JOHAN GALTUNG the same horizontal organizations of people, districts, countrles, even regions in the same position relative to dominance from the center as solidarity organizations ln the struggle agalnst the present pattern and as the ties out of which a more equitable future world can be built. 8 So much for the general concept of self-reliance as a pattern of regeneration through own efforts, of fighting dominance by starting relying on oneself, meaning individual self and the collective Self of others in the same position. But concretely what is the practice of self-reliance? Two principles seem to be at work here in addition to everything said above: the princip/e of participation and the principle of concentric circ/es. These principles are crucial as guidelines, but like all such principles become ridiculous wen they generate into dogmas. • • • Self-reliance is a dynamic movement from the periphery, at all levels-individual, local, national, regional. lt is not something done for the periphery; basically it is something done by the periphery. Thus, control over the economic machinery of a country by national, and even by local, state or private capitalists in order to produce for the satisfaction of basic needs is not self-reliance. lt may be to "serve the people", but it is not to "trust the people" - to use Chinese jargon. Self-reliance ultimately means that the society is organized in such a way that the masses arrive at self-fulfillment through self-reliance - in participation with others in the same situation. Obviously this points directly to a decentralized society, e.g. in the form of the 70.000 (or so) Chinese people's communes with their subdivisions (brigades and teams), and sufficient autonomy locally to permit participation down at the grassroot level.9 Hence self-reliance should ideally be seen as something originating ln the antipode to the metropoles in the Center: the vast rural lands in which the larger part of the world population still lives. Concretely it takes the form of using local factors - local creativity, raw materials/land and capital. Often the center has drained away so much of the conventional raw ma- • T,hus, the UNCTAD 77 fs certainly more than an organizatfon for global articulation and collective bargaining; lt ls also a settlng wfthln whlch new cooperative structures are emerging. • This is developed in some detail ·ln Johan Ga!tung and Fumfko Nishimura, Learning from the Chlnese People (Oslo, 1975), chapter 4. 54
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