Men are born equal and have the right to freedom and the pursuit of Happiness. These words, commonplace today, were first handed down for over two hundred years.
came on the wings of the American and French revolutions in the late eighteenth XVIII, and helped to encourage people to build the fortunes of another way.
A revolutionary transformation.
In past times, people are not created equal, however, were naturally uneven. Neither had the right to freedom, restricted to those calling the shots. As for happiness, that was enough to conform to the current Order. So thought the elite and most societies. It was natural that it did, because it always been like that.
But these revolutions have changed ways of seeing life. And would change history forever.
However, frightened by the power of dreams raised, some men, of good and goods, then tried to impose limits. Equalities and freedoms would be enjoyed only in certain circles - those who could read, owners, men and whites. In the manufacture of the first liberal constitutions restabeleceramse privileges that appeared to have been extinguished forever.
But the damage was done, the apple had been bitten, the virus is known, had spread.
Workers blacks, women, underprivileged, marginalized, the unlucky in life, from all walks of backbiting, scatterbrained and down-shaven, all wanted the same delicacy. As if there were no more kings, everyone wanted to be kings. In the course of his major breakthroughs appeared the first questions: we want too!
The more astute to realize the danger that had formed. Those waves ... no longer possible to stop them.
Consequently, alternative proposals have emerged: democratic and socialist. Power does not would only be for the people, but should be exercised by him, by the people. And equality, they wanted it more comprehensive, covering other dimensions of human life: employment, security, education, health, even the sacrosanct property would be collective. It was unbearable, everyone wanted everything.
The long nineteenth century was the history of these struggles and it tended to be associated with democracy and socialism. Democracy, effective, would be socialist. Socialism, authentic, would have to be democratic, or would not be socialism.
Pressures grown so large that, even among liberals, he admitted the necessity of a process that was gradually able to expand access to suffrage and participation in public affairs. Yet democracy was still anchored in the socialist proposals. Between socialism and democracy, an equal sign.
entãoa came World War I, and its scope, came the Russian revolutions. Prompted by socialists, marked, in its beginnings, radical democratic organizations - the councils workers and soldiers, the Soviets.
But democracy did not work. Traditions, circumstances and choices led to the formation of a revolutionary dictatorship. In fact, under the Russian Empire, no one knew what democracy was or had ever existed democratic institutions. Moreover, years and years of wars, as always, defined centralized political structures, tyrannical. Finally, the choices socialist Bolshevik Party, fearful democratic institutions that will steal the power, closed with thick bars the political process.
converteuse Socialism Soviet socialism in the quarter. Militarized dictatorship. The Communists, as well observed G. Orwell, a new elite have become more equal than others.
the same time, continuing the mutation of liberalism, ever closer to democracy and even references socializing. After the Second World War, fought against the Nazi beast, in the name of democracy, independence of peoples and social justice, consolidouse process. On the basis of universal suffrage, he graduated from liberal democracy, naturalizing the association of two terms, as if they had, always walked together. This did not stop many liberals of supporting dictatorships, according to circumstances and interests.
The Soviet system, reproduziase, albeit with their own color, China, Central Europe, Cuba, building up a new sign of equality between socialism and dictatorship.
In two centuries, the mutations and the ironies of history.
Liberalism classical, elitist, undemocratic and unpopular, insensitive to social demands transformarase in liberal democracy, incorporating social and democratic demands, an actually existing liberalism.
Socialism, the Soviet version was hegemonic throughout the twentieth century, and while making profound social and economic reforms, converterase a world governed by dictatorial states, powerful, but unable to seduce.
If there is a grain of truth in these reflections, the reinvention of socialism in the future depends, paradoxically, a well-directed back to the past. In the inventory of his scars, the Socialists should rescue the equal sign between socialism and democracy, political and precious cultural heritage and beautiful tradition, forged in the nineteenth century and abandoned in the bends of tortuous paths followed by the socialism of the twentieth century.
Published in The Globe on 06/06/2010. Imagined Communities
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