Opinion Sur
It is essential to transform the unsustainable contemporary dynamic by orienting the socio-economic order towards caring for humanity and the planet. It is time to conceive new directions and erect democratic powers capable of leading trajectories.
A socio-economic order that concentrates wealth and decision-making power in 1% of the world’s population is unsustainable. Huge majorities are punished with poor or indigent living standards while the planet is uncontrollably attacked. It is critical to promote transitions towards a better socioeconomic order by erecting a social power capable of facing changes and leading new trajectories.
Founding measures of new courses
A transformative transition needs to impose fundamental measures for a better course and way of functioning. Small adjustments are not enough. It is essential to dismantle the concentrating process and the forces that sustain and reproduce it.
This implies affecting the hard core of concentrated wealth. A first measure may be to establish a global tax on the wealth and income of billionaires, between 3 and 5% per year. These resources would make it possible to capitalize on global and national funds to finance environmental care, social emergency, transformation of the popular economy, public health and education, science and technology to support new courses.
It will also be necessary to reorient the actions of the large investment funds and the largest international corporations. This will require changes in the ownership and management structure, starting with establishing “public gold shares” in each Board of Directors with the mandate to ensure the new guiding criteria for their actions.
These two changes are the foundations of a new socio-economic order. There will be other crucial complementary measures in all areas of collective action.
For the time being, solving the major concentrating crimes. On the one hand, to close the drain of enormous surpluses appropriated, undeclared, and fled by powerful minorities. It means stopping tax evasion and elusion committed by corporations and high-income families that flee ill-gotten resources to tax havens. This criminal action weakens the States by enshrining unjust inequalities and plenty of poor and indigent people.
It is also necessary to dismantle the oligopolistic exploitation of markets where leading enterprises in value chains impose prices and commercial conditions to appropriate values that do not belong to them, but to suppliers, consumers, and the State. There are multiple and diverse ways to avoid these abuses within value chains.
It is essential to transform the tax burden, the allocation of public spending, and order public accounts. The tax structure is highly regressive where those who have the least pay relatively more than those who accumulated fortunes. It is essential to transform the inequitable tax structure. At the same time, it is necessary to redirect public spending so as not to favor those who currently profit from these resources, but to finance critical nodes for national development, including strengthening the popular economy with support systems for the establishment of grassroots enterprises and the implementation of trusts specialized in financing these ventures. Public accounts must be managed effectively and prudently without falling into unsustainable fiscal deficits that can be avoided through contributions from the wealthiest sectors instead of punishing middle- and low-income sectors.
The financial system is a strategic area in refounding the socio-economic order. It needs to banish speculative actions using third-party resources and focus on financing the various industries, agriculture, mining, energy and essential services for fair and sustainable development. The new financial authorities will be responsible for accompanying the new directions and ways of operating with credit, exchange, and regulatory policies.
These fundamental changes of new socioeconomic orders open strategic spaces for transformation in all dimensions of social action, such as the de-monopolization of the media, judicial system reforms to end the impunity of looters and corrupt people, strong reinforcement of public health and education, a full financing of science and technology, replacing abusive centralisms by empowering the entire national territory with equity.
Amalgamating social forces capable of sustaining a better socio-economic order
These and other refoundational measures can only be adopted and sustained if there is a solid democratic support power. Building this power requires amalgamating a fragmented diversity of social forces. These social fragments act with little coordination due to the existence of subaltern antagonisms of identities, and because those who dominate encourage their differences and misgivings to neutralize resistance. Amalgamating middle and popular sectors requires clarification and alignment of their interests.
It is time to recognize what native peoples contributed and the various migratory flows that made up nations, remedying injustices and attacked dignities. Natives were expelled from their territories, losing their natural environment and suffering the devaluation of their traditions and values. The “colonizers” appropriated lands that were not theirs and exploited both native peoples and the migratory waves that were incorporated. Some were assimilated in one or two generations to the rulers, others were resisted and exploited. New nations emerged from hard struggles between diversities that never amalgamated.
This heterogeneous torrent of population needs to be valued, listened to, understood in order to recognize their interests, desires, and needs. Sincere dialogues are required, attending to the diversity of changing singularities that flow in a clamor for equity in reparation.
It is an effort to open hopes without consecrating iniquities or abuses, replacing the privileges of the fateful 1% of billionaires with spaces full of emulation, collaboration, and constructive degrees of collective competences. A nurturing perspective of the capacity for realization of the entire social arc, amalgamating diversities with skill and firmness. That is where the refoundational power is sustained.
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