New values for a new civilization

By
Frei Betto                                                                          Read Spanish Version  

From
Rebelión

At
the World Social Forum in Belém, participants concluded that the
alternatives to neoliberalism and the construction of ecosocialism
are not born in the heads of intellectuals or in partisan programs
but in social practice, through popular struggles, movements by labor
unions, peasants, indigenous natives, ethnic groups,
environmentalists and grass-roots communities.

To
create such alternatives, at least four attitudes are required.
First, a critical view of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism deepens
capitalism’s contradictions, to the degree that the market’s
globalized expansion stimulates commercial competitiveness among the
big powers. It displaces production to regions where producers can
pay laughable wages; it stimulates the exodus of poor nations toward
rich nations; introduces leading technologies that reduce jobs; makes
nations dependent on speculative capital, and intensifies the process
that destroys the world’s environmental balance.

The
second attitude is to organize hope. To find alternatives is a
collective task because they do not emerge from the brains of
enlightened intellectuals or ideological gurus. Therefore, it is
important to provide an organizational consistence to all the sectors
of society that expect something different from the present reality,
from farmers who dream of tilling their own land to young people who
are interested in preserving the environment.

The
third attitude is to rescue utopia. Neoliberalism is not only intent
on destroying the community institutions created by modernity, such
as the family, the labor unions, the social movements and the
democratic state. Neoliberalism’s project to minimize society
reduces man to the condition of an individual disconnected from the
social-political-economic juncture where he stands. It considers him
as a mere consumer. For the same reason, it spreads to the cultural
spheres. As Emmanuel Mounier said, individualism is opposed to
personalism. Pascal was emphatic: “The Id is odious.”

In
its apogee, capitalism merchandises everything: biodiversity, the
environment, the social responsibility of businesses, the genome, the
organs harvested from children, etc. — even our own imagination. A
trivial example is the amount spent buying drinking water that has
been industrially bottled, disregarding the good old ceramic filter
or the collection of rain water.

Without
utopias, there are no mobilizations motivated by hope. There is no
chance of visualizing a different, new and better world.

Fourth
attitude: to elaborate an alternative project. Hope favors the
emergence of new utopias that must be translated into political and
cultural projects that mark the foundations of a new society. That
implies the rescue of the ethical values, of the sense of justice, of
the practices of solidarity and sharing, and respect for nature. In
sum, it is also a spiritual challenge along the lines of Prof. Milton
Santos’ gospel: we must prioritize the "infinite good," not
the "finite good."

The
project of an ecosocialist society that is an alternative to
neoliberalism obliges us to review (in the wake of the fall of the
Berlin Wall) the theoretical and practical aspects of real socialism,
particularly from the point of view of participative democracy and
environmental preservation.

Ecosocialism
would be characterized by the ability to incorporate the concept and
practices of social equality and sustainable development into the
experiences of social and ecological movements, as well as the Cuban
revolution, the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, the land occupation of
the MST, etc.

It
is vital to include in the project and the program the currently
emerging paradigms, such as the ecology, indigenousness, community
ethics, a united economy, spirituality, feminism and holistics.

This
dream, this utopia, this hope we call ecosocialism is the
continuation of the hopes of those who struggled for the defense of
life, such as Chico Mendes and Dorothy Stang, two Christian fighters
who gave their lives for the poor, the exploited, the indigenous
natives, the peasants and the people of the jungle.

Frei
Betto, a Dominican friar, wrote "Letters from jail" and
other books.