forces, seek
greater distributive justice, and protect the Welfare State.
According to Paul Ekins (1992), both versions are homogenizing, reflect
the “Western” mentality, and place the economy at the center of social and
political life. He notes that another option has been emerging, which would
give rise to a “grassroots world order”. It places family and community net-
works and voluntary associations at the center, rather than the market or the
state. In this holistic conception, the economic dimension would be integrated
or immersed in a broader social, ethical, and ecological reality.
There are still no “models” of thought and behavior for the alternative
option, but the disciplined and rigorous articulation of the experiences and
hopes of the majorities, based on acceptance of their diversity and pluralism,
is advancing. They share certain premises: that the current state of affairs is
intolerable, that the course proposed by governments and parties is unfeasible
and unacceptable, that the options for change should not be imposed, and that
ecological issues should not be separated from social and political ones.
An increasingly vigorous current of thought and action, clearly inspired by
the Indian peoples, abandons Cartesian separations of all orders. In the field of
knowledge, it appeals to the idea of “sentipensar” or feeling thinking, based
on the conviction that it is impossible to feel without thinking or to think
without feeling. Before memory, a freezing of reality constructed in the mold
of textuality, enlightened orality, and remembering are reclaimed, with their
changing character and their origin in the heart. An attempt is being made to
bring politics (as a commitment to the common good), together with ethics,
back to the center of social life, displacing the economy. And all this within
the framework of the effort to create a world in which many worlds can be
embraced, like the Zapatistas suggested.
Luis Villoro observes at the end of a long and complex reflection on the
foundations of political ethics, that order, freedom, and fraternity correspond
to three stages of ethical life, which “can be seen as progressive attempts to
give meaning to individual and collective life, driven by desire and justified
by reason” (Villoro, 1997: 378). To go through the three stages would be, for
Villoro, “to fulfill the design of love: to fulfill oneself through the affirmation
of the other” (Villoro: 381). In these terms, it seems to me, the practical-
epistemic dimensions of present, memory, and future could be summarized
150 The Path Towards the Dialogue of Vivires

by building a world in which many worlds can be embraced, in what Raúl

Zibechi (2017) rightly calls societies in movement.

The Other Dialogue

On September 29, 2017, the month of the great earthquakes in the south of
Mexico, we had in Guelatao, in the Sierra Norte of Oaxaca, a meeting organ-
ized months before: “Spirituality and Corn”.
Our ancestors invented corn. And corn invented us. For many people, the
expression “people of corn” is not a metaphor but a real condition of existence.
That is what we wanted to talk about. On the first day of the Encounter, we
gathered in front of the large circle of corn kernels on the ground to attend
the ritual that the people of Guelatao had organized. The grandmothers and
grandfathers arrived to talk to Mother Earth in front of that circle: “Mother”,
they told it, “don’t get agitated like that, we already understand, we already
realized what we are doing to you; don’t worry anymore, we are going to
change. Calm down.”
For almost an hour we listened to a prayer that lovingly caressed Mother
Earth so that she would no longer be so agitated. How can we understand this
with the dominant rationality? Do we have to see the ritual as an expression
of superstition and ignorance?
In the language of many native peoples, such as the peninsular Maya or the
Rarámuris, there are no words to talk about health and disease. They cannot
refer in their languages to those terms we use in Western languages. When a
deep disturbance occurs within the community, the conflict can manifest itself
as an earthquake or as pneumonia in don Rafael. If don Rafael has pneumonia,
the community wonders why it got sick in don Rafael in that way. How to
understand this? It is not enough to recognize that in Western culture illness is
an abstraction, a scientific construct. Disease has no real existence. There are
only patients, who manifest certain symptoms. These abstract constructions
may be useful for a physician, when approaching a patient, but they have also
become a source of business for the health industry. Even if we are aware that
the “disease” is not real, we believe in individual patients. Don Rafael has
pneumonia and needs to be treated with antibiotics. We take it for granted
that he is an individual, that is, an entity separated from others, from the
world, who requires individual attention from a certain medical culture that
we would like to see free of its commercial contamination. How can we bring
these different forms of knowledge into dialogue, how can we have a dialogue
of knowledge, of cultures and of experiences, when we realize that we think in
radically different ways, that our rationalities do not touch each other?
San Andrés Chicahuaxtla is a beautiful Triqui community, located in a very
high mountain range in Oaxaca. It is very cold there. “Development” arrived
there: some leader negotiated the projects of “progress”, and the package
 The Path Towards the Dialogue of Vivires 151

included a very modern health center, full of cement and aluminum. For sev-
eral years they could not get a doctor to go there, and they used the center as
a hotel for visitors. Finally, a member of the community, Zacarías Sandoval,
who had gotten his brand-new diploma as an allopathic doctor, also man-
aged, with great difficulty, to be assigned to the community. Zacarías arrived,
cleaned and fixed up the health center and announced that it would now begin
to function as such. The day after his arrival, a lady showed up who wanted
to be attended for childbirth. Zacarias immediately took her to the operating
room and soon realized that the lady was not comfortable on the table because
in Chicahuaxtla deliveries are done in a squatting position. Zacarias immedi-
ately rearranged the table so that the woman could give birth in that position.
Soon after, he realized that the woman was not comfortable being alone with
him in the room, so he invited other women from the community to come
with her. Zacarias, who is a very sensitive person, soon realized that the ladies
knew much more about childbirth than he did and so he told them: “I’ll be
out here, in the anteroom, at your service. You can call me at any time if you
think I am necessary.”
He was not called. He came when the baby was already crying. The most
interesting part of the story is that Zacarías became famous in the region and
many ladies came to deliver their babies with him, although he always stayed
in the anteroom. Why did they go to him? It was a clean place, with hot water
and a series of things that perhaps the women in labor did not have in their
huts, and he could intervene if necessary. They were attended by ladies of the
community who knew about childbirth… and who did not treat pregnancies
or deliveries as if they were illnesses.
Later, Zacarías weaved a solid agreement with the village healer, discussed
extensively with the people. If a child arrived with a “susto” or scare, Zacarías
would send him to the healer. He explained in the community that he had
been taught to treat this condition as post-traumatic stress. He would have
to fill the child with pills that would keep him dumb for a long time and he
might not be cured. The healer, on the other hand, had a good practice that
was able to get a child out of susto in a short time and without filling him with
pills. Sometimes people come to the healer and he sends them to Zacarias
because he cannot help them. They never quarrel and they send each other
“patients” whose treatment sometimes involves the whole community.
It is not easy to understand this dialogue of vivires (living experience) from
the outside. This is the level at which we must approach the question because
the dialogue of knowledge may be impossible: there are no terms that can
put them in relation because they emanate from incompatible rationalities.
“Susto” and “post-traumatic stress” cannot be put on the same plane. In prac-
tice, however, by rooting the acts in everyday life, it is possible to find forms
of dialogue of experiences that respectfully put the different worlds in relation
to each other.
152 The Path Towards the Dialogue of Vivires

If the challenge is reduced to dialogue between scientific disciplines, we

are facing a difficult technical problem, but one that can be solved. But in our
common house there are not only people from different professions and spe-
cialties, but people and groups from different cultures, with different ways of
being and knowing. We cannot and should not continue to try to reduce them
all to the patriarchal epistemic mania of the West. Listening while transcend-
ing the logos leads to doing and it is there, in practice, where intercultural dia-
logue can finally take place. After all, it is not simply a dialogue of knowledge,
but a dialogue of vivires. Its time has come.

Notes
1 The distinction in Spanish between conocimiento and saber does not have an equiv-
alent in English. Even in Spanish, people may use the two words for a similar
allusion to ‘knowing’. But it is posible to establish a clear distinction. Conocimiento
would be any form of formalized knowledge and saber would be what a person
knows, through the combination of learning and experience.
2 Those who are part of the so-called “original peoples” or “pueblos originarios” have
always resisted the label “Indian” or “Indigenous”. They have other ways of calling
themselves. Recently, a political position associated with the rejection of that label
has begun to gain traction. See Aguilar, 2017. In this essay I use the terms “origi-
narios”, “indígenas”, and “indios” interchangeably, recognizing their limitations.
3 Ethnomathematics is a school of thinking which has been widening, particularly
in Latin America, after the ideas of Ubiuratan d’Ambrosio, who coined the expres-
sion (Blanco, 2008). The reflections presented here don’t come from that school,
but ehnomathematicians take Emmanuel Lizcano, whose ideas are adopted in this
essay, as one fundamental referent in their proposals and practices. The arguments
exposed here were presented in the Sixth International Congress of Ethnomathe-
matics: Saberes, diversity and peace, hold in Medellín, Colombia, on 8-13 July, 2018.

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8
THE AWAKENING: THE ART
OF REBELLING

I woke up, like many millions around the world. It was impossible to continue sleeping.
On January 1, 1994, the Zapatistas took many of our convictions and beliefs and
opened a new path. We are still in that condition, with their trip to Europe embodying
the novelties, beyond all pandemics.
In April 1994, only four months after the insurrection, I wrote Celebración del
Zapatismo: El secreto del EZLN (Celebration of Zapatism: The Secret of the
Zapatista Army for National Liberation). It was published two months later, in Spanish,
and soon was presented in other languages. It was an interesting text. I was really moved
when Subcomandante Marcos asked for 25 copies of the book for their study groups. It was
a good introduction to Zapatismo and to understand it in the frame of the book, México
profundo (Deep Mexico), published by Guillermo Bonfil in the 1990s.
Twelve years later Universidad de la Tierra in Oaxaca published a new version, with
important changes, both to include the fascinating story of those years and the changes in
our perceptions of Zapatismo.
I am including in this chapter a good part of that version of the little book. I will put
on my personal page the full versions in Spanish and English.

Zapatismo is nowadays the most radical, and perhaps the most important,
political initiative in the world.
The Zapatistas challenge in words and deeds every aspect of contemporary
society. By revealing the root cause of the current predicaments, they tear to
tatters the framework of the economic society (capitalism), the nation-state,
formal democracy, and all modern institutions. They also render obsolete
conventional ways and practices of social and political movements and initia-
tives. In reconstructing the world from the bottom up, they reveal the illusory

DOI: 10.4324/9781003262749-9
156 The Awakening: The Art of Rebelling

or counterproductive nature of changes conceived or implemented from the

top down. Their path encourages everywhere resistance to globalization and
neoliberalism, and inspires struggles for liberation. They also contribute to
articulating those struggles.
Only hope remained in Pandora’s Box, after all evils had escaped from it.
By liberating hope and thus discovering a net of plural paths, the Zapatistas
paved the way for a renaissance. They 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 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 not tolerated, the same persecuted, the same as
you. Behind this, we are you.
(The Zapatistas 1998: 24)

Basta! Enough!
At midnight of 1 January 1994, NAFTA—the North American Free Trade
Agreement between Mexico, the US and Canada—came into force. Barely two
hours later, thousands of Indians, armed with machetes, clubs, and a few guns,
occupied four of the main towns in Chiapas, a province of Mexico bordering
Guatemala, and declared war on the Mexican government. The rebels revealed
that they were Indians of different ethnic groups calling themselves Ejército
Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (EZLN). They appealed for an end to 500 years
of oppression and 50 years of “development”, and expressed the hope that a new
political regime would allow them to reclaim their commons and to regenerate
their own forms of governance and their own art of living and dying. It was
time to say “Basta! Enough!”
For ten years, encircled by 50–60,000 troops, a third of the Mexican Army,
the Zapatistas have peacefully resisted the “low intensity” war waged against
them by the government. They have been continually exposed to public
attention. In fact, no contemporary social or political movement has attracted
more public attention and for more time than Zapatismo. But they 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
 The Awakening: The Art of Rebelling 157

democratic principles, and yet is democracy’s most radical critic? People pro-
foundly rooted in ancient Mayan traditions and yet immersed in contempo-
rary ideas, problems, and technologies?

What Zapatismo Is Not

The Zapatistas are not a fundamentalist or messianic movement. Within their
ranks, very different beliefs, and religions, most of them well rooted in their
traditions, coexist harmoniously. They are very open and ecumenical in reli-
gious matters. Most of them are Indigenous people, but they did not start an
Indigenous or ethnic movement. They do not reduce the scope of their initiative
to Indigenous peoples, to a “minority” or even less to themselves, to their own
claims: “Everything for everyone, nothing for us” is not a slogan but a political
attitude and practice.
The Zapatistas are not a nationalist, separatist, or “autonomist” move-
ment. They show no desire for Chiapas to become a small nation-state, an
Indigenous republic, or an “autonomous” administrative district, in line with
the demands of minorities in some other countries. They actively resist the
modern propensity to subsume local ways of being and cultural differences
in the homogenizing treatment given to people classed as “minorities” in
the modern nation state—usually another way of hiding discrimination and
entrenching individualism.
The Zapatistas are not guerrillas. They are not fish that swim in the sea of
the people, as Che Guevara would define guerrillas. They are not a revolu-
tionary group in search of popular support to seize power. Their uprising was
the collective decision of hundreds of communities not interested in power.
They are the sea, not the fish. In exploring this condition, we can discover one
of the most important and confusing traits of the Zapatistas.

Listening While You Walk

“The first fundamental act of the EZLN was to learn how to listen and to
speak”, say the Zapatistas.
On 17 November 1983 a group of six professional revolutionaries arrived
in Chiapas to establish a guerrilla center and base. Their first task was to
learn how to survive in the jungle by themselves. After one year, the person
later presented as Old Antonio discovered them and introduced them to the
communities. Their Marxist-Leninist-Guevarist ideology could not perme-
ate their conversations. “Your words are too harsh”, people kept telling them.
Thus, the guerrillas’ “square” ideas were not only dented but so severely
damaged that they became unrecognizable. The first Zapatistas say that in
this initial confrontation they lost—they, those bearing that ideology and
that political project, a would-be guerrilla in the Latin American tradition.
158 The Awakening: The Art of Rebelling

But out of this intercultural dialogue Zapatismo was born and rooted itself in
hundreds of communities.
In the following years, these communities tried every legal tool at their dis-
posal, every form of social, economic, or political organization. They organized
marches, sit-ins, everything. They even walked two thousand kilometers from
Chiapas to the capital, Mexico City, to find someone to hear their call. No one
listened. Not the society and not the government. 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 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)

All they had been left with was their dignity. They affirmed themselves in it,
hoping that their sacrifice might awaken society, and that perhaps their children
and grandchildren could live a better life.
They were the weakest. Nobody was listening. But their uprising was ech-
oed by the “civil society”, that urged them to try a peaceful and political way.
They accepted such a mandate and they made themselves strong in it, chang-
ing the form of their struggle. Only 12 days after the armed uprising started,
they became the champions of nonviolence.
According to the Zapatistas, after the Dialogue of the Cathedral in March
1994 (frustrated after the assassination of the presidential candidate of the
official party) and the elections of that year, they needed to create a different
kind of space for dialogue:

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 1994 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.

When the Aguascalientes of Guadalupe Tepeyac was destroyed by the federal

army, in February 1995, other Aguascalientes were born in different Zapatista
 The Awakening: The Art of Rebelling 159

communities. They have served since then many purposes, especially for the
relationship with “civil society”.
In December 1995 autonomous municipalities started to be created in the
Zapatista area. In them, despite the military encirclement and other external
pressures, the Zapatistas practiced their autonomy, both within each of the
communities constituting every municipality and within each municipality,
where the communities organized and controlled a governing council.
After long reflection on these experiences, the Zapatistas introduced
important changes in their internal structure and in their ways of relating to
“civil society”. In order to inform about them, burying the Aguascalientes and
giving birth to the caracoles (snails, seashells), they held a great celebration from
8 to 10 August 2003.
Internally, they decided to separate the military structure from the civil
organization and to harmonize the activities of the autonomous municipalities
in every Zapatista region through Juntas de Buen Gobierno (Councils or Boards
of Good Government). These new autonomous bodies were created “to take
care that in Zapatista territory those that lead, led by following… In each rebel
area there will be a Junta, constituted by one or two delegates of each of the
Autonomous Councils (of the municipalities) of the area”.
The autonomous communities and municipalities will thus continue func-
tioning with their own structure, but now they will also have these Juntas de
Buen Gobierno, embracing several municipalities. The Juntas will attend to
conflicts and difficulties of the autonomous municipalities within the jurisdic-
tion of each Junta. Anyone feeling that an injustice has been committed in his or
her community or municipality, or that things are not being done as they ought
to be done, according to the community will and the principle of command by
obeying, may have recourse to this new body. These Juntas will also oversee any
dealings with “civil society” and if needed, with government agencies.
Why call the new political bodies caracoles? The Zapatistas offered different
explanations:

The wise ones of olden times say that the hearts of men and women are
in the shape of a caracol, and that those who have good in their hearts and
thoughts walk from one place to the other, awakening gods and men for
them to check that the world remains right. For that reason, who keeps
vigil while the others are sleeping uses his caracol, and he uses it for many
things, but most of all as not to forget.
They say here that the most ancient ones said that others before them
said that the very first people of these lands held an appreciation for the
symbol of the caracol. They say that they say that they said that the caracol
represents entering the heart, that this is what the very first ones called
knowledge. They say that they say that they said that the caracol also
represents exiting from the heart to walk the world, that this is what the
160 The Awakening: The Art of Rebelling

very first people called life. And not only, they say that they say that they
said that with the caracol the community was called together for the word
to travel from one to the other and thus accord was born. And also they
say that they say that they said that the caracol was a gift for the ear to hear
even the most distant words. This they say that they say that they said.
The caracoles will be like doors to enter into the communities and for
the communities to come out; like windows to see us inside and also
for us to see outside; like loudspeakers in order to send far and wide our
word and also to hear the words from the one who is far away. But, most
of all, they will remind us that we ought to keep watch and to check
uprightness of the worlds that populate the world.

At the celebration that buried the Aguascalientes and birthed the caracoles, the
Zapatistas announced that in their territories the Plan Puebla-Panamá—a neolib-
eral scheme for Southern Mexico and Central America—would not be applied.
They proposed instead the Plan La Realidad-Tijuana that “consists in linking all
the resistances in our country, and reconstructing Mexico from the bottom up.”
As these highlights of the very complex story of Zapatismo illustrate, the
Zapatistas do not enclose themselves in a body of doctrine or an ideology,
which usually starts as a guide to action and ends transmogrified into a rigid
and authoritarian straitjacket. They have changed continually, enriching their
statements and ways, according to changing circumstances and following their
intense interaction with other groups and organizations. They listen, learn from
others, and apply in each step a healthy self-criticism. Yet this is not mere prag-
matism. They continue to be solidly attached to certain principles of behavior
and they possess splendid moral integrity. They also possess the strength of
character that emanates from a well-rooted, open, and hospitable dignity.
There are few things more distinctive of the Zapatistas than their capacity
to listen…and to change, according to what they heard, introducing pro-
found mutations in their movement. What some people see as chameleonic
behavior, or betrayal of sacred principles or doctrinaire statements, is instead
an expression of vitality, flexibility, openness, and capacity to change. This is
the challenge in describing Zapatismo. You need to allude to the mutations
of the subject itself and its attitudes.

Walking at the Pace of the Slowest

All the “revolutionary vanguards” are obsessively focused on keeping their
position of leadership and command. They must be at the top and control, by
all means, the “masses”. And they always are in a rush. They must be the first
to arrive in the Promised Land, which usually means seizing power. Once in
power, they think, they will be able to lead the people in the realization of
their revolutionary project.
 The Awakening: The Art of Rebelling 161

The Zapatistas are instead focused on seeking consensus and walking at the
pace of the slowest. No important political decision is taken by a small group
of leaders. Consequently, the decision process is slow and complex. It requires
long and convoluted forms of discussion and consultation. They do not speed
it up through the method of voting, which always leaves a balance of winners
and losers, majorities, and minorities. And the march itself, walking the con-
sensual path, is unavoidably slow.
Such search for consensus rejects the assumption of homogeneity in the
understanding of social subjects or issues, as well as in the basic attitudes of the
assembled people, implicit in conventional “democratic consensus”. The ballot
box for referenda, plebiscite, and elections are not only exposed to manipula-
tion and control; they are also based on the assumption that everyone shares a
common understanding of the matters to be voted for and that the voters also
share some basic attitudes determining the “democratic consensus” constructed
through their votes. Fully aware of the many differences in the plurality of
interests, perceptions, attitudes, and voices of the real world, the Zapatistas try
to identify by consensus the paths to be walked. And in walking them, once
agreed upon by everyone, they adjust the pace of the walk to those straggling.
The slowest, on their part, have been accelerating their pace, as they see the
institutional roof falling over them.
At the same time, while walking that path, the Zapatistas are resorting to
legal and political procedures, to construct another level of consensus. They
seem convinced that those procedures, integral to one another, are the best
way to protect the structure of freedom they are creating (Illich, 1974).
The Zapatistas insist that they are rebels, not revolutionaries. Perhaps they
are right. The true revolutionaries would be those ordinary men and women
mobilized by the dignified rebellion of the Zapatistas. They are producing
a radical change at the grassroots, all over the world. For the most part, the
change has not yet crystallized in enduring institutions, but seems to have
very solid foundations. It is perhaps the first social revolution of the twenty-
first century: the revolution of the new commons (Esteva and Prakash, 1998,
Esteva, 2000).

Democracy? Presence and Representation

During their First Intercontinental Encounter for Humanity and Against
Neoliberalism, in July–August, 1996, Subcomandante Marcos explained, in
an informal intervention, the attitude of the Zapatistas about power when they
were preparing the uprising:

We thought that we needed to reformulate the question of power. We

will not repeat the formula that to change the world you need to seize
power, and once in power you will organize it the way it is the best for
162 The Awakening: The Art of Rebelling

the world, that is, what is the best for me, because I am in power. We
thought that if we conceived a change in the premise of the question
of power, arguing that we did not want to take it, this would produce
a different form of politics, another kind of politicians, other human
beings who could make politics very different to the one practiced by
the politicians we suffer today along the whole political spectrum.
(The Zapatistas 1998: 69)

On January 1, 1996, in their 4th Declaration of Selva Lacandona, the Zapatistas

invited everyone to explore at the local level what the people can do without
political parties and the government. For the Zapatistas, the question is not
who is in power, or how any person, group, or party got a position of power
(through elections or other means), but the very nature of the system of power.
They do not believe that the improvement in the electoral procedures, which
seem to need everywhere a complete overhaul, will be able to address the
problems embedded in the very structure of the “democratic” nation-state.
They stopped thinking that the needed changes should, or can, come from
above. They think instead that those changes can only be realized with the
transformation of the society by itself, from within, in people’s social fabric in
communities, barrios, municipalities.
Democracy, in fact, can only be where the people are, and not “up there” at
the top of the institutions, no matter how perfect the procedures to elect rep-
resentatives who will shape and operate those institutions could be. Instead of
putting their trust in the constituted powers, whose legitimacy they question,
the Zapatistas place their hope in the constituent force, the force constitut-
ing the constituted powers, the one that can give, or not, life, meaning, and
substance to them. Zapatismo has been, from the very beginning, an open
appeal to this constituent force of society, an invitation to those forming it to
directly and consciously deal with social transformation, not through their
supposed representatives.
It is increasingly evident, everywhere, that the constituted powers are not
respecting people’s will. The voices of 30 million people, for example, occupy-
ing the streets everywhere to stop the war in the Middle East, were not heard.
This situation generates increasing disenchantment with formal democracy. It
produces a feeling of impotence. Many people react with apathy, indifference,
even desperation. Both voting, or abandoning the ballot box, may be useless
or counterproductive.
The Zapatistas created an alternative path—a political force, instead of a
political party, which transforms social and political reality at the grassroots
and can enclose the enclosers, encircling and controlling the powers that be.
The Zapatistas know very well that their current struggle occurs within the
legal and political framework of the Mexican State. But they are not trapped
in the perverse illusion that the State is the only general political reality or a
 The Awakening: The Art of Rebelling 163

privileged form of political activity. Politics, for them, is a commitment to the

common good, as expressed in common sense, the sense held in the commu-
nity. They take away from the State and the market the function of defining
the good life and reclaim it as a faculty of “civil society”, that is, the people.
The Zapatistas are also fully aware of the current debate about the situation
and prospects of the nation-state itself. They observe that this modern inven-
tion, within which the economic society was organized and promoted in both
capitalist and socialist forms, is now exposed to a two-pronged attack by trans-
national forces and institutions, or by internal groups with ethnic, religious,
or ideological claims. They seem clearly interested in the different notions of
nation and state, abandoned after the creation of the nation-state, which dif-
ferent groups are now reclaiming. They have expressed their sympathy with
efforts attempting to transform the homogeneous state (monocultural or mul-
ticultural) into a plural state, according to diverse conceptions. But they have
not committed their will or their discourse to any specific political design, sug-
gested as a substitute for the “democratic” nation-state. They seem convinced
that “society as a whole” (the general design of a society) is always the outcome
of a multiplicity of initiatives, forces, and impulses—not the fruit of social
engineering or theoretical designs. They appeal to sociological and political
imagination, while emphasizing that what is really needed is the full partici-
pation of everyone, particularly those until now excluded, in the concepts and
practices that will give a new shape to the society and its political regime.
In their own regions, where they are in control, the Zapatistas seem to be
clearing a path in which democracy means presence, rather than representation.

Beyond Both Universalism and Relativism

The idea of One World is an old Western dream, project, and design, whose
origins can be traced back to the parable of the Good Samaritan and the
Apostle Paul.

The Enlightenment secularized this heritage and turned it into a human-

ist creed. Neither class nor sex, neither religion nor race count before
human nature, as they didn’t count before God. Thus, the universality
of the Sonship of God was recast as the universality of human dignity.
From then on, “humanity” became the common denominator uniting
all peoples, causing differences in skin color, beliefs, and social customs
to decline in significance.
(Sachs 1992: 103)

Accepting the assumption that there is a fundamental sameness in all human

beings, the construction of One World was adopted in the West as a moral
obligation. It became a destructive and colonizing adventure, attempting to
164 The Awakening: The Art of Rebelling

absorb and dissolve, in the same movement, all the different traditions and
forms of existence on this planet. This old project, supported by all the forms
of the cross and the sword, is now carried on under the US hegemony. At the
end of the Second World War, such hegemony used the emblem of develop-
ment (Esteva, 1992). The emblem of globalization replaced it at the end of the
Cold War, promoting with more violence than ever a universal culturicide.
The current global project is economic in nature: it attempts the trans-
mogrification of every man and woman on earth into homo economicus, the
possessive and competitive individual born in the West, who is the social
foundation of capitalism (and socialism), and what makes possible the social
relationships defining it. This economic project has a political face: formal, or
representative, democracy. And a moral or ethical face: human rights. (When
the economic project requires it, these “faces” are abandoned).
“Enough!” said the Zapatistas to all this. For centuries, their communities
entrenched themselves in their own places, resisting colonizers and developers.
Such cultural resistance often expressed forms of localism or even fundamen-
talism. Through atrocious experiences, the Zapatista communities have learned
that in the era of globalization no localism will survive and no cultural resistance
is enough. They have also learned that capital now has more appetite than ever,
but not enough stomach to digest all those that it attempts to control. Millions of
people, therefore, and clearly most Indigenous people, are becoming dispensable.
The Zapatistas transformed their resistance into a struggle for liberation.
They remembered the experience of Emiliano Zapata, who gave them their
name. In 1914, when the peasant and Indigenous armies occupied Mexico’s
capital, after the defeat of the dictatorship that was bringing them to the brink
of extinction, Zapata and Villa, the two main leaders of the revolution, fell
into perplexity. Their uprising was not to seize power and govern the country.
They only wanted Land and Freedom. They thus came back to their own
places, dismantled the haciendas of the big landowners who had been exploit-
ing them, and started to enjoy the land and freedom they had conquered
through their struggle. Four years later, both of them were assassinated. True,
thanks to the revolution, most peasants and Indigenous people got some land;
but step by step they lost their freedom and autonomy in the political regime
established after the armed struggle.
Today’s Zapatistas, as the former, are not interested in seizing power and
governing the country. But they have learned the lesson of their predecessors.
They are clearly interested in the kind of regime to be established in the coun-
try. It should permanently and fully respect their land, their autonomy, their
freedom, their radical democracy. They do not attempt to impose on others
their own conceptions and ways. They only hope that such a regime will be
really conceived and constructed by all Mexicans—not by only a few, not by
only the elite or a revolutionary vanguard. And that such a regime will be
defined by the harmonious coexistence of different peoples and cultures.
 The Awakening: The Art of Rebelling 165

The Zapatistas resisted the secular, liberal temptation of “liberating” them-

selves from their own culture in order to adopt “universal” ideologies or
values. Well affirmed in their own cultures and communities, they opened
themselves to wide coalitions of the discontented. Their localization is thus rad-
ically different to both globalization and localism. It invites those still search-
ing for a change in the frame of One World to create a whole new world in
which many worlds can be embraced. It is an invitation to go más allá (beyond)
mere cultural resistance or economic or political claims (in a struggle for a big-
ger piece of the existing pie), towards an epic of transformation open to many
cultures. It is an invitation, not preaching or instructing. It is not a sermon or
a lesson, but a gesture.
The Zapatistas are fully aware that in the current situation any local reality
is directly and immediately global, in the sense that it is exposed to inter-
action with global forces and processes. To be deeply immersed in strictly
local affairs, to rigorously deal and cope with them, in the way everyone
wants and can do, implies dealing with the intertwining, interpenetration and
interdependence of all localities. This kind of awareness has compelled many
of those discontented with the neoliberal shape of the global project to con-
ceive alternative globalizations. The Zapatistas resist such temptation. They
are fully and deeply committed to the articulation of all resistances, to wide
coalitions of the discontented, to the gathering of all rebellions. But they do
not attempt to subsume all the struggles in a single definition of the present
and the future, in a single doctrine, slogan, or ideology. They are aware that
the shared construction of a real por-venir (the world to come) for all those dis-
contented, increasingly dispensable for capital, can only be realized in a world
in which many worlds can be embraced. They know that the time has come
to bury forever the dream and project of constructing One World, which has
been the pretext of all colonialisms and today nourishes forms of fundamen-
talism whose level of violence has no precedents. What is emerging, instead,
can be expressed in the formula “One No, Many Yeses” (Midnight Notes,
1997, Kingsnorth, 2003).

Zapatistas and Zapatismo

The record of the Zapatista impact until now is pretty impressive.

• The Zapatistas were a decisive factor in the dismantling of the oldest

authoritarian regime in the world, Mexico’s ancient regime. They cre-
ated an option through the profound social and political transformation
which started after the collapse of that regime. Autonomous municipal-
ities, in different parts of Mexico, and other initiatives inspired by the
Zapatistas have now increasing visibility and political space. Their con-
vening power grew from the few thousands of the first week of 1994 to
166 The Awakening: The Art of Rebelling

the 3–4 million involved in the national and international consultation

of 1996, to the more than 40 million (40% of the Mexican population),
for the 2001 March.
• The situation in Chiapas changed dramatically; thousands of peasants,
mostly Indigenous, got the land they had been struggling for and a new
balance of political forces is now redefining the social fabric.
• In the territories occupied by the Zapatistas, despite military encircle-
ment and continual paramilitary threats, they have been doing what they
said from the very beginning that they wanted to do. After reclaiming
their commons, they are regenerating their own forms of governance
and their own art of living and dying. They have been able to operate
autonomously, and to improve their living conditions, without any kind
of services or funds from the government. They are in fact living beyond
the logic of the market and the State, beyond the logic of capital.
• All over the world, there are gestures, changes, and mobilizations that
seem to be inspired by the Zapatistas. The highly visible social movements
against globalization, neoliberalism, or war, quote the Zapatistas as a source
of inspiration and support them. Thousands of committees, which call
themselves “Zapatista committees”, operate across the world. They were
founded as an expression of solidarity with the Zapatista cause. They are
still ready to offer such solidarity and some of them are actively engaged
in doing something with or for the Zapatistas. Most of them are rather
involved in local or issue struggles: for their own dreams, projects, initia-
tives, or against a specific or general development or injustice: a dam, a road,
a dumping ground, a McDonalds…or a war, a policy, a government…

One must go back very far in history to find another political initiative with
similar global repercussions. Wallerstein found in Gandhi and Mandela points of
comparison. But a real historic equivalent would require going much farther back.
While the Zapatistas affirm today that Zapatismo is stronger than ever, the
political classes, the media, many analysts, and even some sympathizers are
beginning to consider that the Zapatistas are history. Parallel to the extensive cel-
ebrations organized around the world for their tenth and twentieth anniversaries
(10 years after the uprising, 20 after their beginnings), there were many attempts
to organize their funeral. It was said that they failed as a social and political move-
ment. That far from an improvement, the material conditions of the Zapatista
communities had deteriorated under their leadership and control, and that the
Zapatistas are now increasingly isolated in four municipalities in Chiapas, and are
basically irrelevant in the national or international political scene.
The Zapatistas have frequently used a very loud “strategy of silence” that
usually generates wide bewilderment and suspicions about their political death.
They have radically abandoned the conventional political arena. They openly
reject all political parties and refuse to have any contact with the government,
 The Awakening: The Art of Rebelling 167

both for its services or funds—which they reject—or for a dialogue, since
the government has not honored its word and signature in the Agreements
of San Andrés. They refuse to participate in the electoral process. All these
elements contribute to explain the conventional, reactionary, or even friendly
perception that the Zapatistas are history, that the peak of their movement and
initiatives is over.
“We are just beginning”, Commander Abraham said recently (Muñoz
2003: 77). He is probably right. The depth of the radicalism of the Zapatistas,
and at the same time their amazing restraint, make it particularly difficult to
appreciate their situation and prospects.
Words are windows of perception, the 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 fleshed in their behavior
have been the main weapon of the Zapatistas. Using their words brilliantly
and effectively, 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 demo-
cratically, the very foundation of the existing Power/Knowledge system. While
this system hides within spectacular shows of strength its increasing fragility, the
Zapatistas exploit for their struggle its profound cracks, denounce it as a struc-
ture of domination and control, and begin the construction of an alternative.
The importance of Zapatismo is derived from its grassroots radicalism. It
operates as a riverbed for the flow of growing discontent with conventional
organizations, political parties, and governments, particularly to resist the
neoliberal globalization as the current form of capital expansion.
The Zapatistas opposed globalization when it was universally perceived as
an ineluctable reality, a necessary path, a historical fact. By revealing, before
anyone else, that the emperor had no clothes, the Zapatistas awakened those
who intuited the situation and yet did not dare to recognize it. In showing an
alternative, they created an opportunity to escape from the intellectual and
political straitjacket in which the dominant “truths” had trapped us.
The radical promise of the Zapatistas is not a new ideological construction
of possible futures. It is continually self-fulfilled in their deeds, in their daily
behavior, as a redefinition of hope. Their position is not equivalent to expec-
tation, as the conviction that something will turn out well. It expresses the
conviction that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out. “Hope
is that rejection of conformity and defeat” (The Zapatistas 1998: 13).
Such an attitude, defining Zapatismo, is called dignity by the Zapatistas:

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)
168 The Awakening: The Art of Rebelling

They are fully aware that “the expanding dignity of each man and each
human relationship must necessarily challenge existing systems” (Illich 1972:
18). Their localization is a feasible and effective alternative to both localism
and globalization. Their autonomy challenges the centralism of the state, mar-
ginalizes the economy, and resists modern and capitalist individualization pro-
moted by both internal and external colonizers. Rooted in their dignity, the
Zapatistas have been erecting some landmarks and signposts in what looks like
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 perspec-
tives that herald a new social order, beyond both modernity and post moder-
nity, beyond the economic society (be it capitalist or socialist), beyond formal
democracy and the nation state, más allá (beyond) the current conditions of
the world and their intellectual, ideological, and institutional underpinnings.
The Zapatistas seem increasingly to be ordinary men and women with
extraordinary behavior. They are one of a kind, yet at the same time they are
typical. They continue to inspire hearts and heads. They exemplify thousands
of initiatives now being taken at the grassroots everywhere. The Zapatistas are
no longer the Zapatismo circulating in the world.
At the Intercontinental Encounter against Neoliberalism in 1996, the
Zapatistas told all the participants that they were not together to change
the world—something quite difficult, if not impossible to do—but to create a
whole new world. This phrase was received with fascination and enthusiasm…
but also skepticism. To some, it appeared unfeasible and romantic. Step by
step, however, as soon as many people started to escape from the dominant
intellectual and ideological straightjackets, they discovered in themselves a
dignity similar to that of the Zapatistas and started to walk their own path.
Today’s Zapatismo is no longer in the hands of the Zapatistas and may
ignore its original or current source of inspiration.

The Transition to Hope

I was talking with Doña Trinidad, a magnificent old woman of Morelia, one
of the Zapatista communities most affected and harassed by both the military
and the paramilitary. I wanted to know how they were feeling in such difficult
conditions. She told me, smiling: “We are still hungry. We are still threat-
ened and harassed. But now we have hope. And that changes everything”.
I can imagine the terrible feeling of living under such atrocious oppression
and thinking that your children and grandchildren will continue to suffer it.
If you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, if you can nourish some hope,
restrictions become bearable and life livable…
The Zapatistas have brought prosperity to the communities, if we reclaim
the original meaning of the word: from the Latin pro spere, according to hope.
For ten years, they have organized their own lives with no dependence on the
 The Awakening: The Art of Rebelling 169

State, whose services, proposals, programs, or projects they reject, and they
have kept the market at their margin, instead of hanging their very existence
on it. They are still dealing with too many restrictions, none of which is a
novelty for them. But they have found the path that allows them to overcome
one by one each of those restrictions, as they walk their path.
Hope is the very essence of popular movements (Lummis, 1996).
Nonconformity and discontent are not enough. Neither is critical awareness
enough. People mobilize themselves when they think that their action may
bring about a change, when they have hope, when they share the conviction
that something makes sense.
With words and deeds, with amazing talent, imagination, and courage,
the Zapatistas brought a new hope to the planet. Millions of people seem now
to be sharing and nourishing it. In celebrating the tenth anniversary of the
Zapatista uprising and the twentieth anniversary of the original initiative, we
all are really celebrating the beginning of Zapatismo.

Bibliography
Esteva, Gustavo. 1992. “Development.” In The Development Dictionary: A Guide of Know­
ledge as Power, edited by Wolfgang Sachs, 6–25. London: Zed Books.
Esteva, Gustavo. 2000. “The Revolution of the New Commons.” In Aboriginal Rights
and Self-Government, edited by Curtis Cook and Juan Lindau, 186–217. Montreal:
McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Esteva, Gustavo, and Suri Prakash, Madhu. 1998. Grassroots Postmodernism: Remaking
the Soil of Cultures. London: Zed Books.
Illich, Ivan. 1972. Deschooling Society. New York: Harper & Row.
Kingsnorth, Paul. 2003. One No, Many Yeses: A Journey to the Heart of the Global Resis­
tance Movement. London: The Free Press.
Lummis, Douglas. 1996. Radical Democracy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Midnight Notes. 1997. One No, Many Yeses. No. 12. Jamaica Plain, MA.
Muñoz, Gloria. 2003. 20 y 10: El fuego y la palabra. (20 and 10: The Fire and the Word).
Mexico City: Rebeldía/La Jornada Ediciones.
Sachs, Wolfgang. 1992. “One World.” In The Development Dictionary: A Guide to
Knowledge as Power, edited by Wolfgang Sachs, 111–126. London: Zed Books.
The Zapatistas. 1998. Zapatista Encuentro: Documents from the 1996 Encounter for Humanity
and Against Neoliberalism. New York: Seven Stories Press.
9
THE FESTIVAL OF DIGNIFIED RAGE

On January 4, 2009, the Zapatistas organized in San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Chiapas,
Mexico, the Festival of Dignified Rage. I was one of the many people invited to the Festival
and I am including in this chapter excerpts and an edited version of my participation in it.
The festival looked like the pertinent frame to share some reflections about the State,
particularly my critique of the Leninist tradition of seizing the State power to organize
the revolution. It was also the appropriate context to reflect on democracy in the nation-
state and elaborate on what we have been calling radical democracy, a notion that seems
to express well what the Zapatistas are doing. All this was presented in the context of
the current crisis, which exploded in 2008.
In this and the previous chapter I am trying to illustrate the art of rebelling with
which the Zapatistas awakened millions of us and became an appropriate preparation
for the challenges at the end of an era. The original text was published in Socialism
and Democracy, Vol. 23, No. 3, November 2009, as “Another Perspective, Another
Democracy” and also reproduced as a pamphlet by the Zapatista Autonomy Project.

We brought to the festival the rage in our skin, produced by the continued
violence against the Zapatistas, Indigenous communities, women, defend-
ers of human rights… We could not react with destructive fury or least of
all desperation. We were trying to transform our rage into courage and
accepted an invitation to celebrate, with the spirit of a fiesta, a new hope,
“that rebellion that rejects conformism and defeat”, a hope that also is
called dignity, “that homeland without nationality, that rainbow which is
also a bridge, that murmur of the heart which does not care for the blood
living in it, that rebel irreverence mocking frontiers, customs and wars
(EZLN 1997: 126).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003262749-10
 The Festival of Dignified Rage 171

The Corruption of the Perspective

For a century, those interested in radical social change adopted a political per-
spective built up on the notion of a vanguard, with the eyes fixed on the State.
Since Lenin’s time it has been widely assumed that a group of enlightened
revolutionaries would lead the masses to the Promised Land it had conceived
for them. The struggle against the State would become instead a struggle for
the State, with the aim of conquering it. Raised in this tradition, we assumed
that the State is just an instrument which simply does whatever it is told to do.
The State is fascist or revolutionary or democratic depending on who runs it.
We must recognize that the nation-state, be it the most ferocious dictator-
ship or the gentlest and purest democracy, has been and remains a structure for
dominating and controlling the population, to put it at the service of capital.
The modern state is the ideal collective capitalist. As such, it functions as a
dictatorship even when it has the most up-to-date democratic institutions. It
must therefore be resisted at every turn in the anticapitalistic struggle. By the
same token we must flee like the plague any temptation to occupy the state or
collaborate with it. Once the battle has been won, we must shake free of the
State and must totally dismantle the state machinery.
The left’s obsession with taking power gives rise to two types of self-de-
structions. The first and more obvious one is corruption. Ethical sensibil-
ity disappears when one takes power. High ideals gradually dissolve during
struggle. Taking power ceases to be a means and becomes instead the end. At
this point, all means become justified, including treason, collaborationism,
complicity, any kind of crime, dishonesty, impunity—in short, a blatant and
cynical lack of integrity.
But there is another type of self-destruction which is often overlooked.
We lose or abandon our perspective not only by looking to the top (mirar hacia
arriba) but by thinking that we are seeing from the top (ver desde arriba). In our
eagerness to hold state power, we begin to think like a state (Scott 1998). A long
tradition of political theory and practice has accustomed us to adopting this
view from above—as if we were already up there—and to attributing almost
magical powers to abstract entities like the State. The political imagination
thus becomes carried away with grand theories and imperial visions, and we
lose any sense of reality.
Many militants committed to transformation base their work on a prior
totalizing vision of society, including a description of the Promised Land and
the formulation of a revolutionary program that everyone will have to follow.
But transformative action does not have to be based on such a vision; on the
contrary, we must break radically with the tyranny of globalizing discourses.
Society “as a whole” reflects a multiplicity of initiatives and processes, most of
them unpredictable (cf. Foucault 1980). As Marx said of the Paris Commune,
the workers
172 The Festival of Dignified Rage

have no ready-made utopias to introduce par décret du peuple. They know

that in order to work out their own emancipation … they will have to
pass through long struggles…. They have no ideals to realize, but to set
free the elements of the new society with which old collapsing bourgeois
society itself is pregnant.
(Marx 1978b: 633f).

The issue for us is not who holds power, nor is it the means—electoral or
other—by which any particular person, group, or party got into power. The
issue is the very nature of power in the nation-state, as a structure of domina-
tion and control.
“Let’s not be in love with power,” advises Foucault (1983: xiii). Those who
taste power, whether at the summit of the State or in the smallest of posts in
some remote town, are made delirious by it. A similar delirium affects those
who struggle for it. Because in the end power is a relation, not a thing that can
be distributed, that some have and others lack, that one can conquer and exer-
cise in the name of diverse goals, like any tool. Within the nation-state, Power
expresses a relation of domination and control, in which the dominant player
can carry out what it wants, from high ideals to petty swindles. He who strives
for power acquires the virus of domination and applies it without scruple over
his own comrades-in-arms, since every means is justified for the sake of his
“noble goals,” and his rivals may stand in the way of attaining them.
Instead of this dead-end street, the left’s defining struggle should be to gen-
erate social relations in which there is no room for those associated with such
power—new social relations in which power exists only as the autonomous
expression of dignity; relations built from below by the common people, not
by an enlightened vanguard. The idea is not for social engineers to lead the
masses to a paradise they have invented for them. Quite the opposite: it is to
place full trust in the creativity of real, ordinary men and women, who are,
in the final analysis, the ones who make revolutions and create new worlds.

The Other Democracy

The anticapitalistic struggle requires firmly demanding another kind of
democracy.
The debate over democracy usually focuses on the forms needed for the
popular will to be expressed fully and freely through elections and for it to
be respected in the exercise of governance. The prevailing assumption is that
“democracy is formal or it is not democracy.”
In the real world, the democratic model has normally been elitist, in that it
assures the perpetuation in power of self-selected minorities. In a democracy, a
small minority decides for the others: it is always a minority of the people and
almost always a minority of the voters that decides which party will govern; a
 The Festival of Dignified Rage 173

still smaller minority promulgates the laws and makes the important decisions.
Alternation in power and constitutional checks do not change this fact.
In any case, the cynicism, corruption, and disarray into which governments
have fallen in democratic societies—not to mention the continuous injection
of fear, misery, and frustration which they apply to their subjects—make nec-
essary a reconsideration of the dominant institutions, avoiding what seems
to be a new “democratic fundamentalism” (Archipiélago 1993). The State has
turned into a conglomerate of corporations, in which each one promotes its
own product and serves its own interests. The combination produces “well-
being,” in the form of education, health, jobs, etc. At appropriate moments,
the political parties assemble all their stockholders to elect a board of directors.
And these stockholders are now not only the private companies (national or
transnational), but also the big professional associations that serve them or the
State (like education or health workers), which, in defending their own inter-
ests, reinforce the system that gives them status and income while at the same
time keeping them under its control (Illich 1973: 109).
In the last 20 years, we Mexicans have learned what in other places has
required decades and even centuries: the limits of representative democracy. We
already know what that regime cannot give us. Now we need to examine
ways to reconstruct social life that stays clear of the democratic illusion with-
out falling into new forms of despotism or dictatorship. Being in favor of
democracy no longer has any precise meaning: it lends itself to a variety of
positions. The political classes and the media embrace a notion of democracy
which confines it to what goes in the higher levels of government (allá arriba).
This notion has never held much attraction for most Mexicans. For those who
belong to “the people,” democracy is a matter of common sense: that ordinary
people run their own lives. They have in mind not a set of institutions but
rather a historic project. They are thinking not of a specific form of govern-
ment, but rather of the affairs or policies of government, of the thing itself, of
the power of the people.
This notion of democracy should be distinguished from the formal notion.
It is not the same as the idea of a government “of the people, by the people, for
the people.” In Lincoln’s Gettysburg address, in which that phrase originated,
the word “democracy” does not appear. Lincoln was referring to an ensemble
of governmental institutions supposed to give power to the people; he was not
referring to the people that possess it. For Lincoln himself, the Union was not a
democracy. “It was to clarify just this distinction that he made his famous figure:
government institutions were not the golden apple of liberty but rather the silver
frame by which the apple was (hopefully) to be protected” (Lummis 1996: 24).
Nor does our notion correspond to so-called “direct democracy.” This
expression alludes to a regime that antedated modern democracy. It may
have functioned in ancient Athens, but it could not function in any mod-
ern state (Mayo 1960: 58). Finally, our notion is not satisfied by practices
174 The Festival of Dignified Rage

like referendum and recall, which are mere appendices of formal democracy
(Cronin 1989). It goes beyond all this. It has been called “radical democracy.”
Although the expression has not been used much in Mexico, it accurately
reflects people’s experiences and discussions. Those who call themselves radi-
cal democrats convey its content clearly:

Radical democracy means democracy in its essential form, democ-

racy at its root…. From the standpoint of radical democracy, the jus-
tification of every other kind of regime is something like the illusion
of the emperor’s new clothes. Even a people that has lost its political
memory … may still make the discovery that the real source of power
is themselves…. Democracy is … the root term out of which the
entire political vocabulary is ramified…. Radical democracy envi-
sions the people gathered in the public space, with neither the great
paternal Leviathan nor the great maternal society standing over them,
but only the empty sky—the people making the power of Leviathan
their own again, free to speak, to choose, to act.
(Lummis 1996: 25–7)

As a notion of political theory, radical democracy is at once omnipresent and

yet peculiarly absent. One flirts with it while yet avoiding it. No one seems
ready to engage it in depth. It’s as though it were too radical or illusory: what
everyone looks for, but no one can find. Given the dominant rhetoric, it is
useful to keep in mind that the only explicit manifesto for radical democracy
is found in Marx:

In monarchy the whole, the people, is subsumed under one of its particular
modes of being, the political constitution. In democracy the constitution itself
appears as only one determination, that is, the self-determination of the
people. In monarchy we have the people of the constitution; in democracy,
the constitution of the people. Democracy is the solved riddle of all consti-
tutions. Here, not merely implicitly and in essence but existing in reality, the
constitution is constantly brought back to its actual basis, the actual human
being, the actual people, and established as the people’s own work.
(Marx 1978a: 20; Marx’s emphasis)

Examining the experience of the Paris Commune, in The Civil War in France,
Marx clearly points out that it is not enough to simply take hold of the state
machinery and use it for other ends; it is necessary to demolish this machin-
ery, as the Commune did, and to establish in its place a democracy, under-
stood as the practical alternative to representation: “The Commune was to
be a working, not a parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same
time”; its public servants were to be “elective, responsible, and revocable.”
 The Festival of Dignified Rage 175

The central government would be left with “few but important functions.”
According to Marx, universal suffrage was to be used by the organized people
for the constitution of its own communities, not to establish a separate polit-
ical power. The regime thus established “would have restored to the social
body all the forces hitherto absorbed by the State parasite feeding upon, and
clogging the free movement of, society” (1978b: 632–4).1
Radical democracy contends that the power of the people means their
actual exercise of that power and not some role in merely establishing a con-
stitution. It is a matter of living democratically–implementing democracy in
daily life, via political bodies through which the people can exercise their
power. There are no clear models of this; for a hundred years we stopped
thinking, obsessed with ideological dispute. But if we search, we find a
variety of urban or rural communities and new reformulations of the nature
of the State. Communities appear as an alternative because they restore the
unity of politics and place, and the people acquire a framework in which it
can exercise its power without having to hand it over to the State. It is once
again coming to be felt that “the future will in some way be communitar-
ian. Socialism had a communitarian impetus, but it became collectivism,
bureaucracy, and self-destruction” (Esteva/Shanin, 1992, in Chapter 1 of
this book).
Politics and place are in fact deeply interconnected. The focus on place
refers to the management of issues common to a shared space. But contempo-
rary political science has few concepts to elucidate this idea. Not to belong to
a place, to a community, is a generalized condition of modern mass societies.
In the mass, one loses the capacity to mobilize oneself, to act purposefully for
political ends. Despite its seemingly radical sound, the word mass is of ecclesi-
astical and bourgeois origin: it reduces humans to a condition they share with
material things–that of being measured by numbers and volume.
While consolidating and deepening democracy at the community level, we
need to revisit juridical and constitutional processes to reshape the country’s
political structure, which should be subjected to three conditions:

• Grounded on the power of the people and on a social pact that accepts a
fundamental pluralism;
• Applying to all spheres of power the principle of “leading by obeying”
(mandar obedeciendo); and
• Reducing to the indispensable minimum–for clearly specified and closely
monitored functions—the spaces and instances of service and coordina-
tion, in which the principle of representation will no longer be applied.
(The principle of representation—in a social organization or a party as
in a government—inevitably transfers power from the group to the rep-
resentative, allowing the latter free rein in the exercise of power, even if
held to account and subjected to the possibility of recall.)
176 The Festival of Dignified Rage

If an effective articulation of social movements uses both juridical proce-

dures and political force, it will make people’s power count. Instead of sur-
rendering it through representation, it will widen the spaces to exert it and
progressively reduce the power of the State.
All this, in my view, is being shaped in the current struggle for autonomy
which the Zapatistas have thrust into the national political agenda: “As the
indigenous peoples that we are, we insist on governing ourselves, with auton-
omy, because we wish no longer to be subjected to the will of any national
or foreign power…. Justice must be administered by the communities them-
selves, in accordance with their customs and traditions, without the interven-
tion of illegitimate and corrupt governments” (Autonomedia 1995: 297). Thus
did the communities confront the dual challenge of consolidating themselves
in their own spaces while at the same time projecting their political style to the
whole society, without imposing it on anyone.
The reaction of the State and the parties against autonomy makes perfect
sense. The struggle for autonomy threatens Mexico’s dominant regime with
dissolution. But it’s not true, as has been alleged that it contains elements
of separatism or fundamentalism, nor that it supports the fragmentation of
the country or the formation of patrimonial castes or estates. Recognition
of the autonomy and cultural self-determination of the Indian peoples—
made explicit in the San Andrés accords—calls into question the social pact
bequeathed by the Mexican Revolution and gradually dismantled in recent
decades. It demands a new one in its place. In changing the content of social
life, it would necessarily change the nature of the continent, which will no
longer be in the shape of a nation-state; with a new sense and meaning, the
nation would have more unity. Form is always substance. Democracy cannot
be reduced to a mere form containing undemocratic components; form and
substance alike must be democratic.
This regime of autonomy does not arise as a counterweight to state power;
rather, it renders the latter superfluous. It thus differs from the European
autonomist tradition, which frames autonomy within the current structure
of the State and envisions it as part of a process of political decentralization. In
the formalist version of autonomy, “self-government” or “autonomous gov-
ernment” is simply “a specific instance (orden) of government that is part of
the system of vertical powers that makes up the organization of the State”
(Díaz Polanco 1996: 109). Such “autonomy” has historically involved the full
subsumption of the people within the order of the State. Gaining it would be
a pyrrhic victory. In exchange for jurisdiction over an administrative unit,
with “autonomous” institutions granted by the centralized State, the structure
of the latter would be further consolidated, introducing into the midst of the
people’s own systems of government the virus of their dissolution. In exchange
for certain tenuous advances in formal democracy, any possible advances in
radical democracy would be frustrated.
 The Festival of Dignified Rage 177

By contrast, the substantive view of autonomy is radical democracy itself,

the power of the people. With it arises the possibility of leaving behind the
aphorism of Hegel which since 1820 has framed the debate on democracy:
“The people is not capable of governing itself.” The Zapatista communities
are striking proof of the opposite.

A Different Response to the Crisis

We need a different perception of the current crisis and a different way of
reacting to it. We are at the end of a historical period. But the almost uni-
versal consensus on this point breaks down when it comes to characterizing
that period.

• Some, turning their backs on reality and finding refuge in their ideology,
claim that it was just another economic downturn, soon to be replaced by
an expansionary phase.
• Those who blame the crisis on the greed and arrogance of financial spec-
ulators think that simply restoring the State’s regulatory functions and
applying Keynesian remedies will restore capitalist normality.
• Many believe that the neoliberal policies known as the Washington
Consensus are finished. Some who hold this view recently organized in
San Salvador a funeral for those policies. But for most of those who wrote
that obituary, this implied only a slight shift of functions between the
market and the State, without substantive changes in orientation.
• Some understand that the position of the United States has changed sub-
stantially; Wall Street is no longer the world financial center. But they
haven’t given up their hegemonic ambitions, and the liquidation of the
empire is full of tensions and irrationalities.

The spectacle of today’s political leaders and experts, in relation to the cri-
sis, is that of a chicken with its head cut off. On December 15, 2008, the
prominent German economist Klaus Zimmermann denounced the confusion
which his colleagues were creating with their predictions and proposals. It
seemed to him that they were acting like charlatans, because the models that
they used for their analyses and predictions did not include financial crises
like the present ones.2
They can recognize that the situation is serious, but they can’t tell how
serious it is, let alone what can be done about it. For example, those who feel
vindicated in their view that the State must regulate the economy seem to for-
get the role that it has played in capitalist society and the depth of its current
decadence. In the wake of excessive deregulation, one can observe a wave of
new regulations. As George Soros has noted, however, “[R]egulations can
be even more defective than market mechanisms.… The regulators are not
178 The Festival of Dignified Rage

just human beings, but also bureaucrats exposed to lobbying and corruption”
(Soros, 2008: 65). The issue of free trade is typical. All kinds of abuses and
outrages have been committed in its name. But the reaction is to shift the pen-
dulum to protectionism, ignoring the fact that it never protects people. In the
end, one side tells us to trust the market while the other side tells us to put our
faith in bureaucrats—who are nothing but agents of capital!
Following the 1929 crisis and under the influence of John Maynard Keynes,
all governments and international financial agencies adopted a regime of gov-
ernment controls to stem the increasingly painful and disruptive effects of eco-
nomic cycles. Instead of solving the problem, however, these policies made it
worse. The compensatory measures taken by governments merely restrain and
conceal cyclical forces; they do not eliminate them. Although this made pos-
sible an unprecedented rate of economic growth, it also produced a new type
of phenomenon unknown to economic theory: economic activities reached
a magnitude that outran any possibility of human control. Keynes himself
may have anticipated this “when he wrote in the 1930s that by 1955 most
Treasuries of the world would have adopted his policies, but by then they
would be not only obsolete but dangerous. Since policies based on his theories
have failed to prevent the more recent recessions, both his foresight and his
gloom seem to have been borne out” (Kohr, 1992: 10).
The irresponsible greed and arrogance of the last 20 years—the period of
so-called neoliberal globalization—has led to an impasse. What precipitated
capitalism’s current breakdown, strictly speaking, was not so much its struc-
tural contradictions as a peculiar kind of suicide, based on a sinister fusion of
free-market fundamentalism with the ambitions of big capital. Wallerstein
has repeatedly noted that although capitalism is in its final phase, this could
prolong itself for decades. The acceleration seems to have been caused by the
irresponsible delirium of capital, at the end of the Cold War, combined with
the insurrection of the people, all over the world. More than any other thing,
aggressive neoliberal arrogance produced everywhere battalions of discon-
tents, whose actions, struggling for mere survival or their own interests or in
the name of old ideals, would be the root cause of the current crisis.
The government regulations intended to bring the market under control
depend on two conditions for their success: perfect visibility and margin of
error.

• The first is a matter of common sense: it is necessary to see clearly what one
wants to control. But this has become impossible. As shown by the persis-
tent mystery of the financial instruments created in the last 20 years, there
can be no transparency for globalized economic activities that take place
outside the field of vision of all governments (singly or in combination) and
international agencies. Even with the necessary enforcement machinery, it
would be impossible to know where and to what end to apply it.
 The Festival of Dignified Rage 179

• The second condition refers to the need to foresee miscalculation and

human error, within a margin of security. During the first 25 years of
experimentation with government controls, there was still a margin
of security because things remained within reasonable proportions. But
this margin became increasingly narrow as the economy grew. The small-
est error in launching a rocket to Mars can send it into empty space. The
current crisis is due in part to miscalculations by both speculators and
government. The new financial engineering “makes calculating the mar-
gin and the requirements of capital extremely difficult if not impossible”
(Soros 2008: 65).

Leopold Kohr, the founder of social morphology and Schumacher’s mentor,

argued some time ago that

Recent fluctuations are no longer caused by the system but by the scale
which modern economic activities have assumed. Capitalism no longer
figures. Like waves in the ocean, these giant swells are caused by the
chain-reacting instability inherent in everything that has grown too
large, be it the mass of a heavy atom, a building, a market, or a state.
They are no longer business, but what may be called sacle or size cycles
which take their amplitude not from any particular economic system
but from the size of the body politic through which they pass. Unlike
the old-fashioned business cycles, size cycles are therefore not dimin-
ished but magnified by the economic integration, growth and expansion
effect produced by government controls.
(1992: 11. Kohr’s emphasis. See also 1986: 147f)

In face of the current disorder, the ideological arrogance of the leaders—

public and private—of the global capitalist empire prevents them from under-
standing what is happening and drives them, as conditioned reflex, to take
increasingly drastic measures which only make the situation worse. Knowing
that no single country can bring things under control, they hold to the illusion
that appropriate steps can be taken by all the great economic powers acting
together. But they failed in November 2008 when they met in Washington,
and they will fail again. The bigger the measures they might take, the more
devastating will be their effects.
Leopold Kohr offered clear evidence that Keynes was right and that for
decades, the policies implemented in his name have been aggravating the
problems they purported to correct. But they continue to be applied mechan-
ically, as if nothing had happened. The theoretical possibility of starting a
new cycle of capitalist expansion lacks political feasibility, because the current
structures of power cannot do what is necessary: restore human scale to the
political bodies in which decisions are made. They will continue bailing out
180 The Festival of Dignified Rage

failed enterprises and precarious banks, instead of allowing a massive destruc-

tion of capital which would reestablish opportunities for investment. They will
hold back wage increases and invoke Keynesian methods to stimulate employ-
ment, instead of raising demand via higher wages and supporting the informal
sector so as to facilitate local self-sufficiency. They have neither the ideology
nor the political resources to do what is necessary.
If we need to deal with size, rather than business cycle, instead of attempt-
ing an increase in government controls until they match the devastating scale
of the new type of economic fluctuations, “what must be done is to reduce
the size of the body politic which give them their devastating scale, until they
become again a match for the limited talent available to the ordinary mortals
of which even the most majestic governments are composed” (Kohr 1992: 11).
Instead of this, the political and economic leaders who continue destroying
the planet come up with ever more absurd measures, like the recent proposal
to spend between 7 and 10 percent of the global gross product (ten times the
amount so far put forward) on new bailouts and stimulus packages. Just as they
may thus accelerate the liquidation of capitalism, they will at the same time be
able to deepen the state terrorism which they have been preparing under var-
ious pretexts. Despite their fundamental blindness, the political and economic
leaders seem to realize that at the root of the current crisis are ourselves, the
undefeated, the insubordinate, the rebels, those who have been resisting neo-
liberal virulence and, in our autonomous spaces, creating new social relations.
For this reason, they increasingly apply repressive mechanisms of control, dis-
mantling freedoms obtained in 200 years of struggle for civil rights and build-
ing protective barriers in the form of both police lines and physical walls. We
could be at the threshold of a crazed form of authoritarianism, worse than the
fascisms of the past century, in the kind of regime foreseen by the dystopian
imagination of Orwell.
The only way we can stop such a catastrophic development is by effectively
channeling the rage and discontent that have been provoked by neoliberalism.
The corrupt, unresponsive, and inefficient bureaucracies must be broken up,
not to privatize the functions of the State—as the neoliberals would have it—
but rather to socialize them: to leave them in the hands of the people, reducing
political bodies to a suitable scale. This is what is actually being sought by
many popular movements—in Mexico and elsewhere—that are refusing to
let their experiences of self-government be watered down into an individual-
istic and purely statistical kind of democracy, manipulated by parties and the
media. They are countering the old watchword of democratic centralism with
decentralism; they are convinced that democracy depends on localization, on
the local areas where people live. “Democracy doesn’t mean putting power
some place other than where people are” (Lummis 1996: 18).
Radical democracy will only be consolidated with a new constitution—not
only formal but substantive. The transition is a process of building political
 The Festival of Dignified Rage 181

spaces in which people can exercise their power, rejecting the dominant polit-
ical mythology. With a new constitution formulated by delegates of local pow-
ers, it will be possible to develop a juridical process inspired by opposition
to professional or state bureaucracy, to carry out the necessary institutional
transformation. Among other things, it will thus be possible to change the
organization of work to make it more convivial than the industrial mode of
production.3 In a very real sense, it implies abolishing “work” as labor, as the
activities performed in a job at the service of capital or the State.
All this requires that we channel our indignant rage into the peaceful and
democratic uprising that we have been forging since the Zapatistas launched
La Otra Campaña.
While the system is falling apart, many people, still stuck in their individ-
ualism, throw themselves into insane adventures. On their part, many groups
are creating autonomous worlds, in their own local spaces, where they build
social relations beyond capital and in open resistance to the dominant system.
They are increasingly joining in broad coalitions with others like themselves.
These small-scale initiatives are a clear anticipation of the future society, but
they are up against an aggressive and hostile system which harasses them
continually and wears them down. As John Berger has suggested, we are liv-
ing today in a kind of prison. Under these conditions, we cannot hope that
the flowering of isolated initiatives will be enough to bring our emancipa-
tion and prevent the disaster that is being prepared from above. The oppres-
sive and destructive capacity of the established powers remains enormous.
We are at a decisive moment. It is terrible to have to fight, but we should
commit ourselves without regret to the militancy which is now needed. In
connecting our desires with reality, in interweaving our grievances with our
actions, we will for the first time be injecting the theoretical or political forms
of representation with real revolutionary force (Foucault 1983: xiii). This is
our present task.

Notes
1 In the introduction the 20th anniversary edition of The Civil War in France, Frie-
drich Engels wrote: “Of late, the Social-Democratic philistine has once more been
filled with wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and
good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at
the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” (Marx 1978b:
629). These ideas also inspired the revolutionaries of 1917 who began building
workers’ councils, the soviets. In August, writing the third chapter of The State
and Revolution, Lenin enthusiastically invoked Marx’s analysis of the Commune,
including the need to smash the State and create another democracy. The theme
was central to the debates of socialist theoreticians in the 1920s, leading up to Pan-
nekoek’s classic work of 1940 (see Bobbio 1981: 493ff ). However, the face of the
dictatorship that the world came to know, because of the change of political course
taken by Lenin, was that of Stalinism, not that of the Paris Commune (Lummis
1996: 25–7).
182 The Festival of Dignified Rage

2 Klaus Zimmermann is Director of the German Institute for Economic Research

(Deutsche Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung). See http://www.netzeitung.de/
wirtschaft/wirtschaftspolitik/1233037.html, Dec. 15, 2008.
3 At the threshold of the industrial mode of production Engels wrote: “Lasciate ogni
autonomia, voi che entrate!” (“You who enter, leave behind all autonomy!”). The
connection is central. Generalizing the political style of radical democracy would
bring deep changes in the organization of work, along the lines of what has been
put forward for decades by authors like Jacques Ellul, Paul Goodman, Ivan Illich,
and Leopold Kohr. Lummis (1996) focuses especially on this link.

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Archipiélago. 1993. “La ilusión democrática” [The Democratic Illusion]. Archipiélago,
no. 9: 37–45.
Autonomedia. 1995. Ya basta! Documents on the New Mexican Revolution. New York:
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Bobbio, Norberto. 1981. “Democracia” [Democracy]. In Diccionario de Política, edited
by Norberto Bobbio and Nico Matteucci, 441–452. México: Siglo XXI.
Cronin, Thomas. 1989. Direct Democracy. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
Díaz, Héctor. 1996. “La autonomía de los pueblos indios en el diálogo entre el EZLN
y el gobierno federal” [Indigenous People’s Autonomy in the Dialogue between
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(enero-marzo): 104–15.
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de 1995/24 de enero de 1997 [Documents and communiqués 3, October 2, 1995/
January 24, 1997]. México: Ediciones Era.
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LV, 19, December 4–17.
10
THE OAXACA COMMUNE

Was the “Oaxaca Commune” an ephemeral insurrection, an explosion of popular rage,

without enduring consequences? Was it a specific expression of autonomous movements, an
experiment anticipating the direction some of them are taking? Or was it an isolated, singular
episode of people’s struggles?
We don’t have yet enough historical perspective to fully appreciate the nature and
impact of the events in Oaxaca, in 2006, which attracted the world’s attention. But
it is worth exploring them and discussing a tentative hypothesis about their nature and
meaning for the autonomous movements, when the gap between means and ends is closed
and the shape of the struggle is also the shape of the society the struggle attempts to create.
In this chapter, I am including provisional notes written at the beginning of 2007,
as an introduction to a research agenda, fragments of articles published in that year and
particularly The Oaxaca Commune and Mexico’s Autonomous Movements,
published in 2008 by Ediciones ¡Basta!,

From June to October 2006, there were no police in the city of Oaxaca
(population 600,000), not even to direct traffic. The governor and his func-
tionaries met secretly in hotels or private homes; none of them dared to show
up at their offices. The Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) had
posted 24-hour guards in all the public buildings and radio and TV stations
that it controlled. When the governor began sending out his goons to launch
nocturnal guerrilla attacks against these guards, the people responded by put-
ting up barricades. More than a thousand barricades were put up every night
at 11 p.m., around the encampments or at critical intersections. They would
be taken down every morning at 6 a.m. to restore normal traffic. Despite the
attacks, there was less violence in those months (fewer assaults, deaths and
injuries, or traffic accidents) than in any similar period in the previous ten

DOI: 10.4324/9781003262749-11
184 The Oaxaca Commune

years. Unionized workers belonging to APPO performed basic services like

garbage collection.
Some observers began speaking of the Oaxaca Commune, evoking the
Paris Commune of 1871. Oaxacans responded, smiling: “Yes, but the Paris
Commune lasted only 50 days and we’ve already lasted more than 100.” The
analogy is pertinent but exaggerated, except in terms of the reaction that these
two popular insurrections elicited in the centers of power. Like the European
armies that crushed the communards who had taken over all the functions
of government, the Federal Preventive Police of Mexico, backed by the army
and the navy, were sent to Oaxaca on October 28, 2006, to try to control the
situation. On November 25 those forces conducted a terrible repression, the
worst in many years, with massive violation of human rights and an approach
which can be legitimately described as state terrorism. The operation—which
included imprisonment of the supposed leaders of the movement and hundreds
of others—was described by the International Commission for the Observation
of Human Rights (which visited Oaxaca in January 2007) as a juridical and
military strategy whose ultimate purpose was to achieve control and intimi-
dation of the civil population.1 For the authorities, this strategy would dissolve
APPO and send a warning to the social movements in the whole country.
This same strategy has been employed since then and has had a profound
impact in Oaxaca. The results increased and exacerbated polarization. Some
activists are in jail and others exiled out of Oaxaca or even Mexico. It has been
impossible to identify all the disappeared; their families are afraid of revealing
their names. Many professionals are now joining the usual migrants, out of
fear or for lack of economic opportunities. Some people are afraid of exhibit-
ing any support to APPO or participating in autonomous initiatives. People of
different sectors of the society blame APPO for whatever economic difficulties
they are confronting. Some others take for granted that the movement is over
and the tyrannical governor will remain in office for the rest of his term, and
are thus trying to accommodate themselves to that prospect. All this is true;
there exist many symptoms of intimidation. However, the opposite is increas-
ingly predominating. Marches are growing, as are sit-ins. Everywhere there is
intense effervescence. Oaxaca is boiling. There is an increasing risk of violent
confrontations in this highly polarized society, which may be used as a pretext
for more authoritarianism. Many factors, however, may block this option and
nourish the hope that the movement will be able to peacefully evolve and con-
solidate. The impulse for a profound transformation is very deep and strong
and perhaps inevitable.
On November 23, 2006, a week before Felipe Calderón took office as the
new, rightist and contested president, Subcomandante Marcos, the speaker of
the Zapatistas, declared that he was going to start to fall from his first day in
office and that we were on the eve of a great uprising or civil war. When asked
who would lead that uprising, he replied: “The people, each in their place, in
 The Oaxaca Commune 185

a network of mutual support. If we don’t accomplish it that way, there will be

spontaneous uprisings, explosions all over, civil war…” (https://enlacezapatista.
ezln.org.mx/)
He cited the case of Oaxaca, where “there are no leaders, nor bosses: it’s
the people themselves who are organized.” That’s how it is going to be in the
whole country; Oaxaca serves as an indicator of what’s going to happen all
over. If there isn’t a civil and peaceful way out, which is what we propose in
the Other Campaign,” Marcos warned, “then it will become each man for him-
self … For us, it doesn’t matter what’s above. What matters is what’s going to
arise from below. When we rise, we’re going to sweep away the entire politi-
cal class, including those who say they’re the parliamentary left.” (La Jornada,
24-11-06). This is a clear definition of the challenges that lie ahead.

What APPO is Not

APPO remains a mystery, even for those who are part of it. The distortions
introduced by the media and by some participants in APPO, who were using it
to promote their own political and ideological agendas, have created extended
confusion. Furthermore, its innovative character is a challenge to understand-
ing the nature, meaning, and implications of this strange political animal.
Both insiders and outsiders still view APPO as a political organization. They
assume that, like almost all of them, it is focused on the State and replicates
structurally the apparatus which supposedly aspires to run. Like the State,
it would be vertical and hierarchical. Its leaders, like state officials, would
routinely succumb to partisanship and corruption. If the people cannot act
on their own, someone would be pulling the strings behind APPO. Surely, a
group or a leader would be manipulating the masses.
Officials, parties, and commentators saw the insurrection, especially at the
beginning, as a mere revolt. They were not altogether mistaken; it fitted well
into the tradition of popular outbreaks that occur in the face of an unbearable
oppressor or of a measure that constitutes “the last straw.” It was also seen as a
rebellion because it was an uprising of indomitable people affirming their dig-
nity. By the thousands, by the millions, the people rebelled. “Enough!” was
the cry of the rebels who suddenly emerged from every corner.
But this insurrection was neither a mere revolt nor just a rebellion. Revolts
may be volcanic and irrepressible, but also ephemeral. They subside as quickly
as they arise. They leave a permanent imprint, like volcanic rock, but they
crumble. This is not what occurred here. This insurrection did not subside,
until a massive repression dissolved it. Governor Ulises Ruiz embodied the
source of discontent and displayed the worst traits of the oppressive system, but
he was no more than the detonator of dispersed discontent.
Nor is APPO a “mass movement”—whatever might be said by the con-
ventional Left and even by some of its own constituent groupings. The masses
186 The Oaxaca Commune

are made up of atomized individuals grouped into abstract categories defined

and controlled by others—passengers of a plane, pensioners, workers in a
factory, voters, party members, demonstrators, etc. In the mass, people lose
control over their capacity to move independently.2 The “mobilizations” of a
trade union, a party, or a leader, organized and controlled from above, tend
to demobilize people. Despite its overtones of radicalism, the word mass has
ecclesiastical and bourgeois origins. It reduces people to the condition they
share with material objects: being measured in numbers.3 The illusion that
the mass of consumers controls the market, or that the mass of voters controls
political power, serves to hide the real situation, in which people are continu-
ally stripped of political and economic power.
APPO’s huge marches seemed to be comprised of masses. Some groups
thought that they had succeeded in creating a “mass movement.” To be sure,
certain isolated individuals, identifiable with some category, participated on
their own initiative as a way of expressing their support for the movement. Most
of those who have participated in APPO, however, have done so not as individ-
uals but rather as members of a group, based on decisions taken within a com-
munity. They do not constitute masses in the conventional sense of the word.

Organizing a Movement of Movements

There is an increasing consensus that APPO is a movement, not an organiza-
tion. Like any movement, it may have organizations within it—each with its
own leadership, goals, structures, etc. “Fuera Ulises!” (calling for the resigna-
tion of the governor) emerged clearly as an expression of the immense popular
discontent, but it cannot be viewed as a goal. There is no proposition or goal
that defines APPO; it encompasses a diversity of intentions and trajectories.
There is growing convergence around certain agendas—like producing a
new constitution or resisting capitalism—but even on these points there is no
agreement on what they mean.
Neither the 30-member Coordinadora Provisional which operated from June
20 to November 12, 2006, nor the 260-member State Council which was
formed on the latter date, can be taken to constitute or represent APPO; nor
have they had governing authority. They carried out important functions,
especially at critical moments, in disseminating information and guidelines,
and also in coordinating specific actions such as marches. But they were never
able to control the autonomous actions or initiatives of the participants. The
Council was never able to assemble all its members, not even on its founding
day. Far from being a source of weakness, however, this situation gives the
movement a great force.
Looking more closely at APPO, it becomes evident that it is a convergence
of movements and organizations of very distinct types. Some of the move-
ments are longstanding, like the Indigenous movement and the movements
 The Oaxaca Commune 187

of peasants, feminists, environmentalists, and defenders of human rights or of

cultural traditions, etc. Other movements were formed or became more sharply
defined with the emergence of APPO, particularly in the city of Oaxaca and
in some other regions. In addition, APPO embraces several types of organi-
zations. What has been called the “civic space” of APPO is made up of many
civic organizations and non-profits dedicated to the most diverse activities,
and closely linked to existing groups and communities. There are also political
associations and organizations, some of them strictly local and others linked to
national organizations and parties.
This great diversity implies disagreements and contradictions.4 Decisions of
the coordinating bodies, which in principle must be by consensus, tend to be
slow and difficult, often resulting in the lowest common denominator, which is
not always the best response to rapidly developing events. The underlying diver-
sity, however, is at the same time an immense source of strength. APPO did
not depend on a leader. Its strength did not come from any momentary episode
but rather from powerful historical forces impelling people to strive for change.
APPO softly mutated from the condition of a mere event: an assembly to
support Local 22 of the teachers’ union (after the repression they suffered dur-
ing their strike), to a coalition of leaders of around 300 organizations which
came to the meeting convened by Local 22. Very soon it fluidly mutated
again to become an articulated convergence of political and social movements.
However, when the issue was to evolve from the form revolt/rebellion to
the structured organicity of a movement of movements many divergences
emerged. There was an active promotion of a front of political organizations,
to adopt the vertical structure of the latter. This proposal found continuous
resistance, but APPO has not yet discovered the pertinent organizational
form, as a web or network of social and political movements and autonomous
organizations, collectives, and communities, and even less the structure that
originally defined it: an assembly of assemblies, a political project emerging
from the grassroots and not from leaders, organizations, or social engineering.

Participation of Indian Peoples

The state of Oaxaca has more natural and cultural diversity than any other
Mexican state, and it is the only one with an indigenous majority. With
5 percent of the national population, it contains one-fifth of all the country’s
municipalities or municipios. The municipal fragmentation of Oaxaca is main-
tained from two directions. The authorities imposed it to overcome resistance
on the part of the Indigenous peoples, but the Indigenous peoples transformed
the municipio into a political expression of their autonomy. Four out of five
municipios are governed based on “usos y costumbres”—a euphemism to empha-
size that the people as a whole exercise authority without electoral processes,
arriving at its decisions in communal assemblies. The Indigenous struggle also
188 The Oaxaca Commune

accounts for Oaxaca’s existence as the state with the highest proportion of
communally owned land: more than 80 percent. Upon recovering their lands,
the communities were able to express through them their own approaches to
relations among people and with nature.
For many years, the federal and state authorities allowed the Indian peoples
of Oaxaca to practice their own forms of government in most of the state’s
municipios, beyond the reach of the constitution, the law, and partisan politics—
but not without overlaying these forms with an elaborate system of simulation.
The commemoration in 1992 of 500 years since the European invasion gave
Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas the opportunity to show the vigor
and vitality of their initiatives. The governor who took office in Oaxaca at the
end of that year found the Indigenous people in full effervescence. On March
21, 1994, fearful that the Zapatista insurrection of January 1 would spread to
Oaxaca, he offered the Indian peoples a “New Accord” giving them certain
shared authority in the state government. Although the “Accord” was blocked
by bureaucratic and cacique-type structures and remained mostly at the level
of rhetoric, it had some important legislative consequences. On August 30,
1995, the reform of Oaxaca’s electoral law gave Indian communities the power
to decide whether to choose their authorities through party-competition or
through the traditional system of usos y costumbres. On November 12 of that year,
when the reform was applied for the first time, 412 of Oaxaca’s 570 municipios
opted for the traditional approach. None of them experienced the post-electoral
clashes that were common in those which opted for the party regime.
The change had implications beyond any electoral outcome; it was under-
stood as a strong expression of autonomy, involving many other aspects of
the relationship between Indian peoples and the State. In some villages there
began to appear graffiti declaring, “Here we do not allow political parties, least
of all the PRI.” (They were thus expressing a new form of resistance to a party
which has dominated Oaxaca for 70 years). The new law, instead of enhanc-
ing state intervention, served to restrain it, by requiring that the authorities
respect the will of the community.
On June 6, 1998, changes in Oaxaca’s Constitution were promulgated,
and on June 17 a new Law on the Rights of the Peoples and the Indigenous
Communities of Oaxaca was passed. The reforms granted self-determination,
in the form of autonomy, to the Indigenous peoples and communities. They
also recognized them as juridical entities under public law. Many analysts con-
sider the resulting regime the most advanced in the Americas in relation to
concerns of the Indigenous population. However, in action it is almost useless:
the three branches of government ignore or openly violate it.
The timid openings that seemed to have occurred with the “New Accord”
were drastically canceled in the corrupt and authoritarian administration of
state governor José Murat (1998–2004).5 The discontent that had built up under
 The Oaxaca Commune 189

his rule led all the opposition forces in the state to ally themselves for the first
time in 2004 against the PRI, which up to that time had maintained effective
control of the ballot boxes. Ulises Ruiz, the PRI candidate, lost the election,
but managed to take the governorship by means of a transparent fraud. Ruiz is
notorious as the PRI’s leading expert in electoral fraud. All the electoral organs
of Oaxaca were under his control and ratified his victory. The opposition chal-
lenged the outcome in the Federal Tribunal, which acknowledged the fraud
but refused to nullify it, on the pretext that it was a local matter.
Those who despite all their lack of trust in representative democracy had
taken the trouble to vote felt an enormous frustration. Three months after the
election for governor came the municipal elections. In four-fifths of the muni-
cipios, the people organized the elections in their own way. In those cases
where the election was organized along party lines, the rate of abstention was
overwhelming. In the state capital the new municipal president was elected by
only 11 percent of the registered voters.
The new governor, lacking all legitimacy, governed despotically, constantly
attacking the people’s movements, the autonomous organizations, and civil
society initiatives. The destruction of the natural and historical patrimony of
the state, especially in the city of Oaxaca, produced by public works conceived
with a distorted notion of modernization, generated immense discontent. He
used federal funds to finance all sorts of useless projects, with the dual aim of
winning votes and generating resources for the presidential campaign of the
PRI. When the presidential election date ( July 2, 2006) came close, the gov-
ernment intensified its pressure on the voters. No holds were barred: intim-
idation, threats, imprisonment, direct violence, buying votes, illegal use of
public resources, etc. Never before, despite the PRI’s long history of fraud and
manipulation, had anything similar been seen. Ruiz thus helped create the
atmosphere in which the movement would grow.
The Indian peoples were slow to join the movement. Although well-
known Indian leaders were involved from the beginning and there was visible
Indigenous participation even in the earliest marches, the discussions within
the communities dragged on for months. In many cases the debate reflected
a long-standing tension between the communities and the teachers, which
made the communities reluctant to join in what they saw as a purely trade-
unionist mobilization on the teachers’ part.
In late September and early October 2006, however, major Indigenous lead-
ers, intellectuals, and organizations joined in the call for a Citizens’ Initiative
for Peace, Democracy and Justice, which was inaugurated on October 12.
Later that year, in the big march of November 5, municipal and community
leaders had a significant presence. In the inaugural Congress of the APPO,
it became clear that in several regions of the state indigenous participation
had become well established, sometimes in the form of regional APPOs.
190 The Oaxaca Commune

In the predominantly indigenous Sierra de Juárez, for example, the Assembly

of Zapotecan, Mixe and Chinantecan Peoples was formed and sent 23 del-
egates to the statewide APPO. Finally, the Forum of Indigenous Peoples
of Oaxaca convened on November 28–29, 2006, involving 14 different
Indigenous peoples.6 The Forum examined extensively, in a democratic way,
fundamental issues for the Indian peoples, like self-determination and auton-
omy; land, territories and resources; intercultural Indigenous education and
communication; and human rights violations. It called for the removal of the
governor, it denounced violations of the law, and it called for strengthening
the organization and joint activity of the APPO.

Urban Autonomy
More than half of the current population of the city of Oaxaca lives in popular
neighborhoods formed, in most cases, by illegal land-occupations of squatters.
Their struggles to regularize their situation and obtain basic services were well
known, but they did not seem to have a major presence in the social and political
life of the city—except through the graffiti which could be seen everywhere.
The sudden presence in the movement of groups from the popular neigh-
borhoods and some from the middle classes was unexpected. It was not known
to what extent the communal social fabric also existed in those neighborhoods.
The barricades arose spontaneously as a popular response to the governor’s
attacks on the APPO encampments, and rapidly took on a life of their own, to
the extent of becoming autonomous focal points for social and political organ-
ization. Long sleepless nights provided the opportunity for extensive political
discussions, which awakened in many young people a hitherto nonexistent or
inchoate social consciousness.
On the barricades, new forms of anarchism—in both ideological and
lifestyle applications—began to appear. The collectives on the barricades
defended their autonomy ferociously and sometimes with a level of hostility
that was hard to channel. Some groups occupied abandoned public build-
ings and began not only to live in them but to convert them into centers
of cultural and political activity. The children and youth of these groups
played a significant part in the movement, especially in confrontations with
the police, which many of them were used to.

Paths of APPO
APPO is rooted in longstanding and very Oaxacan traditions of social strug-
gle, but it is strictly contemporary in its outlook and its openness to the world.
It owes its radicalism to its very nature: it is at ground level, close to the roots.
It acquired its insurrectionist tone after trying all the legal and institutional
methods of advancing its demands and finding them all blocked. But it does
 The Oaxaca Commune 191

not dance to just any tune; it composes its own music. Where there are no
markers, it blazes its own trail.
APPO is clearly a result of general discontent with the rule of Ulises Ruiz.
Beginning with very concrete experiences, like the successful opposition
to erecting a McDonald’s in Oaxaca’s central plaza, it quickly and clearly
adopted the politics of a single NO and many YESes that characterizes many
present-day social movements. This approach finds unity in the common
rejection of an action or omission, a policy, an official, or a regime, but
allows at the same time for a plurality of affirmations, projects, ideals, and
ideologies.
The rejection of Governor Ulises Ruiz, which persists to this day among
the majority of Oaxacans, increasingly became a rejection of a regime and of
a whole state of affairs. Ulises Ruiz is just one embodiment of a government
that is already considered unbearable. Corruption and authoritarianism did
not begin with him, but they reached extremes under his rule that made them
intolerable for the majority. For many APPO participants, rejection of this
regime includes a rejection of capitalism.
The diversity of the innumerable movements and organizations makes it
impossible to identify a single path for the APPO. There really are many
YESes that are being put forward by its participants. Although there are clear
overlaps and convergences among them, the propositions put forward by the
Indigenous movements, for example, are not identical to those advanced by
environmentalists or human rights advocates.
Convergences and divergences can be observed in the current struggle.

• First, there are conventional struggles to claim—from capital or the

State—economic and social improvements, or to defend what has already
been obtained whenever it is exposed to a real or perceived threat. But
there are also struggles openly transcending that framework.
• Second, there are struggles over different kinds of democracy—
representative, participatory, and radical democracy. Many attempt to
perfect formal democratic processes by promoting legal and institutional
reforms to improve those processes and put an end to electoral fraud.
Others struggle to introduce participatory democracy, with tools like
referendum, plebiscite, recall, participatory budgeting, transparency,
and social control, in order to widen the participation of the citizens
in the operation of the government. The third and final struggle, and
the main challenge to the APPO, is to place formal and participatory
democracy at the service of radical democracy, the democracy which has
been practiced from time immemorial in the Indigenous communities
and municipios and is usually associated with autonomy. The idea now
is to extend this way of governing to the entire society, beginning with
the formation of autonomous regional bodies. This implies a new kind
192 The Oaxaca Commune

of society, beyond the design of the nation-state and as an expression of

political autonomy. While the struggles around formal and participa-
tory democracy focus on legal and institutional reforms, the struggle
for radical democracy focuses on what the people themselves can do to
transform the conditions under which they live.
• Third, in the tradition of the Latin American Left, which sees the State as
the main agent of social and political transformation, many efforts attempt
to change the orientation or role of the State, with emphasis on social
rights. Some groups struggle to reorient the existing public policies, mod-
erating the neoliberal model, while others look for a socialist variant—
from “populist Stalinism” (with verticalism, supreme leader, and one
party) to different forms of participatory socialism,7 after seizing power
through public pressure, mass mobilization, sudden attack, democratic
elections, or an armed uprising. Those with no trust in the transformation
from the top down, by the State, which are perhaps the majority, attempt
to redefine the nature and operation of political power and tend to adopt
an autonomist and libertarian orientation.

There has been a very intense debate, inside and outside the APPO, about
the character and traits of a “people’s government” [gobierno popular]. Some
believe that it is necessary to seize the organs of the State, getting rid of the
established authorities to install in their place “people’s representatives” who
would use State power to serve the people. This “people’s government” would
be installed as a substitute for the present rulers. Others question not only
the feasibility of this approach (under present conditions) but also its justi-
fication. They believe that oppression and authoritarianism are inherent in
the apparatuses of the State and that the supposed “people’s representatives,”
once in control of these apparatuses, invariably become corrupt, regardless of
how they came into that position—whether by genuinely democratic election,
by revolution, or by sudden attack [golpe de mano] (as would be the case in
Oaxaca). According to this view, it is not enough to change the ideology of
those who run the State; all its institutions should be dismantled. Moreover,
this transformation must be carried out by the citizens themselves, through
their own initiatives and actions, in order to reorganize the society from the
bottom up, and not the reverse, through social engineering.
They share with other groups the critique of the private property of the
means of production and of capitalism, but they emphasize communal prop-
erty, which allows for some forms of personal ownership of some means of
production, when it does not involve exploitation, as in the Indigenous com-
munities. These struggles are mainly oriented towards the creation of new
social relations, by the people themselves, in the framework of radical democ-
racy. They see formal democracy as a political umbrella for the transition, bet-
ter than a dictatorship, but they have a profound distrust for the representative
 The Oaxaca Commune 193

system and its electoral procedures. They appreciate participatory democracy,

but only as training for radical democracy.
These examples are only the tip of the iceberg of themes discussed continu-
ously in Oaxaca, in the most diverse ways. In many cases the debates dispense
with technical terms and even with widely used concepts (like capitalism and
socialism), but their content and orientation clearly express a radical critique
of the status quo, along with a continuous search for alternatives and a com-
mitment to fight for them.

The Pot and the Vapor

In the midst of the daily struggle, an image which attempts to express what
has happened in Oaxaca has been circulating for a long time. Years of fierce
corruption and overflowing authoritarianism converted Oaxaca into a pres-
sure cooker above a slow flame. Ulises Ruiz added fuel to the fire until the
pressure hurled the lid off on June 14, 2006, with the repression of a teachers’
sit-in. APPO articulated the discontent brewing inside the pot and converted
it into transformative action. The ferocity of the federal forces put a new
heavy lid on top of Oaxaca on November 25, but the fire continues. Small
holes, which opened in the lid through people’s initiatives, alleviate the pres-
sure, but they remain insufficient. The pressure continues to accumulate and,
in any moment, will hurl the lid off once more. The experiences accumu-
lated in these years might provide ways to let the pressure escape in a more
organized way, but nobody can foresee what will happen. There are too many
forces at odds with each other.
Another metaphor can contribute to an understanding of what is coming:
the one of vapor, piston, and boiler. If the vapor represents people’s energy and
the piston and the boiler the organizational apparatuses, Oaxaca’s experience
seems to contradict the conviction that without the boiler (the apparatuses) the
vapor (people’s energy) will dissipate. This is usually true, but people’s energy
may not dissipate, but endure, transmuted in experience—invisible for those
that identify the movement with the organizational apparatuses, but existing
in subsequent aspects of daily life8.
Oaxaca is still “at full steam”. Part of what was generated in 2006 has
condensed itself into an experience and transformed into a behavior: it is in
the daily attitudes of many people, who will never return to the old “nor-
malcy”. Another portion of the “vapor” generated yesterday, or that comes
up every day, propels many initiatives. And there is “vapor” that continues
to accumulate, that raises the pressure and that perhaps is trying to redefine
its course once it succeeds in liberating itself from everything still retain-
ing it—not a boiler with a piston, but the oppressive lid of the repression
that continues: political and police mechanisms blocking off the popular
initiative.
194 The Oaxaca Commune

The obsession to ascertain who generates that “vapor” persists, reinforc-

ing the prejudice that ordinary people cannot take initiative themselves. It
is taken for granted that somebody, a person or a group, would be throwing
rocks and hiding the hand: it would have manipulated the docile masses and
would want to continue doing so. The media constructed their own leaders,
presenting them as people whose image would prepare public opinion for the
violent liquidation of the movement. The authorities did the same to organize
co-optation and repression; they seem now to believe that the APPO will be
paralyzed or at least disabled as long as those that supposedly lead the move-
ment remain in prison. Similar attitudes have been observed in the left, inside
and outside the movement. Those who think that what has happened would
be inconceivable without a leading organization now see it dissolved or weak-
ened and want to renovate it or reconstruct it. Or else, when the absence of
real leaders of the APPO is recognized, everything is transferred to the past:
that absence would have provoked the evaporation of the spontaneous popular
outbreak. The popular energy would have dissipated, like vapor not contained
in a boiler.
When the question is not about seizing the State apparatuses, but about
changing social reality and thus dissolving them, the vapor, which continually
condenses in everyday experience, operates in its dissipation and spills onto
reality. The vapor cannot be contained in “organized apparatuses” nor be
driven by “leading organizations”. For those apparatuses and organizations
to be relevant and play a role, they should renounce the pyramidal structure,
when a web is needed, and they must learn to lead by obeying. Furthermore,
they should operate on an appropriate scale, adapting themselves continually
to the conditions and styles of the real men and women that are always the
vapor, the impulse, and those finally determining the course and reach of
the whole movement.
Mechanical metaphors always fall short of the richness of real social pro-
cesses. But the pot and the vapor are useful images to observe the complex
present situation, in Oaxaca and greater Mexico, when what is most important
seems to be invisible.

Postscript—February 2010
The terrible impact of the savage repression of late 2006 is still felt widely in
Oaxaca. There are many ruined families, and there are widespread feelings of
uncertainty, fear, and economic insecurity.
The political classes are supporting Ulises Ruiz to the end of his rule, in
December 2010. They have been adopting his authoritarian style as Mexico
increasingly operates under an undeclared state of exception9 —which may
soon be legally declared.
 The Oaxaca Commune 195

Oaxaca’s social and political polarization continues and may deepen even
more in the electoral processes of 2010. Parties from left and right concerted
an alliance to beat the almighty PRI, weakened by internal conflicts and the
resentment left by the administration of Ruiz. But they are not getting the
attention they expected, given the profound disenchantment with representa-
tive democracy pervading in the state.
Nobody knows if APPO, as an emblem, will remain; some sectors of the
society see it as the cause of their economic difficulties, and those committed
to it are not sure about what to do. It is perceived today as an incomplete
experiment. The original idea, an assembly of assemblies, defined a process
brutally interrupted at the end of 2006. The reorganization or the creation
of assemblies at the grassroots continues, at its own pace, looking for more
solid grounds, but unable, at this point, to attempt again the extension of this
organizing principle to whole regions and the state, except in specific places,
where the traditional struggle for land is becoming territorial defense and
gives autonomous initiatives a new dimension.
What The Invisible Committee described as “the coming insurrection”
(2009) seems to be already in Oaxaca and Mexico…but seems also invisible.
As Subcomandante Marcos warned, if such a peaceful, democratic insurrec-
tion does not constitute the political force to implement the radical changes
defining it, a very violent, vicious civil war may start soon, with all kinds of
chaotic explosions and unprecedented forms of authoritarianism.
Oaxaca’s experiment in 2006 could be seen today as the expression of a
sensitive political antenna, the classical canary’s mine, for what is currently
emerging in Mexico and the world.

Notes
1 See the full report in www.cciodh.pangea.org/.
2 “When I say mobilize, I mean mobilize, I mean that a people must be more
mobile than it is—that it have the freedom of a dancer, the purposefulness of a
soccer-player, the surprise-factor of a guerrilla warrior. One who treats the masses
as a political object will not be able to mobilize them; he only wants to give them
orders. A package, for example, has no mobility; it is merely sent from one place
to another. Mass rallies and marches immobilize people. Propaganda which para-
lyzes rather than giving free rein to their autonomy has the same effect; it leads to
depoliticization.” (Enzensberger, 1976: 10).
3 “One can say that the concept of mass, which is purely quantitative, applies to peo-
ple in the same way that it applies to anything that occupies space. True enough;
but in this case it has no qualitative value. We should not forget that to arrive at
the concept of human masses, we have abstracted out all the traits of people except
for what they share with material things: the possibility of being measured in
numbers. And thus, logically, the human masses cannot be saved or educated. But
it will always be possible to mow them down with machine-guns.” (Machado,
1975: 239).
196 The Oaxaca Commune

4 It is not possible here to give even a minimal account of all the incidents in the
evolution of APPO, but one central fact stands out. Local 22 of the Teachers Union
initiated a trade-union struggle around certain economic demands which momen-
tarily took on a political expression, but which never lost their original aspect.
Once the economic demands were satisfied (at least on paper), its mobilization
ended. APPO, on the other hand, undertook from the very beginning a political
and social struggle. It continuously supported the trade-unionist struggle of Local
22 but did not allow itself to be defined by it. This contrast gave rise to all kinds of
tensions, which came into the open at the end of September 2006, when the teach-
ers decided to return to classes and end their mobilization while APPO was facing
the arrival of the Federal Preventive Police, holding its constitutional convention,
issuing its Citizens’ Dialogue Initiative for Peace, Justice and Democracy, and
holding a large forum of Indigenous peoples. The tensions are also evident inside
Local 22, as many teachers participate actively in APPO and are even trying to
transform their trade-union struggle into a political one. Rank-and-file teachers
continue to be an important part of APPO. Amidst accusations of treason the gen-
eral secretary of the union stepped down in February 2007. When a new one was
elected, more than a year later, after a very complex process, the outcome revealed
an important political reorganization within Local 22 but no changes in its nature
and orientation.
Apart from these tensions between APPO and Local 22, there have been other
tensions within APPO. Some of these reflect the distinct styles, concerns, and strate-
gies of the participants. For example, the dominant opinion in APPO favors a peace-
ful and democratic movement, explicitly opposed to all forms of violence, whereas
some organizations and individuals consider it necessary to use violence, not only
in self-defense but as part of the struggle. The most important tensions are between
strictly local movements and organizations and those that are the expressions of
national organizations. The local groups, while ready to offer and receive solidarity
from outside, and aware of the national and global ramifications of their struggle,
remain primarily concerned with local issues; they resist pressure on the part of the
national organizations to subordinate APPO to national or international political/
ideological agendas (especially those of political parties).
Although these tensions have affected the functioning of APPO, especially by
blocking certain agreements and decisions in its coordinating bodies, it has been possi-
ble to limit their effects. Still, it is conceivable that the unity and coherence achieved up
to now may weaken as APPO enters a new phase and as some organizations bet on its
collapse or abandon it to pursue their agendas elsewhere.
5 Murat led an aggressive offensive against the popular movement. He became
a representative in the Federal Congress and is under indictment for financial
irregularities.
6 The amuzgo, chatino, chinanteco, chontal, chocholteco, cuicateco, huave, maza-
teco, mixe, mixteco, tacuate, trique, zapoteco, and zoque peoples. The declaration
has not yet been published.
7 Some groups, small in size but highly visible and organized, maintain a Marxist–
Leninist orthodoxy largely abandoned elsewhere (which includes Stalin among its
exemplars) and defend positions superficially grafted onto a socialist framework.
Broader groups embrace a critical position regarding socialism, viewing it as a
historical phenomenon whose end is nearing and whose theoretical construction
has important deficiencies as argued by Harry Cleaver. (See Cleaver 1992). This
broader current appears not to have much interest in such socialist experiments as
that of Venezuela. The overall tendency, grounded in Indigenous traditions, seems
to be focused in leaving behind socialism as well as capitalism.
8 Adolfo Gilly, 2006, personal communication with the author.
 The Oaxaca Commune 197

9 As Agamben 2005 observes, the state of exception traditionally defines normalcy

for whole categories of people–which in the case of Oaxaca may include the
majority. What is currently happening in Mexico is that such condition is now
applied to the whole of the society…and that the oppressed are applying their one
notion of state of exception.

Bibliography
Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. State of Exception. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Cleaver, Harry. 1992. “Socialism.” In The Development Dictionary, edited by Wolfgang
Sachs, 233–249. London: Zed Books.
Enzensberger, Hans. 1976. Elementos para una teoría de los medios de comunicación.
[Elements for a Theory of Mass Media]. Barcelona: Anagrama.
Illich, Ivan. 1996. Deschooling Society. London: Marion Boyars.
Machado, Antonio. 1975. Prosas [Prose]. Havana: Editorial Arte y Cultura.
The Invisible Committee. 2009. The Coming Insurrection. Los Angeles: Semiotext.
11
THE ONGOING INSURRECTION

The nature and scope of the 2008 “crisis” are still being discussed but from the beginning
there were other insights. At the end of 2010, I was invited to the Institute of Economic
Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) to participate
in a series of lectures on “Civilizational crisis and overcoming capitalism”. My experi-
ences at the grassroots, what I sensed in my own context, demanded the dissolution of
dominant convictions. I dared to argue that we were in the midst of an insurrection that
heralded the end of an era. That the time of patriarchy, capitalism, and the democratic
nation-state was coming to an end. But we weren’t building another regime, nor did we
have a general or global conception of what was happening or what was to come. In a
very concrete sense, we were returning from the future. I tried, as best I could, to describe
the features of that insurrection.
Almost ten years later, the same group gathered us again to continue the reflection.
I tried to consolidate my analysis and presented a reflection on the ways in which grass-
roots initiatives were trying to deal with the barbaric aggression established when a mode
of production mutated into a mode of dispossession.
I am including in this chapter excerpts from those essays. I had many doubts about
including them. In these excerpts, I use not only ideas but even full sentences and even
paragraphs that appear in other chapters. I did finally include them, because they can
be seen as an actualized synthesis, in the proper order, of ideas dispersed in the book. It
can be useful to see all of them together, after reading their evolution over half a century.
Furthermore, these texts make evident that the conditions currently attributed to the
pandemic, in order to blame the virus for the disaster, were already implanted long before
the pandemic.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003262749-12
 The Ongoing Insurrection 199

I. Crisis of Civilization and Overcoming Capitalism

A few years ago, Subcomandante Marcos used a metaphor to describe what
was happening. He suggested that on the ship we were all aboard, “[T]here
are those who dedicate themselves to imagining that the steering wheel
exists and arguing over controlling it. There are those who look for the
steering wheel, sure that it exists, that it must be out there somewhere.
There are also those who take an island and don’t use it as a refuge for
self-satisfaction, but as a boat to link up with another island, and another,
and another…” (2003: 10).
I want to expand and deepen this metaphor and use it as a framework for
what I want to say.
The great ship crosses through a perfect storm, the worst of all. All the lead-
ers have gathered in the machine room: politicians, scientists, financiers, intel-
lectuals, activists… They argue intensely with each other about the decisions to
be made and the path to follow. They are so busy debating that they don’t even
notice the ship is sinking. On deck, where the people are, there is also a debate.
The steering wheel is nowhere to be found; like Subcomandante Marcos said,
some still believe it exists and they fight among themselves to control it. Others,
accustomed to individual initiatives and confident in their own forces, throw
themselves to the water and begin to drown. The rest, in small groups, in com-
munities, begin to discover or construct boats and barges and launch themselves
into navigation, until they find that they are in the middle of an archipelago
and head towards its beaches to try to convert each island into a bridge that will
allow them to find others. From there, having woefully watched the big ship
and all of its leaders sink, they begin to build a new world in which many worlds
can be embraced.
The metaphor seems appropriate to allude to the shape that the initiatives
and movements that I call an insurrection are taking. Here and there one
can already observe traits of the new world that is beginning to be built.
The archipelago is taking shape as people discover and take advantage of the
cracks in capitalism to pursue their own creations (Holloway, 2011). Groups
and forces that seek not only to maintain the current state of affairs but also to
extend their domination, accelerate the sinking of the democratic ship, which
serves them less and less, to achieve by brute force what is already impossible
in a climate of freedom. They take advantage of the growing desperation of
many people, overwhelmed by the crisis and the violence that accompanies
it, as well as the survival instinct of those who are beginning to sink in the
turbulence, to launch with blood and fire a new era of capitalist expansion
and conventional development. Its democratic cover is increasingly illusory, a
mere simulation to cover an undeclared state of emergency, with pretexts such
as international terrorism or drug trafficking, which dissolves day after day
two centuries of struggles for civil rights and democratic freedoms.
200 The Ongoing Insurrection

It is still possible that a new era of capitalist expansion and conventional

development could be unleashed. It would produce unprecedented environ-
mental devastation and the deepening of social inequality by displacing and
marginalizing large groups. It would be driven by an unholy alliance between
big transnational capital and leftist governments, such as those that have been
predominating in Latin America.
Such a prospect is possible but not likely. Since that project is encountering
growing resistance among the peoples directly affected and at the grassroots,
it could only be carried out under extreme authoritarianism, which would
alter the political interrelations of forces and strengthen the option I want to
refer to. I want to speak of an insurrection that few have perceived: it is taking
place before our eyes, but we are unable to see it. And I want to venture bold
hypotheses about its meaning and about the immense risks it is faced with.

Everyday Rebellious Dispersion

The recovery of verbs seems to be the common denominator of the initiatives
taking place at grassroots. People replace nouns such as “education”, “health”,
or “housing”, so-called “needs” whose satisfaction depend on public or pri-
vate entities, with verbs such as “learn”, “heal”, or “inhabit”. In this way, they
reclaim personal and collective agency and enable autonomous paths of social
transformation. Exploring what is happening in the spheres of everyday life
where this occurs shows the character of the ongoing insurrection.

Eating
As Galeano warned a long time ago, we’ve reached a point where whoever
is not afraid of hunger—which is once again affecting a growing number
of people—is afraid of eating—given the growing awareness of the harmful
ingredients in the alimentos sold in the markets (Galeano, 1998).
People are reacting. There are still struggles to change laws and govern-
ment policies so that they regulate and stop the harmful actions of the handful
of corporations that already control 80 percent of the world’s food trade and
are trying to control production as well. Increasingly, however, the effort is
going in a different direction.
Above all, a novel form of rural-urban linkage, based on long-standing
precedents, is being established that generates an alternative to the market.
Groups of urban consumers associate with rural producers and assume together
the risks and characteristics of production. At times, the relationship becomes
a new commons with wide-ranging potentialities. This type of relationship,
designed to eliminate the fear of eating, has acquired such dynamism that even
Walmart is already trying to appropriate it. In Mexico, it draws from traditions
over 50 years old.
 The Ongoing Insurrection 201

Food production in cities is becoming increasingly important. The most

spectacular example is Cuba. It began during the so-called special period, as a
citizens’ initiative, when Cubans discovered that after 50 years of revolution they
were importing 70 percent of their food and all the chemicals required in their
entirely industrialized agriculture. Today they are world champions in organic
agriculture, their country is the only one that meets sustainability requirements
and their cities produce more than half of what their urban dwellers consume. In
the United States, this trend is spreading impressively quickly. In Detroit, a uni-
versal example of the failure of industrial development, 900 community gardens
are flourishing, most of them dedicated to food production. In Mexico, these
types of practices are reviving very old traditions. They are advancing slowly but
solidly in Mexico City and other large capitals and are spreading with peculiar
agility through efforts such as the Autonomous Network for Food Sovereignty,
created in the city of Oaxaca.
In the countryside, the struggle for land is broadening and deepening.
Sometimes it takes the form of a relatively silent, more or less clandestine, reoc-
cupation such as the one that made it possible to recover a million hectares in
Peru, and to produce 40 percent of the country’s food from there, using tradi-
tional practices. At other times it is a spectacular struggle, with irregular results,
such as that of the landless peasants of Brazil, who have organized one of the
most interesting social movements of the continent.1
In recent years, this ancient struggle has undergone a political mutation: it has
become an exercise in popular sovereignty, shifting its focus to territorial defense
and autonomy. It expresses resistance against government-backed corporations’
aggressive attempts to conquer the land for food production or other purposes—
from mining to adventure or ecological tourism. The Mexican government, for
example, has already ceded much of the national territory to private national and
transnational corporations that received 50-year mining concessions. By grant-
ing them the land, the government acquired the responsibility of vacating those
territories to make them available for the corporations. According to new inter-
national agreements, these corporations can sue them if they do not do so within
the established terms, which opens a new line of business for them.
Among the Zapatistas, the defense of the territory has been a constant. In
the face of continuous paramilitary attacks, they firmly stated: “We are not
going to allow them to take it away from us again. We will defend it so that
our children do not have a boss or suffer humiliation and contempt” (Muñoz
Ramirez, 2007). On March 25, 2007, they announced the Global Campaign
for the Defense of Indigenous, Peasant and Autonomous Lands and Territories
in Chiapas, Mexico, and the World. João Pedro Stedile, leader of the Landless
Movement of Brazil, and Rafael Alegría, of Via Campesina’s Campaign for
Agrarian Reform, accompanied the launching of this new initiative. “We call
for this global campaign of mutual support among rural peoples and other peo-
ples who support our rights and our struggles for the right to life and dignity,
202 The Ongoing Insurrection

to join forces with others” (EZLN, 2007) said Subcomandante Marcos in an

event held in San Cristóbal de las Casas. One of the first actions of this global
campaign was the creation of a document in which 202 organizations from
22 countries and 1,104 people from 40 nations demanded guarantees for their
possession of land in the autonomous communities of Chiapas. They were
threatened with the imminent dispossession of more than 5,000 hectares.
Via Campesina and the Continental Network for the Demilitarization of the
Americas, as well as organizations of workers, peasants, and Indigenous people,
human rights, research centers, environmentalists, and religious groups from
many countries, supported the demand.
All these attitudes and initiatives, such as the slogan adopted in Quito:
“For agrarian reform, for the defense of land and territory”, express an
increasingly relevant conceptual shift. In addition to the land itself, people
are trying to reclaim a specific form of relationship with it, different from
the one imposed by public and private developers in the last 50 years. It
constitutes a sovereign exercise of collective will that challenges the attribu-
tions and powers of governments, and is manifested in de facto institutional
arrangements: a growing number of people, especially peasants, already con-
trol their territory and govern themselves, in their own way (Esteva 1998a).
All this can be framed within the idea of food sovereignty as defined by Via
Campesina, the largest peasant organization in history, which already consists
of hundreds of millions of peasants in over a hundred countries. It is expressed
in simple terms: defining what we eat for ourselves … and producing it on our
own terms. (See Declaration of Nyéleni, (Vía Campesina, 2007)).
Given the current state of the world, and the fact that a very large proportion
of the population has surrendered to the diets and food practices imposed by
capital and its productive regime, there are few proposals as radical and complex
as this conception of food sovereignty, which substantially transforms the search
for food self-sufficiency.

Learning
The education system is in crisis: it does not prepare people for life or work
and marginalizes the majority. The main product of the school system is drop-
outs: 60 percent of the children entering school this year will not be able to
reach the level considered compulsory in their countries, which will mean
permanent discrimination for them, lacking this new type of passport essen-
tial to circulate in modern society. Those who learn to consume this new
commodity called education and accumulate 20 or 30 years of hours on their
asses and solid diplomas cannot get a job: nine out of ten graduates of Mexican
universities will never be able to work in the field they studied. The crisis of
the educational system is already recognized in all countries and since the 90s
it has had as much visibility as the financial crisis has today.
 The Ongoing Insurrection 203

Despite the obvious and well-documented failure of the school system and
the damage it causes every day, there is still a widespread struggle to “obtain
education”. Since the production and distribution of this commodity were
included from the beginning in the policy package of the development era, a
1953 meeting of UNESCO experts attempted to characterize the “deficit” in
Latin America. Their conclusion was that the main educational problem in the
region was the indifference and even resistance of parents to send their children
to school. Eleven years later, the same experts modified the diagnosis: they
concluded that no country in the region could meet the demand for education.
The campaign to convince parents to send their children to school had been
successful and continues to be successful to this day, but there is no possibility of
meeting their demands, even though the World Bank and every government’s
main proposal is “education for all”.
People have been reacting. Students, parents, and teachers are still trying
to reform the educational system and change its theories and practices from
within. They are arguing with the unions entrenched in the system, with the
state and with corporations—all of which are aggressively trying to mold it to
suit their own interests.
Likewise, various groups are struggling, inside and outside the State and
the market, to promote “alternative education”, based on a critique of the
dominant educational, economic, and political systems. They adopt interest-
ing pedagogical innovations, such as those suggested by Freire, but without
criticizing the very idea of education (as an authoritarian exercise of control)
or more importantly, criticizing the society that needs it to reproduce itself—a
capitalist society in which the production, distribution, and consumption of
this educational merchandise is already the economy’s most important sector
and the one that absorbs the largest proportion of the population—in each
country and in the whole world.
A vigorous movement is now spreading and moving in another direction.
Autonomous and free learning practices are increasingly popular and the
movement is generating its own institutional arrangements, outside, against,
and beyond the system. Such practices, underpinned by their own theoretical
apparatus, cannot be understood within the predominant frameworks. They
recover ancient learning traditions and introduce contemporary technologies
that allow learning and studying to be joyful and free activities.
It is a peculiar movement. It is possibly the largest in the world, in terms
of the number of people involved: perhaps billions. But it is basically invisible
and many of those who participate in it do not feel like they are a part of a
social or political movement in the conventional sense of the term, although
they are enthusiastic about meeting others like them, establishing horizontal
relationships and sharing experiences. In general, they are fully aware of the
meaning of what they do: they fully embrace the radicalism of breaking with
all forms of education to learn and study in freedom.
204 The Ongoing Insurrection

It has become impossible to achieve any precision about quality and quan-
tity in this movement. One of its forms is the so-called free school. Google
reports more than 500 million references, most of which refer to ongoing
initiatives somewhere in the world. Similar things happen with references such
as “learning communities” and other similar expressions that allude to current
experiences.

Healing
The healthcare system is increasingly inefficient, discriminatory, and counter-
productive. The iatrogenic effect is beginning to be documented: doctors and
hospitals produce more illnesses than they cure. What caused great scandal
when Ivan Illich published Medical Nemesis 40 years ago has now become
commonplace. The production, distribution, and consumption of health is the
second largest sector of the world economy and the first in terms of the number
of people directly involved in it. The medical profession and the health indus-
try have taken possession of all institutional apparatuses: they make the rules,
enforce them, and punish those who violate them. Each failure of this profes-
sional dictatorship offers the opportunity to strengthen and expand it. And the
failures are multiplying.
As in the case with education, there are countless efforts to reform the health
system. Likewise, there is a proliferation of alternative therapies that seek to
avoid the most harmful effects and incompetence of the dominant system.
Increasingly, however, there are initiatives that openly challenge the system
itself, break with dominant notions of disease, health, and even body and mind,
while nurturing autonomous healing practices, recovering marginalized ther-
apeutic traditions that had been disqualified by the medical profession, and
enabling healthier forms of behavior and more humane treatments, rooted in
the home and community. Their new institutional arrangements are beginning
to take shape.

Other Spheres
Dwelling
The disasters that usually accompany public and private developments and
promote the proliferation of homelessness are still spreading. At the same time,
autonomous building practices that have long characterized urban sprawl
are consolidated and strengthened, enriched by contemporary technologies.
Dozens of “transition towns” define a radical attempt to transform urban life.
The squatter movement, regeneration efforts in the barrios and the creation of
new commons are spreading everywhere. There has been a rise of struggles
that bring the aforementioned political mutation of the rural areas to the city
 The Ongoing Insurrection 205

and create coalitions of territorial defense—against airports, new roads, and

public and private developments. They tend to become seeds for installing
autonomous forms of government. (See Hopkins 2008, Hern, 2010). Part of
this movement is made up of initiatives to recover autonomous mobility, on
foot or by bicycle, and to actively resist subordination to motor vehicles.

Exchanging
Although the Wal-martization of the world is ongoing and a few companies
continue to extend their predatory capacity and cause all kinds of damage, a
new era of direct exchange is beginning to spread outside the capitalist market.
Not only are markets flourishing, where producers and consumers abandon
abstract conditions to deal directly amongst themselves, so are local curren-
cies, which operate as means of payment and communal mortar.

Saber and Conocer2

New centers of knowledge production are being generated outside public or
private research centers and conventional university institutions. New tech-
nologies are emerging in them, based on significant theoretical innovations,
which reformulate perceptions of the world and introduce new methodologies
for interacting with it that question the dominant paradigms. As Foucault sug-
gested, the insurrection of subjected saberes is strengthened and deepened: his-
torical contents that had been buried or masked within functional coherences
and formal systematizations are recovered; specific, local, regional, differen-
tiated saberes that were disqualified because they were considered incompe-
tent, insufficiently elaborated, naïve, and hierarchically inferior to scientific
knowledge are revalued. Erudite knowledge is juxtaposed and combined with
local memories, to form a historical knowledge of struggle, which requires
demolishing the tyranny of globalizing discourses, whose use of scientific
classification creates hierarchies, inherently privileging certain saberes as an
exercise in power.
In all spheres of everyday life, new attitudes, rooted in their physical and
cultural contexts, are manifesting and thriving within new political horizons,
beyond dominant ideologies and conventional patterns. Such initiatives gain
increased visibility in a crisis because they offer creative options for survival
and effectively resist dominant policies and projects.
It is true that many people participate in these initiatives without abandoning
dominant individualism. They adopt these attitudes for their own satisfaction
and firmly reject their social and political meaning. But it is equally true that
even they begin to react against the reigning hyper-individualism, suffer its
consequences, and open to others in an attempt to redefine themselves in their
social condition.
206 The Ongoing Insurrection

This account of what is happening raises some obvious questions: What

is the character and scope of this insurrection? What is its nature? Is it really
anti-capitalist or is it functional within the context of the dominant regime,
prolonging its agony? Why call insurrection behaviors that at first sight are
mere survival reactions, often desperate, with no evident articulation to them?
This essay is a hasty and tentative attempt to answer them.

Beyond Development: Buen Vivir

If there were an expression capable of capturing the meaning of the social
movements spreading throughout Latin America, it would be that of buen vivir,
living well, usually complemented by that of “mutua crianza” (mutual nur-
turing) (Apffel-Marglin, 1998; América Profunda, 2004; Chuji, 2009). This
emphasis generates all sorts of tensions and contradictions with governments
across the ideological spectrum, which tend to disqualify and criminalize them.
The definition of the good life, of what it means to live well, a sphere of
imagination and action that traditionally belonged to civil society, was attrib-
uted to government in the modern nation-state, which usually surrendered the
responsibility to capital, private corporations, and the media.
In the last 50 years, the development enterprise has been based on a univer-
sal definition of the good life associated with the average lifestyle of developed
country’s inhabitants, particularly Americans. Postulated as a universal ideal,
this definition was explicitly or implicitly adopted even by the most recalci-
trant enemies of the United States. It soon became evident that it was not fea-
sible and would be ecologically unwise for all the inhabitants of what Truman
called underdeveloped areas to adopt such lifestyles. However, since the 1970s
the proposal has been realistically downgraded to a commitment to guaran-
tee the satisfaction of certain basic needs for all. The universal definition of
the good life has not been abandoned in the construction of social goals and
even in the definition of those basic needs. This definition continues to deter-
mine government policies everywhere, despite the ideological differences that
prompt different countries to emphasize the market or public initiatives for
social affairs.
These attitudes are part of a typical Western tradition, focused on the con-
struction of “one world”—under the most diverse banners and pretexts (Sachs
1992). The hidden agenda of development is a new way of westernizing the
world, assuming that the West is an expression of the supreme point humanity
can reach when carried by the arrow of progress. For years now, however,
the arrow has been broken: the very idea of progress is ripe for the museum
(Sbert, 1992). The cultural homogenization associated with development is
met with growing resistance everywhere. As the Zapatistas have pointed out
since 1994, it is now a matter of creating a world in which many worlds can be
embraced. Instead of continuing to dissolve peoples and cultures to integrate
 The Ongoing Insurrection 207

everyone into a universal and uniform design, it’s imperative to explore forms
of harmonious coexistence among the different. This new attitude points to a
political horizon beyond the nation-state, reformulating the meaning of dem-
ocratic struggles and recovering definitions of the good life that emerge from
autonomous centers of knowledge production.
It is true that even governments that openly oppose the dominant paradigms,
such as those of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela, still adopt the conventional
catechism of development and heretically repress the grassroots movements that
challenge it. But it is also true that resistance is growing. It has thus become
possible to submit to public debate a central precept of the dominant religion:
the goal of accelerated economic growth. Fifty years of propaganda have turned
this economists’ dogma into a general prejudice. It is still accepted without
question as desirable, but an increasingly vigorous current of thought and
action questions this pernicious obsession and demands its abandonment. This
is what is being actively sought, all over the world, by those who have begun to
regain control of their own lives, which they had surrendered to the market or
to the State. In Mexico, it has been publicly stated since the 1980s that a nega-
tive rate of economic growth stemming from conscious initiatives and not the
unforeseen consequence of the financial crisis or the authorities’ incompetence
is a condition for living well, with justice and freedom.
The idea that the economy grows indefinitely, along with the population,
seems like a commonsense principle. But it is not. Many things must grow
to size: plants, animals, people. When someone reaches their size and some-
thing keeps growing, we call that bulge “cancer”. A good part of what grows
when the formal economy grows is a social cancer. Speculation, irrational or
destructive production, corruption, and waste grow, at the expense of what
we need more of: social justice, the welfare of the majorities.
In every country there are things that have grown too much, so they must
be pruned, and others that have not grown enough or need to continue to do
so to benefit the general population. A high rate of economic growth, meas-
ured by the gross national product, usually manifests itself by that which is
already too big continuing to grow, a real social cancer, and that which should
continue to grow, shrinking.
Economic growth produces the opposite of what it promises. It does not
imply greater welfare or employment for the majority, or greater efficiency in the
use of resources. It is the opposite: it generates misery, inefficiency, and injustice.
There is abundant historical experience to support this argument. Continuing
to propose a high rate of economic growth as a social goal is pure folly. It must
be attributed to blissful ignorance, cynicism, or a combination of the two.
Almost 40 years ago, Paul Streeten rigorously documented, for the ILO, the
perverse association between economic growth and injustice. He showed that
more growth corresponds to more misery, and that there is a cause-and-effect
relationship between the two. He also showed that the famous “trickle-down
208 The Ongoing Insurrection

effect”, the idea that concentrated wealth spills over to the majorities until it
generates their welfare, is an unfounded perverse illusion.
Focusing social efforts on economic growth conceals what is really being
pursued: greater opulence for a few, at the expense of general misery and the
destruction of the natural world. This is hardly logical, because the economists’
obsession does nothing more than apply to society as a whole a strict logic that
only applies to capital: capital that does not grow, dies; and so it must grow
indefinitely. That is why cultivating this obsession implies writing a blank
check to the leaders of the market or the State so that they can do what they
want in the name of general welfare that never arrives and will never arrive.
We need to recover our sense of proportion, which is another form of
common sense, the one we have in community. Against the society of waste,
destruction, and injustice, which produces global collapse and is now blamed
for the disasters caused by irresponsibility, we can raise the courage to sensibly
and responsibly renounce the unnecessary in the name of viable social goals
that forever discard the idolatry of economic growth.
The time has come to seriously consider the advantages of a negative
growth rate, clearly detailing what we want to continue to stimulate. This
means, for example, supporting highly efficient, productive, and sensible sec-
tors, such as those that make up the bulk of the “informal sector”. This means
concentrating on expanding the productive capacities of the majority, instead
of supporting inefficient giants. The economists’ nightmare—a fall in gross
product—could be a blessing for most people.
It is time to stop the prevailing madness. Some things must grow and others
contract. Let our livelihood capacities and our vital autonomy increase. Let the
spaces and ways in which we can practice our freedom and initiative expand.
May the opportunities for the good life be multiplied, according to the way
in which each person and culture defines what it means to live well. And in
order to make this possible, may we reduce the weight of the formal registered
economy that burdens and oppresses us, as well as everything that runs coun-
ter to the good life of all or destroys nature.
This is what the ongoing insurrection is looking for.

The End of an Era and the Communal Alternative

To properly appreciate all these initiatives to live well we need to take seri-
ously what was proposed at the beginning of this cycle. Something that lasted
200 years is now suffering from a terminal illness. We are living through a
catastrophe of civilization that threatens the survival of human life.
In doing so, we must guard against a kind of apocalyptic randiness that has
become fashionable. The end of the world is described with a kind of erotic
excitement. Climate change is passionately affirmed or passionately denied.
All while failing to account for the fact that both positions imply unbearable
 The Ongoing Insurrection 209

arrogance: they imply that we know well what is happening on the planet and
that we know how it reacts and, even worse, we pretend to know how to fix the
problem on a global scale. We should abandon the arrogance of so-called global
thinking (Berry, 2003) and think at the scale of our ordinary mortal lives. What
we know for sure is that we’ve adopted suicidal behavior: what we’re doing is
wrong and we should stop doing it. Which is, in fact, what some people have
begun to do.
The end of an era demands that we abandon the type of thinking we have
been molded by and recognize that we have been trapped in an ideological
dispute between capitalism and socialism for the past 150 years. We stopped
thinking. We allowed the radical critique of the existing system to degenerate,
based on certain socialist assumptions. We lost the ability to influence real pol-
itics as well as two or three generations of thought. As can be seen in the first
chapter, when I explored this theme 20 years ago with Theodor Shanin, we
spoke of the conceptual disaster we had fallen into and of the need for a new
theoretical and political framework. That is what is being produced.

Rethinking the Character of the Dominant Regime

The Specter of Capitalism
Let us take the hypothesis that we are in the terminal phase of capitalism, that
this mode of production and societal organization has come to its end, seriously.
For this hypothesis to be useful in the present struggle we need to struggle
against the specter of capitalism we have participated in building. It is true that
the mentality of capitalism contaminates all human relations, even in the pri-
vacy of one’s bedroom, but it is equally true that not everything is capitalism.
The prevailing view includes the features brilliantly described by J.K. Gibson-
Graham (1996), that lady who is two,3 one of whom is now dead. In her book
on the end of capitalism, she makes considerable progress in the necessary task
of dismantling the reified version of capitalism that overwhelms the leftist tradi-
tion. Their work allows me to skip over that complex argument here.
“Free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia,” recom-
mended Foucault (1983: xiii). In an anti-capitalist struggle, we cannot liberate
action while maintaining a vision of capitalism that submerges us in paranoia
by perceiving it as a unified, homogeneous system that occupies all social space
and from which nothing can escape. It would be omnipresent and almost
omnipotent. Driven daily by all the media, this paralyzing vision is nourished
by the idea that this world system can only be dismantled as a whole. That
is why the proletarians of the whole world must unite: only their organized,
unified, homogeneous force will be able to defeat such an entity. This percep-
tion, which comes from afar, seems to find empirical confirmation in so-called
globalization.
210 The Ongoing Insurrection

The left, educated in that theoretical tradition and political practice, con-
tinually fights against a specter … or continually postpones the real struggle
against capitalism, because it has not succeeded in building up the strength
required to confront the giant that its imagination conceives. This percep-
tion disqualifies any non-capitalist reality, except when it recognizes some
pre-capitalist condition inevitably linked to capitalism and functional for it,
and rejects, as ridiculous or pernicious, any partial struggle against capital-
ism and even more so that which pretends to be located beyond capitalism.4
Staying within that framework and building alliances with national or trans-
national capital is justified in the name of so-called realism.
What is important for our purposes is to recognize capitalism as an eco-
nomic regime characterized by certain social relations of production, techni-
cally described since Marx’s time. In societies where this regime dominates,
there are vast spaces where such social relations do not prevail. These auton-
omous spaces -such as the areas under Zapatista control—are limited and
affected by the dominant regime, but they are pockets of resistance from
which the ongoing insurrection is driven and organized, as I will examine
below. In them, or in spaces under strict control of the dominant regime, new
social relations are being generated.

The Era of Systems

The end of capitalism is not necessarily good news. What is preparing to take
its place is even worse.
At the end of the seventies, Ivan Illich demonstrated the counter-
productivity of all modern institutions and anticipated their decadence with
prophetic clarity, which is becoming more evident every day. Illich dedicated
the last 20 years of his life to warning us about the suicidal path of current
civilization and the way it is being displaced by another that could hardly
be called civilization. He alluded to it as the “era of systems”, using a very
different definition of systems than Wallerstein’s. He couldn’t bring himself
to describe it. It seemed to him that only Orwell’s dystopic imagination, as
described in 1984, had been able to sketch its features.
We have been being transformed into subsystems of systems that were once
our tools. We now know that “when tools exceed a certain dimension and a
certain power, their use leads to dependence, exploitation and impotence”,
and thus “men are put at the service of machines” (Illich, 1973). This is an
objective tendency, which appears as an undesired consequence of a particular
historical evolution. Those who hold economic and political power in the
current regime are using it in their attempt to retain their position in the time
in which the dispositive sustaining it is falling apart. Such attempt would only
be possible under unprecedented levels of authoritarianism. It would not be
the continuation of capitalism but its authoritarian negation. We could be on
 The Ongoing Insurrection 211

the verge of a maddened exercise of power, even worse than the fascisms of the
thirties, in a context where politics and police have become synonyms (The
Invisible Committee 2009).
An example that is becoming a daily occurrence can illustrate the argument.
If we have the misfortune of falling into a modern hospital, we immediately
disappear as people. An abstract statistical profile is constructed from our flu-
ids and skins and compared with an equally abstract standard profile. From
there a syndrome (an abstract disease) is constructed and a standard prescription
is mechanically applied. This is not the catastrophe, this analytical procedure
that can be useful. Nor does the catastrophe consist only of being reduced to
that condition at every step: that we become passenger 17B on an airplane, a
social security number, one more in a queue… The catastrophe is realized when
instead of rebelling against that brutal reduction and claiming our reality as
singular persons, we assume that abstract condition as our own, we experience
it as a natural way of being, and even enjoy it. That is the era of systems.
When the government fears the people there is liberty, Jefferson once
noted; when the people fear the government there is tyranny. We are in a tran-
sition. Across the world, governments panicking because of the insurrection
that openly challenges their power, try to expand all forms of control over the
population under the most diverse pretexts: terrorism, drug trafficking, health.
The swine flu circus could be seen as an experiment in population control.
The current struggle, therefore, is not only the passage from resistance to
liberation in relation to capital, which can exit history in violent and destruc-
tive ways. Above all else, it is also a struggle to prevent the establishment of
what is being installed in its place and to open the possibility of other options.
This authoritarian perspective is not that of a sudden installation, through
a kind of coup d’état by a group or class, but the deepening of a process that
began decades ago.
Forty years ago, Foucault and Deleuze detected and described how we
have been leaving disciplinary societies (whose models of confinement are
the school, the prison, and the hospital) and entering into societies of control,
“which no longer function through confinement but through continuous con-
trol and instantaneous communication”. New types of sanction and surveil-
lance are installed for them (Foucault, 2008).

Technology
Technique is the tool we use to expand and enrich our capabilities. It can
be instruments or equipment, a hammer or a computer, or services and
institutions: social security and the electoral system are social tools. Techno-
logy is the logic, the social and political nexus, implicit in our tools. The
current problem is that a good part of modern tools has become counter-
productive systems: with the auto-mobile we lost autonomous mobility and
212 The Ongoing Insurrection

became dependent on a complex system, which includes roads, production of

cars and gasoline, their supply, etc.; with the doctor and the clinic, both tools,
we transitioned to a health system that makes us sick and controls us. We tran-
sitioned from the common learning space when we passed to the school and
the educational system, which produces ignorance and social control.
A growing awareness of this technological dimension can be seen in the
initiatives people are taking. What I mentioned regarding eating, learning,
healing, or inhabiting clearly implies the recovery of autonomous capacities
through tools that correspond to our intentions and remain under our control,
instead of submitting us and putting us at their service in a system.
Dry toilet technology can be seen as a symbol and metaphor for the soci-
ological and political novelty we are experiencing. It can successfully dis-
place one of the costliest and environmentally harmful technologies we use:
the one that leads to drainage. It could autonomously solve, in a short time,
health, economic, and ecological problems. And be a symbol of another way
to change. Just as the separation of church and state was a precondition for
democratic societies, the separation of poop and state can be a precondition
for the emancipation that is needed today. The dry toilet and other varia-
tions of this technology symbolize the autonomous capacity to act without
depending on public or private institutions, on centralized apparatuses. It is
an effective metaphor for a new social form of existence, which substantially
broadens people’s “threshold of autonomous subsistence”. This obviously does
not imply dogmatically discarding other tools that operate with other techno-
logical frameworks—for example in producing locomotives.

Articulation and Organization

The current insurrection is a challenge to the dominant political regime, but
it appears as a dispersed rebellion without articulation or organization. In real-
ity, there are new forms of interweaving initiatives that follow new paths,
where community networks are reconstituted or formed for the first time,
locally rooted but not localist, and characterized by radical pluralism. The
endeavor of articulation seeks to escape the usual temptation to constitute
national or global political subjects, which inevitably take the form of the
party, and fall into the authoritarian dynamics of the nation-state, which iden-
tifies itself through friend/enemy relationships. An old Arab saying advises:
“Choose your enemy well; you will be like him”. Current initiatives maintain
their confrontations and resistance against capital but are not defined by them:
they trace a path defined by the grassroots and enriched by dialogue with
other peers. They are fully aware that capital and its administrators have cho-
sen ever-growing categories of citizens as their enemies,5 but the YESes that
people affirm themselves in cease being rooted in the grammar of negativity
and cease reproducing the logic it confronts. Among the elements that shape
 The Ongoing Insurrection 213

this style of constituting subjects, new forms of regulation stand out: forms
of regulation where autonomy predominates over ontonomy or heteronomy,
and means and ends are reintegrated by decentralism and by reconfiguring
“power”, through the insurrection of subjected knowledge that Foucault
described as political insurrection (1970, 1980, 2002, 2008), forms that resolve
what appeared as an unbearable contradiction in his proposal: positing that
Power is dead and that power is everywhere. According to Foucault, the rad-
ical rejection of the Power of the powerful (increasingly fragile and incapable,
useful only to destroy), does not imply impotence. It does not seek the con-
struction of an alternative or different power, because this would reproduce
the evil it rejects. It creates new sociological and political inventions that take
shape in regenerated social relations, which are not determined or conditioned
by Power. Foucault spoke, on the one hand, of the fact that it’s not about
modifying people’s conscience or what is in their heads, as reformers and rev-
olutionaries from the entire political spectrum claim. It is about changing the
political, economic, and institutional regime of truth production, that is, the
statements according to which we govern ourselves and others. Foucault thus
offered some clues that make it possible to build bridges between conventional
political thought, which already functions as an eye-opener for many people,
and the radical political innovations we are witnessing. In this process the
center is reconfigured… by dissolving it, by giving it the support of multiple
cultural nuclei that are autonomous centers of production of “truth” and are
interconnected as a network, eliminating the need for a common center. It is
the passage from decentralization to decentralism, in a pattern of behavior that
can give a pale mechanical image of what is currently happening in the world-
wide operation of the postal system, the telephone system, or the Internet….
I cannot avoid the rigidity and confusion of this simplified description of
very complex ideas. During the description, to escape the straitjacket of dom-
inant notions, I employ Foucault’s difficult jargon as a set of limits or bounda-
ries of the reflection. It is not something to be done lightly. (See Esteva, 1994,
1998a, 1998b, 1999, 2003; Holloway, 2002, 2011).
The quality of the transformation efforts is often measured by the quality of
its program—the project for a country or society that would define the objec-
tives of the struggle, the meaning of the transformation, the conception of the
future for which it would be fighting. It is assumed that without objectives,
any endeavor would lack destiny and rationality, since the program is not born
spontaneously from the scattered initiatives of the persons, communities, peo-
ples, which seem to react to the grievances suffered, past humiliations, and dis-
possession. From this perspective, the need for leading cadres to bring to the
movement its program is established.
While examining this matter it’s useful to remember that “society as
a whole” is always the result of innumerable factors and impulses that are
beyond anyone’s control. This perspective of society as a whole, past, present,
214 The Ongoing Insurrection

and future, cannot be considered a pre-requisite for mobilizing, which would

be to dream with elements of the past, as Foucault said. Furthermore, we are
in the twenty-first century. The twentieth century witnessed, as James Scott
(1998) has sufficiently shown us, the failure of social engineering, of all the
efforts to improve the social condition driven by programs conceived by lead-
ers. These programs tend to expropriate the breath of change, reducing or dis-
rupting it beyond recognition, often taking a violent form. The assassinations
of Zapata and Villa are emblematic examples of the force used against the rev-
olutionaries’ impulses for transformation, to reduce them to the leaders’ pro-
gram enshrined in the constitution. Between 1917 and 1921, in the same way
and practically at the same time, a war was waged in Russia against the auton-
omous forces that had seized local power in the revolution. Lenin recognized
this situation in 1918 when he pointed out: “Anarchist ideas have now taken
on a living form” (in Guerin 1970). The war was waged around the destruc-
tion of the Soviets’ independent power. In cities labor control was imposed,
workers’ right to strike was abolished and, in the countryside, political con-
trol replaced autonomous communal power. This historical experience, which
marks the whole of the twentieth century, is what the social movements of the
twenty-first century draw from to try to go down a different path.
The state of affairs observed in Mexico and in the world, after the neolib-
eral decades, can be described as that of a pot or cauldron over a slow fire in
which the pressure of the steam that is generated accumulates. What is that
“real, ungraspable and indefinable matter” that Trotsky calls “energy of the
masses” and compares to “steam”? According to Adolfo Gilly, this matter has

sense, understanding and reason and therefore does not dissipate, like
steam, but remains transmuted into experience, invisible to those who
believe that the movement resides in the piston and the boiler (i.e., in
the organizational apparatus), but present in subsequent and unexpected
aspects of everyday life.
(Gilly 2008)

In the ongoing process, the steam, to use the above metaphor, that continu-
ously condenses in experience acts in its dissipation, spilling over into reality.
Occasionally it is accommodated in boilers and pistons that the steam itself
generates in its path and uses for certain tasks, but it cannot be contained in
“organizational apparatuses” nor be driven by “leading organizations”. For
both to be relevant and to have a role to play, they must cease being a pyr-
amid and start operating as a horizontal network, and they need to learn to
command by obeying. Moreover, they must operate on an appropriate scale,
continually adapting to the conditions and styles of the real men and women
who are always the steam, the impetus, who ultimately determine the direc-
tion and scope of the movement.
 The Ongoing Insurrection 215

Mechanical metaphors always fall short of the richness of real processes, but
this one can illustrate what is happening. When it is not a question of masses,
that is, of groups of homogenized individuals brought together by a leader, a
party, an organization, but of communities and groups constituted through
internal cohesion, the direction, the sense of the movement, effectively starts
from the past: from grievances, from an unbearable experience. But they
acquire in their own dynamics the hope that is the essence of all popular
movements—a hope that packs into the broadest sense of the present, in the
form of the struggle, the traces of the future, which is not the illumination of
a utopian star but the vision of the rainbow, with its bright and diffuse colors
and its unattainable character.
This is a central aspect of the matter of organizing. The “masses” are con-
stituted by the homogenization of the individual atoms that form around a
leader, an ideology, an apparatus, which gives them cohesion and direction
and at the same time make them manipulable…and machine-gunnable!
These atoms do not acquire organizational capacity by themselves: they
are like a house of cards, which is toppled by a breeze. Cards or billiard
balls, like images of homogeneous atoms, masses, or political parties, can
only be maintained in structure if an external force (leader, ideology, appa-
ratus…) gives them cohesion and unity. If the movement of transformation
is made up of people (nodes of webs of real relations) and these are mobi-
lized in groups (in the form of communities, commons, etc.), the cohesion
comes from within: they are organized and bound together by their shared
motives and horizons (they are the cultural/political nuclei I referred to
earlier), and their interaction with other similar nuclei gives rise to hori-
zontal coalitions that maintain their character, that is to say, their cohesion
does not come from the outside.
On the other hand, when new political initiatives manage to avoid the
separation between means and ends, giving the struggle the form of its out-
come, and when they do not operate in the form of masses but of coalitions
of autonomies, they are capable of generating their own mechanisms of lead-
ership. First, they tend to be made up of discontented people who become
refuseniks, people that due to their experiences share a radical critique of the
dominant certainties that usually manifests as disenchantment: people have
ceased to believe the “truths” with which they governed themselves until
recently. Secondly, their intellectuals now emanate from their own social fab-
rics. We will call them embodied intellectuals, only to distinguish them from
the organic intellectuals, of whom they are heirs, and to especially distinguish
them from the cabinet intellectuals.
Foucault expressed, time and again, his dream about an intellectual that
destroys evidence and generalities and discovers the inertias and constraints of
the present time, who is incessantly on the move, who doesn’t know exactly
where he is heading, nor what he will think tomorrow for he is too attentive
216 The Ongoing Insurrection

to the present (1980). Foucault’s dream is becoming reality. In 1994 it mani-

fested very concretely:

“We”, said the Zapatistas, “those who have to die to make ourselves
heard, those who are always forgotten by the revolutionary tasks and the
political parties, those absent from history, those always present in mis-
ery, the small, the mute, the eternal infants, the voiceless and faceless,
the abandoned, the recipients of contempt, the disabled, the abandoned,
the dead without numbers, the instigators of tenderness, the profession-
als of hope, those of the denied dignified face, the pure rage, the pure
fire, those of the enough is enough, those of the dawn, those of the for
everyone everything, for us nothing. Those of the word that walks, we
do not want duty, not glory, not fame. We simply want to be the ante-
room of the new world. A new world with a new way of doing politics,
a new kind of government policy, a new kind of men and women who
command by obeying.”
(Subcomandante Marcos, 1994)

A very recent expression of all this, which bears a striking resemblance to the
language of the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, was the People’s
Congress held in Bogotá from October 8 to 12, 2010. The 17,000 participants
from 212 organizations brought with them to the Congress the many experi-
ences they had accumulated in the effort to “walk the talk”. In it they “aban-
doned the inveterate custom of representing the people and delegating their will
to parties or self-proclaimed vanguards”. The Congress was built with mandates
raised from the grassroots. “No one spoke as a leader or as an individual. They
spoke as a region, as an organization, as peasants, as young people.” To build
a new world, they were determined to legislate from below. In the course of
November 2010, they met again to formulate work plans for 2011 based on
which they will dedicate themselves to uniting and rooting themselves in “pop-
ular autonomy” and “joint deliberation and action in all corners of the country”
to fulfill the purposes of the Congress: “Let the country from below legislate.
Let the people rule. Let the people order the territory, the economy, and the
way to govern themselves. Let the word walk” (Zibechi 2010).

Rhythm and Violence

Those interested in profound social change generally observe with great inter-
est the initiatives coming “from below and to the left”, as the Zapatistas would
say; the movements I alluded to in the first part of these notes; the decisions
being made in all sorts of communities. At the same time, however, they tend
to disqualify their potential for the transformation that is needed. In addition
to what I already mentioned in the previous paragraphs, which refers to their
 The Ongoing Insurrection 217

dispersion and lack of articulation and organization, they critique their pace:
they cannot advance at the pace needed in the face of the rapid aggressiveness
of capital and its administrators, and the seriousness of the current difficulties,
which demand “rapid” change.
There tends to be a consensus on this sense of urgency. The severity of the
current situation, and the growing threat of authoritarianism, demand an imme-
diate response. For this very reason, instead of continuing to wait for “organ-
izational construction” on a national and international scale, which seems to
grow slower by the day, it is necessary to take initiatives on a scale that everyone
can participate in. If it is a matter of groups and communities, it is necessary to
“walk at the pace of the slowest”, as the Zapatistas say and do, instead of sub-
scribing to an authoritarian exercise in the name of urgency. “Let’s go slowly
because I am in a hurry” expresses traditional wisdom of great political value.
The use of violence for political ends, even in the name of the highest
causes, is also part of the experience of the twentieth century. The immediate
and general mass response to the Zapatistas’ armed uprising exemplifies how
that experience has been sedimented. There is a growing and well-founded
conviction that violence only generates more violence and that it is very dif-
ficult, in social and political practice, to escape its consequences. Beyond the
classic ethical, moral, and political arguments, a simple reflection has been
made: if one is the stronger, violence is unnecessary and non-violent means
can be used to subdue the weaker; if one is the weaker, violence is suicidal and
leads unfailingly to defeat, to self-destruction. This reflection is even more
pertinent when it is not a question of subduing anyone and can be applied even
in the case of self-defense, but it is necessary to distinguish this posture from
that which expresses cowardice or what is usually called pacifism.
This does not mean automatically condemning those who use violence.
Arundati Roy brilliantly expressed this position when asked whether it was
immoral to condemn those who resort to violence in her country, India
(2007). But more urgently than ever, we need to resort to active nonviolence,
articulated through dialogue.

The Nature of the Crisis

Characterizing the nature of the current crisis allows us to better understand
the nature of the ongoing insurrection.
It is clear at this point that we are not facing another economic cycle, but
a turning point. But the direction of change is not written in the stars and
all kinds of hypotheses are trying to explore the options. To ground these
hypotheses, to avoid them hiding from us, and to clear the way forward, we
need to appeal to memory.
Capitalism managed to emerge from the Great Depression through the
agreements expressed in the United States in Roosevelt’s New Deal: a labor
218 The Ongoing Insurrection

deal, a production deal, and a social agreement, which were complemented by

the famous Keynesian remedy. Thus, came the “30 glorious years”, as French
analysts call them. The steady increase in real wages, the growing power of the
unions, and the continuous extension of the social safety net, could be seen as
an expression of a spectacular capitalist expansion.
In the 1960s and 1970s, based on these political and economic advances,
but also because of the unequal exchange and the legacy of racism and sexism
evident in the international division of labor, there were once again broad
mobilizations of workers who wanted to “storm the skies”. They mobilized
in many ways, from schools and factories to kitchens, with hippie communes,
sit-ins, and guerrilla warfare. The Keynesian arrangements were undermined
at their base, within each country and on an international scale, once again
putting the survival of the system at risk.
Capital’s response to these struggles is what would really constitute “neolib-
eral globalization”, well before the Washington Consensus. Its main purpose was
to dismantle the gains made by working people and return to the situation before
the New Deal…and the crisis of 1929. The strategy took very different forms,
depending on the correlations of forces existing in each country, but in general,
it included the relocation of the means of production, the de-territorialization of
capital, increased competition among workers due to the expansion of the labor
market, the dismantling of the “welfare state” and the expropriation of land.
(See Midnight Notes 1997).
The strategy dismantled all previous agreements, both those of the New
Deal and those of the Cold War and the relationship with the Third World.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist regimes of Eastern Europe
and the decision of the Chinese Communist Party to try the capitalist road not
only produced discouragement and confusion among workers. They also sig-
nificantly modified the internal correlations of forces and maneuvering space
agreed upon under the cloak of the Cold War. The social truce agreed upon in
the wake of the Great Depression between workers and capital, which guar-
anteed social stability as long as the former continued to generate profits and
jobs, was thus dissolved. The end of the truce resulted in, among other things,
a new wave of workers’ mobilizations. More than anything else, the neolib-
eral strategy produced battalions of discontented workers, many of whom no
longer had institutional avenues to express their demands. There was a simul-
taneous mobilization of those who had lost their jobs, pensions, and social
safety nets, and those demanding better wages and working conditions (or
their equivalents in the social factory) and of those resisting the increasing
destruction of the natural world, which reached unbearable extremes. These
mobilizations became increasingly visible and effective.
The Zapatista uprising in 1994 can be seen in this context as the detonator of
a global mobilization that, beyond any of the specific demands, radically ques-
tioned the system with formulations continually improving. Until then, some
saw globalization as a promise and others as a threat, but all tended to see it as a
 The Ongoing Insurrection 219

reality that had to be accepted. The great anti-systemic movements, beginning

with Seattle, have recognized that the Zapatistas were the first to firmly sustain a
radical rejection. Moreover, they gave a new form to the political struggle and to
the possibility of articulating social movements with the approach of one “NO”
and many “YESes”. The conception associated with the idea of building a world
in which many worlds can be embraced, from a radical rejection of capitalism,
favors the convergence and agreement of all those who share this rejection, the
common “NO”, but recognize the real plurality of the world and the diversity of
cultures and ideals of life, the multiple “YESes” of the difference, in the recon-
struction of the historical subject of transformation (Esteva 1998b).
The current crisis differs profoundly from that of 1929. Not only is it
impossible to confront it with the instruments that would have been effec-
tive in that crisis, had they been applied from the beginning, or those that
finally allowed us to get out of it. The application on an unprecedented scale
of Keynesian remedies temporarily alleviates the situation by stabilizing the
financial sector but aggravates the crisis instead of resolving it. This crisis has
no solution within the framework of the system, partially because of capital’s
strategy of fleeing to the financial system in the face of workers’ mobilizations,
which further weakened the real economy.
According to the Midnight Notes and friends’ collective (2009), some of
the main factors that determined the failure of the neoliberal strategy were the
inadequacy of institutional arrangements, the inability to subject the energy
industry to neoliberal demands, the inability to continue to control the level
of wages, the inability to extend control over natural resources and the inter-
nalization of environmental costs.
In all cases, these are “workers” struggles that blocked the advance of the
neoliberal strategy, leading to a typical crisis of realization: the combination
of over-production with under-consumption. The capitalists could no longer
sell the immense mass of goods they had generated in markets increasingly
contracted by the reduction or stagnation of wages.
The “instant of danger” was thus configured in the tense confrontation
between capital and its state administrators, on the one hand, and the people
on the other.

The Rupture
What to Do with Modernity?
The universal consensus on the end of a historical cycle is broken by trying
to identify the corpse and to specify what is dying. Perhaps the hardest corpse
to gnaw at is that of modernity, but I think Foucault succeeded in outlining
its obituary. We are in the period of chaos and uncertainty that appears at the
end of an era, when its narratives, pretensions, rationalities, and dreams have
ceased to function, but those of the new era have not yet emerged or are not
220 The Ongoing Insurrection

yet evident. In his famous conversation with Chomsky, Foucault demands

that we abandon the framework of ideas and concepts born in the bosom of
the oppressive society…which for many implies a leap into the void. Without
them, without their critical apparatus for example, how are we to think? If the
ways of perceiving and experiencing the world in which we were formed are
no longer useful for understanding what is happening, much less for imagin-
ing the new era, and the rationalities of the new era are not yet established,
what can we do? (Chomsky and Foucault, 2006). How can we think about
what is happening today and how can we experience the processes of transfor-
mation, if what happened yesterday is no longer useful and what will happen
tomorrow has not yet arrived?

Beyond Abstraction
When reason and science tried to take the place of God, substituting destiny
or supernatural forces in determining human actions, they inherited the abso-
lutist tradition, which continued to infect our ways of thinking. But we are
not only facing the end of the era of absolutist reason. There is something else.
As I mentioned before, Plato warned us not to confuse abstraction with reality.
Unfortunately, we have already been conditioned to do so, based on the prem-
ise that our sensory perceptions of reality can be misleading.
We are living at the end of an era in which we mistook abstract entities for
reality and in their name, we committed all sorts of attacks and lent ourselves
to all sorts of manipulations. Conventional allusions of practical utility became
ways of experiencing the world. For those who are less than 40 years old and
have seen a thousand times the blue bubble, the photograph of the planet, it is
difficult not to take for granted that we live on planet Earth. Or in Mexico, for
that matter. This becomes dangerous nonsense.
I want to say this in a more provocative way, using Raimón Panikkar’s
words:

One of the manias, or to put it more elegantly, one of the brilliant

inventions of the West… is the discovery of classification… We classify
everything… And it is of little use, but it is unquestionably useful. What
happens is that when we fall into the trap of classification there is no
way out. Once our head has begun to classify, not only do the com-
puters arrive, but there is no way out… We do not know how to think
without classifying. Better said, or rather much worse: we believe that
classifying is equivalent to thinking. Thinking is no longer the creative
act by which man knows, that is, identifies himself with reality and thus
modifies it. Thinking has become confused with calculating, that is,
with classifying.
(1993: 17)
 The Ongoing Insurrection 221

Abstractions, classifications, theories, can be used as mostly useful provi-

sional lanterns that illuminate segments of reality to see and examine them
better. But they are not reality. For example: it is still useful, I would say
indispensable, to carry out class analysis and to have class consciousness. But
on condition that we recognize that in the real-world people struggle, real and
concrete men and women, not classes. And thus, we avoid the trap of trying to
build class organizations, dancing to a tune that is not ours. Instead of looking
for “mass” movements (homogenized individuals, massified in their depend-
ence on a leader, an ideology, a party, a structure that from outside aggluti-
nates them), we need to put ourselves in the hands of horizontal coalitions of
diversified autonomous nuclei.
We can use abstract tools for our purposes or intentions, but the instrumen-
tal era is coming to an end. We enter the era of systems, when tools stop being
ours, at our service (see Esteva 1979, 11ff.).
I insist that classifying is human heritage, a human constant. We do it
continuously, by applying our minds to separating the qualities of an object,
considering them in isolation. This activity can become a threat, an obsession,
and a mania, but it is a type of relationship and dialogue with reality. I sort the
kernels of corn to select those for my next harvest. I sort the plants to select the
ones I will be able to eat. I classify the people I meet to know how to address
them: addressing a child is not the same as addressing an elderly person. It is
also an exercise in power. With plants, with animals, with people. If I am
strong enough to impose my will, my classification can become an exercise in
domination. By way of classification, applied to man, we arrive at the concept
of mass, which despite its radical resonance has ecclesiastical and bourgeois
origins which we need to leave behind. Which is, clearly, what the social
movements have been doing.

Postmodernity and Postmodernism

The terms “postmodernity” and “postmodernism” have undoubtedly been a
bridge to the current rupture. The former is not only what follows modernity,
but an epoch in which the value system of the preceding era is still relevant.
Newtonian physics, Cartesian reductionism, Hobbes’ nation-state, and the
world capitalist system define the modern paradigm. Postmodernity is not
equipped with such a paradigm. The word describes a state of mind of those
disillusioned with the great truths of the previous epoch, who have not been
able to find a substitute. This is experienced as a loss of values and direc-
tion, which sometimes turns into fundamentalism—a return to fundamentals
prompted by insecurity. It can also be experienced as the novel conviction that
there can be no single truth (Dietrich 1997).
Postmodernism is a particular way of knowing. Postmodern thought is a
method of thinking. When faced with the loss of the basic values of modernity
222 The Ongoing Insurrection

and the insecurity it creates, the social sciences try to elaborate a new way of
interpreting social reality (Dietrich 1997). Postmodern thinking is not asso-
ciated with arbitrariness. Disillusionment implies that truth can no longer be
found in the pre-modern/Christian/Western sense nor in the enlightened/
civilizational sense of modernity. This perception seeks to define difference,
after recognizing a plurality of societies and pluralism in them and in their
truths, which are often contradictory and incompatible. Postmodern thought
defines a mental and social openness in which, unlike modern thought, it does
not attempt to dissolve plurality, but demands respect for and coexistence with
difference. Postmodernism operates with concepts that are beyond universal-
ism and the civilizing process of the West, beyond the modernist belief in the
objective truth of scientific postulates, and beyond the belief in the solubility
of conflict (Dietrich 1997).
Both terms, “postmodernity” and “postmodernism”, could be seen as aca-
demic and intellectual efforts to grasp what is happening in the real social
dynamics, which is clearly the fruit of an epistemological rupture, which did
not occur in the academic world or in the head of an illustrious thinker but
constitutes a social fact. Some say that the French Revolution began the day
the first peasant stopped saluting the feudal lord. What is certain is that in a
given historical circumstance it was possible to think the unthinkable: to cut
off the king’s head. It is not a matter of speculation, analysis, or a hypothesis
that conceives the theoretical possibility of the end of an era or anticipates it.
It is about the rupture within a specific way of being, within a specific social
reality, which allows us to think the unthinkable. This is the rupture we are
experiencing, in the wake of neoliberalism. It is the historical moment in
which we began, as a collectivity, as a generation, to dissolve the prison of uni-
tary thought, the fatalism of the dominant capitalist crust and to visibilize the
immense cracks in the oppressive vault of capital and its administrators. Thus,
it began to recognize that the rebels are key to breaking the vault…

Revolt, Rebellion, Uprising, Revolution

The ongoing insurrection is not a mere popular revolt, a sudden outburst with
lasting traces, like the lava of a volcano, which disappears as quickly as it arose;
it cannot even be seen as the simultaneous eruption of dormant volcanoes.
Nor is it analogous to episodes such as those that become symbols of lasting
transformation, like the storming of the Bastille or the Winter Palace.
We are clearly in the midst of a rebellion—the kind of gesture that consti-
tutes the substance of any authentic revolution. It is an irruption of the dom-
inated being in the political event of domination, in its becoming, as Adolfo
Gilly says. It is not the elites, even the radical ones, who give substance to the
rupture of the old order and make way for the new. It is others, the humili-
ated and offended, who are the protagonists of the material and corporal act
 The Ongoing Insurrection 223

of revolt without which there is no revolution but, at most, a change in the

established political command (2008).
The novel character of this rebellion is its protagonists’ general conviction,
based on the experience of all previous struggles, that they cannot cede their
strength, their command, their capacity to lead the transformation. They are
unwilling to delegate all this to a group of leaders, even those emanating from
their own ranks, to shape the new legal and institutional framework that will
delimit the new state of affairs, the product of the revolution. In order not
to repeat the historical experience, in which time and again what they have
achieved is expropriated, they will try to maintain control of the process.
They have been learning to do so in assemblies and parliaments of growing
coalitions, where agreements are reached among those who come with tem-
porary representation subject to precise mandates, always subject to the reval-
idation of those they represent. None of this, which requires imagination and
sociological and political creativity, must be decided in advance. It will emerge
in the process itself, when needed.
The small-scale initiatives that make up the ongoing insurrection are a
clear foretaste of the society to come, but they have to be carried out against
the backdrop of an aggressive and hostile system that continually harasses them
and wears them down. John Berger pointed out, not long ago, that if he were
forced to use a single word to describe the current situation, he would resort
to the image of prison. That’s where we are. Imprisoned and confined. Under
these conditions, we cannot wait for the autonomous flourishing of isolated
initiatives, because of the onslaught of destruction and oppression. The forms
of solidarity and mutual support already provided by the broad coalitions
formed by the discontented are sufficient in these circumstances.
The uprising is necessary. It should not be confused with the “armed way”
that some groups are still counting on. It will be peaceful and democratic, as
peaceful as circumstances permit and as democratic as possible. This does not
mean forcing the convergence, in space, time, and purpose, of the innumera-
ble movements currently underway.
The uprising is needed—an uprising that operates by contagion (as it has
always been with Zapatismo), rather than by clandestine strategic coordination
from the leadership. It is true that fighting is abominable but surrendering to
this militancy should not cause sadness. By connecting our desires with real-
ity, weaving rage and discontent into action, instead of withdrawing into the
forms of theoretical or political representation, we will give them full revolu-
tionary force (Foucault 1983, xiii).
Howard Zinn insisted all his life on showing us that great revolutions
are not the work of great leaders or violent social earthquakes. He celebrated
and made visible the countless tiny actions of unknown people that bring
about great social change. He knew that even entirely marginal gestures can
become the invisible roots of change. He urged us to see revolutionary change
224 The Ongoing Insurrection

as something immediate, as close as the palms of our hands, requiring both

courage and imagination:

There is something we must do.

There is a commitment to fulfill our duty.
But the time and place, the when and where, the calendar and geography,
are below. Not in dates or in places, but down here, where our dead live.
(Paraphrasing Viejo Antonio 2010)
San Pablo Etla, November 2010

II. The End of Capitalism

It has been said that capitalism has returned to its phase of original accumu-
lation, but the rate of dispossession is much greater than that of that phase of
accumulation and is substantially different: the former created capital, since
what was dispossessed was converted into capital by using it to purchase labor.
This is exactly what can no longer be done. The employment figures confirm
it. Corrected for what is happening in China and India, which requires special
analysis, it can be seen that the present unprecedented accumulation cannot be
converted into the acquisition of labor.
The characterization of dispossession also requires special analysis, since
there are some that correspond to the previous logic and others that are entirely
new.
The transition did not follow the pattern predicted by John Maynard
Keynes, when in 1934 he warned that by 2010 we would reach a type of capi-
talism without accumulation. Keynes was almost right in his prediction that by
2010 the profit of capital would reach zero; it happened a little earlier. We live
already, as Jappe says, in an autophagous society: it devours itself ( Jappe 2017).
Everything that is done to revive or resuscitate capitalism sinks it further.
We are facing the last phase of patriarchy. Its “hatred of life”, its tendency
to destroy the living to transform it into something that is supposed to be bet-
ter through an alchemical transformation, is today taken to the extreme, to a
destruction that seems to have no limit; the most prominent and well-known
case is that of seeds. (Von Werlhof and Behman 2010).
There is physical destruction. The most serious thing is not what agribusi-
ness or greenhouse gas emissions are doing, but what military geoengineering
is doing (Bertell 2000). And the social and cultural destruction is far more
serious than the physical destruction.
We need a more precise characterization of the post-capitalist autophagic
regime. We also need to show that the strategies of struggle employed against
it are not only obsolete but counterproductive within the new regime. We
must keep the characteristics of this new “dominant regime”, which include
the traces of the world coming to an end, in sight, to be able to confront and
transcend it.
 The Ongoing Insurrection 225

Lines of Enquiry
As the late Subcomandante Marcos once said, we are in a historical moment
where to glimpse what is next, we must look back. I propose three lines of
research that focus on the past: the experience of the 1960s, the transition to
the cybernetic mentality, and the passage from oligarchic despotism to new
fascisms in the democratic nation-state.
We must rigorously investigate the fact that when trying to identify the main
actors in this barbarism, it seems as if no one is in charge. There are large
corporations with immense power and governments at their service, but there
is no longer anything equivalent to the Trilateral Commission, a device that
was abandoned in the 1990s, when it was thought to have fulfilled its function
and victory could be celebrated. There are some similar mechanisms, but they
do not have the same operational capabilities and consensual overview of the
Commission. The political and economic “powers” are in competition with
each other and cannot escape the suicidal and autophagous logic in which they
find themselves. There are no longer any mechanisms to moderate their excesses
and change course. This racist and sexist society cannot exist in any other way.6
A broad social stratum becomes an accomplice to the fantastic accumulation of
wealth and to the suppression of the disposable. The middle class plays a large
part in this, but all classes participate. It is useful to contribute to their awaken-
ing, but we should abandon any Leninist temptation to “lead the masses”.
The research deals with the history of the disassembly in order to rigorously
characterize the result.

The Post-Capitalist Condition

In sum, to give precision to my answer to the question that summons us, that
of how capitalism sustains itself, I propose the following. We should no longer
qualify as “capitalist” a regime that is no longer so, and it does not “sustain
itself ”, because it cannot reproduce itself on its own terms; it is in a destructive
and autophagous fever.
The death of a regime does not imply the sudden disappearance of its forms
of existence, some of which may last for centuries. What happens is that these
forms cease to be “dominant” and operate according to the logic of the new
regime. Feudal forms of land ownership persist to this day, but they are no
longer what they were. We see capitalist enterprises everywhere and capitalist
practices and conceptions persist. The labor force continues to generate surplus
value. These capitalist operations, however, are increasingly inscribed in a
post-capitalist logic. Society is no longer organized around the accumulation
of capital, through the continuous expansion of production and the purchasing
of labor, incorporating into it those who have remained totally or partially out-
side of it. In the same way pre-capitalist forms persisted for a long time within
226 The Ongoing Insurrection

capitalism, and it is even considered that their existence was always necessary
for its expansion. The capitalist operation is part of the mode of dispossession.
To emancipate ourselves from it, it is of enormous importance to rigorously
characterize this dominant form, because the self-destructive regime of dis-
possession has stopped operating within capitalism’s political forms.
The structural contradictions of capitalism in its terminal phase, are still man-
ifest, but the self-destructive compulsion that the dominant forces cannot even
moderate, is constantly intensifying. More than the classic contradictions, the
contradictions generated by economic and political actors are determinant. These
contradictions can only remain and prolong their destructive work by denying
themselves, by becoming something other than what they are. It is not a return
to previous stages, such as the original accumulation. It is the contemporary
formation of an atrocious destructive regime of oppression, patriarchal, anthro-
pocentric, racist to the point of genocide, and sexist to the point of femicide. It
has statist modalities, but no longer conforms to previous authoritarianisms. Nor
does it conform to the previous role of the state, as what was called its relative
autonomy vanishes or weakens and rescuing it becomes virtually impossible.
The transformation underway must be examined within the framework
of the Fourth World War, which aims to eliminate all forms of autonomous
subsistence, both those that managed to survive the conventional onslaughts
of capitalism and those that have flourished in response to recent developments
(Subcomandante Marcos, 2001). Likewise, they must be examined within the
framework of the “end of an era”, in which patriarchy, modernity and post-
modernity, capitalism, the colonial form of existence, the industrial mode of
production, and the political forms of all of these would be left behind.
This hypothesis considers that continuing to see the currently dominant
regime as capitalist prevents us from clearly seeing what is happening and con-
ditions reactions that are obsolete. We cannot wait for it to go extinct because of
the autophagy that characterizes it, which would result in the extinction of all
living things. To stop it and create something else, it is necessary to characterize
it in its current reality, not in the terms of the era that is ending. Instead of ask-
ing ourselves about what sustains capitalism, we need to analyze what has been
dismantling and replace it to organize our struggle accordingly.

The Paths of the New World

The “ongoing insurrection” that I began to explore in 2010 has taken very clear
forms in recent years. What eight years ago I was tracing with difficulty, with
more or less vague features, is now unfolding everywhere and acquiring con-
crete profiles, although it remains invisible: the conventional gaze fails to see it.
The insurrection dismantles the bases of the patriarchal operation, through
the suppression of the hierarchical system (some command and others obey) and
the reformulation of the center of social life, in which care for life is prioritized,
 The Ongoing Insurrection 227

as well as the re-centering of politics and ethics—which displace the economy.

It establishes new social relations, beyond capitalism. It conceives and practices
forms of social existence that transcend the democratic nation-state and the
industrial mode of production. All this takes place within initiatives and move-
ments that change the way of changing: instead of aiming at the conquest of
the state, through vanguards in the Leninist tradition, they are concerned with
the reconstruction of society from below, by ordinary people. This style of
transformation is forced to accept all sorts of compromises, due to the dominant
regime’s permanent harassment. It struggles, in particular, to prevent interac-
tion with the patterns and norms of the era that is ending from contaminating,
distorting, or paralyzing the efforts that transcend it. It is necessary to rigor-
ously examine the ways the enemy is internalized, particularly with regards to
the patriarchal impulse. It is also important to examine the new modalities of
grassroots commitments, which are woven in very innovative forms and with
attitudes and behaviors that do not conform to the old categories because they
already exist “outside the system”. Affection and friendship are the mortar that
makes up the community networks that are multiplying. These are not mere
feelings, but forms of relationship that have become political categories and
constitute the cells of the new society. In the networks there are immediate
abolitions, within their various material bases, which usually include that of
labor7 and that of the dominant assumption about notions such as education
and health. They are linked in new ways, beyond national borders. For example
in the Global Tapestry of Alternatives, which include anti-patriarchal, anti-
capitalist, anti-statist, anti-caste, anti-anthropocentric, anti-racist, and anti-
sexist experiences, but an “alternative” is not defined by what it fights against,
by its “anti” condition, but by what it is doing.
The expressions of resistances and of the forms of the new world, which
I allude to here, should not to be seen as “cracks” or “bubbles”. They are
not characterized by “isolation” or “separation”. They are not experiments
disconnected from the general reality. The notion of “localization” alludes
to their condition, which distinguishes them from both globalization and
localism. They are initiatives that are launched based on new social relations,
radically breaking with the dominant ones and dismantling the conditions
that necessitated them, even if the daily tasks require maintaining links with
the dominant society. They are deeply rooted initiatives, situated, committed
to the concrete realities in which they exist, under constant harassment, but
at the same time open to others like them, interconnected amongst each other.

The Main Contradiction and the Options

In the current transition, two radically different political projects and styles
oppose each other. One is attached to the dominant political mythology,
which since 1820 has been nourished by Hegel’s apothegm: the people are not
228 The Ongoing Insurrection

in a position to govern themselves. According to this, the political question

is reduced to determining how to define who should govern, through for-
mally democratic or despotic means of constituting political power. The other
style breaks with this tradition. It seeks to build another form of society and
government, in which the people are not only the formal holders of political
power (which they deposit in representatives by voting), but in which they
can maintain and exercise power. This standoff defines the current opposition
between the project of the elites and that of the people. The possibility of a
peaceful transition, the direction of the country, and the character of the new
regime depend on how this challenge is faced.
A vigorous current of thought and action maintains that the twentieth cen-
tury witnessed the eradication of the possibility of change processes occurring
under state leadership. According to Boaventura de Sousa, there is no attempt
today to replace democracy with dictatorship, but rather to turn it into a des-
potic instrument that facilitates dispossession and destruction. In it operate
“three powers at the same time, none of them democratic: capitalism, colo-
nialism and patriarchy”. It proposes transcending liberal democracy, working
on participatory democracy with social movements and advancing in the con-
struction of what has been called “radical democracy” (De Sousa 2018).
The current reactionary cycle coincides with the rebellion of the “yellow
vests”, which is already spreading across about 20 countries. Across the world,
a radical rejection of the system of representation in all its forms is emerging:
“[M}y dreams do not fit in your ballot boxes,” said the Indignados in Spain;
“Everyone should go!”, protested the Argentines. The “left” is now part of the
problem and the distinction between above and below proposed long ago by
the Zapatistas is becoming increasingly meaningful.
The grassroots are on their feet and on the move. They seem to have com-
pletely abandoned the Leninist style that dominated the twentieth century,
at all ends of the ideological spectrum. Instead of vanguards, with the most
diverse pretensions, there is a return to the protagonism of the common people
who are, by the way, the ones who ultimately make all revolutions and allow
the passage from one era to the next. It is possible that the Zapatista’s most
radical phrase is the one in which they affirmed that they are common people,
ordinary men and women, and therefore, rebels, insubordinates, dreamers. It
is time to listen to ordinary people, to maintain a continuous dialogue with
them. And to listen, as Commander Tacho once said, is not only to hear the
other, but to be willing to be transformed by the other.
In the practices that are part of these endeavors, it is very important to rec-
ognize the meaning of what is being done. In the name of food sovereignty,
for example, we celebrate growing food at home. But we must distinguish
between reactionary tomatoes and the revolutionary tomatoes that we can thus
harvest. It can be more of the same, an individualistic and self-centered fad,
with seeds and chemicals bought at Walmart, or it can be efforts to create
 The Ongoing Insurrection 229

community networks among families who have a common interest and already
form the cells of the new society.
In this tragic moment, hope and surprise appear as two fundamental pillars
of endeavors aimed at change. Hope remains the essence of popular move-
ments, and it is clear that, as Illich anticipated, the survival of the human species
depends on recovering hope as a social force (Illich 1996: 106). Surprise implies
the conscious renunciation of deterministic hypotheses and plans, especially
those that refer to “society as a whole”, which is always the result of a multi-
tude of unpredictable factors and behaviors. Finally, it is about transforming
pain and violence into a form of convivial reconstruction, distancing oneself
from the state, from the supposed capitalist omnipotence and from the future,
beyond the regime of sex, based on communal agreements that set limits under
a common roof (Illich 2006: 761). The transition to a new political regime in
which we find ourselves comprises a substantial change in political leadership
(in people and in the way it is constituted), as well as in the political, economic,
and social relations between people. In the coming years, the popular tradition
and that of the elites will once again confront each other in order to define the
direction and guide the transition. The former cannot be contained in formal
democracy. It has its own conception of what democracy means. The meaning
of the transition depends on the notion of democracy that manages to prevail
in a country.
We have reached the final phase of the old historical dispute between two
groups of impulses that have tried to define, in their own ways, the course
of the nation. One of them tries to incorporate it into the dominant political
style on the world in the twenty-first century, even though it shows signs of
cracks everywhere and has a self-destructive and devastating drive. The other
group is trying to bring about a radical democratic revolution, based on the
commons, a revolution that seems to be sweeping the world.

Notes
1 The Movemento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), a very important
movement in Brazil and a leading force in Latin America, has been in continuous
tension with the government, in a country where 1% of the population owns 46%
of the arable land. In October 2009 the powerful agribusiness sector drove the
creation of a congressional commission to investigate the MST.
2 As I explained before, this common distinction in Spanish cannot be translated to
English. We are using here the word saber to allude to what is known by experi-
ence and conocer to formal knowledge.
3 J. K. Gibson-Graham refers to Julie Graham and Katherine Gibson, feminist econo­
mic geographers, and is their shared pen name.
4 This same vision incorporates another specter into the struggle: socialism, framed
as the legitimate and necessary successor of capitalism. The variants of that vision
created by the thesis that socialism could be built in a single country or region of
the world and that held that capitalism and socialism could peacefully coexist were
extinguished when the Soviet experience was characterized as state capitalism.
230 The Ongoing Insurrection

Finally, the collapse of the Soviet Union led many to think that the socialist expe-
rience had merely been the longest, cruelest, and most inefficient way to capitalism.
On the contrary, it is a question of becoming its heirs, once we have confirmed that
socialism, as a historical phenomenon, is at the beginning of its end, and as a body
of doctrine is sinking into a controversy without solution.
5 The saying accurately applies to them. By raising the specter of “international
terrorism,” many governments have been adopting terrorist practices. The war on
drugs, as a repressive and authoritarian pretext, uses more illegal and illegitimate
violence than that of the criminals it supposedly targets.
6 In Mexico, we should also investigate the hypothesis that the idea of mestizaje is
deeply racist and sexist, which could contribute to explaining the current social
configurations and the individualizing fragmentation of the dominant barbarism.
7 There is abundant literature on the abolition of labor, such as that by the Krisis
Group (1999) and John Holloway (2011).

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12
THE CONVIVIAL PATH

I cannot, at this point, disentangle my own thinking and practice from Ivan Illich. It is a
long story. In the 1970s, when he was at the peak of his fame, I did not read his work.
For us, in the Marxist left, he was just a reactionary priest. His critique of education and
health was for us the obvious condition of those fields in capitalism. We were convinced
that “good” education and health services would be provided in a socialist society, as
Cuba was already demonstrating. Meeting him, in 1983, changed entirely the picture.
We became friends and I collaborated with him until the end of his life.
In this chapter, I share some fragments of that story and explore the importance
of Illich’s notion of a convivial society for the current construction at the grassroots,
in a new era. I am also including a brief exploration of the current importance of the
commons movement—to which he alluded frequently.
I am using here extensive excerpts from my essay “Regenerar el tejido social
de la esperanza” (Regenerating the social fabric of hope), which was published, with
considerable editing, in a book I coordinated: Repensar el mundo con Iván Illich
(Rethinking the World with Ivan Illich) (Guadalajara: La Casa del Mago, 2012).

It was difficult to be a friend of Ivan Illich.

First of all, you had to have your suitcase ready. At any moment he could
call you and say: “Gustavo: you have to come. Here is Teodor Shanin and you
must meet him”. And he was always right: it was more than justified to go to
the other end of the world to talk with him and his friends.
But there was also the inhibition of knowing who he was. The bonhomie
he exuded and his demeanor without posturing or pedantry could not dissolve
the barriers that one imposed on oneself when being close to him.
It was not easy. But Ivan knew how to be a friend. Once he suddenly can-
celed all his lectures and seminars, and only later did we learn why. A friend

DOI: 10.4324/9781003262749-13
234 The Convivial Path

called him to tell him that she would like to see him before she died. The next
day he took the plane to Switzerland and stayed by her side for 20 days, until
she died. I thought his main vice was polyphilia, that he couldn’t live without
friends, that all his remarkable creations passed through that filter before going
to print. His open house, in Happy Valley, Pennsylvania, or in Bremen, as well
as in Ocotepec, was always a hospitable and convivial space.
I enjoyed immensely, in the eighties, my activity in Indian and peasant vil-
lages and with urban outcasts. But I understood little. To study social sciences
became useless for my understanding of my daily experience in villages and
barrios. One day, I don’t know how or why, I took off my development glasses
and put aside all the categories in which I had been educated. Although my eyes
began to discover realities that the veils of the dominant or alternative mentality
had been hiding from me, I still lacked the theoretical basis to understand them.
I appreciated them intuitively and increasingly linked my action to that of those
who became my companions and friends. But I did not understand.
In 1983 Rodolfo Stavenhagen invited me to a strange seminar at El Colegio
de México, where Wolfgang Sachs would speak about the social construction
of energy, a subject that seemed completely foreign to my interests or concerns.
I went, and there was Ivan. I was amazed by his brief intervention. That night
José María Sbert invited us to his house for dinner and I had the opportunity
to talk directly with him. I was shocked and dazzled. I ran the next day to find
all his books and devoured them. At every turn I found that his intellectual
edifice was made up of words like “conviviality” and “vernacular”, which I
had heard frequently in towns and neighborhoods, not in academia. I began
to suspect that Ivan had articulated in an original and brilliant way something
that could be called “the discourse of the people,” both in offering keys to
understanding that reality and in anticipating their reactions. It has happened
to me since then that when I use Ivan’s words to discuss issues in towns and
neighborhoods there is always what we call among us the “aha” effect. “Aha!”
people say, to emphasize that they already knew what I was saying but had not
been able to articulate it that way.
Thanks to José María I went back to Ivan’s house. We became friends. He
let me ransack his desk to publish unpublished texts in newspaper supplements
that I edited at that time. He invited me to discuss with him and his friends
what living beyond development was all about. He let me participate in his
concerned explorations of the age of systems and the recovery of the sense of
proportion, the project to which he devoted the last years of his life. We had
a plan to meet when he returned from Germany in December 2002. I didn’t
know of anyone else with whom I could delve into things that concerned me.
But it was no longer possible. His absence is more and more noticeable.
As we come to the end of this book, I thought it worthwhile to add some
comments on two of his favorite themes: conviviality and the spheres of
community.
 The Convivial Path 235

Conviviality
Ivan Illich conceived what he called his “Cuernavaca pamphlets” in the moral,
intellectual, and political context of the “spirit of the sixties”, when it became
possible to show what was intolerable in society and open up to another pos-
sibility. His pamphlets were part of the critical awakening that led the Club
of Rome, in 1972, to urgently demand limits to economic growth, but they
took its concerns much further. After demonstrating how the expansion of
services—the option suggested by the Club of Rome—would do more harm
to culture than the damage caused by goods to the environment, he revealed
the counterproductivity inherent in all modern institutions: the fact that, after
a certain threshold, they begin to produce the opposite of what they propose.
In September 1971 Illich began to explore the hypothesis that it was neces-
sary to impose maximum limits to certain technical dimensions in the means
of production. After discussing various versions of that hypothesis with very
different groups he wrote the one that appeared in Tools for Conviviality, writ-
ten in 1972, and begins with the following words:

During the next several years I intend to work on an epilogue to the

industrial age. I want to trace the changes in language, myth, ritual, and
law which took place in the current epoch of packaging and of school-
ing. I want to describe the fading monopoly of the industrial mode of
production and the vanishing of the industrially generated professions
this mode of production serves.
(1973: xxi)

This essay, and The Right to Useful Unemployment: And Its Professional Enemies,
(1978) which was published as a postface to Tools for Conviviality, really fulfilled
their intention: they offered a radical critique of the industrial mode of produc-
tion, capitalist or socialist, and of the disabling professions that accompany it;
they made evident the damage they cause to nature and culture; they outlined
some characteristics of a post-industrial society, and finally they delimited the
conditions for convivial reconstruction, anticipating the struggles that would
allow the necessary political inversion and the ways in which people would react
in the hour of crisis—the present hour.
Forty years later Ivan’s ideas remain a useful guide to what is happening in the
world. While governments increasingly function as mere administrators of pri-
vate corporations, ordinary people, for reasons of strict survival or in the name of
ancient ideals, have been reacting with vigor. Their initiatives are becoming more
and more widespread and radicalized, until they give shape to the insurrection I
described in Chapter 11, whose traits are clearly like those anticipated by Illich.
The Royal Spanish Academy finally admitted the word “convivialidad”
(conviviality). It considers it a Mexicanism that would be synonymous with
236 The Convivial Path

camaraderie. In English, conviviality is a festive condition, a joyful and jovial

accompaniment. “Convivio” is still a common word in Mexico, which can be
used for a formal office party but rather alludes to a warm gathering of neigh-
bors or friends. In 1987, when visiting one of the horrendous little apartments
built by the government after the 1985 earthquake in Tepito, a lady said to
me: “Yes, the walls and ceilings are better…but there is no conviviality here.”
She resented the loss of the atmosphere she had shared in a typical Tepiteño
neighborhood courtyard, conducive to conviviality, impossible to achieve in
the collection of individualizing enclosures that were built as a substitute for
what the earthquake had destroyed.
Ivan Illich was well aware of all these connotations of the word he used to
articulate his thinking. Although he took it from Brillat-Savarin, who coined it
in his Physiology of Taste, written in 1825, he picked it up in Mexico and it res-
onated for him with the meaning it has among us. In any case, Illich gave new
meaning to the word, which from his point of view designates a new frame of
reference, a new type of society. Conviviality is now personal freedom exercised
in a technologically mature society that can be called post-industrial. It must be
distinguished from the fraternal and solidary cohabitation of intentional com-
munities and other isolated initiatives, such as those who gradually, reluctantly
and frustratedly marginalize themselves from the consumer society. It refers to
a social alternative made possible by the full maturity of industry. A convivial
society would be one “in which modern technologies serve politically interre-
lated individuals rather than managers”. After acknowledging his indebtedness
to Brillat-Savarin, who coined the word in 1825, Illich clarifies:

I am aware that in English “convivial” now seeks the company of tipsy

jolliness, which is distinct from that indicated by the OED and opposite
to the austere meaning of modern “eutrapelia”, which I intend. By apply-
ing the term “convivial” to tools rather than people I hope to forestall
any confusion.

He calls “austere” the man that finds his joy and equilibrium in the use of
convivial tools. And he adds:

“Austerity… has also been degraded and has acquired a bitter taste, while
for Aristotle or Aquinas it marked the foundation of friendship”. It does
not imply isolation or reclusion. It would be a virtue that only excludes
enjoyments distracting from or destructive of personal relatedness. It
is “a complementary part of a more embracing virtue, which (Thomas
Aquinas) calls friendship or joyfulness. It is the fruit of an apprehen-
sion that things or tools could destroy rather than enhance eutrapelia
(or graceful playfulness) in personal relations.
(1973: xxiv and xxv)
 The Convivial Path 237

According to Illich, the declared crisis of the dominant institutions must

be greeted as the dawn of a revolutionary liberation that will emancipate us
from those institutions that mutilate the elementary freedom of the human
being. This planetary crisis of the institutions can make us reach a new state
of consciousness that affects the nature of the tool and the action to follow, so
that the majority takes control That is what it is all about. Today. That would
be what millions of people, around the world, are trying to do.
Corporations, Illich believed, can use the law and the democratic system
to establish their empire. He believed that American democracy could survive
the victory of Giap, who was able to use the American war machine to win his
war in Vietnam, but it could not survive the triumph of the corporations. He
warned that the total crisis makes it evident that the nation-state “has grown
into the holding corporation for a multiplicity of self-serving tools, and the
political party into an instrument to organize stockholders for the occasional
elections of boards and presidents” (1973: 109). It is nothing but a conglomer-
ate of anonymous societies, where each constellation of guilds, corporations,
and institutions tries to promote its own product and serve its own interests.
“The whole produces welfare … and success is measured by the growth of
capital in all these societies. In due course, political parties bring together all
shareholders to elect a board of directors (2006: 479).”1 As the state has become
a mere guardian of the dominant institutions, it can no longer perform its
political management function. When this becomes clear to the people, in the
midst of widespread crisis, the opportunity for change arises:

The loss of legitimacy of the State as holding corporation does not

destroy, but reasserts, the need for a constitutional procedure. The loss of
confidence in the parties that have become stockholders’ factions brings
out the importance of adversary procedures in politics … The same
general crisis that could easily lead to one-man rule. Expert government
and ideological orthodoxy are also the great opportunity to reconstruct
a political process in which all participate.
(1973: 109)

Illich was convinced that socialist ideals could not be realized within the dom-
inant institutions, without replacing industrial instrumentation with convivial
tools. And the re-tooling of society, for its part, could only be realized by
adopting the socialist ideals of justice. Anticipating the crisis of institutions
that would give rise to a revolutionary liberation and a new state of conscious-
ness, Illich stressed that

[I]f tools are not controlled politically, they will be managed in a belated
technocratic response to disaster. Freedom and dignity will continue
to dissolve into an enslavement of man to his tools. As an alternative
238 The Convivial Path

to technocratic disaster, I propose the vision of a convivial society. A

convivial society would be the result of social arrangements that guar-
antee for each member the most ample and free access to the tools of the
community, and limit that freedom only in favor of another member’s
equal freedom.
(1973: 12)

All this is what seems to be happening. People are reacting to a crisis that
marks a change of epoch and an epistemic rupture. Faced with governments
panicked by the mobilization of the people and economic and political power
structures ready to do anything not to lose their position, millions of people
are on the move. Their initiatives are already taking the form of an insurrec-
tion. They maintain their resistance but move on to disobedience. They are
in protest but open themselves to radical rejection. They question the daily
decisions, the daily outrages, the endless aggression, all the deaths and prison-
ers, all the environmental destruction, and at the same time they challenge the
legitimacy of the system itself, not only its operators: they deny their consent
and refuse that representation is still the synthesis of social consensus. People
increasingly assume the moral and social obligation to refuse to obey an ulti-
mately anonymous apparatus and assert their independence from that appara-
tus, to stop being slaves of the tool, subsystems of the systems. They recognize
the decadence of the consumer and welfare society, of an organizational and
monopolistic capitalism interwoven with the state. They reject with increas-
ing firmness the dominant democratic despotism under whose formal cloak is
disguised the political, economic, and technical imperialism to which every-
one is increasingly subjected, which makes of every electoral promise one
more link in the chain that imprisons. They show and demonstrate that class
domination is above all domination of the consciousness of the people and of
their self-confidence—which is prolonged by reducing change to the replace-
ment of leaders. Little by little they articulate the terms of a social organization
based on personal energy, that is, the energy that each person can control, on
freedom regulated by the principles of common law, on the rearticulation of
the old triad: person, tool, and society, and on the sustenance of all this on
three classic pillars: friendship, hope, and surprise.
On the occasion of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, the team of the English
magazine The Ecologist traveled the world to examine the initiatives that were
being taken in the face of the environmental crisis. It concluded that their
common denominator seemed to lie in the regeneration of the commons. He
then tried to provide them with a historical frame of reference. He emphasized
the enclosure of the commons as the mechanism through which all forms of
predatory colonialism were exercised and the foundations of industrial society
were laid. By rediscovering this historical fact, the team was able to show how
economic forces still maintain that momentum: in that logic could be found the
 The Convivial Path 239

key to understanding the process of destruction of cultures and environments

that still continues. And in that same intellectual movement, the team showed
why people’s initiatives have focused on stopping that enclosure, when it has
not yet ended, or direct them to recover and regenerate their commons or cre-
ate new ones. The Ecologist then produced a book that presented the sequence
of historical events that led us to the current situation, and a documented and
rigorous analysis of the way in which people are taking initiatives, all over the
world, that allow them to take their destiny back into their own hands (1993).

Choice in the Face of the Crisis and the Commons

There is an interesting controversy about the translation of the term “com-
mons” to Spanish. It is not a mere semantic dispute: it is a question of defining
a political project. The enclosure of the commons in England was a deci-
sive event in the transition to capitalist modernity. How to avoid losing that
semantic footprint when expressing the idea in Spanish? Most of the commons
have been torn apart or destroyed almost everywhere. The foundations of
their existence have been undermined. Those who still resist the attacks and
try to defend them have been joining those who are looking for other life
options and believe they find them in the regeneration of the commons: the
historical resonance of the word would be giving a common sense to these
very diverse endeavors. Still others are trying to apply the notion of commons
and its norms to conditions of the natural world that are shared on a planetary
scale: air, water, forests, and technical devices such as the Internet.
I have been using for many years, as shown in this book, the word “com-
mons” to what today is called the commons movement in the world. But I
would like to emphasize the need to carry out historical research of enormous
complexity. We need to study and compare, with all rigor, the community
modalities that have existed in different times and places. Just as commons is
a generic term for a variety of social forms existing in Europe, and particu-
larly in England, before capitalist or socialist industrialization turned them
into resources, the word “community” cannot capture the immense wealth
of social organizations included in this term. The Spanish ejido is not identical
to the English commons, nor to the various indigenous organizations that the
Spaniards labeled with that word, nor to the current Mexican ejido, invented
in the 1917 Constitution, made a reality by Cárdenas in the 1930s and refor-
mulated or destroyed since 1992. Even less do certain contemporary (which
are not really) novelties fit in it. The Thursday tertulia, (gathering) which took
place for 10 years in the 1980s at the “Centro Cultural El Disparate” in Mexico
City, was equivalent, but not identical, to the Wednesday lunch in Berkeley
of the same period, when Lee Swenson and his friends would read Goodman,
Nietzsche, or Huck Finn for the sheer pleasure of doing it together and crea-
tively. Both are new commons. It is necessary to clarify what brings these two
240 The Convivial Path

groups closer and what distances them from each other and from a thousand
other forms of communal existence, then and now. There already exist, but
they are useless for the purpose, more or less pedantic academic typologies.
It is now a matter of making a theoretical effort of ordering that shows, in all
its richness, the differential and sometimes convergent features of the varied
human experience of creating and maintaining spaces of freedom. It is neces-
sary to know as much as possible about spaces that are outside the threshold of
the private but are not defined as public. They are the opposite of circulation
spaces, but they are not mere collective shelters or hunting grounds. They are
not types of land ownership or tenure. They are the intricacies of men and
women in which the free encounter of ways of doing things, of speaking and
living them—art, techné—is an expression of a culture as well as an opportu-
nity for cultural creation. In this exploration, special consideration should be
given to Illich’s hypothesis on the importance of gender in the configuration
of these spaces, and in particular his suspicion that gender is suspended, but
not broken, in some contemporary communities (Illich, 1983), as well as to his
hypotheses on the construction of the individual afterwards from the creation
of the text in the twelfth century (Illich 1987) and on friendship as a key to the
creation of new commons by the individualized subjects of the modern world.
We also need to perceive the limits of all communal forms, as well as their
chains, their oppressions, their straitjackets. This panoramic historical vision
can enrich our perception of the present, unveiling what has been overshad-
owed by modernity and uncovering the options open, as urgent challenges, in
the hour of the death of development.
This type of reflection arose from the critique of development, which
in the mid-1980s brought the term “post-development” into vogue. Latin
America was experiencing what was called “the lost decade for develop-
ment”. For many of us it was the decade in which the myth of development
was lost. The illusion that caught our imagination when President Truman
coined the word “underdevelopment” on the day he took office, January
20, 1949, had been left behind. In the 1980s we were well aware of how
that dream had turned into a nightmare. Thirty years earlier, Leonteiev had
prepared the statistical matrix which suggested that countries like Mexico
or Brazil would take 25 to 50 years to catch up with the developed coun-
tries. The World Bank reported in the 1980s that it would take many more
years; centuries, for some countries. In 1960, rich countries were 20 times
richer than poor countries; 20 years later, thanks to development, they were
46 times richer. The gap has continued to widen. Although this awareness
produced anger, frustration, and individualism in many people, for a good
number of us it was an opportunity to wake up. It became clear to us that it
was not necessary to attempt the impossible race to catch up with the “devel-
oped,” for we still possessed our own definitions of the good life. It was
entirely feasible to live by them. We could radically abandon the far-fetched
 The Convivial Path 241

illusion of adopting the American way of life as the universal standard for
living well, as suggested by the catechism of development. We would no
longer fall into the conceptual traps that later appeared with expressions such
as sustainable development or human development, much less those of glo-
balization, which appeared as the new emblem of U.S. hegemony to replace
the battered banner of development at the end of the Cold War.
In those years a group of Ivan Illich’s friends met periodically around him
to talk about what it meant to be beyond development. Wolfgang Sachs edited
the fruit of our conversations in the Dictionary of Development: A Guide to
Knowledge as Power (1992). I was responsible for writing the entry on “devel-
opment” in that book and in my conclusions I pointed out among other things
the following: the “marginals” are transforming their resistance to develop-
ment and economic ways of life into a liberating endeavor, which leads them
to reclaim and regenerate their commons or to create new ones; for them,
detaching themselves from the economic logic of the capitalist market or the
socialist plan has become a matter of survival: they are trying to put the eco-
nomic sphere on the margin of their lives; interaction within these commons
prevents scarcity (in the economic sense of the term) from appearing in them,
which implies the redefinition of needs. My text was a call to action to estab-
lish political controls to protect the commons. I then wrote numerous texts on
the subject, which explicitly addressed the resistance to the creation of scarcity
practiced in the economic society.
In those same years, when The Ecologist found everywhere the affirmation
of the commons, Elinor Ostrom decided to concentrate on studying them,
which 20 years later would give her the Nobel Prize in Economics. In my
texts, I tried to show that the Indian peoples of Mexico, based on what they
still had, materially and spiritually, were abandoning the impossible enterprise
of recovering, restoring, or reconstituting their ancient commons. Without
breaking with tradition, they had ceased to see their past as destiny and were
trying to realize their dreams in new or regenerated commons. It seemed to
me that they were trying to move towards a form of radical pluralism, which
could lead to the harmonious coexistence of culturally differentiated peoples.
Instead of a social pact between individuals, the premise of the modern nation-
state, they were trying to build a society in which individualized, Westernized
Mexicans could coexist with people living in communality. These were not
reminiscences of the past or the impossible return to a pre-modern condition,
but strictly contemporary creations.
Since the 1980s I had been observing in Mexico that peasants, urban mar-
ginalized, and deprofessionalized intellectuals were increasingly disengaging
themselves from institutional mechanisms and trying to prevent their links
with them, still indispensable, from excessively disturbing their ideas, hopes,
and projects. What was happening among the majorities and among some
dissident vanguards, when they tried to take life into their own hands, seemed
242 The Convivial Path

impossible for conventional wisdom and unthinkable for the prosperous

minority in the middle or upper strata of society. But that profound social
transformation lacked a name. I began to suspect that it was a revolution of
a new kind and I called it a revolution of the commons, an example of what
Shanin has called “vernacular revolutions”. I saw the whole process as a reality
at the beginning of germination in my world of Indian peoples, peasants, and
urban marginalized, what Ivan Illich had identified conceptually when he
referred to the reappropriation of the goods of the commons. “Commons”
is an old English word. Almende and Gemeinheit are corresponding German
terms … The Italian term is gli usi civici. “Commons” referred to the part of
the environment that lay beyond a person’s own threshold and outside his
own possession, but to which, however, that person has a recognized claim
of usage—not to produce commodities but to provide for the subsistence of
kin. Neither wilderness nor home is commons, but that part of the environ-
ment for which customary law exacts specific forms of community respect…
Those who struggle to preserve the biosphere and those who oppose a style
of life characterized by a monopoly of commodities over activities, emerging
and converging reality, have been called the “archipelago of conviviality” by
André Gorz. The key instrument for mapping this new world is Valentina
Borreman’s Reference Guide to Convivial Tools, Special Report no. 13 (New
York Library Journal, 1980), a critical guide to over a thousand bibliographies,
catalogs, journals, etc. (See also The Recovery of the Commons, Illich 1983: 18).
The decisive event of the 1990s was for many of us the Zapatista uprising
of January 1, 1994. Chapters 8 and 9 refer to the Zapatistas and to Zapatismo.
“Commons” is pertinent when alluding to the mode of living of Zapatista
communities. Their social and political creation clearly corresponds to the
description of a convivial society, which adopts socialist ideals but instead of
trying to put at its service the dominant institutions created in capitalism, in
the industrial mode of production, it inverts or abolishes them. They demon-
strate in their practices that conviviality is not today a futuristic utopia, but is
part of our present, even if we have not realized it. It already has a place in the
world—that is why it is not utopia. But we still do not recognize it.
The profound social transformation that is currently taking place can be
called the revolution of the new commons. It goes beyond development and glo-
balization; it marginalizes and limits economic society, in its capitalist or socialist
forms, by rejecting the premise of scarcity as the basis for the organization of
social life; it affirms communality, as opposed to the prevailing individualism;
adopts new political horizons, beyond human rights and the nation state, sus-
taining in radical pluralism forms of social and political organization that allow
the harmonious coexistence of the different; and employs formal or represent-
ative democracy and participatory democracy as forms of transition to radical
democracy, constructed as the kingdom of liberties, after expelling the economy
from the center of social life and installing politics and ethics in it once again.
 The Convivial Path 243

In the present circumstances, it is necessary to promote the simultaneous

upheaval of ideologies and institutions, as Foucault argued; it is not enough
to change the ideology, in order to alter the course of the apparatuses without
changing the apparatuses themselves, or to reform the apparatuses without
changing the ideology. It is a matter of putting all the tools, all the systems,
under the control of the people, as an expression of freedom. “Man ceases
to be recognizable as one of his kind when he can no longer shape his own
needs by the more or less competent use of tools that his culture provides”
(Illich 1978: 73).
This is what is underway. The best example is undoubtedly that of the
Zapatistas, who in the area under their control have created a new way of
life and government that clearly overflows the dominant framework. They
maintain relationships with each other and with the natural environment that
clearly leave behind the patterns of predatory capitalism and demonstrate the
viability of an alternative. This is a unique example, in its depth and scope,
but it is not an isolated phenomenon: initiatives that tear apart the dominant
fabric and create new possibilities are multiplying around the world.
There are clear examples in all spheres of daily life and in all countries. The
counterproductivity of modern institutions, including of course a despotic
regime of government that still claims to be democratic, has become entirely
evident. The increasingly organized response is not taking the conventional,
partisan form and is abandoning the illusion that it will be possible to bring
about the changes that are needed through the ballot box. The coalitions
of discontents that Illich anticipated for the moment when industrial society
was shown to have transcended its limits are already underway. The rational
and political abolitions required in the construction of a convivial society are
already being practiced by the people themselves.
San Pablo Etla, October 2012

Note
1 This sentence does not appear in the original text in English. It is taken from the
Spanish version, revised by Illich.

Bibliography
Borremans, Valentina. 1980. Reference Guide to Convivial Tools, Special Report no. 13,
New York: Library Journal.
Esteva, Gustavo (ed.). 2012. Repensar el mundo con Iván Illich [Rethinking the World
with Ivan Illich]. Guadalajara: La Casa del Mago.
Illich, Ivan. 1973. Tools for Conviviality. New York: Marion Boyars.
Illich, Ivan. 1978. The Right to Useful Unemployment and its Professional Enemies. London:
Marion Boyars.
Illich, Ivan. 1983. Gender. New York: Marion Boyars.
244 The Convivial Path

Illich, Ivan. 1987. “A plea for research on lay literacy.” The North American Review 272,
no. 3 (September): 10–17. University of Northern Iowa.
Illich, Ivan. 2006. “La convivencialidad” [Conviviality]. In Obras reunidas I. Illich,
Ivan. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica.
The Ecologist. 1993. Whose Common Future? Reclaiming the Commons. London: Earthscan.
Sachs, Wolfgang (ed.) 1992. The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power.
London: Zed Books.
13
THE DAY AFTER

And then came the pandemic.

Never before have so many people obeyed formal instructions that turned their lives
upside down. Millions lost their jobs and sources of income. It was no longer possible to
live a “normal” human life…
I wrote a lot about the situation and participated in many conversations and reflec-
tions about this. In Universidad de la Tierra, we published three books to share our
reactions, exploring the dangers and opportunities created by this unique phenomenon.
I am including here an article I wrote in April 2020 for a university journal, with the
same title as this chapter, and some articles from my column in La Jornada, a Mexican
newspaper.

Without a Future
We have lost our footing.
Our world was reasonably predictable. Suddenly, from one day to another,
the entrenched tendencies that allowed us to anticipate the general and prob-
able course of events and behaviors disappeared. We can no longer foresee
what will happen. We are facing radical uncertainty.
There are inertias, obsessions, propensities, and hobbies. We can correctly
assume that a variety of actors and sectors of society will persist in the lines of
behavior that characterize them. But we cannot know the outcome of their
actions in what a new balance of powers will undoubtedly be, under radically
new circumstances.
The world we will experience after the pandemic—if there ever is an
“after”—will not have changed because of it, but rather because of the critical
conditions that preceded it. We know almost nothing about the climate that is
DOI: 10.4324/9781003262749-14
246 The Day After

emerging in the aftermath of climate collapse. We know even less of what will
remain of the institutions after the sociopolitical collapse. The pandemic only
rendered visible the challenging crossroads we had already reached.
A few years ago, Giorgio Agamben warned us that the future no longer
has a future. They stole it. Financial power has kidnapped “all faith and all
future, all time and all hopes” (Agamben, 2012). Agamben assumed that our
time, a time of little faith or bad faith, faith sustained by force and without
conviction, “is a time with no future and no hope—or empty futures and false
hopes” (2012).
Uncertainty can be distressing, particularly for those who have become
accustomed to valuing their lives on the premise of some promised future and
are seldom rooted in the present. But it can also offer the chance to return to
reality and re-cognize it. The late Subcommander Marcos was right when he
warned us a decade ago that we were at a peculiar historical moment in which,
in order to sniff out the future, we had to take a look at the past. “The struggle
for liberation—say those who keep the mobilization alive in Chile—draw
their strength not from a vision of the future, but from a vision of the past”
(Vaneigem, 2020).
Widely criticized for his recent writings on the coronavirus, which many dis-
missed as outright nonsense (Berg, 2020), Agamben is right. We need to pluck
our future from the hands of “these gloomy and discredited pseudo-priests,
bankers, teachers and officials” (2012). He insists:

Perhaps the first thing to do is to stop looking only at the future, as we are
exhorted to do, and to turn instead to the past. Only by understanding
what happened and, above all, trying to understand how it could hap-
pen, will it be possible, perhaps, to find freedom again. Archeology—
not futurology—is the only way to access the present.
(Agamben, 2012)

The End of the World

It is necessary to vigorously reject the apocalyptic enthusiasm that has been
proliferating to spread panic, with expressions such as what the Director of the
International Monetary Fund declared: “A crisis never seen in our history”
(Georgieva, 2020), or what the Canadian Prime Minister called: “The biggest
health crisis in history” (Ellsworth, 2020).
At the same time, we need to acknowledge, with composure, that the world we
knew came to an end and will not return. None of the forms or definitions we had
given to “normality” will return, nothing from that set of conditions that were
unbearable for many people, who have now been insisting that they do not want
to return to it. Evade Chile stated this clearly on March 19: “We will not return to
normality, because normality was the problem” (Evade Chile, 2020).
 The Day After 247

Risk and Opportunity

As the Chinese symbol of crisis underlines, there is risk and opportunity in
this one. On the one hand, we can already observe that the darkest forces
in society, throughout the world, are using all their capacities and resources to
establish a fiercely authoritarian regime to rule over a “society of control”. The
electronic means put to the test by the pandemic and the other resources that
have recently been experimented with in many parts of the world will create
the technical possibility to control the thoughts and behaviors of individuals
constructed and homogenized through those same means. Experiments that
governments have not dared to try will be implemented: only online teach-
ing, for example, after closing universities and schools; “machines will replace
all contact—all contagion—between human beings” (Agamben, 2020a). Not
even Orwell was able to imagine such dystopia. They will take advantage of
the fact that for years the society has been advancing in this direction, produc-
ing new entities in which it is already very difficult to recognize humanity.
This aberrant social construction has begun with the declaration of a state
of exception (emergency). For years it was established through the gradual
dissolution of the rule of law, but it was done almost secretly, under pretexts
such as terrorism or cartels; governments were reluctant to acknowledge what
they were doing. It is now formally declared, on the grounds that it is needed
to “save lives,” which is a ridiculous but credible pretext.
As Boaventura de Santos warned, democracy is being democratically dis-
mantled (De Sousa Santos, 2005). Under the pretext of the pandemic, a par-
liamentary majority has just given Víctor Orbán all-encompassing powers to
rule Hungary at his will, indefinitely, outside the jurisdiction of laws and
institutions. Little by little, all governments take the same direction (towards
“total authority”, as former president Trump once declared), subjecting peo-
ple to control and confinement. In many places the police have been arriving
long before the medical personnel. The most serious thing is that many peo-
ple, until yesterday passionate advocates of democratic practices, are fervently
applauding the process that eliminates them. They join those who blindly
followed a leader or doctrine and were already programmed for obedience.
What Foucault called the fascist that we all carry inside, the one that makes
us love the power that oppresses us, is exploited in the name of the pandemic
(Foucault, 1983). Covid-19 gives apparent justification for general obedience
to often-foolish rules and instructions. Thus forms the petri dish of social
conformity that is necessary to establish the new regime.
In fact, without resorting to any of the conspiracy theories circulating,
there is a spreading conviction that this is an experiment that tests what is
to come. “The current health emergency”, holds Agamben, “can be consid-
ered as the laboratory to prepare the new social and political arrangements
awaiting humanity” (Agamben, 2020b). “We could get out,” thinks Franco
248 The Day After

‘Bifo’ Berardi, “under the conditions of a perfect techno-totalitarian state”

(Berardi, 2020). It is the conclusion of Raúl Zibechi: “Militarism, fascism and
population control technologies are powerful enemies that, together, can do
us immense damage, to the point that they can reverse the developments that
movements have been woven since the previous crisis” (Zibechi, 2020).
On the other hand, in parallel to this risk, opportunities rooted in local
realities, have been emerging to regain meaning in our lives and to recover
our senses. Millions of people, who lack economic reserves and even spaces in
which to confine themselves, people accustomed to living day-by-day, once
the conditions on which their livelihood depended disappeared, are forced to
locally produce their own lives. In general, neither the market nor the State
will be able to take care of them or will only offer limited and transitory sup-
port. Many only manage to survive in the short term thanks to manifestations
of local solidarity sprouting everywhere. At the same time, thousands of urban
and rural communities are no longer obliged to dance to the music that all
kinds of social forces played for them, and now are silent. They must create the
conditions for survival on their own. Suddenly and unexpectedly, the impor-
tance of the local is restored and people can abandon the roles that society at
large assigned to them and finally return to being themselves.
The overwhelming insufficiency of “health” services worldwide, combined
with the scandalous confusion that governments and the media, including
social media, have created, gives unusual value to the concrete experience of
care and compassion. It re-discovers that for most people nothing beats direct
and personal care of oneself and one’s loved ones. The “deadly threat of a mys-
terious enemy” can thus become, in most cases, a well-kept flu. Everywhere
people and small associations share on a small scale what they have with those
who have not and offer protection to those who are always marginalized,
buttressed by the uniting force of compassion. Rahamin, the Hebrew word for
compassion, comes from rahem, belly, entrails. That’s where compassion comes
from, from the gut, as we recover our senses and with them a new sense of
who we are and what we do.
And thus, from below, often with impulses driven by survival in extreme
conditions, the world in which the Zapatistas dreamed is formed, the world
in which many worlds can be embraced, when real people, in the most varied
contexts, give new meaning to their lives.

Waking up
We knew that long ago. All sorts of pandemics and much more serious threats
lurked. The worst forms of patriarchy manifested in their most violent forms.
Dispossession replaced a mode of production that was already coming to an
end, where the unprecedented accumulation of wealth, in fewer and fewer
hands, was parallel to the unprecedented increase and generalization of misery.
 The Day After 249

The sudden confirmation of the incapacities and distortions of the domi-

nant regime, of its profound immorality, has reached the elites. An unexpected
editorial in the British newspaper, Financial Times, calls for radical reforms “to
reverse the prevailing political direction in recent decades,” because it is about
“forging a society that works for all” (Financial Times, 2020). The editorial
states: “[G]overnments will have to accept a more active role in the economy,”
but in a new way, because the government support that has been given makes
the situation worse. “Redistribution will have to get back on the agenda”
and leave the privilege of the rich behind. One of its strongest defenders thus
elegantly buries the neoliberal gospel.
For many common people, this sudden awareness of the consequences of the
neoliberal trap rings hollow. As does the need to escape from it with remedies
that were anathema until recently, like the Keynesians, the tireless repetition of
dogmas of those who continue to believe that everything can return to be as
before if appropriate measures are taken, sound like empty promises. Since the
circumstances are requiring the majority to recover meaning in their lives and
reclaim their senses to survive, cracks have begun to show in the mentality that
turned abstractions into a new religion, falsely ascribing to them the character
of “really real” reality.
The new mentality did not reach or contaminate everyone in the same
way but began to be a common experience that transformed users of tools
into mere subsystems of systemsGto the move from the typewriter to Word,
for example. Step by step, people accepted without reservations a “conscious-
ness” in which all of us would be homogeneous atoms of a global “reality”.
Even those who could not help but cling to their immediate reality to survive
began to doubt their own convictions. They came to think that, in effect,
we all lived in a “globalized world” and that we shared “common problems”.
Although the pandemic is reinforcing that general way of thinking, at the
same time it makes clear that this is an unbearable reduction. The virus is not
the same “problem” in Brussels, as in an upper-class neighborhood in Mexico
City or in a community in Chiapas. It is not the same even in different neigh-
borhoods in New York.
An awakening is taking place.

Abandoning Ghosts and Illusions

The invention of global ecology, at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, put the
task of dealing with it in the hands of the governments and corporations that
are the main causes of environmental destruction. The vigorous environmen-
talist movement, advocating for action at ground level, whose increased mobi-
lization provoked the Summit, was thus undermined. The invention of global
ecology, one of the forms of “globalization”, prepared people step-by-step to
accept both the reality of “global problems” and the need for “equally global
250 The Day After

remedies”, which could obviously not be developed and managed by ordinary

people, by the majority. “Saving the planet” appeared to be a sensible demand,
which could only be conceived and implemented from above.
In this manner a general prejudice formed about a “global” reality, which
fluidly supported the catechism of “global” answers to the pandemic, acting
as the extreme evidence of a “global fact” that affects and infects us all. In the
real world, a savage struggle persisted among groups and countries to seize
scarce medical resources that are considered essential to “save lives”, in order
to somehow compensate for the neglect of the health services. However, far
from discouraging the obsessive effort, the savage struggle, the scandalous lack
of coordination among institutional mechanisms created to arrange interna-
tional action and the chaotic dispersal of efforts against the “common enemy”,
intensified the calls to formulate a global policy and to establish the powers
and institutions capable of implementing collective action. Institutions and
powers aimed at putting everything and everyone in order, on a national and
global scale, under a superior and common leadership, was called for. This
became accepted as the only way to win what has been considered the first
truly global war in history. As we advance in that direction, power is concen-
trated in the medical profession, which will be the key weapon in this combat,
consolidating what it already had; it can now dictate universal norms.
Plato had already warned us: while employing the formidable human
capacity to abstract, we must put the abstractions we make in parentheses,
so as not to confuse them with reality. In the West, however, the parenthe-
ses were dropped, and then something worse emerged. By gradually losing
confidence in the senses, in the concrete perception of reality, the condition
of real reality began to be attributed to abstractions, relativizing empiri-
cal experience. Little by little, people’s abstractions began to be replaced by
abstractions produced by the elites to format mentalities and behaviors in
a programmed way. Often these abstractions came packaged as “scientific
truths”, to which a superior and unquestionable value was attributed. Global
ecology, such as pandemic, appeared as mere data of the reality actually
backed by science. There was no greater objection to the fact that collective
decisions began to be guided by static probabilistic models. Models of a phe-
nomena are not the phenomena itself. Nonetheless, fundamental decisions
affecting the lives of millions of people are made based on these models that
reduce these considerations to units of risk.
Wendell Berry was right when he warned us about this, almost 30 years
ago, in one more of his calls to turn our gaze locally. Speaking explicitly he
pointed out—it is not possible to think globally (Berry, 1991). Those who have
“thought globally” (and among them the most successful have been imperialist
governments and multinational corporations) have done so by simplifications
so extreme that they do not deserve the name of thinking. Global thinkers
have been and will be dangerous people.
 The Day After 251

Likewise, Iván Illich was right when he showed, 50 years ago, the counter-
productivity of all modern institutions. Applying his argument to the field of
medicine, in 1975, he denounced that institutionalized medicine had become
a serious threat to health and that we were already living under the dictator-
ship of the profession, which formulated sanitary norms, applied them and
penalized those who did not comply with them—as is done now when the
public force is used to subdue those who do not comply with the standards for-
mulated by medical experts. Illich considered that “the impact of professional
control of medicine, which disables people, has reached the proportions of an
epidemic” (Illich, 1976). He called that plague “iatrogenesis”, in which iatros is
the Greek name for doctor and genesis means origin.
Twelve years later, in reexamining his argument, he noted that his book
had not taken into account a symbolic iatrogenic effect even deeper that those
he had denounced: iatrogenesis of the body itself, the fact that since the mid-
dle of the last century “the apprehension of our bodies and of our self is the
result of medical concepts and medical practices”. He had failed to discern,
in writing his book, that, “like the perception of illness, disability, pain, and
death, the body’s perception itself had taken an iatrogenic turn” (Illich, 1986).
And he took his argument further. It seemed to him that he was facing a
transition by which the iatrogen body dissolves in a body adapted by and for
advanced technology.
In the text in which he reflects on his book, Ivan seems clearly horrified
at a process that dismantles before his eyes the traditional art of embodying a
culture, in which there is clear awareness that the body is a fundamental place
of experience, and it is admitted that each era has its own style for living out
the human condition traditionally called “the flesh”. Now, it seemed to him,
arose an individual who objectifies himself and considers himself the “pro-
ducer” of his body, justifying practices such as “body building”. This would
become one component in a new epistemological matrix that would generate
a new type of beings.
For Illich, what he had anticipated since 1973 was becoming real in the
worst way imaginable. In Tools for Conviviality he warned that a threshold had
been crossed after which the protection of a submissive and dependent popu-
lation would become the main concern, and source of business for the medical
profession (Illich, 1973). Today, the extent to which many people who are
usually critical of government policies and measures accept without saying a
word and even celebrate foolish measures is astonishing.
For those who read these old Illich texts today, it will be amazing how he
seems to be describing what happens during the pandemic, when what he
suspected has been realized and we have begun to be treated as elements of
algorithms and we have even entered into that game, to self-algorithmization.
Our transformation into subsystems of systems in each of the facets of our
daily life has been accepted without a hitch (Cayley, 2020).
252 The Day After

The Rupture
The pandemic is undoubtedly a wake-up call. It allows us to see many aspects
of the horror that we had come to consider “normal”. However, even the pro-
posals that seem more radical and “progressive” maintain obsolete language
and a misplaced gaze. A group of prominent Spanish intellectuals, for exam-
ple, has just rightly criticized the “Letter to the G20” signed by a prominent
group of “world leaders to provide a global response to the coronavirus crisis”
(Berglöf and Farrar, 2020). In their pronouncement, “‘Letter to the G20’?
More of the same, not”, they reject recipes like those from 2008, when we
need something entirely different (Zaragoza, 2020). Nonetheless, they formu-
late their alternative proposal with a plethora of platitudes, using all the terms
denounced by Illich, and end invoking a ghost: a “global awareness of world
citizenship”, which will be able to “face-to-face or in cyberspace manifest
itself without hindrance” to impose “the force of reason and not the reason of
force”. They do not seem to realize the colonial universalism from which they
formulate their prescriptions.
For most people, either confined or forced to struggle in the streets for
survival, either constrained by imposed rules that they consider appropriate
to obey—even when they seem foolish—or in the freedom of towns and
neighborhoods that are defining their own norms, the pandemic requires
reconsidering the direction of the gaze. Many people begin to see their places
again, the specific persons around them, even those neighbors who barely said
hello. They start to see each other again, with different eyes. They suddenly
cease to be blinded by labels defined by the roles fulfilled in everyday life, as
individual components of abstract categories, by being passengers of one bus,
customers of one restaurant, students, teachers, consumers, professionals in
any field…because they are no longer in vehicles or institutions but in their
homes, in their places.
From their guts, with the Rahamin (compassion) they already feel for others,
arises a strange sensation of re-cognition of another “I” that they had sub-
merged, within the prison of the habitual conditioning of “normality”. It is an
“I” that now has the opportunity to lift its head and feel the heartbeat in har-
mony with the sensation of a real “us”, of no longer being an individual within
a homogeneous mass, but rather a knot in a net of concrete relationships.
Instead of looking towards the global, the national, the population, the human
lives probabilistically modeled by the experts, instead of a gaze imposed by a
maddened system, they recover their own gaze. Often, on this new path, these
“I”s manage to join those who never strayed and had been fighting to survive
alongside it. Together, they now say firmly: “We don’t want to go back to
normality”.
Thus, day after day, the mental and practical fabric that rejects im-munity,
the rejection of all reciprocal obligations (the common munus) to assert itself
 The Day After 253

in the community, began to be forged (Esposito, 2011; 2003). In the middle

of “enemy’s territory”, just as Giap used the North American war machine to
defeat it, new expressions appear such as: “cultural hacking”, which consists
of “making radicalism common sense (Hackeo Cultural, 2020). Open-source
insurrectional narratives. Defend life and territory; disrupt oppression systems
one meme at a time”.
Finally, it is about returning to what we are, what dharma expresses, in
Hinduism, or comunalidad among the Indigenous peoples of Oaxaca: persons,
knots within networks of concrete relationships, which can only be what they
are when those networks form community, when they have among them
reciprocal obligations. There is no better antidote for the rampant authoritari-
anism that harasses us and that permeates all electronic resources imposed as a
condition of survival, in the last expression of the patriarchal empire.
San Pablo Etla, Oaxaca, Mexico, April 15, 2020

Learning Capitalism
(October 30, 2020)
In the course of 2020, many people discovered the incorrigible nature of
the dominant regime. They are already looking for other forms of social
existence.
Capitalism and its political form were always presented as a desirable way
of life. When the socialist way seemed to have failed or lost its appeal in
the 1980s and 1990s, the capitalist way became both desirable and unique.
Fukuyama famously proclaimed the end of history. He went so far as to say
that the marriage of capitalism with liberal democracy was the culmination
of human history, and we wouldn’t even be able to imagine anything better.
Many people believed him.
The idealization of capitalism goes way back. Marx’s idealized formulation
when he describes the exploits of the new ruling class in the Manifesto of the
Communist Party is unparalleled:

The bourgeoisie has created productive energies far grander and more
colossal than all past generations put together … It has produced mar-
vels far greater than the pyramids of Egypt, the Roman aqueducts and
the Gothic cathedrals; it has undertaken and carried out enterprises far
grander than the emigrations of peoples and the crusades.

Among his creations is the modern representative state, which is the board of
directors of his activities.
For good reason Marx never used the word “capitalism.” He kept to the
conditions of his time, referring only to the capitalist mode of production.
Today, the whole of society, in all its aspects, is shaped by capital. Even our
254 The Day After

most intimate desires can be determined by it, which defines the way of life of
the majority. While the defects of that regime were always evident to almost
everyone, they did not detract from its magic, its attractiveness; it was gener-
ally believed that it was possible to correct them, by means of reforms in which
the political struggle was engaged.
That is what would have ended for many people in this year. It became
clear that this way of life is unbearable. That there is no way to justify the
conditions it imposes on the majority. While confinement aggravated seri-
ous domestic difficulties, such as violence against women and children, it is
also true that it revealed, for millions of people, another way of living, other
experiences of daily life, more joyful and creative ways of loving, of playing,
of eating, of living, of enjoying the family, which before should have been
reserved for weekends or vacations.
At the same time, in the same experience, the profoundly immoral and
irresponsible character of the ruling classes was on display. Clear and con-
vincing evidence has been circulating of what everyone suspected: it is now
impossible to draw a line that clearly distinguishes the world of crime from
the world of institutions: there is no area or sector of society and government
that is not involved in criminal behavior. At the same time, evidence is offered
of what everyone suspected: the deep links between the cartels and the banks,
for example. Likewise, the criminal and irresponsible voracity of the health
industry, which subordinates to its own ends a sick medical service and a dis-
mantled health system, has been on display.
Few things have made the nature of this regime more evident than its
behavior around food. It is already criminal that the capitalists produce food
that causes all kinds of diseases and disorders, and in so doing destroys the
environment and pollutes everything in their path. It is also criminal the way
they generate the consumption patterns of those foods. It is really amazing
how those responsible for this criminal activity have been defending them-
selves when timid legal advances against junk food or food labeling began to
emerge. The obscene and deceitful nature of their arguments was suddenly
visible to everyone.
None of this is news. It was a known and recognized reality, even if not
all people perceived it clearly. But this did not weaken the belief in the good-
ness of the system, if not in its omnipotence. Neither facts nor arguments had
managed to refute that belief, formed, and affirmed in an order different from
that of reality. And it is there, in that order, where the experience of these
months could have finally managed to undermine it and, for many people, to
dismantle it.
A growing number of people are now joining those who seek, more with
their hands and hearts than with their heads, a different way of living, a world
that is no longer imprisoned by these inhuman and unbearable conditions.
There is a growing urgency to put a stop to the terrible murder that continues
 The Day After 255

to be practiced with impunity and senselessness. Above all, initiatives are mul-
tiplying, even in the most unexpected places, by those who, out of strict sur-
vival or moral duty, have decided to take a path that until recently seemed
unthinkable, a path that goes beyond capitalism.

Time of Rupture
(November 30, 2020)
It is only because of politically pathological blindness that we do not see the
current significance of Zapatismo, nor do we celebrate its anniversary.
There is a lack of words and images to refer to the catastrophe we are liv-
ing. The world we had is falling apart around us in the worst imaginable way.
The ridiculous promise of returning to a certain normality is another form of
threat: it seeks to take the horror that characterized that disappearing world
even further.
No optimism is possible. All options are fraught with violence and destruc-
tion. It seems impossible to stop an immoral and irresponsible ruling class,
which carries out the plundering to which it is dedicated and devastates
everything in its path, nature as well as the social fabric and culture.
Climate collapse is already a publicly known and daily experience. It is anx-
iously repeated that we do not know if the new climate will be compatible with
human life. If we manage to stop hurting her as we are doing, perhaps Mother
Earth could recover; but we should do it now, right now, before it is too late.
And then we become frustrated: we do not see how to achieve such a radical
change, putting an end to the consumerism that makes us accomplices of the
destruction carried out by those who produce what we consume…
It is also known that the sociopolitical collapse is even worse. One needs
to be very cynical to still call “democratic nation-state” what exists today in
the whole world or to maintain, against all experience, that there can be a
responsible, honest capitalism, with social sense, capable of bringing welfare
to the people and blessings to the poor without harming the environment. But
the political imaginary would have been exhausted; there does not seem to
be an alternative regime. It would be necessary to act within this framework.
And so, in that condition, as desolate as it is realistic, when even the most
daring spirit despairs, Zapatismo gains strength as a source of hope. It is not
a fairy tale, a promise, an illusion. Even less so a doctrine, a gospel, a recipe.
It is a new reality, built by the blows of the soul over 37 years.
Zapatismo is knowing how to listen. That is how it was born. Those who
invented Zapatismo began by listening to themselves, by allowing themselves
to be transformed…and they still have not stopped doing so today. That is why
they have changed continuously. One of the most difficult things to understand
is how to change profoundly to the degree that it seems to be walking in the
opposite direction to the one previously followed … without betraying oneself.
256 The Day After

The challenge seems very difficult, but at its heart it is simple: “For every-
one, everything; nothing for us” Yes, it is that simple. It is a matter of behaving
contrary to the dominant norms, which universally guide the capitalist society
and is the reign of the individual’s grabbing as much as possible for his/her
own benefit.
It is Zapatismo to look at what each person, in his or her place, can trans-
form, what he or she can put his or her hands to. Not to imagine change as
some general utopia, but to sentipensarlo by doing it, turning each day into the
construction of a new world. And the Zapatistas show like no one else how
far one can go through transformations based on localized daily endeavors.
But it is not localism. It is not about isolating oneself from the world. At
the same time, without losing track, without ceasing to be in contact with the
ground one walks on, it is about raising one’s gaze. That is why the Zapatistas
organize national, international, intergalactic meetings … and will go to
Europe and the rest of the world. It is about intertwining with others equally
dedicated to creating a world in which many worlds can be embraced.
We need more than ever to celebrate Zapatismo and to learn to listen.
We need to dialogue with submissive and obedient people who bowed their
heads in the face of senseless instructions given in the name of the supposed
pandemic. The fear campaign took the general attention away from the things
that really matter and continues to count the bodies that would have been
affected by the virus. Instead of blaming the obedient, who are the victims, it
is necessary to dialogue with them, to share with them the practice of rooted,
conscious, and open care, carried out with others.
In Mexico, 2019 was the most violent year of the century and there was
more violence, in proportional terms, than in any other country. In 2020
there were more deaths from diabetes than those attributed to the virus and
many more continue to die from conditions clearly associated with our way
of life. We will only face the real threat of the virus by resisting what weakens
and sickens us and by giving special attention to those most affected by the
enemy that we internalize through our consumption, a lot more dangerous
than the virus.
Instead of continuing to sink into the ferociously authoritarian regime of
the control society, which confines and isolates us, we need to listen to each
other. Listen first and foremost to the Zapatistas. Before it is too late. When
we can still nurture hopes and make the necessary ruptures.

Time of Discovery
(December 12, 2020)
Little by little, against the tide, in an almost subversive way, the nature of the
crisis and how it came about is revealed. The veils that concealed the process
are falling and its motives are revealed.
 The Day After 257

Never before have healthy people been confined as a public health meas-
ure. There can be no “studies”, scientific or otherwise, to support this strange
measure. It is increasingly clear that the virus was only the pretext for a pro-
grammed destruction that does not affect everyone equally. The economic
disaster caused by the policies adopted accumulated immense wealth for a few,
kept many people in conditions of economic comfort, and condemned those
who form the majority to hunger, abject misery, and a strict struggle for sur-
vival. Many millions will die.
The disposable, the people who have no use for capital, are being discarded.
The destruction of their material conditions of life, jobs as well as autonomous
sources of income, continues at an accelerated pace, and their environments,
soils, waters, forests, jungles… are also being destroyed.
This destruction is sometimes carried out under the alibi of the virus: we
are confined, everything is closed, the economy is paralyzed, to protect us
from it. Other times it is alluded to development and progress: destructive
public and private investments should be maintained and even accelerated for
our own good. For example: modes of social existence that ensured a dignified
life, in a sensible relationship with Mother Earth, are being rapidly liquidated
to achieve “the development of the Southeast”, in Mexico, the area that would
have been “left behind”.
It is no longer seems possible to hide the meaning of what is being done.
Through very destructive decisions and activities, all the economic structures
are reorganized to continue with the dispossession and establish the control
society, which has been receiving many names and was prepared over a long
period. It includes many forms of militarization and authoritarianism.
For those who live below, at the grassroots, the horror that tended to be
concealed or attributed to circumstantial factors becomes increasingly evident.
At the same time, capacities that seemed dormant, torpid, or deteriorating are
rediscovered. They were no longer counted on. Faced with the catastrophes
that overwhelm us, we have no choice but to reinvent ourselves. Unable to
continue the path we were on, we began to open another.
There are those who are still waiting for the return of “normality” or the
promised “new normality”. They believe that thanks to the vaccine and other
factors, the jobs they lost will come back or tourists will return to those who
sold goods or services to them. Some tourists will return, no doubt. They are
already arriving: those who could not bear the confinement in their places
and came to enjoy spaces with fewer restrictions, or those who cannot give up
their annual travel patterns, despite the risks they now imply. Some jobs that
were thought to be lost forever are also recreated.
But this is not the case for conditions and opportunities for the majority….
and people have been taking notice. Alongside understandable anxieties and
despair, communal creativity reappears. There is a growing conviction that
only with others will it be possible to get out of this situation. In some cases, it
258 The Day After

is just a small group of friends taking an initiative. In other cases, it is a whole

community. The reserve of communal capacity, on which we had ceased to
count, becomes now decisive.
Numerous stories are already circulating that show successful ways of deal-
ing with the threat of the virus and of carrying out a solid creative regener-
ation. It is not a matter of going back to doing the same thing, what one had
stopped doing, although this also makes sense: returning to the cornfield,
for example, for those who had abandoned it, or cleaning up the tools in the
workshop that had been left to sleep. But it is above all to reinvent oneself, as
the conditions that previously ensured subsistence vanish.
The market and the State will provide opportunities for survival for a time.
Resources will continue to flow under different modalities: unemployment
insurance in some parts, in others help for the elderly or disabled, scholarships,
productive support, and all that the bureaucratic imagination still offers. There
will be a market to sell some of what is produced, or some tourists will arrive.
Increasingly, however, people are realizing that the world we had is no more.
A new one must be created. And that is what they are doing.
Certainties that guided our behavior are vanishing. We know that we do
not know what is going to happen with the climate, institutions, or almost
anything else. In the midst of radical uncertainty, we have no choice but to
be guided by our own certainties, which we form as we build the new world.
This, by the way, is one of the forms of liberation.

End of Cycle
(December 26, 2020)
It is not just the end of the year. It is the end of a cycle, an era, an epoch.
It is not Gramsci’s predicament, when the old has not yet died and the new
has not yet been born. It is the predicament of the death of the old and the
forms of the new.
First of all, we must recognize what we did, a terracide. We liquidated the cli-
mate we had. The destruction of living and inanimate beings, plants, animals, and
people, as well as soil and water, is as atrocious as it is inconceivable. An immoral
and irresponsible greed of corporations and governments caused this destruction
and created addictions that make us accomplices of the daily crime, since con-
sumption patterns and lifestyles persist that can make the new climatic conditions
incompatible with human life. It is both suicidal and criminal behavior.
The symptoms of this catastrophe are evident, although it continues to be
denied. Even more denied is the collapse of the sociopolitical world, where
crimes are even more serious but the liquidation of the old is not equally evi-
dent. When a regime dies, its rituals, illusions and signs remain for centuries
and generate the impression that what has died is still there. There are still
kings and queens and with them the monarchical mentality, even though
 The Day After 259

that regime has been over for a long time. Those who want to feed the
illusion that everything remains the same are now busy setting up the usual
rituals so that people act as if the corpse were still alive.
We still have, for example, electoral exercises. They were never true democ-
racy. It is embarrassing to observe that voting is still considered our most
important political action. It is also embarrassing to think that even when the
vote worked it only produced majority rule; it never expressed the collective
will. It should worry us that many people continue to believe in these exer-
cises, increasingly ridiculous and useless; they do not perceive how they con-
tribute to the authoritarian exercise, to give it a poor appearance of legitimacy.
There are more complex aspects that are not easy to perceive. The indi-
vidual, one of the creations of the modern era, was the basis of the capitalist
operation and defined its political form in the nation-state. This social con-
struct has lost strength and vitality and is fading at every step. People recognize
themselves more and more as knots in networks of relationships, and the cells
that form social existence are no longer individual. The current obsession of
the Mexican government with giving individual form to all social programs,
pushing aside all collective or communal forms of existence, is a further symp-
tom of its entrenchment in obsolete forms of operation. Especially dangerous
is its design to destroy and sell off the southeast in the name of development
and progress, with increasingly authoritarian devices. Just as it opens the bor-
der to toxic wastes that China rejected, it is attempting to implant economic,
social, and political wastes in open decay.
The new world appears in two antagonistic forms. One is even worse than
that of the world that has died. It is based on the unprecedented accumulation
of wealth in a few hands, widespread destructive dispossession, and the estab-
lishment of a society of control, put to the test under the pretext of the virus.
It is an atrocious domination, exercised in a crazed manner by an increasingly
cynical, immoral, and irresponsible elite. It destroys nature and culture alike,
the social fabric as well as autonomous capacities. It is already causing hunger,
anguish and grief in millions of people and its damages will be more and more
serious, in the midst of the mafia-like, corrupt, and growing violence that is
its natural form of existence.
The other form of the new world reflects centuries of learning about the
ways of being human. It is not utopia or doctrine, but a world of many worlds,
as the Zapatistas say. Millions of people, in very diverse urban and rural con-
texts, have begun to build countless dignified ways of living that respect both
nature and culture. They are committed at ground level to their immediate,
concrete space, which is the only one in which we can act politically with a
sense of our own. But they are not driven by a localist spirit. They are inter-
twined at the same time with others who carry out a similar exercise every-
where. In this way they resist the horrors that beset us and repair the damage
we have done in all dimensions of reality.
260 The Day After

It would be ridiculous or crazy to claim victory. All sorts of horrors lie

before us. Hunger, pain, and grief lurk for many millions of people. It will be
impossible to prevent many aspects of the ongoing destruction. It is a time of
disobedience and struggle, unceasing, daily struggle, struggle as a way of life.
However, we need to recognize that it is also a time of celebration. Reinventing
ourselves creatively has become a condition of general survival. We are obliged
to do so. In this way we will be able to generate the strength that is needed,
with sufficient courage and capabilities to face the challenges that await us.

Resisting, Fighting, Mobilizing Ourselves…for Life

( January 9, 2021)
It is time to act, to get moving. It is strictly a matter of survival.
It is the same struggle, the same as always, which is essentially a way of
living. But adjusted to the circumstances.
Above all, the sense of urgency. Threats of all kinds are increasing every
day and the situation of many millions of people is worsening. All sorts of
horrors are upon us. We cannot rely on promises from above or solutions from
outside. And we must overcome the paralysis caused by the fear continually
stimulated by the ongoing campaign.
Under current conditions, mobilization does not necessarily mean taking
to the streets to demonstrate en masse. It may be necessary to do so in certain
cases, as an expression of resistance to concrete actions, or to demonstrate
our strength, to see ourselves and to be seen. But it has no longer meaning to
take the streets to present demands. Governments know well how to ignore
popular demands and they are more than ever the problem, not the solution.
It makes no sense to keep looking up.
To get moving means above all to concentrate on what we do in our imme-
diate reality, in the space we inhabit. It presupposes a clear awareness that we
are accomplices of the system that oppresses, dispossesses, and kills us. That
the main action today is to change a way of life in which we were educated
and even forced to adopt. It reached its limit some time ago. There is no sur-
vival possible if we remain in it.
In this concrete world, there is no change more urgent and important than
the anti-patriarchal struggle. We need to recognize that in our organizations,
in our spaces, in our families, the structures and forms of behavior of the
patriarchal tradition are maintained. And we must be aware that there are
few things more difficult than dissolving it, starting with the suppression of
all hierarchy. This is not merely a matter of gender equity, although this is
important. It implies eliminating the innumerable forms of violence within
which we have become accustomed to living. And it means recognizing that
in the current struggle, which puts the care of life back at the center, women
have and will increasingly play a central role.
 The Day After 261

By concentrating our efforts in the local space, by carrying out there the
transformations necessary for our autonomous construction, we must confront
all forms of localism. We need to raise our gaze.
To step out of our individual or group crust is not to focus on class, regional
or even national motives. Looking up today means looking for others like
us, who are also struggling for life, in their own contexts and circumstances.
It is about nurturing each other, learning from each other, and weaving our
endeavors into an exercise of solidarity and alliance that recognizes the plane-
tary nature of today’s predicaments.
All of this addresses the Zapatista call that has been circulating in six com-
muniqués. The anniversary of the insurrection that changed for many of us
both realities and perspectives, to a far greater extent than is often acknowl-
edged, now has special significance. As Subcomandante Moisés reiterated,
they did their part (Osorno, 2021). And so, they touched us, they continue to
touch us. They are a source of inspiration and also a warning sign.
We must reiterate, with Raúl Zibechi, that the EZLN is “the most power-
ful light in the Latin American sky”. Its existence “is an impulse, a reference, a
light that tells us that it is possible to resist capital and capitalism, that it is pos-
sible to build other worlds, resisting and living with dignity” (Zibechi, 2020).
It is no small thing to organize a trip to Europe in the current circum-
stances. What this organization has achieved so far, which illustrates well what
it means to weave together equals who are different, was clearly reflected in
the Declaration for Life that was signed, together with the Zapatistas, by an
impressive variety of grassroots people, organizations and movements from
Mexico and Europe, who share the decision to meet. And to struggle.
The Declaration announces the agreement to “hold meetings, dialogues,
exchanges of ideas, experiences, analyses and evaluations among those of us
who are engaged, from different conceptions and in different fields, in the
struggle for life”. It also announces the agreement to do all this in the five
continents, starting in Europe, and to invite

those who share the same concerns and similar struggles, all honest
people and all those who rebel and resist in the many corners of the
world, to join, contribute, support and participate in these meetings
and activities, and to sign and make their own this Declaration for Life.
(EZLN, 2021)

Complicities
(April 19, 2021)
For many years I have been obsessed with one of Foucault ideas. His notion
of the fascist that we all carry within, which makes us to love the power that
oppresses us.
262 The Day After

In his analysis, Foucault clarifies that power is not a thing, something that
some have, and others do not, so it should be redistributed; those who do not
have it should be “empowered”, as the World Bank says. Power is a relation-
ship, in which one party surrenders its will to the other. It can be surrendered
in the face of permanent physical coercion, such as that suffered in prison, or in
the face of the threat of that or other forms of coercion, such as fiscal coercion.
Such situations do not generate “love” for the power that oppresses, but the
opposite. But the free will also surrenders out of conviction, even fascination,
for the charisma of a leader or for political, religious, or ideological reasons.
And then we love the power that oppresses us.
The main function of the school is to format us in this way. It is hard to
imagine a more despotic regime than that of the classroom. The teacher has
power and reason and acts under the assumption that everything he does is for
the good of those in his or her charge. Although the teacher may ruin their
childhood, impose oppressive rules, and commit all sorts of arbitrary acts,
many children learn to love him.
In the rising tide of authoritarianism sweeping the world, this is one of the
most dangerous factors. It has formed the breeding ground for a new form of
fascism, reminiscent of that of the 1930s and taking it to unprecedented heights.
In various places and aspects, today’s authoritarianism is similar to yester-
day’s. A central power, concentrated in one person or group, is exercised over
the entire social body, even without coercion or threats. Whether or not it is
based on a charismatic person or group, it is preached in the name of the com-
mon or general good. This is the case of Covid-19. A good part of the popu-
lation punctually followed the instructions of the authorities, after a campaign
of fear and disinformation linked to a real threat. Measures with no basis other
than the biased opinion of experts or politicians were devoutly obeyed and
even gratefully accepted.
Even more general is an authoritarianism without authority or very dif-
fusely linked to central authority. As the state of exception replaces the rule of
law and the law is used to affirm illegality and guarantee impunity, recognized
common rules cease to apply. An arbitrary order based on the use of direct,
indirect, or disguised violence, in addition to structural violence, now prevails
in much of the world.
In Mexico, this general situation has reached its extreme. It is the country
with the highest level of violence, in terms of deaths, disappearances, and
other forms of physical coercion. In large areas of the country, authorities from
the three levels of government show passivity, complicity, or direct involve-
ment in all kinds of crimes and violations of the law. It is increasingly difficult
to distinguish between the world of crime and the world of institutions, and
the world of crime is not only that of the so-called cartels. There are very
diverse groups that impose their will and their codes of behavior on the entire
population of the regions in which they operate.
 The Day After 263

These devices are used against Zapatista communities and Indigenous

groups defending their land and territory, and therefore operate as counterin-
surgency tools. They are at the service of private interests or government pro-
jects. Although this is very serious, it is even more serious that the passionate
support for this power that oppresses us is multiplying. That even in the most
unexpected places the fascist in us appears.
Thus, the news, announced since October, that “the virus of resistance and
rebellion” would begin to sail, arrived as a wind of hope. It is true that “the
day will come when death wears its cruelest clothes”, as we are seeing, but
there will also be “wonderful things”—like that “seed that seeks other seeds”,
determined to “do something worthwhile”. In December they anticipated us
in that, as “the first thing is the road”, they had set out to invent it and they
already had it, they already knew where they did not want to go. They would
leave in their “struggle for life”, which is “everywhere and all the time”, and
they would do it in April and by sea and towards Europe, first of all.
In that transit, we were reminded of what Don Durito had said since
1995: “It is not necessary to conquer the world, it is enough to make it anew”
(EZLN, 1995). And that is what the 4-2-1 battalion—four women, two men,
one other—is already doing and will do in its own way, as they announced.
Finally, the remedy to this fascist in us can only be to look to the sides and
meet with others who have already made the decision not to bow their heads,
not to surrender their will to any power. To look for those who, instead of
continuing to look obsessively upwards—as if there were destinies and hopes
there—look downwards and start walking, or sailing, depending on what is
needed.

The Great Turning Point

(November 15, 2021)
“No more blah blah blah”, said Greta Thunberg a week ago at the COP 26 in
Glasglow. “No more exploitation of people and nature and the planet” (India
Today, 2021). In what was a fundamental shift in her campaign, she warned
that change will not come from governments and corporations, but from the
people themselves.
Greta was 8 years old when she stopped eating and talking and lost ten kilos
in a few days. She could not bear the silence and indifference of everyone to
the climate issue that had begun to obsess her. She was diagnosed with a form
of autism and began her solitary campaign before the Swedish parliament.
She continued for months and years with gestures and initiatives that inspired
impressive mobilizations, which exerted multiple pressures on governments
and international institutions. In the process, over the course of a decade,
Greta learned, like millions of others, that governments know well how to
ignore popular demands to continue their path of destruction in the service of
264 The Day After

capital, deepening the inequalities they combat only in rhetoric. Finally, Greta
stopped looking up. She is already onto something else.
As was clear in Glasgow, Greta is not alone in her rebellion. Activists did
not go to the conference to make demands of governments or politicians. They
went to listen to each other and to weave agreements for action. On behalf
of Indigenous Futures, for example, 15 brilliant women were very active in
Glasgow. Their message was clear. “Those inside the Conference should learn
to shut up and listen to Indigenous women. They should stop the simulation.
We don’t need development. We know how to live in our territories.”
Like Greta, Re Cabrera began her activism on gender and climate in ele-
mentary school. In 2019 she participated in the organization of the Third
World Climate Strike. At 19, she arrived in Glasgow to continue her struggle,
which combines the ecological issue with actions against racism and patriar-
chy. It seems to her indispensable to intertwine the climate struggle with the
social struggle.
“We did not come to talk to the powerful,” stressed Mitzi Violeta Cortés, a
22-year-old Mixtec woman, “but to articulate ourselves with other struggles.”
She insisted that “change will come from below, not from above, from the
so-called leaders of the world”. With many other young people, she described
what they can do and how many people are already doing what is needed.
“There are no limits to what women can do,” stressed Georgina Cortés, who
brought to Glasgow the 200 fabrics on which her organization, “Zurciendo
el planeta”, had stitched trees. “We never thought something wasn’t possible”
(Zurciendo el Planeta, 2021).
The climatic and institutional collapse is already showing extremely serious
manifestations: famines of 45 million people; unprecedented levels of mal-
nutrition, obesity, and diabetes; the aggravation of syndemia—concurrent
diseases in their social context… The daily life of all people is affected by rad-
ically new climatic conditions, while the climate we had is becoming extinct
and it is no longer known whether the human species will be able to survive.
The incredible irresponsibility and ineptitude of governments at COP 26
made evident the depth of the institutional collapse we are suffering. Although
it generates concern and anxiety in many people, and even despair, it strength-
ened a turning point of enormous importance. The fact that young people
and women have taken matters into their own hands and no longer expect
anything from their governments is of enormous importance.
“If the world expects the COP to solve its problems, we are lost,” said
Daya Bai from India (Chiapas Support Committee, 2021). Under the con-
viction that COP 26 was still committing a terracide, thousands of activists
showed the path they have opened, in which millions of people are already
participating.
To reforest territories and hearts, Indigenous women organized a very spe-
cial event in Glasgow: “A cura da Terra” (Cura da Terra, 2021). Governments
 The Day After 265

and corporations, they pointed out, “want to prescribe as medicine the same
disease: green capitalism, inclusive colonialism, sustainable development,
recycled extractivism”. They know that they, by healing the territory and the
spirit, “are living solutions to the climate crisis”. They assumed “the respon-
sibility to continue breathing life, to continue weaving among indigenous
women, to continue existing and creating healing spaces to end the structural
inequality that is the root of the crisis”.
“The survival of the human race depends on rediscovering hope as a social
force,” Ivan Illich said 50 years ago (1972). The streets of Glasgow illustrated
in these days that rediscovery, but perhaps nothing shows it as clearly as La
Travesía (The Crossing) of the Zapatistas. At every point of the Insubordinate
Land, as they renamed the old continent, the social force of a new hope, for-
mulated from below by those who are building a new world and laughing
more and more at the blah blah blah that continues above, is manifested when
they arrive.

Note
Sentipensar: the verb Orlando Fals Borda heard among the Afrocolombians and
tried to diseminate in the 1980s, has become almost a fashion in this century. Its
translation “feelthinking” does not seem to be as strong as in Spanish, to express a
very simple reflection: it is impossible to feel without thinking or thinking without
feeling. Better to say it when using those verbs.

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14
FRIENDSHIP, HOPE AND SURPRISE—
THE KEYS FOR THE NEW ERA

This looked to me as the natural conclusion of this book. To understand the new era and
even more to consciously participate in its construction and flourishing, we need friend-
ship, hope, and surprise.
I am using here the text of the inaugural lecture of the 8th South South Forum on
Sustainability, given on June 15, 2021.

No face. No contact. No interaction with others, even loved ones: they can
contaminate you, even kill you, by sharing their Covid 19.

Confinement. Children plugged into the screen for hours, attending the classes
of a universal curriculum increasingly irrelevant for their lives.

Can we call this a human society, a humane society?

Systematic destruction of Mother Earth.

Increasing violence and the dismantling of the social fabric and the rule of
law, with increasing, illegal control of people’s lives, is becoming the normal
condition everywhere…

In Mexico, one hundred people are assassinated every day and immense areas
have remained for years under criminal control.

Evident in the past year are the extremes of national and global inequities
exacerbated by Covid-19. Having lost jobs or income sources, millions were
forced to reinvent themselves to survive.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003262749-15
 Friendship, Hope and Surprise 269

The Lancet was right. We are not suffering a pandemic. Since 2019 it
warned that we are facing a syndemic, the concurrent disease clusters and
generalized chronic conditions, emerging under health disparity and caused
by poverty, stress, and structural violence. This approach departs from the bio-
medical approach isolating and treating diseases as distinct entities, separated
from other diseases and social conditions, as has been done with Covid 19.
The Guardian was right. We are not facing climate change or global warm-
ing. We are facing a climate collapse. The climate we had is gone. We know
nothing about the emerging climate. We don’t know if it will be compatible
with human life.
The sociopolitical collapse is even worse. All the institutions defining our
era are in open decadence, substituted by a dispositive that in many senses is
the opposite of what they were. Under these conditions, confusion, uncer-
tainty, and suffering among millions of people, and the disruption, deterio-
ration, or destruction of living conditions constitute the real “new normal.”
The entire world is embroiled in the “long emergency”.
Multiple socioeconomic and political crises beginning in the 1990s and
exploding in 2008 produced unbearable conditions for millions of people
around the world. In the face of converging catastrophes, the elite minority
scramble to secure their privileges, while most people experience the devas-
tating effects of the current moment.
Hunger, violence, incarceration, wealth/income gaps, intractable wars, and
the collapse of democratic norms and institutions further demonstrate how
attempts to address these problems via escalation of past solutions are doomed
at the outset.
Numerous scholars argue that the world has arrived at a “point of no return.”
I am sorry for using all this time to bring to your attention the horror we all
know too well. I just wanted to acknowledge it and to underline that it is the
expression of a dying era. Like always, the dying regime, patriarchal, capitalist,
and “democratic”, uses all its remaining forces and resources to pretend it has
more power than ever, that it is alive and well and that soon we will be back to
better conditions. Both prosperity and freedom for everyone will be restored…
or established for the first time.
Allow me now to talk a little more about that dying era.
Despite capitalism’s global vocation, expressed in all forms of colonialism
and imperialism, the nation-state was always the main arena enabling capital-
ist expansion. In the latter part of the twentieth century, however, national
borders increasingly posed an obstacle. Macro-national structures like the
European Union, designed for the free movement of capital and commodities,
did not solve the problem. Consequently, neoliberal globalization began to
erode the substance of the nation-state. The main function of the nation-states’
governments—namely the administration of the national economy—became
impossible, with all economies being exposed to transnational movements
270 Friendship, Hope and Surprise

beyond the control of individual nations. While national rituals and nation-
states themselves still persist as points of reference, their raison d’être and the
material substance giving them reality have disappeared.
The progressive dissolution of the “democratic nation-state” is also a con-
sequence of the fact that capitalism has come up against its own internal limits.
Since the 1970s, the so-called “neoliberal revolution” has brought about polit-
ical, economic, and technological changes that have dismantled, at a global
level, the social advances accumulated over 200 years of workers’ struggle.
The repercussions are evident everywhere: dwindling employment levels,
lower salaries, reduced fringe benefits, and deteriorating public services.
Some countries and regions are more severely affected than others. Unpre­
cedented levels of inequality have been created: worldwide, 1 percent of the
population own more wealth than the other 99 percent combined, and fewer
than 30 individuals hold more wealth between them than almost four billion
of the world’s poorest people.
Most of what is produced in the world today still has a capitalist character,
but capital can no longer resort to the mechanism that drives it, namely the
investment of profits in the expansion of production by purchasing labor and
balancing every labor-reducing increase in productivity with an equivalent
increase in production. For these and other reasons, the worldwide reproduc-
tion of the capitalist system is no longer feasible. Capitalism’s evolution has, in
effect, killed the goose that laid the golden eggs.
In 1995, at a meeting of the State of the World Forum in San Francisco, eco-
nomic and political leaders like Mikhail Gorbachev, George Bush, Margaret
Thatcher, Václav Havel, Bill Gates, and Ted Turner began to talk about a
20:80 world, namely the idea that once the technological revolution is com-
plete, only 20 percent of the population will be necessary for production. In
reality, it appears that a new social class has been created: disposable human
beings, sometimes described as The Precariat. In the past, the unemployed
fulfilled a certain function for capital. They were its industrial reserve army.
Now, capital has no use for this new class. Political and economic leaders are
continually redefining the “surplus population”, incorporating more and more
new groups of expendable humans.
Barbarism has become the norm. Speculation, dispossession, and compul-
sive destruction are replacing production as a source of accumulation of wealth
and power. The democratic façade is no longer useful. Of the old design of
the nation-state, only the tools for direct and indirect control of the popula-
tion remain. The use of new technologies may usher in the extension of such
oppressive control to previously unimaginable aspects and spheres of daily life.
One pillar of the “democratic” nation-state—the “rule of law”—was the
culmination of 200 years of struggle for civil rights and democratic freedoms.
Today, it is being replaced by a declared or undeclared state of exception, state
of emergency. Everywhere, new laws are being used to normalize illegality
 Friendship, Hope and Surprise 271

and impunity for ever greater numbers of crimes; Mexico and the US are good
examples of this general condition. Instead of the rule OF law—common
norms properly enforced—we are increasingly under the rule BY law.
The dominant, irresponsible forms of production and consumption have
wrought environmental destruction tantamount to extreme abuses of the most
basic common sense. In the wake of rapid technological, environmental, and
social changes, new forms of political domination are emerging. Political lead-
ers with an open anti-democratic vocation and even fascist propensities are
currently being elected or re-elected, or are at least ascendant.
Increasingly, people cleave desperately to fundamentalisms—spiritual, reli-
gious, or political—even as the ideas and institutions in which they trusted
dissolve before their disbelieving eyes. “Democracy” is being “democratically”
dismantled almost everywhere.
The twenty-first century is now characterized by the proliferation of dis-
content, even in the most unexpected places. No space of social reality is
immune. Even those who have concentrated an obscene proportion of wealth
in their hands recognize the instability and dangers inherent in the current
state of affairs.
In my view, all this is but the expression of the current transition and I want
to talk about the world emerging in the womb of the old, about the new era.
Ivan Illich observed 25 years ago that friendship can no longer flower out-
side of political life. “I do believe—he said—that if there is something like a
political life to remain for us in the world of technology—then it begins with
friendship.” I want to take this observation seriously and even more: I want to
suggest that friendship is at the very center of the path guiding us to the new
world and allowing us to escape from the dying era.
What we need to do, said Illich, is “to cultivate disciplined, self-denying, care-
ful, tasteful friendships. Perhaps,” he added, “here we can find what the good is.”
This is the central point, because to find what the good is, the common good, is
the very definition of politics. It is the political life still open to us. Illich added:
“This goes beyond anything which people usually talk about, saying each one is
responsible for the friendships he/she can develop, because society will only be as
good as the political result of these friendships” (Illich, 1996).
Illich was a man of action, a political man, and we can thus understand how
and why friendship became for him his sin, his obsession, the center of his life.
And he knew very well how to be friends. I would like to tell a story of one
of his friendships that I find particularly pertinent for the current moment, for
our predicament, and about the new world.
To be acquainted with Latin America, Illich looked for the advice of the
bishop Dom Helder Cámara in Brazil. Every day, Dom Helder gave to Ivan
one book of a Brazilian author and the next day he introduced the author to
him. That is how Illich met Freire and they became friends from the very first
day. Dom Helder also told Ivan that to know Latin America he needed to walk
272 Friendship, Hope and Surprise

it. He walked the favelas of Río with Freire. And later he walked, alone, from
Santiago de Chile to Caracas in Venezuela, just to know us, the people in this
area of the world.
Years later, when Freire was incarcerated by the Brazilian dictatorship,
Illich used all his political influence to get him out of jail, and bring him to
his center, the CIDOC, in Cuernavaca, Mexico. He translated and published
there Freire’s first books. In some editions of The Pedagogy of the Oppressed you
can still find an Illich sentence: “Here you have a really revolutionary peda-
gogy”. They had many things in common. They shared the critique of what
Freire called the “banking education” and capitalism. Both of them wanted a
profound social and political change. But they also had profound differences
and soon parted ways.
Freire dedicated his life to implementing his ideas, promoting literacy cam-
paigns and popular education. He was not addressing the masses but a group of
mediators who would use conscientization to educate the masses in their own
liberation. His popular educators were soon everywhere and became particu-
larly prominent in Latin America.
Ivan parted ways with Freire when he “moved from the criticism of school-
ing to the criticism of what education does to a society, namely, foster the
belief that people have to be helped to gain insights into reality, and have to
be helped to prepare for existence or for living” (Cayley 1992: 206). He thus
focused on the social conditions in which education may appear as a need, as a
means for survival, as the only way to become a legitimate citizen.
He was asking himself what kind of society wants to educate all its mem-
bers in the same way. He knew the answer. The modern society was the first
that wanted to shape all its members in a certain way. What we call education,
in the modern era, was born with capitalism and for the same purpose.
Ivan dedicated his life and work to dismantle the dominant regime. He
knew well its patriarchal nature and the need to dismantle the economic soci-
ety, capitalist or socialist, and to also dismantle the nation-state, the political
form of capitalism, supposedly democratic. He wrote against conscientization,
against the mediators, even against the magnificent and very popular Freirean
educators. For a change, he was not appealing to a leader, a vanguard, a party, or
any kind of mediator, but to the people themselves, ordinary men and women,
at the grassroots. He assumed that they would create coalitions of discontents.
Despite that increasing divergence, Illich cultivated his friendship with
Freire with discipline and care, a tasteful friendship, until Freire’s death. Here
I find a very important lesson for those fighting among themselves all the
time, even for marginal differences, and creating separation and division, par-
ticularly in groups in the left. In this case, Illich and Freire were openly mil-
itating in opposite trenches in the war against capitalism and the dominant
regime. While Freire, as I said, was involved in literacy campaigns, to bring
the alphabet to the masses, and tried to apply his “revolutionary pedagogy”
 Friendship, Hope and Surprise 273

everywhere, to transform public and private education, Illich was openly

and courageously struggling against both literacy and education. But they
remained good friends.
Ten years after the publication of Deschooling Society, the most famous of
Illich’s books and the least understood, he confessed that he had been bark-
ing up the wrong tree, that at the end of the twentieth century the whole
of society was educating its members in a certain way, formatting them to
become subsystems in a system, in the society of control. He was thus strug-
gling against all forms of education, not only the school. And against the
whole structure behind education.
I would like to reflect on these points, that in my view are central to open-
ing ourselves to the new world.
Literacy campaigns, as well as the programmed teaching of how to learn
and write in school, generate three forms of radical disqualification.
First of all, literacy disqualifies at least a billion people on Earth, the illit-
erate adults, many of whom have often assumed their own inferiority because
they lack the specific ability of reading and writing. One can often hear a very
wise peasant saying that perhaps what he is saying is totally wrong, because he
does not know how to read and write and has no schooling. The role attrib-
uted to literacy in society creates a damaging form of illegitimate hierarchy.
Literacy also disqualifies reading. The fact that it is imposed, often in very
inadequate conditions, provokes people into abandoning reading as soon as
they can. According to UNESCO, a person can be called a reader if he or she
reads more than five books per year. In no country of the world the proportion
of ‘readers’ is more that 20 percent of the population, not even in countries
with 99 percent literacy, like the US, or in countries like India, Thailand,
and China, that have the highest number of hours of reading per week. Many
studies have shown that those who learn freely how to read, by their own will,
love to do it and usually read many books per year.
Literacy radically disqualifies oral civilizations and devalues their way of
thinking, remembering, or living, which means not only to disqualify many
people still living in the oral civilizations that survive, against all odds, but
also to devalue their contributions to the understanding of the world and to
defining what a good life is.
We currently have in Mexico magnificent examples of what happens with
children and adults that learn to read and write in freedom, for the joy of it,
not for any external imposition. Many of us are today openly opposing all
forms of literacy, particularly for children.
We are also resisting all forms of education, inside and outside public or pri-
vate institutions. The school is a dispositive that clearly spoils the spontaneous
behavior of children and their opportunities to grow and learn in freedom.
There is no system more despotic than the classroom, where the teacher has
the power and the truth and supposedly does everything for the benefit of the
274 Friendship, Hope and Surprise

students he or she controls. That is how the fascism in us all is created, the
fascism denounced by Foucault when he wrote about the one “that is in our
heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascisms that causes us to love power,
to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.”
There is something more: education castrates our imagination, making it
almost impossible to think of a social organization without hierarchy, without
a structure of command and control—that is exactly the kind of organization
we need now, to really care for life and survive, something that is almost a
definition of the new world, which should be constructed beyond any form
of patriarchy.
In the case of children, we are explicitly supportive of the disciplined cultiva-
tion of their passion to learn, that they have since they are babies, and to open for
them opportunities to discover what they want to learn. We are trying to recu-
perate all forms and traditions of apprenticeship and the conditions for all people,
children and adults, to learn in freedom by doing what they want to learn—
which is, by the way, how we all learn most of what we do in our daily life.
What we need to do, said Illich, is “to cultivate disciplined, self-denying,
careful, tasteful friendships.” We can construct with them the alternatives to
the powers oppressing us. In my view, that is exactly what is happening today
in the world, and becomes a solid source of hope. And it is happening in a
convivial climate of friendship.
There is today an extended search for alternative ways of learning. Never
before was there something like this. What the governments imposed in the
name of Covid 19 allowed the parents to experience directly the school set-
ting. Many of them could no longer accept that form of oppression for their
children. Resistance similar to that opposing the establishment of the school
system started to proliferate. A million students abandoned school in Mexico,
during the last year, with the support of their parents. Old kinds of learning
practices are being adopted everywhere. In many cases, groups of friends come
together to conceive and implement the alternatives.
In the public system of education in Oaxaca in the south of Mexico where
I live, a courageous struggle of the teachers resulted in permission from the
educational authorities to conduct an experiment in a few public schools.
When the children arrive for the first day of classes in high school, the teach-
ers tell them that there will not be classes, classroom, disciplines, or grades,
or other evaluations. With two to five friends they should conceive one or
several projects to develop by themselves in the course of the next three years.
They can talk with their parents, the elders, the authorities in the community,
to confirm the communal value of the projects, and then develop them. The
teachers will have two functions: to protect the children from any educational
inspector approaching the school, who will not be allowed to talk with them,
and to offer them some advice and support if they cannot solve some aspects
of their projects.
 Friendship, Hope and Surprise 275

The results of this experiment are very impressive, particularly by rooting

their children in their own places, which is exactly the opposite to what the
school was doing to them: uprooting them, creating the desire to abandon
their communities for an illusory improvement in the cities or other places.
Years ago, we started to observe in villages and barrios, particularly among
Indigenous peoples, a radical reaction against education and schools. A few of
them closed their schools and expelled their teachers. Most of them avoided
this type of political conflict and started instead to just by-pass the school,
while reclaiming and regenerating the conditions in which people tradition-
ally learned in their own ways.
They came to this point after a long experience and for many years they
resisted the school. In 1954, UNESCO complained that the main obstacle to
education was the indifference of parents to sending their children to school.
Fifteen years later, they had to notice that the demand for schooling exceeded
the number of available classrooms by seven times. The UNESCO campaign
was very successful: the parents were educated in the need to send the children
to the school, only to find that there were not enough schools and teachers.
Since then, no Latin American country has been able to satisfy the demand for
education. More and more the people suffered the damages of schooling their
children and participated in all kinds of efforts to reform, widen, or improve
the system. And finally, many of them said ¡Basta, Enough! like the Zapatistas.
They know now very well what is happening. Benjamín Maldonado, an
anthropologist, verified it. Using a variety of tests, he compared children
going to school with those out of school.
He wanted to teach a lesson to the parents, to tell them, see what you
are doing to your poor children, dooming them to ignorance, putting
them behind. The tests revealed that those out of school knew more about
everything, including reading and writing, except the national anthem… To
know the national anthem was the only advantage of those going to school.
And those going to school looked down on their communities and cul-
tures, and had subordinated their minds and hearts to the authority of the
teacher. “The Indigenous school as a path towards ignorance” is the title of
Maldonado’s report (1988).
In fact, the people in the villages know very well that school prevents their
children from learning what is needed to continue living in their communi-
ties, contributing to their common flourishing, and that of their soils, their
places. And it does not offer them an appropriate preparation for life or work
out of the community. They are no longer delegating their children’s learning
to the school.
True, many of them don’t dare yet to take their children out of primary
school. They don’t want to deprive them of the school diploma, a required
passport in the modern society, whose lack is a continual source of discrimi-
nation and humiliation. But even those still sending their children to school,
276 Friendship, Hope and Surprise

in our communities, have many ways of practicing damage control, both sup-
porting their children in active resistance at school and creating alternative
opportunities for them to learn whatever they have a passion or talent for.
We are increasingly convinced that radically de-schooling the world can be
today the most important change than anyone can conceive for a new society.
It implies a complete reorganization of our lives. I am not suggesting clos-
ing all the schools tomorrow morning, or any time soon, which is obviously
impossible and may become counterproductive. The most important point is
to de-school ourselves, our minds and hearts, and then to begin the appro-
priate reorganization of society. We are convinced that education is the very
foundation of the current society and its oppression. To escape from it requires
the dismantling of such a foundation. It is a pre-condition for a real change, for
the construction of the new society.
What about the teachers? There are many people who have dedicated their
whole life to teaching, with love, care, and commitment. Are they doomed?
In my view, they are doomed by the system. They are no longer useful for the
purpose of shaping the people in a certain way. They may be put in the cate-
gory of dispensable humans. Most universities and schools are already feeling
the reduction of budgets and the experiment of 2020 created the possibility of
disposing of the teachers. Like millions of people, the teachers may try to rein-
vent themselves… and they can make immense contributions for the needed
changes. If they begin to abandon the idea of the curriculum and the obsession
with “transferring” certain knowledge and abilities to the children and youth;
if they construct an alliance with them to organize ways to learn in freedom
and create apprenticeships; if they assume themselves as committed actors of
a transformation that substitutes nouns creating dependence—like education
or health—for verbs relying on autonomous agency—learning, healing—they
can become one of the best pillars of a peaceful transition.
It seems to be a common experience that we learn better when nobody is
teaching us. We learn better from a master when he or she is not teaching us.
We can observe this in every baby and in our own experience. Our vital com-
petence comes from learning by doing, without any kind of teaching… It seems
easy and accessible for everyone to escape from education in that very sense.
We have learned, with the Zapatistas, that while changing the world is
very difficult, perhaps impossible, it is possible to create a whole new world.
That is exactly what the Zapatistas are doing in the south of Mexico. How
can we create our own new world, at our own small human scale? How can
we de-school our lives and those of our children in this real world, where the
school still dominates minds, hearts, and institutions? Friendship is a central
component of the answer.
Real freedom is of course a fundamental condition for friendship to flour-
ish. But not freedom in the abstract or in political bodies. You can befriend
someone in jail or a concentration camp. Also in school. But there should not
 Friendship, Hope and Surprise 277

be strings attached to the relationship between would-be friends. No condi-

tions imposed. No rules or restrictions.
At the end of Deschooling Society, where he elaborates on his not very smart
proposals, Ivan wrote:

What characterizes the true master-disciple relationship is its priceless

character. Aristotle speaks of it as a “moral type of friendship, which
is not in fixed terms: it makes a gift, or does whatever it does, as to a
friend”. Thomas Aquinas says of this kind of teaching that inevitably it is
an act of love and mercy. This kind of teaching is always a luxury for the
teacher and a form of leisure (in Greek, “schole”) for him and his pupil:
an activity meaningful for both, having no ulterior purpose.
(1972, 101)

That is the main point in friendship. Gratis. Not only because there is no
economic exchange involved, but because you are doing what you are doing
for the joy of it, having no ulterior purpose. Gratis. Learning together is
not a means towards an end, but an end in itself, for the joy of it. It is a
pleasure to do it with friends, as an expression of friendship. That is, in
my view, what is happening around the world. Friends come together and
begin learning what they can do in the current transition. Which are the
challenges of the current horror. How can you begin an alternative path?
Together. With friends.
There is another component of this path that we must consider carefully,
with open eyes. Working with Indigenous communities brought us back from
the future years ago. There, you don’t have expectations. You have hopes. In
Spanish, we have a beautiful expression to say that you have hopes: Abrigo espe-
ranzas, that is, I wrap my hopes up well, for them not to freeze. You nourish
your hopes, you care for them. As Ivan once said,

Hope … means trusting faith in the goodness of nature, while expec-

tation … means reliance on results which are planned and controlled
by man. Hope centers desire on a person from whom we await a gift.
Expectation looks forward to satisfaction from a predictable process
which will produce what we have the right to claim.

And he also warned us: “The Promethean ethos has now eclipsed hope. Survival
of the human race depends on its rediscovery as a social force” (1972, 105–6).
At the end of the Intercontinental Encounter against Neoliberalism, the
Zapatistas, giving a new use to old leftist jargon, suggested the creation of
the International of Hope. Using words as their main weapon, the Zapatistas
rediscovered hope as a social force and opened a whole new avenue of trans-
formation for all of us.
278 Friendship, Hope and Surprise

Radical hope is the very essence of popular movements. People start some
action with the conviction that their mobilization may bring the changes they
are looking for. But we need to be aware that hope is not the conviction that
something will happen in a certain way, but the conviction that something
makes sense, no matter what happens.
Hope should be associated with hospitality: “recovering threshold, table,
patience, listening, and from there generating seedbeds for virtue and friend-
ship on the one hand—on the other hand radiating out for possible commu-
nity, for rebirth of community” (Illich, 1996). Hope and friendship are indeed
key in the path to recovering the commons.
For many years, we all have been orienting our lives as a projection to the
future. It looked sensible and pertinent, because there were some deep trends
that allowed us to anticipate what will happen in the future. Tomorrow looked
more or less like today. Many predictions failed, of course; you cannot know
the future. But it was possible to anticipate certain evolution, based on past
experience. Agronomic wisdom was based in the careful observation of nature,
to detect in a timely manner some signals that allowed us to anticipate the
probable evolution of natural phenomena, if we will have or not have enough
rain, if we need or do not need to change the date of planting the seeds…
Something similar was done with social, economic, and political events. It was
possible to anticipate the evolution of the main phenomena affecting us.
We need to be aware that this condition changed entirely. We have entered
a time of radical uncertainty. We don’t know what will happen. Natural and
social phenomena became unpredictable. The deep trends allowing us to fore-
see what will happen are no longer there. We don’t know. In a very real sense,
that only means to come back to our senses. We never knew, for sure. We are
now consciously open to surprise.
Yes, we are now coming back from the future, living in the present, living
in our own places, not in search of any kind of mobility which will take us to
the centers of power of the global economy…
To be back from the future means to resist the temptation of pretending to
know the future and even worse, to being able to control it. To resist the sin of
pretending to know what our children and young people will need, what they
will want, not today or tomorrow, but in a year, in ten years, in 20 years, the
rest of their lives… To resist the idea that we can plan a learning process for
them to be prepared in a distant future for something that we pretend that we
know today… A plan defining the knowledge, skills, or dispositions that they
all may need, as preparation for life or work, even if we cannot know what
kind of life or work they will have, in what kind of planet they will live…
To be back from the future means to be living in the present. Instead of
sin, virtue. Virtue, that is, “shape, order and direction of action informed
by tradition, bounded by place, and qualified by choices made within the
habitual reach of the actor”. Virtue is “practice mutually recognized as being
 Friendship, Hope and Surprise 279

good within a shared local culture which enhances the memories of a place”
(Illich 1991: 57).
Back from the future means to be here, talking with friends, instead of
staying physically here but only in transit, your being going some place else…
The question is really living, instead of going… To be a student means in a
sense to stop living, to just go—to go for the grade, the diploma, the job…
Back from the future means resisting the idea of goals, having them, dream-
ing about them, reaching them… Yes, I know, in some contexts, if the par-
ents find that their 12-year-old has no goals they immediately call a shrink…
Apparently, in some societies you cannot survive without goals. In other
places, to have goals is a sin… I know nothing about the future, except that
it does not exist. And I don’t know if it will exist for me. I have no goals. My
grandmother passed away, when she was 96 years old, ignoring what it is to
have a disease… or to be infected by a goal. We have motives, impulses, forces
rooted in precedent, giving us direction and meaning in our living present.
“True learning”, Illich once said, “can only be the leisurely practice of
free people”. In the consumer society, he also said, we are either prisoners
of addiction or prisoners of envy. Only without addiction or envy, only with-
out educational goals, in freedom, can we enjoy true learning.
In my place, every I is a we. And thus, we live together, in our living pres-
ent, rooted in our social and cultural soil, nourishing hopes with friends at a
time in which all of us, inspired by the Zapatistas, are creating a whole new
world, open to the surprise of another era.

Bibliography
Cayley, David. 1992. Ivan Illich in Conversation: The Testament of Ivan Illich. Toronto:
Anansi.
Illich, Ivan. 1972. Deschooling Society. New York: Harper & Row.
Illich, Ivan. 1991. “Declaration on Soil.” In International Foundation for Development
Alternatives DOSSIER 81, (April/June): 57–8.
Illich, Ivan. 1996. “Ivan Illich with Jerry Brown.” Accessed November 30, 2021.
http://www.wtp.org/archive/transcripts/ivan_illich_ jerry.html/.
Maldonado, Benjamin. 1988. Los indios en las aulas [The Indians in the Classrooms].
Oaxaca: Centro INAH.
INDEX

Note: References following “n” refer to notes.

Abraham, commander 167 Arango, G. 33

abstractions 31, 143–145, 221, 250 Aristotle 140
Adrian VI, Pope 105 Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca
affection 227 see Popular Assembly of the Peoples of
Agamben, G. 2, 246, 247 Oaxaca (APPO)
agrarian reform in Mexico 98, 110–111 Assembly of Zapotecan, Mixe and
agribusiness 76, 97, 100, 224 Chinantecan Peoples 190
agro-industrial production complex 87 Aubry, A. 84
agronomists: Borlaug 119–121, 126; austerity 74, 236
Fidel Palafox 108–112, 123–124, authoritarian industrial techniques
128–130; Gómez 113–116, 118–119, 55–56
125; Xolocotzi 117–119, 121–123, authoritarianism 180, 184, 191, 193, 195,
127–129 200, 210, 217, 262
Aguascalientes of Guadalupe Tepeyac Autonomous Network for Food
158 Sovereignty 201
Alegría, R. 201
alimentos (edible objects) 78–79, 82, “back from the future” perspective
97; for globalized minority 80; 278–279
insufficiencies and deficiencies of Backyard farming 97
80; scarcity of 79; transport of 81 banking education 272
“Alternative Development” concept 23, barbarism 133, 225, 230n6, 270
29 barrios 37, 88–90, 162, 204, 275
Alvarado, S. 114 Barthes, R. 81
Andean agriculture 85–86 Bartra, R. 36
Andean Project of Peasant Technologies Batalla, G. B. 155
(Pratec) 85–86 benefactor-State, democratic form of 6
Anglo-Saxon discourse 63 Berardi, F. 247–248
anomie, definition of 133 Berger, J. 181, 223
Appfel-Marglin, F. 104 Berry, W. 80, 89, 250
Aquinas, T. 140 Beteta, R. 111

Bolshevik approach 6
Borlaug, N. 119–121, 126
Borreman, V. 242
bourgeois mathematics 139
bourgeois tribe 139
Bretón, A. 110
Brown, L. 125
buen vivir (living well) 97, 206–208
Bush, G. 270
Cabrera, L. 110
Cabrera, R. 264
caciques (local bosses) 5
Cajica, J. M. 110
Calderón, F. 184–185
Camacho, A. 115
Cámara, H. 271–272
Campaign for Agrarian Reform 201
campesinos 24
Canetti, E. 76
capacities and needs 56; needs and satis-
fiers 73; progressive autonomization
of 64
capital 40, 270; accumulation 40;
internationalization of 77
capitalism 15, 16, 39, 41; in agriculture
44; contradiction and options 227–229;
crisis of 37; emerged from Great
Depression 217; end of 210, 224;
learning 253–254; lines of enquiry
225; overcoming 199–200; paths of
new world 26–227; post-capitalist
condition 225–226; struggle against
specter of 209–210
caracoles (political bodies) 159–160
Cárdenas, L. 33, 34, 109–111, 117, 119,
239
Castro, F. 1
Center for Intercultural Encounters and
Dialogues 132
centralized system 60; lack of internal
coherence of 55; for seed production
and distribution 57; stability of 56
chacra (farm) 85–86
charity 59
Charles V, Emperor 105
Chávez, A. 77
“Che” Guevara, E. 1, 157
Chomsky, N. 220
Citizens’ Initiative for Peace, Democracy
and Justice 189, 196n4
civilizational crisis: beyond abstrac-
tion 220–221; articulation and
Index 281
organization 212–216; buen vivir
(living well) 206–208; capitalism,
end of 210, 224–229; communal
alternative 208–209; direct exchange
with outside capitalist market 205;
end of cycle 258–260; era of systems
210–211; global thinking, end
of 208–209; impacts in dwelling
204–205; modernity issue 219–220;
nature of 217–219; and overcoming
capitalism 199–200; postmodernism
issue 221–222; postmodernity issue
221–222; rebellion in 222–223;
rebellious dispersion 200–204; revolt
in 222–223; revolution in 222,
223–224; saber and conocer 205–206;
struggle against specter of capitalism
209–210; uprising in 223; see also
crisis in Mexico
civil society of Zapatistas 158, 159, 163
The Civil War in France (Marx) 174,
181n1
classification, discovery of 143, 220,
221
Cleaver, H. 196n7
climate change 132–133, 208
climate collapse 246, 255, 264, 269;
complicities 261–263; mobilization
against 260–261, 264–265
collectivism 12, 13, 15, 175
comida 59–61, 78–79, 97; in food
in-context 81; idea of re-embedding
90; industrial 93; lacking for feed
globalized minority 80–81; scarcity of
79–80; as social fabric 81–82
commodities 41, 94, 242
commons 94–96, 239, 242; affirmation of
241; as convivial society 242; enclosure
of 238–239; movement 239; radical
pluralism 96–97; recovering 99–100;
revolution of 242; Vía Campesina
97–99; see also new commons
communal alternative 208–209
communal power 14–15, 214
communism 15, 28, 95
communitarianism 13
comunalidad among Indigenous peoples
of Oaxaca 253
conmoción (co-motion) 21
conocer (formal knowledge) 205–206,
229n2
conocimiento (knowledge) 147, 152n1
consumer sovereignty 80
282 Index
Continental Network for the
Demilitarization of the Americas 202
conviviality 235; archipelago of 242;
convivial society 236, 238; convivial
tools 236, 237
corruption 8, 9, 17, 23, 171, 173, 191
Cortés, G. 264
Cortés, M. V. 264
Councils or Boards of Good
Government see Juntas de Buen
Gobierno
counterproductivity 30, 211, 251;
documentation on 58; of fertilizers
57; of Green Revolution 57; of
modern institutions 210, 235, 243,
251
Covid-19 crisis 245; awakening from
neoliberalism after 248–249; “end
of the world” perspective 246; and
global ecology 249–251; impact in
Mexico 268–269; impacts in com-
munities 252–253; resisting, fighting,
mobilizing for life 260–261; risk and
opportunity 247; time of discovery
256–258
crisis in Mexico 56, 73; crisis of
institutions 237; deregulation issue
177; free trade issue 178; ideological
arrogance of leaders 179–180; need for
radical democracy 180–181; impact of
neoliberal globalization 178; universal
consensus 177; see also civilizational
crisis
Cuba, food production in 201
“Cuernavaca pamphlets” 235
cultural/culture(s) 54, 145; autonomiza-
tion 26; comida relation with milpa
60; dialogue between 145; diversity
126, 134, 136, 187; hacking 253;
homogenization 206; isolation 77;
missions 111; as mythical universe
146; relativism 137–138
culturicide 137
cynicism 173, 207
Dag Hammerskjöld foundation 71
d’Ambrosio, U. 152n3
Declaration of Lacandon Jungle 216
Declaration for Life 261
decolonial/decoloniality: proposal of
133–134; school 134; thinking 105
de-coupling 26, 29
Deleuze, G. 211
democratic/democracy 247; being
democratic 12; at community level
175; consensus 161; control 99; direct
173–174; dismantling of 271; formal
96; fundamentalism 173; limits of
representative democracy 173;
parliamentary 12; participatory
96, 191; radical 97, 174–175, 177,
180–181, 228; rights of minorities in
172–173; techniques 55, 56; universal
model of 141
democratic nation-state 141, 162, 163,
225, 227, 255, 270–271
democratization in Mexico 5–6;
scientific socialism and 6–7; socialism
and 10–12; state socialism and 15–16,
19; underdevelopment 10
de Sahagún, B. 105–106
DESAL 38
Deschooling Society (Illich) 273, 277
de Sousa Santos, B. 146, 228, 247
despotism 5, 13
development 10; archeology of 58;
burial of myth 29; catechism of 241;
cultural homogenization associated
with 206; deconstruction of myth
31–35; demographic explosion 31;
discovery of illusory and destructive
nature in US 20; economic growth
30, 31; enterprise 93–94; Esteva’s
viewa about 22–26; hypothesis of
27–28; Illich’s views about 21–22;
myth of 26–29, 70–71; physical and
social destruction 58; population
growth 31; progress in San Andrés
Chicahuaxtla 150–151; as source of
scarcity 53–54, 58; stopping 59–62;
theory 30; unequal 43
dharma in Hinduism 147, 253
dialectic 11, 13; idealism 11; interaction
130; materialism 11
dialogue 145; between cultures 145;
intercultural 143–146, 152; of
knowledge 150, 151; of saberes
146–148; see also vivires (lived
experiences), dialogue of
“dialogue and interepistemic conflict in
the construction of a common home”
132
Dialogue of the Cathedral 158
Díaz, P. 109
Dictionary of Development: A Guide to
Knowledge as Power (Sachs) 241

dignity 167, 170; autonomous expression
of 172
direct democracy 173–174
“direct workers of the social factory”
(TRADIFAS) 36, 43–44; contents of
social negotiation 41–42; conquering
of land 45–46; frame of reference 39;
maintaining permanent reconstitution
47–49; organization 46–47; sphere of
social negotiation 42–44; substance of
44–45; work for social factory 39–41
dispossession 81, 100, 202, 248, 257,
259; characterization of 224; mode
of 133, 198; self-destructive regime
of 226
diversity 136; challenge of 134–136;
cultural 126, 134, 136, 187; in Oaxaca
state 187; radical 129
Dom Helder see Cámara, H.
Don Alfredo see Bretón, A.
Don Durito 263
Don Efraím see Xolocotzi, E. H.
Don Fidel see Palafox, F.
Don José see Cajica, J. M.
Don Marte see Gómez, M. R.
don Rafael 150
Don Romárico see González, R.
drug: trafficking 199; war on 230n5
dualism 37, 129
Dubos, R. 73
Durkheim, E. 133
Duus, E. 81–82
Dyer-Witheford, N. 95
The Ecologist magazine 95, 238, 239,
241
education(al): banking 272; “education
for all” movement 203–204; resist-
ance in Mexico 273–276; system in
crisis 202–204; system with science
124–125
egregious errors 127
ejidatarios 110, 117
ejidos 95, 110, 117, 122, 239–240
Ejйrcito Zapatista de Liberaciyn Nacional
(EZLN) see Zapatistas
Ekins, P. 73, 149
El Día (El Gallo Ilustrado) 22
Ellul, J. 182n3
Engels, F. 11, 181n1, 182n3
Enlightenment 137, 163
ethno-mathematics 139–140, 152n3
Etla, S. P. 3
Index 283
European Convention on Human
Rights 12–13
European Economic Community 19
European Union 269
eutrapelia (graceful playfulness) 236
Experimental Fields Department 116
Fals, O. 134
fascist/fascism 171, 180, 211, 225,
247–248, 261–263, 274
Federal Preventive Police of Mexico
184, 196n4
Feder, E. 36
Festival of Dignified Rage 170
First Intercontinental Encounter for
Humanity and Against Neoliberalism
161
food: commerce reorganization 98;
definition of 79; food as human right
98; sovereignty 98–99, 202; tinned 81
Food and Agriculture Organization
(FAO) 98
food crisis in Latin America 76, 77;
alimento 78–81; comida 78–82;
expelling of peasants 87–88; beyond
Green Revolution and development
82–84; institutional inversion 90–93;
political mutation 93–94; Pratec role
to overcome 85–86; reclaiming
commons from 94–100; rooting of
social majorities 77–78; urbanization
88–90
Forum of Indigenous Peoples of Oaxaca
190
Foucault, M. 2, 28, 133, 143, 147, 172,
209, 211, 243; clarification of power
262; conversation with Chomsky 220;
expression of dream about intellectual
215–216; radical rejection of power
described by 213; suggestion about
saberes 205
Fourth World War 226
free market 149; fundamentalism 178
Freire, P. 203, 271–273
Friar Bernardino see de Sahagún, B.
friendship, cultivation of 227, 271–273,
276–277
Fukuyama, F. 253
fundamentalism 133, 138, 221, 271;
democratic 173; free market 178
Galeano, E. 76, 100, 200
Galilei, G. 141
284 Index
Gandhi, M. K. 26, 166
Gates, B. 270
Gaud, W. S. 126
Giap, V. N. 237, 253
Gibson, K. 209, 229n3
Gilly, A. 214, 222
Global Campaign for Agrarian Reform
94
Global Campaign for Defense of
Indigenous, Peasant and Autonomous
Lands and Territories 201
global ecology 249–251
globalization 218–219; global ecology
249; neoliberal 218; neoliberal 269
globalized minorities 78; alimentos for
80; lack of comida 80–81
Global Tapestry of Alternatives 227
global thinking, end of 208–209
Goethe, J. 142
Goldsmith, E. 71
Gómez, M. R. 108, 113–116, 118,
125; founded Regional School of
Agriculture 114–115; role in Ministry
of Agriculture 115–116; work in
National School of Agriculture 114
González, R. 109
good life, universal definition of
206
Goodman, P. 182n3, 239
Gorbachev, M. 270
Gorz, A. 95, 242
Graham, J. 209, 229n3
Great Depression 217, 218
Green Revolution in Mexico 76, 82–84,
92, 94, 99, 107–108; agronomists
role in 112–113, 116–123, 128–130;
agronomy of 125; consequences of
simplification 124–128; counter-
productivity of 57; Gómez’s role in
114–116; land distribution process
109–112
Grillo, E. 85–86
Guollermo Bonfil see Batalla, G. B.
Havel, V. 3, 270
Hegel, G. W. F. 27, 177, 227
Hobsbawm, E. 9
homo economicus 137, 164
hope 2–3, 33, 73–75, 100, 111, 156,
167, 168–169, 246; barrios of 37; for
movements 277–278; and surprise
229
hospitality 107, 142–143, 278
human masses, concept of 195n3
humus theory 83
hunger 54, 61, 76, 77; ending globaliza-
tion of 98; institutionalized 57–58; in
United States 60
iatrogenesis 251
idealism, dialectical 11
Illich, I. 2, 53, 101n2, 101n3, 104,
141, 182n3, 233, 234; articulation
of conviviality 236–238; about
counter-productivity 251; Cuernavaca
pamphlets 235; about cultivation of
friendship 271, 274, 277; defining
“era of systems” 210; friendship with
Freire 271–273; literacy campaigns
273; predictions about crisis situations
251; publishing Medical Nemesis
204; about true learning 279; about
underdevelopment 32, 34; views
about Mexico development 21–22
impostura 81–82
Indian techné of agriculture 112
India, political strategy in 5–6
individualism 13, 15, 157, 181, 205, 240,
242
individualization 99, 168
industrialization 101n2, 239
informal economy 30, 74, 78
Institute for Research of
Anthropological Assessment 84
institutional inversion 90; decentralized
food fortification 92; industrial comida
93; Latin American Declaration on
Transgenic Organisms 92; Lima
Declaration 92; regenerative agri-
culture movement 90; struggle for
self-sufficiency in national food
production 91; “wheat, livestock and
durable goods complexes” 90–91
Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)
189, 195
insurrection: metaphorical description of
193–194, 214–215; nature of 217–219;
political 213; of subjected knowl-
edge 213; of subjugated knowledge
133–134, 147; use of technology
211–212; violence vs. non-violence
role in 216–217; see also civilizational
crisis
Inter-American Bank 92
Intercontinental Encounter against
Neoliberalism 168, 277

intercultural dialogue 105, 136, 152;
limitations of respectful attitude
144–146; risks of abstraction 143–144
International Commission for
Observation of Human Rights 184
International Commission on Integral
Agrarian Reform 94
International Labour Office (ILO) 38,
39; association between economic
growth and injustice 207; Basic Needs
Approach 71
International of Hope, creation of 277
International Seminar for Food
Self-Sufficiency 53; agenda for
research and change 58–59; autono-
mous theoretical production 64–65;
bibliographic clues 66–69; challenge
of change 62–64, 66; development
as source of scarcity 53–54; institu-
tionalized hunger 57–58; stopping
aid 59; stopping development 59–62;
strategic challenge 64; technological
intermediation 54–56
international terrorism 199, 230n5
The Invisible Committee 195
Jappe, A. 2, 224
Jefferson, T. 211
Juntas de Buen Gobierno 159
Kautsky, K. 11
Keynes, J. M. 178, 179, 224
knowledge of people 64, 133
Kohr, L. 179, 182n3
Krisis (German group) 2
Kurz, R. 2
labor force 48, 225; conditions for
reproduction of 41; rights of
ownership over 40; value of 41–43
Landless Movement of Brazil 201
La Otra Campaña 181
The Late Marx and the Russian Road
(Shanin) 4
Latin American Declaration on
Transgenic Organisms 92
Lenin, V. 181n1, 217
liberalism 12
liberation 101n3; revolutionary 237;
struggle for 137, 156, 164, 246;
theology 134
Lima Declaration 92
Lincoln, A. 173
Index 285
listening 1, 146, 152, 157, 158
“listening to the peasant” principle 120
Lizcano, E. 138–139, 152n3
Local 22 of Teachers Union, trade-
unionist struggle of 196n4
Local Futures organization 20
localization 78, 138, 165, 168, 227
López de Santa Ana, A. 113
Lovelock, J. 132
Lummis, D. 182n3
Lupe, D. 21
Machado, A. 132
malnourishment 77, 79
Mandela, N. 166
maquiladora 70, 90
Marcos, Subcomandante see Vicente,
R. S. G.
marginality/marginalization 36; discourse
of 37–38; ideological discourse on 44;
of knowledge systems 83–84; Latin
American theory of 38
marginal(ization) 37, 77, 83, 90, 107,
112–113, 117, 122, 128, 133, 241; mass
38; pole 38; urban 36, 46, 66, 94
Marglin, S. 104
Marx, K. 11, 12, 27, 101n3, 171–172,
174–175, 253
mass, concept of 185–186, 195n3, 215
mathematics 139; bourgeois 139; discourse
of 138; ethno-mathematics 139, 152n3;
mathematizing modern language
140–141
meal, definition of 79
Menéndez, G. P. 22
mestizaje, idea of 230n6
Mexican ejido 239–240
Mexican Food System (SAM) 57, 71–72,
128
Mexico: adjustment process 70; agrarian
reform in 110; agricultural revolu-
tion 125–126; Basic Needs Approach
adopted in 71; conventional image of
70; crisis/predicament in 24, 25, 29,
30, 34, 56, 58, 70–71; destabilization
of 21–22; economic growth 30, 31;
food system in 91; forms of develop-
ment model 6; Green Revolution in
82–84; idea of mestizaje in 230n6;
lack of democracy in 5; need for
scientific socialism in 6–7; peasants
expelling from agricultural land
in 87–88; population growth 31;
286 Index
religious conversion of Indians in
105–107; resistance to education in
273–276; rise of authoritarianism
in 262; Rockefeller Foundation’s
involvement in health field 115; rural
landscape between 1935 and 1938 in
110; see also crisis in Mexico
mineral theory 83
mobilization 44, 45, 166, 195n2, 263;
against capitalism in agriculture
44–45; in Chile 246; against climate
crisis 260–261, 264–265; peasant 86;
population 61; of trade union 186;
workers’ 218, 219
modern/modernity 90, 219–220; end of
132–133; hunger 54; knowledge 133;
peasants 46; representative state 253;
society 40; state 171
Moisés, Subcomandante 261
Montreal Intercultural Institute 146
Movemento dos trabalhadores rurais sem
terra (MST) 102n7, 229n1
Mumford, L. 55
Murat, J. 188, 195n5
“mutua crianza” (mutual nurturing)
206
Nandy, A. 124
National Autonomous University of
Mexico (UNAM) 198
National Food Program 61, 128
National Forum on Food Sovereignty
(1996) 77
National School of Agriculture 112–114,
119
“negative” rights 13
neoliberal globalization 167, 178, 218,
269
neoliberalism 156, 180, 222
“New Accord” 188–189
new commons 95, 239; creation of 204,
240; revolution of 94, 161, 242; with
wide-ranging potentialities 200
New Deal 217–218
new world, idea of 216, 226–227, 276
Nietzsche, F. 239
normality after pandemic 246, 252, 255,
257
North American Free Trade Agreement
(NAFTA) 87, 156
nourishment, definition of 60, 79
“nutritional fortification” policy
102n6
Oaxaca Commune 183–185 see also
Popular Assembly of the Peoples of
Oaxaca (APPO)
Oaxaca state 184, 185; comunalidad
among Indigenous peoples of 253;
diversity in 187; municipal frag-
mentation of 187; “New Accord”
188–189; impact of savage repression
in 194–195; social and political polari-
zation 195; traditional government
assemblies in 135
Obregón, A. 110
One World, idea of 163–164, 165; end of
136–138
Orbán, V. 247
Ortíz, U. R. 185, 191, 193, 194
Orwell, G. 81, 247
Ostrom, E. 96, 241
Palafox, F. 108; as administrator of
hacienda La Laguna 109–110; career
116; organizing land distribution pro-
cess 111–112; publishing agricultural
research book 128–129; resistance to
publish writings 108–109; silence of
123–124
Panikkar, R. 2, 104, 105, 143; and
cultural diversity 134; about discovery
of classification 143, 220, 221; about
human rights 147–148; using inter-
culturality 136; problem of pluralism
defined by 130; radical pluralism
defined by 105
Paris Commune 173, 174, 181n1, 184
participatory democracy 96, 191–192,
228, 242
peace, concept of 31, 147–148
Peasant Regional Schools 111
The Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire)
272
“people’s government” (gobierno popular)
192
Physiology of Taste (Illich) 236
Plan La Realidad-Tijuana 160
Plato 220, 250
Plejanov, G. 11
pluralism 129; problem of 130; radical
212, 241; of reality 144; see also radical
pluralism
pluriformity of plants 129
Poiesis (culture) 54
Point Four Program 25
Polanyi, K. 90
 Index 287

Popular Assembly of the Peoples of reductionism 101n1, 122, 127;

Oaxaca (APPO) 183, 195; “civic space”
of 187; Coordinadora Provisional of 186;
metaphorical description of insurrec-
tion 193–194; as non-violent move-
ment 185–186; organizing movement
of movements 186–187; participation
of Indian peoples in movement
187–190; people’s response to 184;
struggling to organize non-violent
path 190–193, 196n4; support to trade-
unionist struggle 196n4; for urban
autonomy 190
populism 9, 192
Porritt, J. 71
“positive” rights 13
post-capitalist condition 225–226
postdevelopment 20, 240
postmodernism 221–222
postmodernity 132, 221–222
power 213; communal 14–15; Foucault’s
clarification of 262; myth of 28–29;
radical rejection of 213; seizure of 97
Puebla-Panamá Plan 160
pueblos originarios 152n2
Pythagoras 141
Quijano, A. 134
Quito Declaration 94
radical democracy 97, 174–175, 177,
180–181, 228
radical disqualification, forms of
273–274
radical diversity 129
radical hope 278
radical otherness of other 105, 142
radical pluralism 96, 101n4, 105, 142,
212, 241; see also pluralism
Rahamin (compassion) 248, 252
Rarámuris people 150
Reagan, R. 16, 79
real societies 15–16
rebellion: in civilizational crisis
222–223; of “yellow vests” 228
rebellious dispersion in Mexico 200;
education system in crisis 202–204;
food production 200–201; healthcare
system in crisis 204; struggle for land
201–202
reciprocity 47, 65
“recommended diet”, idea of 79
Redclift, M. 71
ethnocentric 39
Reference Guide to Convivial Tools
(Borreman) 242
reformisms 63
Regalado, E. 86
Regional School of Agriculture 114–115
religious conversion of Indians in
Mexico 105–107
Rello, F. 30
relocalization 78
Rengifo, G. 85, 86
representative democracy 63, 173, 189,
195, 242
República Restaurada (1867–76) 113
revolt in civilizational crisis 222–223
revolution(ary) 222, 223–224; in
civilizational crisis 222, 223–224;
of commons 242; neoliberal 270;
pedagogy 272–273; vernacular 242
Rieger, M. 141
The Right to Useful Unemployment: And Its
Professional Enemies essay (Illich) 235
Rockefeller Foundation 83, 84, 115
Roosevelt, T. 16
Roy, A. 217
Royal Spanish Academy 235
Roy, R. 124, 125
Rural Bank of Mexico 24
Russia, distribution system failure in
16–18
saber (knowing) 147, 152n1, 205–206,
229n2
saberes 133, 142, 205; dialogue of
146–148
Sachs, W. 234, 241
Sahlins, M. 74
San Andrés Chicahuaxtla 150–151
Sandoval, Z. 151
Sartorello, S. 132
Savané, M-A. 62
Sbert, J. M. 234
scarcity 61, 73; development as source of
53–54; of native and improved seeds 72
Schumpeter, J. 27
scientific approach to agricultural studies
122–123
scientific knowledge 64, 205
scientific socialism 6–7
Scott, J. 214
self-algorithmization 251
self-government 176, 180
288 Index
Selva Lacandona Declaration of Zapatistas
162
Serres, M. 139
shadow work 101n3
Shanin, T. 2, 4–5, 36, 233; discussion
with Esteva about democratization in
Mexico 5–19; and reductionism 122;
and vernacular revolutions 242
Six-Year Plan in Mexico 111
socialism 13, 15, 175, 196n7, 209,
229–230n4; discussion about 10;
history of 11–12; Marxist 14;
scientific 6–7; state 15–16, 19;
theoretical critique of 11
social negotiation: contents of 41–42;
sphere of 42–44
social relations 39–40, 47, 172, 227;
organization of 43; regenerated 213;
renewal of age-old patterns of 49;
reproduction of 40; traditional 47
“society as a whole” perspective
213–214, 229
Soros, G. 177
Spanish ejido 239–240
Special Studies Bureau 115, 118
“standard of living” 101n1
state capitalism 229n4
Stavenhagen, R. 234
Stedile, J. P. 201
Streeten, P. 71, 207
subjugated knowledge, insurrection of
133–134, 147
Sweezy, P. 8
Swenson, L. 239
Tacho, commander 146, 158, 228
technological intermediation 54–56
Tecné (art for the Greek) 54, 95, 145,
146, 240
Thatcher, M. 16, 19, 270
The Other Economic Summit (TOES)
53, 71; and Basic Needs Approach 71;
expression of self-sufficiency 74; and
Mexican Food System 71–72
Thunberg, G. 263
Tojolabales 140
tolerance 107, 142
Tools for Conviviality (Illich) 235, 251
“tradifas” see “direct workers of the
social factory” (TRADIFAS)
trickle-down effect 207–208
Trilateral Commission 225
Trinidad, D. 168
Trotsky, L. 214
Truman, H. S. 20, 25, 33
TS see Shanin, T.
Turner, T. 270
Ulises Ruiz see Ortíz, U. R.
uncertainty 219, 245, 246; radical 132,
258, 278
UN Climate Change Conference in
Glasgow (COP26) 20, 264–265
underdevelopment 10, 20, 25, 101n3,
240; Illich’s views about 32, 34;
memories of 89–90; myth of 26
unemployment 22, 24; insurance 47, 258
UNESCO 203, 273, 275
United States (US): bureaucratic
dictatorship combined with inertia
19; in development of industrial and
scientific techniques 33; discovery
of illusory and destructive nature of
development 20; global strategy for
domination 18–19; industrial devel-
opment in 201; New Deal 217–218
United Workers Party 14
universalism: colonial 252; exclusive
127; inclusive 127; radical rejection of
137; of Zapatistas 163–165
urbanization in Latin America 88–90
urban marginal 36, 46, 66, 94
Vachon, R. 104, 145, 146
Valdés, M. A. 111
Valladolid, J. 85, 86
vegetarianism, controversy about
102n5
vernacular gender 101n2
Vía Campesina organization 97–99, 201,
202
Viadas, L. 113, 115
Vicente, R. S. G. 132, 147, 155, 161, 184,
185, 195, 246; metaphor to describe
civilizational crisis 199; promotion for
global land defense campaign 201–202;
proposing lines of research 225
Villa, P. 164, 214
Villoro, L. 149
virtue 278–279
vivires (lived experiences), dialogue of
151–152; abandoning western views
138–142; decoloniality, proposal
of 133–134; diversity, challenge of
134–136; modernity, end of 132–133;
new “world order” 149; “one world”
idea, end of 136–138
von Liebig, J. 83, 125

Wallace, H. 125
Wallerstein, I. 166, 178
Walmart 200, 228
Washington Consensus 177
well-being 8, 9, 15, 24, 26, 173
“Western” mentality 149; abandoning
138–142
“whole of society” approach 39, 40,
65–66, 253, 273
workday 41–42; conflict over duration
of 42; struggle for reduction of
42–43
World Bank 24, 92, 203, 240, 262
World Food Summit of FAO 98
Xolocotzi, E. H. 108, 112, 117–118,
123, 127; Borlaug vs. 120–121; con-
tribution to traditional agricultural
technology 128–129; ethnobotanic
exploration 120; leaned value of
informal networks 117; role in Special
Studies Bureau 118–119; studying
agricultural practices 121–123
Zapata, E. 114, 164, 214
Zapatismo (armed movement) 5,
155, 157, 158, 160–162, 165–168,
255–256
Zapatista Army of National Liberation
see Zapatistas
Index 289
Zapatistas 1–3, 96, 155, 156, 157,
165–168, 217, 243, 248, 256, 261; 4th
Declaration of Selva Lacandona 162; act
of learn to listening 157–158; autono-
mous municipalities 159, 165; challenge
in words and deeds 155–156, 169; civil
society of 158, 159, 163; committees
166; communities 177; defense of
territory among 201; defining dignity
167–168; democracy, meaning of
161–163; democratic consensus 161;
against globalization 167; insurrection
188; new world, idea of 206–207, 216,
276, 279; Puebla-Panamá Plan 160;
radical promise of 167; resistance into
struggle for liberation 137, 138; using
“strategy of silence” 166–167; struggle
for autonomy 176; suggestion to crea-
tion of International of Hope 277; track
record of 165–166; transition to hope
168–169; universalism and relativism
163–165
Zapatista uprising (1994) 1, 94, 132, 157,
169, 217–219, 242
Zapotecs 148
Zibechi, R. 150, 248, 261
Zimmermann, K. 177, 182n2
Zinn, H. 223
Zionist creed 14
zur Lippe, R. 141