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We Need to Look for a
New Cake
The Asia-Pacific meeting of the Alliance
has ended. For the moment most of us are joyous about its
outcome. We believe we have achieved a breakthrough in arriving
at a tentative vision for the early part of 21st century.
From the beginning we had maintained that the crisis today
was to arrive at meaningful paradigms that can lead us from
the ideological collapse we have witnessed in the past ten
years. We believe that at this workshop we have the outline
of such a set of visions.
The context for our search was one where
we believe that globalisation was doing more harm than good,
particularly regarding: the sense of powerlessness and displacement
that millions of people are experiencing all over the world;
large-scale poverty and human rights abuses making life
intolerable for billions of people in the less industrialised
countries and even in the industrialised ones.
Even water has become scarce
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Ecologically, the situation is getting
worse day by day. Even water has become a scarce commodity
(per capita availability of water has gone down by 50% in
the past twenty years and will go down by another 50% in
another twenty years). Culturally, there is an invasion
of values produced by the market which renders people more
individualistic, aggressive, and competitive. Respect and
compassion for other human beings has declined with this
individualistic culture.
We are finding social transformation difficult
not because we lack analyses, but because we do not have
the visions that will motivate billions of us to persist
in the long hard journey of social transformation. Everybody
who came to the meeting was involved with significant social
issues such as: child labour, gender, trade unions, ecology,
farmers, water, indigenous peoples, untouchable social movements,
religious renewal, anti-nuclear struggle, anti-dam struggles
etc. Each sector had already many creative strategies and
proposals to offer. But we were in search of a common basis
of inspiration.
A marriage in spirituality of social and
ecological struggles
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The breakthrough concerning visions was
as follows: We felt that we needed to wed the social struggles
with ecological ones in an old-new perspective. The problem
was not one of having a cake which the elite wanted to corner
and appropriate on the one hand, and the oppressed peoples
wanted to corner and appropriate on the other. The problem
was that the cake itself was the wrong one. It was a cake
which would destroy the earth ecologically and socially.
We needed to look for a new cake, very
different from the one which consumer
society was projecting before our eyes. This cake would
be based on simple lifestyles and a lowering of consumption
standards. It would be based on a deep and profound respect
for Earth mother, from which we have all evolved. It would
be a vision based on Inter-existence, Inter-being, Inter-connectedness
and Inter-dependence. While we would respect and nurture
the uniqueness of each person we would also believe that
each of us is part of a larger web of life. What we do to
others and to the earth we do to ourselves.
We felt that such an eco-social-spiritual
vision was crucial for the political struggle that lay ahead.
We came up with several key challenges
that had to be tackled urgently. Likewise we also came up
with strategies that had to be used. But we will submit
all this in our larger report which will be ready in a few
weeks time.
-- Summary Conclusions of the Continental
Meeting in Asia -- by Siddhartha
- From Fireflies Ashram, near Bangalore, India, Asia, June
24,2001
- Asian Continental Meeting
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