Padilla ’21 [Luis-Alberto; 2021; president of the board of the Guatemalan International Relations & Peace Research Institute (IRIPAZ), member of the International Peace Research Association (IPRA), former Secretary General of the Latin American Council on Peace Research (CLAIP), Director of the Diplomatic Academy, Former Vice Minister, former ambassador in Chile, former permanent representative to the United Nations at the Vienna International Centre, former ambassador to Austria, former ambassador to the Russian Federation, former ambassador to the Netherlands, permanent representative to the UN in Geneva, and professor of the Seminar of World Geopolitics at the Faculty of Political Sciences of the Catholic University Rafael Landivar (URL) of Guatemala; Sustainable Development in the Anthropocene, “Richard Wolf,” Ch. 5.3.3, p. 231-232] SPark
According to the American scholar Richard Wolff, capitalism and democracy are in permanent contradiction, given the fact that corporations and enterprises are ruled by CEOs and managers who answer to the owners of capital, not to society and citizens. Consequently, radical reform of the economic system is needed to democratize the economic system by creating, for instance, producers’ cooperatives, or democratically managed enterprises that might be an alternative which generates a new, genuinelysocialistmode of production which is fully consistent with the ultimate rationale underlying Marx’s theoretical approach in Das Kapital. Furthermore the proposition that firms should be run by the workers on their own was endorsed in the past by famous and well-known liberal thinkers such as John Stuart Mill and John Dewey - one of the prominent philosophers of the twentieth century - as well as Marxists like Karl Korsch, Wright Mills and Antonio Gramsci. Besides, the stark contrast between the innermost driving force behind capitalism and generally recognized ethical values, such as Christian ethics that extol virtues such as benevolence and care for our fellow-beings, condemns greed and discourages the accumulation of wealth, so there is nothing to be admired in individuals whose actions are solely guided by the personal profit motive, rather than the duty to take care of their fellowbeings, i.e. the behaviour of people operating in capitalistic systems of interpersonal ties does not proceed from democracy, but from the development of capitalism. Thus the establishment of a new system founded on solidarity is an absolute necessity, given that in capitalism “all the higher bonds of love and solidarity are dissolved: from the bonds of craftsmen’s guilds and social castes to those of religion and the family” (Gramsci 1994: 134). In a new democratic economic system where a cooperative or enterprise is ruled byworkers’ councils, “limits are placed on the sway of capital in the workplace” and people gain autonomy and freedomas members of collectives. Hence socializing production also involves humanizing the workplace, making it is possible to say that citizens are better forged in the factory than in the electoral district. This also explains why it is important to press for the permanent inclusion of workers in the strategies and bargaining agendas of all trade unions. Furthermore, if the supreme value of life is not to have but to be, being oneself and enjoying life will be facilitated by a socialist order founded on being, rather than having, and this will be the result of the active involvement of workers in economic life as free citizens.
