4/YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE!
- What is needed is a clear change of tack, placing the satisfaction
of human needs at the heart of government policy. To this end,
restrictive measures must be taken against the holders of capital.
The oppressed can become agents for revolutionary change.
Globalisation can be avoided; those who insist it cannot should
know that they can be removed from office (Chapters 17 and 18). - After almost 20 years of neo-liberal policies, economic growth
has not reached the levels of the three decades that followed the
Second World War. Development has not only slowed, the new
neo-liberal framework means that inequalities have increased
both within countries and between the countries of the centre
and those of the periphery (Chapters 1-4). - The type of globalisation underway has meant a recentring of
investments, production and trade towards the world's three
main industrial, financial and trade poles: North America,
Western Europe and Japan (Chapter 3). - The Third World and the former Eastern Bloc have been mar
ginalised, except for a small number of countries (Chapter 3).
Within these two regions of the world, accounting for 85 per
cent of our total population, there has also been a growing mar-
ginalisation of a majority of the population, concentrated in the
most dispossessed zones. - In the countries of the North, a growing minority have been
excluded from productive activity. They survive thanks only to
the mechanisms of collective solidarity (social security systems)
that were the fruits of struggles by the oppressed through much
of this century. Otherwise, they live off scraps and the
underground economy (Chapter 1). - In its current form, globalisation has meant both an opening of
borders for capital flows and a closing of the borders of industri
alised countries to the populations of the Third World and
former Eastern Bloc (Chapters 8 and 12). - Wealth is produced by human labour and nature. A growing
proportion of the surplus of human labour is being channelled
into the financial sphere by the holders of capital. They invest a
decreasing share of this surplus in the productive sphere. This
process cannot continue indefinitely. If a change in tack is not
made under pressure from below, it could last for some time and
be the source of repeated and increasingly damaging financial
crashes (Chapters 3, 4 and 16).