Estas palabras, tomadas de una canción de Tom Jobim que todo Brasil conoce, son también el título de un artículo del editor Cesar Benjamin en la revista Piaui de abril de 2015. Tal vez sea una de las más sugestivas interpretaciones de la mega-crisis brasilera, fuera del marco teórico del repetitivo y engañoso discurso a partir del PIB.
En él se afirman, a mi entender, dos puntos básicos: el agotamiento de la forma de hacer política del PT (lulismo) y la urgencia de pensar un proyecto de Brasil a partir de nuevos fines y de nuevos valores. Ese sería el gran legado de la actual crisis que Benjamin reputa como «la más grave de nuestra historia». Eso me remite a lo que oí a J. Stiglitz, Nobel de economía, el año 2009 durante una conferencia en los espacios de la ONU a la cual asistí: «el legado de la crisis económico-financiera de 2008 será un gran debate de ideas sobre qué mundo queremos». En todo el mundo y en Brasil ese parece ser realmente el gran debate. Otros llegan a formularlo de forma dramática: o cambiamos o moriremos.
La percepción generalizada es que tal como están las cosas, no pueden continuar, pues ahí por delante nos espera un abismo. Ante la crisis actual adquieren fuerza las palabras severas de Celso Furtado en un libro que vale la pena volver a revisar: Brasil: la construcción interrumpida (1993): «Nos falta la experiencia de pruebas cruciales, como las que conocieron otros pueblos cuya supervivencia llegó a estar amenazada. Y nos falta también un verdadero conocimiento de nuestras posibilidades y, principalmente, de nuestras debilidades. Pero no ignoramos que el tiempo histórico se acelera y que la cuenta del tiempo va en contra nuestra. Se trata de saber si tendremos un futuro como nación que cuenta en la construcción del devenir humano. O si prevalecerán las fuerzas que se empeñan en interrumpir nuestro proceso histórico de formación de un Estado-nación» (p. 35). Y concluye pesaroso: «todo apunta hacia la inviabilización del país como proyecto nacional» (p. 35).
Estimo que la grande y decisiva “prueba crucial” ha llegado. He planteado con frecuencia esta alternativa: o nos proponemos volver a fundar Brasil sobre una nueva visión de mundo y de futuro o estaremos condenados a ser un apéndice del proyecto-mundo que ha entrado en crisis en los países centrales, extendiéndose por todo el sistema y que no consigue encontrar una salida viable.
¿Deseamos dar ese paso que nos renueve desde los fundamentos? Benjamin considera: «Nuestro sistema político gira en falso. Se gobierna a sí mismo, en vez de gobernar a Brasil. Presos en esta trampa, nos hemos vuelto una sociedad de voluntad débil, que no consigue canalizar su energía para lo que verdaderamente importa. Sociedades así pierden la capacidad de desarrollarse, aún más en un contexto internacional, como el actual, en el que las disputas neutralizan cualquier avance». Y concluye: «Necesitamos encontrar gente nueva, organizada de manera nueva, que, en vez de tratar de adaptarse a lo que la sociedad es o parece ser, acepte correr el riesgo de anunciar lo que puede llegar a ser, para impulsarla». Esta gente nueva es lo que estamos buscando y lo que Celso Furtado tanto deseaba.
Mi modesto sentimiento del mundo me dice que es importante realizar las siguientes transformaciones si queremos salir bien de la crisis y tener un proyecto autónomo de nación:
-asumir el paradigma contemporáneo que tiene ya un siglo de existencia: el eje estructurador no será más la economía sostenible ni el PIB sino la vida. La vida de la Tierra viva, la diversidad de la vida y la vida humana. El capital material agotado dará lugar al capital humano-cultural inagotable, permitiéndonos ser más con menos e integrar a todos en la misma Casa Común. Todo lo demás debe colocarse al servicio de esa biocivilización, llamada también “Tierra de la Buena Esperanza” (Sachs, Dowbor). De continuar el paradigma actual nos llevará fatalmente al peor de los mundos.
-hacer una verdadera reforma política, pues la que se ha hecho no merece ese nombre y es fruto de mero fisiologismo.
-hacer una reforma tributaria para disminuir las desigualdades del país, uno de los más desiguales del mundo, dicho en términos ético-políticos, uno de los más injustos.
-hacer una reforma agraria y urbana ya que la ausencia de la primera llevó a que prevaleciese el agronegocio exportador en detrimento de la producción de alimentos e hizo que el 83% de la población emigrase a las ciudades, generalmente hacia las periferias, con mala calidad de vida, de sanidad, educación, de transporte y de infraestructura.
-asumir de forma estratégica la cuestión ecológica que es urgente a nivel del mundo.
Retomo el título de Benjamin: “es palo, es piedra, es un fin de camino”, no sólo el fin del actual proyecto-Brasil sino el fin del proyecto-mundo vigente.
Dentro de poco, la economía se orientará por lo ecológico y por los bienes y servicios naturales. En eso podemos ser una gran potencia por los inmensos recursos que tenemos. El mundo necesitará más de nosotros que nosotros del mundo.
A quien toma en serio la reflexión sobre una ecología integral prácticamente ausente en las discusiones económicas, el calentamiento global y los límites físicos de la Tierra, estas palabras mías no le suenan apocalípticas sino realistas. Tenemos que cambiar si queremos continuar sobre este planeta Tierra, pues por causa de nuestra irresponsabilidad e inconsciencia ya no nos soporta más.
Vea mi libro Cuidar de la Terra-proteger la vida: cómo evitar el fin del mundo, Sal Terrae 2010.
Traducción de MJ Gavito Milano
Republicou isso em O LADO ESCURO DA LUA.
Caro LB
Leia o artigo abaixo, é um libelo.
“Magna Carta Messed Up the World, Here’s How to Fix It: The “logic” of
capitalist development has left a nightmare of environmental
destruction in its wake.
Noam Chomsky
The Nation, March 23, 2015
In a few months, we will be commemorating the 800th anniversary of the sealing of Magna Carta—commemorating, but
not celebrating; rather, mourning the blows it has suffered.
The first authoritative scholarly edition of Magna Carta was published by the eminent jurist William Blackstone in 1759.
It was no easy task. As he wrote, “the body of the charter has been unfortunately gnawn by rats”—a comment that
carries grim symbolism today, as we take up the task the rats left unfinished.
Blackstone’s edition actually includes two charters: the Great Charter and the Charter of the Forest. The former is
generally regarded as the foundation of Anglo-American law—in Winston Churchill’s words, referring to its
reaffirmation by Parliament in 1628, “the charter of every self-respecting man at any time in any land.” The Great
Charter held that “No freeman shall be arrested or imprisoned,” or otherwise harmed, “except by the lawful judgment
of his equals and according to the law of the land,” the essential sense of the doctrine of “presumption of innocence.”
To be sure, the reach of the charter was limited. Nevertheless, as Eric Kasper observes in a scholarly review, “What
began as a relatively small check on the arbitrary power of King John eventually led to succeeding generations finding
ever more rights in Magna Carta and Article 39. In this sense, Magna Carta is a key point in a long development of the
protection of rights against arbitrary executive power.”
Crossing the Atlantic, the Great Charter was enshrined in the US Constitution as the promise that “no person shall…be
deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” and that “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused
shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury.”
The wording seems expansive, but that is misleading. Excluded were “unpeople” (to borrow Orwell’s useful concept),
among them Native Americans, slaves and women, who under the British common law adopted by the founders were the
property of their fathers, handed over to husbands. Indeed, it wasn’t until 1975 that women gained the right to serve
on juries in all fifty states.
The Fourteenth Amendment applied the “due process” provisions to states. The intent was to include freed slaves in the
category of persons, but the effect was different. Within a few years, slaves who had technically been freed were
delivered to a regime of criminalization of black life that amounted to “slavery by another name,” to quote the title of
Douglas Blackmon’s evocative account of this crime, which is being re-enacted today. Instead, almost all of the actual
court cases invoking the Fourteenth Amendment had to do with the rights of corporations. Today, these legal fictions
—created and sustained by state power—have rights well beyond those of flesh-and-blood persons, not only by virtue of
their wealth, immortality and limited liability, but also thanks to the mislabeled “free-trade” agreements, which grant
them unprecedented rights unavailable to humans.
The constitutional lawyer in the White House has introduced further modifications. His Justice Department explained
that “due process of law”—at least where “terrorism offenses” are concerned—is satisfied by internal deliberations
within the executive branch. King John would have nodded in approval. The term “guilty” has also been given a refined
interpretation: it now means “targeted for assassination by the White House.” Furthermore, the burden of proof has
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been shifted to those already assassinated by executive whim. As The New York Times reported, “Mr. Obama embraced
a disputed method for counting civilian casualties [that] in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as
combatants…unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.” The guiding principles are clear:
force reigns supreme; “law” and “justice” and other frivolities can be left to sentimentalists.
Problems do arise, however, when a candidate for genuine personhood is targeted. The issue arose after the murder of
Anwar al-Awlaki, who was accused of inciting jihad in speech and writing as well as unspecified actions. A New York
Times headline captured the general elite reaction when he was assassinated: As the West Celebrates a Cleric’s Death,
the Mideast Shrugs. Some eyebrows were raised because Awlaki was an American citizen. But even these doubts were
quickly stilled.
Let us now put the sad relics of the Great Charter aside and turn to the Magna Carta’s companion, the Charter of the
Forest, which was issued in 1217. Its significance is perhaps even more pertinent today. As explained by Peter
Linebaugh in his richly documented and stimulating history of Magna Carta, the Charter of the Forest called for
protection of the commons from external power. The commons were the source of sustenance for the general
population: food, fuel, construction materials, a form of welfare, whatever was essential for life.
In thirteenth-century England, the forest was no primitive wilderness. It had been carefully nurtured by its users over
generations, its riches available to all. The great British social historian R. H. Tawney wrote that the commons were
used by country people who lacked arable land. The maintenance of this “open field system of agriculture…reposed
upon a common custom and tradition, not upon documentary records capable of precise construction. Its boundaries
were often rather a question of the degree of conviction with which ancient inhabitants could be induced to affirm
them, than visible to the mere eye of sense”—features of traditional societies worldwide to the present day.
By the eighteenth century, the charter had fallen victim to the rise of the commodity economy and capitalist practice
and moral culture. As Linebaugh puts it, “The Forest Charter was forgotten or consigned to the gothic past.” With the
commons no longer protected for cooperative nurturing and use, the rights of the common people were restricted to
what could not be privatized—a category that continues to shrink, to virtual invisibility.
Capitalist development brought with it a radical revision not only of how the commons are treated, but also of how they
are conceived. The prevailing view today is captured by Garrett Hardin’s influential argument that “Freedom in a
commons brings ruin to all.” This is the famous “tragedy of the commons”: that what is not owned will be destroyed by
individual avarice. A more technical formulation is given in economist Mancur Olson’s conclusion that “unless the
number of individuals is quite small, or unless there is coercion or some other special device to make individuals act in
their common interest, rational, self-interested individuals will not act to achieve their common or group interests.”
Accordingly, unless the commons are handed over to private ownership, brutal state power must be invoked to save
them from destruction. This conclusion is plausible—if we understand “rationality” to entail a fanatic dedication to the
individual maximization of short-term material gain.
These forecasts have received some challenge. The late Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009 for her
work showing the superiority of user-managed fish stocks, pastures, woods, lakes and groundwater basins. The
historical review in her study, Governing the Commons, ignores the Charter of the Forest and the practice over
centuries of nurturing the commons, but Ostrom did conclude that the success stories she’d investigated might at least
“shatter the convictions of many policy analysts that the only way to solve [common-pool resource] problems is for
external authorities to impose full private property rights or centralized regulation.”
* * *
As we now understand all too well, it is what is privately owned, not what is held in common, that faces destruction by
avarice, bringing the rest of us down with it. Hardly a day passes without more confirmation of this fact. As hundreds
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of thousands of people marched in the streets of Manhattan on September 21 to warn of the dire threat of the ongoing
ecological destruction of the commons, The New York Times reported that “global emissions of greenhouse gases
jumped 2.3 percent in 2013 to record levels,” while in the United States, emissions rose 2.9 percent, reversing a recent
decline. August 2014 was reported to be the hottest on record, and JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical
Association predicted that the number of 90-degree-plus days in New York could triple in three decades, with much
more severe effects in warmer climates.
It is well understood that most of the world’s fossil-fuel reserves must remain in the ground if an environmental disaster
for humankind is to be averted, but under the logic of state-supported capitalist institutions, the private owners of
those reserves are racing to exploit them to the fullest. Chevron abandoned a small renewable-energy program because
its profits are far greater from fossil fuels. And as Bloomberg Businessweek reports, ExxonMobil announced “that its
laserlike focus on fossil fuels is a sound strategy, regardless of climate change.” This is all in accord with the capitalist
doctrine of “rationality.”
A small part of the remaining commons is federal land. Despite the complaints of the energy lobbies, the amount of
crude oil produced from onshore federal lands in 2013 was the highest in over a decade, according to the Interior
Department, and it has expanded steadily under the Obama administration. The business pages of newspapers like The
New York Times and The Washington Post are exultant about “the boom in American energy production,” which shows
“no signs of slowing down, keeping the market flush with crude and gasoline prices low.” Predictions are that the
United States will “add a million more barrels of oil in daily production over the next year,” while also “expanding its
exports of refined products like gasoline and diesel.” One dark cloud is perceived, however: maximizing production
“might have a catastrophic effect” in “the creation of a major glut.” And with climate-change denier James Inhofe now
chairing the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, and others like him in positions of power, we can
expect even more wonderful news for our grandchildren.
Despite these long odds, the participants in the People’s Climate March are not alone. There is no slight irony in the fact
that their major allies throughout the world are the surviving indigenous communities that have upheld their own
versions of the Charter of the Forest. In Canada, the Gitxaala First Nation is filing a lawsuit opposing a tar-sands
pipeline passing through its territory, relying on recent high-court rulings on indigenous rights. In Ecuador, the large
indigenous community played an essential part in the government’s offer to keep some of its oil in the ground, where it
should be, if the rich countries would compensate Ecuador for a fraction of the lost profits. (The offer was refused.)
The one country governed by an indigenous majority, Bolivia, held a World People’s Conference in 2010, with 35,000
participants from 140 countries. It produced a People’s Agreement calling for sharp reductions in emissions, as well as a
Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth. These are key demands of indigenous communities all over the
world.
So, as we commemorate the two charters after 800 years, all of this gives us ample reason for serious reflection—and
for determined action.
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