How the Poor Rise Up in San Cristobal de las Casas
Over the past year throughout Chiapas, there have been regular road and highway blockades. Between May 10, 2016 and August 10, 2016, over 260 roadblocks have taken place in the state.1 The disruption has been a daily part of life, making movement between cities and communities difficult. Community organizations, political parties, teachers’ unions, and indigenous and campesino organizations block transportation and demand the annulment of elections, money, dialogue, the effectuation of workers’ rights, an end to impunity, and general political change. These blockades stop the flow of money through and out of the state. They are targeted actions that specifically frustrate the movement of money from money-poor communities to national and transnational corporations. In fact, many of the blockades allow personal vehicles to pass while only stopping trucks transporting goods for transnational corporations. This type of response has not been unique to Chiapas; rather, many states in the country have similar processes in play. The states declared by CONEVAL (The National Advisory on the Politics of Social Development, a United Nations-funded advisory board in Mexico) as having the highest rates of “multi-dimensional poverty and extreme poverty” in Mexico (Chiapas, Guerrero, and Oaxaca) have experienced the most citizen-led blockades.
Chiapas is considered to have the highest rate of multidimensional poverty, comprising 76.2% of the population in 2014.2 The designations and use of terms like “multi-dimensional poverty” and “extreme poverty” are development definitions that originate with the United Nations Millennium Development Goals. The program, which concluded in 2015, claimed to have met approximately 85% of its goals. However, in the state of Chiapas these organizations know that there is solidarity and strength, a vast array of abilities, and internal personal resources that support continued resistance. Courage is an important word here because the state’s hired paramilitary thugs frequently kill protesters and teachers. It takes courage to value oneself and the community: courage in the face of physical and psychosocial violence and by being categorized as multi-dimensionally impoverished. By maintaining and creating value in-place, these communities challenge the notion that multi-dimensional poverty and extreme poverty are as widespread as the United Nations would suggest. Rather, the categories built into development goals clash with other definitions of richness embraced by organizations in Chiapas. What poverty is, and how it is manifest, come into question. This questioning and resistance visibilize how resource-full people rise up.
Multidimensional poverty is formally measured by looking at one’s income, education lag, access to health services, access to food, housing quality and space, to basic housing services, social security, and the degree of social cohesion.3 With the implementation of the United Nations (UN) Millennium Development Goals, these factors used to measure multidimensional poverty in effect became reality. The UN now has a formal metric to categorize people into several tiers of impoverishment. Once an individual is designated as being in a state of poverty or extreme poverty, not only do they become vulnerable to falling short of meeting their basic needs, but they also become vulnerable to having their lives interrupted by the imposition of capitalist structures.
Chiapas, known by many for its 1994 Zapatista uprising—and their continued resistance to this day—has many grassroots movements and organizations. Some negotiate with the state by doing actions such as blockades, as well as dialogue. Other organizations, similar to the Zapatistas, work to create autonomous regions with a self-organized infrastructure, government, economy, and education. This work in creating autonomy is not unique in the world; there are many movements and organizations that seek these goals and use similar tactics. From the perspective of the United Nations Development Program, many of these movements arise in regions that experience both poverty and extreme poverty. This process is nothing new; the term “development” means that a region will experience the replacement of its traditional non-capitalist methods of resource distribution with more capitalist mechanisms, whose objective is to profit from a divided and quantified economy. In this sense, we see collective work on community land being replaced with wage labor for individuals or education in non-indigenous languages that will incorporate rural and urban peoples into a capitalist economic-legal-social system. In this chapter I will reflect on what poverty means in Chiapas, as well as the non-capitalist alternatives to gaining access to resources and fomenting resistance to combat poverty.
What it Means To Be Poor
The term poor is integral in maintaining a capitalist economy. It implies that a lack of money in a region also indicates a lack of access to resources. According to neoliberal capitalism, resource access should only be mediated through the exchange of money. Access to healthcare, education, housing, food, safety, energy, and many other resources is supposed to be based on an individual’s access to money. When one is poor, it is expected that one lacks access not only to money, but all other resources as a consequence. This is the reality for people who live in these highly capitalist societies and economies: access to money governs access to other resources. In these areas, the dominant message is, “No money? Sorry, you’re out of luck.” As Karl Marx famously explained, the accumulation of money is the accumulation of social power, where the term is defined as one’s ability to accumulate just about any resource and oppress others with less money by controlling their access to resources.4 Access to money is not a question of luck. That is to say, money is not an abundant resource that is easily accessible to most people on Earth. It is a socio-economic construction, and access to money is obfuscated by the naturalization of institutionalized manifestations of violence seated in coloniality.5 These forms of structural violence include constructions of race, gender, class, ability, property, natural resources, epistemic and ontological validation, nationality, and the allocation of infrastructure. Structural violence refers to how economic, social, and political systems create harmful situations for different groups of people. Certain populations suffer disadvantages that have destructive repercussions for their well-being.6 People are considered poor when they are denied access to resources through structural violence. The term “poor” is situated within a colonial context and enacted today through capitalism. Following Karl Polanyi, if a market economy requires a market society, then in areas where there is little money, there is also a diminished presence of capitalism both socially and economically.7 While recognizing that poverty kills, having limited access to money does not mean that one is resource-poor, or that one will have a low quality of life. Rather, it means that for many people their access to basic resources comes from outside of capitalist interactions, or they choose to live in spaces beyond the reach of capitalism. In this way, they choose, are born in, or are forced into, a non-alienating economy where social relationships foment resource sharing and collectivization.
Non-monetary forms of exchange are nothing new. They are common everywhere.8 Sharing amongst neighbors, collective work, volunteering, and gifting, are all common practices that emerge socially within communities. Over the last ten years, the rise of the solidarity economy movement has shown that many of these practices are being recognized and formalized into networks of value. In this way, social equality and mutual aid are gaining strength as practical methods of decreasing one’s dependence on money while simultaneously creating communities that value care and support.
Economic resistance is something that each of us can do, starting right now. Social movements that incorporate immediate networks of non-capitalist economies often last longer and incorporate larger numbers of people. Contrary to the commonly held belief, local economies and/or decolonial economies need not be small; instead, they tend to pull people in and begin to distribute resources immediately in non-oppressive exchanges. Evidence for this can be seen in the Kurdish resistance in Rojava and Northern Syria,9 the Zapatistas in Mexico,10 the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil,11 the Piqueteros in Argentina,12 the autonomous region of El Alto, Bolivia,13 and many other large movements throughout the world. Resistance through economic decoloniality tends to act on a shorter timeframe than more cultural approaches such as resisting the coloniality of thought, power, or gender. Decolonial economic praxis is the practice of using our non-capitalist knowledge and skills to create spaces that free us from the confines of the constant contemporary experiences of colonialism. It begins with talking with one’s neighbors about how they would like economic exchanges to happen, about their needs, and their well-being. It starts when people begin to organize themselves around how they would like their neighborhood or community to be, and what kinds of resources are actually needed.
Obviously, this kind of thinking is not conducive to extending the reach of capitalism or the traditional capitalist lie of “eliminating poverty” through employment for all. The very existence of large transnational corporations, and the high-cost infrastructures they build, is naturally limited in places dominated by local collective economies that emphasize communal support over profit. Instead, the thrust of my argument is that we should challenge the classical concept of poverty, as understood to mean lacking access to money, and therefore resources. There are many kinds of poverty including a poverty of community, where people that have plenty of money and access to resources are completely alienated from others in the community around them, if that community exists at all. This type of poverty through isolation can be deadly to those in our community, our families and friends, old and young, who depend on the support of the community for their health and mobility. These poverties of care, love, nurturing, freedom, and joy will often arise from the isolation and oppression by systems of coloniality that divide people into incommensurable classes, races, genders, abilities, ethnicities, and sexualities. Being care-poor, love-poor, nurture-poor, community-poor, freedom-poor, and joy-poor are devastating poverties that lead to the destruction of the self.
Frantz Fanon wrote extensively about the internalization of coloniality. In Black Skin, White Masks, he explains how within coloniality Black men (and sometimes women) were acculturated into feelings of constant inadequacy because they were taught to believe that whiteness was the only (unachievable)good as Blackness was constantly portrayed as the source of all of the worst aspects of society.14 In this way whiteness, the epistemic and ontological foundations of white coloniality, has been internalized into the experience of the colonized self. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon regularly refers to people who believe that they are white or Black.15 Race is a powerful concept that is used to create oppression. The first step in the resistance against racist ideology and practices is changing how we situate ourselves in relation to each other, and refuse to allow others to devalue ourselves and our bodies. Coloniality enacted as “development” creates a constant process of division; between people, within us, and from the land. Nanda Shrestha has also written about the internalization of development and coloniality in Nepal, from his experience:
Bikas [a name for capitalist development] could bring things instantly, and we did not have to work hard to acquire what we wanted. But we were all bewitched. Foreign aid had become our sole medium of material nirvana. Pride in self-achievement and self-reliance was conspicuously absent.
Bikas solidified the colonial notion that we were incapable of doing things for ourselves and by ourselves. The colonial ‘civilizing mission’ was resurrected as the mission of development. These Western ‘civilizers’ first undermined our relative self-sufficiency and self-reliance, and then categorized us as inferior and poverty-stricken. Closely inter-woven with nature and its cyclical rhythm, our way of life was certainly different, but not inferior. True, it was not prepared to bring nature under large-scale human subjugation. But our relatively harmonious coexistence with nature was interpreted as a sign of backwardness and primitiveness. Development was measured in terms of the distance between humans and nature. The greater the distance between the two, the higher the level of development. The distance between the two definitely increased – in some cases literally, as poor Nepalese village women walked further and further every year in search of fire wood and animal fodder.16
Shrestha elegantly exposes the divisive and purposeful destruction that is the expansion of coloniality through capitalist development. It internally robs people of their autonomy, pushing them into a psychology of poverty while impoverishing their landscape by ravaging all that it has to offer. This practice can only be called theft. The ravenous appetite of development not only seeks to strip the land of its resources, but also benefits from exploiting, and essentially enslaving, those it assimilates by upturning the relationships of people to the land and access to the resources the land provides.
In analyzing how coloniality has and continues to construct gender, Maria Lugones has written about the creation of sex-based genders and the subjugation of women, especially women who are not white skinned.17 Coloniality has created extensive internalization of binary genders compounded with what was and is considered the impurity and aberration of sexuality of the non-white woman. Lugones writes that while white women were constructed as the pure, submissive, and non-sexual birthing counterpart to bourgeois white men, non-white women at the time were not even considered human.18 Many women I know, a few who are very close to me here in Chiapas, were born in indigenous families and communities, and at a young age were sent to work for upper class families here in the more metropolitan San Cristobal de las Casas. At home and at school they were educated not to speak, not to let their presence ever be an interruption in the others’ lives. The internalization of this structural violence does incredible harm to our communities. We lose so much of women’s participation in creating our world, by this practice of silencing. For myself, I know that being a cis-gendered, white-presenting woman, my body and mind have been constant sites of attack over my entire life. I know that the violence lived by others who do not present the same is a source of deep pain and debilitation. However, I also know that we can have courage, we can grow, we can do things daily to stop being paralyzed through violence, and to walk a path toward well-being, collectively. As a group, we can lean on each other, learn from each other, and find ways to proceed. Only through de-normalizing our internal experiences of gender and race, and simultaneously creating communities that seek the elimination of these oppressions through immediate and constant response to each attack, will we change how we are valued. We have to do it ourselves; it will not come from anywhere, or anyone, else.
Poverty, as an expression of coloniality, also injures us through feelings of worthlessness. Years ago, I was working in HIV/AIDS prevention in Latino Communities on the east coast of the United States. In a workshop on changing behaviors that put us at high risk for HIV/AIDS, a participant was talking about the challenges of working in low-income communities. She said, “Risk behaviors are part of a larger feeling of vulnerability: You go home; you live in an apartment with holes in the walls and rats; your food doesn’t fit into what is considered healthy; there are problems everywhere without solutions; you feel like your low worth is reflected in everything that is around you.” People who are money-poor are constantly treated as worthless. This is part of the psychology of coloniality. It is a process of constantly devaluing people, the earth, and all forms of life.
Development and Poverty in Chiapas
In 2009, Chiapas became the first state in the world to adopt the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) of the United Nations in its constitution. The MDG was novel in its approach to creating poverty.19 Instead of only focusing on income levels to identify poverty, it implemented this search and seizure process called multi-dimensional poverty. Now people could be identified as poor by their level of hunger, education, gender equality, child mortality, maternal health, environmental sustainability, and how connected the community was with transnational investors. There were suddenly many ways to make someone poor. People could be designated as poor simply because of their hunger. Instead of recognizing that capitalism requires the exploitation of workers and the maintenance of a class that desperately needs money because their access to resources has been curtailed, people were told that they as individuals and communities were hungry and in need of development. While the scope of this chapter is too short for an overview of all of the ways that capitalism creates hunger, it suffices to say that low wages, destruction of the land, the privatization of property, food deserts, displacement of peoples, war, and institutional violence deny people access to food or agricultural resources effectively making people hungry. Similar arguments could be made for each of the MDGs. For example, education is a process of indoctrinating people into the “society” in which they live.20 If one is education-poor, one essentially has not been adequately indoctrinated; from an MDG perspective, such people need to be developed. This system of education will, over years, drive the person into thinking within a context of coloniality that makes the psychology and sociality of capitalism normalized. This is how people are molded for incorporation into the workforce. They are told that the kind of job they do, the way they are exploited, defines their worth as person, while other people are shamed by the work they do. This is what education in a capitalist system creates: workers.
The other MDGs, gender equality, child mortality, maternal health, and environmental sustainability have similar solutions. They propose to fight poverty by incorporating people into a system that creates poverty. The Millennium Development Goals in Mexico: Progress Report, Executive Summary (2013) states, “The Mexican population’s wellbeing cannot be improved without effective economic changes that foster productivity, growth, investments, generate more and better formal jobs and a sustained increase in wages.”21 The MDGs fall into a circular argument where the problems created by coloniality through the system of capitalism can only be solved by the same system. People who live in poverty need quality access to health care, education, infrastructure, dignified treatment, and autonomy, but this will never be fully realized within a capitalist system. The capitalist economic system creates an exploitable working class in which people are made desperate to earn wages. Capitalism creates poverty which creates wealth for the rich. As long as people are dependent on money for access to social services that foster well-being, but are denied sufficient money to allow participation in that same system, they are forced into a system of exploitation.
On June 18, 2016, the state governor of Chiapas added the UN 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda, officially known as Transforming our World: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, to the state constitution as well. The Sustainable Development Agenda is more comprehensive than the MDGs because it extends capitalism to more people through more specific means. While there were only eight MDGs, the Sustainable Development Agenda has been expanded to encompass seventeen goals. Every single goal in the Agenda has a capitalist economic solution to the problem of poverty. While we have not seen the results of the new Sustainable Development Agenda, I have no doubt that the continued incorporation of more people into neoliberal capitalism will only create more exploitation and denial of access to resources for the money-poor, and wealth for the rich. For this reason, other alternative economic systems must be developed to create value and resource access in our communities, while banishing coloniality from the oppositional economic practices of the people.
El Cambalache: Creating Inter-change
El Cambalache is a small moneyless economic project located in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas. It began after eight months of talking, debating, practicing, and learning. El Cambalache (The Swap) opened its doors to the world in March 2015. Inter-changes began immediately. Our six-woman generator collective works to create moneyless economic space. The focus of our work is to distribute resources across our money-poor neighborhoods by revaluing objects (that are normally considered waste) and marginalized knowledge. So many of life’s activities tend to be undervalued within capitalism. We work to give them real value. Many people from different social classes come into the project and say that they want to participate but don’t know what they can offer. We start by asking people to think about their abilities and knowledge, and what they would like to share. Reflecting on valuing, generator Sarai notes, “We started to think of all of the things we could offer, and before that one never thinks about all that you can give, not only materially, but from your being. All of the knowledge, everything, everything, everything.” Among the skills that have been offered there are juggling acts, puppet shows, massages, construction, TsoTsil, and French classes, equinotherapy, cooking, electrical installations, horticulture classes, and talks about cosmology. The project also offers regular classes in laptop maintenance, medical consultations, and haircuts.
In El Cambalache, we work through horizontal consensus decision-making practices, where no one person’s voice is valued over any other. Our desire to function without hierarchy leads us to the creation of our exchange value, called inter-change value (El valor de inter-cambio in Spanish), where everything in the economy has the same value. The objects exchanged are things one no longer needs, and skills, mutual aid, and knowledge that one wishes to share. Each person who passes through our office has access to the basic rules. We explain the rules to each new person and have them written on the walls. That way, we can talk about capitalism, money, mutual aid, undervalued abilities, and valuing each other, among other things. Many people come by the Cambalache just to spend time and talk. The project strives to make an economic space that is also socially inclusive.
In inter-change value, not only does a pencil equal a sweater or a computer or someone helping paint a house, but also we seek a change from within. Cinthia, a generator, explains inter-change value: “Inter-cambios are concrete anti-capitalist actions that we can do in the quotidian... without waiting for the great revolution that overthrows the capitalist system. Through inter-cambios we change ourselves and at the same time our individualist, consumer, competitive relationships imposed by capitalism.” In little more than a year, over seven hundred people have participated in inter-changes.
We don’t have much web presence. There is little time to devote to Internet communications, and many people in our networks do not have regular access to the Internet. Most people know about us by word of mouth. Through talking in person with other women, two Cambalaches have opened in San Andres Tuxtla, Veracruz and Bacalar, Quintana Roo. Each of these Cambalaches is different from ours here in San Cristobal de las Casas. The Cambalache in San Andres Tuxtla involves exchanging things once a month and having community potlucks on inter-change days. While the Cambalache in Bacalar is located in a women’s spiritual healing center where women come and exchange things as part of a full moon ceremony once a month. For us, what makes a Cambalache is that it has inter-change value. Beyond that we expect that each new endeavor will meet the needs and interests that people have in their areas.
By embracing horizontal power relationships with each person who enters into the project, we are trying to practice anarchist ideals of non-domination. Instead of an anarchist economy operating out of chaos, non-hierarchical relationships require that each person who participates in the project be responsible for their participation. The responsibility of each person is to the group, and there are no negative repercussions for not participating. Rather, we expect that each member of the group, in each project, express what they can do in the context of their own daily lives. That’s enough. In a non-alienating economy, the experience and struggles of each person is an important part of how exchanges occur.
El Cambalache is small. In thinking about larger social movements, there are specific mechanisms that economic resistance presents that support organizing and well-being for money-poor, resource-full communities. When one is money-poor, one is vulnerable, under constant judgment, ridicule, and mistreatment. Race, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality come to the forefront as social excuses to treat people badly. The wealthy more easily overcome obstacles of structural violence. This means that in a society where purchasing power allows us to buy security, weapons, people’s labor, health care, property, sex, religion, and just about anything—except for liberation from the rigid class structure and social violence we must constantly navigate—the only way to resist and overcome that is by changing the rules of the game. This is not an easy task, but it is far from impossible. It requires looking at one another as resource-full individuals. As individuals we may not have enough, but as a community, we do. A common tendency among the left is to constantly cut away at our alliances. However, in creating mass movements, non-oppressive resistance requires solidarity, even when people disagree with each other. It requires being generous with one another, recognizing that each person has had different experiences, and we are always in a state of growth and transformation. Our conversations, and talking about feelings, are part of economic resistance.
In October of 2014, when we were trying to envision and build our economy, some of the generators did a workshop on exchange value. I arrived at our meeting ready to talk about monetary and non-monetary ways that people exchange goods and services. However, the workshop was not about either of those kinds of exchanges. Instead, we focused on how one feels valued on a personal level when exchanges, both monetary and non-monetary, occur. Disillusionment, low self-worth, failure, and incompetence were all feelings associated with not being able to make a purchase while, on the other hand, feelings of euphoria, being a good person, and making other people happy were associated with being able to make purchases. As a collective, we decided that this emotional bipolarity was not acceptable. Money was not going to decide how we felt about ourselves, and we did not want that to happen to other people. Our economic resistance would create communities of care, and care creates social change. In our practice, we have incorporated the emotional side of economic interactions into the project by making everything that can be exchanged have the same value. Anything that is offered can be exchanged for anything else, be that a class, or a service in the form of mutual aid or objects. Each person decides the worth of what they exchange. A shirt, a toy, a pair of shoes, a telephone, a radio, a box of books or one book, a bunch of vegetables, a medical consultation, a massage, therapy, a class in embroidery: all have the same value. We have a space where the objects are kept that is organized like a store. Everything that enters and leaves is registered. The abilities and mutual aid that are inter-changed are written onto an exchange board. People can freely choose what they would like to give and receive. In that way, no one is denied access to anything El Cambalache has to offer.
Economic Resistance Without the State
In anarchism, there is essentially one metric against which all other theories and practices are measured: Is this practice or theory a vehicle for creating or maintaining any form of domination? The state, colonialism, and capitalism operate as mutually interdependent processes. This means that “global” capitalism can only exist when there is a legal system that enforces the existence of private property and the mistreatment of other people through the exploitation of their labor. The state can only exist when borders are created and other territories (colonies, post-colonial territories, and strategically impoverished neighboring states) are robbed of their resources for the benefit of the most oppressive states. Race, gender, ethnicity, ability, sexuality, class, and criminality have been created through the construction of the non-human-ness of others. In that way, we return to the creation of the money-poor as an institutionalized legal system fueled by the processes of colonialism, capitalism, and the state.22 For this reason, a truly liberatory economy cannot be capitalist, and it cannot exist within the structure of the state. The combined system is by design an oppressive organization of people and institutions. Of course, I am not the first person to call for economic resistance with or without the formation of the state. A great number of incredible thinkers such as Emma Goldman,23 Peter Kropotkin,24 Lucy Parsons,25 and Mikhail Bakunin26 have called for this kind of change. If a resistance movement does not include a non-capitalist economic process, the money-poor will be excluded from the movement. If a movement cannot meet the needs of people that have difficulty meeting them, they will not and cannot participate on a long-term basis without another economic system that meets their needs incorporated into the resistance movement. This is why the Sustainable Development Agenda has created seventeen different needs to be met and then used as a tactic for incorporating people into capitalism.
Conclusion
Non-capitalist economic resistance is essential for creating resource-full communities. In Chiapas, despite the constant work being done to create multi-dimensional poverty and extreme poverty, people keep resisting. They demand that the state incorporate their needs, desires, and ideas into the creation of the many worlds that exist here. The process is constant. Our worlds are vulnerable and under constant assault by local and international organizations that work to incorporate each one of us into capitalism and obedience to the state. We have been injured repeatedly. Healing these injuries brings people together. As Maya Angelou famously said to Tupac Shakur, “Do you know how important you are? Do you know that our people slept, laid spoon fashion, in the filthy hatches of slave ships in their own and in each other’s excrement, and urine and menstrual flow so that you could live two hundred years later? Do you know that? Do you know that our people stood on auction blocks so that you could live? When is the last time anyone told you how important you are?”27 In heeding Dr. Angelou, our collective work in El Cambalache is to remind people how important they are, that their experience is valuable, and that our inter-changes as a community bring us together. In El Cambalache, we insist that each person inter-change something because we know that everyone has something to offer. Knowing that each of us can give, that each person is rich in knowledge and abilities is a first step. For us, it’s a step worth taking every day.
In eliminating poverty, social movements must provide economic systems and practices that help us meet our own and each other’s needs. When social movements do not include economic systems of resistance they exclude the money-poor and maintain class divisions. We live in precarious times, and our economies must create care for each other. Otherwise, more people will fall into poverty. Development can only offer a separation from nature, our bodies, and our selves, for they are all the same. The belief that developed countries are rich is a lie. Capitalists know poverty, albeit not experientially: they create it, and they have names and faces.
In Chiapas I see people rise up every day. They are organized. They refuse to be poor.
Endnotes
1 I compiled this data through reviewing social media sites alertachiapas.com and ret.io.
2 Anahi Rama and Anna Yukhananov, “Mexican government says poverty rate rose to 46.2 percent in 2014,” Reuters, July 23, 2015. Available online: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-poverty-idUSKCN0PX2B320150723.
3 CONEVAL, The Millennium Development Goals in Mexico: Progress Report 2013, Executive Summary. (Mexico: INEGI, 2013).
4 Karl Marx, Capital: Volume One: A Critique of Political Economy (London: Penguin Classics, 1990), 229–230.
5 Coloniality refers to the continuity of a colonial mentality where nation states that were once governed under colonial rule continue to be controlled economically, politically, and socially as inferior to a western way of thought and being. See the work of Maria Lugones, Walter Mignolo and Anibal Quijano, for starters.
6 See http://www.structuralviolence.org/structural-violence/.
7 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001).
8 I refrain here from using terms that indicate the developed/undeveloped world, first/third world, global north/south because even in the most “developed” countries we find people who are money-poor relative to their economy.
9 Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, A Small Key Can Open a Large Door: The Rojava Revolution (Combustion Press, 2015).
10 Subcomandante Marcos, YA BASTA!:Ten Years Of The Zapatista Uprising—Writings Of Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos (Oakland: Ak Press, 2004).
11 http://www.mstbrazil.org/.
12 Moira Birss, “The Piquetero Movement: Organizing for Democracy and Social Change in Argentina’s Informal Sector.” Available online: http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.4750978.0012.206.
13 Raúl Zibechi, Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces, Ramor Ryan, trans. (Oakland: AK Press, 2010).
14 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Richard Philcox, trans. (New York: Grove Press, 2008).
15 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Constance Farrington, trans. (New York: Grove Press, 1963).
16 Nanda Shrestha, “Becoming a Development Category,” in The Power of Development, Johnathan Crush, ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 274.
17 Maria Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” Hypatia 25.4 (2010): 732–759.
18 Ibid.
19 Here I refer to the MDG as creating poverty because the process of identifying who has been made poor by a capitalist market is calculated numerically, through a set of Western, development-oriented standards that envision access to resources as solely being dependent on access to capital. However, many groups of people actively choose to resist incorporation into the capitalist political-economic system, while development strives to include them into that system. From a decolonial perspective, rather than communities being designated as poor, they should be able to choose which services, goods, and protections they should have access to, instead of being obligated into denial of resources because they are now part of a monied system without having access to money.
20 Noam Chomsky, “How the young are indoctrinated to obey,” Alternet, April 4, 2012. Available online: http://www.alternet.org/story/154849/chomsky%3A_how_the_young_are_indoctrinated_to_obey.
21 Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía, “Millenium Development Goals in Mexico: Progress Report, Executive Summary,” (INEGI, 2013).
22 Theorists/historians such as Immanuel Wallerstein, Benedict Andersen, and Karl Polanyi (among many others) have documented and explored how the creation of markets required standardization of exchange values and monetary instruments. This process was dependent on the institutionalization of capitalist market interactions to build what Polanyi calls the market society, and Andersen refers to the cultural domination of economized people as the creation of imagined communities. Wallerstein refers to this process as the creation of world systems that are dependent on coloniality where capitalism is the economic system created by colonialism.
23 For more information see: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/goldman/PrimarySources/index .html.
24 For more information see: http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/kropotkin/Kropotkinarchive.html.
25 For more information see: http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bright/ lparsons/lparsonsbio.html and http://www.iww.org/history/biography/LucyParsons/1.
26 For more information see: http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/bakunin/BakuninCW.html.
27 See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1gZiYPmOvs.