The Movement of Movements

The coming of a pluriversal world

The last decade has been a decade of movements. Movements are societies’ immune system. The increasing number of movements are a sign of profound underlying malaise. I see the truth of this in the movements dotting the globe today from the Farmers’ Protest in India to Democracy for Myanmar, from Fridays for Future to Occupy Wall Street, from Black Lives Matter to Shaheen Bagh. They are dispersed, diverse, distributed. Seemingly disparate, they are connected by deep bedrock values and beliefs that cut across the superficial differences of cause, culture, and context. They are a countering force to the self-proclaimed superiority of Western cosmology. They stand in direct challenge to the universalization of Western worldviews and the hegemony of neo-liberal, free market economy.

Paul Hawken called this ‘the biggest movement in the world that no one saw coming.’

I believe that we are part of a movement that is greater, and deeper,

and broader than we ourselves know or can know.

It flies under the radar of the media, by and large.

It is non-violent. It is grassroots.

It has no cluster bars, no armies and no helicopters.

It has no central ideology.

A male vertebrate is not in charge.

This is no longer, or simply, about resources or factions or injustice.

This is fundamentally a civil rights movement, a human rights movement.

This is a democracy movement.

It is the coming world.

…

It’s everywhere.

There’s no centre.

There’s no one spokesperson.

It’s in every country and city on Earth. 
(Emphasis added)

These movements hold the seeds of the new civilizational narratives. These seeds point to a pluriversal world woven from an entanglement of cosmologies. The Western cosmology becomes one more thread in the weaving of the fabric of the future, but no longer a particular narrative holding the functioning of the world captive to its frameworks. The emergent narratives are being woven together by the multitudes—those who went unheard, unseen, and unacknowledged for centuries. No matter where they geographically exist on the planet, they are the Global South. Global South, a symbol of resistance, is not a geographical location but a metaphorical identity that enfolds the unseen and the unheard, the disowned and the disavowed, the delegitimized, invisibilized, and demonized billions. 

Our current narrative was dreamed up by a handful of men--white, European men to be precise. The time was ripe. Harry Turman’s Point Four Program for developing countries caught on. This proposal to help the ‘third world’ was embraced with enthusiasm as the fallout of colonialism and imperialism was reverberating across the global South. However, the global North had no real intention of giving up power, privilege, or profit. They were just dressed in the more palatable and acceptable garbs of development and progress. Thus, began the decades long journey of neo-colonialism and neo-liberalism.

Neo-liberalism and the illusion of ‘free market’ converted the Planet into a vast storehouse of free natural resources to be excavated and exhumed, cheap labor, and islands of trash. Even as climate crises and the threat of sixth mass extinction loomed large, the decisive point of rupture and discontinuity came with the pandemic. The vacuity of the old narrative, which had already started crumbling, was thrown into stark relief. The enforced pause was a moment of reckoning for nation-states and their leaders across the globe.

The pause emphasized and amplified the power of the new narratives rising across the world—in pockets of resistance. Started by an unlikely motley of people from farmers to students, housewives to activists—the old and young took to the streets in ever-growing numbers. Shaking the hollow foundations of the current civilizational ‘order’.

These emerging and evolving narratives will no longer be the construct of a handful of white men. There will no longer be a single narrative that bends everyone to its will. A pluriversal world is being co-created; the signs are all around us. This of course doesn’t mean that the old narrative will exit quietly. All the powers of the states are being unleashed to keep the old show running—from the police to the military, from rules and regulations to structuring of new policies, from incarceration to mass killings of those deemed inconvenient to the march of progress.

António Guterres sounded the alarm at the 76th Session of the UN General Assembly calling out what has been known for more than five decades. The narrative has now come back to haunt the creators. It took us decades to remotely acknowledge the crises the civilization was under because of a handful of powerful men. The alarm had been sounded as far back as 1972 in the Limits to Growth. In 1973, in Khumtung, Mizoram women hugged trees to prevent them from being felled for logging. The movement came to be known as the Chipko Movement, one of the strongest movements to conserve forests in India. Women in the Sunderbans region—one of the most critical bio-diverse mangrove ecosystems on the planet—are helping to restore mangrove cover in collaboration with an NGO. 

The Chipko Movement

The alternative narratives have been building in the background for decades. They have stayed unacknowledged and have been forcibly delegitimized and invisibilized by the mainstream economy and media. However, as the movements spread irrevocably, the edges and margins of the world are encroaching uncomfortably on to the center, claiming their rightful space and place. Herein lie the seeds of the new narratives. The seeds are now taking roots. With slow and relentless steps, the center is being dislodged.  

What is arising is a decolonial vision of a world in which many worlds co-exist. They are evolving from the edges, the margins, from the unseen and unheard corners. They are erupting from unknown places forcing the mainstream to accept their entanglements. They are arising from the ruins of the current narrative just like the Matsutake.

Matsutake’s willingness to emerge in blasted landscapes allows us to explore the ruin that has become our collective home. Matsutake are wild mushrooms that live in human-disturbed forests. Like rats, raccoons, and cockroaches, they are willing to put up with some of the environmental messes humans have made.
~ The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing