"Globalization", in quotation marks, is not a new phenomenon. Neither is
it a strategy in itself. It is a process which is part of the
globalization of capitalism. And as a consequence, the current phase of
this process, when one looks at the results, turns out to be fragmented
and fragmenting. Thus, globalization as a goal, if we extrapolate from
this process as it presents itself today, is impossible: from an
ecological standpoint alone, it is impossible to duplicate the standard
of living of the wealthiest on a global scale; nor, in the logic of the
system, is there productive employment for all the planet's inhabitants.

Nevertheless, through the massive diffusion of elite consumerism -
assisted by the media -, and in a pirouette of absolute perversity, its
values have infiltrated even those groups without any access to this
consumption, those excluded from equity, from clean air and water, from
peace, from employment, from rights, from land, from their future, from
the media themselves... Nearly all of society has been inoculated by a
kind a of global illusion; a phantasm that creates and recreates
exclusion, which feeds competition by destroying solidarity, that rewards
inhuman wealth. If employment increases - seen as a premonition of
inflation - the stock market falls and financial performance suffers, as
is happening now in the United States.

If we naively take the perspective that everything is being globalized
and that all that remains is for us to globalize ourselves, we fall into
a trap. We have known for a while that the world is round, but it seems
we don't grasp that its capitalist roundness is exclusionary.
Capitalism, which has made possible the most monumental production of
material goods and the greatest technological advances in history, has
polarized their distribution in an equally monumental way: the three
richest people on the planet, all men and all North Americans (really, it
couldn't be otherwise), have a combined fortune greater than the GDP of
the world's 42 poorest countries, home to 600 million people. The
resources which the Europeans and the gringos use every year to feed
their pets would be sufficient to rid the world of hunger; for what they
spend on perfumes, every woman in the world could be assured of
reproductive health care.

We are faced with "a value system, a model for existence, a civilization:
the civilization of inequality", as Joseph Schumpeter put it. An
inequality exacerbated by the neoliberal religion of the market, which
undermines even further the two basic sources of all wealth: nature (the
ozone layer is deteriorating and the temperature of the atmosphere
increasing, causing ever more complex global climactic problems) and work
(which is structurally scarcer and more precarious, with a growing number
of excluded, even disposable, people, who lack even the privilege of
being exploited.)

A doubly perverse reality, whose results are insupportable, and which is
totalitarian in closing the door to alternatives. A reality which needs
to change by reducing the role of competitiveness to its proper
dimensions and reinforcing the role of solidarity, thus permitting the
generation of employment and an urgently necessary redistribution of
income, without waiting for the indirect effect of economic growth, and
subordinating economics to nature. A reality which calls for a cry of
indignation and at the same time hope from the excluded, as a starting
point for constructing a globalization without exclusion.