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OBSERVATORY PRESENTATION

Jorge Beinstein (Economist - Argentina)
Reinaldo Carcanholo (Economist -Brazil)
Wim Dierckxsens (Sociologist - Economist - Holland)
Antonio Jarquin T (MD - sociologist - Nicaragua)
Paulo Nakatani (Economist-Brazil)
Remy Herrera (Economist - France)
Paulo Campanario (Sociologist and Demographer - Brazil)

What encourages us?

1. The World is living today a very stressing situation yet not completely understood, and the mass media fully committed to the great economic interests in control of the planet, try to make peoples to believe that it is just simple and temporary problems easily solvable. We live in fact a severe structural crisis of the capitalist system, even more, a truly civilizatory crisis that can jeopardize the future of entire human kind. This structural crisis has different ways of manifesting in the different continents, spaces and human activities, and affects all standards of life and society.

2.In the last three hundred years capitalism has headed, as ever before in History, a real explosion in the technologic development, productive forces, sciences, communications, arts, trade, education, health care, and so on. However, this system, along with colonialism and imperialism, have been also, and keep being, responsible for the extreme exploitation of human beings, which leads, for one hand, to a Diaspora around the planet and, on the other hand, to systems of social apartheid, of destruction, waste and degradation of natural resources, which are central to sustain human dignity and life. The dictatorship of dominant elites who have controlled and concentrated the wealth and the resources of the world are responsible for the present state of destruction of ecosystems, of global deterioration, and the deep differences in the conditions of life of millions human beings.

This crisis, because of many reasons, comes along with high levels of hazards ever seen in History. On the other hand, all the citizens of the world are responsible for this crisis, since we did not do enough to avoid it. That is why we have the moral responsibility of participating in the struggle to overcome the crisis.

3.Today, in the beginning of the 21st Century, and as ever before, it is vital that we become aware of the meanings and the implications of the crisis, which requires proper levels of information, from different disciplines and perspectives of human knowledge. This will make possible to reach a right understanding of the problems and their solutions. This is the main reason to organize this INTERNATIONAL OBSERVATORY OF THE CRISIS, a Latin American initiative.

4. The present crisis of capitalism, in the 21st Century, is a critical period, but is also an opportunity to pave a new way. In this context, peace with democracy, freedom, justice, dignity and equity for progress, common security, survival for all the human beings and future generations, must be a priority not subject to negotiation.

5. The Soviet Union lost the “cold war” which ended up in its self-dismemberment; United States and Western world also lost the war, which is manifested in the present crisis of capitalism. Hence, there were no winners, we all human beings lost.

6.Since the World War II, and particularly, with the last stage of neoliberal globalization, we have seen a historical period of the greatest transfer of wealth from poor countries to rich ones in all the nations, and from the poor countries from the South to the rich countries in the North. These massive subsidies from poor to the rich has not been enough to compensate the great unbalances resulted of the cold war, the speculation and the unproductive waste of the dominant elites and great powers, above all, their military expenditures.

7. From the 80’s in the last Century, with neoliberalism, the productive sector tended to grow each time less and less; the speculative financial sector became dominant and turned into the core of the present crisis which is economic, financial, political, social, military, ecologic, climatologic and cultural. At the same time we are in the top of the world production of oil, and the water and mineral resources become each time more scarce. On the other hand, there is a competition between bio-fuel and food for the use of the land, which makes food every time more expensive. It is clear that this is a structural crisis, not a particular juncture, but even more, it is a crisis of civilization, demanding a re-draw of the parameters which the logic of capital cannot answer and respond any more.

There is a very grave financial crisis. Since mid 2007 lots of money has been injected, magically created from the air by the central banks and corporations, the main responsible for the crisis. These bailouts have recently reached unimaginable levels (trillions of dollars). Such monetary interventions make the system even more volatile and increase the uncertainty, deepening the crisis and the damage, which is already dramatic in many sectors of world population. This means that in the future, the inorganic emissions of money will be backed up by bigger transfers of wealth from the Third World, from working and middle classes in the rich countries, using different methods included the threaten or military imposition to sustain the economic power of the elites in rich countries, particularly in the United States.

8. This financial crisis is evident in the volatility of currencies (particularly of the US dollar), in the insolvency of the banks, the growing debts, as a part of the crisis of the entire system of production and distribution. The present economic and financial crisis comes along with an environmental crisis. Natural resources are not enough to support the western life style; 20% of world population, concentrated in the North, consumes the 80% of natural resources.

9. There is an ecologic crisis. The environmental unbalance and the global warming, consequences of over exploitation of natural resources (particularly of non renewable ones) affects all the regions in the world and is more intense in the most depressed areas, and, above all, in the poorest sectors. Just in 300 years of industrial revolution we have destroyed what took the nature millions of years to build. The biggest reserves of natural resources are located in the South and they are fiercely disputed by dominant countries. This has generalized wars tending to widespread to the whole planet. For that reason, in order to get protected from the crisis, it is necessary that Latin American countries (and not just them) claim their sovereignty over their natural resources, which are central for the world economy, for its preservation as a contribution to the future and world survival.

10.At the present time a social crisis exists that is expressed through the extremely unequal distribution of the wealth and the rent, which is fed by the permanent flow and the transfer of this resources from the South to the North. The South has come financing the development and the progress of the North through transfers of wealth that have been produced in the South. It is necessary a process of redistribution of these, in function of the poor countries and, in particular, of the sectors more impoverished at the level of every country and of the world.

11.The XXI century is a period of exhaustion of the reserves of primary resources and this reality configures a new situation and a very serious problem for the humanity. The upward prices of the minerals lead to a deformation of the economic structure of the countries possessors of those resources. On the other hand, the inflation rate of the agricultural products is in the last years double the rate of general inflation. These social problems end in the increment of the violence as a method for the solution of the daily conflicts; cultural disorientation, product of the hegemony of a western culture of progress and waste without limit, excluding and causing more exploitation, alienation, loses of hope, fatalistic visions, xenophobia and racism, and the emergency of religious fundamentalist extremisms. To this it is added that most of the mass media is dominated by the interests of the elites that control the capital and they serve as instruments of deformation of the conscience in the societies. On the other hand, the historical inequality of the women persists, in a scenario of worse ways of violence and sexual exploitation, with bigger gender discrimination and a visible setback in the recognition of its rights and freedoms.

12. We are in front of a political crisis at international level. The war is the instrument that the capitalist system doesn't doubt to use to appropriate of the natural resources and, in particular, the energy ones, like it has happened in Iraq and in Afghanistan, or to solve the internal contradictions, without discarding the use of the nuclear weapon and other instruments of massive destruction. Latin America is not to the margin of this geopolitical strategy that rebounds in the current general military crisis and that threaten its expansion. At the beginning of the year 2008, United States announced and it began the deployment of its IV fleet in the Latin American seas, what is seen by many countries as a threat for its security and for that of its natural resources. This is an element of pressure that pushes the region to acquire and to invest in new equipment and military technology, which will alter the current balance of forces in the region and will take off valuable productive resources that are necessary for people, to be dedicated to the unproductive sector of the armaments. This only benefits the world industrial military complex. Latin America needs to try to solve the matters of peace and of security, as well as those of their survival and development in peace, in a combined way, among the states, and as an all only one; from here it is derived the urgent necessity to conform quickly, from Mexico to Tierra del Fuego, a regional unity in the diversity and with the biggest possible equality, in a process of construction of regional independence that should not be delayed any more.

13. We find a crisis of the State that has been put on to the service of the capital. There are questioning of governments, legitimacy lose of political parties and of the construction of spaces and democratic processes. The corruption forms part of the economic logic of the transnational ones, of the elites and its forms of accumulation, at the time that its action in the outlying economies, when prioritizing the accumulation of earnings, distorts the rational functions of the states and of the economy, as for the provision of goods, services and employment for its respective societies; and it damages the conservation and renovation of the natural resources and the institutionalism of the nations.

14. The level of this crisis has come deepening more and more and it requires of their integral and careful pursuit, starting from analysis and diverse opinions that allow to the world citizenship their understanding, their state of alert and their preventive action, in front of the dangers that it contains for social groups, countries, regions and for the whole humanity.

Which are the Objectives of this Observatory?

1. It is looked for to analyze and to inform on this crisis of the civilization in their different dimensions, with the objective of looking for in it, opportunities to build a post-capitalism in the practice and in the theory. That is to say, new forms of social reorganization, on the base of the positive and negative experiences of the XX century, articulating in a serious way, the contents of such concepts as democracy, freedom, justness, justice, common security, peace, real citizenship, etc., with the sustainable use of the natural resources and their social appropriation, to stop the waste of this resources, the predominance of the “value of use” - that is to say, to give answers to people's necessities – over the “value of change”, - that is to say, the necessity of accumulation of money -, the widespread democracy to all the social, political, economic, cultural relationships, of gender and the multiple cultures, so that it is allowed to all to participate with their knowledge, philosophies and religions, to give their own contribution to the social reconstruction of a new society in balance, responsible with the environment and with the capacities of the planet.

2. It is looked for to analyze how the current crisis also offers new opportunities to the human beings for the resistances to the current system in the different sectors: peasants, workers, indigenous, africandescending, migrants, women, young and old people, professionals and citizens at all the levels that demand a justice and more equal world, in peace and harmony with the nature. There are diverse processes; with multiple actors that face radical oppositions of minority elites in function of interests of classes or of dominant groups whose alone objective is the accumulation of money, wealth and power, above other human considerations. These processes find in the crisis - like in all the social processes - new organization difficulties, cultural, ethical and ideological, but also new opportunities. They are dialectical processes that demand determination, realism, concrete strategies, but mainly clarity of vision and information.

3. It is looked for to analyze how the crisis offers opportunities for the construction of new institutions or for the improvement of integration processes started before, as it happens today in Latin America. The world is needy of constructive multinationals and multicultural solutions ; to assure the justness, the common good and the common security, the progress, the peace, the freedom and the integral democracy, exits that they won't be able to arise from those that have taken humanity to the edge of its own extermination.

4. We seek that this observatory transcends the academic role and be an instrument of information and documented alerts for the people in their struggles, for the construction of alternatives and to make proposals in the different spaces and regions of the world.

5. It is wanted for this Observatory to be an exchange place in the world to socialize the ideas from a constructive and interregional multidisciplinary perspective. In this sense it can become a construction instrument, for exchange and unification of approaches to concert proposals at national, regional and world level.

6. Finally, the XXI century is like a time that could be the end of the history or the beginning of a new history; that is to say, a period when the humanity can be reconstructed as human race, for the future generations and their continuation, learning and building, starting from the errors and the successes of the past. That is the challenge for the humanity: to build the alternative or the transition toward something superior in function of the maximum creation that we can wish, the integral human being in harmony with himself and with the nature.

Organizing Committee