The notion of weaving is the essence of 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.. Ivan Illich used the analogy of a persian rug to highlight its relevance. If one looks at this rug from the front, there are many patterns and interconnected colors and threads throughout it. The patterns intersect and form a beautiful tapestry. If looked at from the other side, the tapestry is obscured by a single color and/or pattern, one that appears overimposed on the diversity of colors, patterns and combinations.¹⁾ The metaphor is used to exemplify two things: first, that the ‘era of development’ (1949-) is the latest imposition of a series of colonial ways of seeing, being and knowing the world that has lasted over 500 years, starting with the European invasion of the American continent. We now live on the backside of the rug, and we were made as subjects, convinced that there is only one way forward (that of industrialization and technological progress and growth), and that there is no alternative. Secondly, those patterns and colors obscured by the mono-logic of development remain on the other side, a process that, as the civilizatory crisis advances, has revealed some of the other words on the back that now become visible.

Plastic, or amoeba words as Ivan Illich referred to them,​​ are certain words that become so flexible that they cease to be useful; ‘like an amoeba, they fit into almost any circumstance’.²⁾ Words like energy, sexuality, transportation, education, communication, crisis, etc become ‘plastic’ as they are processed through capitalist modernity and deployed to sustain that which remains, by definition, unsustainable. Perhaps the most famous of these amoeba words or concepts is ‘sustainable development’. Extracted from indigenous knowledge, sustainability concealed growth and economic liberalization under the perverse concern over the environment. Similarly, words like ‘transitions’ –mostly used in relation to energy– are deployed as palliatives or as euphemisms for crisis, designed to reduce popular anxiety after the 1973 oil crisis. The threat of plastic words continues to expand even to those concepts that seem ‘too radical’ to be subsumed, the most recent example being degrowth.³⁾

The rejection of plastic words can only be done by a direct rejection of epistemic extractivism and by ‘grounding’ concepts to embodied action. While the postcolonial and decolonial ‘turns’ in academia have pointed towards some important challenges to capitalist modernity and its founding dichotomic myths – such as the separation between nature and culture, staged progress, linear forms of growth and the notion of private property– knowledge appropriation, combined with a depoliticizing form of identity politics, continues to be deployed even within these structures, maintaining power and privilege within academia and failing to question some of these founding myths and the possibility of a pluriversal transformation. Weaving remains a concept ‘outside’ the domains of academic thinking; it emerges from a dialogue and shared practice of doing. However, the risk of it becoming a plastic word, of being absorbed by the hegemonic system persists.⁴⁾ While the risk of epistemic extractivism (i.e. the extraction of knowledge) persists within academic institutions, the task of the GTAGlobal Tapestry of Alternatives is to continue rooting its practice and knowledge in the dialogue with those lived experiences of those who weave other worlds into a tangible possibility. This process should include and encourage critical spaces within academia, pushing for other militant –instead of activist or traditional research– commitments to ways of doing research. ⁵⁾

The commune of Rojava weaving internationalist support. Source: https://www.novacomunidade.org/wiki-mcf/category/rojava.⁶⁾

Abdullah Öcalan’s – The imprisoned PKK leader and one of the main thinkers and contributors to the notion of democratic confederalism– challenge to the modern state resonates clearly with the importance of weaving as a pedagogy (i.e. as a practice and not as a concept), and as a form of socio-political organization. For Öcalan, the state, built under a monopoly of power and politics, entails the erasure of otherness in favor of a single national identity. While experiences in Latin America point towards plurinational states, these efforts –however well intentioned– remain limited and deployed under the same colonial and patriarchal forms of organization. Homogeneity and hierarchies remain, as these are embedded into bureaucracies regardless of how ‘progressive’, and ‘leftist’ they might be. Through the exploitation of reproductive work assigned to women, a quasi-religious form of governance under the perception of positivism, everything other is excluded and seen as retrograde, flawed or backward. The collapse of capitalist modernity calls for a rejection of universal solutions, a transmodernity – a multiplicity of politic-epistemic projects that reject a universal view of the world – involving a federation of small radically democratic self-governing communities.

Weaving enables a radical pedagogy between worlds. It creates conditions under which a dialogue between those that have been othered by the hegemonic view of the world is possible thusly. First, weaving goes beyond a mere dialogue of knowledges as it places practice and lived experience at the center: only through sharing the world (i.e. not just knowledge or the logos) can the possibility of a dialogue become possible. Secondly, weaving can also encompass a plurality of political horizons and possibilities. Bringing the matter of size into the debate, weaving places direct democracy, autonomy and dignity as the basis of political organization, a project built from the ground-up, from a collective defense of the territory, recognizing socio-ecologically -determined limits and a reformulation of the relationship between humans and nature.

An ontological confederalism, would entail a rejection of a single world-view that has shaped the era development through –going back to our metaphor of the rug– a totality built under the monologue of development. Weaving entails learning to listen, of sitting in the in-betweenness of worlds. Or rather, it is a way of embodying a radical plurality into our own way of seeing and being in the world. Rejecting the state as the sole form of politics and the only way for different nations to exist in modernity, becomes the main task to challenge capitalism (how would a system based on violence work without its enforcer and disciplinary institutions?). Weaving entails the possibility of formulating a radical confederalism, such as the one put in practice by the women of Rojava⁷⁾ one rooted into particularities to produce an alternative to a universal civilization. Weaving is then an encounter, a dialogue and a shared experience, one that rejects the universal project of modernity but is willing to dialogue with modernity in some of its forms. As Gustavo Esteva would argue, it goes beyond the logos (dialogue) as it involves a shared techne, an encounter that shapes the world in the experience of sharing, one that requires access to it only in community. Of course weaving can be done individually, but this usually also centers the dialogue with the other, the shared experience gathered from the action.

Weaving entails a form of radical pluralism, one that challenges and rejects the assumption of a culture supremacy, or a right way of doing, being and thinking in the world. This, however, does not imply cultural relativism; it simply shows that incommensurability between worlds is a position that we must assume before we come into dialogue. The possibility of dialogue of livings, as Gustavo Esteva argued, is rooted on the recognition of incommensurability as something inherent in the dialogue: we might not be able to fully understand the other, but we can, through an encounter, be able to share the world with them. Incommensurabilities do not mean a lack of understanding, or a nostalgic romanticism for the other, they simply mean to be open to otherness.⁸⁾

The Zapatista journey for Life in 2021 as an example of civilizational transition Source: https://chiapas-support.org/2021/01/10/the-ezln-and-the-other-europe/

A pluriverse that ensues from such a dialogue is built on a rejection of the universalization of a singular, hierarchical and hegemonic worldview, and hence is incapable of becoming a dominant or hegemonic worldview. Drawing on the Zapatistas, weaving is a practice rooted in the possibility of sharing the world. While the dialogue of knowledges – a key concept in the decolonial scholarship– has centered the need not only of recognizing the other and knowledge that has been subjected into a one-world totality. A civilizational transition will then not be based on a singular world-view capable of substituting or replacing capitalist modernity, but on multiplicity of practices capable of coming into contact and learning from one another. As the Zapatistas would say, drawing on the ‘many belows’ that shape otherworldly possibilities.⁹⁾

John Holloway has recently theorized money as a totalizing force in capitalism. In capitalism, money supplants the need for a commons and the process of weaving, it convinces us that weaving is redundant or unnecessary. Instead, money shapes our everyday lives in almost every way. Weaving is akin to a vernacular domain, the space that remains outside the hegemonic economic ideology where human and more than human relations are possible despite the economy. Weaving entails the possibility of voluntarily shaping our everyday life against an external force that binds or ties our actions, this force being money. Hence weaving is an antidote for money;¹⁰⁾ it is not the opposite of it, but the possibility of claiming that which has been made to appear as redundant (i.e. the commons, the spaces and process of reproduction, nature, etc.). The struggle for a world without money requires that we see the weakness in capitalism. Marx himself argued that Capital is a moving contradiction, it presses to reduce labor time to a minimum, while it posits labor time as the sole measure and source of wealth.¹¹⁾ This contradiction maintains a fall in the rate of profit over time. Such a tendency maintains that, unless there is a rise in the rate of exploitation, the rate of profit will fall – this is akin to what Moishe Postone called the treadmill effect–.¹²⁾

Hope in Hopeless Times times, by John Holloway (2023). Source: https://www.plutobooks.com/blog/podcast-hope-in-hopeless-times/

The tendency of the rate of exploitation has increased. It is no surprise that today capitalism, as the civilization crisis of the West becomes a planetary catastrophe, can no longer reproduce itself in its own terms: capital depends on violence and on an enforcer (a State) that can sustain that violence over prolonged periods of time and manifest in multiple forms. Pandemics, wars, climate catastrophes and ecological collapses are now the sources of value production, as capitalism destroys nature and exacerbates the unequal distribution of wealth to an obscene degree (Oxfam has recently warned of the rise of a first trillionaire by the end of the decade).¹³⁾ Holloway, however, sees the tendency of the rate of profit to fall as an opportunity for struggle. That struggle is rooted in a refusal of money and the recuperation of weaving. A rejection of the thing that makes us complicit with the capitalist system in everyday life, a process that entails an ongoing insurrection where we are able to reclaim verbs and actions instead of becoming dependent on nouns and institutions.

These meditations of weaving are the result of a dialogue that has been brewing within the GTA and its Weavers. Weaving a diverse set of threads, with all their differences and similarities, contributes to a broader whole. Weaving is a pedagogy, shatters the illusion of a single way forward or a universal solution for all, instead it argues for a reformulation of our socioecological relations woven together in non-hierarchical orders, acting like a rhizome, where the whole is what matters and were no discernable beginning or end is evident. Weaving is how movements and grounded alternatives learn from one another. The work of Crianza Mutua Mexico (CMMCrianza Mutua Mexico) for example, has placed emphasis on the rejection of a hierarchical structure, placing the dialogue of livings or a form of radical pluralism between alternatives as a way forth. This of course still poses the challenge of how weaving is brought to our everyday lives and struggles. In CMM for example, weaving entails periodical gatherings between alternatives rooted in different places. In these encounters, participants come to share knowledge, practices and experiences for a few days and then return and report back to their territories/movements. The choice of voluntarily rejecting a hierarchical form of organization is matched by an openness of being transformed by the other. This places the work of the GTA and CMM (as well as the other Weavers) in a direct opposition to capitalist modernity. Even if the alternatives on the ground do not openly reject capitalism or modernity, the act of recognizing that other worlds are possible and that it is possible to engage in an embodied dialogue with the other, manifests in the actual practice of a pluriverse. The challenge and the struggle will be to create a dialogue based on weaving as a global confederacy of possibility and not on the terms of state institutions, capitalism and academic extraction.

Carlos Tornel is a Mexican writer, researcher and activist tornelc@gmail.com. He is the co-author, with Elias González Gomez of “Gustavo Esteva, life and work of a deprofessionalized intellectual” (in Spanish, and soon to be translated into English). He is part of the Facilitation Team of the Global Tapestry of Alternatives.