Producing the Common to Sustain and Transform Life: Reflections on Interdependence

Since 2011, the Research Seminar on Communitarian Weavings and Political Forms in the Social Science and Humanities Institute at the Autonomous Benemeritus University in Puebla, México has developed a perspective that focuses on the multicolored and polymorphic ways in which various human groups – both Indigenous and non-indigenous – have committed to social struggle in both everyday and extraordinary ways in order to guarantee material and symbolic conditions for their own (re)production. We call these political practices the production of the common, which is the focus of the first part of this work. In the second part, we present some of the partial syntheses that we have achieved in our collective research efforts. Our aim is to foster discussion about various elements that we consider to be communitarian-popular social transformation in full development, working against the deployment of devastating offensives – including extractivist policies – produced by the patriarchal, colonial, capitalist complex that puts the reproduction of life at risk.