Ayni and Neltilitztli: The reconstitutions of the destituted

I

By using an Aymara-Kechwa word (ayni) and a Nahuatl word (neltilitztli) in the title, I invite the reader to find equivalences in non-Western languages familiar to them. Ayni refers to the vincularidad that interrelates all that there is on earth and in the cosmos. In Aymara Pachamama is the telluric force that generates life on earth, including the human species, while Pachakama means the energies of cosmic forces that made life (including the human species) possible on earth. ¹ The Nahual word neltilitztli means living in harmony and equilibrium among humans, with life on earth with cosmic energies. The word responds to the Aztecs’ awareness that they lived on a slippery earth (tlaalahui or tlapetzcahui in tlalticpac: “It is slippery, it is slick on the earth,”) always walking the tense moral line between what is beneficial and what is harmful among themselves on earth and the cosmos. Sacrifices were intended to prevent “the Fifth Sun” of their cosmogony from harming life on earth. Distinct from Aristotle’s eudaimonia, the Nahuas concept of neltilitztli provided a different orientation of life on earth for the human species. But this viewpoint was destituted by the colonial revolution and replaced by eudaimonia from then until now. What ancient Greeks and Aztecs had in common was that economy and market were not a concern at all to the orientations of life on earth. That is why political economy is one of the few Western modern disciplines that are not grounded on Greek thoughts. Lynn Sebastian Purcell tells us that for the Nahuas life of tlalticpac (earth) was grounded on principles distinct to Aristotle’s assumptions:

The good life, understood as neltilitztli, bears only an accidental relation to elevated emotional states, to one sense of hēdonē. Composing flower-song, or uniting one’s face and heart, makes for a better and more beautiful, if still transient existence. It is better and more beautiful, finally, because it is ultimately one rooted in teotl [the initial energy of their cosmogony, WM] in the way things are through their changes. ²

My subtitle, “The Reconstitutions of the Destituted,” refers to issues I have been arguing that we—in the planet—are experiencing a change of epoch (or era) no longer an epoch of changes. Covid-19 and simultaneous economic and financial turbulence brought these signs to the surface and accelerated the process of radical (in the literal sense of “to the roots”) transformations. The cycle that is closing first erupted through the sixteenth century with the colonial revolution (Aymara/Kechwa, the Pachakuti, a violent turnaround and disequilibrium of existing modes of existence). The cycle initiated with the colonial revolution that established the pillars for the constitution or Western Civilization. ³ and a type of epoch or era that inaugurated an economy consisting of re-investment of surplus to increase the production of commodities for a global market. Modernity and salvation, both religious and secular, became mantras in the rhetoric of Western modernity in order to justify its constitution and legitimize the simultaneous destitution of whatever threatened disruption of the global designs set up during the colonial revolution.

The word “market” entered the Western vocabulary in the early 20th century, referring to a meeting at a fixed time for buying and selling livestock and provisions, an occasion in which goods are publicly exposed for sale and buyers assemble to purchase them. It was derived from Latin mercatus, trading and exchanging places. In ancient Tenochtitlan, meaning before the European invasion, the word tianguis referred the place of trading and exchanging. Tianguis is but one example of destitution and displacement by the concept of market. Consequently, to understand the meaning of tianguis now, non-Nahuatl speaker must access it through Western vernaculars. ⁴ The current descriptions in Western modern languages are of this type:

The word tianguis comes from the Nahuatl (the language of the Aztecs) tianquiztli which means marketplace. It differs from a “mercado” in that the mercado has its own building and functions every day whereas a tianguis is set up in the street or a park for one day of the week. In some areas, a tianguis may be referred to as a “mercado sobre ruedas” (market on wheels).

Indeed, tianquiztli does not mean marketplace in the English sense for the simple fact that the cosmology in which English speakers are enclosed is not the same by which Nahuatl speakers were and are bound. We can also access the word bazaar that entered the Western vocabulary around the sixteenth century.

1580s, from Italian bazarra, ultimately from Persian bazar (Pahlavi vacar) “a market,” from Old Iranian *vaha-carana “sale, traffic,” from suffixed form of PIE root *wes- (1) “to buy, sell” (see venal) + PIE *kwoleno-, suffixed form of root *kwel- (1) “revolve, move round; sojourn, dwell.”

If bazaar was translated from Persian and Old Iranian, it means, quite obviously, that beyond the West and before the Atlantic colonial revolution there were places where people could get and exchange what they couldn’t provide themselves. Western capitalist markets in the West starting in the sixteenth century destituted but did not eliminate the tianguis and equivalent places of exchange on the planet. They destituted them from Western economic markets. However, the tianguis remains in place as an “informal economy” from the Western gaze and vocabulary. Detaching ourselves from the belief that markets in capitalist economies are universal and that nothing else exists, and detaching ourselves from the belief that capitalism equals economy, are necessary decolonial moves.

II

For economic historians, the economy of ancient Greece is a mystery. I found this dilemma very interesting to debrief what is generally understood by economy and market. And I find the following quotation by economic historian very revealing:

Although the ancient Greeks achieved a high degree of sophistication in their political, philosophical, and literary analyses and have, therefore, left us with a significant amount of evidence concerning these matters, few Greeks attempted what we would call sophisticated economic analysis. Nonetheless, the ancient Greeks did engage in economic activity. They produced and exchanged goods both in local and long-distance trade and had monetary systems to facilitate their exchanges. These activities have left behind material remains and are described in various contexts scattered throughout the extant writings of the ancient Greeks. ⁵

Obviously, in Greece there was no “market” because the basic communal cell was the oykos, not the market and the central public space of the polis for gathering and exchanges was the agora. And that explains also why Aristotle wrote Nicomachean Ethics, because the organization of the poli in ancient Greece was not founded on market economy but on basic regulation of the oyko-nomos, from where the word oyko-nomy was derived. If from oykos was derived the word economy (oyknomia) in the Western vocabulary, the meaning of the word mutated radically during and after the Atlantic colonial revolution of the 16th century: economy was no longer oykonomia (regulations by gift and reciprocity) but economy (regulations for accumulation of wealth by appropriation and expropriation of land and by exploitation of labor). ⁶ The regulation of the oykos was based instead on what since the first half of the 20th century has been understood as a “gift and reciprocity economy”. ⁷ Dominique Temple’s three volumes investigation of the “oykonomia of reciprocity” is a helpful update of non-capitalist and non-market oykonomia. ⁸ The value of this investigation lies less in knowing what gift and reciprocity economies are than recognizing what has been destituted and what may need to be reconstituted both gnoseologically (knowing) and aesthesically (sensing, emotioning, subject-formation) today. There cannot be reconstitution by public policy and goodwill alone. Gnoseological and aesthesic reconstitutions cannot be done within existing modern/colonial narratives. Consequently, decolonial narratives require labor and our will to liberate ourselves from ways of knowing and patterns of sensing.

It is also necessary to extricate ourselves from the beliefs that the State, the IMF, the UN, the G7, the G20, the World Economic Forum (Davos) will volunteer to do. Obviously, that is something that cannot be expected. Interpreting Sylvia Wynter’s insistent call, I would say that by telling stories of the destituted, the reconstitution of the communal is unavoidable: it must happen someplace else, not in and by State, political, and economic institutions. ⁹ If culture is all that exists of our species’ making, including the stories that govern us, and nature is all that exists that was not made by human beings and of what human beings are made of, then the existing culture is no longer viable. The culture that governs the inter-state world order, domestic states and human subjectivities is a patriarchal culture. What is needed is working towards the reconstitution of matristic cultures. ¹⁰ Matristic cultures were cultures of care for life where sexual females and males and all the gender spectrum common in communal organizations before Western theology and secular ideologies, disrupted their praxes of living and their oykonomia.

III

In the territorial sphere of lakou in today Haiti, as Jean Casimir told me in a personal email conversation, there is no market economy but rather an oykonomia of reciprocity. It is the law of reciprocity and solidarity that prevails in all relationships. Relations between the lakou occur in the places of exchanges (e.g. agora between several lakou), which becomes the knot of a new territorial organization contradicting the fragmented, extroverted and nucleated organization delineated by the city/port of the plantation society. Here, the knot is the “bourg,” the small provincial town born from the articulation of the lakou of a geographical area. ¹¹

The market could hardly be transformed while retaining the actual concept of “market,” which is the capitalist market. But the button line is that the problem is not the market. The market is the visible and surface sign of something deeper, invisible and difficult because its flow and diversification cannot be submitted to quantification. Behind the current relevance of the market (and particularly the stock market) relentless transformations in Western history, there is the assumed ideology of salvation, of progress, delopement, modernization and civilization. When salvation by conversion was the main goal at the inception of the colonial revolution in the sixteenth century, merchants were devalued (as they were in ancient Greece). Christian ethics was the overall frame of Western global designs. When religious salvation by conversion was displaced by secular salvation by conversion to civilization, embracing progress as a civilizational horizon, Adam Smith (a philosopher and moralist more so than an economist), mapped the first encompassing treatise of political economy. The market took the stage as one important character in the narrative of Western Civilization.

Smith presupposed that an “invisible hand” would regulate the market; a moralist, he assumed the goodwill of the traders, too. Liberal ethics secularized Christian ethics, trusting Reason more than God, and soon became the engine of the industrial revolution. Its rapid growth prompted Karl Marx to question Smith’s moral presupposition of bourgeois honesty: this ethno-class took advantage of the “wealth of nations” offered to them. However, until 1945, the market was believed to be at the service of society and of the country, since the creation of nation-states in Europe was part of the secular mutation that transformed a theological community of believers into a secular community of nationals (natio, born). The image of the unity of nations presupposed the idea that the state was at a nation’s service. No longer. After 1945 and particularly since 1970, the economy took a leading role in the great transformation placing society at the service of the economy, a neo-liberal inversion of liberal ideals. The “victory” of neo-liberalism made possible to dismantle communism, the brother of liberalism, both sons of the European enlightenment. It was possible for mainly two reasons: the triumph of the ideology that equated happiness with the will to have, from bank, corporations and bank officers, to the consumer of Louis Vuitton (the transformation of airport into malls), to Wall Mart and the image of the US as the country who was able to move the Paradise from heaven to earth. It was a massive transformation of subjectivity at all levels. Today, the question and the goals cannot be to transform the market within the same logic of coloniality that created the market to manage desire, both of the governed and governance (the state, corporations, banks, religious institutions, mass-media). For that a different horizon of meaning is necessary. But that will require another argument. The bottom line requires gnoseological (principles of knowing) and aesthesic (sensing, emotioning) reconstitutions of our praxis of living, a task that cannot be reduced to one universal model. These undertaken are already at work around the planet, not in the spheres of the states, financial and economic institutions, but by people taking their destiny in their own hands.

With more space, I would have introduced the case of the gift and anti-economy in Arab-Muslim societies. ¹² I will restrict myself to one more case. The Communal Economy of Solidarity (CES) (Economia Comunitaria Complementaria) of the Aymara’s and Kechwa’s ayllu, an institution destituted by the conquest, but not eliminated. It has subsisted through the years. Fernando Huanacuni Mamani explains:

. . . all forms of relationship in the ayllu must be in permanent balance and harmony with everything, because when these rules are broken the consequences are for everyone. Within the ayllu there is no place for the term “resource”, since if everything lives, what exists are beings and not objects, and the human being is not the only parameter of life nor is it the king of creation. The principle of the West seeks to dominate nature, from the original beginning it does not seek to dominate anything, it seeks to “relate” under the principle and consciousness of ayni. Nor does the principle of exploitation of anything or anyone fit, because nothing and no one is useful only for one, nor is the purpose of the other forms of existence only the benefit of the human being, everything is in a complementary relationship of a perfect balance (Khuskha). ¹³

The point is that the market cannot be transformed if the entire mindset and corresponding subjectivities that created, regulated and maintain the market economy of growth and competition continues to be obeyed. The reconstitutions of neltilitztli and the ayni (as only two decisive destituted narratives), require a massive mutation of mindset that requires shaking off the basic assumptions upon which Western Civilization and the keywords of its judgmental and unilateral storytelling is revered. Salvation, progress, and development sustain the make-believe that happiness consists of the “feeling” projected by advertising images of people jumping in open fields and smiling in front of the credit cards, and of acquiring those desirable objects offered in glossy adverting publications by sellers of exquisite furniture. Without a drastic mutation of the mindset that places life as the ultimate goal of human existence there would be no soluton to the increasing damages of provoked by the “market economy.”

The market economy cannot be transformed beyond itself, because it is the soul of the societal horizon that destituted and continue to destitute the diversity of communal economies around the planet. Delinking from the social market economy and reconstituting the diversity of the communal (since there cannot be one blueprint of the communal that replaces the blue print of liberalism, neoliberalism, Marxism, et) and envisioning pluriversality as the universal project, are some decolonial horizons that should be anchored in education rather than schooling. Training is necessary in all professional schools today. But training cannot be confused with education, research cannot be confused with the politics of decolonial investigations. ¹⁴ Both education and decolonial investigations are of the essence to the reconstitution of the communal, extricating ourselves from the dominant storytelling of Western idea of happiness that con-fused economy with capitalism. These are tasks for all of us, in and beyond the academy. Covid-19 did not create this need, which was already at work, certainly accelerated its becoming.