Opinion Sur
How can it not be possible to exercise decisional sovereignty and eliminate poverty and indigence, when it is the clamor of billions of people in the world and there are resources, talent, technology. All that is missing is the determination to achieve it.
Exercising decisional sovereignty without further poverty and indigence requires raising from the monolithic thinking, structured to preserve burdensome inequalities and privileges. We have been caged, numbed, alienated. We are mindlessly moving in a direction that is socially and environmentally destructive out of greed and selfishness. We move in complex realities, confused nebulae that seem ungraspable. These circumstances do not occur by chance but respond to causalities derived from decisions of those who dominate. It is time to unravel them, understand how they subdue our freewill and work collectively to establish a new path of justice, peace, equity, environmental responsibility. Make that deceptive impossible, possible.
Addressing the impossible is not to jump into an abyss or to consecrate naïve voluntarisms. Instead, it points out the commitment to overcome the ignominy of an opulence sustained by the suffering of immense majorities punished without reason, deprived of care, invisible so as not to interfere with the development of privilege.
It is not simple but possible to eliminate poverty and indigence. Of course, we will need to dismantle the unbridled concentrating process that appropriates for a few what is produced by entire societies and that, in addition, seizes decisional power. They enshrine tremendous social inequalities and environmental destruction.
Why tolerate, accept that imposition?
Harsh and unsustainable stalemates
When we fall into destructive systemic stalemates, it is time to change the course and way of functioning. If the necessary changes were denied or hindered, we would be even closer to runaway explosions of unforeseeable consequences. Furies and hopelessness are understandable but difficult to channel constructively. The challenge is to overcome eternal postponements and move forward with clarification and organization in the collective construction of a path of good living, peaceful, courageous, including everyone.
We do not accept continuing to enrich the affluent instead of supporting the immense social base of countries, of the suffering contemporary humanity. This requires addressing various fronts of intervention, from respecting the planet and generating enough genuine work spaces, to regulating systemic functioning and, between these extremes, what makes social care as the centrality of living in society, and no longer an appendage of corporate profit.
In this path, it will be necessary to exalt social affection, unlock the restrained potency, give sense and meaning to the collaboration between the diverse and the different.
Where to move forward
It is possible to move forward with diverse strategies and measures because no one has a monopoly on knowledge and because it is essential to consider the unique circumstances of each country and its moments. It is only worth mentioning some of the main features of this challenge.
For starters, it is essential to dismantle the financial debauchery. There will be no society that can ensure their population care by generating decent jobs and income when the resources dedicated to financial speculation are rewarded with returns several times higher than those who invest and work in the real economy. We know how to do it and who we have to confront. It will be necessary to discern between movements of capital that are legal and legitimate and therefore can continue to be carried out, from those that, illegal or illegitimate, configure burdensomely speculative modalities that do not generate wealth, work, income, but exploit the other actors via appropriation of values generated by them. The ordinary citizen has little information about how this robbery materializes, but those responsible for regulating financial actions are not unaware of these criminal networks.
It is also necessary to dismantle the different modalities of tax evasion and elusion, a very serious injustice that feeds the flight abroad of ill-gotten capital. If this drain on resources is not closed, genuine investment will continue to be compressed and its impact on national development will be sterilized.
Another front concerns oligopolistic markets where a handful of leading companies profit at the expense of suppliers and consumers. They abuse their market power to extract value from those who make up their production chain, as well as from consumers forced to accept prices imposed on them. This can be addressed by mediating within existing productive chains so that those who make them up receive fair compensation for the productive effort they contribute and, at the same time, as indicated below, promoting new productive chains with associative or family enterprises of popular base.
A critical aspect whose resolution requires the convergence of various measures refers to the country’s productive matrix. In general, this matrix was generated from investment decisions of particular groups interested in obtaining the maximum possible profit without considering the functioning of the country as a whole. No attention was paid to the “normal” constraints that functioning itself inexorably generated. One of the most burdensome, the dreaded “external sector restriction”, appears when the country grows and needs to import inputs, equipment, and finished goods without having the necessary foreign currency to acquire them. Without foreseeing that these bottlenecks will appear, the productive process enters into crisis with tremendous social and fiscal impacts. It would be different if the dysfunctions of an unbalanced productive matrix were addressed by promoting, at the same time, differentiated exports to increase foreign exchange inflows, direct new investments towards activities that demand few imports, and promote the substitution of imports with local production.
It is clear that not only macro, meso, and microeconomic measures are needed. Along with them, it is necessary to confront the mechanisms for manipulating public opinion, establish a justice service independent of economic power and political power, and permanently advance in clarification to banish values that sustain greed, selfishness, belittlement of others. Domination has been responsible for imposing a common sense that threatens solidarity, devalues compassion, collaboration and mutual help. We have been molded to operate in a social jungle, where everyone is “saved” by her/himself, even if s/he must step on heads, elbow their way, violate regulations in order to “succeed” which, for those who dominate, means accumulating wealth at all costs and then covering up how it was achieved.
The challenge of productively including those suffering from poverty and indigence
So far, we focused on liberating a country from the robbery to which it is subjected, putting it on its feet on a sovereign and sustainable course. Doing so creates the conditions for reducing poverty and indigence through more formal work and better incomes. However, the shortcomings suffered by those living in poverty and indigence require that other complementary measures be taken to not only reduce but eliminate poverty and indigence. That is, solutions are not reduced to subsidies for popular consumption but also include the full productive inclusion of these sectors. Here is another “impossible” assumption that can be worked to make it possible.
The shortages of all kinds that corner huge segments of the popular economy make it necessary to propose specific solutions to tackle them. It is not only a lack of financial resources, but also little or no information on promising opportunities, contacts, and organizational ways to take advantage of them, technological knowledge, and market access, among many other restrictions. These limitations should not be surprising, since they are similar to those faced by enterprises operating in markets which, with their own resources, shareholders or credit funds, acquire these services. We propose with firmness and conviction that the full productive inclusion of those who are in a situation of poverty and indigence is possible, as long as ways are conceived to ensure the services that every productive effort requires.
This requires support instruments that provide organizational, technical, and managerial assistance in support of new or existing grassroots ventures along with critical seed capital resources, consolidation capital, and credit support. The important thing is that different forms of support can be adopted, including the one proposed in Opinion Sur focused on two powerful instruments, the developers of associative or family enterprises of popular base and the trusts specialized in the popular economy, they both work together with social organizations of the popular economy, as well as with other support entities. We point out these instruments by explaining that it is not the only form of intervention, although knowing it can serve to induce other modalities.
It is worth closing these lines by reaffirming that it is possible to exercise decision-making sovereignty to eliminate poverty and indigence. No one can make us believe that it is one more of the “impossible”. Of course, it requires being part of a permanent political work of clarification and organization that, leaving behind these and other demobilizing prejudices, allows to move forward with determination.
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