Oppression and Human Liberation: Towards a Third World Utopia

Abstract

The Third World being bound together by the experience of oppression rather than by common cultural traditions, its utopia must recognize oppression - and liberation from oppression in its widest sense - as the central problem in envisioning an alternative human future. Such a vision must recognize the continuity between the oppressed and the oppressor and see the institutional and psychological liberation from outer oppression as a matter of self-realization. At one time, such a perspective smacked of defeatist, life-denying spiritualism, but the present civilizational predicament of the West has concretized the Marxist, Freudian and the Gandhian visions that oppression and freedom from oppression are indivisible. The criteria by which the Third World cultures were once judged deficient - e.g. the absence of a commitment to the ideas of productivity and work; a ‘non-masculine orientation to nature and society; an unwillingness to see the winners and losers in a power game as discontinuous entities; and a historicity - are exactly the criteria by which by Western civilization today is being found decadent. Dominance is never cost-free; victory is rarely safe for the victors. And the defences and techniques of survival the subjugated cultures of the world have developed in response to their shared experience of oppression are exactly the ones which must be explored as possible paths of liberation, not only for the oppressed, but also for those caught in the hinges of the traditional concepts of success, privilege and progress.