Gustavo Esteva

In late January I had the fortune to meet Gustavo Esteva. Gustavo is defined as “grassroots activist and a de-professionalized intellectual”; he is a simple straight forward man, very passionate and fair.

So there was I, a European-city-woman asking Gustavo what could be my role here. As you state this you already found out the answer, right? It just doesn’t exist, as I first felt, as I learnt also within my friends in Schumacher.

So very directly, Gustavo just told me that I couldn’t do anything and in fact, if I tried, that was a mistake. Shocked? No, that was just the way I felt about it all, about the way the project was developing, about my introduction in the community, about the work all these organisations do with the communities, about how the communities are right now.

I don’t want to be unfair with all the organisations, people and with my own organisation and my own job, but it just seems that colonisation is still going on. Who am I to say that this is the right way to live? For sure most of priests also thought that teach the word of God was definitely the right way and I can see it was a mistake now. So building eco-technologies is a positive or an harmful approach?

So Gustavo was telling me his own experience and he was just trying to explain me that change has to come from the inside since I cannot enter entire in someone’s body to cure a disease, because that will kill the person. That’s also why he his defined as a “de-professionalized intellectual”, since he also disbelieves in teachers and students. How good can a teacher be if he doesn’t learn everyday from his students? And how good can a student be if he is not able to share his knowledge?

But in the end a question just couldn’t leave me, despite I agree with Gustavo in all: if change is from inside, how do we explain Che Guevara and SubComandante Marcos?

In that same night I went to CIDECI, an Indigenous Centre for Integral Education. Gustavo tried to make me an introduction by explaining me that in CIDECI they don’t believe in teachers or in classrooms or in all the classic way of teaching. Knowledge has to be free. We can understand that for knowledge to be free it cannot be confined to a specific formula to be disseminated, since we are all different and we all learn by different methods. So I ask, is knowledge free in our society? And does free as to do with free colleges? Are they the same thing?

In CIDECI you have what they call dynamic self learning. You are your teacher and who decide what, where, when and with whom you want to learn, in your own time and space. Its all experiencing, since we are all in this new era where caminamos preguntando.

In that night Gustavo talked about the Zapatista rebellion and about power, saying that they don’t want to take the power since power is not something for someone to gather, power is a relation so it has to be distributed; if you don’t distribute power – as you do it with love, happiness, sadness – you fall in domination. He made a good analogy between power and capital.

We developed a relation with capital based in possession, rather than in distribution. And when you think about how economy rose, you realised that money was just to help transactions and not something for you to possess. Money was really just a mean, something to be distributed.
But somehow we developed an unhealthy relation towards money and decided that you just have to have money and distribute it the less you can, as if you could be happy by cage your love. If you gather something for yourself, no matter what, can that really make you happy?

Something I really enjoyed in his conversation was about the difference between collective and community (this is a hard job to do in English since they mean the same, so I will try to do the best I can!).

So collective is what capitalism is able to do: generate groups of people that are organised by an external strength, creating individuals. In communities we are not individuals, we can’t since we don’t represent an “I” but rather an “us”. In communities I'm not Joana, but rather the daughter of Maria, the aunt of Marisa; we represent a link of relations, we represent a net of relations, we represent, in the end, the community. So we just have to fight against this way of seeing us as an individual and start see us as a net of relations, as an “us”.

But how can we do this? Well, first of all, by not being arrogant. We are arrogant when we think we are going to change the world, we are arrogant when we cannot see our scale, the scale in which we operate. Are we really the change we want to see in the world? if not, how can we change it? So start by yourself and then operate in your scale – your networks of family, friends – and start to build communities and change your “I” to an “us” – can we do it?

Tomorrow is going to be my first night in the community, my first meeting with all the teachers from secondary school… For sure I will learn a lot!