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Facing the threat of a world organized by relations that destroy life and generate exclusion, inequalities, and violence, we need to think about how to build a fair, global society rooted in both diversity and solidarity. From the standpoint of Brazil, an emerging global power, but threatened by a huge social divide, and from that of Amazonia, the planet’s lung, which the market in its blindness is seeking to possess and wipe out, Grzybowski offers a few pointers for change based on studies by IBASE and the experience of the “great school of planetary citizenship”, the World Social Forum.

We are living at a crucial moment for humankind. Despite the pockets of resistance organizing within the Earth’s different societies, then interlinking from the local to the global level in the forms of coalitions and networks, today’s world is still dominated by relationships, structures, processes, interests, forces, and ideologies – all very powerful, all aiming at homogeneity and exclusion of that which will not be homogenized, all tending to intensify capitalist globalization. The persisting dominant forms of power and models of the economy are destroying the natural foundations of life, concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a few global corporations, and generating ever more exclusion and violence. Where are we heading? How can a world of social justice and sustainability be constructed? A world of equality in social and cultural diversity? Of rights and responsibilities, with solidarity, from the local to the global level? Of democratic participation and citizens’ power?

It is from this perspective – which is “global” and at the same time firmly rooted in the local, where we can actually exercise our citizenship to the full – that I would like to offer some food for thought. The ideas are rough, an effort to outline issues for a process of analysis, discussion, and comparison among partners sharing the same values, in the spirit that moves us to join in the World Social Forum process. There is also a degree of pragmatism in what follows, because we are facing the concrete challenge of holding the World Social Forum in Amazonia in January 2009. This entails thinking about Brazil and Amazonia from a world standpoint and thinking about the world from the standpoint of Brazil and of Amazonia, with its peoples and biodiversity.

I – Global “disorder”: How is the crisis of civilization to be confronted?

In the early twenty-first century, we are part of a threatened world. After three decades of ferocious economic and financial globalization, with rampant deregulation in the name of “the free market,” twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the bipolar Cold War order, we are facing challenges on a planetary scale. Capitalist globalization has completed and radicalized the interconnections among the world’s different societies in such a way that we are entirely dependent on one another, because what is done in any given place has all sorts of consequences for all the other peoples and habitats of the planet. At the same time, never before have we been so aware that things simply cannot go on like this. Nonetheless, we do go on… but for how long?

My feeling is that at the core of the crisis we are facing is the belief, now rid of ideological masks, in a development model as an ideal for all societies, founded on a vision of limitless progress, itself based on an industrial-productionist-consumerist model, whether under capitalism or under socialism, in the right wing and the left wing, in which neither wellbeing nor sustainability are even remotely aimed at. Or should we say wellbeing, yes, for the happy few at the expense of everyone else, in a pattern of production and consumption that the Earth cannot withstand, supported by a model of society that implacably leads to concentration in the hands of the few and to exclusion of the many through violence, terror, and war.

Nation-states and existing multilateral arrangements, especially those set up in the aftermath of World War II, can no longer cope with what is happening in the world. In the subsequent void, the USA and its bellicose imperialism is on a rampage like wounded bear with great destructive power but no direction. With the UN and the multilateral financial organizations (the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization) grown weaker and in the process of losing their capacity and legitimacy to regulate, what we are witnessing in the “recolonization” of the world is the law of the economically strongest, i.e. China as an emerging economic and nuclear power, and the major corporations, themselves more important than a great many nation-states, and the G-8 of the leading developed nation-states, which – whether extended or not – is more of a private “club” than a legitimate multilateral organization and takes no account of the diversity of emerging contradictions and demands, because its main object is precisely to make sure the crisis is kept alive.

The crisis of civilization – which can be seen in terms of challenges to an also emerging citizenry of planetary dimensions – can be seen in three dimensions:

•  Social inequality

The economy continues to expand globally against all societies. Inequality and social exclusion are becoming more marked worldwide, between countries, as well as within each society. Today, the poor of the South (migrants, communities of depressed zones, ethnic minorities, etc.) have been marginalized by the small developed North, with 10 % of the world’s population controlling more than 85 % of its wealth. Opposite the wealthy of the North (owners of land, cattle and people, businessmen and their “multinationalized” managers, and the political elite at their service) stands the South with its people, destitute of wealth and power, condemned to live off the crumbs. This multifaceted inequality with its multiple perversities goes beyond social classes and facing it requires an in-depth review of conceptual and analytical paradigms, and proposals and strategies of action. Our global mix is a combination of inequalities and forms of domination, the main features of which are patriarchism, racism, xenophobia, and the denial of diversity.

• Environmental crisis

This crisis is where three high-impact processes converge:

• climate change due to the greenhouse effect;
• the intensive use and depletion of non-renewable, fossil energy sources, which are the base of the industrial-productionist-consumerist model; and
• the destruction and exhaustion of our common natural assets, particularly water, genetic resources and biodiversity, and soil for agriculture.

• Violence

We are the witnesses of a proliferation of situations where open violence, intolerance, and are forms of fundamentalism are defining collective ways of life, imposing suffering and fear, threat and death, and the displacement and deterritorialization of large contingents of civil populations. Whole peoples are torn apart by endless conflicts, cities are divided and countries invaded. In a context of concentration and a limitless quest for profit, of economic inequality and unbalanced power, and of the exhaustion of natural resources, the dispute for control of those natural resources fuels the violence and inflames fundamentalism ever more strongly, leading to ever greater militarization.

In this three-dimensional crisis, “bad governance” and its concomitant absence of concerted regulation have become more acute. The former order of domination can no longer meet the challenges and the new order has not yet emerged. This is the context in which we need to position ourselves, Brazil and Amazonia. What does the world expect of us? What can we and should we do from here on, as active citizens, to meet this crisis of civilization?

II – Brazil as an emerging power: For whom?

Brazil is without a doubt a country of enormous possibilities – but there can be no disguising the levels of social exclusion, the vast pockets of poverty, the disgraceful, persistent, and multifaceted inequality. We are responsible for one of the world’s most important natural heritages. But destruction of those natural resources is progressing even faster than our economic growth rates. Our territory and our population place us in the small group of countries over-endowed with resources, but we seem unable to use that potential to generate a sustainable, fair Brazil, to contribute to building that other world.

Recent achievements deserve to be mentioned and acknowledged as bases for “another development,” but we must not deny that the above-mentioned limitations are real. The most important and fundamental of these achievements is our political democracy, which though still young, has demonstrated its vitality. We have come a long way in institutional terms, while recognizing that much remains to be done. Perhaps the most promising aspect is the willingness of broad sectors to participate in the process. Many, however, remain politically “invisible,” because they are not organized or are still heavily dependent on favors and unable to assert their rights. The fact is that we have a civil society with a potential for initiative, the expression of a democratic culture, and a social fabric interwoven with strong organizational fiber that is growing and gaining political strength.

What we are lacking and where our progress has been weak lies in the area of social democracy. Lula’s election as president meant that the lower classes of Brazil had come to power, and it seemed that we were finally laying the political foundations for the historical task of reconstructing a faire, sustainable Brazil. In practice, however, there are still only timid signs of significant change. The Brazilian state, which is managing our particular form of development, has been captured by powerful interests and forces, and confronting the latter will call for resolve and much more complex engineering than that set in motion by the PT to win the elections and keep itself in power.

We have made unquestionable progress in a number of social-policy areas, addressing urgent matters, such as hunger, and redeeming historical social debts. The fact is, though, that such policies are not strategically designed and nor even thought out as structuring a new model of development and, above all, of social democracy. They are immediately needed compensatory policies – no question about that – but they cannot bring into being a sustainable, fair, participatory society on good terms with all the peoples of the planet.

We are basically pursuing a development model that is predatory on nature, concentrates wealth, and reproduces enormous pockets of poverty. At least development is once again on the discussion table, even though the debate is essentially confusing development with GDP growth rates. We have, nonetheless, stopped – although rather hesitantly – the dismantling ordered by the Ten Commandments of the neoliberal “Washington Consensus” of the 1990s. For all its timidity, the Growth Acceleration Program (Programa de Aceleração do Crescimento, PAC) of the Lula government signals a kind of new start – albeit only for things we are already familiar with, such as large infrastructure projects, export production, and so on.

What is happening to Brazilian exports is a good example of the dilemma we are facing, of developing while aggravating the contradictions of the past instead of changing our course and outlook. Moreover, the “success” of our exports and our having produced a large trade surplus is seen by public opinion and specialized academic and business circles as a major indicator that strategy is on target, because it is pulling along the economy as whole. The problem is that we are going back to being a kind of primary-export economy, because 70 % to 80 % of our exports are nature: soy complex, coffee, meats, minerals and steel, paper pulp, and so on. To paraphrase Eduardo Galeano and his famous book on Latin America, I would say we are dilating our already-open veins in order to export even more the very bases of our own life. And now we have decided to include ethanol among our export products!

Of course, all this can be seen from the other side. In the terms of the dominant development model, in a world controlled by large corporations and with China’s capitalist expansion consuming whatever is left of the planet’s natural resources, Brazil’s option to exploit the “comparative advantages” of the moment seems like a good deal. A deal – and a big one – it certainly is, but what social and environmental debt will Brazil be diving into? Who gains from all this? As for the funds from this export surplus, are they financing social democracy or rather are they being captured in that all-engulfing logic that takes everything it can – even the lion’s share of the public budget – to boost profits?

The export question is a long way from exhausting the complex issue of the development model, but it does illustrate what I am trying to argue here. Brazil is coming up as an emerging power in political and economic terms, particularly in our region. However, I cannot see this emergence signaling progressive changes in the structure and process of relations that sustain dominant globalization. As a strategy, it even seems to suggest that we are tending to want rather to form part of the select group of countries that behave as if they owned the world – the G-8 group – than to express necessary, urgent changes in the geopolitics and organization that regulate world power so as to permit the construction of sustainable, fair, democratic societies in solidarity.

It is time, once again, to innovate boldly. We need to recognize the new threats and challenges to citizenship and democracy in Brazil, today in a context of greater openness to the world and greater interdependence generated by globalization and the enormous crisis spawned by it. This brings us back to the large questions facing Brazil in the world. One has to ask: What is the Brazil that the world needs and that our citizenry, in alliance with world citizenry, can produce? What state? What sovereignty? What democracy? What social justice? What type of sustainability and for whom? We can only construct these answers from what we have learned in the great school of planetary citizenship, the World Social Forum. It is a question of taking up our responsibilities as Brazilian men and women, but in open dialogue with other peoples and subjects of the world, recognizing that here we decide our future and we also influence the future of all of humankind, as managers of our lives and of the natural heritage that sustains them.