Political alternatives in an era of dilemmas

On April 8 at Sesc-Pompeia in São Paulo, the debates and presentations continued on how to build alternatives in today's world and emphasizing the importance of knowing what to do. Moderated by Miriam Nobre, of Brazil’s World March of Women, the panel began with her intervention affirming the need to build an alternative agenda at the same time as carrying out an organizational process to defend that agenda, recalling, moreover, that it was something that Nalu Faria, a historic Brazilian activist and founder of the World March of Women, who passed away in 2023, used to say.

In addition to Miriam Nobre, Najib Akesbi, a Moroccan professor and researcher, Duma Gqubule, a South African researcher, and Andreina Tarazón, former Minister of Women of Venezuela, participated in the panel. All the presentations revolved around the urgency of the Global South to reform its political systems so that they cease to be structures for the administration of crises and become engines of development and long-term social inclusion.

“The dilemma is how we construct narratives and models that respond to individual aspirations on the basis that the central objectives of our projects are dignity and human rights, always under the rational principle of the common good,” says Andreina Tarazón, who also asserts that, without ignoring individual needs, it is necessary to move towards collective paradigms.

In this panel, all the participants talked about ideas and possible paths for alternatives in this global scenario. “The issue of political power, how it is expressed, how it is exercised and managed, is a matter of the utmost importance because it is not only the product of the conditions on which it is built, but because it can in turn change them when the great movements of transformation in our countries do so. Today more than ever, we need to reflect on a fundamental truth: The way power is organized in a society has a direct impact on the lives of its people, on the food that arrives on the table, on the school that opens its doors, on the health we take care of and on the future we dream of,” says Tarazón.

In this sense, Tarazón gives a concrete example of when internationalist projects, once they leave the political power of their own countries, put the possibilities of influencing the global agenda at risk and in check. “By the way, today and tomorrow the CELAC summit is being held in Honduras. This mechanism can be a faithful example of how its weakening and strengthening has been at the mercy of electoral cycles in Latin America,” she argues.

The speakers also raised the difficulty of planning in government projects that last an average of five years when education, industrialization, social inclusion, technological sovereignty and environmental sustainability are processes that require decades, constancy and coherence in the design and execution of policy. 

In this sense, Andreina Tarazón emphasizes: “They lied to us and measured the quality of our political systems by the number of electoral processes we held, by the number of presidents we can elect in a decade...they told us that the more robust and of higher quality our democracy was, the more national plans we left halfway because the supposed democracy is about that, changing course every 5 years. In this type of model, there is more improvisation than planning. More management than transformation. This, my friends, is the formula for failure, for backwardness and for poverty for millions of people.”

The common problems

Although they all mentioned similar situations, Najib Akesbi's dissertation differed somewhat from the others: he spoke of the union of the countries of the Global South in common problems and adversities. 

Among the major common problems, Akesbi mentioned: 1) Our dependence on the Global North, including its financial institutions (IFIs), its military-industrial complex, and its ideological and media arsenal; 2) We have begun (or ended) by opting for the market economy and integration into the world economy, which have proven to be... counterproductive; 3) We have suffered - to a greater or lesser degree - from Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP), and many of us continue to suffer from them in other forms because we are still trapped in the “debt cycle”; 5) Our economies continue to be more marked by the logic of income than by that of a supposedly free and competitive market.

Likewise, he also expressed his views on left-wing governments and limits: “Any left-wing government that cannot free itself from limits will find that social inequality and the environmental crisis end up increasing. We are united because we have the same problems and we have to face them,” said Akesbi.

In this sense, Duma Gqubul argued that in addition to governments, the left has a communication problem: “we are always on the defensive”. He also added that in his country, South Africa, the private sector does not substantially participate in any of these debates, similar to those of Dilemmas of Humanity, since businessmen simply generate panic and noise with respect to these discussions and do not sit down to debate them.

Proposing possible alternatives

The focus of the discussion was on proposing possible alternatives, although both Duma Gqubule and Nayib Akesbi presented proposals for overcoming the current crisis, Andreina Tarazón presented a successful option: the case of China. 

“The People's Republic of China offers us a powerful example, although not without contradictions, of how a political system can be the axis of a national transformation project. Under unquestionable political leadership, the country designed an institutional architecture that allowed it to maintain stability and a long-term vision. There was no improvisation. There was direction. There was no populism. There was strategy. There were no external recipes. There was a national interpretation of the challenges,” explains Tarazón.

She added: “China, with all its challenges and contradictions, has been able to read and respond to those aspirations. It has generated a national narrative of shared progress. And that narrative has been its most powerful source of legitimacy. This is undoubtedly a topic of the utmost importance and study for those of us who are looking for alternatives, who are looking for ways out of the dark tunnel of a century marked by structural inequality.”

In the case of South Africa, Duma Gqubule argues that his country needs to reorient itself towards strategic objectives like other countries in Africa, Asia and the BRICS in order to stop depending on the United States and Europe. Gqubule also argues that “there must be unity in the Global South to generate common responses to the crisis.”

That is why, although Trump's “Liberation Day” has had a negative impact, “a market crisis does not necessarily mean an economic crisis,” explains Duma Gqubule.

In the same vein, towards the end of her speech, Andreina Tarazón said that “it is time to build alternative political systems to the ones we have known until now and which have not resolved the great dilemmas of humanity. Political systems that not only organize elections, but also guarantee the future”.