Aporophobic policies

When at the end of the 90s Attac warned about the consequences of the financialization of the economy, we could not yet guess how far the destructive power of today's digital and financial capitalism would go.Saskia Sassen already announced the evolution of the economic system towards a massive extractive capitalism (Expulsions, 2014). In the 20th century, the economy was based on the production of material goods and it was necessary to have citizens with the economic capacity to acquire them, which is why the political axis was inclusion, the welfare state. On the contrary, in a world where profit comes from financial speculation, people have ceased to have value as producers and consumers, and worrying about the welfare of the middle and lower classes is a waste of resources. Thus, the system now pivots around a radical logic of massive exclusion or expulsion of a large part of the population to the margins of the system. The current configuration of financial capitalism no longer generates generalized well-being, but rather the growth of inequality. While some elites enrich themselves disproportionately, the working and middle classes are being displaced towards precariousness and impoverishment. To austerity policies and reduction of public services, unemployment, and the loss of labor rights, is added the dynamic of financial capital which, in order to continue expanding, needs to commodify and appropriate the basic goods and services of life, such as housing, healthcare, education, and pensions, and cause their scarcity or elitization. The consequences of this economic evolution are incompatible with the cultural framework that has governed us since the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the UN (1948). To affirm that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights and […] should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood” has a revolutionary scope today, because capitalism needs to expropriate and undermine lives and rights to extract value.The far-right is the instrument of extractive capitalism not only to promote its deregulatory proposals and suppressors of rights and guarantees in various areas of life, but also to generate in society another mental framework that facilitates the advancement of these expropriatory economic and social policies, not only without citizen resistance, but with acceptance and adhesion, by influencing schools, education, culture, and the media. As E. J. Díez says, “neoliberalism and neofascism constitute two inseparable expressions of the same current configuration of the capitalist system”. Thus, the far right generates and generalizes discourses that break the basic consensus of equal rights based on human dignity, and legitimizes inequality and restriction of rights to some groups. Rights? Not for everyone. The far right points the finger at those who are already in an initially disadvantaged situation to accentuate it. Their apparent fight is against feminism, against migrants, against the most excluded social sectors, making them appear as culprits of economic and social problems or scarcity to justify their expulsion from the welfare system, while the real culprits are hidden. Starting to cut rights first for some, in the future for many more. In this context of growing social exclusion, aporophobic policies emerge, executed wherever the far-right and its follower right-wing parties govern, including on our island. When Mrs. Prohens, president of the CAIB, opposes the administrative regularization of migrants and says that “not everyone who arrives is a being of light,” she is saying that it is no longer enough to be a person to have rights; they are granted or not according to the power's pleasure and convenience. And in general, they are taken from the most disadvantaged. Why spend money on them? We see it nearby. For example, the massive deregistration of precarious residents in Palma, the refusal to register homeless people and caravanners. The harassment of homeless people. The dehumanization and criminalization of minors in transit to deprive them of their rights as minors. The suppression or restriction of benefits such as the guaranteed social income. The transfer of designated land (intended for services) to real estate developers with the excuse of a lack of housing. There is a future for everyone, but we must defend it today.