Modernity inherited two almost twin words and decided to separate them as though they had never walked together. Progress (from pro + gredi, to step forward) became the verb of advancement — running, overtaking, accelerating. Congress (from con + gredi, to step with others) was reduced to the space of meeting, negotiation, waiting. This rupture is not merely linguistic, but political, economic and social, defining a moral order.
Since the Enlightenment, with the promise of a "new man" — rational and autonomous — this separation takes shape. The education of the masses emerges as emancipation, but rapidly converts into normalisation. With the Industrial Revolution, the school becomes a space of discipline and productive preparation, of functional integration. The "new man" is born inscribed in relations of power; the bourgeois individual is liberated whilst oppressions persist over the poor, women and colonised peoples.
More recently, with the digital revolution, this process reaches its paroxysm. Automation becomes subjective, moulding individuals as extensions of the system. Everything is product and content. Acceleration transforms into instantaneity — lines into points — in an autophagic logic that feeds on attention and time. The collective comes to be seen as an obstacle.
Education structures this model. It measures, compares and positions from the nursery onwards, in permanent competition. The difference between formation and formatting becomes uncertain. There has never been such access to education and information and yet, the collective grows fragile. Inequalities, violence and environmental destruction intensify. Educating to compete does not lead to a more just society — only to one more efficient in its contradictions.
Every innovation depends on invisible networks, shared knowledge and collective infrastructures, but the myth of solitary progress conceals these dependencies and the forms of oppression within which it operates. The world moves swiftly, but unevenly. Some run, many are dragged along, others are the very foundation of the race. But since humanity is part of a larger system — the environment — when one part accelerates without considering the whole, imbalance sets in.
Progress sustains itself on a logic of continuous extraction and assumes the form of erosion. It presents itself as development, but installs the deliberate production of scarcity. Places of abundance become places of want. Autonomous communities come to depend on systems they do not control. A clear example of this logic is waste. There were societies that had no such concept — materials circulated and returned to the environment — but today plastic imposes another temporality: it endures, accumulates, persists. What was a cycle becomes continuous residue, and waste itself comes to reveal the limits of a model based on extraction without return.
As Silvia Federici observes, capitalism is born from the creation of artificial scarcity through enclosures. The fences that privatised the forest were not merely physical structures, but devices of social transformation — which is precisely why they were destroyed at night by women who recognised this process. The same pattern repeats itself today. In Varela, Guinea-Bissau, women organised against an extractive company, destroying its machinery. They were imprisoned for opposing development and private property.
This movement is not accidental; it has well-defined historical roots. The Berlin Conference did not aim merely to "divide Africa", but to control flows — namely the Congo and Niger rivers — in order to render its riches liquid, transportable. To liquidise implies both circulation (to make liquid) and destruction (to liquidate). Language itself reveals the violence inscribed in the process.
The result of this dissociation between advancement and the collective becomes visible on the ecological and symbolic plane. Progress detached from the collective produces ecological fracture. And it is at that point that ruin emerges — not merely as destruction, but as a message about what has been neglected. The world organises itself as a theatre of capitalist operations, where territories, bodies and resources take the stage. But that same theatre contains another possibility — that of the assembly, the encounter, the shared experience. And it is precisely there that fissures appear in the dominant model.
These fissures manifest themselves even in forms of language and in everyday gestures. In the Kriol of Guinea-Bissau, one does not say "I caught rain" — one says "the rain caught me". The subject shifts from the centre. The relation ceases to be one of domination and becomes one of traversal. Likewise, in certain traditions, eating with metal is associated with war, whilst eating with one's hands or with wood is associated with peace. Metal, linked to fire and extraction, carries a memory of violence.
Even the very idea of liberation carries this relational dimension. Liberation comes from libra — the scales. It refers to balance, not to isolation. To liberate is to rebalance.
Thus, the question shifts from speed to form. Reconfiguring progress implies recovering the relational dimension — not as an obstacle, but as a condition. But progress and congress belong to the same gesture. When together, there is freedom.
An African proverb encapsulates this tension: "if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together".
Filipa César and Marinho Pina