[News] The Future Will Only Contain What We Put into It Now

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/53-new-year/ The Future
Will Only Contain What We Put into It Now: The Fifty-Third Newsletter (2020)
Vijay Prashad - December 31, 2020
------------------------------

Português
<https://www.thetricontinental.org/pt-pt/newsletterissue/cartasemanal-53-ano-novo/>
हिन्दी
<https://www.thetricontinental.org/hi/newsletterissue/newsletter-53-nav-varsh/>
Deutsche <https://ifddr.org/kooperationen/newsletter_53_2020/>

[image: Image in homage of Bolivian people’s resistance by Tings Chak
(China)]

Image in homage of Bolivian people’s resistance by Tings Chak (China)

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
<https://thetricontinental.org/>.

Towards the end of November, United Nations Secretary General António
Guterres addressed the German Bundestag to celebrate the 75th anniversary
of the United Nations (UN). At the heart of the UN is its Charter
<https://www.un.org/en/sections/un-charter/un-charter-full-text/>, the
treaty that binds nations together in a global project, which has now been
ratified by all 193 member nations of the UN. It is well worth reiterating
the four main goals of the UN Charter, since most of these have slipped
from public consciousness:

   1. To prevent the ‘scourge of war’.
   2. To ‘reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and
   worth of the human person’.
   3. To maintain the integrity of international law.
   4. To ‘promote social progress and better standards of life’ as a means
   to enlarge the experience of freedom.

Guterres pointed out that the avenues to realise the aims of the Charter
are being closed off not only by the neofascists, who he euphemistically
calls ‘populist approaches’, but also by the worst kind of imperialism, as
illustrated by the ‘vaccine nationalism
<https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/48-covid-vaccines/>’
driven by countries such as the United States of America. ‘It is clear’,
Guterres said, ‘that the way to win the future is through an openness to
the world’ and not by a ‘closing of minds’.

[image: CoronaShock: A Virus and the World. Cover image by Vikas Thakur
(India).]

*CoronaShock: A Virus and the World*. Cover image by Vikas Thakur (India).

At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we take the UN Charter as
the foundation of our work. To advance its goals is an essential step for
the construction of humanity, which is a concept of aspiration rather than
a concept of fact; we are not yet human beings, but we strive to become
human. Imagine if we lived in a world without war and with respect for
international law, if we lived in a world that honoured fundamental human
rights and tried to promote the widest social progress? This would a be a
world where the productive resources would no longer be used for military
hardware but would be used to end hunger, to end illiteracy, to end
poverty, to end houselessness, to end – in other words – the structural
features of indignity.

In 2019, the world’s nations spent
<https://www.sipri.org/media/press-release/2020/global-military-expenditure-sees-largest-annual-increase-decade-says-sipri-reaching-1917-billion>
nearly $2 trillion on weaponry, while the world’s richest people hid
<https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2019/09/tackling-global-tax-havens-shaxon.htm>
$36 trillion in illicit tax havens. It would take a fraction of this money
to eradicate hunger, with estimates ranging
<https://reliefweb.int/report/world/multibillion-dollar-question-how-much-will-it-cost-end-hunger-and-undernutrition>
from $7 billion to $265 billion per year. Comparable amounts of money are
needed to finance comprehensive public education and universal primary
health care. Productive resources have been highjacked by the wealthy, who
then use their money power to ensure that Central Banks keep inflation down
rather than pursue policies towards full employment. It’s a racket, if you
look at it closely.

Two new World Bank studies show that, because of a lack of resources and
imagination during this pandemic, an additional 72 million primary school
aged children will slip
<https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2020/12/02/pandemic-threatens-to-push-72-million-more-children-into-learning-poverty-world-bank-outlines-new-vision-to-ensure-that-every-child-learns-everywhere>
into ‘learning poverty’, a term that refers to the inability to read and
comprehend simple texts by the age of ten. A UNICEF study shows that in
sub-Saharan Africa an additional 50 million people have moved
<https://reliefweb.int/report/world/covid-19-catastrophe-children-sub-saharan-africa>
into extreme poverty during the pandemic, most of whom are children; 280
million of sub-Saharan Africa’s 550 million children struggle with food
insecurity, while learning has completely stopped for millions of children
who are ‘unlikely to ever return to the classroom’.

The gap between the plight of the billions who struggle to survive and the
extravagances of the very few is stark. The UBS report
<https://www.ubs.com/content/dam/static/noindex/wealth-management/ubs-billionaires-report-2020-spread.pdf>
on wealth bears an awkward title: *Riding the storm. Market turbulence
accelerates diverging fortunes*. The world’s 2,189 billionaires seemed to
have ridden the storm of the pandemic to their great advantage, with their
wealth at a record high of $10.2 trillion as of July 2020 (up from $8.0
trillion in April). The most vulgar number was that their wealth increased
by a quarter (27.5%) from April to July during the Great Lockdown. This
came when billions of people in the capitalist world were newly unemployed,
struggling to survive on very modest relief from governments, their lives
turned upside down.

[image: CoronaShock and Patriarchy. Cover image by Daniela Ruggeri
(Argentina).>]

*CoronaShock and Patriarchy*. Cover image by Daniela Ruggeri (Argentina)

Our most recent study
<https://www.thetricontinental.org/studies-4-coronashock-and-patriarchy/>,
*CoronaShock
and Patriarchy*, should be compulsory reading; it provides a sharp
assessment of the social – and gendered – impact of CoronaShock. Our team
was motivated by the acute state of deprivation in which billions of people
find themselves and how that deprivation morphs basic social bonds towards
the hyper-exploitation and oppression of specific parts of the population.
The report closes with an eighteen-point list of demands that are a guide
for our struggles ahead. We make the case that the capitalist states are
controlled by elites who are unable to solve the basic problems of our time
such as unemployment, hunger, patriarchal violence, and the
underappreciation, precarity, and invisibility of social reproduction work.

The texts that we published this year – from our red alerts on the
coronavirus <https://www.thetricontinental.org/red-alert-7-coronavirus/> to
the studies <https://www.thetricontinental.org/studies/> on CoronaShock –
seek to orient us towards a rational assessment of these rapid
developments, rooted in the world-view of our mass movements of workers,
peasants, and the oppressed. We took seriously the view
<https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/02/1057431> of the World Health
Organisation to ground our studies in ‘solidarity, not stigma’. Based on
the startlingly low numbers of infections and deaths in countries with a
socialist government from Vietnam to Cuba, we studied why these governments
were better able to handle the pandemic. We understood
<https://www.thetricontinental.org/studies-3-coronashock-and-socialism/>
that this was because they took a scientific attitude towards the virus,
they had a public sector to turn to for the production of necessary
equipment and medicines, they were able to rely upon a practice of public
action which brought organised groups of people together to provide relief
to each other, and they took an internationalist – rather than a racist –
approach to the virus which included sharing information, goods, and – in
the case of China and Cuba – medical personnel. Because of this, we
– alongside other organisations – have joined the campaign
<https://www.cubanobel.org/> for the Nobel Prize for Peace to be given to
the Cuban doctors.

We have assembled a remarkable archive of material on CoronaShock and on
the world that it has begun to produce. This includes a provisional
ten-point agenda
<https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/25-2020-ten-point-agenda/>
for a post-COVID world, a paper first delivered at a High-Level Conference
on the Post-Pandemic Economy, organised by the Bolivarian Alliance for the
Peoples of Our America (ALBA). In the first few months of 2021, we will
release a fuller document on the world after Corona.

[image: CoronaShock and Socialism. Cover image by Ingrid Neves (Brazil),
adapted from People’s Medical Publishing House, China, 1977]

*CoronaShock and Socialism*. Cover image by Ingrid Neves (Brazil), adapted
from People’s Medical Publishing House, China, 1977

On a personal note, I would like to thank the entire team at
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research for their resilience during
the pandemic, their ability to work at a pace much greater than before, and
their good cheer towards each other during this period.

We swim in the waters of our movements, whose fortitude against the
opportunistic and cynical use of the crisis by capitalist governments lifts
us up and gives us courage. Last week, the newsletter highlighted the
patient and dedicated work done by the young comrades of the Communist
Party of India (Marxist) in Kerala, who work to build a humane and just
society. The same kind of work can be seen amidst the Landless Workers’
Movement in Brazil (MST), and it can be seen in the Copper Belt region of
Zambia, where the members of the Socialist Party campaign for next year’s
presidential election, and in South Africa, where the National Union of
Metal Workers (NUMSA) fights to defend workers against retrenchment during
the pandemic and where Abahlali baseMjondolo builds confidence and power
amongst shack dwellers. We see this great endurance and commitment from our
comrades of the Workers’ Party of Tunisia and the Democratic Way of
Morocco, who are leading a revitalisation of the Left in the
Arabic-speaking regions, and in the great application of the peoples of
Bolivia, Cuba, and Venezuela, China, Laos, Nepal, and Vietnam, as they seek
to build socialism in poor countries who face a sustained attack against
the socialist path. We take strength from our comrades in Argentina, who
struggle to consolidate the power of the excluded workers and to build a
society beyond patriarchy. We are a movement-driven research institute; we
rely upon our movements for everything that we do.

At Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we harbour dreams of a
better life. We want to peer over the horizon to see what kind of society
human beings are building now that suggests the possibilities of a
post-capitalist, non-antagonistic life. For us, this new horizon is not
something that awaits us, fully formed, in the future; it is created in the
present by the struggles of the working class and the peasantry against
great material deprivation and by the dreams of a world outside this life
of indignity and want. The future, we believe, will only contain what we
put into it now.

We welcome you to donate
<https://www.paypal.com/donate/?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=MWPEXCCQMZNLL>
towards our work by visiting our website.

Happy New Year.

Warmly,

Vijay


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