Opinion Sur
Socioeconomic transformation is a process that involves a diversity of forces that encourage changes and others that resist them. As every social dynamics, it always responds to singular trajectories with progresses and setbacks. That is why its sustainability is closely related to a permanent and well-managed deepening effort. Socioeconomic transformation is a process of modification of the prevailing order driven by social, economic and technologic forces; a process that is at the same time conditioned by alterations in its context, such as regional and global crises, geopolitical conflicts or natural catastrophes. If the transformational impulse were lost, a new or reconditioned status quo would become established. However, since the demographic, environmental and technologic dynamics does not stop; new circumstances and correlations of forces will motivate new changes that will generate other transformations. These processes are not linear nor respond to pre-established trajectories but instead they unfold with each situation´s singularities; therefore the specificity of each transformation.
Transformation implies changes in a society´s social, economic, political and cultural structure, which make possible new ways of functioning and a course adjustment in its aim of reaching certain medium and short-term objectives (referential utopia). This is to say, important changes that affect the existing institutions which demand progressively adapting to the times of our democracies. Democracies with people that long for significant improvements in terms of equity, justice, environmental care, social inclusion, peaceful resolution of conflicts and full mobilization of its productive factors. This vector of objectives is merely indicative since every society has the power to choose its own referential utopia which, in addition, adjusts over time even when certain values that are considered fundamental tend to be sustained with higher stability.
The trajectory of a transformation
There will always be forces that drive reforms and forces that resist transformations. Among the forces that look for transformations are population majorities, a heterogeneous universe with a diversity of interests and very different levels of awareness regarding the functioning of contemporary economic systems. Forces that resist transformations are those that hold privileges and dominant positions in the economic and cultural fields; they are joined by those who serve them and help them exercise their power along with segments of the population that are manipulated so they will not become aware of their own interests; this way they remain functional to those who abuse them.
Forces that drive reforms require determination and ability to carry out the transformation; they need to take into account the existing correlation of forces and actions to influence it in favor of the transformation. This demands choosing sequences and priorities because it is extremely complex to face all desired transformations at the same time. At the beginning it will be necessary to focus on those that will facilitate building up forces, wills that will widen and strengthen the support base of the transformation as to, with a more favorable correlation of forces, advance and deepen the changes.
It is necessary to assume that a sustainable transformational process needs to align interests of multiple actors. It is not beneficial to divide society´s spectrum between ¨good guys¨ and ¨bad guys¨, ¨us¨ and ¨them¨ since there are actors who have differentiated interests but objectively not antagonistic in terms of the transformations. It is true that there will be a hard core of resistance formed by those who have privileges and those who serve them; it will be difficult to align interests with them. However, other actors that would be favored by the transformation could be inclined to resist it not only due to the manipulative action of public opinion that the hegemonic sectors constantly exercise, but also if unskillfulness, negligence, shortsightedness or meanness prevails within the leadership or activists that drive the transformation.
The aim of every force that resists changes is to reproduce the established order and to do so it deploys its power and influence to block the way for fundamental transformations. They seek to prevent the adoption of measures required to dismantle the mechanisms used to preserve the status quo. Sometimes those that resist changes accept minor concessions as long as it ensures the preservation of their main interests (¨changing something so that nothing substantial will change¨). They tend to shield themselves in strategic institutional nodes such as certain sectors of the political system, the media, the Judiciary, the educational system and ideological think-tanks they control. In other times armed forces were used as the main battering arm against transformation but, with the strengthening of democracy, the concentrated sectors resort to other intervention modalities: they take advantage of influential positions to discredit, paralyze or destabilize the transformational attempts.
There are ¨ultra radical¨ sectors, to name them somehow, whose actions can also be functional to the established order. Their proposals and perspectives seek to radicalize the changes and, to some extent, they can add value to the ideological debate. The problem is when they try to impose them through forceful measures that, whether with or without intention, become destabilizing factors of the ongoing transformational process. Few are the times they manage to prevail but their actions can eventually help those who defend the status quo and their privileges.
Sustainability and deepening of the transformation
Sustainability and deepening are aspects of the transformational process that are closely related. Sustainability implies attracting forces in favor of the transformation and this can be achieved by making the population´s economic and cultural rights prevail over the interests of privilege thus reverting the complicity or negligence of the traditional public action. This demands a serious and permanent effort of understanding, awareness and mobilization of the population in support of the transformation of institutional nodes geared to reproduce the established order instead of ensuring and extending common wellbeing.
Deepening the transformational process implies staying on track far beyond the first changes as to ensure that the new course and way of functioning cannot be reverted. The process of dismantling structures created to sustain the existing order demands a constant and progressively more effective effort that cannot be discontinued. Abating open or concealed privileges requires establishing an entire new spectrum of public policies regarding fiscal solvency, public expenditure, monetary and external balance´s stability, promotion of responsible investments, fair credit allocation, environmental care, encouraging the emergence of people-based new economic actors, something that is not always considered.
This last issue has been one of the main concerns addressed in numerous articles by Opinion Sur. It faces a critical challenge as complementing the support received by individual small and micro-scale ventures with medium-scale new organizations that combine popular sectors with managerial knowledge of excellence (not the residual or discarded one they usually have access to). These ventures we call inclusive in fact adopt a wide variety of organizational modalities, all legitimate as long as they, ultimately, manage to overcome scale limitations, can integrate promising value chains and manage to elevate the threshold of effectiveness regarding management and negotiation with the rest of the economic actors. These statements can be materialized by establishing a comprehensive support system for inclusive ventures that will include (i) backing a variety of promoters, (ii) creating specialized developers for these type of ventures, (iii) establishing trust funds that will provide seed capital and capital for further expansion and (iv) facilitating access to credit and trade channels.
This reference provides a glimpse of the unfinished work that would imply stopping or slowing down the transformational process without deepening it until the concrete reality of people would have been reached. The offered example refers to the area of fledging productive actions because it is a matter we have dedicated particular attention to but, of course, there have been many other transformational initiatives that have been fueled in areas of culture, social and political organization, environmental care, the media, the judiciary, the financial system, among others. All those initiatives, one way or another, challenge a march that is loaded with alienation and injustices and lead to reflect upon the values that need to be respected, the motivations that inspire us and the purposes we pursue. In this way they are part of that valuable and permanent search, individual and collective, of existential meaning.
