Construction of a World where Many Worlds Fit

Sunil Ray

The old is dying and the new cannot be born’. That was Gramsci almost a century ago. But Gramsci’s disquiet does not hold anymore. The contemporary counter-narratives of social disobedience against the dominant development paradigm testify it. The old is indeed dying, but the new is also born now, maturing and expanding the horizon of its mass acceptability. Its passage for expansion is gradually widened by the radical alternatives, as demonstrated by the resistance movements, most of which are anti-systematic. These movements have devitalised the reasons for the old to stay and decide the fate of humanity. A new society is germinating from these movements as an outcome of the inexorable forces of history.

Several such movements took place in the recent past, both at the national and international level. While most of them were directed against globalisation, environmental degradation and racial and gender discrimination etc, they all opposed the exploitative system. They were anti-systemic. Of course, several resistance movements were organised in different parts of the world that went against global capitalism, while some others not. The anti-globalisation movement organised by the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions and Aid to Citizens (ATTAC) that initiated the first world social forum in the Porto Alegre in 2001 suggests how solidarity of the losers, the deprived, around the world, from North to South can create another world, (with the slogan Another World is Possible). The global justice movement is another such movement that counter-poses an alternative conception of welfare and development to the ones advanced by the International Monetary Fund [IMF], World Trade Organisation [WTO] etc. Similarly an immense variety of radical alternatives to the mainstream development regime emerged during the past two decades around the globe. They range from sector-specific such as sustainable and holistic agriculture, community-led water/energy/food sovereignty to more holistic or rounded transformation attempted by Zapatistas in Chiapas in Mexico.

The Chiapas during the early 1990s showed how a new world could be born. This was another anti-systematic movement after 1840 when the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) proclaimed the autonomy of the indigenous people and went much beyond the reformist movements. This was followed by the new political processes in Ecuador and Bolivia under the influence of Buen Vivir [meaning good life].

The foundational feature of the cosmovision as quoted below from the declaration of the EZLN in the Intercontinental Encounter for Humanity and Against Neo-liberalism shows how they differ from others. In particular, it displays a remarkable epistemological shift from the world of artificial perfection of the dominant development paradigm.

The universal need for a more just and inclusive world, in opposition to the commodified and exclusionary world of neo-liberalism, is the great event of our country, it opens the possibility of joining together local, national, sectoral and class struggles, in one single struggle for the formation of a planetary community, the self-realisation of civil society and the construction of a world where many worlds fit [EZLN, 1996].

Not only it debunks commodification as an enemy of civilisational progress, but more importantly, it also completely rejects the hominization principle and mainstream economics based on which market-oriented model of globalisation is built. ‘The construction of a world where many worlds’ fit is a powerful theoretical abstraction founded on existentialism. It combats principle of homogenisation that presumes a flat world economy under globalisation.

According to them, representative democracy is ‘democratic despotism’ in reality. Hence participatory democracy is the construction of democracy from the root in which common people can assume the power to act upon which they think necessary for their development. The striking aspect of this autonomy movement is not to seize the state power but to dismantle it and rebuild it where the practice of commanding by obeying thrives.

Transformative narratives explicitly or implicitly recognise different principles to organise the economy and society that are anti-thetical to the dominant development paradigm. Central to all is breaking off from dualism between human and nature. The accordance of legal right to nature exemplifies its uncontested solidarity that must be rebuilt with the people of multicultural origin within the relational context of reciprocity. Legalising such an intrinsic bond, done nowhere else so far, is a unique attempt to stop its destruction that threatens the co-evolution of human and nature. It contributes to the formation of an alternative development paradigm by being based on nature-centric development epistemology. Equally important is its radical understanding of well-being that never considers economic growth as the means of development. The transcendental influence of this paradigmatic shift of development on several other countries, including Bolivia and Brazil, has turned Latin America into an epicentre for deconstructing the dominant notion of development.

Lessons that one learns from several other transformative initiatives worldwide against the dominant regime rooted in capitalism, patriarchy, racism, statism and anthropocentrism during the past two decades or so are equally robust. These initiatives found their expressions either through social movements, like the ones discussed here, or ideological reconstruction or new experiment with a fresh idea of development. These experiences break new grounds for designing new organising principles for the society and economy.

The emergence of self-organisations, for example, as niche institutions in several parts of the world, demonstrates it sufficiently well. The new practices and behaviour of these organisations illustrate how significant have been the new grounds they break for creating a ‘fitness landscape’ in the competitive environment for the survival and development of people. The reinvention of workers’ cooperatives, as an independent creation of the workers, not as protégé’s of either the government or the large capital or of producers or community-based organisations in India or Bangladesh and in many other countries, including Brazil, Argentina and other Latin American countries, and some examples that one can cite to show how new organising principles that are antithetical to the dominant regime have grown in the intestine of the capital system detrimental to the interest of the latter.

The coordinates of transformation must arise from cooperation, not competition. The dialectics of progress of human society are then governed by the law of reciprocal altruism, not methodological individualism. Cohesive development arises as an alternative development paradigm based on these new coordinates of transformation.

[Excerpted from Prof Sunil Ray’s forthcoming book ‘Birth of an Alternative Development Paradigm’—Unfolding of Transformative Mode of Production, to be published by Germinal Publications Pvt Ltd]

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Frontier
Vol 57, No. 15 - 18, Oct 5 - Nov 2, 2024