Categoria: Idiomas

Whither the Indignados and the Occupiers?

Leonardo BoffDeixe um comentário

In one of the most important debates in the Thematic Social Forum of Porto Alegre, Brazil, where I had the opportunity to participate, I was able listen to the living testimonies of los Indigndos from Spain, London, Egypt and the United States. What impressed me deeply was the seriousness of the speeches, far from the anarchic tone of the 1960s, and very down to earth. The central theme was «democracy now». A different democracy was re-vindicated, very different than the one we are used to, that is more farce than reality. They want a democracy built from the streets, from the squares, from the place where real power originates. A democracy from below, organically created by the peoples, transparent in their procedures and never again corroded by corruption. To begin with, this democracy is characterized by linking social justice with ecologic justice.

Curiously, Los Indignados, the Occupiers and those of the Arab Spring do not identify themselves with the classic speeches of the left, or even the dreams of the several editions of the World Social Forum. We find ourselves in a different era, and a new sensibility has arisen. Another way of being a citizen is postulated, powerfully including women, who were previously made invisible, citizens with rights, with participation, with horizontal and transversal relationships facilitated by the social networks, by the mobile media, twitter and facebooks. We find ourselves facing a true revolution. Relationships were previously organized in a vertical form, from top to bottom. They are now created horizontally, towards the edges, in the immediacy of communication at the speed of light. This form represents the new times we are living: of information, of the discovery of the value of subjectivity; instead of modernity, encapsulated in itself, one of relational subjectivity, of the emergence of a consciousness of the kind found within the selfsame and unique Common House, that is threatened with collapse, as a result of the excessive thievery practiced by our system of production and consumerism.

This sensibility no longer tolerates the system’s methods for overcoming the economic crisis and its derivatives, salvaging the banks with the money of the citizens, imposing a severe fiscal austerity, dismantling social security, cheapening employment, cutting investments, illusorily supposing that this way the confidence of the markets will be regained and the economy will be revived. The belief has become dogma, and in many places the stupid catch phrase is heard: “TINA: there is no alternative”. The sacrilegious high priests of the not so holy trinity made up of the International Monetary Fund, (IMF), the European Union and by the European Central Bank, have dealt a financial blow to Greece and Italy, and have imposed their acolytes there with responsibility for the crisis, without going through the democratic rites. Everything is viewed and decided from an exclusively economic perspective, devaluing the social, and increasing unnecessary collective suffering, the desperation of families, and youth indignation because they cannot find jobs. All this can result in a crisis with dramatic consequences.

Paul Krugmann, Nobel Prize Laureate for Economics, spent some time in Iceland, studying the way this small Arctic country solved its devastating crisis. They followed the correct path that other countries should have also followed: they let the banks collapse, jailed the bankers and speculators who engaged in embezzlement, rewrote their Constitution, guaranteed social security to avoid a generalized collapse, and managed to create jobs. Consequently, the country emerged from the mess and is one of the Nordic countries with the greatest growth. News of the Icelandic path has been suppressed by the world means of mass communications, out of fear that it might serve as an example for other countries. And thus the carriage, with incorrect but coherent measures, rushes rapidly towards the precipice.

Against this foreseeable course stand Los Indignados. They want a different world, friendlier to life and respectful of nature. Perhaps Iceland will serve as inspiration for them. Wither will they go? Who knows. Certainly not in the direction of the worn-out models of the past. They will head in the direction of what Paulo Freire spoke about, the «unedited viable» that will be born from the new creativity, one that expresses itself, without violence, with a democratic-participatory spirit. In any event, the world will never be as it was before, and much less as the capitalists would like it to be.

Brazil: from internationalized enterprise to biocentric society

Leonardo Boff4 Comentários

There are classical interpretations about the forming of Brazil as a nation, but the one by the political analyst Luiz Gonzaga de Souza Lima is surely unique, and helps us understand Brazil in the present process of world globalization: The Refounding of Brazil: towards a bio-centric society (La refundación de Brasil: rumbo a una sociedad biocentrada (Rima, São Carlos 2011). His starting point is the brutal fact of the invasion and expropriation of Brazilian lands by the «colonizers» based on slavery and the super exploitation of nature. They came here not to found a society, but to create a large international private enterprise, a true agro-industry, in order to supply the world market. It was built by kingdoms, churches and big private companies such as those of the West Indies, the Oriental Indies, the Dutch of Mauritius and Nassau, with navigators, merchants, and bankers, who, without forgetting the modern vanguards, had new dreams, and sought quick wealth.

Once the land was occupied, they brought in sugar cane, then coffee, technologies which were modern for the time, capital, and African slaves. The slaves were considered «things» to be bought in the market, and like coal, to be consumed in the sugar mills. With reason Souza Lima affirms: “the outcome was the appearance of a new social configuration, unknown by humanity until that moment, created solely to serve the economy; in Brazil was born what can be called the «social enterprise formation»”.

Modernity was born in Brazil and in Latin America, in the sense of the utilization of logic of production, of the desire for unlimited accumulation and the systematic exploitation of nature, of the creation of immense towns of marginalized people. In this sense, Brazil has been new and modern, ever since her origins.

Europe could have her revolution, called modernity, with rights and democratic institutions, only because she was sustained by the brutal robbery carried out in the colonies. With Brazil’s political independence, the nature of the social enterprise formation did not change. All the impulses for development that arose did not undermine the dependent and subordinate character that resulted from the business orientation of our social structure. Even now, global world capital tends to try to shape our eventual future into our known past: it would behoove Brazil to be the great provider of raw materials for the world market, with little added value.

Enterprise-Brazil is the key, according to Souza Lima, to understanding the historical formation of Brazil and the place assigned to her in the present process of unequal globalization. The challenge lies in creating a society that suits us, and leads to a different future for us. The inspiration comes from something that is our own: Brazilian culture. Our culture was born of the slaves and their descendants, of the Indigenous that remained, of the mamelucos, the sons and daughters of poverty and crossbreeding. They created something singular, not that desired by the holders of power, who always rejected them and never recognized them as the subjects, and sons and daughters, of God.

What matters now is re-creating Brazil, «to build for the first time a human society in this immense and beautiful territory, something that never happened in all the modern era since Brazil was founded as an enterprise; to create a society with the sole objective of saving our people». It is about moving from Brazil as an economically internationalized state, to Brazil as a biocentric society.

As a biocentric society, the Brazilian people will transcend modernity, corrupted as it is by injustice and greed, that is leading humanity to the abyss. Still, for better or worse, our modernity helped us forge a physical infrastructure that can support building a bio-civilization that loves life in all its forms, where all differences peacefully coexist, and that has the capacity to synthesize the most diverse factors.

In this context, Souza Lima links the refounding of Brazil to the promises of the new world that must succeed this agonizing one, that is incapable of projecting any horizon of hope for humanity. Brazil could be,as others, the niche that generates new dreams, with the real possibility of carrying them out in harmony with Mother Earth, and in a manner open to all peoples.

Sustainable Development: a Critique of the standard Model

Leonardo Boff5 Comentários


Official UN documents, as well as the current draft of Rio+20, devote substantial space to the model for sustainable development: It must be, they say, economically viable, socially just and environmentally correct. It is the famous triplet called The Triple Bottom Line (the line of the three pillars), coined in 1990 by John Elkington, from Great Britain, founder of the ONG SustainAbility. But this model cannot withstand a serious critique.

Economically viable development: in the political language of business managers, development is equated to increasing the gross national product, (GNP). Woe to the enterprise and the country that do not have positive indices of annual growth! They fall into crisis or recession with the consequent reduction of consumption and increase in unemployment: in the business world, it consists of making money, with the least possible investment, the maximum possible profitability, the strongest possible competitivity, and in the least possible time.

When we speak here of development, we are not talking about just any development, but of the one that actually exists, that is, of industrialist/capitalist/consumerist development. It is anthropocentric, contradictory and wrong. Let me explain.

It is anthropocentric because is centered only on the human being, as if the greater community of life (the flora, fauna and other living organisms), that also need the biosphere and equally demand sustainability, did not exist.

It is contradictory, because development and sustainability obey opposing logistics. The development now in existence is lineal and increasing. It exploits nature and favors private accumulation. Its political economics is of a capitalist character. The sustainability category, to the contrary, comes from the sciences of life and ecology, whose logistic is circular and inclusive. It represents the tendency of the ecosystems towards a dynamic equilibrium, an interdependency and cooperation of all with all. As can be seen, these are two contrasting logistics: one favors the individual, the other the collective; one promotes competition, the other cooperation; one the evolution of the fittest, the other the evolution of all, interconnected.

It is wrong, because it asserts that poverty is the cause of ecological degradation. Thus, the lesser the poverty, the more sustainable development would be, with less degradation. This is incorrect. By critically analyzing the real causes of poverty and the degradation of nature, one can see that they result primarily, if not exclusively, from the type of development now in existence. That kind of development is what produces the degradation, because it degrades nature, pays low salaries, and thus generates poverty.

This kind of development is a trap set by the prevailing system: it co-opts the ecological (sustainability) terminology in order to gut it. It assumes the ideal to be the economy (growth), thus masking the poverty it produces.

Socially just: if there is one thing the present industrial/capitalist development cannot say about itself, it is that it is socially just. If it were, there would not be 1.4 billion starving human beings in the world, with the majority of nations in poverty. Let us look only at the case of Brazil. The 2010 Social Atlas of Brazil, (IPEA), states that 5000 families control 46% of the GNP. The government gives annually 125,000 million reales to the financial system to pay back the loans they received, with interest, and only gives 40,000 million reales to the social programs that benefit the great majority of the poor. All this reveals the fallacy of the rhetoric of socially just development, which is impossible within the current economic paradigm.

Environmentally Sound: the present type of development implies an endless war against Gaia, taking from her everything that is useful, and susceptible to profitting, especially by the minorities that control the process. According to the 2010 UN Living Planet Index, in less than 40 years, global bio-diversity suffered a 30% decline. From only 1998 to the present, there has been a 35% rise in the emission of global warming gasses. Instead of talking of limits on growth, we should be talking about limits on the aggression against the Earth.

In conclusion, the leading model of development that calls itself sustainable is pure rhetoric. It advocates the production of less carbon, utilization of alternative energies, strengthening of degraded regions and the creation of better means of waste disposal. But let’s be clear: all this is dependent on not impairing profits and not reducing competitivity. The use of the expression «sustainable development» has an important political meaning: the necessary change of the economic paradigm, if we want a real sustainability. Within the present one, sustainability is either localized, or non-existent.

Sustainability: an attempt at defining it

Leonardo Boff4 Comentários

There is a conflict these days among the different ways people understand sustainability. The definition of the 1987 Brundland Report of the UNO is classic: Sustainable development is one that attends the needs of present generations without endangering the capacity of future generations to attend to their needs and aspirations. This concept is correct, but it has two limitations: it is anthropocentric (it only considers human beings) and it says nothing about the community of life (other living beings that also need a biosphere and sustainability.) I will try to make a formulation that is as inclusive as possible:
Sustainability is every action destined to maintain the energy, information, and physical-chemical conditions that make all beings sustainable, especially the living Earth, the community of life and human life, seeking their continuity, and also to attend the needs of present and future generations in such a way that the natural capital is maintained and its capacity of regeneration, reproduction and eco-evolution is enriched.
Let’s rapidly explain the terms of this holistic vision:
To make sustainable all the conditions necessary for the creation of all beings: they exist starting with the combination of energies, of the physical-chemical and informative elements that, combined together, give origin to everything.
To make sustainable all beings: this is about completely overcoming anthropocentrism. All beings emerge from the process of evolution and enjoy an intrinsic value, independent of human use.
To especially make the living Earth sustainable: the Earth is much more than a «thing» (res extensa), lacking intelligence, or a mere means of production. She does not contain life; she is alive, she self-regulates, self-regenerates and evolves. If we do not guarantee the sustainability of the living Earth, called Gaia, we take away the basis of all other forms of sustainability.
To also make the community of life sustainable: the environment does not exist as something secondary and peripheral. We do not just exist: we coexist, and are all interdependent. All living beings are carriers of the same basic genetic alphabet. We form the net of life, microorganisms included. This net creates the biomass and the biodiversity that is necessary for the subsistence of our life on this planet.
To make human life sustainable: we are a singular link of the net of life, the most complex being in our solar system and a spearhead of the process of evolution as we know it, because we are carriers of consciousness, sensibility and intelligence. We feel that we are called upon to care for and to guard Mother Earth, to guarantee the continuity of civilization and also to be vigilant of our destructive capacity.
To make the continuity of the process of evolution sustainable: all beings are conserved and supported by the Basic Energy or the Source that Creates all Beings. The universe possesses an end in itself, by the simple fact of existing, of continuing to expand and create itself.
To make tending to human needs sustainable: through the rational and caring use of the goods and services which the cosmos and the Earth offer us, and without which we would cease to exist. To make sustainable our generation and the generations that will follow ours: the Earth is sufficient for each generation so long as a relation of synergy and cooperation with the Earth is established, and goods and services are distributed equitably. The use of those goods must be guided by generational solidarity. Future generations have the right to inherit a well preserved Earth and nature.
Sustainability is measured by the capacity to conserve natural capital, that it may renew itself and, perhaps through human genius, that it may be enriched for future generations. This widened and integrating concept of sustainability must serve as criteria for evaluating whether or not we have progressed along the path of sustainability, and should serve equally as inspiration or idea-generating for making sustainability a reality in the different fields of human activity. Without it, sustainability is pure rhetoric, without consequences.