The narrow gorge between neoliberalism and autocracies/dictatorships

There is a narrow gorge between neoliberal and dictatorial autocracies hegemonies in advancing towards an economic, social, and environmental order that serves humanity and environmental protection, even narrower when hegemonies are overlapped.

Dominators do not relinquish their privileges graciously but rather they are ready to stop or castrate any transforming attempt. As they cannot openly defend their interests, they conceal the mechanisms they use to loot what is produced by societies. They have established a concentrating machinery that greatly and nonstop increases inequalities and mercilessly punishes two thirds of the world population.

It is not easy to confront such huge power but it can be tackled by building another power sustained on an enlightened firm support of middle and popular sectors. This implies forming powerful social coalitions capable of choosing and sustaining over time governments committed with the general wellbeing and environmental protection. It is an effort that includes popular clarification, social organization, outlining of a country project to guide actions, designing a trajectory in accordance with circumstances of each country and moment, and the formation and start-up of a calibrated mechanism for management and implementation control.

By invoking the formation of wide social coalitions, we need to acknowledge that, given the diversity of participant sectors, there will always be tensions regarding interests, perspectives, and personalities. Aligning such diversity is one of the greatest challenges to tackle. Differences within middle and popular sectors need to be attended both during an electoral phase as well as in the crucial instance of governing. It will be necessary to overcome internal and external resistances and not fall prey to traps or induced divisionism promoted by dominators to deviate the main focus that is to dismantle the subduing mechanisms.

Advancing while aligning interests demands not leaving segments of the coalition out of the country project. It will be necessary to explain, every step of the way, the basis of the policies used to advance through the narrow gorges, something that every sector of the coalition can understand as long as they are not the ones bearing the largest costs of decisions. To prevent such bias from prevailing, it will be necessary to compensate the sectors affected by the ongoing development, in particular vulnerable sectors, which are always subjected to sufferings and punishments. These sectors have the right to distrust promises of better days that never come; instead, they require urgent productive and assistance supports. Those who can assume the own burdens of a transforming process are those that concentrate the wealth of the country. In this social distribution of charges, there is no space for opposing levies on wealth and opulent incomes by arguing that in this way investment would be disincentivized. In reality, the contrary happens, history shows once and again that investment comes when a social and economically vigorous country growths while distributing equitably the burdens and results.  

Therefore, the need, once more, for clarification starting by making explicit that development is far from being a unique and inexorable process as dominators try to impose. There is a vast diversity of development modalities, some more inclusive and equitable than others. They all have technological options regarding how to implement initiatives but, beware, it is not technology on its own what determines priorities and sequences but rather the convergence of political decisions. That is, defining what to do, when, where, in which order, how burdens and results are distributed and even which technological options are chosen, as each technological modality differs in social, economic, and environmental impacts. It is said that these fundamental decisions are political in the sense that those who take them are the ones that have decisional power. If such decisional power is exercised by a small group that concentrates local and national wealth, the result would be that it will still prevail the subduing dynamic of middle and popular sectors.

It is not lack of sagacity on the side of dominators for preserving their privileges. They know how to operate with advances and setbacks, grating minor changes to sustain their essential interests. In front of transforming charges, they relinquish degrees of State control but only to entrenched themselves in strategic nodes of the economy, the media, the judiciary that they fight for preserving. If those spaces are not dismantled, sooner or later the domination will be fully restored. With their resources, those that dominate coopt political and social leaders, judges, prosecutors, regulators and public policy makers. They change names, arguments, strategies without altering their main objective, that is, to continue concentrating wealth and decisional power while debilitating the social capacity of resistance to the domination.

In this way, dominators secure their capacity of making profit even through changes in the context. They achieved that by imposing neoliberal governments and continued profiting during the pandemic. In the new bellicose post-pandemic context, they keep on doing it through reinforcing the appearance of inflationary processes. Inflation allows them to squeeze more and more middle and popular sectors with mechanisms such as, (i) straggling of the incomes of wide majorities in relation to prices imposed by concentrated groups (expropriation of middle and popular sectors’ resources that lose purchasing capacity) and (ii) imposing increases in interest rates benefiting the owners of financial capital.

It should not be disguised how many times we have used the verb impose and the qualifier merciless because that is what happens when decisional power is part of the tremendous, outrageous, and inadmissible concentrating process of wealth. By combining concentration of wealth and decisional power in few hands a global and national course is consolidated, one that destroys societies and the environment, a suicidal destiny for humanity which needs to be transformed.

Strategic spaces to advance towards transformation

We should decide whether we resign ourselves to the concentrating advance or, on the contrary, we try other courses and ways of functioning. If we adhere with developing new options, how can we not lose ourselves in the unknown while passing through the aforementioned narrow gorges! That is what we will refer to in the following lines.

A fundamental space is that of “Power,” a power capable of resisting domination and at the same time generating the new. Such power is played on and needs to be established at the global, national, and local levels. The power of exercising decisional sovereignty with coalitions from countries in changing global geopolitics, with political coalitions from middle and popular sectors within each country and, at the local level, with clarified coalitions from social and territorial movements. In every level aligning interests to have the ability to dismantling destructive hegemonies.

Another critical space that crosses over all dimensions is joining firmly in the battle with respect and care for the environment our Mother Earth celebrated since ancestral peoples. The Planet already reacts before the permanent attacks in a process that does not anticipates an easy return. The absolute priority for the entire humanity is reverting what greed and irresponsibility have been generating.

There is a critical subduing space that drains resources and sterilizes the capacity of entire nations of using their potentialities. It is the huge social and sovereign over indebtedness imposed by international financial groups with local complicities. Those are overburdening debts impossible to repay, what demands reconversions every time more leonine. They result in a permanent drainage of resources, a merciless expropriation of the domestic savings. Many of those debts have illegal origins or, at least, illegitimate thus the solutions go beyond what is strictly financial, they demand political solutions that annul large part of such appropriation. It is the most effective way for solving the Gordian knot that asphyxiates countries so that a few opulent fellows continue profiting excessively.

In such direction, it is indispensable to restore the firm regulation of speculative capital flows by dismantling the financial primacy that only serves for appropriating surpluses generated by the entire society. We should close the criminal circuits of large part of the financial systems that facilitate tax evasion and laundering of ill-gotten assets, another huge drainage of resources that could be devoted to cancelling the social debt and financing productive support for development.

As part of the critical effort in dismantling concentration and redistributing wealth and incomes, we should have to promote markets that are not oligopolistic, that is, where few enterprises have concentrated the power of determining prices and what, how, when and how much is produced. That is, preventing leonine prices and commercial conditions to extract resources from small providers and consumers (decapitalize them) for their own profit. The purpose is to support a large diversity of small and medium-size producers that operate close to the markets they serve.

We mentioned that dominators aim at preserving their control indefinitely of hegemonic media and critical sectors of the judiciary to manipulate public opinion and secure impunity for themselves in their criminal acts. Dismantling such trenches is of strategic importance and should be addressed with utmost urgency.

We present a special reference to the so-called popular economy that has been the forced refuge for millions of unprotected families in the fight for survival. They have been treated in the worst of ways, being left abandoned or receiving handouts and very precarious support programs. This large populational universe demands the rights that have been neglected to them and the facilities for their full integration into the national and local functioning. They do not need residual assistance, but rather one of excellence, both for ethical reasons of justice and equity as well as because in the popular economy nests a great capacity for producing goods and services, creating culture and developing knowledge, contributing for the better functioning of the country, social understanding, and civilian security. Crumbs are not useful as they just reproduce misery and all types of scarcities. Here, large part of that national future is at stake. Humbly, we have been proposing powerful instruments for assisting popular economy. On the one side, equipping the own organizations of the popular economy with a qualified team capable of identifying and establishing in their locality productive and cultural ventures of medium size and associative base. Those so-called “ventures’ developers” allow for inserting popular economy initiatives into promising value chains. To complement them, we propose the creation of trusts specialized in popular economy funded with a diversity of private and public capitals, including foundations, universities, and development organizations. These powerful mechanisms, or others similar, are indispensable for prioritizing at the highest level the support for huge populational segments that are today cornered up into poverty and oblivion.

For now, some remarks for prioritizing challenges when crossing through harsh conditions (gorges) in search for new courses and better ways of functioning. It is not easy to tackle those challenges, it never was. However, there was no lack of courageous people to lead and militate, generation after generation, the fights for liberating from submissions and give way to new realities.

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