Categoria: Idiomas

A New Society of a Social Ecologial Tsunami?

Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

In my last article I offered the idea, supported by few, that the current crisis of capitalism is systemic and terminal, and not just a cyclical one. In other words: the conditions for the continuation of capitalism have been destroyed, either because it has reached the limit of goods and services that it can offer, because of the devastation of nature and unraveling the social relations, controlled by a market economy where financial capital predominates. The prevailing theory is that we can resolve the crisis, returning to the status quo ante, with minor corrections, thus guaranteeing growth, regaining employment and assuring profits. Consequently, everything would continue, with business as usual.

The injection of thousands of millions by the industrial States saved the banks and avoided collapse of the system, but it did not transform the economic system. Worse yet, the States’ interventions facilitated the triumph of the speculative economy over the real economy. The former is considered the principal factor that unleashed the crisis, as it was run by real thieves, who put their own personal enrichment above the destiny of the peoples, as is seen now in Greece. The logic of maximum enrichment corrupts individuals, destroys social relations and punishes the poor, who are accused of impeding the injection of capital. The bomb remains, with its fuse intact. The problem is that anyone could ignite that fuse. Many analysts ask themselves fearfully: will the world order survive another crisis like the one we had?

French sociologist Alain Touraine maintains in his recent book, After the Crisis, (Después de la crisis, Paidós 2011), that the crisis will either accelerate the formation of a new society or become a tsunami, that can devastate everything in its way, putting our very existence on planet Earth in mortal danger, (p. 49.115). All the more reason to maintain the thesis that we are facing a terminal situation of this type of capital. It is extremely important to develop values and principles that could help create a new way of inhabiting the Earth, of organizing production and distribution goods, not just for us (anthropocentrism must be overcome) but for the whole community of life. This was the objective when elaborating The Earthcharter, urged by Michael Gorbachev who, as the former head of the Soviet Union, well knew the lethal instruments available to destroy down to the very last human life, as he has pointed out in several gatherings.

Approved by UNESCO in 2003, The Earthcharter contains in effect «principles and values for a sustainable way of living, as a common criteria for individuals, organizations, enterprises and governments.» It is urgent to study and to allow it to inspire us, especially now, as we prepare for Rio+20.

No-one can foresee what will come after the crisis. We have only hints. We are still in the phase of diagnosing its underlying causes. Unfortunately, it is mostly only economists are who are analyzing the crisis, and not sociologists, anthropologists, philosophers or cultural scholars. What is becoming clear is the following: there has been a triple separation: financial capital was separated from the real economy; the economy itself separated from society; and society in general, from nature. And this separation has created such a dust storm that we can no longer see the path to follow.

The “indignants” who fill the squares of some European countries and the Arab world, are putting the system in check. It is a bad system for most of humanity. Until now, they were silent victims, but now they shout out loud. They demand not only jobs, above all, they are reclaiming fundamental human rights.They want to be subjects, this is, actors in different kind of society, where the economy is at the service of politics and politics serves the good living, the people themselves, and nature. Wishing is not enough. A world effort is needed, the creation of organs that can make possible a different way of coexisting, and political representation linked to general aspirations, and not to the market interests. We must rebuild social life.

I see many signs of the appearance of an eco-and-bio-centered world society. Its central idea will be the life-system, the Earth-system and humanity. Everything must be based on that. Otherwise, it will be difficult to avoid a potential socio-ecological tsunami.

Is the Crisis of Capitalism Terminal?

Leonardo Boff7 Comentários

I believe the present crisis of capitalism is more than cyclical and structural. It is terminal. Are we seeing the end of the genius of capitalism, of always being able to adapt to any circumstance? I am aware that only few other people maintain this thesis. Two things, however, bring me to this conclusion.

The first is the following: the crisis is terminal because we all, but in particular capitalism, have exceeded the limits of the Earth. We have occupied and depredated, the whole planet, destroying her subtle equilibrium and exhausting her goods and services, to the point that she alone can no longer replenish all that has been removed. Already by mid XIX century, Karl Marx prophetically wrote that this tendency of capital would destroy the twin sources of its wealth and reproduction: nature and labor. That is what is happening now.

Especially in the last century, Nature was stressed as never before, including the 15 great disasters she experienced throughout her four billion year history. The verifiable, extreme, phenomena in every region, and the changes in the climate that tend towards ever increasing global warming, support Marx’s thesis. How can capitalism continue without Nature? It has reached an insurmountable limit.

Capitalism reduces, or eliminates, labor. There are great laborless inventions. A programmed and robotic production apparatus produces more and better, almost without labor. The direct consequence of this is structural unemployment.

Millions of people will never join the labor market, not even as a reserve army. Instead of depending on labor, capital is learning to do without it. Unemployment in Spain approaches 20% of the general population, and 40% of youth. In Portugal, it is 12% of the population, and 30% among the young. This results in a grave social crisis, like that which Greece is undergoing at this very moment. All of society is sacrificed in the name of an economy that is not designed to take care of human needs, but to pay the debts to the banks and the financial system. Marx is right: exploited labor is no longer the source of its wealth. The machine is.

The second reason is linked to the humanitarian crisis that capitalism is creating. Before, it was limited to the peripheral countries. Now it is global, and it has reached the central countries. The economic question cannot be resolved by dismantling society. The victims, connected by new venues of communication, resist, revolt and threaten the present order. Ever more people, especially the young, reject the perverse capitalist political economic logic: the dictatorship of finance that, through the market, subjugates the States to its interests, and the profitability of speculative capital, that circulates from one stock market to another, reaping profits without producing anything at all, except more money for the stockholders.

Capital itself created the poison that could kill it: by demanding that its workers have ever greater technical training, to create accelerated growth and greater competitiveness, it unintentionally nurtured people who think. They are slowly learning the perversity of the system, that all but skins people alive in the name of pure material accumulation, and shows its heartlessness by demanding greater and greater efficiency, to the point of profoundly stressing the workers, pushing them to desperation, and in some cases, even to suicide, as has occurred in several countries, including Brazil.

The streets of several European and Arab countries, the “indignants” who fill the squares of Spain and Greece, are an expression of a rebellion against the current political system, controlled by the markets and the logic of capital. The young Spaniards shout: «it is not a crisis, it is theft.» The thieves are comfortably housed on Wall Street, in the International Monetary Fund, IMF, and in the Central European Bank. In other words, they are the high priests of the exploitative global capital.

As the crisis worsens, the multitudes who can no longer tolerate the consequences of the super exploitation of their lives and of the life of the Earth, will grow; and will revolt against the economic system that is in agony, not because it is old, but because of the strength of the poison and the contradictions it has created, punishing Mother Earth and afflicting the lives of her sons and daughters.

Strauss-Kahn: a metaphor for IMF Practices

Leonardo Boff5 Comentários

One might think that it is a tragedy that the head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, succumbed to his vice, the obsessive search for perverse sex. Running naked after a Black maid in suite 2806 of the Sofitel Hotel in New York City, he grabbed and forced her to have sex. The details were thoroughly described by the New York District Attorney. For the sake of decency, I will not repeat them. It was not a tragedy for him: it was just one more person in this world whom he has victimized. Afterwards, he got dressed, and went directly to the airport. What is funny is that he left his cell phone in the hotel suite, and because of that, the police were able to detain him, after he had already boarded the plane.

The tragedy was not what happened to him, but to the victim, which no-one wants to know. Her name is Nifissatou Diallo, an African, Moslem, from Guinea, a widow and mother of a 15 year old daughter. The police found her hiding behind a cupboard, crying and vomiting, traumatized by the violence suffered at the hands of the hotel guest, whose name she did not even know.

Most of the French media, cynically and openly machista, tried to hide the facts, claiming even possible entrapment of the future socialist candidate for President of the French Republic. The former Minister of Culture and Education, Jacques Lang, from whom we could have expected some esprit de finesse, said contemptuously: «in the end, no one died.» It was not important that a woman was psychologically devastated by Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s brutality. For them, she is just a woman, an African woman. Could it be that in their backward mentality, a woman is good only to be a mere «object of bed and table»?

In fairness, we have to see the facts through the eyes of the victim. Only then can we capture the dimensions of her suffering, and the humiliation of so many other women in the world who have been kidnapped, raped, and sold as sex slaves. Only a society that has lost all sense of dignity, that has been brutalized by the prevalence of a materialist conception of life, that turns everything into objects and merchandise, could make such an offense possible.

Everything today has become merchandise, and an opportunity to make money; from privatizing the goods common to humanity, (such as water, earth, seeds), to prostituting children and women. Even human organs are marketed. If Marx saw all this, he would certainly be scandalized, because to him capitalism lived on the exploitation of the work force, but not from selling lives. Nonetheless, already in 1847, in the Misery of Philosophy, he wrote: «Recently, we have arrived at a point where everything that men had considered inalienable has been turned into objects of exchange, commercialized, and subject to sale. Things have become commercialized that previously were communicated, but never exchanged; given, but never sold; acquired, but never bought, things such as virtue, love, opinion, science and consciousness. A time of general corruption and of universal venality reigns … when everything is taken to the market.»

Strauss-Kahn is a metaphor for the present neoliberal system. It sucks the blood of countries in crisis, such as Iceland, Ireland, Greece, Portugal, and now Spain, as was previously done with Brazil and the countries of Latin America and of Asia. To save the banks and enable repayment of debts, it devastated societies, forced workers out of their jobs, privatized public goods, cut salaries, delayed retirement ages, mandated longer work hours. All because of capital. The enforcer of these world policies is, among others, the IMF, of which Strauss-Kahn was the central figure.

What he did to Nafissatou Diallo is a metaphor for what he was doing to the countries in financial difficulties. He deserves jail not just for the sexual violence against the hotel maid, but even more, for the economic rape of the people, that he committed from the IMF. We are desolate.

I knew a Man….

Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

Slender, elegant, always smoking his straw cigarette, he was a pioneer. When the Italian settlers no longer had lands to cultivate in Sierra Gaucha, they emigrated in groups to the interior of Santa Catarina, the land of Concordia, famous as the home of Sadia and Perdigao, the best known meat enterprises in the country. There was nothing there, except some mestizos, survivors of the Contestado war, groups of Kaigan Natives, and a superb, immense pine grove, stretching as far as the eye could see.

The Italian settlers came in caravans. They brought their teachers, their prayer leaders, and an immense will to work and build their lives from scratch. He had studied for several years with the Jesuits of São Leopoldo, and accumulated a broad humanistic knowledge. He knew Latin and Greek, and could read foreign languages. He came to enlighten the lives of the people. He was a teacher, a man of reference, highly regarded. He would teach classes in the morning and afternoon. At night, he taught Portuguese to the settlers who spoke only Italian and German at home. He also opened a small school for the more advanced, to train them as bookkeepers, to do the accounting for the stores and salesmen in the region.

Since the adults had special problems learning, he used a creative method. He became the agent for a radio distributing company, and ensured that each family had a radio at home. This way, they would learn «Brazilian» by listening to programs in Portuguese. He set up windmills and small generators at waterfalls, for them to recharge their batteries. As a school teacher, he was a Paulo Freire avant la lettre. He founded a two thousand book library. Each family would take home a book, read it, and on Sunday, after praying the rosary in Latin, a circle was organized, so that they could say, in Portuguese, what they had read and understood. We children laughed a lot at their poor Portuguese. He not only taught the basics, but what every settler needed to know: how to measure land, tile the roof of the munitions depo, calculate interest, care for the woods, clean the rivers and manage the sloped terrain.

He introduced us to the basics of philology, teaching us Latin and Greek words. As small children, sitting by the stove in the freezing cold, we had to recite the whole Greek alphabet, alfa, beta, gamma, delta… and later on in College, we would be filled with pride when we showed classmates and teachers the origin of words. He motivated his eleven children to read a lot. I would recite from memory phrases from Hegel and Darwin, without understanding them, just to impress others.

He was a teacher in the fullest sense of the word because he did not limit himself to the four walls of the classroom. He would take walks with the students, to contemplate nature, and explain the plant names, and importance of the waters and fruit trees. In those interior locales, far from everything, he acted as a pharmacist. He saved scores of lives with penicillin, when he was called, often very late at night. He learned from technical books the symptoms of various illnesses, and how to treat them.

In those remote lands of our country there lived one who was troubled by political and metaphysical problems. He even created a small gathering of friends who would get together to discuss «serious matters», but more than anything else, to listen to him. He read the classics of philosophy, such as Espinoza, Hegel, Darwin and Ortega y Gasset. He spent long hours at night glued to the radio, listening to foreign programs in order to stay informed about World War II.

He was critical of the Church of the priests, because they did not respect their neighbors, all German protestants, condemned to the fires of hell because they were not Catholic. He vigorously opposed those who discriminated against the «negriti» and the «spuzzetti» (those who smelled bad). We, his children, were made to sit beside them at school, in order to learn to respect and to coexist with those who are different.

His piety was internalized. He transmitted to us a spiritual and ethical sense of life: to be always honest, never to lie and to unconditionally trust Divine Providence. So that his eleven children could study and go to the university, he sold all the land he had or had inherited, piece by piece. In the end, he had to sell his house. His joy was boundless when we came back on vacation, because then he could converse with us for hours. And he would top us all. He died young, at 54, exhausted from so much work and from serving everyone. He knew he was going to die. He would dream of talking with Plato, arguing with Saint Augustine, and being among the wise.

At the very time and day I took off to study in Europe, his heart stopped. I only learned of it when I was in Munich. My brothers and sisters wrote piously his life’s motto on his grave stone: «From his lips we heard, from his life we learned: only a life spent serving others is a life worth living.»

On May 23, 2011 he would have been one hundred years old. This wise school teacher from the interior, was Mansueto Boff, my greatly beloved and much missed father.