What does it mean to be a “citizen”? Can "citizenship" regenerate or (re)build the community fabric? Here are two concerns that lead us to explain the implicit contents of words and concepts, beyond the usual understandings.
The Eurocentric vision has cultivated, among us, the belief that the urban, its qualities and its inhabitants are a manifestation of the most civilized stage of humanity (read: the highest). There is a modern/colonial imaginary—which we assume and reproduce in practice and in our ways of thinking—that considers the city as the privileged place where being civilized makes his life. As we said in another edition of think hard, modern society, to disintegrate community relations, promoted, among other strategies, the impoverishment of the countryside and a pedagogical citizenship that projects, as an ideal model, bourgeois and city life.
Problematizing the word "citizenship" would not make sense due to a mere theoretical or linguistic desire. At this historical moment - when what is at stake is not only the reconstitution of community politics, but the very reproduction of life - the questioning of "citizenship" is not a frivolity or a whim or an abstract speculation, since Words reveal perspectives, beliefs, stories, which, in turn, presuppose conceptions, worldviews and ideal models, from which we feel, act and relate. Making this string of meanings explicit is part of the cultural decolonization that revolutions demand.
What appears in the word and in its concept expresses the foundation; In this case, "citizen" expresses to be defined by the West; that is to say: it manifests the projection of the bourgeois subject made god. In this way, if the urban (bourgeois) subject is the "civilized", the "developed"; Consequently, the peasant is the barbarian, that is, the rural is in an inferior, "underdeveloped", "subhuman" position. Being a "citizen", thus, represents an ontological imperative that presupposes a hierarchy that establishes the boundaries of what is human.
How do we understand the city, then? The modern city is designed so that we are individual subjects, useful to a model of existence. The city we know today embodies and configures the subjectivity of the modern project; that is to say: an individualistic subjectivity, which reproduces capitalist relations. Living in cities, we consume what they contain and emanate; In short, a way of life, which is constituted in accordance with the "ideal model" presupposed by modernity. That Lifestyle It becomes part of us, that is, it constitutes our subjectivity.
But what is that Lifestyle What constitutes pedagogical citizenship? This question seems to be answered in the reasoning masterfully argued by the Bolivian philosopher Juan José Bautista, based on the theses of Capital: «Capitalism [with the cultural horizon that has engendered it: modernity], in order to constitute itself as such, needed to destroy, little by little, every form of community life, that is, every other form of life other than the of social life that capitalism produces as its correlate, because capitalism, in order to become the dominant form of production, had and has to permanently produce, not only capitalist commodities or capitalist market relations, but its pertinent human association or conglomerate. , that is, a form of human grouping that was the product of its own form of production and subjective reproduction, made in its image and likeness. For this reason, capitalism, from the beginning, was always at odds with any other form of life that did not live up to its needs and expectations. For this reason, from the beginning, it made them “appear” as pre-modern, that is, literally inferior.
This logic of the demands and expectations of modern/capitalist society is characterized by the decolonial philosopher Rafael Bautista, in his book The decolonization of politics: introduction to a community policy. Rafael agrees with JJ, emphasizing that society and community are incompatible: they oppose each other! The youngest of the Baptists deplores that "citizenship" presupposes society and this, in turn, supposes an abandonment of all traditional (community) forms of integration. According to Rafael, "citizenship" is a historical process and must be considered in the perspective of time; This also means knowing how to locate its origin and the ultimate meaning that it displays as a way of realizing oneself. The abstraction of these elements means loss of real context and such ambiguity has consequences that are always practical. In this sense, he details the peculiar attributes of citizen subjectivity: 1) The "citizen" develops, in himself, the [anti] values of modern society. 2) The "citizen" is what remains of the broken individual: an individual produced by the market, whose relationships are no longer human, but commercial. Individuals isolate themselves from each other and from Mother Earth, because the commercial relationships they establish produce, in them, a reciprocal alienation that, in its constant cumulative repetition, breaks down all types of ties that are not those pertinent to purchase and sale; That is to say: it destroys all closeness and all community relationships. 3) In the normality of social life in the city, what prevails is competition. Society colonizes every traditional community form to subsume it around the new pattern of power that the modern individual develops. 4) People recognize each other as owners, and as such establish contractual relationships with each other. The contract is the most visible form of this recognition (…). Its particular form is that commercial relationship, in which it recognizes itself as owner, even as owner of rights. 5) From the modern Manichean dualism (man/beast, civilized/savage, rational/irrational, subject/object, urban/rural), the "citizen" the further removed from nature, the more human he is. As such, his way of relating does not relate, but rather reifies every relationship, even to Mother Earth. He does not feel part of anything, because he has devalued everything as an object and exercises a relationship of power and domination. That same devaluation forces him to distance himself. 6) To be a "citizen" is to be part of a society of capitalist progress, consumption and accumulation. The "citizen" thinks of himself as "included" in the modern world-system and, consequently, with the right to an economy with developmental criteria, in which "progress" is to accumulate goods and have access to satisfiers of what the hegemonic system considers They are human needs, without seeing the human and natural cost that that represents. In summary, It is impossible that the «citizenship» produce community!
This process of social exchange, to which the Bautista brothers refer, was conceptually described by Karl Marx, in Capital, in the following way: «Things, in themselves and for themselves, are alien to man and, therefore, alienable. For this alienation to be reciprocal, men need only confront each other implicitly as private owners of those alienable things, confronting each other, precisely for that reason, as independent persons from each other. […] He exchange of goods begins where community entities end, at their points of contact with other community entities, or with members of these" (bold letters are mine). This is how modern/capitalist society and its "development" model are configured.
Citizenship is one of the flags of the civilizational project of modernity. To do this, the philosopher Franz Hinkelammert points out, he has shielded himself from all criticism, making the ideal content of his way of life appear as the ideal of humanity. In other words: modernity/coloniality imposes capitalist social relations on reality, to then affirm that reality "is" like this, that it has always been like that and that, in the future, it will always be that way.
Is it appropriate, then, for a claim of liberation, to maintain a Logos whose foundation and imaginaries are contrary to the constituent and instituting character of community subjectivity? Rafael Bautista's response is illuminating: one can have very good intentions and embrace revolutionary ideas; But, if we continue thinking according to the format that has constituted the logic of domination, the only thing we are going to do is replicate or performativize modernity, and give it elements to resignify itself or establish new forms of domination. We cannot forget that, eIn the concept, a way-of-life is expressed and formalized and its production is also the production and development of that way-of-life..
Let's consider a couple of questions at this point: if sovereignty resides in "citizenship", what is the subjectivity that the protagonists embody? What is the spirit that we want the commune to embody? It is, of course, about locating oneself in other horizons that project community life. Stop seeing only what the modern/capitalist myth wants us to see! That's called fetishism. The ethics of live well in community It is situated outside the possibilities of the totality of modernity/capitalism, its imaginaries and existential meanings.
Can think beyond that modernity begins with the words that shape our practices and our expectations. Working to reveal the ideology behind words and concepts involves a school of suspicion and a pedagogy of the question that invites us to think deeply, so as not to remain in the automatic response, nor in the intellectual trap of modernity, which leads us to drag, ontologically and epistemically, its entire horizon of prejudices. The abstract, flat and homogeneous consideration of words is the product of a lack of critical reflexivity and can lead us to fall back on the very thing we want to change. As Rafael Bautista warns, it is impossible to overcome the modern/colonial/capitalist project if the “ideal model” that makes it possible and that is expressed in the myths that legitimize it and in the form of relationship that it produces is not stripped and dismantled. .
The Venezuelan teacher Simón Rodríguez, aware of the ideology that underlies words and concepts, already in the 19th century, shared some coordinates to make this reflective passage: «Names do not make things, but they distinguish them; "Actions are the same with ideas." In other words: behind words there is not only speech and language, but there is also a reason that expresses a vision of the world, which, in turn, frames our aspirations and, therefore, presupposes a certain horizon of senses. What Robinson's pedagogy allows, methodologically, is to reflexively go back to the "ideal model" that is hidden in our expectations; For this reason, this American thinker does not stop expressing the need to be scholars, sensible y thinkers to not continue to suffer the impact of Western irrationality and ignorance in the political projects that we want to build: "Only men [human beings] endowed with these 3 qualities see things as they are in themselves and work to make them known."
Aha! And what do you propose? Think deeply, and get out of the limits (cultural, relational, economic, political and even cognitive) that the modern world of capitalist development has imposed on us. The revolutions of the new era should be aware of the ideology that has historically impregnated political projects in order to truly be able to leave the social simulacrum that the West has produced and transcend, existentially, the existential paradigm of capitalism. It is impossible to cement new realities with modern imaginaries! Rafael Bautista would say, “the task of thinking is also to take words out of their everyday environment and take them to a fundamental environment; to what they hint at, although ambiguously. In other words: investigate the content of the words.
Thinking about the ethics of the community of life (which includes humans and the Earth, which gives us roots and existence) requires assuming the complexity of radically reflecting on the subjectivity to come. That is to say: think about the subjectivity of the community members, of the common people, of the singular people who put themselves at the service of the reproduction of all life, in the territory, as a political and spiritual space. What we say with words is not only a discursive act: words express a way of thinking, feeling, relating, acting... wishing and dreaming. He why of words is translated into a certain conception of the world and life and, consequently, into a political project.
