[[Pluriversal Politics_ The Real and the Possible — Arturo Escobar — Latin America in Translation, 2020 — Duke University Press — 9781478007937 — 442404d3bd55adc136e3a858e86a4ea8 — Anna’s Archive.pdf]]

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On the Possibility of Articulating Ontological and Modernist Forms of Politics Can modernist politics contribute to fostering a pluriversal politics? This seems to be a key issue related to ontological politics, and it takes several forms, all of them important. Can modernist forms of politics aimed at fostering radical social change (say, in relation to heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism) be effective in resisting social injustices, potentially in tandem with pluriversal forms of politics? Or are they necessarily at odds? Do not the very people engaging in pluriversal ontological politics, such as those defending communal and autonomous worlds, also participate in modernist politics, for example, vis-à-vis the state? Can we moderns play a role in the politics of the pluriverse? While I do provide some partial answers to these questions in this volume, and in other recent books (2014b, 2018), given their recurrence, I would like to offer some brief additional comments. I do not think there is a way to settle this dispute once and for all; it will remain an open question.

Ontological Politics as Pluriversal Politics Let me start with a straightforward statement: I believe multiple ways exist for those of us who operate on the basis of modernist politics to contribute to pluriversal politics even if not embracing ontological politics explicitly—for instance, modernist struggles for economic democratization, for depatriarchalization and the end of racism and homophobia, for environmental justice, and academic critiques. A substantial amount of resistance to injustices and inequities fits the bill. That said, it is also important to recognize that many modernist forms of politics are counterproductive in relation to pluriversal politics; they reproduce and strengthen, rather than undermine, the modernist ontology of separation from which they stem. This is especially the case with liberal forms. Adapting a broad typology of forms of politics drawn from the field of international development (explained in chapter 6), I would propose a three-layered characterization to sort out and evaluate the field of political strategies. The first layer comprises political strategies and designs conducted in the name of progress and the improvement of people’s conditions; these are the standard biopolitical liberal forms of design and politics, such as those by most neoliberal governments, the World Bank, and mainstream NGOs. They take for granted the dominant world (in terms of markets, individual actions, productivity, competitiveness, the need for economic growth, etc.); taken as a whole, they can only reinforce the universals of modernity and their accompanying capitalist institutions with their strategies of domination, control, violence, and war; they are inimical to pluriversal politics. The second layer comprises political strategies and designs for social justice: this is the kind of politics practiced with the intention of fostering greater social justice and environmental sustainability; it embraces human rights (including gender, sexual, and ethnic diversity), environmental justice, the reduction of inequality, direct alliances with social movements, and so forth. Some progressive development NGOs, such as Oxfam, and a number of social movements, might serve as a paradigm for this second trajectory. In principle, these forms of politics may contribute to pluriversal politics, especially if they are pushed toward the third trajectory. The third option would be pluriversal politics proper, or political strategies and designs for pluriversal transitions. Those practicing this option would engage in ontological politics from the perspective of radical interdependence. In doing so, they would go beyond the binary of modernist and pluriversal politics, engaging all forms of politics in the same, though diverse, movement for civilizational transitions through meshworks of autonomous collectives and communities from both the Global North and the Global South.5 No readily available models exist for this third kind of politics, although it is the subject of active experimentation by many social struggles at present. How these kinds of politics might initiate rhizomatic expansions from below, effectively relativizing modernity’s universal ontology and the imaginary of one world that it actively produces, is an open question in contemporary social theory and activist debates. Let me underscore that many activists and groups move in and out of the three types of politics just outlined. Even highly politicized social movements, such as those by ethnic, peasant, and urban marginal groups, engage in actions and critiques that can easily be qualified as modernist—for instance, in their critiques of inequality, corruption, and dispossession in the name of rights, culture, access to land and public services, and so forth. Readers will recognize such instances in the statements by some of the Afro-descendant and indigenous actors featured in the various chapters. In this way, their practice could be described as modernist, Left, and pluriversal at the same time. At their best, they engage in the interplay of politics from the perspective of their autonomy and through collective decision-making processes. I do not want to suggest, however, that all resistance by these groups is explicitly ontological or pluriversal. Those committed to one or another form of leftist politics and alternative modernity can usefully consider the following questions, among others: What habitual forms of knowing, being, and doing does a given strategy contribute to challenge, destabilize, or transform? For instance, does the strategy or practice in question help us in the journey of deindividualization and toward recommunalization? Does it contribute to bringing about more local forms of economy that might, in turn, provide elements for designing the infrastructures needed for a responsible ethics of interexistence and the deep acceptance of radical difference? Does it make us more responsive to the notions of multiple reals and a world where many worlds fit? Does this shift encourage us to entertain other notions of the possible, significantly different from those on offer by capitalism, the state, the media, and most expert institutions? To what extent do our efforts to depatriarchalize and decolonize society move along the lines of liberating the Earth and weaving the pluriverse effectively with others, human and not? The fact is that we all live within the Earth as pluriverse; we weave the pluriverse together with every existing being through our daily practices. We are all summoned to the task of repairing the Earth and the pluriverse, one stitch at a time, one design at a time, one loop at a time, so to speak (Escobar 2018). Some of our stitches and loops will likely contribute to the web of relations that sustain life, others less so or not at all. Our collective weaving of a place, including a form of habitation, is a major part of it. We are summoned by place into entanglements with each other and with nonhumans, whether in conflict or cooperation or both, as all of us, willy-nilly, live in coexistence with multiple others through intricate relations that define our very way of being, even if most often we imagine those relations as weak links from which we can easily disassociate ourselves. As the geographers Soren Larsen and Jay Johnson (2017) put it in their work on the contested nature of places and landscapes in which Native and non-Native peoples coexist, this confers on place a political and spiritual dimension, which I believe can and needs to be struggled over in urban territories as well (Escobar 2019). This agency of place and the pluriverse—that they call us into coexistence with others—suggests that pluriversal politics itself involves an entanglement of forms, inhabiting a spectrum from the radically relational to the modernist liberal, and that we are all, ineluctably, part of it. Seen this way, the seemingly firm boundaries between the Global North and the Global South, and between what might be considered modern or not, weaken significantly and, eventually, begin to dissolve. Succinctly put, the struggle to reinhabit the pluriverse is everyone’s. As we will learn from the Nasa indigenous movement in Colombia (chapter 3), we are all thrust into the liberation of Mother Earth from whichever place and position we happen to occupy, for as long as Earth is enslaved, as the Nasa argue, so are all living beings.

Pluriversal Politics and the Left A second important question is that of the relation between ontological politics and the Left. The election of Hugo Chávez as president of Venezuela in December 1998 inaugurated a period of progressive governments in the continent that lasted until about 2015, when a turn to the right again manifested in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, among others. According to the United Nations, the progressive governments accomplished noticeable reductions in poverty and modest reductions in inequality. However, their policies were based on utterly conventional development strategies, modernizing to their core, organized around the extraction of natural resources. For some observers, despite the reported accomplishments, these experiences demonstrated the limitations of achieving significant transformations within any modernizing Left framework (see Escobar 2010 for a review). It might be the case, however, that taken as a whole, modernist-leftist policies create less inimical conditions for pluriversal politics than neoliberal right-wing regimes==, which, in Latin America at least, are often bent on brutally crushing any form of dissent and resistance. Mexico and Colombia are, sadly, notorious cases in this regard. ==Pluriversal and leftist politics could be mutually enabling, though this convergence cannot be taken for granted, as exemplified by the repression of environmentalist and indigenous organizations in Ecuador and Bolivia under their respective Left governments. It is also the case that in their practice many social movements blur the boundaries between counterhegemonic and ontological politics. Drawing on Audre Lorde’s (1984) well-known provocation (“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”), one might say that counterhegemonic politics use the master’s tools to push radical demands forward, to the system’s breaking point, if possible. This might involve modernist practices such as claiming rights, using legal instruments (such as the Indigenous and Tribal Peoples Convention, ILO 169, which has been used adroitly by indigenous peoples and ethnic minorities, albeit with mixed results), negotiating political rights with the state, and so on. Strategies of this sort make counterhegemonic use of hegemonic tools with varying degrees of effectiveness (Santos 2007).6 For these strategies to move along the lines of pluriversal politics, nevertheless, they must take on an explicitly political ontological character. In the spirit of Lorde’s revolutionary imperative, this would imply, as maintained by some black and Latina/o scholars, broadening the parameters of change so as to articulate their anticapitalistic and antiracist stance with languages and strategies that push beyond the dominant ontologies==. From this perspective, it should be clear that ==principles of struggle such as autonomy, territory, communality, and care cannot easily be accommodated within actually existing Left discourses; while much can be done to advance these causes through counterhegemonic strategies, they also require an explicit ontological framing that advances the principles of interdependence and relationality.7

Pluriversal Politics in Actually Existing Communities I deal in passing in these essays with the criticisms about the plausibility of pluriversal politics, particularly as compared with better-known Left strategies. These critiques are addressed to perspectives that are perceived as too localist and not infrequently take the form of charges of romanticism (see, e.g., Gibson-Graham 2002, for a countercritique). Emotions run high in these exchanges. I will not rehearse my responses here (see chapter 1; Escobar 2014a, 2018), but I would like to add some elements from the perspective of the previous discussion. Let me start by rearticulating the question, or rather questions: Is pluriversal politics a workable horizon for action? Is the construction of autonomous spaces from below sufficient to even make a dent in the global capitalist system of domination? We speak about recommunalization as essential to pluriversal politics, but are not communal logics central to the subordination of women and youth? Do the struggles in question really embody other principles of being, knowing, and doing, as ontological politics claims? Or, on the contrary, are they not mired in internal conflict and contradiction, thus too vulnerable to external threats and repression to have a chance of success? Are they not often reinscribed into modernist frameworks by their all-toopowerful adversaries, particularly the intolerant heteropatriarchal and economistic norms of capital and the state? Are not the territories of difference and the zads (zones à défendre, or zones to defend) liable to being reoccupied materially and ontologically by the powers that be?8 At the heart of these questions are the criteria for assessing the effectivity of diverse forms of politics and resistance. Thinking in terms of articulations, alliances, convergences, bridge building among systemic alternatives, and rhizomic and meshwork processes of connection among antisystemic movements is but a starting point. Positing the possibility of articulations among transformative alternatives, however, is essential for conveying the idea that, at times at least, they might be able to make a dent in the structures of devastation and oppression. This kind of thinking—along with a critical reassessment of well-known notions of rescaling, the nature of structural change, global/local binaries, and so forth—is crucial so that antisystemic alternatives are not dismissed as unviable, ineffective, place-specific, small, unrealistic, or noncredible alternatives to what exist. Ideas and movements aiming toward the convergence of alternatives endeavor to drive this point across. The geographers Gibson-Graham have exposed the capitalocentric and globalocentric nature of a great deal of the critique of place-based alternatives. Most of these critics, whether Marxists or poststructuralists, they suggest, “do not see themselves as powerfully constituted by globalization. The realists see the world as taken over by global capitalism, the new Empire. The deconstructionists see a dominant discourse of globalization that is setting the political and policy agenda. In different ways, they both stand outside globalization, and see it ‘as it is’—yet the power of globalization seems to have colonized their political imaginations” (2002, 34, 35). As I explain in chapter 1, this modernist and masculinist political thinking, which ineluctably disempowers the local and place based by locating the decisive power to change things in the global, depends on the ontological assumption of the existence of a one-world world, one real, and one possible. I am not saying that all those who adhere to modernist leftist politics fall into this globalocentric trap; very often, they also endorse progressive politics of place. I am suggesting, however, that the very question of the political effectiveness of a given movement or strategy is laden with discursive operations and emotional attachments that need to be made explicit as part of the process of making up our minds about it. Moving toward the realization of multiple reals/possibles is the best antidote against globalocentric thinking; it enables us to consider the power of the place based and of local becoming in new forms, perhaps envisioning what Gibson-Graham imaginatively called a homeopathic politics, that of healing multiple locals through communal economies and logics connecting with each other into diffuse, constitutive, and sustaining forms of translocal meshworked power. Telling this story is perhaps not as thrilling as recounting the saga of the great capitalist machine and its potential overthrow, but it is one to which more and more groups seem committed. As Gibson-Graham put it, “The judgment that size and extensiveness are coincident with power is not simply a rational calculation in our view but also a discursive choice and emotional commitment… . Communities can be constituted around difference, across places, with openness to others as a central ethics… . New forms of community are to be constructed through cultivating the communal capacities of individuals and groups and, even more importantly, cultivating the self as a communal subject” (2002, 51, 52). In the last instance, it is a matter of cultivating ourselves as theorists and practitioners of multiple possibles, even as we alternate between diverse types of strategy. What practices of resubjectivation are needed for actively and effectively desiring nonpatriarchal, noncapitalist, and deeply relational modes of being, knowing, and doing? In other words, we need to disidentify ourselves actively with capitalism, masculinism, colonial, and racist practices and with the ontologies of separation that are an integral part of most, if not all, forms of oppression in the world today. One might call this disidentification, following the Mexican feminist sociologist Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar (2017), a politics in the feminine: one centered on the reproduction of life as a whole, along the care–conservation axis, in tandem with the social reappropriation of collectively produced goods (postcapitalism), and beyond the masculinist canons of the political linked to capital accumulation and the state. Or one might speak of it, with the Argentinean anthropologist Rita Segato (2016), as a politics that ends the “minoritization” of women that has accompanied the decommunalization (radical individuation) of modern worlds, in favor of a recommunalizing autonomous politics that reclaims the “ontological fullness” of women’s worlds. For Segato, patriarchal masculinist ontologies, with their foundational binary matrix, not only represent “the first and permanent pedagogy of expropriation of value and its subsequent domination” (2016, 16) but continue to be at the basis of most forms of violence and predatory accumulation. They can only result in a “pedagogy of cruelty” functional to the deepening of dispossession. This ontological mandate has to be dismantled by building on the relational and communal practices that still inhabit, albeit in fragmentary and contradictory ways, many Afro-Latin American, indigenous, peasant, and urban marginal worlds. Let us listen to Segato’s conclusion before broaching the notion of a radical rupture from the metaphysical structure of modernity (2016, 106): We need to remake our ways of living, to reconstruct the strong links existing in communities with the help of the “technologies of sociability” commanded by women in their domains; these locally rooted practices are embedded in the dense symbolic fabric of an alternative cosmos, dysfunctional to capital, and proper of the pueblos (peoples) in their political journey that have allowed them to survive throughout five hundred years of continued conquest. We need to advance this politics day by day, outside the state: to reweave the communal fabric as to restore the political character of domesticity proper of the communal… . To choose the relational path is to opt for the historical project of being community… . It means to endow relationality and the communal forms of happiness with a grammar of value and resistance capable of counteracting the powerful developmentalist, exploitative, and productivist rhetoric of things with its alleged meritocracy. La estrategia a partir de ahora es femenina [the strategy, from now on, is a feminine one] (my emphasis). This is a feminist and radical relational politics I fully endorse.