From globalized structural change to economic stagnation, the country presents very low economic growth rates, entirely unsatisfactory in terms of employment and access to the minimum standards of well-being considered in Mexico and the rest of the world. We are not speaking here of any “conjuncture,” but of a constant or a structure: the lack of economic growth.
From crisis to crisis, since 1982, with a population in accelerated transition toward demographic maturity, neither the country nor its State has been able to sharpen its vision and focus its efforts on a sustainable economy, capable of supporting the expansion of the labor market and promoting policies in favor of the most vulnerable and poor. This summary acknowledgment is an essential starting point for reflecting on the present and the future and debating the advisability and possibility of a change of course, a renewed path for our development that allows us to grow and redistribute—income, access, and capabilities.
It is urgent that we have the disposition and the will to thoroughly and seriously review our political and ideological projects in order to formulate alternative strategies and policies for a sustainable economic recovery and forms of governance that give rise to a lasting and inclusive democratic order.
In this way, we would move towards a construction that unites forces, efforts, and wills aimed at fostering fundamental transformations in a flawed economy, beset by multiple demands, always ready to erupt into a major social upheaval; a broad political and democratic agreement would have to be its axis and support. Such is our starting agenda.
Without principled platforms like this one, we will hardly be able, as a society and as a state, to align ourselves with the new currents of structural change that the new globalist cohorts seek to define and implement in the face of a world of dizzying upheavals.
To demonstrate, in both deeds and rhetoric, a credible unifying will to defend democracy, no government can legitimately sustain itself if it is unable to create the minimum conditions for growth compatible with progressive equity and horizons of social equality. From this foundation, the rejection of any form of violence as a method of governance and as a means of appropriating the fruits of growth will be viable and credible.
Criminal groups must be dismantled through clear and swift actions that adhere to the law and are committed to justice. Only in this way will governments and their political forces, as well as any state whose reform implies political will and democratic convictions—not electoral posturing—gain greater legitimacy and credibility. These practices of democratic and civic recovery must be geared towards building a constitutional democracy that, if it is to be truly constitutional, must be social in order to protect citizens “from cradle to grave,” as Lord Beveridge and the British Labour Party advocated at the beginning of the post-World War II era.
Let us not forget that this was a time of suffering and mass extermination, but also of a planetary awakening to the urgent need to promote major global agreements for renewal and inclusion. These were projects that had to consider the demands of “the impertinent ones,” who, bursting onto the world scene in the heat of the terrible Second World War, wanted to throw out the window Kipling’s arrogance that those stories had been nothing more than “the white man’s burden.”
It was through paths, many of them narrow and under the strict surveillance of “the West,” that the idea of development as social and collective change and emergence began to make its way into the corridors of the United Nations and multilateral organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
Inextricably linked to the new global dispute of the so-called Cold War, this idea of liberation persisted, which allowed the voices of the new world to emerge, demanding well-being and material progress, like that which was beginning to recover in the “North.”
It was undoubtedly a change in climate; an extreme circumstance that formed the backdrop for, and was intended to facilitate, the reconstruction of the world. It was a formidable political undertaking, encompassing social demands while simultaneously establishing democratic governance and modulating the capitalist economic cycle. The idea of development was thus implemented as an offensive discourse for emerging societies that sought to define themselves as states and as a “Third World.”
The consequences of those moments of virtual confrontation, yet with “atomic fangs,” as Mao once described them, are numerous and cannot be confined to a single dimension that aims to extract timeless and unequivocal achievements, much less redefine today’s world according to a single code.
Source: jornada
