The difference between liberal capitalism and neoliberal capitalism is small but significant. In liberal capitalism the issue was development and hopefully many people were to benefit from it. Today the issue of neoliberal capitalism is not development but modernisation. The needs of the people are not considered, technology is, in this growing process of investments.

Speculation is talked about in neoliberalism. At the world stock exchanges, money is transferred from city to city through internet in search for better investments. In the neoliberal system exclusion is talked about. Perhaps the most perverse phrase that I read during these last years was the one of an American economist Paul Samuelson, in the Newsweek magazine. He stated the following: “The war against poverty ended, and the poor people lost it”. Nothing can be done and no concern is any longer available for the poor. In the mechanism of production the excluded are not the problem of neoliberalism, they are a necessary consequence to facilitate the accumulation of capital.

The market is a new God, omniscient, omnipresent, globalised. The difference is that the few happen to benefit from the market. In fact the market exists for those privileged few that have access to accumulation of wealth.

We used to talk about values. Today we talk about success, it does not matter that to be successful all values are sacrificed.

In the past, the socialist governments used to talk about the nation and the social responsibility of the state which assured to all basic needs such as education, health, housing and work. Today the governments talk about privatisation of all the state’s enterprises, education, social services, public health and worse of all our values.

We are not stupid, we all know that the present socialism in existence today in various Latin American countries make errors and have problems. But we are stupid to the point not to distinguish that in these countries, the fundamental basic needs are now structurally guaranteed, while nowadays these rights in Europe are not fundamentally guaranteed.

All week as TV viewers, we are invited for a manipulation of our intelligence. We are dehumanising ourselves for modernisation, the technological advance and the currency stability, for the total instability of the nation by excluding the environment and social justice. This is the complete investment of the new technology.

Privatisation is a very aggressive phenomenon that affects our hearts and minds. People no longer have any social preoccupation for justice, it no longer matters what is going on in the world, and people are becoming more indifferent to the values of solidarity and friendship. People participate less in collective causes because they believe less in the possibility to change society, into a less selfish society.

Lino Vella

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