[Presentation to the International forum on Interculturality and
Development, Uribia, Colombia, 23 of May 2009]
By Mónica Chuji G. [Translated from Spanish by Bob Thomson,
Ottawa, 21 July 2009]
As we all know, at the beginning of March 2007, the subprime
mortgage investment fund Bear Stearns collapsed and gave rise to one
of the deeper financial and economic crises of recent decades. This
happened in the world-wide economy and it seems pertinent to me to
our discussions of the problems of globalisation, development and
interculturality to mention this fact.
Indeed, the world-wide crisis originated in the richest countries
comprising the G7, and has required the intervention of the State to
avoid the collapse of global financial markets. In these two year and
a half years since the outbreak of the crisis, the countries of the
G7 have allocated nearly 5 trillion dollars to the financial markets
and have recognized the necessity of establishing better mechanisms
of regulation and financial control.
However, five trillion dollars is too great an amount to even be
imagined. In 2007, the gross national product of the United States
was 13.86 trillion dollars. We can imagine then that in these two
years, the financial markets were allocated around 40% of the amount
of the total wealth of the United States.
It is a paradox of the times that the amount needed to overcome
world-wide poverty and to fulfill the Millenium Development Goals of
the United Nations for the poorest countries is not even 100 billion
dollars, an insignificant fraction in relation to that allocated to
save the world-wide financial system. The amounts to reduce poverty
in Africa are even more modest, not even 55 billion dollars. In the
same vein, to equip the poorest population of Latin America with
basic services a small fraction of the resources that were destined
to the financial markets would have been needed. In fact, in the USA,
the Bush administration vetoed legislation to give free health care
to children, in a program that would cost around 6 billion dollars.
The argument of the Bush administration was that there were no
resources to finance this program of public health. Days later, the
same Bush administration was exerting pressure on the US Congress to
allocate trillions of dollars to salvage the banks.
These facts seem to me pertinent because they allow us to clarify
the distance between the speeches and the realities of power, and at
the same time demonstrate that much of this discourse is no more than
a mechanism of ideological and epistemologic colonization, rather
than a discourse that has some social and scientific validity. I want
to talk especially about the discourse of globalisation.
During the two last decades we have been witnesses to the form by
which the discourse on globalisation has been constructed in a way
which has narrowed the horizon of human possibilities to the
coordination of markets and economic agents. States, the system of
the United Nations, international development cooperation, the
multilateral institutions, all of them, began to think, speak and
operate based on globalisation, the efficiency of markets, and
poverty as a strictly economic phenomenon associated with
consumption. However, we see that reality constructed from the
discourse of globalisation finally failed and is leading humanity to
an unprecedented crisis. Nevertheless, the discourses seem not to be
affected by this reality. There is a world-wide crisis that has
forced humanity to undertake an enormous exercise to save the banks,
because the five trillion dollars are a bill that we will all have to
pay in the end, but the speeches and the ideas keep pouring out as if
nothing had happened.
If globalisation failed, if the markets failed, it would be
normal, in any circumstance, that the speeches that legitimized and
sustained globalisation and the markets, should begin to change and
recognize the world-wide crisis. But we continue speaking of
globalisation as if nothing had changed in recent years. As if the
crisis was a circumstantial and limited phenomenon in few countries
and as if the invoice of five trillion has nothing to do with us.
This attitude of theoretical / ideological colonialism has an ethical
side: we continue as if it were absolutely normal that five trillion
dollars are spent to save the banks and we did not bother to spend a
cent to overcome poverty, discrimination, violence.
For this reason, to speak of globalisation, when the entire world
is suffering the perverse consequences of the markets, seems to me
more an act of cynicism and collusion with power. Thus, I consider it
pertinent that we begin to maintain critical distance from these
discourses which legitimize power. The world-wide crisis is
demonstrating to us that a system which decides to protect markets
over the human beings who belong to it is a sick system, a system
that must be relegated to history.
The world-wide crisis allows me to put into perspective another
subject that seems important and that has a long life in modern
discourse: the discourse of development. I think that globalisation
and the crisis are the manifestation of something deeper and that
make reference to the very essence of the system. It is the notion
that man is separated from nature and must use nature and other human
beings as tools to achieve egotistical (individual) aims. This use of
nature, with no ethical consideration, is seen as absolutely
pragmatic, and is central to modern beings. This dimension of egoism
and individuality, is also central to modern beings. In the
Nineteenth century the utopia of this modern being was born in the
form of progress.
The ideology of progress has been shown to be perverse. Wars and
the concentration camps constituted a closing of the discourse on
progress, but not of the idea of progress. This idea transformed into
the modern notion of development. Nevertheless, development is as
perverse as was the idea of progress in its time. I want to remark on
two dimensions of the perversity of the discourse on development: the
first makes reference to the relation of man with nature that in the
discourse on development is purely instrumental and that now
threatens to become a problem of survival of the human species. The
second dimension makes reference to the subordination of ethics to
economic growth: if to grow in economic terms it is necessary to wipe
out the surface of the planet down to the last tree, the notion of
development has no obstacles.
For that reason we needed to overcome notions of modernization,
development and economic growth with a form of life that is
convivial, respectful and harmonious. We indigenous people have that
knowledge, we have that practice, we have that legacy that comes from
our ancestors, and we want it to share with all. It is called sumak
kawsay which translated into English is the good life or life in
harmony.
Little by little, the concept of sumak kawsay has begun to emerge
from the invisibility to which it was subjected for more than five
centuries. Sumak kawsay is the alternative to progress, development,
modernity. It is a notion that wants to recover that harmonious
relation between human beings and their surroundings. Between
humanity and its fellows.
Sumak kawsay is not a return to the past, nor to the age of stone
or of caves, and it does not deny either technology nor modern
knowledge, as the promoters of Capitalism have argued. Sumak kawsay
is part of the debate on our destiny that societies and human beings
must have in the future. For sumak kawsay the fundamental thing is
human beings, not markets nor the industrialist's eagerness for
economic growth. For this reason, sumak kawsay states that to leave
the productivist/industrial vision we must enter a process of
decrease in the production of things, to enter a process of measured
human growth, not in terms of things, but in human terms. In that
context indigenous nationalities and peoples need to reclaim our
self-determination, to deepen and to extend the practices of living
well into society.
The planet is sick. The jungles, the forests, the rivers, the
mountains, are agonizing. The model that we have created, the model
of development, growth of markets, competitive individualism, of
globalisation of markets, is leading us to an environmental
catastrophe of unpredictable consequences. I'd like to exaggerate,
but the data tells us that levels of environmental pollution have
begun to reach critical and irreversible levels. Beside the
environmental catastrophe is the human catastrophe that the present
system is producing: poverty, inequality, violence, confrontation.
The system can give no more. It is exhausting its historical
possibilities and it is now that we must begin to think about
alternatives. Living Well, as part of a Plurinational State, is the
alternative to avoid the human and environmental catastrophe of
Capitalism.
This allows me to finish with a thought on interculturality on a
different plane: that of civilizing dialog. I believe that
interculturality must be put in a framework to find bridges in the
transition between civilizactions. That is to say, interculturality
must be the form by which we conserve the best of this system, to be
journeying towards a new system that surpasses Capitalism and
modernity in a definitive way. Seen this way, interculturality
becomes one of the most convenient forms to overcome development and
journey towards sumak kawsay.
Interculturality must open that civilizing dialog. It must help
our understanding of the ethical values of modernity that can be
rescued with those ethical values of indigenous people and nations.
It must become a challenge to humanity to solve the problems that
confront it.
Interculturality must be the base from which to begin that dialog
of knowledge with a view to, literally, save humanity from Capitalism
and modernity. This may sound utopian, but utopia is one of the most
beautiful values of modernity. It is necessary to rescue those values
and to begin that work of all of us, in which we go about, as the
Ecuadorian indigenous leader Dolores Cacuango said, seeding Paramo
straw in the world, because this straw, no matter how uprooted,
returns to grow.
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