The social wars

By Ignacio Ramonet, Le Monde diplomatique, November 2002

SINCE September 2001 and the war in Afghanistan people feel the world has been dominated by political violence and terrorism. For over a year the press has created an atmosphere of fear with images of bombings, massacres, hostage-taking.

Hardly a week seems to pass without bloodshed in the world—Israel, Bali, Karachi, Moscow, Yemen, Palestine. It feels as if a hurricane of conflict of a new kind is sweeping the planet, and as if we face the prospect of a war against terrorism even more cruel than the wars that preceded it—a war in which the American invasion of Iraq will be merely one episode.

This impression is false. In fact, political violence has never been at such a low ebb. Politically motivated insurrections, wars and conflicts have rarely been so few. Surprising though it may seem, and contrary to the media impression, the world is actually a calm and largely pacified place.

Look at the present geopolitical landscape and compare it with 25 or 30 years ago. Almost all the radical protest groups engaged in armed struggle then have disappeared. And most of the high- and low-intensity conflicts that each year caused tens of thousands of deaths across the world have now passed into history.

Almost all the troubled zones fired by the Marxist project for creating a better world have either been, or are on the way to being, extinguished. There are now only a dozen or so focuses of violence worldwide: the whole of the Middle East, Colombia, the Basque country, Chechnya, the Ivory Coast, Sudan, Congo, Kashmir, Nepal, Sri Lanka, the Philippines. Admittedly, radical Islam, devoted to the armed struggle, has appeared and moved to centre stage. But even the spectacular actions of Islamic fundamentalism cannot hide the fact that political armed struggle is far less widespread.

There are obviously other forms of violence at work. We could begin with the economic violence perpetrated against the world with free-market globalisation: the violence of the rulers against the ruled. Inequality is reaching extraordinary proportions. Half of humanity lives in poverty, and a third in misery; 800m people suffer from malnutrition; almost a billion are illiterate; a billion and a half have no access to safe water; two billion do not have electricity.

And incredible as it may seem, these billions of wretched of the earth are keeping politically quiet. This is a great paradox of our time: we have more people in poverty but less people in revolt than ever before. Can this continue? Probably not. Because Marxism is exhausted as an international motor of social struggle, the world is in transition. We are in a phase between two cycles of political revolution. Social injustice is more outrageous than ever, and partly as a result of this other kinds of violence are extreme. In particular the violence of the poor against the poor, and primitive forms of revolt (1) expressed in illegality, criminality and insecurity. Little by little, in one country after another, these moments of violence and revolt are taking on the characteristics of what we could call social war.

Thirty years ago in Latin America and other parts of the world, a young man with a gun might have enrolled in a political organisation committed to armed struggle as a way of bettering the lot of humanity. Today a young man with a gun would think first of himself, and viewing himself as a victim of the way that the ruling classes have reneged on the social contract, he might decide to break that contract by robbing a bank or shop. In Argentina the rate of criminality has quadrupled since the big economic crisis began in December 2001 and pauperised the middle classes

In Brazil, one of the most inequitable countries in the world—where the electorate has just voted massively to elect the candidate of the poor, Inacio “Lula” Da Silva, to the presidency—the scale of this social war is extraordinary. In Rio de Janeiro alone, more under-18-year-olds were killed by bullets between 1987 and 2000 than in all the conflicts in Colombia, Yugoslavia, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Israel and Palestine put together. During the past 13 years 1,000 young people have died in the confrontation between the Israelis and the Palestinians; in the same period 3,937 were murdered in Rio (2).

Faced with this rising tide of what the media calls insecurity, several countries—including Mexico, Colombia, Nigeria and South Africa—now spend more on fighting this social war than on national defence. Brazil spends 2% of GDP on its armed forces and more than 10.6% on protecting the rich against the despair of the poor.

The great lesson of the history of humanity is that in the long term people will always revolt against worsening inequality. The present rise, in North and South, of illegality and criminality, often primitive and archaic manifestations of social agitation, is a clear sign that the world's poorest have had enough of social injustice. It is not yet political violence. But we all suspect that it might be a lull before a storm. How long will it last?

Notes

(1) See Eric Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in archaic forms of social movement in the 19th and 20th centuries, Praeger, New York 1959.

(2) El País, 11 September 2001.