3.1 The Awakening: agreeing on an emancipatory horizon and a great narrative of enchantment

We are entering into a phase of bifurcation, and therefore of uncertainty, where, in order to preserve itself at all costs, financial capitalism will impose increasingly authoritarian and law-and-order political models, and decreasingly democratic ones (the shifting political landscape to the right of right is a type of response to that demand); or, impelled by progressive social actors of civil society, a new social pact will see the light of day. It is clear that the transition is under way and that we must urgently give it the direction we want along with its institutional forms and a narrative. We must therefore have the lucidity to recognize that a battle over the direction of current transitional processes is ongoing¹

Despite the disastrous effects of the global and planetary crisis, dominant elites continue, in large part, to have faith in the benefits of modernity. Collectively, we have relegated the task of imagining a better future to the dreamers and utopians. We must awaken our spirit to a new civilizational reality that will promote the subjective material conditions required to guarantee living well collectively in a way that is inclusive, supportive, democratic, proud, ecological and, ethically and aesthetically speaking, founded on new epistemic enchantment.

We have identified the era of the Awakening as the historical period that will ensure the concretization of a great enchanting narrative that advocates for the transition’s objective modalities. These will allow many of the contradictions at the heart of the current global and planetary crisis to be overcome. To construct this narrative, we will draw on the numerous experiments and initiatives currently underway, but also from the work of reconceptualizing normality. This construction will require breaking down polluted knowledge fed by colonialism, extractivism, sexism and inegalitarianism in order to defuse the negative effects of socio-territorial disparities that have been naturalized in social relationships.

Just like decolonized knowledge, emancipatory experiments and initiatives will provide the key elements of a new vocabulary that will need to be aligned with our goals for emancipation. Deconstructing to rebuild will require us to be vigilant against those wanting to rebuild the old order, which means resisting the temptation to re-engage with ‘neomodernism’ and “neo-colonialism.”

Fundamentally, we will have to give a specific direction to our relationships with our livelihoods. To do so, we must clarify the meaning of “working within society,” define what “production of collective living” and “working together” represents as well as specify how “human, plant and animal dignity” relates to inter-species coexistence, indispensable in light of evolutionary interdependence-based relationships.

Concretely, we will need to specify Common rights and imagine how to manage counterpowers, the centripetal will that feeds corruption, nourishes deviancy and drives the development of mafia-like societies. The work is at once theoretical and practical, forward-looking while anchored in daily actions. It builds meaning that will allow us to state the possibilities for the world, and the pathway to achieving them.

The Awakening will rely on a cultural/natural configuration that mobilizes a social and environmental pact and a set of values and principles.

A new ‘social pact’ will allow us to reconnect with a

material existence of communal living no longer based on property and separation, but rather on cohesion and the collective. Essentially, we must resist the privatization of possessions, knowledge and power. Similarly, it is important to preserve the symbolic dimension of existence. This would be possible through a re-enchantment process that would connect our existence with processes and dynamics that promote Nature’s expanse : multiplication, densification and complexification of ways of being, acting and thinking. It is important to continue producing uniqueness and differences, in short, to resist the excessive hold that communities have over the individual… Postmodernity is therefore not simply the end of great narratives. It is the moment where we, the modern us, are confronted with a duty to revoke our contradictions, that is, to face our duty and responsibility to exist individually within the communal².

An environmental agreement, in the image of Article 2 of the United Nations’ Global Pact for the Environment will make it so that :

every State or international institution, every person, natural or legal, public or private, has the duty to take care of the environment. To this end, everyone contributes at their own levels to the conservation, protection and restoration of the integrity of the Earth’s ecosystem³.

A set of key values and principles will be written in the ‘Codex of the Collective’:
- Solidarism between humans {sociative values}
- Complete and whole democratization [‘governmentality’ principle]
- Alterity and altruism {sociative values}
- ‘Ecocentrism’ [‘subsistivity’ principle and ecological values]
- Critical cognitivism [principle of doubt and respect for target public]
- Legal pluralism of the Collective [ecosystemic governmentality principle]
- Ethism of beauty, harmony and Buen vivir [substantivism principle and values]
- Aetheticism of balance in the Real [artistic principle in and of itself]

Imagining another world
If we accept the need for a new ethic, we must incorporate elements that are consubstantial with a true process of radical transformation and that promote equality, diverse forms of equity, liberty, social and environmental justice, as well as moral, aesthetic and spiritual elements. In other words, human rights merge with the rights of nature in an effort to permanently democratize society and to build strong citizenry. Every person has a right to a dignified life that ensures health, food and nutrition, access to clean water, to housing, to a healthy environment, to education, to work and employment, to rest and leisure, to physical activity, to adequate clothing, to social security and to other necessary social services. In order to really exist, access to these rights demands a change in the distribution of wealth and revenue, all while ensuring environmental balance. This leads us to reestablish and review all that would be public, universal, free and diverse components of new societies systematically seeking liberty, equality, equity and inclusion as the main drivers of Buen Vivir. Alberto Acosta (2011.) « Sólo imaginando otros mundos, se cambiará éste. Reflexiones sobre el Buen Vivir », p. 204 – 205, in Farah H. Ivonne et Luciano Vasapollo (Eds). Vivir bien : Paradigma no capitalista ?, La Paz, Plural editors, pp. 189 – 208.

Notes

1
Delruelle, É. (2015): http://blogs.ulg.ac.be/edouard-delruelle/la-modernite-comme-fin-et-comme-aporie/.
2
Ibid.
3
Global pact for the environment project : https://globalpactenvironment.org/uploads/EN.pdf.