(Julia Carleton/The Phoenix)
On Tuesday evening, Mexican activist Gustavo Esteva told the audience packed into Science Center 101 for his lecture “Beyond Development and Globalization” that it is impossible to change the world. For a man who has served as an advisor to the Zapatistas since 1996, won Mexico’s National Prize for Political Economy, and served as president for the 5th World Rural Sociology Conference and the Mexican Society of Planning, this outlook seems especially bleak. However, after an hour and a half long exploration of grassroots movements, the nature of anarchy and the concept of “buen vivir,” or living well, he offered the Swarthmore community an alternate solution: to build from the bottom up and create new worlds in a time when frustration with governemnt and institutions is at an historic high.
Esteva, whose political ideology has evolved across a wide continuum throughout his lifetime, advocated a turning away from traditional power structures within society, suggesting a turn instead to the collective power of smaller-scale communities in an increasingly globalized era. “Power is usually perceived as a thing which some people have and some people don’t,” Esteva said on Tuesday. “That’s why you’re talking about empowerment … we cannot cheat power that way. It is not a thing … power is always a relation and what you can do is change that specific relation.” As an example, he pointed to recent marches in Greece, where students have turned their faces away from the authorities to salute the people instead.
The concept of creating new societies where reform has proven ineffective is one Esteva first encountered in 1996, at a Zapatista rally with some 6,000 activists from 70 countries. The Zapatista Army of National Liberation, or EZLN, is a primarily nonviolent, leftist group based in Southern Mexico. It is composed of mostly rural indigenous people seeking autonomy from the state and to reclaim natural resources seized by the government. “[The Zapatistas said] we are not here to change the world. [That is] something that is very difficult and impossible. We are here to create a whole new world … and we discovered that they are right, it is impossible to change the world,” Esteva said.
Esteva refers to reorganizing from the ground up as radical democracy, which operates not as a struggle for representation within the given political system but instead subverts traditional power structures and creates new ones. This kind of reorganization goes against 200 years of political ideology built on the premise that people cannot govern themselves, and must therefore be subject to an elite ruling few, according to Esteva. “Buen Vivir,” or “living well,” appears to manifest many of the ideals of radical democracy in South America by emphasizing the process of recreating a society instead of attempting reform. People embodying “buen vivir” attempt to implement change directly into their own lives, instead of waiting for an institution to bring change to them. An aspect of this lifestyle is reclaiming language, and using verbs which transfer agency from an outside force to the people. Instead of referring to “education,” for example, Esteva suggests thinking of “learning,” which we ultimately direct in our own lives. “We have been too busy critiquing this world, which is falling apart, to imagine the alternatives,”Esteva said.
With suggestions ranging from a reclaiming of the language of agency to creating a self-sustaining food source to investing in composting toilets, Esteva illustrated the ways in which people can take their lives and organize them on a more human scale. Citing La Via Campesina, an organization founded in 1993 and alternatively known as “The Peasant’s Voice,” he emphasized the ability of ordinary men and women to come together and make substantial changes in their lives. Now present in 140 different countries and grown to include some 800 million people, La Via Campesina’s conviction “that small farmers, including peasant fisher-folk, pastoralists and indigenous people, who make up almost half the world’s people, are capable of producing food for their communities and feeding the world in a sustainable and healthy way,” as stated on the organization’s website, illustrates the power of solidarity and localized reform in creating substantial change. This movement, which also focuses on issues of gender equality, is one which is beginning to carry over to urban settings in America, according to Esteva.
So where does anarchy come into play? Although Esteva shied away from explicitly defining the word, the necessity of reconsidering it was apparent. For him, anarchy, long equated with chaos, disorder, and violence by the general public, instead provides an example of men and women coming together to create their own system of self-government – a concept very much rooted in the American dream and the spirit of friendship. This system of organization relates closely to grassroots movements, which embody the spirit of small-scale reform. Anarchy, then, can be seen not as throwing off all forms of order, but of shucking the oppression of institutionalized order and creating relationships and systems of living which reflect the autonomy of a group of individuals.
Swarthmore Spanish Professor Aurora Camacho de Schmidt, who is a citizen of Mexcio, found Esteva to be “right on the money” in his conviction that the necessary way to move forward is through localized rebuilding. “As a Mexican citizen living in the United States, and looking at Mexico from afar, I ask ‘where is the hope?’” Schmidt said following the lecture. “And I think the most important issue is coming to where [Esteva] is … that there is hope in the mobilization of their own tools, and creating a life the size of their own bodies … I think grassroots mobilization is the only way Mexicans can protect themselves.”
Naomi Glassman ‘12 found Esteva’s focus on “Buen Vivir” to be especially engaging, as that was one of the focuses on her semester abroad in Ecuador during her junior year at Swarthmore. “I was interested by the treatment of indigenous populations as a last frontier alternative to capitalism, while still accepting the framework of a globalized world, [in particular] the focus on food sovereignty as a critical form of self sufficiency,” Glassman said. Although she liked “a lot of his ideas and the way he thinks outside the dominant framework,” Glassman thought his discussion lacked a coherent thesis. While Esteva certainly fit a lot of content into a single lecture session, his passion for his topic and his solutions to the more negative aspects of an increasingly globalized era were refreshing and poignant. “The world is falling apart before our eyes,” he said. “We need a change. But people don’t jump blindly into the unknown unless they have hope. What we need to do is nourish their hope.”
