Merciless accumulation

Accumulate, accumulate more, accumulate much more; endlessly, with no limits, with no mercy.

The unbridled process of wealth concentration is one of the most destructive factors of contemporary reality. This concentration that involves the appropriation of assets and incomes is a globally uncontrolled and accelerated phenomenon. It also promotes the consequent concentration of decision power in other issues apart from economics and mobilizes a series of complicities in areas so sensitive as the media, educational systems, politics, the judiciary, the prevailing values and attitudes. Its influence gets projected over the environmental destruction, geopolitical confrontations, the growth of ideological fundamentalisms, the escape towards nihilism, addictions, existential alienation, and a serious and dangerous setback in the permanent search for meaning in our life.

Such concentration is produced by the extraction of value that the most powerful do over the less powerful, the weakest, those vulnerable. It is a global tendency in which everybody that can do it and is imbibed in an alienated greed organizes its activities to appropriate value generated by others. The main actors, and in another scale many others, aim at accumulating the maximum possible value, with no limits, no remorse, no compassion towards those who are striped from good part of the product of their effort and that of their ancestors.

The explanations, justifications, arguments defending these actions are infinite, as much as or even more than the questionings they receive. They are not only endless but also much more audible for the loudspeakers and distribution channels of ideas and values they control. Those who benefit from the concentration are unwilling to graciously give up their privileges even if they know that with their actions they cause tremendous damage to the planet and the entire humanity. Why would they care if they operate within the hegemonic rationality, if they are part of a systemic dynamic that they claim was not created by them but that they just take advantage of?

If they could reflect on and look beyond the short term (that can suddenly become extremely short with the explosion of a generalized reaction), they would become aware that the course and way of functioning that direct or indirectly they have helped to impose, lead to a social and environmental abysm that will also swallow them. At this point, there is no room to beat around the bush and no one can hide behind the fatuous belief that the “successes” (privileges) the concentrated groups and their accomplices have accumulated is the result of their own effort. There is no formula that can explain, and even less validates, such huge level of accumulation without the presence of illegal or illegitimate actions. That is, a trajectory that could have combined criminal actions (among them, tax evasion, money laundering, links with organized crime), environmental depredation (depletion of natural resources and environment destruction) and abuses of market power (extortions on suppliers, workers, clients, and States, plundering assets from competitors and people in precarious situations, forcing the acquisition of enterprises that could have remained independent but are absorbed to reinforce oligopolistic power.

This handful of huge appropriators is so submerged in their own values that anything goes, at any cost, with no limits, no mercy (unfamiliar notion in their culture), that they do not perceive the proximity of serious social and environmental dangers. Featherbrained as they are, they believe they have an impenetrable shield that guaranties eternal impunity for the misdeeds they perpetrate. In their irrationality there is no room for the pain, frustrations, and resentments they generate and that produce hate and vengeance. Hopefully we will find peaceful answers to this system of chained submissions and that the despair and impotence will not lead to violent eruptions. Evil-eye looks expand throughout the world while in captured democracies the ability and maybe even the determination to transform are sterilized turning a squeezed process into a dead end.

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