#WORLD #WORLDWIDE #SPAIN #ANARCHISM #News #Journal #Update - (en) #Spain, CNT #431 - Critical and transformative consumption - OTHER LOOKS (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 The constant persecution of trade unionists in states of the global south for

defending their territories against the barbarity of our consumption models must
lead us to a trade union response proportionate in solidarity. ---- Avoid
nutritionism, gastronomic hedonism or environmentalism as objectives in
themselves, a constant to take into account in the search for the improvement of
our occupational and community health, prioritizing the radical humanization of
exchange relationships and creating broad, diverse and emotionally safe dialogue
forums. ---- For years we have been clear that our structure of production,
distribution and consumption must be overcome qualitatively and quantitatively
-including the existing model in agroecological consumption groups- to avoid
dynamics that once again reproduce the precariousness of workers from the
countryside, from the sea and from broad sectors of sustainable agri-food
transformation (for the LIFE they generate). In these alternative contexts, in
some cases, class inequalities are also aggravated and the broad participation of
neighbors is not achieved, either due to disconnection with the discursive
framework, or due to priorities of each other or due to conditions of structural
poverty of the homes.

The conventional production and distribution model consciously makes us sick,
attacking the public health system.

To talk about critical and transformative consumption, we must also highlight
that the concept of sustainability -Slow, Km0, ecological, natural, sustainable
tourism- is being radically engulfed by the capitalist framework and by
privileged socioeconomic sectors, which hold individual discourses of
consumption, but also supposedly alternative health or education. All of this
supported by the multiplication of sustainable technicians, making it difficult
for us to discern between their priorities -that of the technicians- and those of
the group, through subsidized organizations that are presumably at the service of
global productive responsibility. We have a clear and doubly fraudulent example
in the conceptual framework of rural and sustainable tourism stimulated by a
university, institutional or employer discourse that ignores, for example, the
legalized exploitative and precarious working conditions that we cannot
understand as sustainable for life, as well such as turning the destinations of
this type of trip into an elitist and unaffordable context for the working class,
also creating serious problems of access to housing.

It is no less true that in our organization and as a result of complex
circumstances, we have gradually abandoned the agri-food industry and the rural
environment, these being directly linked to the concept of environmental health
that has historically been present in CNT. That is why the reconstruction of
solid information and distribution networks, with efficient logistics tools and
fair prices, but also with community control of the entire production process and
not only of the properties or shortcomings of the final product, forces us to
seek a breakdown of the consumer/producer dichotomy. In this way we will be able
to strengthen the ties of solidarity, of human and trade union confluence in our
places, also counting on a reflexive local business that integrates community
discourse, democratizing in practice access to a consumption model that improves
the lives of all, not only of an elite, and fleeing from the paternalism of the
state, a solution that the structure of social services has prepared for us in
the face of the poverty that they themselves generate.

Yes, it roams freely, however, in our towns, the exploitative agro-livestock
bosses, ecologically and disguised as progressive unionism, unionism linked in
some cases and demagogically to international networks that fight for Food
Sovereignty. It is thus that our small villages and rural unions should be
pampered to the extreme, with the fundamental objective of building sustainable
productive identities, the exclusive productive and cultural identity being the
alibi under which the economic and political control of our regions is coupled,
with fine patronage networks in which everyone wants their piece.

We are clear that the conventional model of distribution -supermarkets, large
distribution markets, small franchisees from the towns... - in which we actively
participate is criminal and is making us sick, millions of euros of public money
being injected through the PAC, generating in society a misleading view of cost
prices, unaffordable for people who try to work in connection with their natural
and human environment outside the subsidized circuit.

There are already advanced models, such as that of some French AMAP (Association
for the Conservation of Peasant Agriculture) in which the search for overcoming
this producer/consumer dichotomy is consolidated, also taking into account what
they have to say people who get their hands dirty on land or in the sea, people
who are not always listened to in order to integrate the needs that their
difficulties demand. It is also convenient to remember the model of Agriculture
Sustained by the Community (Urgenci) or the enhancement of those Community
Participation Systems (SPG) as a practical example of good work, integrating in
the process tools as useful in pedagogy as community kitchens (nursing homes,
schools...) with educational projects in themselves.

We must create real and democratic alternatives in the conditions of production
and access to food and the goods necessary for life, just as our organization has
been doing historically.

In another order, the immobile sentimentality or the inactive nostalgia about the
rural environment and its bucolic productive tools of yesteryear, lead us
inexorably to the paternalism of the subsidized state, to representative and
patronage clientelism. In another, the dogmatism in which in many cases we settle
allows us to rest placidly in inaction, but facilitating the establishment of the
neoliberal structure and the disappearance of dozens of interesting incipient
projects that are already spread throughout the territory, projects that lack of
support in everyday life: financing, logistics, human support...

That is why we must create real and democratic alternatives in the conditions of
production and access to food or goods -to their property- necessary for life as
our organization has been doing historically, alternatives that make palpable a
more necessary proposal than ever in a context where food and energy sovereignty
are non-existent, seriously endangering life. We cannot continue to make use of a
production model in which we use the land as an extractive matrix, tearing
everything we need from it without reflecting on the damage we cause in our
purchases and the superfluous needs we generate.

We must wrest from the productive power the coverage of vital needs with the
political struggle, but also with logistical and economic proposals. Individual
and collective responsibility must lead us to progressively abandon financial
entities and conventional production and marketing networks in all areas, since
there are already real alternatives to which we have something to say.

Our model of the Various Trades Union (SOV) is an optimal model to break with
corporatism and the compartmentalized vision that exists in the face of
consumption habits, historical and organizational potential that we must take
advantage of to raise awareness of these problems, in which the agri-food sector
It should function as an educational tool in critical and transformative
consumption of the first order, taking care in our organization of those nuclei
or small unions of the towns that undertake trade union work at the service of a
productive and sustainable consumption model and, as a consequence, of a society
rural respectful, diverse, free and egalitarian.

https://www.cnt.es/noticias/consumo-critico-y-transformador/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca