Rafael Correa, defends the concept of Good Living as alternative to the capitalist consumer model
If interested, please read the whole article because my snips don't represent it well
By Harald Neuber
Berlín, Apr 20 (Prensa Latina) ...
"It is not a concept of my government, it comes from our original peoples. The concept of the Sumak Kawsay says we need to live with dignity, not pursue to have more each day, but to live in harmony with nature and with the rest of the human beings", Correa said in an exclusive interview with Prensa Latina.
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"Because the measures taken in Latin America prolonged and deepened the crisis and unfortunately, that is what is being done in Europe", he added.
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"But of course, when the crisis arrived, the region was faced with the problem of over-borrowing as we lent too much, too many credits to military dictatorships without any social control, without any democratic legitimacy", recalled the President.
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At the same time, Correa stressed the importance of the new regional institutions in Latin America. What Unasur has achieved in these years of creation since 2008, much more than what the European Union advanced in the same period of time. We are going faster, but we have to go faster yet, he said.
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He described as absurd to use a foreign currency for trade exchange between Latin American countries. Because with that operation, wealth is transferred to the currency emitter, say the U.S. dollar or the euro.
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http://www.plenglish.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1332441&Itemid=1
In the article, he also mentions that they're working on the "Bank of the South" to lend money under adequate conditions for projects, mainly of infrastructure for the development of South America" and says that things are finally changing but that's creating big enemies.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Ecuador: Building a Good Life - Sumak Kawsay
by Alberto Acosta, Translation by Christina Hewitt
Thursday, 24 January 2013
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Essentially, these proposals recapture key issues that spring from the knowledge of the ancient peoples. The Constitution of Ecuador and Bolivia are the most well-known in their reflection of these ideas; the first presents the idea of “Good Living” or Sumak Kawsay (in Quechua), and the second, “Living Well” or Suma Qamaña (in Aymara). Similar notions (although, not the same) exist in other indigenous cultures, such as the Mapuche in Chile, the Guaraní in Bolivia and Paraguay, the Kuna in Panama, the Achuar in the Ecuadorian Amazon, and in the Mayan tradition in Guatemala and Chiapas (Mexico), among others.
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An Alternative to Development
Since Good Living emerged from non-capitalist indigenous roots, it proposes a vision of the world that is different from Western ideas of hegemonic civilization. It breaks away from anthropocentric capitalist logic based on the philosophy of a dominant civilization, as well as the various “real” socialisms, and their intrinsic contradictions, that have existed until now.
The idea of development that emerged from Western ideas of progress and the development of civilization established a complex series of dichotomies based on dominance: developed-developing, advanced-backward, superior-inferior, centre-periphery, first world-third world...and so the old savage-civilized dichotomy gained new force and was violently introduced into our Abya-Yala more than five centuries ago with the European conquest.
In the context of global forecasts, the dominant structure of civilization today is realized. The institutionalization of the superior-inferior dichotomy led to the emergence of multiple forms of coloniality as ways of justifying and legitimizing inequality: the coloniality of power expressed in the maintenance of the north-south power divide; the coloniality of knowledge that imposes homogenizing Western-thinking with the intention of overriding popular-thinking; the coloniality of being that represses the otherness of the minorities, and, the coloniality of having that attempts to reduce Good Living to consumerism and the belief that those who have more are superior to those who have less.
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After five centuries of horror and mistakes committed in the name of progress - and development in the last six decades - it is clear that the issue is not one of simply accepting one path or another. The path to development is not the main problem. The difficulty lies in the concept of development.
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http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/4087-ecuador-building-a-good-life-sumak-kawsay
