Transformative Economies Agenda
#agenda-FSMET Process of co-construction of the pact and the agenda of transformative actions
FOR AN ECONOMY FOR LIFE
The sense of urgency for an integral transformation of the system that mobilized the FSMET, as well as the need to expand alliances, commitments and actions towards an economy for life, have been confirmed in this time of pandemic.
These have been months in which we have experienced complex and contradictory events. On the one hand, the effects of capitalist and neo-liberal devastation, expressed in the influence of a virus capable of altering the life of the population on a planetary scale. With the pandemic, structural injustices and inequalities have been laid bare, exacerbated by the predominance of neo-liberal agendas of unprotection and commodification of life, health, education, and the production of basic goods and services. As in other crises, but in unprecedented proportions, households - converted into workplaces, education, comprehensive care - and women's work have absorbed, with enormous human costs, all the impacts of this situation.
On the other hand, the flow of production, services, relationships generated by transformative economies around the world has shown its capacity to respond in extreme conditions. Basic food, inputs and health care, among others, have been provided from these environments. Social, collective, community, and neighborhood initiatives, in combination with public policies and resources in some cases, have allowed life to be sustained. The proximity of transformative economies to essential goods and services, to the economic and social fabric that preserves and reproduces life, has become evident.
At the same time, the deployment and threat of corporate formulas for managing crises is present. More concentration of great fortunes, dispute over private and commercial modalities of treatment of the pandemic, the onslaught of speculative financial capital, expansion of 'surveillance capitalism' in a world that is confined and dependent on internet connection.
A scenario of uncertainty in the face of which the transformative economies confirm today the ways out. The ethics of solidarity, economic and environmental justice, strengthening the public for the common good....
Where we are
Well into the 21st century, we are still suffering the consequences of that political and ideological operation launched during the 1980s by the champions of neoliberalism, which has kept us closed for decades in the iron box of Thatcher's There Is No Alternative, the embodiment of this damned combination of moral conservatism and economic neoliberalism that still endures and grips us today.
The global financial crisis that exploded in 2007 - fruit, precisely, of the connivance of the established political powers with the financial elites and their desire for capital accumulation - demonstrates the need to rethink the established economic order from its roots. A multitude of anonymous voices, all over the planet, are united in a clamor that calls for the removal of the established regimes, from the outraged to the Arab springs, passing through the Occupy movement ... and the national popular movements of recent years, from Chile to Lebanon, as well as those for climate justice.
From shock economy to transformation economies
In the de-mediatization of these movements he is accompanied by a silent current, built on the sediments of the "other world is possible" of the anti-globalization movement and of long historical traditions such as cooperativism and community economies. A current of heads and hands that build in the here and now ways of living, ways of making economy - of working, of living, of consuming, of living together - established on a material and cultural basis, diametrically opposed to the regime of late capitalism, which shows that there are other ways of living, despite having to do so from the narrow margins that the economy of capital gives us.
These other economies, which have been growing strongly in recent years outside the radar of the elites (and also, unfortunately, of the social majorities), are, therefore, in the process of accumulating forces. One of the main challenges that we find in this path is the lack of a common narrative; of an overall vision that would allow us to identify and combine the different proposals, and to come together in relation to a broader and shared narrative of socio-economic transformation.
