As Van Jones, a human-rights and environmental activist from Oakland, says, “Martin Luther King didn’t become famous by saying, ‘I have a complaint.'” The Left, in North America at least, has lost much of its vision, allowing the Right to frame the issues and spending all of our time fighting against their ideas instead of putting forward our own. We are the anti-globalization, anti-racist, anti-war movements, but what are we for? What is needed, and happening more and more, is the building of new alternatives at the same time as protesting reactionary policies. Envisioning and creating a new world in the soil of the old is critical to building movements for change in a society where cynicism and fear are so widespread. This vision emerges not always from thinkers on the Left but also from a broad range of actors and thinkers from the practioners of free software who are creating horizontal networked economic models to the spiritual activists who are seeing the need to act in the world if their vision of one world is to become real; from anti-poverty activists in Britain who have taken control of their own housing and services to indigenous peasants in Bolivia who are in the process of taking control of their entire country though a process deeply rooted in their values and sense of radical equality and reciprocity.

Excerpt from Judy Rebick’s contribution to the Re-Imagining Society debate:

“Rooted in centuries-old traditions of communitarian socialism, reciprocity, and a oneness with the earth, and combined with decades of radical and militant trade union and indigenous struggles, the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) came to power in December, 2005. Evo Morales is not only the second indigenous leader in the Americas in more than five hundred years but he is also a campesino and leader of the cocaleros (coca growers), one of the most militant trade unions in the country. The MAS led by Morales is not a political party in the classical sense. It is what people here call a political instrument of the social organizations. All the indigenous campesino organizations came together and formed a political organization that could contest elections. While these organizations started the MAS, they were joined by most of the trade unions and neighborhood organizations as well as various elements of the middle class, including intellectuals and elements of the urban Left. Like Hugo Chavez, they reject both the old revolutionary strategy of armed revolution, best represented in the person of Che Guevara, who was killed in Bolivia, and the social democratic strategy of change from within. For Morales, taking government does not mean taking power. Power, for those who have never had it, must be built from the bottom up, non-violently but not naively.

There will be confrontation, but large numbers of people can resist it and turn it around. Indeed since my visit two years ago, the Right in Bolivia has gotten more violent, even killing 17 peasants in the Pando province. But with the mobilization of the people and the rule of law, the MAS has managed to achieve a tremendous amount including nationalization of hydrocarbons, significant agrarian reform, a new constitution that is anti-neoliberal and anti-colonial. In fact, Evo speaks of Bolivia as the first non-colonial state in the Americas. Bolivia is having a huge influence across South America in deepening the understanding of the centrality of ending colonialism as part of a vision of a new society. And that vision includes aboriginal knowledge and wisdom in solving the problems of the planet.

In an interview Evo told me:

The indigenous communities have historically lived in community, in collectivity, in harmony not only with each other as human beings but with mother earth and nature, and we have to recover that. If we think about life as equality and justice, if we think of humanity, the model of the West, industrialization and neo-liberalism is destroying the planet earth, which for me is the great Pachamama [Mother Earth]. The model that concentrates capital in the hands of the few, this neo-liberal model, this capitalist model, is destroying the planet earth. And it’s heading towards destroying humanity. And from Bolivia we can make a modest contribution to defend life, to save humanity. That’s our responsibility.

Legendary Peruvian indigenous leader Hugo Blanco put it this way in a speech he gave in Toronto in 2007:

European religion believes in a superior spirit who created nature to be in service of man. Our culture is completely different. For our culture, we are children of that nature. It’s not that nature was created for us in our service, but we’re children of nature and we have to live in harmony in her bosom. And in her bosom we live in harmony with the plants that do us the favour of feeding us, with other plants as well that may not feed us but indicate to us whether the harvest will be good or bad, other plants that do us the favour of healing us, and in this way, the solidarity extends to all of nature. There is worshipping towards water, towards the sun, towards the river. The other characteristic of our culture is collectivity.

As the young U.S. Aboriginal leader Evon Peter points out, it is only when we start to understand the impact of colonialism in excluding the knowledge and contributions of those whom society has excluded, and begin to reverse it in our own minds, as well as in our governing structures, that we will find a path to equality and social justice. I believe that the most important part of a new vision is a world in which all forms of diversity are embraced and valued rather than a world in which we value ourselves only by seeing ourselves as superior to others. If European identity was formed by colonialism defining the white race as superior to those Europe was exploiting, perhaps the arrival of hundreds of thousands from the Global South to Europe is the opportunity to turn the world right side up. I recently attended a meeting at which an Aboriginal woman, in talking about the apology by Prime Minister Stephen Harper for the residential schools in Canada, said, “We have a prophesy that white people and indigenous peoples are tied in a knot by colonialism, and each one of us suffers as a result. Now is the time to untie that knot and find freedom for everyone.”