2019: a new chapter of the dispute for the future

 
For these times of the year there are usually calls for harmony and fraternal coexistence. Putting aside the hypocrisy of those who conceive of "social peace" as a mechanism to shield injustice, there is no doubt that the people at this time honestly wish for a period of greater warmth, closeness and humanity. In the same way that they express with sincerity of heart, auguries of a better year.
2019: a new chapter of the dispute for the future

After the truce, the illusion of the end of the year vanishes, revealing that none of the conflicts has truly disappeared. What ran aground on the shores of the new year is there, waiting for the new tide of events, of a swell that brings with it transformation. Swell in which we are in danger of being dragged, of not being able to reflect, to see more clearly and to position ourselves in front of the main conflicts.

This applies in the same way to those who claim to hold positions of presumed "impartiality", close in many cases to flight or decommitment, cynicism, indifference and, of course, not? also to fear, disappointment, threat, segregation, blackmail or persecution. Still founded, passivity, non-election, have the consequence of becoming an object and not subject of the circumstances to come.

The conflicts

The existing conflicts are polarities, fields of "social magnetism", around which the great human groups will be added in the coming years. The direction that events take will depend on the potential that each polarity accumulates.

The problems are intimately intertwined, forming a structure in which some pieces link with others. However, they can be observed in detail without awarding them priority, linearity or hierarchies.
Equality of opportunity vs. social exclusion

Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that "Everyone has the right to an adequate standard of living that guarantees him, as well as his family, health and well-being, and especially food, clothing, housing, medical assistance and necessary social services; he also has the right to insurance in case of unemployment, illness, disability, widowhood, old age or other cases of loss of his means of subsistence due to circumstances beyond his control. "

70 years after this Declaration was consecrated, the reality is quite different. According to the report "Reward work, not wealth" (Oxfam International, 2018) the richest 1% continues to accumulate more wealth than the rest of humanity. Citing different sources, the same report states that "about 43% of the active young population does not have a job or, if they work, they still live in poverty. More than 500 million young people survive on less than $ 2 a day. "

In Latin America and the Caribbean, in 2017 the richest 10% of the population concentrated 68% of the total wealth, while the poorest 50% had only 3.5% to survive, adds the aforementioned source.
On the other hand, 821 million people suffer from hunger in the world - one in nine - and more than 150 million children suffer from stunting, the UN said in a report released last September in Rome. Far from retreating, hunger has increased in the last three years, returning to the levels of ten years ago.

Faced with this barbarism, political efforts to alleviate inequality and hunger are artfully fought by those who generate the problem - banking and business corporations - in an irrational spiral of economic violence that throws the large groups to suffocation and despair .

The scale of the grievance corresponds to a social genocide that is behind the "inviolability" of private property, that is, of unlimited accumulation. In the face of outrageous size, the articulation of majorities under the banner of social inclusion and the demercantilization of dignified subsistence is historically inevitable, but it must be accelerated.

Self-determination, cooperation, integration vs. unilateralism and nationalism

The possibility of equal relations between nations, many of them newly emancipated from colonialism after the Second World War, was buried by the confrontation of blocks first and by globalization later, overwhelming all possible self-determination. Given this new dependence, the countries of the global South determined to assert their autonomy, amplified their bilateral relations and built diverse multilateral mechanisms. The objective of integrating virtues and weaknesses was to make common force against de facto usurpation. At the same time, actors such as China, India and Russia emerged or resurfaced on the world board, undermining the unique power of the US (and the West) in the international sphere.


The nationalisms that have arisen throughout the world and those governing today in many countries result from a reaction to the unipolar world domination attempt and the transfer of power from the States to the transnational corporations, such as resistance to the factual centralization of economic power contrary to popular needs. . At the same time, the decline of Western power seeks to defend itself from its final decline by breaking the international rules of the game at the moment when it begins to lose the game, trying once again to impose its own interest as the only possible rule.

Faced with the irrationality of the single power, the solidary relationship between peoples and states, cooperation, the self-determination of peoples and their growing integration towards a new paradigm of "universal human nation", the struggle for the deconcentration of the power of transnational corporations they appear as the path to travel.

Wars or Peace

The colonial interest to monopolize resources and markets, to impose unique cultural norms, continues in force. That interest, along with the gigantic arms business, continues to be the promoter of wars. The existing historical rivalries, are not the cause of the war massacres, but are revived and propagated by the powers to divide, face and conquer.

Faced with this destructive frenzy, the banner of peace supposes a proposal and revolutionary conduct, since it constitutes a step of superior conscience essential to face true challenges of popular unity and liberation from subjugation.

Participatory democracy to defeat fascism

The democratic schemes are severely damaged. The people are effectively away from any decision and elected officials often move away from their constituents living in autistic spaces, also taking advantage of the benefits of their privileged position. The exception, those militants or leaders, who on the basis of an ironclad service to the people try to escape from this pandemic, are attacked by the media dominated by capital, judged by non-existent causes and condemned without evidence.

Lawfare, the persecution and political proscription of popular leaders, the McCarthyism of the right-wing governments, are antibodies to the plutocracy of money that rejects any "democratic interference in their internal affairs", that is, in their business.

The characters of the extreme right have the support of capital to suppress revolts and guarantee their protection. But they also attract the adherence of a large part of the common people, blinded by a resentment manipulated by the media but also fed up with a parody of self-referential democracy. In the perception of this broad sector, "really existing" democracy has become sterile, incoherent, deceitful, debased, incapable of putting an end to injustice and solving popular needs.

The future democracy will have to be deep or it can not be reconstituted. The only way to regenerate the democratic spirit, while balancing the enormous antidemocratic counterweight of economic power, will be to give broad participation to the peoples in the decisions. Participatory democracy will be extended, in a learning of errors and successes, to finally give ground to the "Ancien Régime" of a representation co-opted by real power.

Food Sovereignty, Good Living and Agrarian Reform vs. climate catastrophe

Capitalism is synonymous with human and environmental violence. The common resources of the planet are alienated by a minority that takes advantage of positions of force to dominate the rest. The irrationality of waste, the unequal energy use between North and South, the permanent extraction and contamination of soil, air, water basins, agricultural monoculture, real estate speculation. The carbonic exhalation of an exalted world, deforestation, the poisoning of crops, frantic consumption ... is there anything sustainable about it? There is no "sustainable capitalism" or "green technology" that makes it sustainable, since the maximization of profit - the motor energy of capital - does not tolerate ecological limitations. Private revenue does not accept collective reasons.

Therefore, the only real safeguard of the environment that makes life possible on this planet goes through the systemic transformation towards a way of life that places as a central value the distribution of wealth as a finite and common good. A new system that consecrates the right to share, despises unbridled consumption as irrelevant to happiness and prioritizes collective well-being over individual egoism.

Feminism vs patriarchy

The massive mobilization of women demanding the end of a system of patriarchal domination will continue to be one of the central issues on the political agenda of the new year. The conflict will be one of the main axes of intergenerational tension and will become enormously important when discussing habits rooted in different cultures, reaching an unprecedented global dimension.

Women will be a key factor in the re-definition of power relations in the face of the conservative reaction produced by the vortex of changes, the existential uncertainties and the lack of opportunities for subsistence and human development presented by the current system.

Universal citizenship vs. criminalization and discrimination of migrants

There will be no wall, fence or army that manages to contain the desperate migration, if it does not end with wars, hunger, violence produced by misery, local inequality and between regions of the world.

There will be no fair and free migration, if companies insist on attracting precarious labor, in a situation of illegality, to evade responsibilities derived from current labor law. Discrimination will not disappear, while immigrants are blamed for the lack of work, instead of pointing to the productive emptying of usurious and speculative capitalism.

Universal citizenship, the freedom to choose the place of belonging and the equality of rights for all human beings beyond their provenance, will only become reality within the framework of a new system, as already outlined in previous sections.

Sense of community and renewed transformative project vs retrograde advance

Many human beings feel dragged by fast events that do not dominate, leaving behind well-known realities in the family, work, professional and relationship world. We live in an accelerated world that erases from the face of the earth that landscape that we thought would last forever. In a few years, little of the previous remains, except in the memory ... and the history books.

That is one of the vertices that lead to longing for a lost world, to idealize with nostalgia the past, to criticize the "new customs", to demand the return of an irrecoverable reality. It is one of the main factors that motivate retrograde vision.

This vision is fed by the accumulation of present social difficulties already outlined, which press for quick exits. The personal and social anguish is multiplied by the loneliness, the transience of ties of relationship and the rupture of belongings that give shelter in the midst of gales of insecurities and violence. To all this is added the banality of a world that exhausts its options in a consumerist hedonism, in a tiring journey that fatally leads to death.

All this explains why the conservative ecclesiastical options advance, offering an attractive offer in the face of the abandonment and exclusion of an accelerated, empty and violent civilization.

To this counterhistorical correntada one must oppose a strong and non-transigible project of social transformation, which in addition to contemplating physical and biological needs, also contains the emotional and existential ones. A social practice that holds each person in a community fabric.

A project that ponders human beings on all other considerations and that in itself, endows a new meaning to human life. A sense of evolution, of collective growth, that allows the birth of a renewed human species, that gives wings to the old myth of the New Woman and Man.

To this statement we should dedicate our efforts, unite in our struggles, towards that horizon to converge the welcome diversity.

Have good festivities and renew energies for the year that begins, a new chapter in the dispute for the future.

Contrast in poverty vs. wealth