PES Manifesto

Let us not leave the peoples of the world hungry for more...

Published Monday, April 14, 2008 at 14:46
by Pierre_Kanuty (738 views and 0 comments)

What a cruel joke and what a fundamental question we are confronted with today: just switch on your television set or read your newspaper, and you will see how much the prices of raw materials have increased. This in turn has led to an explosion of violence in the developing countries, with what we now call the 'hunger riots'. Let us not forget that the same kind of riots often led to big revolutions in the past.

Since then, democracy has allowed us to generate the necessary conditions to anticipate these problems in order to solve them with all parties involved. If the weapon of the hungry and the poor remains violence, it is because politics and democracy are not part of these processes. Indeed, for a long time, the functioning of international regulatory bodies has been put into question. As socialists and social-democrats, we are not calling for their abolition but rather for their democratization. The work launched by the French socialist Dominique Strauss-Kahn at the head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) follows this rationale in a will to better represent emerging countries. The idea is that the IMF should no longer be the 'banking police of rich countries' systematically oppressing those nations in need.

We are working on the PES manifesto for the 2009 elections and in a couple of weeks, the Socialist International will hold its Congress in Athens. It is high time that all progressive forces remember the meaning of their mission and their historical role. The socialist and social-democratic workers' movement was very often born out of hunger and poverty riots in XIXth century Europe. It put the problem in a political framework and allowed the hungry and the poor to organise themselves and gave them the power to change the situation for millions of people. It was not just about the 'ownershp of the means of production' or about 'destroying the bourgeois state'. It was about defending what we now would call 'decent work for a decent life'. It would be bizarre and certainly tragic not to be up to the task today... The work of political parties at international level is getting more and more formal. It is high time we come up with a useful concept of social-democracy.

Tags: decent work, food crisis, poverty