Latin America Is Moving Collective seeks to explore the construction of radically new worlds grounded in the work of Latin American social movements. The global health crisis has revealed the wounds left by decades of neoliberal expropriation in health, education and labour rights, reinforcing inequalities based on gender, race, class and geographical location. Is the “new normal” a way to establish a new capitalist hegemony, or are there possibilities for imagining and practising other worlds?

In this enquiry, Latin America is Moving Collective’s work aligns with the proposals that come from below, from feminist and ecological collectives to movements enhancing Buen Vivir and post-extractivism.

As highlighted by Arturo Escobar in his opening speech for the Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, these proposals construct collective imaginaries that build a future based on caring for life. Their vision includes relocating alimentation back to communities and local agents, recommunalizing, depatriarchalising, deracialising and decolonising, all of which require redefining the meaning of progress, well-being and happiness (Escobar 2020).

What Latin American social movements and the new activism show is that the heterogeneity of experiences and intergenerational differences instruct us to avoid constructing metanarratives that pretend to encapsulate all world experiences into polarising opposites. As Escobar proclaims, today, moving toward realising multiple reals/possibles is the best antidote against globalocentric thinking (2020).

In support of the calls from below, we offer a series of events open to everyone, and where we hope to generate ideas on how to best contribute to the processes of bringing about radical social change in Latin America, but also at home, as decolonisation is not only confined to the subaltern.

Decolonising ourselves means that envisaging a post-COVID society is not solely reduced to a new set of economic policy toolboxes. We all can weave other worlds through our designs and daily practices (Escobar 2020). While we may not answer all the critical questions raised by collectives demands on the spot, we hope to start thinking about alternatives by getting acquainted with activists’ struggles. We move through trials and errors, and experimenting is better than no action at all.

The COVID19 is fundamentally a crisis of care work and social reproduction, showing that what is at stake is how we care for each other (Féliz 2020). For a long time, the colonial patriarchal division of the public and the private has relegated female labour done in the private sphere of the home as invisible, at the same time making female bodies expendable, as demonstrated by the continuing violence against women and femicide.

The invisibilization of the labour of women tends to be more extenuated in extractive zones. As a response, women have come to hold a central role in today’s social struggles in Latinoamerica, in collective auto-organization, and leading popular and middle-class struggles. Whereas calls for basic income can partially compensate for the labour that has been rendered invisible in the private space of the home, in addition to it, we seek to look beyond economic necessities and commodification of life to propose a reorientation towards placing care at the centre of societal value.

We live in times when giving time to capital is more celebrated than giving time for care, for ourselves and others, in its emotional and physical forms. In exploring our relationship with care, how may “freedom” be transformed into “caring for life”?

While the progressive governments of the Pink Tide accomplished noticeable reductions in poverty and modest inequality reductions, the many policies aimed at diminishing inequalities and expanding social inclusion never questioned Latin American dependency and extractive activities. They did not make any structural break with neoliberal policies, nor with capitalist reproduction.

The policies promoted by the 21st-century political leaders were based on conventional development strategies organized around the extraction of natural resources and the super-exploitation of labour (both paid and unpaid).

While movements towards Buen Vivir succeeded in establishing the rights of nature in Ecuador and Bolivia’s legislation, they could not avoid being subordinated by the developmental paradigm. The human/nature divide implicit in the state ethical code may well provide a philosophical debate yet to be transcended for the ecological aspect of the pact inherent in the rights of nature to be able to deliver.

The academic critique on the continuing extractivism of the progressive governments nonetheless may ignore the imperialist dimension of capitalism and even consolidate a new wave of authoritarian right-wing power. In the aftermath of the governments of the Pink Tide, the pandemic has become the perfect excuse for increasing social control, especially in ‘hotspots’ in popular neighbourhoods where social movements ferment alternatives, and security forces have regained control of the streets (Féliz 2020). The state context that has left little room to critique the dominant imperial relations has enabled resumption to mining during lockdown to happen at an incredible speed, exposing workers to more significant numbers of contagions in many places.

A post-COVID social change needs to go beyond conventional extractivism and progressive neo-extractivism, which share the appropriation of nature to feed economic growth. As Eduardo Gudynas has argued, any alternative to development must deal with extractivism and promote a post-extractivist plan that will break and overcome dependency and imperialist imperatives.

Depending on the criticism, the above does not necessarily suggest a ban on all extractive industries, but rather, a massive decrease whereby the only industries left operating are those that are essential, directly linked to national and regional economic chains, and meet social and environmental conditions.

Will the crisis open space for the Pink Tide governments to be back, and to what extent will they break the cycle of extractivism? What role do social movements and autonomous communities have in these debates?

Whereas the progressive governments of the Pink Tide placed inclusion at the centre of their political rhetoric, the consolidation of right-wing politics after the demise of the Pink Tide have extenuated the racialisation of injustice. In Peru, deadly confrontations between environmental activists, indigenous communities, and state forces have occurred even during the celebrated “Indigenous Day”, exposing capitalism’s racialised dynamics.

As opposed to many neoliberal state implemented intercultural projects, the fight against Terricide means that any fruitful discussion of interculturality must also mean going beyond treating the Earth as a resource. Thus, the question is not on how to include, integrate, assimilate or accommodate, indigenous peoples into the state, but how the state can engage with the indigenous vision to transform itself (Merino 2015).

Interculturality must also look into cities where the pandemic has revealed the importance of communitarian practices and the value of autonomy. Trueque, exchanging goods considered of the same value, have served communities during the lockdown. Barrios populares, asentamientos (humanos) or villas in the city have seen a surge of ollas comunes, common food pots made by women to take care of the rising poverty caused by the economic crisis.

However, the resilient economic and social practices are not to be mistaken as “alternative economies” but as practices covering immediate needs. They rise out of the very behaviour of capitalism that creates people excludable from protection. While some people were repatriated overseas, parts of the excludable class living in large cities’ outskirts were forced to migrate back to their natal villages on foot. Not everyone survived the walk.

The surge of the commons during crises signals nonetheless how spaces of care are paramount for weaving collective visions from below, forming part of the “creative poetics” that occurs in marginal neighbourhoods (Petropoulou 2018). In Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s estimation, the co-existence of multiple realities in Latin American cities has always been there. The narrative of “progress” has ignored this vitality.

Taking the city factor into account, how can we design cities that place the commons and spaces of care at the centre rather than at the margins of social organisation?

Latin America is Moving seminar sessions aim to provide a space for prefiguring new knowledge production by reflecting on our engagement methods. There can be no discourse of decolonization, no theory of decolonization, without a decolonizing practice (Cusicanqui 2012).

• How can we bring people into conversation with our representations to serve the communities we study in partnership.

• Looking inwards, despite the surge of attention given to activism and care in academia, we often listen to the same voices, providing little room to the people we pretend to speak for. How can academia’s ethical command be transformed into more caring, which works towards common goals instead of individual credentials? How can we articulate knowledge production from within/without the movements in a way that avoids “academic extractivism”?

• We propose the seminar sessions as a space for self-reflection, developing new tools that may also deal with the emotional aspects entailed in witnessing a rapidly changing world.

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THE RONDAS CAMPESINAS: THE ROLE OF CIVIL SOCIETY IN CONTROLLING COVID-19

Accion y Reaccion Blog de Eduardo Gudynas

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