Zibechi emphasizes the importance of non-capitalist forms of relation with no division between intellectual and manual work or between those who give and those who obey orders. Compare our social relations to these characteristics of the movements:
- They have become producers, taking the everyday life of the people into their own hands.
- They have adopted organizational forms based on the family with new, stable and complex forms of extended family relationships.
- Not only is patriarchy breaking down but there is a feminization of the movement – not just women in men’s roles. In Bolivia “the political exists not so much in the streets but in the more intimate sphere of markets and households, spaces in which women undoubtedly dominate.”
- ‘It is not only teachers who teach but… the whole movement itself is an educating space.’
- In production they seek self-sufficiency and diversification of products, distribution venues, skills and roles within the process.
- Health movements are recovering lost knowledge and eliminating the passive, dependent “patient” relationship.
This article gives an interesting perspective. Read it and respond by applying the information in the book:
Reclaiming Our Imaginations from ‘There Is No Alternative’
We live in a time of heavy fog. A time when, though many of us dissent and resist, humanity seems committed to a course of collective suicide in the name of preserving an economic system that generates scarcity no matter how much is actually produced. To demand that all have enough to eat on a planet that grows enough food, that absurd numbers of people do not die from preventable disease, that utter human deprivation amongst plenty is not tolerated, or that we put the natural laws of the biosphere above socially constructed economic “laws” — is presented as unrealistic, as the fantasy of idealists or those who are naive to the “complexity” of the world’s problems. If we create and recreate the world everyday, then how has it become so supposedly absurd to believe we might actually create a world that is honestly making the possibilities of egalitarianism, justice and democracy?