The People's Dialogue is an effort to bring social organisations and movements of Latin America and Africa to discuss and promote action to strengthen the foundations for changes towards new models of development and democratic participation processes to confront the capitalist system, while incorporating aspects relating to the organizational experiences and struggles, as well as the ethnic, cultural, political diversity, etaria and gender diversity.
This endeavour starts from the political principle that the capitalist system, in its various manifestations and currently in its neoliberal, corporate form, is deliberately harming humankind, nature and the diversity on Earth that is the basis for “Another Possible World”.
The commoditisation of natural goods, of life in general, and of the values that sustain our peoples’ life in community, oblige us jointly to meet the challenges that, to both Latin America and Africa, mean ever increasing poverty, destruction of food sovereignty, global warming and the recurring crises of capital, if we are to be able to build and offer alternatives towards a new ethics and politics of liberation coming from the peoples of the South.
1.1.1. General Aim of the Dialogue
To identify and strengthen struggles and a joint agenda in Africa and Latin America that are working explicitly to build a model of social, political and economic development based on democratic and social and environmental justice principles.
1.1.2. Specific Aims
-
To strengthen South-South solidarity.
-
To construct an inter-regional arrangement for exchanging information and experience.
-
To examine and learn from the struggles and mobilisations ongoing in various different regions of the world.
-
To develop and propose a methodology for Dialogue among organisations, networks and movements.
-
To boost the flow of knowledge shared among rural and urban organisations, to allow connections to be built among their struggles and circumstances.
-
To strengthen better qualified participation in regional alliances for “other possible worlds” and in the World Social Forum.
-
To continuously monitor the role of South Africa and Brazil as regional hegemonies
-
To explore the building of alternative models of development
1.1.3. Main lines of action
-
Struggles, resistances and alternatives to the capitalist system and to models of development that exploit the common goods of nature and of peoples: this line of action entails, above all, working opposite the large transnational corporate groups and the mega-projects in the various regional integration processes and in defence of territoriality as the political cornerstone of peoples’ autonomy and sovereignty, as well as the development of concrete alternatives.
-
Democracy and integration in solidarity among peoples discussing and questioning the various roles of the State, particularly and crucially as regards recognition for the diverse identities and pluralities that go to make up the outlooks of new pluri-national formations, as well as the importance of social movements’ democratising, participating and gaining strength as agents of political change, in policy-making for the common good and in regional integration processes.
2. Intercultural Dialogue: a methodological proposal
One of the main objectives of the work of the Dialogue is to move ahead in building a methodology that will make it easier to bring us closer together, to exchange and elaborate knowledge, actions, building on the differences, diversity and complementarity of the players involved, in a process of political capacity-building that will strengthen self-construction of active subjects and alliance-building among social movements and struggles.
For this purpose, we approach dialogue with others on the understanding that our own cultural and epistemological points of reference (knowledge and expertise) are incomplete. The proposal for a cultural dialogue based on pedagogy of liberation directed to fostering the autonomy and emancipation of social agents, underlines the value of culture as central to processes of political change.
In this regard, the dialogue process is committed to the collective construction of knowledge as part of the social processes of the subjects and communities involved; that is, it recognises and incorporates affectivities and emotions, as well as, e.g., struggles, contradictions and resistances. It operates on the principles of cooperation, exchange of experience, active listening and respect for the processes, values and knowledge brought to it.
For these purposes, the spatial relations, symbolic relations and power flows in play wherever the Dialogue is at work are introduced and problematised as key elements in teaching and learning. In this way, the Peoples’ Dialogue endeavours to help ensure that the political, ethical and aesthetic dimensions of social players’ everyday lives are integrated into the process.
This methodological proposal, currently being developed jointly with the movements, is complemented by an effort to foster the translation of knowledge and to move ahead with systematisation and evaluation, as these two tools can facilitate the creation of new knowledge built on action informed by criticism and directed to change.