The Western vision of “progress” has imposed a hegemonic model of living, producing and organizing ourselves, with now planetary claims. The development of capitalism, which has extended its empire over nature and the peoples of the world, as well as the successive industrial revolutions at the source of incessant technological innovations have led us to a globalized, colonized, sanitized and smooth world, like screens ubiquitous chills of the digital revolution. Like the constantly renewed matrix, we would only be the interconnected elements of a mass unified by the consumerist thought and action of the civilization of oil and the iPhone. Abandoning our last fragments of freedom and our creative intentions, we would have capitulated to the colossal force of the system. The “iron lady” had warned us: “ There is no alternative. »
If the system dominates, it struggles to impose itself. It is even today widely disputed for having engendered the era of the Anthropocene, which brings us collectively to the edge of the abyss. And the history of its imposition is just as much made up of crises and resistance, revolts and innovations (social this time) to explore other ways of living, producing and organizing ourselves. The system has never been unanimous. It even carries within it the ferments of its criticism and its overcoming.
As we celebrated the 150th anniversary of the Paris Commune last year, the recent Zapatista Appeal of January 2021, A declaration… for life, bears witness to the vitality of these social dynamics. “There are many worlds that live and struggle in the world, and any claim to homogeneity and hegemony undermines the essence of the human being: freedom. The equality of humanity is found in respect for difference. It is in its diversity that its resemblance is found,” the Zapatistas tell us from southern Mexico.
From a historical and current, global and local perspective, the latest issue of the journal Possible opens a window on the plurality of the social universes that surround us, testifying to the various experiences, past and present, here and elsewhere, of freedom and the multiple autonomous communities that travel the path of utopia-in-the-making -To do. Its intention is to offer a critical exploration of the ways of embodying these other worlds and revealing them to implode the hegemonic claim of the dominant model. In order, to paraphrase the poet Gaston Miron, to “achieve what begins”.
One of the first steps is probably to consider, as has been stated by the descending author Pierre Thiesset, that “the economy is a house of cards of which we ourselves are the cards”. We often participate in the system we denounce. The bet of life outside the system aims to overcome our contradictions in order to move towards greater coherence between our actions and our aspirations. These experiments with other possible lives are not just a matter of theory or perception. They are rooted in both individual and collective experience and approaches that ultimately remind us that the system is not immutable. Real solutions persist.
Beyond its degree of radicalism, its ability to democratize ethical discussions, its creativity in terms of economic practices or even its internal management of political dynamics, working outside the system supposes opening a breach. Because to get out of capitalism and neoliberalism, it is necessary to operate a mental reversal, to get out of one’s certainties and one’s comfort zone. Go on an adventure and create your life, clear new horizons and perceive reality from a different angle.
This is also the goal of the collective work that led to this issue. It is an invitation to circulate ideas that have the potential to steer our society towards real democracy, ecological resilience and indispensable cooperation to face the many challenges of our time. The health crisis we are going through with the COVID-19 pandemic is an eloquent example.
By revisiting the Paris Commune and the Zapatista insurrection in Chiapas, by re-immersing ourselves in the founding values and the challenges experienced by the collective experiences carried out in Auroville, India, as well as in Kurdish Rojava, we seek new avenues, new paths to take. As well as drawing inspiration from the local experiences of the Projet Bâtiment 7 in Pointe-Saint-Charles, the intentional community Le Manoir in the Baie des Chaleurs or the Collectif La Nuée in Saint-Didace. The regions of Quebec can also take on the atypical face of renewal and ecological and social transition, if we know how to take a fresh and attentive look at it.
However, we must not sink into naïve angelism. These initiatives deserve a critical look. The system will not yield easily. As confirmed by the initiatives of citizens of Montreal North during the coronavirus crisis, the system continues to condemn part of the population to social exclusion. In short, living outside the system also takes the form of a suffered and unwanted experience. This is, moreover, the whole challenge of the transition: to undergo it or to provoke it.
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