Opinion Sur
The domination of powerful minorities over large majorities seeks to appropriate wealth that does not belong to them and exercise to the maximum possible the ability to make major decisions. What features does this logic of domination present?
This process of domination generates a disastrous dynamic concentrating wealth and decisions at the expense of huge segments of the population. A cascade of appropriations is established with a global peak that is projected at the national and local levels. Cycle after cycle the opulence of the few and the misery of the many grow.
Those who dominate impose a biased understanding of what happens by manipulating public opinion and repress those who resist oppression. They rely on a logic of domination developed around an invented reality. They adopt an ideological cover that serves to favor their interests that they mask because they cannot be defended openly.
The ideological coverage is sustained in a theoretical construction that, like any theory, includes certain rigorously formulated hypotheses (although disconnected from facts that make reality), also choose certain variables that they define as the most relevant and identify the relationships that link them to extract consequences from these interactions. Based on this theoretical framework, they propose policies and measures to address real problems that they fail to solve. What they do achieve is to preserve the interests and privileges of dominant groups.
An extensive bibliography of articles and books seeks to give credibility to these theories without explaining that their usefulness is closely conditioned by the nature of their hypotheses and by the type of variables they include in their analysis and, most seriously, by the number of other significant variables that they leave out of their analytical framework. An example helps to understand this point.
Dominators explain the existence of high inflation by concentrating on a major factor, monetary issuance. Monetary issue as a generator of inflation emerges from their analytical framework and, for them, is associated with fiscal accounts overflowing with serious fiscal deficits. And continuing with their limited and biased analytical framework, they preach that inflation is reduced by cutting social and productive investment items that “bulge” the State budget. It is the typical solution of social adjustment without touching the privileges of those who concentrate wealth. Other analytical frameworks point out several inconsistencies to this orthodox perspective.
For now, a fiscal deficit can be solved without affecting social investment but by increasing the negligible tax contribution of the groups that concentrate wealth. This can be achieved with a higher tax on large fortunes and by firmly attacking tax elusion and evasion that these groups practice, resulting in a huge and constant flight of ill-gotten capital abroad. It constitutes an immense drain of resources that weakens the national economy. Indeed, adopting this perspective implies confronting the powerful to submit to social equity regulations.
In addition, to make this transformative perspective sustainable, other important decisions must be made. Among others, establishing progressive tax structures based on the wealth of each taxpayer, eliminating unjustifiable subsidies in favor of concentrated groups, democratizing the media and the judicial system currently used to manipulate public opinion and ensuring impunity for appropriators.
These measures arise from using another analytical framework very different from the orthodox, though both perspectives refer to the same reality. The absence of significant variables in orthodox analysis detracts from its credibility because, in doing so, its main purpose is evidenced, which is to protect those who dominate. The heterodox perspective is much closer to what happens in reality and, although it addresses inequalities and privileges, it leaves a stretch open without due depth to change the power it imposes and obliges. An always relational power, of some sectors against others.
Finally, beyond this devastating example of the ineffectiveness and uselessness of orthodox perspectives, what matters is to unravel the logic of domination. Those who dominate have appropriated founding nodes of the democratic process, oligopolistic corporations, hegemonic media and key sectors of the judiciary and politics. It is time to dismantle the economic, informative, and interpretive lock, as do specialists in political science and economy, a marriage with tremendous clarifying potential. At the base of a change of course, we need to erect a broad and sustainable political coalition with leaderships far from pettiness, who know how to listen, add wills, with the ability to align the diversity of interests that nest in middle and popular sectors.
The challenge is no less when it comes to unlocking social energy to remove a process that concentrates wealth and decisions that represses but also imposes values and attitudes to sustain itself.
If you liked this text, you can subscribe by filling out the form that appears on this page to receive once a month a brief summary of the English Edition of Opinion Sur
