ECOLOGY OF EVERYDAY LIFE
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■While their education focused primarily on the areas of literacy and sexual
education, they emphasized as well a wide range of other skills that would
prepare women for their life and work in the new anarchist society. In the Fall
of 1936, the Mujeres Fibres in Barcelona offered intensive courses in general
culture, social history, economics, and law in its offices in the Plaza de
Cataluna. Regardless of the topic, the theme was the same: Women must take
responsibility for their own development, education, and participation within
the larger movement.
Oppositional developmental desire has continued to surface throughout
history as people challenge conditions of personal and collective stasis caused
by oppression. During the New Left for example, feminists established a
‘developmental’ agenda, creating consciousness-raising groups designed to
allow women to increase awareness of oppressive gender roles. In turn, in the
Third World, beginning in 1977, women have expressed developmental
oppositional desire in the “Green Belt Movement” in Kenya. In this movement,
activist
and scholar Wangari Maathai formed a network of grassroots
educational and activist groups throughout that country to prepare women to
address the parallel crises of deforestation and poverty. Training women to
work in such areas as seed cultivation, marketing, and forest management, The
Green Belt Movement restored green areas around school compounds and city
limits throughout the country. Seeking more than ecological and economic
restoration, however, The Green Belt Movement allowed women to develop
their status as holders of expert knowledge.
Expressing oppositional desire is a way to feel alive in a world which
deadens our yearning for freedom. To resist, on an individual and social level,
is vital to the revolutionary project; when people forget that they possess die
very means for social change, they become ignorant of their own potential for
dynamism and self-development. "When people see themselves as ‘stuck’, they
are likely to believe that the world is inevitably unchangeable as well. When
we lose confidence in our ability to develop new oppositional ways of being,
we lose faith in our ability to change the world. Propelled by our oppositional
desire, we have the potential to challenge the ‘big lie of stasis’ that teaches us
that the world is controlled by an unchanging set of natural laws that keeps
each thing and each person in place. Once we recognize that we can fight
oppression to become more sensual, cooperative, creative, and whole, the big
static book of natural law looses its yellowed pages as they scatter in the winds
of opposition.