The in-person first Global TapestryThe weaving of networks of Alternatives of Alternatives (GTA) assembly started working in situ in Nanyuki (Kenya, Africa) on August 5, 2023 with meetings of the facilitation team. As many of its members participate and walk the pluriverses and the multiverses, we know that this way of dating time responds to a universalized Gregorian calendar that governs only a part of the world and is governed by certain powers, therefore relative. But, if we think about this same date from the Mayan Tzolk'in calendar, we could affirm that according to the Mayan time-counters, we started our activities on a propitious day to ask for “the success in our projects and to remove mental illnesses in human beings […] to ask for prosperity on Earth.”²⁾ If we look at our insurgent other-calendars from the other-politics in rebellious Chiapas, August takes us back to the month in which the Caracoles and the Zapatista Good Government Councils —incarnations of de facto and without permission autonomy—, were created 20 years ago and recently reorganized.³⁾

Picture Credits: Xochitl Levya Solano

The first face-to-face assembly of the GTA took place between the “post-pandemic” relief and the rise of new waves of violence, wars and deaths on planet Earth. In that August of 2023 we felt that we had emerged from the worst phase of the civilizational-pandemic crisis. The joy of being able to meet face to face leapt out of the more than 60 people from all continents who met in Africa. While those feelings were real, the shadow of the ongoing wars in the different territories never fully dissipated form the background.

We did not come together to talk about wars but about how we embody our alternatives to the dominant systems and how to weave them in a better way in the face of a civilizational collapse. The alternatives that each person, group, movement or network presented, is what each of these groups are implementing in the face of the multiple systemic crises, and yet as the shadow of violence never left us, we had no choice but to speak of these horrors as well. For example: During the assembly, our comrades of the Kurdish movement for freedom,⁴⁾ received news of the worsening violence carried out in their territories in resistance. Two months later, on October 4, Turkish army forces systematically shelled villages, towns and infrastructure in the districts of the Autonomous Administration of Northern and Eastern Syria (AANES) in Kurdistan.

Three months later, on November 5, the Israeli military offensive in the Gaza Strip had already caused more than 10,000 deaths (mainly children and women), left more than 24,000 wounded people and one and a half million displaced. As we know, for none of these occupied territories in resistance war is nothing new, but the ‘new’ forms of extermination are becoming outrageous and atrocious. Both offensives can be seen as different faces of what the Zapatistas have called since 1998: the war against humanity.

Writing in November 2023 about what I learned in the GTA assembly is a major challenge due to the degree of barbarism⁵⁾ reached in Chiapas, Mexico and the world. To think about what we agreed in the assembly in the light of this is, without a doubt, a praiseworthy endeavour to continue weaving the tapestry of radical alternatives⁶⁾; a bet that the GTA makes to contribute to the civilizational transitions that are already seeking to create just, dignified, healthy and violence-free worlds⎯ all in the plural, nothing in the singular⎯.

The GTA could be seen as part of a broader genealogy that in the modern Western world refers to collective actions of transversalization, transnationalization and transterritorialization of struggles that operate on the basis of fraternity and solidarity and that have sought, over several centuries, justice, liberation and the emancipation of subalterned peoples. I say “could be seen” because it is not accurate to say so since in the diversity of the GTA there are people, organizations, movements and networks formed by indigenous, native, Afro-descendants’ peoples of the Global South, so reducing its genealogy to the West and modernity is not entirely accurate since it would mean reducing its roots to those starting points.

At the same time, it is also true that the GTA takes its distance and differentiates itself from what was born in the 19th century as internationalism, understood as a “concept and aspiration of the struggle against capital” and that “connotes class brotherhood”.⁷⁾ Such internationalism in the twentieth century confronted both Facism and Nazism (especially in Europe). Later, in the second part of the 20th century, such internationalism served to confront dictatorial regimes in the Latin American Southern Cone and Central America. This internationalism would take place in the context of the left, the Cold War and the fall of the socialist bloc, while the GTA is the result of the polycrisis, the civilizational crisis and the climatic collapse that we are living through in the 21st century. Hence, the main differences that, in a very schematic way, we could identify between:

Unlike the historical (class) subject of 19th and 20th century internationalism, in Nanyuki (Kenya, Africa), we went as human beings connecting to each other with animals, ancestral spirits, sacred mountains as well as reweaving our multiple, similar but different political histories and cultures. It was no coincidence that many of us called each other “comrades” while others pointed out their critique of political-military forms of struggle.

Picture Credits: Xochitl Levya Solano

When we think and write on paper we can make many bets, have many supreme aspirations of what we collectively want to be and do. As has been said time and again, the GTA is not “an organization” but a “tapestry” of “alternatives”. And within that tapestry, the greatest challenges come when we have to work together, meet face to face and share ourselves in the midst of a world that violates and fragments us. So, as we saw in the assembly, the power, but also the challenges, emerge from the diversities that we are and that we are trying to weave. Diversities that are based on age and generational differences, race, ethnicity, culture, creed, sex-gender, histories, cultures and political practices, spiritualities, ways of organizing ourselves and ways of exercising power and knowledge. All this undoubtedly led us on a journey of colours but also of grays, blacks and whites that we should not fail to reflect on collectively.

Before continuing, I would like to highlight one aspect that has to do with the deep meaning of creating a tapestry. All weavers and embroiderers know that we are talking about an eminently creative practice that leads to “materialize what one has in one's imagination”.⁸⁾ Seen from this point of view, I believe that this assembly helped us to materialize the “reweaving of the web of life” as Lorena Cabnal and the Mayan compañeras of the Network of Ancestral Healers of the Territorial Feminism Community of Guatemala name and practice it.⁹⁾

At the same time, what happened in the assembly¹⁰⁾ managed to energize us, that is, to inject us with a positive energy that was born from the collectivity gathered there and from what each weaver or endorser contributed in Nanyuki. That energy crossed the body, the heart, the mind, the guts and expanded to the ancestors and the cosmos. This idea came to me as I read the colleagues of Crianza Mutua Mexico, Belén Díaz and Itzel Farías — who shared the assembly with us—. In their text, they emphasized that we start from doing. They said: “we thanked, listened, learned, looked, watched, discovered, healed, communicated, conversed, inhabited, expanded, danced, knitted, defended, sang, shared, gave, ate, played, received, mirrored, recognized, surprised, embroidered, embraced, sang, cooked and prayed…”.¹¹⁾ All of this nourished us to go forward in our struggles. This is no small matter in a world of growing barbarization; in a world where hopelessness, impotence and extermination reign.

Four years after a handful of founders started the GTA, this space, as has been said in many spaces and texts, is composed of a group of facilitators (mostly volunteers), four weavers and half a hundred endorsers. From there, how did we organize ourselves for this first face-to-face assembly? In the facilitating group, we drew from our pedagogies, methodologies and deschooling, decolonial and autonomous practices. We agreed to highlight the work done by the weavers, and from there we wove everything else.

Picture Credits: Ryan Martinez

The GTA weavers so far exist in four different parts of the Global South: India, Mexico, Colombia and Southeast Asia. Each has particular characteristics but all share the common characteristic of being networks of networks that interconnect people territorially rooting themselves in processes of resistance, re-existence or resilience. These people, groups and/or collectives are woven with different actors of civil society: activists, academics, scholars and non-governmental organizations. During the assembly, we first heard the presentations form the delegates of the weavers, in their own voices. Placing more relevance on them was not an act of courtesy, but is a way of pay back a historical debt and reaffirming the nature of this tapestry: weaving from the bottom up.

For us in Chiapas this is not new, we began to hear about it in 1994 when the Zapatista movement spawned a new geo-onto-politics which they called: “from below and to the left”. We then learned what is and how to embody this form of other-politics and, from within it, how to put other-autonomies and the other-solidarities at the center. The Zapatistas were showing us, with their own lives other ways of weaving, not those of the traditional, partisan or institutional left, but what we usually call the local, national and transnational. For thirty years we have lived this important experience made, above all, on the move and on a trial-and-error basis. This has left us with many life lessons, to mention just one: to learn and unlearn from our mistakes, tensions, clashes, detunings and disharmonies. Hopefully in the GTA we will find the way and time to continue working in form and addressing these challenges.

For example: within this tapestry, which is mostly made up of people from the Global South, there are also people from the Unsubmissive Global North¹²⁾, colonial relations are part of a common history and coloniality is part of our realities. How do these colonial, colonizing and coloniality histories and relations affect and have affected us? How do we include this dimension in our actions and reflections? Because naming is a highly political act, using words that have a violent colonial charge as, for example, “negro” or “negra”, requires a double effort to open ourselves to listen because it turns out that in other latitudes those same words can rise up to those colonial charges and become tools for liberation. I think of how the organization called PCN-[Process of Black Communities] in Colombia⎯ whose delegates were in the assembly⎯ from a maroon episteme call themselves: “Negras” to walk their re-existence in the midst of the Colombian armed conflict and through the Process of Black Communities.

I see the first face-to-face assembly of the GTA and the GTA process as a whole, as part of the many struggles that globalize hope. They are the other face of the racist patriarchal capitalist neoliberal capitalist global offensive that today, with the ongoing violence, shows its dimension of extermination.

Before this phase of extermination⎯ that intensifies both locally and globally⎯ our challenges appear as endless lists: How to tune in when we are harassed and fragmented by thousands of fronts that bring death and violence to our most elementary forms of existence and everyday lives? How to advance in the definition of urgencies and needs that respond to the diversity that we embody, and continue to put as a weaving thread not what is above or the in-between dreams, but what the alternatives from the grassroots urge us to see as necessary to advance in this weaving? How to coalition with other expressions of civil society without them imposing their agendas, modes and times?

To begin again, I bring the words of the Zapatistas issued in their recent communiqué of November 12, 2023, as a sample of the wink they are giving us and which I hope you can grasp:

“Brothers and sisters and compañer@s: I am going to try to explain to you how we are reorganizing the autonomy, that is, the new structure of Zapatista autonomy[ …] Quinto. - The structure and disposition of the EZLN has been reorganized in order to increase the defence and security of the villages and of mother earth in case of aggressions, attacks, epidemics, invasion of companies that depredate nature, partial or total military occupations, natural catastrophes and nuclear wars. We have prepared ourselves for the survival of our peoples, even isolated from each other[ …] as we will see, this new stage of autonomy is made to face the worst of the Hydra, its most infamous bestiality and its destructive madness[ …] For us there are no borders or distant geographies. Everything that happens in any corner of the planet affects us and concerns us, worries us and hurts us all [ … ].”¹³⁾