Decolonization

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This is the third and final installment of a trilogy of dispatches that frame and trellis the (De-/Re-)Constructing Worlds project.

The previous two dispatches framed the initiative as a project in radical everydayness and abolition. This dispatch will frame it as a project in decolonization.

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In the book Tools for Conviviality, Ivan Illich described three different modes of imperialism, each successive mode being more insidious and intractable than the last.

First, he described a nationalist imperialism that is characterized by “the pernicious spread of one nation beyond its boundaries.” Second, he described a capitalist imperialism that is characterized by “the omnipresent influence of multinational corporations.” Third, and finally, he described a careerist imperialism, the most insidious and intractable of the three, characterized by “the mushrooming of professional monopolies over production.”

In and through the (De-/Re-)Constructing Worlds project, I would like to explore the hypotheses that (i) decolonization as antidote to a nationalist imperialism means promoting ecoregionalisms, (ii) decolonization as an antidote to a capitalist imperialism means promoting communisms, and (iii) decolonization as an antidote to a careerist imperialism means promoting dilettantisms.

If I am to explore this hypotheses rigorously, I will need to suggestively define the terms of these hypotheses. As a first step towards doing jut that, I would like to share excerpts with you all from three texts that have inspired the (De-/Re-)Constructing Worlds project

What is a ecoregionalism?

In response to this question, I would like to share an excerpt from A Pattern Language by by Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein:

[N]ation-states have grown mightily and their governments hold power over tens of millions, sometimes hundreds of millions of people. But these huge powers cannot claim to have a natural size. They cannot claim to have struck the balance between the needs of towns and communities, and the needs of the world community as a whole. Indeed, their tendency has been to override local needs and repress local culture, and at the same time aggrandize themselves to the point where they are out of reach, their power barely conceivable to the average citizen.

[…] Unless regions have the power to be self-governing, they will not be able to solve their own environmental problems. The arbitrary lines of states and countries, which often cut across natural regional boundaries, make it all but impossible for people to solve regional problems in a direct and humanly efficient way.

[…] [Furthermore,] unless the present-day great nations have their power greatly decentralized, the beautiful and differentiated languages, cultures, customs, and ways of life of the earth’s people, vital to the health of the planet, will vanish.

What is a communism?

In response to this question, I would like to share an excerpt from Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber:

I will define communism here as any human relationship that operates on the principles of "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs."

[…] Starting, as I say, from the principle of "from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs" allows us to look past the question of individual or private ownership (which is often little more than formal legality anyway) and at much more immediate and practical questions of who has access to what sorts of things and under what conditions. Whenever it is the operative principle, even if it's just two people who are interacting, we can say we are in the presence of a sort of communism.

Almost everyone follows this principle if they are collaborating on some common project. If someone fixing a broken water pipe says, " Hand me the wrench," his co-worker will not, generally speaking, say, "And what do I get for it?" — even if they are working for ExxonMobil, Burger King, or Goldman Sachs. The reason is simple efficiency (ironically enough, considering the conventional wisdom that "communism just doesn't work") : if you really care about getting something done, the most efficient way to go about it is obviously to allocate tasks by ability and give people whatever they need to do them.

[…] [I]n the immediate wake of great disasters — a flood, a blackout, or an economic collapse — people tend to behave the same way, [they revert] to a rough-and-ready communism. However briefly, hierarchies and markets and the like become luxuries that no one can afford. Anyone who has lived through such a moment can speak to their peculiar qualities, the way that strangers become sisters and brothers and human society itself seems to be reborn. This is important, because it shows that we are not simply talking about cooperation. In fact, communism is the foundation of all human sociability. It is what makes society possible. There is always an assumption that anyone who is not actually an enemy can be expected [to act] on the principle of "from each according to their abilities," at least to an extent: for example, if one needs to figure out how to get somewhere, and the other knows the way.

The surest way to know that one is in the presence of communistic relations is that not only are no accounts taken, but it would be considered offensive, or simply bizarre, to even consider doing so.

What is a dilettantism?

In response to this question, I would like to share an excerpt from Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich:

We are used to considering schools as a variable, dependent on the political and economic structure. If we can change the style of political leadership, or promote the interests of one class or another, or switch from private to public ownership of the means of production, we assume the school system will change as well.

[…] [This manner of considering schools] underestimates the fundamental political and economic nature of the school system itself, as well as the political potential inherent in any effective challenge to it.

In a basic sense, schools have ceased to be dependent on the ideology professed by any government or market organization. Other basic institutions might differ from one country to another: family, party, church, or press. But everywhere the school system has the same structure, and everywhere its hidden curriculum has the same effect. Invariably, it shapes the consumer who values institutional commodities above the nonprofessional ministration of a neighbor.

Everywhere the hidden curriculum of schooling initiates the citizen to the myth that bureaucracies guided by scientific knowledge are efficient and benevolent. Everywhere this same curriculum instills in the pupil the myth that increased production will provide a better life. And everywhere it develops the habit of self-defeating consumption of services and alienating production, the tolerance for institutional dependence, and the recognition of institutional rankings. The hidden curriculum of school does all this in spite of contrary efforts undertaken by teachers and no matter what ideology prevails.

In other words, schools are fundamentally alike in all countries, be they fascist, democratic or socialist, big or small, rich or poor. This identity of the school system forces us to recognize the profound world-wide identity of myth, mode of production, and method of social control, despite the great variety of mythologies in which the myth finds expression.

In view of this identity, it is illusory to claim that schools are, in any profound sense, dependent variables. This means that to hope for fundamental change in the school system as an effect of conventionally conceived social or economic change is also an illusion. Moreover, this illusion grants the school—the reproductive organ of a consumer society—almost unquestioned immunity.

[…] Even the piecemeal creation of new educational agencies which were the inverse of school would be an attack on the most sensitive link of a pervasive phenomenon, which is organized by the state in all countries. A political program which does not explicitly recognize the need for deschooling is not revolutionary; it is demagoguery calling for more of the same.

[…] A good educational system should have three purposes: it should provide all who want to learn with access to available resources at any time in their lives; empower all who want to share what they know to find those who want to learn it from them; and, finally, furnish all who want to present an issue to the public with the opportunity to make their challenge known. Such a system would require the application of constitutional guarantees to education. Learners should not be forced to submit to an obligatory curriculum, or to discrimination based on whether they possess a certificate or a diploma. Nor should the public be forced to support, through a regressive taxation, a huge professional apparatus of educators and buildings which in fact restricts the public’s chances for learning to the services the profession is willing to put on the market.

Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends on knowing that secret; that secrets can be known only in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags. New educational institutions would break apart this pyramid. Their purpose must be to facilitate access for the learner: to allow him to look into the windows of the control room or the parliament, if he cannot get in by the door. Moreover, such new institutions should be channels to which the learner would have access without credentials or pedigree—public spaces in which peers and elders outside his immediate horizon would become available