“The iron cage” of Capital will produce ” a polar, icy, dark and arduous night”?

30/12/2021 Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

We are still in 2021, a year that did not end because Covid-19 cancelled the counting of time by continuing its lethal work. 2022 could not, for now, be inaugurated. The fact is that the virus has brought all powers, especially the militaristic ones, to their knees, as their arsenal of death has become totally ineffective.

However, the genius of capitalism, regarding the pandemic, has caused the transnationalized capitalist class to restructure itself through the Great Reset, expanding the new digital economy through the integration of the giants: Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google, Zoom, and others with the military-industrial-security complex.

Such an event represents the formation of an immense power, the like of which has never been seen before. Let us note that this is an economic power of a capitalist nature, and that it therefore realizes its essential purpose, that of maximizing profits in an unlimited way, exploiting, without consideration, human beings and nature. Accumulation is not a means to a good life but an end in itself, that is to say, accumulation for accumulation’s sake, which is irrational.

The consequence of this radicalization of capitalism confirms what a sociologist from the University of California at Santa Barbara, William I. Robinson, in a recent article, has well observed (ALAI 20/12/2021): “As the world shakes off the pandemic, there will be more inequality, conflict, militarism, and authoritarianism, and as social upheaval and civil strife increase, the dominant groups will seek to expand the global police state to contain the mass discontent from below”. In effect, artificial intelligence with its billions upon billions of algorithms will be used to control each person and the entire society. Where will this brutal power take humanity?

Knowing the inexorable logic of the capitalist system, Max Weber, one of those who best analyzed it critically, shortly before his death, asserted: “What awaits us is not the blooming of autumn, but a polar, icy, dark and arduous night (Le Savant et le Politique, Paris 1990, p. 194). He coined a strong expression that strikes at the heart of capitalism: it is an “iron cage” (Stahlartes Gehäuse) that cannot be broken and, therefore, can lead us to a great catastrophe (cf. the pertinent analysis of M. Löwy, La jaula de hierro: Max Weber y el marxismo weberiana, México 2017). This opinion is shared by great names such as Thomas Man, Oswald Spengler, Ferdinand Tönnies, Eric Hobsbown, among others.

Various world-society models are being discussed for the post-pandemic. The most important ones, besides the Great Reset of the billionaires, are: green capitalism, ecosocialism, the Andean bien vivir and convivir, biocivilization, of various groups and Pope Francis, among others. It is not up to me here to detail such projects, which I have done in the book Cvid-19:A Mãe Terra contra-ataca a Humanidade (Vozes 2020). I would only say: either we change the paradigm of production, consumption, coexistence, and especially the relationship with nature, with respect and care, feeling part of it and not over it as owners and lords, or else Max Weber’s prognosis will come true: we may from 2030 to at most 2050, experience an ecological-social Armageddon extremely harmful to life and to the Earth.

In this sense, my feeling of the world tells me that the one who will destroy the order of capital, with its economy, politics, and culture, would not be any mill or school of critical thinking. It would be the Earth itself, a limited planet that can no longer support a project of unlimited growth. The visible climate change, object of discussion and decision making (practically none) of the last UN COPs, the increasing depletion of natural goods and services, fundamental for life (The Earth Overshoot) and the threat of breaking the main nine bounderies of development that cannot be broken at the price of the collapse of civilization, are some indicators of an imminent tragedy.

A significant number of climate experts say that we are too late. With the already accumulated greenhouse gases we will not be able to contain the catastrophe, only, with science and technology, to lessen its disastrous effects. But the great irreversible crisis will come. That is why they have become skeptics and even techno-fatalists.

Are we resigned pessimists or, in Nietzche’s sense, supporters of “heroic resignation”? I think, as a pre-Socratic said: we should expect the unexpected, because if we don’t expect it, when it comes, we will not perceive it. The unexpected may occur, within the quantum perspective assumed by the new cosmoloy: the current suffering due to the systemic crisis will not be in vain; it is accumulating benign energies that, upon reaching a certain level of complexity and accumulation, will make a leap to another, higher order with a new horizon of hope for life and for the living planet, Gaia, Mother Earth. Paulo Freire coined the expression to hope: not to keep hoping that one day the situation will improve, but to create the conditions for hope not to be empty, but to make it effective through our efforts.

I believe that this leap, with our participation, specily the victims of the exploitetion of the capitalism, can occur and would be within the possibilities of the history of the universe and the Earth: from the current destructive chaos, we can move on to a generative chaos of a new way of being and inhabiting planet Earth.

This is what I believe and hope for, reinforced by the word of Revelation that states: “God created all things out of love because He is the passionate lover of life” (Wisdom 11,26). We will still live under the benevolent light of the sun.

Leonardo Boff, ecotheologist, philosopher, and writer, has written The painful birth of Mother Earth: a society of fraternity without borders and of social friendship, Vozes 2021; Inhabiting the Earth: what is the way to universal fraternity? Vozes 2121.

Steps to defeat fascism and the politics of hate

20/12/2021 Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

his article is dedicated to those who fight for wounded democracy and to rescue the devastated nation.

Political forces, enemies of life, have allied themselves with the Coronavirus and are favoring the decimation of more than 600 thousand lives. Their goal is to take us back to pre-modern times, dismantling our culture and science, suppressing labor and social security rights, spreading lies, cowardly hatred for the poor, the indigenous, the quilombolas, the afro-descendants, the homo-affective, and the LGBTI.

Ideologically, these forces are ultraconservative and clearly fascist. They have risen to the highest power in the Republic. The main representative of these forces wants, by all means, even against the law, to be reelected. As a parliamentarian he magnified torturers and defended dictatorships. As head of state he was lenient with the large-scale burning of the Amazon forest, with the loggers, and with the intrusion of mining and gold mining, including on indigenous lands. He committed crimes against humanity by his denialism regarding the Covid-19 immunizers and showed himself insensitive and without any empathy to the suffering of thousands of bereaved families and millions of unemployed and hungry people.

Unfortunately, we have seen the fragility, even the omission, of our official or legal institutions, and the low intensity of our democracy, which, measured by social justice and respect for rights, seems more like a huge official farce. Nothing or little has been done to remove this sinister, authoritarian, fascist figure. They are not allowed to watch, unmoved, the population, cultural, political, and spiritual crumbling of our country.

In the face of this historic tragedy, we need, through elections, to curb the death drive, present in the executive power and its assistants. It is necessary to inflict a resounding electoral defeat on this person who has shown himself to be insane, unworthy, malevolent, and incapable of governing the Brazilian people. He deserves to be legally removed from the political scene and to pay for his crimes, so that we can finally live with a minimum of fair and sustainable development, with social peace, with open joy and with collective happiness.

To achieve this political and ethical diligence, within the limits of the Constitution and the democratic order of law, it is important, in my opinion, to take the following steps:

First, ensure, if possible, already in the first round, the victory for president, of someone with charisma, with the confidence of the great majorities, and with the capacity to pull us out of the dark well into which we have been thrown. He has shown before that he is capable of achieving this redemption. He does not need to reveal his name, because he has already emerged, victorious, in the electoral polls.

Second, it is not enough to elect a president with such characteristics. It is fundamental to guarantee him a numerous parliamentary base, so that the presidential coalition does not compromise the ideals and purposes, present in the origins and redeemable, such as the option for social policies that serve the great impoverished and oppressed majorities, with transparency, with the ethics of solidarity starting with the most vulnerable, and with an active and proud sovereignty. Make alliances with parties in tune with social and popular purposes. The alliances will be made with parties with similar purposes and public policies. It is equally important to guarantee the election of governors and, in due course, of mayors and councilors who, in the regions and the base, support the central government with a sense of social justice and care for the life of the people and of nature.

Third, and most important, to reinforce and, where necessary, to resume grassroots work, organizing popular committees of all kinds, so that they can participate and articulate with the already existing organizations, such as in health, education, gender equality, and others, creating a citizen conscience. It is not enough to guarantee the insertion in the current perverse and anti-popular system, but to create a changing conscience, pointing to another type of society with participative, social, and ecological democracy.

This grassroots work is imperative if we want to create the conditions for a transformation that comes from below and create progressive and libertarian movements that translate dreams into viable, everyday practices. It is at this level, on the first floor, that the new begins to be rehearsed and the necessary energy to continue the re-foundation of a new Brazil is nourished, against the prolongation of historical dependency, against the “vira-latismo”, present in the elites of backwardness, and against the oligopoly of the media, the ideological arm of the dominant class, heir to the Casa Grande.

We are convinced that this suffered destructive chaos will pass and will be transformed into a promising generative chaos of a new order, higher, more just, fraternal and caring for all life: in short, of a Brazil in which we will have joy in living and coexisting with justice, where it will be easier to have the love and joviality that characterize the best of us.

Leonardo Boff is an ecotheologist, philosopher, and writer, and has written: Brazil: conclude the refoundation or prolong the dependence, Vozes 2018.

The rights of nature and the Earth

13/12/2021 Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

Leonardo Boff

With the intrusion of Cvid-19 and the increase of extreme events, nature and the Earth have entered the radar of human concerns. The fact is that we find ourselves within the sixth mass extinction, aggravated by the anthropocene and necrocene of the last decades. Therefore, another type of relationship with nature and with the Earth, our Common Home, is required to maintain its biocapacity.

This will only happen if we redo the natural contract with the Earth and if we consider that all living beings, carriers of the same basic genetic code (the same 20 amino acids and 4 phosphate bases), form the great community of life as understood in the Earth Charter. The Earth Charter states categorically that all of them have intrinsic value, regardless of the use that we make of them, and therefore deserve respect and are subjects of dignity and rights. Repeatedly in his ecological encyclical Laudato Si’ Pope Francis emphasizes that “every creature has a value and a meaning of its own” (n.76).

Every contract is made on the basis of reciprocity, exchange, and recognition of the rights of each party. From the Earth we receive everything: life and the means to live. In return we have a duty of gratitude, of retribution and of care. But we, long ago, broke this natural contract. We have subjected Mother Earth to a veritable war, in our eagerness to snatch from her, without any further consideration, all that we found useful for our use and enjoyment.

If we do not reestablish this bond of lasting mutuality, she may eventually no longer want us on her earthly face. This is why sustainability here is essential, as it is the basis of a real redo of the natural contract.

The President of Bolivia, the indigenous Aymara Evo Morales Ayma in his speech at the UN on April 22, 2009, when discussing whether April 22 would continue to be Earth Day or whether it should be Mother Earth Day he listed some of these rights of Pacha Mama:

“Right to life and to exist;

Right to be respected;

Right to regeneration of her bio-capacity and continuation of her life cycles and processes free from human alteration;

Right to maintain its identity and integrity as differentiated, self-regulated and interrelated beings;

Right to water as a source of life

Right to clean air

Right to integral health;

Right to be free from contamination, pollution, and toxic or radioactive waste;

Right not to be genetically altered and modified in its structure, thus threatening its vital and healthy integrity or functioning;

Right to full and prompt restoration after violations of the rights recognized in this Declaration and caused by human activities.”

His proposal was unanimously welcomed by the Assembly of Peoples. On April 19-23, 2009, the Peoples’ Summit on Climate Change and Mother Earth’s Rights was held in Cochabamba, convened by Evo Morales. From there came the Charter of the Rights of Mother Earth with the items affirmed by him in the UN in which I myself was present with the charge of theoretically founding these rights in the Assembly.

This vision makes it possible to renew the natural contract with the Earth that, articulated with the social contract among citizens, will end up reinforcing the planetary sustainability and guaranteeing the rights of nature and the Earth.

Today we know, through the new cosmology, that all beings possess not only mass and energy. They are also carriers of information that results from the permanent interactions among themselves and that grows until it erupts as self-consciousness.

This fact implies levels of subjectivity and history. Here lies the scientific basis that justifies the extension of legal personality to the living Earth.

Since the 1970s as a hypothesis, and since 2002 as scientific theory, the view that the Earth is a living Super Entity that behaves systemically, articulating the biogeochemical factors in such a way that it always remains alive and a producer of life, has been accepted.

By claiming to be a living Super Entity, it is entitled to the dignity and respect that all life deserves. The clear consciousness that everything that exists deserves to exist and everything that lives deserves to live, grows more and more. And it is up to us to welcome its existence, defend it, and guarantee it the conditions to continue evolving.

Furthermore, no one doubts that the human being is the subject of inalienable rights and that he or she enjoys subjectivity and history. Now, this human being, as many cosmologists and anthropologists maintain, is the Earth itself, which at an advanced moment of its complexity began to feel, think, love and care. These human rights, because we are Earth, must also be attributed to the Earth.

also be attributed to the Earth. The moderns called her Gaia, the ancients Great Mother, and the Andeans Pacha Mama.

This subjectivity has history, that is, it is inside the immense cosmogenic process making the Earth alive through human beings see itself, contemplate the universe, and represent the most advanced stage of the cosmos so far known.

Michel Serres, a French philosopher of sciences, said with propriety: “The Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789, of the French revolution, had the merit of saying ‘all men have rights’ but the defect of thinking ‘only men have rights.

It took a lot of struggle to fully recognize the rights of women, indigenous people, black people, just as it is now taking a lot of effort to recognize the rights of nature and of Mother Earth, made up of all ecosystems.

Because of their mutual intertwining, Earth and Humanity have the same destiny. It is up to us, its conscious portion and its caretakers, to make this common destiny succeed on the condition that we respect the dignity and the rights of Mother Earth.

Leonardo Boff, wrote: Dignity of the Earth: ecology, cry of the Earth-cry of the poor Vozes 1999/2015/ Orbis Books 2000/2010.

The future depends on us now

02/12/2021 Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

The COP26 in Glasgow disappointed in the central point: in the consensus about the mitigation of global warming because it still embraced the use of coal, although it is gradually being abolished as an energy source. But it had merit, never seen in the previous sessions of the 25 COPs. This time, without exception, the anthropogenic existence of climate change was admitted. The extreme events, the methane intrusion due to the melting of the permafrost and the polar ice caps, 20 times more harmful than CO2, the increasing erosion of biodiversity, the range of viruses such as Covid-19, the Earth Overshoot that frightens us every year, because the current consumption demands more than one and a half Earths (1, 75), which impedes its biocapacity, and the crossing of some of the 9 Planetary Bounderies that may jeopardize our civilizational experience, have bent the deniers who would rather defend their fortunes and capital than the life of the planet and our common future.

Such events have given rise to apocalyptic scenarios and a veritable metaphysical terror, in the sense that we fear for our survival on this planet. Many are the warnings of this eventuality on the part of renowned scientists and especially Pope Francis, who in his last encyclical, Fratelli tutti (2020), stated categorically: “we are in the same boat; either we all save ourselves or no one is saved” (n.34).

There is a heated worldwide dispute about how history will follow the post-pandemic. Several models are on the agenda. I think that the most radical ones should be discarded, because they are too cruel and anti-life, like the Great Reset. It is a despotic capitalism, suggested by the parasitic Prince Charles and taken up by the 0.1% of the world’s billionaires.

Also the tempting “Green Capitalism” that aims to cover the whole planet in green but never poses the question of social inequality that penalizes and claims millions of human lives. Acceptable and, in a way, promising are the eco-socialism and the Andean bien vivir y convivir. Both would be viable under the assumption of a global and pluralistic governance, willing to find global solutions to global problems such as pandemic and a minimum planetary order that would include everyone in the one Common House, also nature.

I believe that Pope Francis in Fratelli tutti presented some of the fundamental values from which we could project a paradigm that guarantees the future of the species and our civilization: a biocivilization centered on a fraternity without borders and a universal social friendship.

The first is to overcome the paradigm that has been in force for centuries, that of the human being as dominus (master and lord) who does not feel part of nature but dominates it with the instrument of technoscience. The second, to assume an alternative to dominus that would be frater: the human being, man and woman, brothers and sisters of each other and of all beings in nature because we all have a common origin, the humus of the Earth, because we are carriers of the same basic genetic code and because we feel part of nature. The third, activate the “principle of hope,” deeper than the virtue of hope, that inner impulse that knows no time or space and that is always present in the human being, leading him to indignation against social wrongs and the courage to transform them by projecting new worlds, viable utopias, and self-improvement.

The values will not be taken from the great narratives that have already been tried out, that of the Enlightenment, capitalism and socialism that resulted in the current systemic crisis, therefore, that did not achieve their purposes. It will drink from its own well, in the essential nature of the human being.

There he discovers that we are essentially beings of unlimited relationship, whose best expression resides in loving-kindness; beings of solidarity, which in the early days of hominization allowed us to make the leap from animality to humanity; beings of cooperation, for only together can we build our habitat, which takes place in coexistence, in society and in civilizations, in a word, in the general good-common; beings of care, for this defines human nature, of all living beings, and which also emerges as a cosmological constant: everything exists because all the factors subtly combined to erupt life, and as a sub-chapter of life, human life and the universe itself that without the due care of all the elements, would not allow us to be here writing about these things; spiritual beings, able to ask the most radical questions about why our existence, absolutely free, what is our place in the set of beings, to what destiny we are called and by the fact that we intuit that behind everything that exists and lives. Underneath lies a powerful and loving Energy (the Quantum Vacuum, the Energy of the background of the universe, or the Abyss that generates everything that exists?) with it we can establisch a relationshiep wit veneration and a silent reverence.

From these values, another possible and now necessary world can be forged. Logically, the passage from one paradigm to another will not happen overnight, and not without great difficulties, opposition, and crises. But we have no other alternative. As Eric Hobsbawm wrote in his “The Age of Extremes” (1995) on its last page: “We do not know where we are going. If humanity is to have a meaningful future, it cannot be by prolonging the past and the present. If we try to build the third millennium on this basis we will fail, and the price of failure, that is, the alternative to changing society, is darkness.

This is especially true for those who wish to revert to the old normality, which is perverse to the life of nature and to human life. We have to change, or else, as UN Secretary Antonio Guterrez said, when opening the work of COP26: “If we do not act now, we will be digging our own grave.

The future is today, as the 100,000 people at the parallel COP26 in Glasgow proclaimed. If we do not start guiding ourselves by the values mentioned above right now, we will be paving the way for an ecological-social disaster of unprecedented proportions. But I believe and hope, I hope and believe that the life drive, stronger than the death drive, will lead us to the necessary changes. We will live and still shine.

Leonardo Boff, philosopher and ecotheologist wrote: The painful birth of Mother Earth: a society of fraternity without borders and of social friendship,Vozes 2020.