The Global TapestryThe weaving of networks of Alternatives of AlternativesAre activities and initiatives, concepts, worldviews, or action proposals by collectives, groups, organizations, communities, or social movements challenging and replacing the dominant system that perpetuates inequality, exploitation, and unsustainabiity. In the GTA we focus primarily on what we call "radical or transformative alternatives", which we define as initiatives that are attempting to break with the dominant system and take paths towards direct and radical forms of political and economic democracy, localised self-reliance, social justice and equity, cultural and knowledge diversity, and ecological resilience. Their locus is neither the State nor the capitalist economy. They are advancing in the process of dismantling most forms of hierarchies, assuming the principles of sufficiency, autonomy, non-violence, justice and equality, solidarity, and the caring of life and the Earth. They do this in an integral way, not limited to a single aspect of life. Although such initiatives may have some kind of link with capitalist markets and the State, they prioritize their autonomy to avoid significant dependency on them and tend to reduce, as much as possible, any relationship with them. is a “network of networks”. Each of those networks acts in different parts of the planet by identifying and connecting Alternatives. They are the Weavers. The following are the networks that currently weaves the Global Tapestry of Alternatives. In the following section, our Weavers from India, Colombia and Mexico shares updates from their recent activities and actions.
Grounded voices:
Grounded Voices is a series started by the National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM). The series of talks is an attempt to bring voices which are grounded in lived experience, struggle and organizing, to ask together questions about what matters to understand the moment we live through and imagine an equitable, inclusive and just future for all citizens. Recently, Vikalp Sangam has collaborated with the series to share one dialogue on alternatives on a monthly basis. We have held two dialogues:
Vikalp Sutra:
Vikalp Sutra is a collective, non-hierarchical platform initiated in June 2020, to facilitate dignified livelihoods, workers’ rights and economic democracy in India. The network aims to promote community self-reliance, based on the principles of dignity, justice, equity, peace and ecological sustainability. The platform is currently hosting three projects. Sutra AjeeWiki is a database of organisations and individuals working on dignified livelihoods across India. Sutra Vaani is a free and locally facilitated HELPLINE for workers (especially informal/ unorganised sector) in livelihoods’ distress. Sutra Mandalis are online events discussing various issues around dignified livelihoods. The most recent one was held as an online event in the World Social Forum on May 4th, A Sutra Mandali on Women Farmers’ Collectives
Western Himalaya Vikalp Sangam:
The Western Himalaya Vikalp Sangam (WHVS) is a process to bring together people working on or interested in alternatives, ideologically and in practice in Jammu, Kashmir, Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. Currently, Western Himalaya Vikalp Sangam is working on rewriting its manifesto (you can read the previous version here) and working on a well-being index, both of which seek to have and understand more grounded realities of the communities in the bioregion.
Youth Vikalp Sangam:
The Youth Vikalp Sangam is a process to engage diverse youth in developing a common understanding of the principles and values of true transformation and help them in co-dreaming of alternative ways of living. With the aim to make a youth-friendly space to engage, learn and share across sangams, and creating space for the youth to lead their process and join in intergenerational spaces. The group has been planning to host a Sangam from the 9th to 11th September to discuss the politics of ecology with different youth groups and activists.
Vikalp Sangam Framework:
Currently, the Vikalp Sangam framework is being updated by collating the feedback from the members of the core team bringing in key pointers of intergenerationality, digitisation, healing to incorporate in the note. The draft can be accessed here.
Vikalp Sangam Website:
The Vikalp Sangam website has been recently updated to provide improved access and visibility to stories about alternatives as well as different Vikalp Sangam initiatives and collaborations. The Vikalp Sangam Communications team has been regularly sharing posts on various social media channels, thereby helping to provide a larger audience to the VSVikalp Sangam (India) process.
Vikalp Vichaara:
Vikalp Vichaara was started by a small group within Vikalp Sangam that felt inspired to contribute by creating a space that is dedicated to inquiry and dialogue, to help us deepen our understanding and action in the world.
While the more than twenty Vikalp Sangams that have been organised across the country covering diverse themes and regions have brought to light many stories about people’s initiatives and systemic alternatives, we feel that some important themes remain only at the fringe of the movement. This is an attempt at bringing them into our main discourse.
Worldviews Vikalp Sangam:
An indigenous and other local communities' worldviews Sangam is happening from 4th to 6th November. The Sangam aims to foster a space that can gather indigenous and other traditional/local communities and knowledge-keepers, thinkers, practitioners, activists, and researchers, together and grapple with solutions to the current ecological, social, economic and other related crises. In addition, voice a collective vision emerging from / informed by a diversity of indigenous peoples and local communities, cosmovisions, wisdom and perspectives to move towards a just, equitable and ecologically resilient future. The intention is to nurture and design the Sangam in a way that is based on ancient knowledge and embodies the decolonial ways of coming together, designing, dialoguing, networking, and researching. As activists, researchers, and collaborators (not from indigenous communities or other local communities) to re-discover our own sense of relationship (to self, the other and the rest of nature) and belonging and what social transformations mean from that perspective.
Alternative Economies Vikalp Sangam
The Alternative Economies Vikalp Sangam is working on a fellowship for young people to look at climate and ecological resilience initiatives, where they will be documenting community responses to the global crisis across three landscapes in Tamil Nadu, with both local residents and scholars. They intend to share stories using many types of media with the communities involved, the academic world, and the world at large. The hope is that the act of questioning and documenting will help strengthen the community's self-awareness and clarity in the face of external pressure.
A Facilitation team meeting was conducted on the 1st-2nd July in Pune. The VSFT met for the first time to discuss the overall functioning and governance of the process as a buildup to the core group meeting that will happen in November.
During the last months, Crianzas Mutuas Colombia has participated in several activities. By the end of November 2021, we had our first encounter with Vikalp Sangam from India and Crianzas Mutuas México. Since we all speak different languages, we decided to share our paths through a video that compiles our struggles in different territories of Colombia. Concretely, we have been nurturing emerging alternatives in the spheres of health, economy, education, and art. The aim of these efforts is to liberate Mother Earth and the peoples that have learned to live in a symbiotic relationship with her.
We encourage solidarity economies through the creation of peasant markets that are better understood as “markets of resistance”. The idea is to create exchange webs that ensure reciprocity through food sharing. This means that trade must assure benefits both for the producers and the buyers and that these benefits must be based on the regeneration of agriculture. We also encourage urban gardens and short commercial circuits. Regarding health systems, we are working on the construction of popular and communitarian systems that build from ancestral knowledge. We have also been working on harvesting water, for water brings life, movement, and knowledge. In midst of fierce and egregious violence, we see life flowering thanks to the resistance built from and with the earth, and indigenous, peasant and Afro-Colombian modes of life.
We are also collectively writing a book titled Pluritopías. Después del fin del mundo de la civilización y la barbarie (Pluritopias. After the end of the world of civilization and barbarism). The aim of the book is double. We want to bring back to our memory the paths that we have been walking over the last years in Crianzas Mutuas Colombia, and to shed light on the multiple ways of weaving with the territories that we inhabit on behalf of life, joy, and abundance beyond State, capitalism and patriarchy. The book traces back the emerging processes of more than 40 collectives in Colombia that are building alternatives in the face of coloniality and development. The book also recalls the conversations entertained with Crianzas Mutuas Mexico and Vilkrap India, dialogues that nurture and inspire our own paths. The book is written both in Spanish and in non-colonial languages, it also includes non-logocentric languages, such as videos, songs and images.
On February 2022, we gathered in Cali around the presentation of the book Pluriverse. A post-development dictionary. The book was presented by Arturo Escobar and Alberto Acosta, and it was commented on by Afro-Colombian, indigenous, and peasant social leaders. This was the opportunity to reflect on the importance of inspiring the imagination of sustainable futures by shedding light on existing alternatives in the region.
Finally, with the Tejido de transicionantes por el Valle del Cauca we are currently working on a dream that is already emerging: to redesign the Valley of Cauca region based on enrooted conceptions of Buen Vivir (good living) and abundance. This region has been marked by racial violence and ecological devastation, due to sugarcane plantations and illegal economies that actively produce the rural and urban zones divide. This violence is not hazardous but results from a modern design whose aim is the accumulation of capital. Our hope is to weave the relationship between the countryside and the city with and from communitarian initiatives that already exist in the region.
In 2022 the groups and collectives that are part of the Weaving of Crianza Mutua Mexico continue walking and building their own processes in their contexts, their territories and in their own times. The dialogues and agreements that we reached in the last meetings are the paths to organising the next meetings around “eating” and “healing”, assuming that they will be face-to-face meetings due to the need to share in person and learn about practical experiences beyond virtuality. Towards the encounter of eating and learning, the different experiences are part of the roots that build the alternatives:
Eating:
Learn:
In the same meaningful way of making visible the life of the groups that are part of Crianza Mutua Mexico are the radio programs where the voice and the experience of the different alternatives in relation to the care of life are heard, considering the daily activities that represent the tangible processes in the life of the communities, whether rural or urban. The care of life not only from an anthropomorphic point of view but also considering the care of everything that is on mother earth. These radio programs have been transcribed so that a physical and digital publication can be made and shared to give hope to the discontented.