Northern Winds Do Not Move Windmills: The First Nuestra América Newsletter
Courage to confront and challenge power is necessary. The time of mere criticism is over. The price of cowardice will be the aggravation of the multiple crises. The economic emancipation of the Global South will not be a gift from history, but the result of collective struggle.
Candido Portinari (Brazil), Meninos Soltando Pipas [Children Flying Kites], 1941.
Greetings from the Nuestra América Office of the Tricontinental Institute,
It is with great joy that we share with you the launching of the Nuestra América Office, part of the regionalization process of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research in Latin America and the Caribbean. This space was created to accompany the struggles of the peoples of our region and the Global South, producing critical thinking and useful tools for political action from an anti-capitalist, feminist, anti-imperialist and anti-colonial perspective. We understand that, in the face of current challenges, it is key to articulate efforts from a regional perspective that recognizes our common histories, strengthens integration among peoples and focuses on collective solutions to the multiple crises we face. As part of this effort, today we present the first issue of our monthly newsletter, which seeks to be a bridge between organizational experiences, political analysis, and collective transformation strategies.
In this regard, our first newsletter takes on some of the challenges posed during the fourth conference of the Dilemmas of Humanity: Perspectives for Social Transformation, held in April in São Paulo, at the Sesc Pompéia, a former factory turned cultural center.
Architecture by Lina Bo Bardi, SESC Pompéia, Brazil. Photo, Nelson Kon, 1977.
As Donald Trump threatened the global economy with a new phase of the Cold War and a desperate quest to contain the emergence of a multipolar world, economists and activists from popular organizations around the world-especially from the Global South-answered the call of the International Peoples’ Assembly and the Tricontinental Institute to discuss the multiple crises of capitalism, marked by wars, extreme inequalities and environmental collapse.
During three days of debates, the decadence of the development model based on predatory exploitation was analyzed, where the Global North maintains its dominance through financial and technological control, while the South suffers chronic indebtedness, deindustrialization and the plundering of its natural resources. The reactionary response to this crisis – such as the advance of fascism in Europe, the U.S. and Latin America and the Caribbean – only aggravates the situation, criminalizing social movements and destroying democratic gains.
Dilemmas of Humanity not only reaffirmed the validity of socialism as a historical project but also took a fundamental step: It transformed the critique of capitalism into concrete proposals. Faced with a system that generates misery and environmental devastation, it is no longer enough to denounce it. The challenge is to build viable economic alternatives that put life at the center and break with the logic of capitalist accumulation.
Capitalism has proved incapable of resolving the fundamental dilemmas of our time. While the Global North imposes an international division of labor that condemns the South to dependence and underdevelopment, our economies reproduce structural inequalities. We discuss the configuration and consequences of this model and the threats to the planet in our study “Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous Decadent New stage”, produced together with Global South Insights (GSI). The way out will not come from the traditional centers of power; on the contrary, it must come from authentic regional integration, sovereignty over our resources and the capacity to produce for our peoples, not for the extractivist demands of the powers of the Global North.
An emancipatory economic project requires breaking the dependency’s chains. This implies public control over strategic resources -energy, minerals, and others of natural origin- so that they are at the service of autonomous development and not of transnational plundering.
Anonymous (Chile), Juntos en la adversidad [Together in Adversity], early 1980’s.
Industrialization cannot be an end in itself because, if it reproduces precarious jobs and subordinates itself to global value chains, it will only deepen inequality. In order to build industrialization with social justice, which generates decent jobs and redistributes wealth, it is essential to forge new commercial and technological alliances in the Global South, outside the circuits controlled by the traditional powers.
In the face of the emergence of a multipolar world and U.S. resistance to it, coordinated and integrated measures are required. No solution or change will take place in isolation. In the case of Latin America, our best chance is integration and joint action. Both to position ourselves in multilateral forums and mechanisms and to confront the current global financial architecture, led by the IMF and private banks -responsible for asphyxiating nation states with unsustainable debts-, as well as to counter the conservative offensive in the battle of ideas and values.
The conference was a space to move in that direction: From shared diagnoses to concrete programs. But this is only the beginning. The proposals discussed must be rooted in popular struggles, adapted to each context and, above all, build the necessary power to make them a reality. Because in the face of the civilizational crisis we live in, socialism is not a distant utopia: It is the only compass to navigate towards a future where the economy serves the people and not capital.
René Francisco Rodríguez (Cuba), Para Tomar Medidas [To Take Measures], 2003.
None of this is possible without organized social force and the audacity to emerge from the desert of mediocrity that plagues economic debates. Courage to confront the consolidated interests of the financial market and the war and technology industries, which have hijacked and disintegrated global governance bodies, is necessary. The price of cowardice will be the worsening of the environmental, energy, migration, economic and social crises. It is time to unite theory and practice, resistance and project.
The final message is clear: the time for mere criticism is over. It is time to organize, to build and to contest power. The economic emancipation of the Global South will not be a gift of history, but the result of collective struggle. And on that path, this conference has planted seeds that will undoubtedly bear fruit.
Stephanie1 and Miguel Enrique2
ps// For further reflection we would like to recommend two books: Fascismo, neofascismo y otras expresiones del capitalismo del Siglo XXI published by the Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe Rómulo Gallegos (CELARG), Casa de las Américas and the Network of Intellectuals and Artists in Defense of (REDH) and Nuestra América, EEUU y China. Transición geopolítica del sistema mundial coordinated by Gabriel Merino and Leandro Morgenfeld and published by CLACSO (Argentina) and Editorial Batalla de Ideas (you can purchase it here).
