by Henrique Andrade and Neto Onirê Sankara
"FOR THE LAND
Attention, my lord
Listen to the noise
Here the land is fertile
And it pops
On the edges of Brazil
There are strong and glorious people
The songs swear at the vile enemy
Where deception is a furious threat
With songs and dances
The path opens up and doesn't go wrong
Let's look for emptiness and spears
Think of the will to war
Love paves the way
With peace, struggle and wisdom
In the conflict over the mill's land
Territory is not a commodity here"
~ poem by Henrique Andrade
In January 2006, Mestre Joelson Ferreira invited us to reflect deeply on the paths to be taken by those who think, dream and fight for a dignified future in which people are respected as they are, based on their relationship with nature in its diversity and broad forms of connection between the sacred and the material. Along these lines, he states that "every transformation of a social reality corresponds to transformations in people's consciousness, and this is the path". This text is called "Begin again " and marks a key phase in the critical and conscious formation of the great struggle that still must be forged in the Brazilian reality of inequalities, massacres, and rebellious disobedience.
Teia Dos Povos (The People's Web) is an articulation of the communities, territories, peoples, political organizations, rural and urban populations, riverside dwellers, indigenous peoples, quilombolas, peripheral people, landless people, homeless people, and small farmers who come together, as grassroots nuclei and links, with the aim of formulating the paths to collective emancipation. In other words, to build a Black, Indigenous and Popular Alliance of solidarity, which was officially founded in 2012.
This attempt to produce new worlds and new horizons in other possible and impossible geographies continues the legacy of various movements of the Brazilian and Latin American people who have struggled against, resisted, and confronted the dominators of the territory throughout 524 years of destruction, enslavement, and slaughter. There are many experiences of rebellious struggles led by black and indigenous people in the lands of Abya Yala, in defense of life and emancipatory autonomy on/by the land and in/by the territory.
However, in the midst of the interlinked and unprecedented environmental, agrarian, urban, and labor crises that are currently ravaging us, we ask ourselves: What should we do? What paths should we take? What strategies and tactics need to be implemented so that triumph is elevated to the condition of victory at last? Obviously, we are aware that the "people-grinding machine" is stronger than ever and that never before in history have there been so many weapons in circulation across the great usurping nations.
Three elements are essential in this analysis:
Violence is the historical and concrete mark of the current process in every corner of the planet.
Climate change is no longer a vision of the future, but is plaguing the present and promoting an already known formula, that of exclusion led by large international conglomerates in collusion with the selective omissions of national states.
Today, the project of generalized killing is also taking on cybernetic contours, with the protagonism of social networks destroying minds, bodies, and hearts, especially those of our youth, but not only, because everyone is susceptible to virtual aberrations.
Paradoxically, in the course of history the expropriated people have built possible ways to dispute and exist through rebellious resistance to the destruction imposed by the dominators. Reinvention is a constant, recurring, and concrete mission of traditional peoples and communities, and also of the traditional working class, which is rebuilding its history. This is despite the real advance of uberization, unemployment, the loss of human dignity, the increase in social ills and the dehydration of fraternal and community social relations.
In our Latin America, there are possibilities for building new worlds, such as the Zapatistas in Chiapas and the communalization of indigenous communities in Oaxaca, both in Mexico. In Brazil, there are various social movements, articulations, collectives of the most diverse kind, from the more traditional ones like the MST to the MPA, urban collectives fighting violence, housing struggles like the MTST, various organizations for agro-ecological production, indigenous and quilombola communities in direct confrontation with the extermination by Brazilian structural violence, up to the Peoples' Web, as an articulation aimed at building new worlds through popular autonomy and emancipation.
However, the big issue is that as the Teia Dos Povos and social movements, both in Brazil and internationally, we need to make the leap from the struggle for land to the struggle for the Earth in order to recover the planet's living conditions. Without this, any effort will be in vain. Capital's project is one of genocide and ecocide, which requires the destruction of living conditions for all living beings, both humanity and nature, plants, and animals and, of course, their territories. It is necessary to think about the common horizon in order to consolidate life on the planet, and in the book For Land and Territory, it is possible to understand the steps towards this transformative mission. The social base of popular struggle and confrontation needs to strengthen the struggle for land and territory, in other words, to strengthen life with real struggle, based on material and immaterial forces. There is an urgent need to overcome the struggle for land alone and to empower the social subject of this struggle, because each and every human being needs to be convinced and embraced to engage collectively in social transformation.
It is urgent to bring together the disaggregated and the dispossessed to engage more broadly, with a program of revolutionary struggle to overcome capitalism with a permanent revolution. We must question and confront the foundations of capital if we wish to overcome racism, classism, and sexism, among many other oppressions. In this mission, it is urgent to bring together diverse subjects who need to overcome capitalist ethics and morality, to engage in the struggle by seeking broad and common alliances without class conciliation. The aim is not jusy to build a concrete alliance beyond the common enemy that is capitalism, but rather to overcome it and facilitate the collective production of another model based on good living. In other words, a clear mission, inspired for example by the Zapatista experience, to build other worlds that fit all worlds with good living.
We need to build common agendas and must urgently avoid individualism, thus guaranteeing individuality, diversity and producing the common territory of the plurality of ideas, tastes, decisions, and common goals. The Bahia People's Web has the mission of building the horizon of the struggle without categorizing people, but while understanding that capital has inserted stamps by color, race, sex, place of residence, gender, etc. In other words, avoiding segregating categories, but bringing them together with agendas of struggle aimed at overcoming capitalism through anti-hegemonic struggles. The alliance is about overcoming common problems and not isolated elements, removing violence, and guaranteeing the full development of ways of living with the common goal of transforming society at its roots.
Despite this, the Brazilian and world political horizon is strengthening the fascist international order and there is an urgent need to raise awareness of the human, social and cultural potential for political confrontation with the wisdom of the peoples and not with the enslaving instruments of the dominators. In other words, the process is one of dreaming and building possible and impossible worlds in other deep geographies from below. The global context is also marked by the human tragedy of forced migrations, and this fact today deliberates the cruel existence of environmental, climatic, political, and religious refugees who, among others, demarcate the territory of inhumanity. We know that the oasis is in our free and autonomous territories, full of Creole seeds, good food, forests, seas, rivers, lakes, lagoons, mountains, among many other characteristics of this beautiful and rich cultural mosaic.
Teia's proposed revolution is based on agroecology with a harmonious relationship with nature, protecting human and natural diversity and having the capacity to bring together potentialities and organizations capable of converging towards good living. To this end, various steps and paths have been taken, such as expanding the Teia network to other Brazilian states, dialoguing with international social movements, running the Course for Territory Builders and Defenders, supporting actions to reclaim various territories, the Agroecology Pre-Days and our great Agroecology Day.
The central and urgent question is how to consolidate these diverse experiences in order to restore human dignity and humanity as a whole, how to free the Earth and humanity from the captivity of minds? These are pressing challenges to revolutionize minds and hearts with a view to a concrete struggle beyond capitalism. The way forward is to be inspired by the Bahian songbook, to build libertarian autonomy with popular emancipation and to continue without being "the pawn in the tie ":
Let's collectively create the conditions for this real utopia, because it's July 2024 and the future is already here, it's urgent to wake up!
As the poet Gilberto Gil says, "For Land, Work and Bread "
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