James , 38, activist academic

Unlearning is very important for me because I was a trained and worked as an economist for a number of years. I was working for a wholesale financial institution - it was like a bank to other banks. I was 27 at the time and earning close to $100,000, I owned an investment property, an expensive sports car and I really believed that economic growth and free trade were the way for Third World' nations to get out of poverty. I thought that poor countries were only poor because they hadn’t followed the orthodox rules and all they had to do was trade their way out of poverty.

To cut a very long story short this all changed for me was when I took a year off to travel and was in a mining town in Bolivia and I saw workers, including children, labouring in heartbreakingly horrible conditions, nothing could describe the landscape I saw them working in. And after making some inquiries I learnt that what they were digging out of these mines were the raw materials which were being sold to German car manufacturers. At the time I was driving a German car and I drew the connection between my decision to drive a $50,000 sports car and their working conditions. I realised that the real cost of the car was not the money I had paid for it but quality of life of these people.

I discovered that you can find a bunch of reasons why you can tell yourself that the conditions of people living in the south are nothing to do with you, but they are, no matter how long those connections are, you can find them. I realised that you can not rely on the free market to wave its invisible hand over poverty - the power relationships had been structured in a way which basically mean that the few are living a high life at the expense of the majority. In the half an hour I sat on the side of a mountain in Bolivia I got to review four years of economic theory I had done in my undergraduate degree, three years financial theory I did in my postgraduate degree and seven years of my professional life as an economist and I quit. That was my unravelling, where my life changed unbelievably. When I got back to work people were quite bemused by my transformation from being a capitalist animal to becoming something else completely.

I both disengaged and engaged simultaneously from formal education structures after this time. After I quit working I went back to university and began a masters in environmental policy and ended up doing a PhD in philosophy. But at the same time I came to understand the limitations of formal education and realised the power structures around how we are taught. I supplemented these structures through a lot of my own reading. I tried to go back and understand how I had seen the world, it was a radical process of re-education.

I have been involved in very successful campaigns, such as the one to reform export credit agencies and I have also involved in campaigns which never really took off. One such campaign was against a dam in the Mekong called the Nam Theun 2 that is now going to go ahead after we campaigned for years and we thought we had won. The point I am getting to is that it matters whether you win or not, but what matters too is the process.

Things change, we need new strategies. For example I am really proud that I was involved in the S11 protest down in Melbourne and the May Day protests here in Sydney but also they also taught me that there was a time to move on from front line confrontations where you force the state to react violently. That is not always the answer, it can be conceived as overly masculine. I think confrontation is a really important strategy which has been significant from Seattle to Cancun to what happened in Hong Kong in December (which I went to) to the more localised events like S11, but we need to realise that this is not the only way to confront capital.

I am inspired by  Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, this book is never far from me because there are some beautiful parts of that book were he talks about hope. I find the idea of being able to imagine a different world is an important drive for change, part of the power of the neo-liberal capitalist vision is that they can easily imagine a world which works in their interests.