These days we often talk about the threats facing democracy. It is done due to the rise of far-right forces around the world and the destabilization attempts that occur from one country to another to serve openly authoritarian ends. The richest man in the world, protagonist of some of these recent attempts, already announced those intentions years ago: We will overthrow whoever we wanthe said regarding a political crisis in Bolivia. Now, as that doctrine becomes practice, it becomes even more evident that the main threat to democracy is not electoral, cultural or ideological: it is the unlimited concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a minority. Faced with this, the answer is not withdrawal but advance. Redistributing time, power and wealth today is defending democracy.
This argument is not at all new. In fact, it is one of the principles of democratic thought since its origins in the classical world: political equality that gives meaning to let’s give It was considered incompatible with the hierarchies and servitudes generated by the excessive hoarding of power and wealth (which for the Greeks was typical of a plutocracy: the regime in which the rich rule). It was also one of the premises on which the welfare states of the 20th century were built: the conviction that the most egalitarian, most cohesive and most just societies were also the most dynamic and the most prosperous. The decades of neoliberal rule buried that conviction under ideals that today return in increasingly gloomy forms: the society that exists only as a group of individuals; he I liberated of all interdependence, which inevitably translates into every man for himself; the cult of millionaires like the wonderful people who carries the parasitic weight of others on their shoulders.
Today these ideals no longer support the defense of the free market and the “minimal democracies” that nourished the ideology of the globalized world. At the very least, they have become ammunition against social rights and public freedoms that until recently were considered little less than unquestionable. Authoritarian political projects are built on them, which promise firmness to face the challenges of an increasingly unequal, unjust and violent world. The formula is exactly that: more inequality, more injustice, more violence against those who have the least. Meanwhile, the fortunes that finance these projects and direct their destinies do not stop growing and multiplying for all to see.
Of course, being scandalized by this threat today is of little use. The best way to counteract the authoritarian project that spreads by exploiting fear, uncertainty and the feeling of precariousness is to act in the opposite direction, creating more security socialthat is, democratizing power, time and wealth. In other words, the way to defend democracy is not to entrench ourselves, but to deepen it: more redistribution, more welfare state, more social protection. It is not only a desirable formula to achieve fairer, more stable and cohesive societies. It is also the only viable alternative to the authoritarian ideals that are replicated around the planet.
Unfortunately, we do not talk about other people’s realities. In Spain, the richest 1% of people concentrate up to 22% of the wealth. The top 10% own more than half of the country’s wealth. In contrast, the poorest half of the population barely owns 8% of the total wealth. While a small minority monopolizes an enormous amount of resources, the working majorities have almost nothing. It is an unfair, dangerous and ineffective distribution from all points of view. It is also a difficult order to alter, as it represents powerful and well-organized interests.
Recent attempts to democratize labor relations serve as an example of these obstacles and resistance. Time and again it was announced that the increase in the minimum wage and the labor reform were going to destroy jobs and endanger the business and economic fabric of the country. Today the data shows just the opposite. Historical employment levels have been reached, temporary employment has been drastically reduced, as has the gender wage gap. Low-income households have fallen 25% compared to 2019; those with low employment intensity have been reduced by half. Inequality, measured by the Gini index, is at the lowest figure since 2008. The economy, far from the announced apocalypse, is growing well above the European average. Salary improvements, especially in the lowest deciles of the income distribution, have acted as a driver of the country’s economic development.
It was not true, therefore, that improving the position of labor in the distribution of the country’s wealth was contrary to economic performance. It is important to remember it today, when some of those arguments return due to the confrontation over the reduction of working hours for 12 million workers. It is also important to remember it for another reason. In 2023, with the latest data available, 26.5% of the population in Spain was still at risk of poverty and social exclusion. For children and adolescents, this percentage was 34.5%. Behind the persistent, structural reality of poverty in Spain there continues to be an unequal and unfair distribution of wealth, which is not only unaffordable and immoral in a rich society: it is also contrary to economic interest and a threat to social and political cohesion. of a democracy.
From there are derived the political priorities that we defend within the Government. The reduction of the working day; greater tax capacity on multinationals and large fortunes; the intervention of the housing market, which today has become a risk factor for poverty for the working class; the adoption of a universal child-rearing benefit (configured precisely as a new right of citizenship: the right for poverty and inequality not to be an inherited destiny). It is evidence that, in this difficult context, each of these measures collides with major obstacles, and that sufficient force and social pressure will be needed to counteract them. This is because each of these measures reiterates that same purpose: the redistribution of wealth, power and time as a democratic horizon for society.
A famous economist once said that the wealthiest would be able to turn off the sun because it does not pay dividends. The darkness that we sense in the present is not separated from that blind and short-term effort to defend the current order and the position of those who have the most. Redistributing wealth and power, defending a general interest that is today inseparable from political freedom and social justice, is not only a more effective, more capable and more stable formula than the failed corsets of neoliberalism. It is also the only way to defend democracy against those who today want to empty it, besiege it or subvert it.
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