Weaving is a timeless and worldwide practice usually connected to the sensuous world of free human association. In Ingapirca, Ecuador, the Andean Community of El Cisne, women engage with the ancestral practice of weaving to revive and strengthen ancestors’ knowledge and connect, share, and sit together, chatting and storytelling for the children.¹⁾ Like any other free gathering around a manual activity, these are moments of unspeakable peace, freedom, and joy, moments when the world's troubles seem to stop at the door and cannot interrupt the experience of love and connection. Weaving also appears recurrently in mythological descriptions of the empowered female healer and the wisdom of the goddess: Greek goddess Athena and Laima Dalia in Lithuanian myths were both weavers of the threads of life, while Maori goddess Hine-te-iwaiwa gave people the art of weaving ²⁾. More recently, it has been associated with a path towards (our) liberation. ³⁾

In 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. (GTAGlobal Tapestry of Alternatives), we mobilize the term weaving -a beautiful metaphor, to designate how individuals, movements, communities, and collectives (including the GTA) connect, interact, and build something together toward alternative forms of human and nonhuman life on the planet. Weaving highlights the transformative potential of prefigurative collective actions, i.e., collective organizing that uses the resistance against capitalism to open spaces of possibility to enunciate alternative realities.

Picture credits: A C Dinerstein, Mantra Mapuche, Patagonia, Argentina

Weaving contains a 'we.' The 'we' in the present continuous tense weaving is us, the collective engaged in interlacing threads and reproducing ancestral patterns or creating new ones, usually colourful, straight, or messy lines, that transpire our courageous struggles and multiple relations. In essence, we could say that for us, weaving is an activist method of unveiling the all-well-known forms in which capitalism has transformed us as individually and as collectives into something we do not want to be, revealing the emergence of alternatives that reject capitalism as the 'natural' form of possible society, supporting and connecting us/them.

Conceived as an activist method, weaving does not occur in a vacuum but emerges from the world that we want to change. Although the world is not entirely ours, for we feel alienated, powerless, unrooted, detached, forgotten, or as the English poet D.H. Lawrence once wrote, 'we are bleeding from the roots because we are cut off from the Earth, the sun and the stars,'⁴⁾ this violated world is still the terrain on which weaving takes place. In weaving, we also invite others, including the readers of this piece, to consider the possibility of weaving with us against, through, and beyond capitalism rather than becoming the spectators of my weaving. The choice for the reader -writes Holloway -is either 'to observe objectively (and in the third person) the decline of humanity or to assume (in the first person, plural) our struggle for a different world. Are you We?’⁵⁾

Image by @Alia Ali, Book Cover of Henderson, P.L. (2022) Unravelling Women's Art: Creators, Rebels, & Innovators in Textile Arts, Supernova Books

Weaving challenges the capitalist form of social cohesion attained through a steady money flow. In capitalism, money is more than just a means of exchange. If money were a convention, we could replace it with another universal equivalent. However, in capitalism, money holds a mysterious -invisible- supremacy insofar as it is the quantifiable representation of the power of capital as a form of society rather than a form of the economic system; it is through money that capital comes to life and subordinates the reproduction of human and non-human life to the reproduction of capital. In this way, money is an un-escapable reality, internal to human subjectivity, a flow that shapes our lives and futures. Therefore, weaving is not an isolated, pure practice but a murky one, for the yarns of our tapestries and baskets, are bound to become entangled with the threads of the capitalist net, resulting in entrapments, conflicts, and contradictions.

These encounters will damage the tapestry a wee, or wound it irreparably; then, the work of days, months, and years will be ruined. When disappointment strikes, for hope is contingent, not confident, and surrounded by danger⁶⁾, weaving will start again from scratch. In short, weaving is an activist method that requires us to navigate through, despite, and beyond capitalism, confronting the barriers and open possibilities while also being strong enough to resist the siren songs of the promise of capitalist happiness.

As a worldwide practice, weaving is multi-spatial and varies geographically. One of our constant debates is how to connect different territorial practices into a global one. However, there is another vital element to contemplate when considering alternative practices: time and temporality. Weaving is not only a multi-spatial but also a multi-temporal practice and, as such, is a weapon against capitalist homogeneous universal time. Global capitalism promotes indifference towards individual works, aiming to homogenize and synchronize all human activity (labour) for calculation towards profit making and accumulation in a way that high tech can coexist with (modern) slavery.⁷⁾ Synchronisation fashions and expands a 'homogeneous empty time', a term coined by Walter Benjamin. All of us are ‘asked’ to walk at the same rhythm, time and direction as the pace inscribed by modern universal temporality.

Picture credits: Jette Melgren - https://www.jettemellgren.dk/artist-statement

However, as German philosopher Ernst Bloch illuminates in his critique of Nazism in Heritage of our Time, ‘[n]ot all people exist in the same Now. They do so only externally, through the fact that they can be seen today. However, they are thereby not yet living at the same time with others. They instead carry an earlier element with them’⁸⁾. This bewildering idea speaks of the possibility that what we believe is happening at the same time is in fact ‘non- simultaneous’⁹⁾ : there is a co-existence ‘of things that express or represent different times or that have different dynamics of development.’ ¹⁰⁾

The imposition of the abstract contemporaneity of capital is a form of domination that oppresses other experiences of time and temporality. Weaving must interlace what lies hidden in the homogeneous time of capital: different temporalities, vital rhythms, and beautiful cadences that are obscured and oppressed under the ‘abstract contemporaneity of capitalism.¹¹⁾

Weaving is then a decolonising practice that aims to dismantle the two forms of imposition of universal time. First, as Vázquez suggests, ‘the politics of the time,’ i.e., the temporal capitalist strategy, imposes the present as the ‘sole locus of the real.’¹²⁾ We have learned from indigenous peoples that the present is not the only locus of the real. For example, la Tierra (the land) is defended because it is the political responsibility of the indigenous people to protect their ancestors. It is a revolutionary practice that relies on a different conceptualization of time and being: ‘This political responsibility [is] revolutionary vis-à-vis the modern notion of time.’¹³⁾

Picture Credits: Hella Jongerious, https://jongeriuslab.com/work/woven-cosmos

The defence of the land against brutal extractivism is not only the protection of the means of subsistence: it is the resistance of destroying the memory of the ancestors who inhabit the land. Secondly, modern universal temporality is linear and moves forward. Capitalist temporality subsumes difference under a linear vision of time. In its historicism binary thinking (e.g., pre-capitalism versus capitalism) prevails and difference is regarded as ‘incompleteness,’ implying, for example, that the uncivilized are expected to become civilized, and the undeveloped are expected to develop.¹⁴⁾ The ‘colonial condition’ suggests Rivera Cusicanqui, brings many problems to the task of locating indigenous peoples, movements, and resistances within the modern world: ‘There is no post or pre in this vision of history that is not linear or teleological but rather moves in cycles and spirals and sets out on a course without neglecting to return to the same point. The indigenous world does not conceive of history as linear, the past-future is contained in the present.’¹⁵⁾

As a multi-temporal praxis, weaving allows for the emergence of different dimensions and volumes that are not visible under capitalism's abstract contemporaneity. Weaving connects the threads of a multiversum. The multiversum offers a non-linear alternative paradigm. Bloch inspires us by explaining that ‘instead of linearity we need a broad, flexible, totally dynamic multiversum, a continuous and frequently linked counterpoint with historical voices. In this way, and to do justice to the gigantic extra-European material, it is no longer possible to work linearly, without sinuosity, in series (order), without a complex and new variety of time (. . .) Thus, we need a framework of a philosophy of the history of non-European cultures.’¹⁶⁾ The multiversum points to the plural character of the global world but also to its temporal diversity that will be interlaced and connected into voluminous multicolour tapestries and baskets full of marvellous practices.

With the profound desire to nurturing spatial and temporal diversity, enabling the alternatives to fully take and occupy their space within the tapestry, weaving differs fundamentally from networking. While networking connects dots to create a flat map without imparting any information about the individual dots, weaving creates 3D pieces of solidarity that incorporate struggles, practices, ideas, and knowledge into a colourful composition that can be contemplated from many angles and move in many directions. Unlike networking, primarily dedicated to creating interactions and exchanging information, weaving centres on crafting vibrant fabrics through collaboration and mutual recognition.

Anna Ray: ‘Ribbon chain’ and ‘Margate knot’, https://www.stalbansmuseums.org.uk/whats-on/anna-ray-fibre-and-form

Weaving produces exceptional forms of social interaction and cohesion that initially were difficult to name, but we learnt to name through collective action. Naming is a political process,¹⁷⁾ through which we reject external classifications, and it is an integral aspect of creating alternatives.

As a laborious process, weaving utilises the generous vitality from the weavers who engage in a personal and emotional journey of deep listening, reflection, and understanding in conversation with others, with affection for the others.

Picture Credits: Ana C Dinerstein ‘Weaving a coiled colourful basket’

The emotional journey (short or long) fosters alternative forms of solidarity that differ from the modern liberal solidarity based on Kant’s philosophy. For Kant, solidarity is a categorical imperative, an external moral obligation to help those who suffer. I aid you because it is morally and ethically correct. However, the solidarity created through weaving is driven by a rational-emotional necessity to be (come) with the others, to be in common, ‘being singular plural.’ ¹⁸⁾ Following the precepts of ubuntu philosophy, a person is a person only through others.

Our weaving is taking place within the context of a bottomless crisis of modern civilization, evolving in a collapsed planet, materially and spiritually, and where vulnerability is the common condition to all. Paraphrasing late maestro Enrique Dussel’s “geopolitical thinking “from vulnerability” of those who are not “the same,”’¹⁹⁾ we must always weave from vulnerability (ours and that of those who are not the same). In the end, it is the same vulnerability for all: detrás de nosotros estamos Ustedes.²⁰⁾ the Zapatistas said. Weaving…

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to my fellows Franco Augusto, Shrishtee Bajpai, Xochitl Leyva Solano, Carlos Tornel and Mugdha Trifaley, from the GTA facilitation team, for their insightful comments on an earlier version of this intervention, which helped to improve it significantly. I am indebted to Shrishtee Bajpai and Mugdha Trifaley (editors) for their immense patience while I was delayed in finalizing this piece.

Ana Cecilia Dinerstein is a member of the facilitation group of the Global Tapestry of Alternatives. She is a Professor of Political Sociology and Critical Theory at the University of Bath, in the UK where she teaches and does research on social, environmental, and cognitive justice, social movements, Marxist, feminist and decolonial theory, Latin American politics, and Ernst Bloch's philosophy of hope. Her publications include The Politics of Autonomy in Latin America: The Art of Organising Hope (2015); Women Theorising without Parachutes (ed. 2016); Open Marxism Vol 4; Against a closing world (co-edited)(2019) and A World Beyond Work? (co-authored, 2021). Website https://www.anaceciliadinerstein.com