Victor M. Toledo
C.
I start the year with the following reflection. Beyond the left and the right, beyond the party and the market, critical thinking appears with increasing force. Its main inspiration is a science that is interdisciplinary, collective, public and with social and environmental commitment. This science has been built in recent decades against the current of the academic apparatus. This new modality of science, which arises from the sum of the theory of complexity with the theory of emancipation, no longer blindly stops at the exclusive profession of specialized scientific work, but instead places knowledge, philosophy and ethics.
This critical science is the one that has warned rigorously and in no less detail that either the social urgency and the environmental urgency must be faced and overcome, or humanity will be in chaos in a few decades. Both emergencies are caused by capitalist globalization or, if you prefer, corporate capitalism, and both have been revealed by a science concerned with transmitting its main and disturbing conclusions to world opinion. The social emergency is that humanity is experiencing the worst social inequality in history and the greatest concentration of wealth in a minority of minorities. The main scientific verification comes from the Paris Laboratory on Social Inequality, in which some 100 researchers from 80 countries collaborate, led by Th. Piketty and L. Chancel. The environmental or ecological emergency is carried out by the Intergovernmental Program on Climate Change (IPCC), founded in 1988 by the United Nations, which has published numerous reports; the last in 2021. The IPCC revelations made by thousands of researchers have shaken and even become subversive.
Of the various thinkers who, since the middle of the last century, warned about what we are experiencing today, including Erich Fromm, Arthur Koestler and Ivan Illich, I share some phrases by the philosopher Karel Kosik (1926-2003) from his latest book, Masterfully translated directly from Czech by Fernando de Valenzuela, antediluvian reflections (Editorial Icaria, 2012).
“The system of real socialism that failed in Central and Eastern Europe worked convinced that the reason The highest level of society was personified and embodied by the party, which therefore had the monopoly and inalienable right to direct, order and regulate everything: from the economic, the political and the cultural to the scientific and the military. But in the end it became clear that the much praised and revered party, that conglomerate of pagan church and bureaucratic police vulgarity, only existed and acted as a mixture of stubbornness and blind arrogance. That’s why his domain I had to collapse sooner or later. Today the site of that failed institution is occupied by another body that with the same arrogance and blindness presents itself as the normal that responds to human nature, such as reason finally found and applied to society, the functioning of which will guarantee prosperity and freedom. That instance is the market, which is also considered as the superior and decisive reality. Just like the party in the past, the market today attributes a monopoly position to itself and refuses to tolerate that something else, different, can be at its height and even less above it. Everything that is not subject to the market – the free, the dignified, the poetic – it ends up engulfing it and incorporating it into his mechanism” (pp. 126 and 127).
Kosik identifies as the cause of this double blindness, an obsession of the rational and free modern being: “To dominate nature, to become a monopoly owner and lord… [que] builds a system that guarantees comfort and produces well-being, but also devastation, senselessness and emptiness” (p. 25).
Critical thinking is maintained and increased through scientific, secular, public and popular education, and in social transformations it leads the avant-garde postulates and spurs the renewing forces to carry them out. In Mexico, the government of the 4T is contributing, as it has not been seen in a long time, to the expansion and multiplication of critical thinking among the young generations, especially from the marginalized sectors, with its Youth Building the Future programs (2.4 million scholarships ), the system of Benito Juárez Universities (45,000 students), the strengthening of the 12 intercultural universities, and the change of course in scientific and technological policy with the transformation of Conacyt. Today, critical thinking stimulates and strengthens the five sectors that make up the main forces of radical transformation: feminism, peasant communities, indigenous peoples, environmentalists, and scientists.
