Opinion Sur
Solving poverty, submission, inequity, injustice, assault to the environment, abandonment and suffering of billions of people, recurrent systemic instability, not only calls for compensating and redistributing all what is possible but also for dismounting the driving forces of the tremendous concentration that threatens the Planet as a whole. It is a huge challenge that the entire humanity faces; let’s hope that it can be addressed without setting up more vindictiveness and hate than those that already overwhelm the world.
History is written by dominators, tales, too. Today, diverse concentrated groups are dominant; a dramatic expression of such concentration is that 1% of the wealthiest people on earth control as much or more wealth than 3.6 billion other people that are left behind in the somber bottom of humanity. Experience and economic logic teach us that such wealth is not obtained with the sweat of their brows or their armpits. Also, it is known that the 1% of wealthy people is seconded by a 10% of very rich people that live in central countries as well as in our countries.
How did they make their fortunes? It is frequently a secret; little is known as there is a lot to be concealed.
Is it that nobody researched on them, that the mechanisms they used to accumulate at extraordinary rates were not uncovered? Yes, they were investigated, they were denounced, good part of the mechanisms they used was uncovered. So what happened? Well, the voices that denounce them were largely silenced or were maliciously lost in the oceans of information and news that circulate in a world groggy with banalities and bewildered with half-false, half-right, or completely devious complaints. Little was saved from what was uncovered; the mobbed media did not prioritize such information. Why should they do so if they are accomplices of the accumulation with which they profit and benefit from?
Obscene concentration of wealth, in large part, has a spurious, bloody origin, achieved over millions of tears and suffering. It is neither just statistical data about something that happens by chance nor is the result of a natural law of the economic functioning. Not at all, it is the foreseeable result of the way of functioning that has been imposed on us, despite the attempts through molding our subjectivities and subduing our freewill to inoculate falsehoods that pretend to be truths, as saying that wealth is achieved by merit of the rich.
Neither is fair nor correct to place everybody in the same bag. In processes and situations, heterogeneity tends to prevail over forced homogeneity. It is worth noting that small fortunes could have been generated with honesty and hard work, though, even at that level there are mechanisms of value appropriation. But there have been workers, entrepreneurs, professionals, self-employed persons that had accessed an acceptable living without stepping on heads, exploiting others, or committing crimes. What cannot be refuted is that individual results are always conditioned by the conjunction of factors that form the context in which we live and produce.
That is, it is of critical importance the economic, social, and cultural context in which everybody develops, as it is in that web of constraints (stimuli and obstacles) that the effort, ability, and creativity are applied by individuals. Self-merit explains only partially the results that each one obtains, despite what certain ideologies and own arrogance might say on the contrary. As it happens, with exceptions that justify the rule, our own effort germinates in favorable contexts and can end sterilized in adverse contexts.
Thus, the rich, the powerful, and the gang of accomplices and amanuensis did not obtain their wealth in solidarity context where no one was subdued, abused, or left behind. On the contrary, their privileges were obtained based on their abilities to conquer, by appropriation of what others generate, abuse of market power, despoil or belittlement of many others.
It is heinous to forget the circumstances of contexts that were built from the power of a few and not to consider the behavior of dominant actors. If we did so, we will ignore where we come from and why our societies end up being captured, as it happens in our imperfect democracies. The existence of environmental degradation, poverty, indigence, inequality cannot be understood without identifying the different modalities of economic and cultural submission that have been scourging humanity and the Planet even now. From there, a diversity of dynamics of accumulation and social, economic, and political functioning derive, all plagued with injustices and dead-end alleys that lead towards recurrent situations of economic instability.
Puede afirmarse entonces que no se repararan inequidades y desigualdades con sólo programas de asistencia a la pobreza sino que es imprescindible develar cómo se concentra la riqueza. Esto es, toca colocar un foco en los afluentes y poderosos identificando cómo obtuvieron y reproducen su riqueza y cómo ejercen el consecuente poder de imponer decisiones a los demás.
We can assert that inequities and inequalities cannot be corrected just with poverty aid programs but rather it is indispensable to unveil how wealth is concentrated. That is, we need to focus on the rich and powerful, identifying how they obtained and reproduce their wealth and how they exercise the consequent power to impose decisions onto others.
A crucial factor in every concentration process has been the appropriation of the State to take advantage of its resources, regulations, and public policies. It is a never-ending dispute despite the change in the subduing modalities that are used. At one time, direct repression differentiated the oppressed from the oppressors. Today, such differences still exist but the applied mechanisms seem ever more concealed. Direct repression is still part of the domination arsenal but it is reserved to the more riotous or those who try to clarify how and why it happens what happens. The rest, the large majorities, are subdued through the colonization of their minds, molding of their subjectivities, inoculation of values and beliefs that dismount the transforming will.
There is no one single helmsperson of the domination but most of them emerge, one way or the other, associated with, or supported by, a handful of large financial groups that are, truly, the main decision-makers of the planetary course. Economic domination is exercised through diverse mechanisms of appropriation of value, among which we want to highlight two of the most important ones:
- Indebtedness of people and countries that are lead towards over-indebtedness, which in turn makes them absolutely vulnerable to growing exactions of income and assets. Being in dire straits, the defense lines disappear or are reduced to a minimum capacity of resistance against creditors that operate with merciless and unlimited greed;
- Commercial dominance, shown by verifying that the largest share of the international and regional trade operations and transactions is done by corporations that are part of giant financial conglomerates. In addition to extracting extraordinary returns based in their oligopolistic dominance (they have the ability to charge big margins for trading), that dominant position also allows them to do endless maneuvers to evade taxes in producer For example, commercial triangulations where they sell their subsidiaries products for $100 that they locally bought for $95 and those subsidiaries sell those same products to the final recipient of the traded product for $150: they increase their profits by evading taxes. In the above example, they pay taxes for $5 and not for $55 as they should have done. With that, they cut down national budgets, compromising the capacity of the State to fund social and productive infrastructure with those stolen taxes.
Can we, thus, ignore or forget the actions of concentrated groups, being those local or foreign, in their desire for cunningly appropriating our countries’ wealth? On the contrary, we need to unveil and dismount the mechanisms by which a few appropriate the value generated by entire societies. If we do not do this, the driving forces of the concentration will remain intact.
It is worth to explicit that efforts to solve these outrages and free our captured democracies do not want to install vindictiveness or preach for hate, they just want to repair injustices and help guide the collective effort towards the general wellbeing and protection of the environment. Let’s hope that effective agreements between all the parts involved could be worked out although experience teaches that they are extremely difficult to achieve and, in best case scenario, of long-term maturity. Dominators are neither open to relinquish their privileges nor are aware of the dangers we will all need to address as the present situation is unsustainable. If we fail to transform in time the prevailing course and way of functioning, then we will need to face severe social and environmental crises of unforeseeable outbreaks and consequences.
Time shortens, social resentment is boiling up and ever more difficult to contain. Social clarification and organization intermittently advances in search for transforming avenues. It is not an option to surrender and much less to betray commitments. The transforming effort should be firm but also be done in peace and giving way to full democracies. We have known too many authoritarianisms that have been replaced by new types of authoritarianism, exploiters that passed the torch to other new exploiters. Every march finds opportunistic and greedy mixed with majorities that long for well-being, justice, solidary decisions.
Very serious are the challenges at present time; they cannot be addressed with small patches or mock transformations but rather by adopting other visions, other values, other courses, other ways of functioning. Nihilism is distressing and suicidal, as well as looking away and seeking refuge in selfishness. The most dramatic ancestral call is for preserving humanity and the Planet, caring for each other, that the just and honest should lead, those who carry with them compassion and wisdom.
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