Masters of Degrowth: The Pluriverse (Part 3)

Class's Notes

• Communities that are resilient and truly democratic do not move around a central figure that concentrates power
• Communities are not flourishing as a cultural condition, but rather as a political movement that aims so solve concrete problems and ensure the resilient provision and reproduction of life

 Producing the Common and Reproducing Life: Keys Towards Rethinking the Political

According to Horacio Machado, we can affirm there is no life without biotic communities; that is, communities that are reproduced on the basis of relations of reciprocity, complementarity, mutuality, exchange, and joint determination between members of different species, who need each other in order to produce and reproduce life.

The novelty lies in the fact that, in capitalist modernity, the economic system is based on capital accumulation, and does not ensure or guarantee the reproduction of life. Instead, it imposes a form of reproduction: the reproduction of capital, not of life. Capital attempts to dictate and enforce a homogenized type of subjectivity, denying and nullifying our diverse and varied capacity of giving form.

As a result, a specific vision of the world, and a specific way of structuring social relations based on individuals who are allegedly free, has been imposed. These processes of individualization and separation never end, not because there are still spheres of the social that are historically located ‘outside’ capitalism, but because the possibility of these spheres of social relations is regenerated over and over again as a collective human creation.

The common is produced, it is made by many through the generation and constant reproduction of a multiplicity of weavings of association and through social relations of collaboration that continuously enable the production and enjoyment of a large number of common goods, be they material or immaterial. The goods that are often called ‘common’ – water, seeds, forests, the water distribution systems of certain communities, urban self-managed spaces, etc. – cannot exist without the social relations that produce them. In fact, they could not be understood without the people, organizational practices, processes of collective signifying, affective ties, relations of mutual dependence and reciprocity that shape them every day, that produce these goods as commons.

The sense of inclusion and the relation of being part of lay the foundations of a common doing that reinvents, transforms and recreates the multiple expressions of ‘us’ who produce the common.

 We present the critical quality of the production of the common as the only guarantee of a dignified life, when we insist in that the possibility of social transformation resides only in us: in the us that is recreated every day in processes of caring and creation that focus on the reproduction of human and non-human life, and entail affection and emotions, inherited wisdom and renewed abilities.