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INDIGENOUS DESIGN, INFINITE CAPITAL

For almost three generations, scholars and activists have attempted to craft an intellectual framework to redesign civilization in ways that dismantled colonialism and reversed the consequences of slavery and genocide. This work received little attention through the first half of the twentieth century, but the artistic and popular movements for equity and democracy after 1945 made new areas of inquiry possible by 1968. A conservative rearguard organized an ongoing campaign of political movements that have produced the rise of global authoritarian fascism since 2010. A radical agenda supported by a broad anti-authoritarian coalition can dismantle these threats to freedom worldwide, especially if focused on the ways that digital capitalism attempts to consolidate with no consideration for ethics, humanism, and individual dignity. The heart of the agenda is the restoration of indigenous land and development rights across the western hemisphere and the global south. These efforts must network at the local level with an adaptive set of commitments to solidarity. Breaking the digital and industrial monopolies that have emerged since 1994 is the single largest priority, but transforming the legal landscape to reward labor, migration, and sustainability will also meet the crises related to climate change.



This transformation will rely on systems of digital commerce that develop outside the frameworks of worldwide central banking. Decades of erroneous macroeconomics have enabled the concentration of finance capital in ways that reduce people to units of value. These core assumptions predate the formation of imperial and national capitalist systems. Thousands of indigenous systems of commercial exchange affirmed the inherent value of individuals, families, and communities. Efforts to return these commitments to center of local and regional development will undermine the tyranny of capital, while also creating new opportunities for local sovereignty based on the limitless capacities of human imagination.