In this June 4 "Edges in the Middle" discussion OBI Global Senior Fellow Bayo Akomolafe engages with author, sociologist, and environmentalist Ashish Kothari to discuss the sociomaterial, political, spiritual, and civilizational events shaping our time.
Transcript
Evan Yoshimoto:
Hi everyone, and thank you for joining us today from wherever you are in the world for what is sure to be a riveting conversation between OBI's global senior fellow, Bayo Akomolafe and author, sociologist and environmentalist, Ashish Kothari. My name is Evan Yoshimoto and I'm the head of community of the Democracy and Belonging Forum, joining this conversation today from my home in Berlin, Germany. As the other new Belonging Institute's first ever transatlantic initiative, the forum aims to connect civic leaders in Europe and the US who are committed to bridging across lines of difference while centering the needs and concerns of marginalized groups to counter authoritarian populism. Today we are thrilled to host Bayo and Ashish for a conversation entitled The World Is Not Enough, where there'll be discussing the socio-material, political, spiritual, and civilizational events shaping our time. From the rumored demise of liberalism, the rise of AI, shifts in the global order, numerous environmental crises and international laws failures to rise to the moral occasion of the destruction of Gaza.
They'll be explaining whether this year's events are just about a threat in ideology of belonging, or instead hints at other stories and possibilities. This series entitled The Edges in the Middle will allow Bayo as he puts it, to push away from the safety of secure shores and travel to the edges in the middle where strange frequencies, alien signals, post-human invitations and black noises might be heard. Before we begin, I'd like to thank our wonderful ASL interpreters from Interpret Educate Serve, our captioners from Live Access Media, as well as our comms assistant, Lara Habboub, who is running the tech and communications backstage.
As a reminder, forum members will have the opportunity to reflect on this conversation directly with Bayo and Ashish after this talk, you all should have received an email link to do so. If you haven't, please email me directly and if you enjoy this conversation, I encourage you to sign up for our e-news, which you can find at our website, democracyandbelongingforum.org and follow us on Twitter and Instagram @dnbforum to stay up to date on future conversations like this. And with that, I'll pass the mic on to Bayo to set the stage for this illuminating conversation.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Hello and welcome again to our emergent on the ground exploration of possibilities on a planet that has never been still and is in a bit of some turbulence, to put it mildly, at this point in time. My name remains Bayo Akomolafe, I'm somewhere in California. I've been doing some teaching and traveling, and I'm looking forward especially to the conversation with my dear brother Ashish Kothari today. This has been a long time coming I was just telling him. Ashish is one of the most precise, I'm going to use that word, I don't usually use the word precise as a post-humanist, I'm not quite given to the notions of precision, but I'm going to use that word here. He's one of the most precise minds that I've ever come across. He's an environmentalist, a sociologist and a powerful thinker about politics and pluriverses the idea that we straddle the possibilities, the lines and the eco-tones that hold other worldling projects aloft. There are other worlds that are possible, we don't have to stick true to a single one.
And I met Ashish many years ago. We haven't seen a lot in the years between, but he's here with us and I'm very happy to have him here. But before we get into that, I want to do my usual libations and speak to the themes, the motifs, the topos, the place, the spirits that are here with us and are shaping or will shape this conversation. So, if I haven't said this before or if I haven't said it as often as I need to, welcome to the year 2024, the year of choice. At least, this is the narrative, the dominant narrative that the media houses and journalists are sharing with the people, that the vortices of concerns and the issues and the challenges and the problems facing us as a planet, as a people, will ultimately come down to how people choose their leaders. And as you know in a process that is already on the way, most of the world, more than half of the world of the planet is going to the polls.
I was just telling Ashish in the backstage that we couldn't have chosen a better time to have this conversation right now at the precipice or at the edges of the announcements that are about to be made about the Indian elections, the biggest democracy on the planet. We will talk a little bit about that. But that's not exclusively our focus. We want to disrupt and disturb the idea of choice a little bit. The idea of choice, I mean the metaphysics of choice is fraught with tensions. We're not about to get into a conversation about free will and determinism, but the idea that it comes down to the people, that if only we could choose our leaders, we would have reversed the tide of trouble that faces our planet. That seems to obscure another tension in the room, and that is the concern about how people are being made, right?
It doesn't start from people making choices. We must also notice how people are being made in a time of post-human tensions, in a time when AI is now squarely part of our conversation about electoral politics and how we make choices and how we consume and how we purchase, in a time when it seems that there are other matters at stake with regards to, for instance, the United States elections. It seems choice is misbehaving, that it's not the only thing in the room, and that may be the Democratic project has critical limitations in a multi-species world, a world where we have to deal with the advances in technology, a world in which we have to face squarely viral and microbial and epidemiological concerns and pandemics. We can no longer propagate a story that it's about us simply walking down the path of choice. We must take into consideration that there are other worldling projects that are happening simultaneously as we perform our rituals of choice.
What does this mean for democracy? What does it mean for our paradigms of belonging? What does it mean for how we frame worlds and what is lost in the narrative? In the narrative and the imperatives of framing this year or this time as simply a matter of humans navigating their processes? These are some, and not just all, but some of the questions that we'll be staying with as Ashish and I dive into our umbari. Now, the umbari again, as I like to do, is not an attempt to arrive at a consensus. This is not an attempt to arrive at an agreement.
We are playing with divergences and convergences. We are playing with ways we meet each other. We are not arriving at a final Eurocentric or Euro-American truth. This is not the metaphysics of our conversation. We want to play and touch possibilities and hopefully open up new ways of thinking to move us into new worlds and other places of power. I want to bring up my brother now, Ashish Kothari and welcome him to the room, the stage. He's joining us from Pune, India. Brother, it's good to have you. How are you doing?
Ashish Kothari:
Thank you, Bayo, thank you, Bayo, thanks so much. Wonderful to see you. Even if it's only on-screen, I'm doing well and I think better than I was doing yesterday because like you said something about the Indian elections, so we can get into that. Not that it's great news, but it's certainly better news than we were expecting and we just had our first thunderous rains, so that's pretty good news.
Bayo Akomolafe:
So it's cooler. It's not as hot as it was yesterday.
Ashish Kothari:
Yeah, I mean, at least where I am, I'm right now in Pune just south of Mumbai, and the rains hit earlier this part of the country than of course in North India, and New Delhi and over there. The heat wave is still very, very strong.
Bayo Akomolafe:
It is, it is. Well, speaking about heat waves, Ashish, well, I like the metaphor. It's not a metaphor at all for anyone who's experienced it, but I like the idea and the concept of waves, geological formations that stream above the human and re-territorialize the human, kind of humble us and put us in our place. They say it's not just about you, there are other forces at work, but before we dive into that space together. Ashish, when you look out over the landscape of rituals and performances and electoral enactments, especially in the biggest democracy on the planet.
In a time of genocidal clearings, in a time when the executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change, Simon Stiell announces, and I think he did this in April, that we have two years left. We have two years to get our act together or risk an unprecedented scale of loss. In these times. When you look out over the political landscape over our earthly events, what is your story of where we are now as a species? What is your go-to narrative, your go-to concept that holds the multiplicities of events happening around the planet? How do you frame that with yourself and those around you?
Ashish Kothari:
Well, I think Bayo, you said something about us being in troubled times.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Yeah.
Ashish Kothari:
And if we look at, and I think you mentioned in your opening remarks about this being, we hear the sort of super election year where half the world is going to elections. We've already had South Africa, Mexico, India, and a few others before that coming up with the United States and UK and others. And it seems to be an year in which momentous decisions will be made. Countries will be going one way or the other, right, or left or center, whatever, in terms of their politics. But I think we've got something terribly wrong in terms of if we think that this is actually the epitome of democracy itself.
You mentioned choices. And I think possibly one of the biggest mistakes in terms of choices that we made many decades back was to think that this form of electoral politics where we choose one party to form a government, and then three years later or four years later or five years later, depending on which country you're in, if we don't like that party, we try and bring another party into power. Where we actually willingly give over the power that we are born with, the responsibilities that we are born with to politicians and to bureaucrats that those politicians elect. I'm not even talking about dictators and so on.
We may not do that willingly, but we do do that with our so-called democratic governments. And I think somewhere, 75 years back, or actually a 100 years back, Mahatma Gandhi reminded us that actually decision-making needs to be with us, in our hands, in the hands of us as village communities, as urban neighborhoods, as collectives in whatever form we are. And insofar as we give over that power, which is our birthright, to politicians, it seems to me that this is a very superficial form of democracy. So that's one, and I'd want to get into this a bit more maybe a bit later. So that's one huge sort of a choice that we made where I think there's a big mistake. The second one is, what do we think of ourselves as human beings or as human beings, which are trying to progress or develop in a certain direction?
And this is also a choice that we made perhaps a couple of hundred years back or 500 years back with colonialism, but definitely maybe a few decades back when we brought in the whole project of development, all countries in the world want to develop through economic growth, through greater and greater material use and energy use and so on. To me, this took us into, again, a direction which is a serious mistake. If we were to think of ourselves as human beings, which are within a circle of life, which has not just human beings, but millions of other species, which has the planet, which has the soil, the land, the trees, the rivers, the mountains, everything else that form our home, Oikos as the original Greek word was.
Rather than as a species that can do whatever it wants with the planet and with other species in order to, so-called progress. The consequences of which we are seeing now in terms of the collapse or what you said about scientists talking about we just have two years left. We're seeing the consequence, this is not consequences of just technological mistakes. It's a consequence of the ethical or the directions that we took in terms of what we thought of as human progress and development. And that I think is a second really big, a choice which we made, which is a huge mistake. In both of these things and a number of other elements of course, I think we do have choices to go in different directions.
We have a lot of practice on the ground, which tells us that things can be different. We have a lot of concepts. We are doing Umbari right now. There are similar things all over the world of how people can actually dialogue towards which benefits everybody, every human being, but also every species. And I think we really need to actually dive deep into those and find the systemic transformative alternatives to these two elements that I spoke about. Anyway, so it's just something [inaudible 00:18:08].
Bayo Akomolafe:
Thank you so much, brother, for being so generous. Now, if I were to respond to that question, and I have been responding to that question, I would speak about what I would call embarkation, and the idea of embarkation brings into focus the annals and the stories and the histories of the transatlantic slave theft and how bodies were being spirited away, taken away from their homes. Then I would suggest that those performances of being spirited away, those enactments are not over, they never really quite disappeared. In a sense, we are now being spirited away. Those of us who are framing, belonging within modern civilization are being carried away. This would be my way of troubling the ontology of the category of people. And I think I'm hearing you speak to that as well. That it's never been a stable category, that we are people making choices.
We have to consider that democracy has never lived on its own. It has always seemingly thrived or rather been entangled and imbricated with environmental frameworks, notions of progress and expansionist growth. It has never been by itself. It has always been reworked and modulated and modified within other cosmological concerns about the place of the man within an ecosystem of multi-species projects. So, I am seeking to interrupt the idea that we are merely people. I don't know if this was true, I don't have a lot of data on this, but I hear that there was a lot of AI interference in the politics in India that some politicians used and created videos with artificial intelligence to win the favor of the people to their side.
I'm not exactly sure how rampant this was. But it seems how people are being, peopled is a concern for me. How people are being aroused, how people are being situated, what we eat, what we consume, all of these things are not outside matters. They shape exactly how we become people and what political frontiers now become possible. How would you relate with that brother, that idea?
Ashish Kothari:
I definitely resonate with that Bayo. But I think we need to go, perhaps go back much further. And if you were to really look at some of the, let's say, I mean, you spoke about, let's say slavery, right, of the last 500 years or so. But if we were to go back further, we could possibly say that perhaps the first slavery was that of women by men, patriarchy as possibly being the first colonization, right? Maybe a few thousand years back. And then you build on that.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Way [inaudible 00:21:57].
Ashish Kothari:
Yeah, yeah. Long back, I mean, obviously nobody's ever going to know exactly when, and then you build on that empires well before colonialism. You build on that, kings and rulers and so on trying to invade and conquer other territories. Colonialism builds into that, and you actually see and much more, of course, but you actually see that the category of people or human beings also needs to be understood in a much more nuanced way.
There are humans and there are humans, right?
Bayo Akomolafe:
There you go.
Ashish Kothari:
So there's women and other genders, there's whites and blacks and whatever other, depending on if you look at, so-called races. There's ethnicities and so on. And in that sense, there has been for a long time, not just outright conquest or slavery or colonization, but also the attempt to try and justify that using either religion and God or science, modern science, as justifications for why this is natural. It is natural for men to rule over women. It is natural for human beings to rule over other species. It is natural for Whites to rule over Blacks. It is natural, therefore colonization was completely natural and they needed to come and civilize us, right? Whether we're in Africa or in Asia or back in America. Even the notion of civilization itself emerging as it does from the notion of citizens, cities, urban.
You begin to get hierarchies of various kinds, the urban over the rural, the colonizer over the colonized, genders, etc. And it seems to me that when we actually start nuancing the notion of people and humans and then even beyond that, life, right? Sometimes people ask me, "Are you an Indian?" I say, "Well, look, first I'm a life form, then I'm a human being and then perhaps I think of myself as an Indian. Or then coming down to maybe be a Ghutra [inaudible 00:24:13]." But for me, the first, the most important thing is that I'm a life form and there are other life forms, and if I want to be respected, I should also then be respecting other life forms and then of course beings, etc.
So, when we actually think like this, then what happens is the technologies also obviously are going to be used by those who are trying to impose their will on others. Where power is seen as power over, power to dominate, not power to do something good with, right? So, there can be power over and power with, or power for. There's two different notions of power. And what I'm talking about is first notion of power over, power to dominate. And so, AI or any other previous technologies are actually then developed in a certain way by those who are in power and used in certain ways.
So, in the Indian, it's not just the Indian elections, I think this is across the world now, we're beginning to see all kinds of manipulations, media manipulations, etc. Some very straightforward ones and some using sophisticated technologies like AI to be able to brainwash people, or attempt to brainwash people, to be able to project. I mean, here in India for instance, one of the most dangerous things is how technologies and media are being used to convince the Hindu population that the Muslim population is growing so fast that it's going to overpower and outnumber you very soon. That's the kind of myths that are being built up in order to win elections. And to me, it's actually a fundamental, inevitable component of electoral liberal politics that this kind of manipulation will happen. It's not a distortion, it's part of that, and this is why I say it is an erase of official democracy.
Bayo Akomolafe:
It's part of... Right, right. And it's not a bug, it's a feature, right? The idea that there are certain predispositions that move us and counteract the narrative that it simply begins at the point where we make a choice. Something pre-exists that moment or many things pre-exist that moment and considering those things, it feels a vital move to make. Maybe a broader story to share about these times is that every line that is snaking to a voting booth this year is a philosophical project. We are not just voting in leaders, we are considering the nature of our place in the world, what it means to be human at this time. It cannot be reduced to the act of A or B, the BJP or its opposition, or Trump and Biden, Coke and Pepsi. It goes beyond those seemingly convenient choices.
But Ashish, let's see if we can shift track a little bit. You have invoked this notion of nature already several times and the artifice and the coloniality that has lurked behind our performances of what is natural for a long time, especially to the effect of proliferating dominant patterns, whether it's patriarchy or racism or what I would now call cyber-marinage. But that's a conversation for later, and it involves AI.
My point here is, or my question here is, what other kinds of natures do we obscure or are we losing sight of when we enact the patterns of politics that we're used to today? What is lost? What is missing? What are the forms of power available that you are in touch with? And I know that we've been having conversations with, I mean, Arturo Escobar as well, about pluriverses, that there is more than one world at stake over here. Can you say a little bit about these other worlds, these other concerns? How do you conceptualize the idea of a pluriverse?
Ashish Kothari:
Well, I think, let's just step back a little bit. I think if we were to sort of re-examine the human project and to say that, look, human beings being part of a circle of life, not sort of on top of a biological pyramid, which is what I was taught in biology in school, but we're a circle of life where all species, all life forms, are considered equal in some senses and all have rights, then we would also be questioning many other aspects of what we have taken for granted.
So, development with economic growth, as I've already mentioned, is one of them. And clearly we would then say that, look, if oikos, the original Greek word for home, is at the base of the word economy and ecology and if economy is about managing our home, oikos, ecology is about understanding our home, oikos, then first we need to understand our home before we can manage it well. Which we haven't done. We've separated these two for some reason, neoliberal economics seems to think that environment ecology is sort of outside of, it's an externality as they call it, which is one of the reasons for also the kind of ecological collapses that we are seeing.
And secondly, I think a few years back I wrote about the notion of deadlihoods. Now, what we are seeing in the-
Bayo Akomolafe:
Deadlihoods.
Ashish Kothari:
Yeah. What we're seeing in the sort of transformation of the economy over the last 2, 3, 400 years, we are seeing livelihoods, which were not jobs. These were occupations or work that were connected to the land, to forest, to water, to nature and so-called natural resources, where culture, nature, society, social relations were all bound with each other. I'm not saying they were necessarily ideal. There were lots of inequalities and discriminations there also, but there were livelihoods. It wasn't like 9:00 to 5:00 and then I wait for the weekend desperately, and then I wait for vacations desperately, and then I go off to The Bahamas for my vacation. Very, very new sort of western concept. But it was about, okay, I do work when I want to, but I'm also doing all kinds of other things.
Now, those livelihoods are being destroyed more and more and displaced in the modernizing of our economies and industrialization and development. And what we are creating in their place are, what I call, deadlihoods. Even those who have jobs in the mass production system, like the whole IT sector for instance, people sitting on their computers from 8:00 in the morning till 10:00 P.M. are, what I would call, deadlihoods. Because they might be taking some money back home, but they're non-creative, soul-deadening jobs, right?
Bayo Akomolafe:
Yeah.
Ashish Kothari:
Now, if we were to think of all of that, then what's the alternative, right? So, when you talk about pluriverses, the notion of pluriverse essentially, Bayo, is talking about the fact that we don't have one world. We have many, many worlds. We have inherited, our generations have inherited many worlds, right?
Bayo Akomolafe:
Yes.
Ashish Kothari:
And by that we mean many languages, many cuisines, your food is different from my food, even 100 kilometers away from here there's a different kind of cuisine, many different cultural practices of various kinds, many different religions, faiths or non-faith, ways of believing, many beliefs, knowledge systems and many life forms. And that diversity, that pluralism, is what we would call pluriverse. Now, when we contrast some of these both traditional or new notions with, say, the project of development or economic growth, which is universal right now, we say firstly, there is no such thing as a universal model or pathway that we should be following. That's a huge mistake. You cannot impose universality on a pluriversal world, on a diverse world.
Secondly, that there are hundreds of notions of well-being, not development, but well-being, where you say, "Well-being is for me, happiness, satisfaction, pleasure, autonomy, self-determination, freedom, all of that, but with responsibility towards your freedom, your autonomy, your happiness, your satisfaction." And I say, your, I'm also talking about you could be a tiger or a plant in the Amazon forest or a microorganism, right?
Bayo Akomolafe:
Yes. Yes.
Ashish Kothari:
So, the notion of pluriverse therefore is about a diversity of practices on the ground, how we produce our food, for instance, there are thousands of different ways to do that. But also the world views the notions, the [inaudible 00:33:34], so we have written, Arturo and I and three others actually, wrote a book, edited a book called Pluriverse a few years back in which there's about 100 different such worldviews. There's of course the well-known ones of Ubuntu in Southern Africa, Buen Vivir, Sumak Kawsay, etc. in Latin America, Swaraj in India, Kyosai in Japan, [inaudible 00:33:55] in North America, the notion of country in the Australian Aborigines and many, many, many, many more. And these have all been kind of shoved under the carpet in the last few decades by development as being one universal thing. And this is why it's so important to push for the notion of pluriverses.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Yes, but the political projects of our time aren't calibrated to be sensitive to this pluriversality. It seems it's this mainstream notion that if only we can appear to be good citizens and to abide within this Westphalian, globalized order of belonging, then all is fine. So, that's why we're contesting the dominant narratives of our time that, or if only we can appear to be democratic. I'm from Nigeria and on the surface of things it just had an election and a new president was elected, but everyone who knows anything about that process knows that it was a sham, that it had nothing to do with the people. And that maybe even the idea of a people isn't quite available for the kinds of complexities that are operational in that space that we rudely call Nigeria. There's a lot to say about that.
Is it a question of improving the institutionalization of politics or working within that dominant stream or proliferating other political projects that may intersect or may not intersect with this dominant mainstream? Should we count on this main effort, this globalizing effort, to spread development that is already entangled with democracy? Or are we speaking about other ways of being in the world? Other political projects, they may not even see humans as the prime actors. Could you say something to that? Are we proliferating or sensitizing the dominant project, or is it a matter of doing both at the same time?
Ashish Kothari:
So let me start with three examples, which might illustrate what I would then follow up with. Two that have inspired me a lot, though I haven't visited them, but I have lots of friends in those places. One is the Kurdish freedom movement in the the very troubled quandary junction between Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey, where the Kurdish ethnic population, I think about 40 million people, has been persecuted for a long, long time for being different from the faiths and what those nation states are trying to push dominant religious and other sorts of orders. So, they started with, a few decades back, with a freedom movement, which said, "We want a Kurdish state." But very soon after that, they actually realized that, look, creating a Kurdish nation state would only bring another kind of domination over them. So, they began to actually challenge the notion of the nation state itself and to say, "Why can we not actually have radical forms of democracy?"
Which one of their ideological leaders and freedom movement, Abdullah Ocalan, who's been in jail, by the way, in Turkish solitary confinement for the last 25 years, what he called democratic confederalism or democratic modernity also, it's a bit of a strange term, but he's explained it. And he says that every settlement can be free for itself to take its own decisions with regard to its own affairs, and then it connects to the next one, and then the next one, and you build over a larger landscape whatever decisions need to be taken at that larger landscape, which is why democratic confederalism.
Mahatma Gandhi here in India would've called it oceanic circles, you drop a stone into water and create these ripples. So, different people have used different words. And essentially the Kurdish now have been fighting for a non-state free Kurdistan. The second example is probably even older, is the Zapatista in what is today called Mexico, where they have been living for the last three or four decades a life without a nation state, rejecting the Mexican nation state also, and working with the land, working with eco-feminist principles, etc.
Now, the Kurdish actually have a very interesting slogan called, their main slogan which they start meetings with or end meetings with or when they say bye to each other, is, "Jin, Jiyan, Azadi."
Jin is woman or woman's freedom, jiyan is life and azadi is freedom. So, that kind of, to me, encompasses what would be a notion of democracy, which is very different, of course, from authoritarianism, but also the liberal western forms of democracy that unfortunately we've all kind of accepted. So, in the long run, I would say that that's what we should be struggling for. And we already have examples, at least on a relatively large scale where this is happening for the last few decades. There are smaller ones here in central India, for instance, Adivasi, that is indigenous villages have declared self-rule. They have claimed the slogan that, "We elect the government in New Delhi, but in our village we are the government." Nobody will take decisions other than by the village assembly or through the village assembly. That brings me to the second part of your question.
So, what these villages in Central India are saying is that we are not rejecting the Indian state, insofar as the state exists, we will negotiate with it. We will make it accountable for what it should be doing for us. And in that sense, electoral reforms or making political parties more accountable, making governments more accountable, kind of goes hand in hand with the first part of autonomy and radical democracy, but only if it doesn't simply strengthen the status quo. If our negotiations with governments and which states strengthen, basically give them even that much more legitimacy, and then we are never actually getting towards a democracy which is state free, which is stateless in that sense, then those negotiations are counterproductive. So both, yes, but we have to be careful of which direction we're heading into, which direction we're heading towards.
Now, the problem, Bayo, is most people in the world have been convinced that the only way to run political affairs is through a nation state.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Right.
Ashish Kothari:
And of course, the nation state will also try and keep convincing us and say, "Oh, my God, if we don't have a strong party in power in New Delhi, then Pakistan or China will invade us." And in different parts of the world, you'll have different, quote, unquote, "enemies" that are going to be invading us. It's like that, how sometimes we used to say, "A monster will come if you don't go to sleep," to a child. And we have been actually treated as children and in a very sort of a cynical way-
Bayo Akomolafe:
A puerile way, yeah.
Ashish Kothari:
Yeah. So, when we were fighting for a freedom from the British, they told us, "Hey, you can't manage. You don't know how to manage your affairs. You're better off with us still being your rulers," or whatever. And this is exactly what our governments are telling us today. So-called free India, our government is telling us that, "Without us, you people are sunk." And that's what we've been all brainwashed into thinking. So, we have to be able to get out of that and say that, "No, we are our own decision makers. We are our own power." So, that's the notion of democracy or Swaraj or Buen Vivir or whatever.
And in that other species also come in the more than the human or the non-human comes into the governance where you actually say that in a chair of decision making, in a circle of decision-making chairs, there's a few chairs that are empty, which are actually symbolically for other species. And then, how do you change your decision-making in such a way that you're also thinking about the whales and the tigers and the plants and the microorganisms as part of democracies? And people are actually trying to do this and successfully in some parts of the world.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Yeah, yeah. Thank you, Ashish. Yesterday in class I raised the seemingly exciting prospects of the de-dollarization of the world with the emergence of BRICS and its affiliate nations. I'm not sure what name they want to go for this time, but I think they're sticking with BRICS at this time. On the surface of things, it feels like an exciting thing. It removes empire from its central position. But in another way of approaching this, it seems to re-entrench the same globalizing order. It only just shifts from one department to another. It moves the focus from one department to another, but it maintains the same agreements, the same structures of power, the same notions of the citizen subject. This leads me to be wary and maybe a little bit exhausted with our performances of resistance, that it is often the case that resistance reinforces the logic of what we're resisting.
I was just also speaking with my people in class yesterday about the encampments across US campuses, the pro-Palestinian protests and how those efforts of solidarity, as well-intentioned and as potent and as urgent as they were, they seems to appeal to the same power structures. In fact, in a sense, the same statehood, the same Westphalian order in its self-referentiality is addressed over here. It's like the protests were saying there's a deficit within the system and we would like to address it. There's a deficit and we'll like it to problematize it and address that deficit.
It doesn't seem to move away to this idea of, even beyond alternatives, Ashish, because alternatives can straddle the lines of logic that maintain the familiar, that maintain dominant modes of perception, right? It could just be a choice, an option, one or two. Is there something we can say about moving beyond the logic of our containment altogether? And maybe we can begin to speak about how, in fact... Maybe I should frame it this way. Why is the nation-state so resilient? Why is it so resilient? Why is this status quo so sensuously arousing, why is it that it seems almost difficult for us to think beyond the projects, the political projects that have contained us? What would you say to that?
Ashish Kothari:
Well, I mean, firstly on BRICS, I completely agree with you. I think it's a dangerous diversion for, well, initially obviously for Brazil, Russia, India, South Africa, et cetera. But also now much larger part of the world that's being encompassed within it. Where we kind of had this illusion that something like BRICS and then the BRICS Bank as an alternative to the World Bank and BRICS as an alternative to imperialist US, et cetera, was our solution. And a lot of the conventional left also kind of bought into that, as did many people's movements.
But I completely agree with you that in a sense, it's only shifting the department from one to another. And in some senses also worse, because what we are also seeing is a very intense form of internal colonization in the BRICS countries and many others. You take a colonization of indigenous peoples in China, you take the colonization of Adivasi and Adivasi territories in India, again, indigenous peoples or others. So-called marginal lands, and peoples for extractive projects, for mining, for big dams, for all kinds of things where basically an internal elite, a north within the south so to speak, a global north within the south, one or 5% of India's richest, for instance, are now lapping up, are doing land grabbing and so on at a very big scale.
And it's actually harder to resist against that or to speak up against that than it was to speak up against, let's say, a British imperial power that has come and colonized India. Because people will say, "Oh, but come on, this is an Indian company. What's your problem with it?" Right? Whether it's Reliance, or Adani, or whoever. And so what BRICS has done is to actually not replace, but kind of maybe even supplement-
Bayo Akomolafe:
Replicate.
Ashish Kothari:
... external colonization with internal one. And yeah, it's a replication. And as I was saying, I think it's probably even more dangerous.
Now, I think in terms of alternatives, you are again, absolutely right, that we need to go beyond alternatives as a superficial word. A lot of, or even ecology, if you look at, for instance, products that are being made, everybody's now adding eco in front of their products.
Bayo Akomolafe:
It's trendy.
Ashish Kothari:
Eco-friendly, or eco-tourism, or eco whatever. Or saying, well, don't worry about waste, we will recycle it. Or don't worry about carbon emissions, we'll make sure that they're captured somewhere else in this so-called zero carbon approaches. And so, alternatives for us, in the way that we are conceptualizing it, is where we look at holistic transformations in five spheres of life. So we have something called the flower of transformation. And if you could just imagine a flower with five petals, right?
Bayo Akomolafe:
Yes.
Ashish Kothari:
The five petals are the political, the economic, the social, the cultural, and the ecological. A bit of an artificial distinction, but let's say, and these are intersecting petals, they're not standalone. And what we are saying is that, look, if we are talking about radical democracy where the Zapatista, or the Kurdish people, or the Adivasis in Central India are taking their own political decisions. We are also simultaneously talking about radical economic localization and democracy and self-reliance where the range, the control over the economies, neither with private corporations, nor with the state, but with producers on the ground and consumers on the ground.
We're also then talking about the third petal of social justice because you can have the first two, but you still have serious levels of gender injustice, or inequality, or ethnic inequalities, or discrimination against so-called disabled people, et cetera, et cetera. So the struggles for social justice and equality are the third petal. The fourth petal, as important, is cultural commons and knowledge commons, and diversity of cultures and knowledge, because again, the privatization of knowledge, intellectual property rights, copyright, et cetera, et cetera, are also stealing away of what should be in the commons into private hands, or into state hands. And the fifth, which may be something that should be underlying, all of this of course, is ecological wisdom. Obviously without that, we are dead anyway in the long run or the short run.
So ecological wisdom intersecting with all of these. Now, if you were to think of change happening in only one or two of these, but not enough attention being payed to the others, then we would be talking about somewhat superficial alternatives, or maybe even status quoist kind of reforms, right?
So now every initiative cannot be doing this holistic transformation at the same time, but it needs to be moving towards, and that's why we need to learn from each other. Maybe later I can talk about a couple of initiatives where we try and bring people together so that their initiative, the transformations can actually become more holistic.
And then at the core of this flower, even more important then what I've always just said already. At the core of this flower of transformation is ethics, principles, values. Are we expressing solidarity with each other? Are we holding things in commons? Are we talking about not just rights, but also responsibilities? Are we talking about interconnectedness? Are we talking about rights of not just humans but also other species? Are we talking about diversity? Are we talking about love, generosity, et cetera, et cetera? Are those at the core of whatever we're trying to do? Or are we still stuck within the paradigms of competition, and one-upmanship, and hierarchies, and so on and so forth? And I think that's really what distinguishes a radical alternative from the superficial ones, which is so important today because the whole system is telling us that, oh, we've got the solutions, don't worry. We'll solve the climate crisis through carbon trading and zero, net zero, blah, blah, blah. And we use this flower of transformation to try and distinguish what is actually truly fundamentally transformative and is challenging the status quo.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Let's push that to the edge. Let's go to the edge of this, brother, using the framework of the flower of radical belonging and democracy. Who is the farmer here? Who is the main driver, the main actor? Humans determining these systems, articulating and engineering these paradigms? Or is it something more? Because it seems we haven't been successful at any, I dare call it a proto utopian approach, every attempt at framing, or replicating, or materializing our designs for the future or for politics, it seems at every turn there's trouble. Do you want to say something about that?
Maybe before you do, just to contextualize this further, I've been imbricated with a lot of alternatives to money, projects that explore alternatives to fear of currency. I remember visiting Scotland, Findhorn, a community there that was experimenting with other kinds of currency. I'm sure you know about this community.
Ashish Kothari:
Yep, yep.
Bayo Akomolafe:
And some of the lessons that I think are available from that project, especially during my time there wandering and listening to the people and interviewing them and hearing their stories, was that even though on the surface it felt like something to do, it was always subject to outside forces. And there were internal dynamics that were more than a bit problematic, which ultimately led to some despair and disappointment. I don't want to get into specifics here, but the question about who drives this, who creates the flower of radical change, who makes it happen is very present for me here.
Ashish Kothari:
No, absolutely. And I think, I don't know enough about finally what happened with Findhorn. I remember reading about it long back and being very impressed, at least with the literature that I was finding. But like many other places that seem fantastic, and maybe are fantastic in many ways, there are underlying issues that maybe are not so clear to somebody from outside. And I would say the same with I spoke about the Zapatista and the Kurdish and many others. There are many underlying issues of problems of course. There're all explorations. They're all things where they're trying to feel their way towards the small holistic transformation. To me, I think what's very important is which of these recognizes the agency of two kinds of marginalized beings, marginalized human beings. So whether it's women, or it's so-called people with disabilities, or it's in India's case, the Dalits, the outcasts, or the so-called untouchables in the society, or others in other places. Is their agency being recognized, enabled, supported, right? That's one.
And at least the ones where I've been very impressed with local transformations are where it is, for instance, Dalit women farmers, 5,000 Dalit women farmers in the Southern Indian state of Telangana struggling for and achieving food sovereignty in the last 30 years. And you can see, I've been following that over the last 30 years, the transformations are absolutely remarkable. Because it's not just about food. Good, nutritious, adequate food being available for 5,000 families with organic farming, their own seeds, their own knowledge, et cetera. But also the transformation in gender dynamics and in cost dynamics in their community, which is just really remarkable, right?
Now, so when that agency is enabled through themselves and with support. And then the agency of the rest of nature, how much do we actually allow the rest of nature to also be determining what we are doing? How much do we allow the agency of the river, for instance, to be determining should we be building a dam there or not? Should we be diverting the river for hydroelectricity or for anything? Should we be dumping our waste into the river? And I think the movement for the rights of nature, not in a very legalistic western way, which is happening, but in much more tending to go back towards what indigenous notions of respect for the rest of nature were those movements for the rights of nature, or for respect for nature, or for re-recognizing our kinship with the rest of life and therefore also their agency in our decision making.
To me, these two things, the agency of marginalized human beings, people, and the agency of the rest of nature. If we are able to have decision-making processes which enable these two, then to me, that driver, or those drivers, would be the ones where this flower of transformation is likely to bloom much more than if it's in the hands of NGOs, and governments, and donor agencies, and so on and so forth.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Thank you, brother. This blasts open our conceptualization of the [inaudible 00:58:36], the people. The people cannot be the same. Democracy has never been quite focused or centrally allocatable to human actors. I think is a golden stream of thought that is flashing up as a place to focus on in our conversation. That democracy is, with great respect to Lincoln, is not simply for the people, by the people, about the people. It's more than that. It's something a little more bizarre, and yet hopefully enabling for the flourishing of life. And this feels like the energetic thrust of the actors and the scholars who are articulating [inaudible 00:59:40] verses, that if democracy is to thrive, then we cannot frame it simply in a humanocentric way because this humanocentrism, this anthropocentrism is the engine room for what the stratographic authorities refuse to acknowledge as the anthropo scene, but you understand what I'm saying, is behind the geological events, the forces at work in the world today.
And we cannot simply focus on just proliferating alternatives, because alternatives can still stick true to the logics of the things that they're replacing. We know this well on the African continents through the African independence movements. Our desire to replace our colonial masters only replicated the systems that we sought to exile ,that we sought to drive away. So it seems some other kind of process is required now. Some pedagogy that invites people to sit with and sit with our place in the world right now. How would you frame this invitation to sit? To sit with the concerns that we are articulating and framing right now? Let me put it this way, in a very, very, this is hypothetical, but if you were giving a blank check, Ashish, to speak with the people of India. A broadcast across the Indian sub-continent. If you're to just invite anything you want to see happen, what would you say within 50 minutes? I'm not sure why I went for 50, let's just make it an hour. What would you say? What would you invite? What would you like to see happen if you had that carte blanche, opportunity to speak to Indian people?
Ashish Kothari:
Well, it's an interesting thing. A colleague and I did an exercise a few years back in a book called Alternative Futures: India Unshackled, where we had a person speaking in 2100 reflecting on the last a hundred years of transformation in South Asia. And she was speaking to everybody across South Asia, I guess at that point, must've been one and a half, 2 billion people. And what she said was that, how did we come to this point where we are now much more at peace with each other and with the rest of nature? What were the struggles that were fought? Where did we start in 2010 or whatever, and how did we reach this in 90 years or hundred years? And I mean, I'm not going to go into all those details, but there were three or four absolutely crucial things here. One was, I would say, and she says, that we went back into our 5,000, 10,000 years of history to look back at what were the notions of wellbeing, in various faiths, in various traditions, in various indigenous traditions and religions, wherever. The fundamental notions of wellbeing, not entrenched hierarchies of religions, or not entrenched state hierarchies or so on, but the fundamentals, the spiritual fundamentals [inaudible 01:02:54] And how [inaudible 01:03:00] can we? I'm still on [inaudible 01:03:08] seeing-
Bayo Akomolafe:
You're glitching out, Ashish. Maybe if we could just go back to what you said. I lost you at fundamentals, you were speaking about dramatic shifts.
Ashish Kothari:
So I was saying that if we were to go back into the 5,000, 10,000 years of our history, let's say.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Yes, you're clearing up. Yes, you are.
Ashish Kothari:
[inaudible 01:03:34] had to say how we taught in terms of what is wellbeing, what is happiness, what is satisfaction, is still valuable to us. Where, for instance, our peoples in those days were talking about how living with the rest of nature was very much part of existence. It wasn't dominating nature.
And then you fast-forward to now and say, how much of that have we lost? But you also recognize that 5,000 years back, or a thousand years back, or a few hundred years back, we also had significant inequalities and discriminations. And then you fast-forward to the present and you say, well, but we've got notions of equality, and justice, and non-discrimination, and non-hierarchy. So how do we try and achieve those also, whether we think of them as old traditional notions or new modern notions, and how do we then combine this, what we think of as the best of what we had, what the thousands of years of traditions that we have with the best of maybe some of the new notions, and we discard some of the problematic ones from the past, and we discard the problematic ones from the present. And we also think of time as circular. It's not a linear notion of from primitive to modern kind of thing, or from bad to good or whatever, or from undeveloped to developed. But we actually think of the circularity of this, and we say that then we're therefore, we're not talking about going back. We're simply saying, okay, what has been valuable in all of our existence and what can we continue to bring back, and in what form so that it's relevant for today?
And in that then we would kind of also begin to question, and this is what she does in 2100, she says that why did we divide South Asia? Which is one big ecological, cultural region into seven countries. Partly pre-colonial imperial histories, and then partly colonialism, which actually created these boundaries and they divided rivers, and they divided mountain ranges, and they divided peoples, and they divided wildlife. So can we dissolve, we have actually then struggled over the last few decades, this is what she says, to dissolve these boundaries and to reestablish the flows of rivers, the wildlife that used to go back and forth, the nomadic human populations with the livestock that used to go back and forth, say between Tibet and Ladakh, or the fishing communities that used to be able to go back and forth between what is now India and Bangladesh. And so, obviously then challenging the nation state itself.
And I think, if I had an hour, I would actually say that, look, this is not new. This is stuff we've always had. We have value, and we have just lost it in the last 78 years of this project of development where we seem to think that everybody needs to have huge houses, and six cars, and air conditioners, and more and more and more materials and so on at the cost of the earth and of our own happiness also in many different places.
And maybe I'd give a few examples of where these transformations are already taking place so that people don't think I'm up there in the air talking some abstract masses. So some storytelling built into this of these 5,000 Dalit women farmers that I just told you about. It's a powerful story of what's possible.
Bayo Akomolafe:
It is. It is. It is. And the fact that not a lot of people know about that, and we are solely invested in this performance of choice that doesn't really bring in the dynamic worlding practices at the edges of the dominant. I feel it's unfortunate.
And so, maybe to bring things to a, there isn't a conclusion that I can touch here, but to bring things closer to what might feel like a simmering point, and a place of aliveness for me. If you were to also address the issues around the world, not just on the Indian subcontinent now, but if you're to address the politics in the world at the moment, would you also reduce it to issues around development, and expansionism, and capitalist capture with the wars in the Middle East, the wars on the African continent, are there ways to think about this that might be generative? Are there ways to think about the problems that are recircling? There's a holding pattern here that is very, very alive for me. This repetition, this toxic cyclicity is coming back to a checkpoint over and over again, and the failure of politics to address this. It doesn't seem to me that we can merely say, "If only we got rid of our logics of development we could address these patterns." What do we need to say, or what needs to be said or sat with, with regards to these genocidal harms and pains and violences across the world? Where are we in our attempts to address this in a generative way?
Ashish Kothari:
Well, I would actually, I think, Bayo, I would start with children in our so-called education institutions. That's not going to address the issue that we have only two years left supposedly before the ecological collapse. We don't have shortcuts really for this. I think we've lost a few generations of the possibility of children, all of us, growing up to think of ourselves as human beings in very different ways. As I said, think of ourselves first of all as life forms, then as human beings, and then as Indians or Nigerians or identities that we might want to think of. And if we were to actually bring that back into...
Let me give you a quick, simple example. A colleague and I were up in Ladakh, which is the Trans-Himalayan part of India, just south of Tibet. And she was talking to the children about the rights of rivers. But she didn't start with the rights of rivers. She simply said, "Okay. We're sitting right next to the Indus River. What rights do you have as children?" They said, "We have the right to study and the right to play and the right to sing and talk," and whatever, "And food." So then she said, "What do you think are the rights of the Indus River?" So kids were a bit puzzled. Then one girl said, "The Indus has the right to sing."
Bayo Akomolafe:
Say that again. "To sing"? Did you say "to sing"?
Ashish Kothari:
To sing. To sing songs.
Bayo Akomolafe:
To sing? Wow, okay.
Ashish Kothari:
Yes. So we said, "Well, how?" And she said that, "It gurgles and it thunders and it breaks against rocks and there's a different sound. And it's singing, and that right should be protected." We didn't talk to her about big dams and how that might be stopping the rights of the rivers to sing or to tell stories. People in North India have said that the river has a right to tell stories. And it's those stories that get carried down from the mountain into the sea and then come back as raindrops, and we hear those stories.
To me, those sorts of feelings for each other as humans, and feelings for the rest of nature, if we could bring that back outside of our classrooms, in our education institutions for our children, for our young people and also for adults. It seems to me that a lot of us are so disconnected from the rest of nature, even from the tree that is right outside my window. And this lesson came to me in COVID time. Of course I've been watching nature for a long time. It was such a incredible thing that during COVID I was stuck at home because there was a lockdown, and the tree outside my window was flowering with yellow flowers. Some of those yellow flowers were flying into the window and coming. For me, the tree was giving me companionship at a time when I was stuck alone at home.
Now can we create that sense of the wonders of life and our kinship with the rest of life? And if you were to do that, I think people would also respect other human beings. And then be able to extend themselves to say that, "If this is what's happening in Palestine, I need to stand in support of them." But in a much more fundamental way, not in the way you were talking about, for instance, with the U.S., but in a much more fundamental way, and act both in resistance and also in regeneration in my life.
Some of us have gone back to the notion of swaraj or self-rule or self-determination in India, as we spoke about earlier, and add eco to it, or prakriti, which means natural, swaraj or eco swaraj to say this is really about self-determination for all of us, with responsibilities towards other people and other life-forms. This is one way in which one can try and create a much greater, much more sensitivity, much more of what it is to be a sensitive, caring, belonging, to use your term, human being, life-form.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Yes. Yes. Thank you, brother. I want to add to that, to supplement that question in this way because I kind of anticipated where you would go with that. A lot of people would say that this is fine. We want to be alive to an oikos that stretches beyond the nation-state formulations that subjectivizes us as citizens and that frames agency as a trajectory from our homes to the voting booth. Politics seems impoverished, and it seems too, I dare say, anorexic, to hold the weight of our yearnings and our desires for a more flourishing future.
So activists hit the streets. Younger people are fighting for new livelihoods, not deadly hoods as you would frame. But our activisms are proliferating young veterans. It seems we're moving faster than previous generations from hope to despair quite quickly. It seems we're getting to the grief faster. Younger people are like, "There isn't a spaciousness. Even though we fight, we're trying as much as possible to stave off proto-fascist elements. We don't want our lives to be controlled under these stultifying political forms, but it seems every time we push into it, even our resistance becomes instrumentalized, co-opted within the very systems we're trying to upset."
So what do we say to those who are despairing now? Who say, "This is all nice and fine and possibly very poetic, but we despair. We've tried. We've tried to get here, but it isn't working. Our activisms are becoming redundant." What do we say to them?
Ashish Kothari:
Well, I think one of the issues, and I don't think I or any of us have really easy answers to that, but I think one of the weaknesses or gaps in our resistance movements has been that we are very good at knowing and saying no to something. We don't want extractivism and we don't want patriarchy and we don't want, say, the centralized nation state or we don't want capitalism or whatever. Resistance movements have not been so good at saying, "What is it that we do want?"
So kind of a prefigurative politics, not deciding everything in advance, of course, but something where you say that, "Okay, if we are able to defeat this right-wing government and bring it down, or if we're able to stop a private corporation from taking away our lands, what are we replacing it with? If there are needs, if people have needs for food or energy or education or health or whatever, what is our answer to how those can be met?" Because it is not enough simply to say no. There are people with actual deprivations, and we do need to have proactive, constructive pathways or initiatives.
And I think greater connection with those who are working out these sorts of alternatives. The examples I gave, for instance, from Kurdistan and Zapatista and the Dalit women farmers in South India and so on and so forth, and thousands of them, is that we need to be able to create the opportunities for people to not just be sitting on the streets and protesting against something, but once that's happened, to then go and be with these communities and peoples who are actually making those transformations happen. Because that's where you get the inspiration from. That's where you get the hope from.
Somebody's asked me this. He said, "50 years of activism in India and things seem to be going downhill. Across the world, not just in India. How do you retain hope?" And for me, there are two answers to that. One is constantly being able to go to these communities where even when they're struggling, even when they're actually being displaced and dispossessed, they're still retaining hope. They're still joking with me, they're still feeding me, and creating these fantastic radical alternatives. And the second source of inspiration, of course, again, is that tree outside my house. Despite everything else, it's still flowering and showing me its beauty.
So I think especially in our cities, we don't have enough opportunities for young people to feel these two sources of inspiration and hope so that they go beyond the despair, beyond the clinical climate despair that is there right now, which is becoming a clinical disease also unfortunately, to be able to heal themselves, regenerate themselves with these kinds of sources, of form of inspiration. We just need more of that.
And I think movements of things like bioregionalism, which goes beyond nation states, movements of, like I said, rights of nature, not just legalistic, but much more in terms of respect. These are the sorts of movements more and more especially young people need to be enabled to get into. So that rage, which is legitimate, anger and rage at the system which is very legitimate, is also channelized towards constructive, inspirational, radical alternatives.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Yes, brother, yes. I want to draw out that thread a little bit, that it's probably easier to be opposed to something. In fact, we are mostly habituated into stating our opposition to things that we disagree with, right? It's easier to be anti this and anti that. However, in doing that, we kind of risk losing sight of the ways that the world morphs and changes, the ways that there might be opportunities for what I think of in my work as the minor gesture, the openings, the leakages, the other ways of being in the world that are possibly embedded even in the grief. That the grief doesn't obstruct the path, the grief is the path. There's something about the things that are in the way that become the pathway. Or to repeat Glissant, maybe this is from... A dear brother, Fabrice reminded me of this some time ago, that "The road knows the way. It's not the traveler that knows the way, it's the road that knows the way."
And so maybe that I'll just join my voice to that, and say that in times of hopelessness, the temptation is to quickly beat the odds and continue on the path. But maybe there's something about the thing that presents itself as monstrous that is an invitation to experiment, to stay with the trouble, to sit with those concerns, to play with each other. And yes, even to find companionship in leaves that breed yellow leaves.
Ashish, I'm going to read out a question for both of us to see if we can respond to, question from the audience. "If we do not separate the notion of human from nature..." Let me see if... Okay, yes, I understand that. "... can we imagine that all forms of organizations, economic, political, and their catastrophes are in fact earthly forms?" What would you say to that?
Ashish Kothari:
Yeah, this is a question that doesn't really have an answer. If we are part of nature, then everything that we're doing is also part of nature. It's natural to be a capitalist or it's natural to kill each other or whatever, right? So at a philosophical level, there's probably no answer to that. The only way I would respond to that is to say that if as human beings or as life-forms, we value life itself and we value the possibility of everybody being able to thrive in the way that they want or should be able to, then any parts of our systems, natural or not, which are undermining that ability for ourselves or for others are things that we should be struggling against. And so the struggle against them or challenging capitalism or patriarchy itself would also be natural, and possibly would be something. So we have to decide what are the ethics that we want to work with? What are the ethics we want to live with?
Bayo Akomolafe:
Yes.
Ashish Kothari:
And once we do that... We also get asked this question, "If pluriverse means all worlds, then well even capitalism is part of the pluriverse."
Bayo Akomolafe:
Yup.
Ashish Kothari:
And I would say that pluriverse are all the worlds, none of which are able to undermine the other. If you can find some way in which capitalism can coexist with all of the pluriverse, which I doubt, then fine. But if it is undermining half a dozen other parts of the pluriverse or worlds, then it doesn't have a place in the ethics that we are actually talking about.
And I think, Bayo, maybe just to add here that I think what's very, very important is that we also have this desperation because we often think we're alone. "I'm struggling as an individual or as my community is struggling and it's just too much. The world is too big. It's impossible to actually be able to do this." And I think to be able to dispel this notion, we need much more interconnections, we need much more dialogues, we need much more intercultural spaces of exchange, of being able to talk to each other, learn from each other, talk across languages, across cultures.
And this is why for us platforms like the one I'm involved with called the Global Tapestry of Alternatives are so important because you're trying to bring different radical alternative movements and resistances together to learn from each other. But more than all of that, just to know that there are a thousand other such communities around the world that have similar ethics, similar struggles. They're different from me and us, but they're also similar in that we have threads of values and ethics and principles that which we can weave this tapestry together.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Right.
Ashish Kothari:
Creating those platforms for all of us, I think, to be able to be with each other, to learn from each other, to know that we're not alone is absolutely essential.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Yes. Thank you, brother. Thank you. And just to respond to this person, thank you for the question. Nature is fraught with tensions and internal contradictions. It is a political designation. It has had a colonial history. It has been used in weaponized ways to preserve and perpetuate notions of hierarchy and supremacy and to justify colonial clearings. It has been deployed in ways that would render most of us suspicious of the term. There's something to be said about the fact that many languages beyond English language do not have a term for nature. Some might even say that nature is an Enlightenment concept, that it was invented as a topos to preserve human centrality.
But we can hack the term a little bit. And I like what Donna Haraway does with it when she suggests that nature itself is artificial, that there's the artifice in the concept of nature. That nature is constantly denaturalizing itself. There isn't a steady ground, there isn't an outside, there isn't a fixed notion of nature that is universal, fixed, and once and for all. We cannot even frame a biopolitics of life without thinking about what ants are doing, what trees are doing. Politics has to consider this. It cannot be in its impoverished provincialism any longer. This is the ethos of our conversation.
But I really agree with what my brother is saying here, that what now becomes critical is the moral frameworks that define the boundaries of what we call nature. How would we want to behave within these spaces that we call nature? What projects are emerging? What institutions form? What relationalities are possible? What socio-material forms emerge within the space we call nature? How do we treat each other? How do we consume? How do we make food? How do we educate our children? How do our children educate us?
So if nature is the proliferating, cosmological playground of possibility that allows us to meet each other, if economics is not just what the people define as economists do, but is actually what microbes are doing in our guts as well, then... Beyond the definitions here, beyond how we define here, we want to come into an ethical space of proliferation and practice. This is the force of our conversation. We're speaking about ecologies of practices. This is a term by Erin Manning, by the way. We're speaking about ways of being in the world that do not repeat the patterns that we're seeing, the developmental patterns, the ways that democracy has been hijacked by capitalist extractivism and the ways that it proliferates our suffering.
Ashish brought up the term oikos, home. Maybe I would end with that, that the question of democracy, the question of politics is always a question of how we live with each other. What is home doing? And I hope that through this conversation and much more, through the work of my dear brother here, and through your work and through your questions and through our ongoing conversations, new kinds of homes might be proliferated, prosperous, abundant, new homes. And as the world goes to the polls, that there will be other pathways that spread out from that dominant mainstream that infiltrate our lives and give us new futures. Ashish, would you like to end with a sentence or two?
Ashish Kothari:
Well, maybe just to go back to the [foreign language 01:30:47] or what here sometimes we say zindabad. Zindabad is the revolutionary slogan that we often give in people's movements. It kind of evokes because zinda is to be alive and so zindabad is to celebrate being alive and to resist anything that is actually threatening life. So maybe that's a nice way to end this conversation. I've really enjoyed it. Thanks a lot, Bayo. And thanks to everybody for bringing questions.
Bayo Akomolafe:
Thank you. Thank you so much, everyone. We'll see you soon.
