Decolonize our economic theory and praxis and its traumatic consequences on Human Rights

 by Marcelo Lobosco

Philosopher of Law Specialist in Educational Policies in Philosophy University of Paris 8, France Ghent University, Belgium

LUX MUNDI by NIX RUO

Acrylic on canvas, 100 x 100 

The ethical-mythical cores, as stated by Ricœur, are the cores that carry the foundations of a national culture. They are the cores that create the identity of a people, an ethnicity, a nation.

These cores can be thematized, assumed, socially recovered and objectified, or, as previously stated, they can be censored, prohibited, denied, alienated, consciously or unconsciously, in the deepest layer of a historical-social identity. The point is to contemplate the mapping of this desire that has brought us so many difficulties in the process of historical metabolization.

We believe that politically, memory refers to the painful recent past.

However, philosophically speaking, it has its roots in a more distant past, originating from the instituting practices that give meaning. Memory is intertwined with the ethical-mythical cores, the creators of culture. When we refer to the concept of memory as Argentinians, as Latin Americans, we allude to the recent past. But if we delve deeper and read it philosophically, we must delve into the ethical-mythical cores, which are intertwined with memory in the original instituting practices.

I understand instituting praxis, with Castoriadis, as the practices that institute, regulate meanings in the ordering of social logic, generating imaginary significations of the historical-social world. But this instituting praxis, as our philosopher and psychoanalyst Castoriadis says, requires the social institution of time; it must not be done from a conjunctive-identitarian logic, that is, from a logic that subsumes and reduces the difference of the other in the dialectic of the same and the other, without recovering it. Because history is alterity-alteration.

Our postulates start from this recovery of the self, but taking into account Hegelian negativity, we will resignify the concepts of science and technology sedimented in the lifeworld in an interpretation that goes beyond the immediate past.

Finally, it is relevant to recover the traces of our cultural history, of our traumatic past, not only in the political sphere but also in the economic sphere, of our economic self and the other, in order to recover ourselves as a community, as a people, as a nation. It cannot be that we become aware of political crises, which has been very important in the defense of human rights and collective memory, in order to regain meaning for our actions, but we do not consider the crises that we have every seven or ten years in the economic area as traumatic elements in the psyche of our fellow citizens.

This implies difficulties in having a predictable country for ourselves and for others. Devastating crises regarding human rights have been and are taken into account by the State and civil society. But economic crises also have traumatic effects on our identities as a people, and that, from our perspective, should be a human right to be considered by public agents, our political strategists, and our entrepreneurs, so as not to always depend on credit from multilateral organizations, as is the case with a neoliberal government, and to hegelianly unite differences, symbolic integration in terms of Paul Ricœur, and not differences of unity. As Umberto Eco (2019: 14) said in response to a taxi driver: "Italians have no external enemies, and in any case, they cannot agree on who they are because they are always at war with each other." Could that not be one of the variables of Argentinians? I say one of the variables because there are always many variables. And the cultural element (understood as social representations of ourselves and others) plays a preponderant role.

That is why our utopia is to decolonize our praxis, as developed countries do, taking care of their historical interests.