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The great Christian personality Emmanuel
Mounier declares: “Everything is political, although politics isn’t
everything.” Fábio Konder Comparato, lawyer and activist,
despite the grave deceptions that he has suffered with politics, categorically
affirms: “Outside of politics there is no salvation.” Several
Spanish organizations that work with youth reported in a poll that 60%
of young people have no interest in politics. The simple people in our
regions of the interior of Brazil talk about politics, a priori and a
posteriori, as an evil: “being political” with someone is
to squabble or feud.
So where are we? Politics yes or politics no?
In this World Latin American Agenda for 2008, after talking
about democracy in the 2007 Agenda, we believe that it is more than appropriate
to talk about politics.
It is necessary to recognize the deception that politics causes in practically
all countries. It creates an attitude of distrust, of scorn to the point
of indignation towards politics. What are the causes? Unfortunately, it
is easy to name them: the scandals of corruption, nepotism, the fraudulence
of electoral promises, bogus alliances, the deadweight of national oligarchies,
and the submission of governments and politicians to the macro-dictatorship
of Neoliberal capitalism….
The collective experience, in almost all countries, but especially in
the Third World, is a dance of centuries that masks the same pseudo-politics,
based on power, profit, and privilege. Politics has been made into a business,
the recourse of the elites who keep perpetuating themselves—always
the same people, openly right-wing, and consecrated to the status quo.
As the joke goes, “Let’s stop trying to accomplish political
change with politics! Let’s accept politics for what it’s
good for: doing business.”
This politics has to die. Worldwide it is already a dead politics for
the society that wants to live humanely and construct an authentically
democratic, participatory, and humanizing future, free of the inequalities
that cry to the heavens. The economy grows, but simultaneously so does
inequality. Structural adjustment plans, forced upon poor countries by
current politics, have failed, but still they demand much suffering, misery,
and even blood. “The current process of globalization,” writes
Stiglitz in his book Making Globalization Work, “is provoking destabilizing
results as much between countries as within countries. It creates wealth,
but there are too many countries and people that do not share its benefits…These
global disequilibriums are morally unacceptable and politically unsustainable.”
It has been opportunely affirmed that this inequality assassinates globalization.
It is necessary to come together to engage in multiple processes—in
different places and in different ways—that are at the service of
“equitable globalization,” which shares increases in wellbeing
and conquers misery.
It is essential that engaging in politics becomes a basic exercise of
citizenship. Citizenship is the political recognition of human rights.
Because we are humanity, we are society. The Italian philosopher Giorgio
Agamben argues that “[t]he separation between the human and the
political that we are now experiencing is the extreme phase of the rift
between the rights of the human being and the rights of the citizen.”
Our Agenda surveys the history of politics. It confronts the exercise
of current politics with the demands of human rights, citizenship, cultures,
the role of the laity, inter-religious dialogue, ecology, and communications
media. Current politics has in its hands the manipulation of public opinion
and “the colonization of subjectivities.” For the majority
of humanity, it is a politics that has to die, and that is already a dead
politics. However, politics, the “other” politics, cannot
die, precisely because humanity cannot live without it. Politics is the
organization of human life, the process of society. Politics is more than
a dimension—it embraces all dimensions of social life.
In our Agenda, by denouncing this iniquitous politics, we vindicate true
politics: an “other” politics of justice, transparency, service,
and participation, created and lived locally and globally. This politics
renovates traditional institutions, many of them rotten and unjust, and
supports new institutions. It works for the political formation of citizens.
It suggests attitudes, processes, and campaigns, and it seeks solutions.
We all know that “agenda” means “what we need to do.”
The goal of this Agenda, therefore, is to assist us in thinking about
what we must do so that politics lives—resurrected and distant from
“the whitewashed tombs”—and that it be a human and humanizing
politics.
Following Max Weber, we want to distinguish between politics
as a profession and politics as a vocation. Rubem Alves has written, in
a memorable article entitled On Politics and Gardening: “Of all
vocations, politics is the most noble…of all professions, politics
is the most vile.”
It is necessary to dream while moving forward. We want to and should be
politicians, that is, practice politics. Totally committed and hopeful,
we come together, men and women—and at every moment more and more
women are entering different spheres of politics—to enter into this
great mobilization of goals, forums, campaigns, and achievements. We demand,
loftily dreaming, that politics be an exercise of love, the daily celebration
of a coming together that is truly human. We demand a brotherly and sisterly
politics, a daily prayer to Humanity, and the best worship of the living
God. We want to be politicians and to practice politics, without neutrality
and without even-handed hypocrisy. In his celebrated speech at the University
of Louvain, Saint Romero of the Americas exhorted: “To be in favor
of life or in favor of death. Every day I see with more clarity that this
is the choice we have to make. No possible neutrality exists. We either
serve life or we are complicit in the deaths of many human beings. Here
our faith is revealed: we either believe in the God of Life or we use
the name of God to serve the executioners who bring death.”
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