When a language dies, ancestral knowledge is lost and the culture begins to disappear. Our human capacity for creativity becomes restricted as we increasingly adopt more homogenous points of view. We begin to lose faculties such as tolerance and the practice finding harmony within diversity. Eventually, we begin to deteriorate as a society.
What better argument to justify these pockets of poverty than to say that they’re poor because they want to be that way? Because that’s just how they are. That’s just how they want to be. Anti-Roma racism is actually very useful for justifying that capitalism works. I mean, it leaves the system intact. It’s not that the system couldn’t eradicate poverty, it’s not that there isn’t enough work for everyone; it’s just that the poor are poor because they want to be.
As we know, the left has not been exempt from colonialism throughout its history. It has generally remained loyal to the modern Western idea of a historical continuity that aims to showcase Western communities as the most “advanced” in the world. The idea of “colonial commons” proposes that the new commons left is still dragging around this old problem inherited from the old left.
Eurocentrism is like a second skin, encasing our bodies so closely that we hardly notice it. It’s a supremacist ideology shaped by beliefs, attitudes and practices, which have long since turned into destructive customs.
“How a person lives and interacts with others and with nature is called ubuntu. This indigenous knowledge reminds us that we are humans thanks to mother nature. She belongs to us and we belong to her. But we have forgotten who we are and that we have a deep connection to nature.”
The gravity of the problem is that today, when it comes to migrants and racialized people, media space is made available only when we’re the subjects of research, but not to present us as the owners of our own political identity.
The proliferation of hydroelectric dams is one of the ecosocial conflicts – or new wars – creating the most victims around the world. In Brazil, Colombia, Honduras and Ecuador, people who oppose these dams in defense of the commons are criminalised as ‘terrorists’, persecuted and even murdered.
Feminist resistance must be anti-racist or it is not feminism at all. Of course, as feminists, we are not immune to assuming patriarchal, racist, Eurocentric, classist and transphobic practices, because as activists, we have been socialised, just like everyone else, by a hegemonic, colonial system that rules the western and westernised world. Therefore, in order to eradicate this oppression, we must practice denunciation, reparation and restitution.
Amador Fernández-Savater talks with Guiomar Rovira, author of Networked Activism and Connected Multitudes, about punk, Zapatismo, technology, communication, and activist appropriation of the internet.
The initial promise and subsequent disappointment of 21st Century Socialism – along with emergent self-organized reactions – is thoroughly analyzed in this interview with Venezuelan and Bolivian sociologists Miriam Lang and Edgardo Lander.
“The native peoples anticipated the much-touted sharing economy by a few centuries. While the current global crisis pushes capitalism towards an irreversible mutation, our vision of a post-capitalist future is remarkably similar to the pre-capitalist origins of indigenous America.”