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Public
FTAA.soc/civ/152
June 14, 2005


Original: Portuguese
Translation: FTAA Secretariat

FTAA - COMMITTEE OF GOVERNMENT REPRESENTATIVES ON THE PARTICIPATION OF
CIVIL SOCIETY

CONTRIBUTION IN RESPONSE TO THE OPEN AND ONGOING INVITATION
 


Names(s) Paulo Augusto Antunes Lacaz
Organization(s) Free Lancer - on Religion (Cult - Dogma and Regimen), Politics and Philosophy, based on the Positivism Doctrine)
Country Brazil
FTAA Entities addressed
in the contribution
FTAA Process

MIAMI 1994 – FTAA PROCESS – PLAN OF ACTION – III – ERADICATON OF POVERTY AND DISCRIMINATION IN OUR HEMISPHERE.

BOOSTING SMALL AND MEDIUM-SIZED ENTERPRISES

    Given the inevitable situation of having to produce indefinitely on large scales and in series, it became necessary to separate entrepreneurs or directors (employers) from most workers (proletariat) and to promote the specialization in one of the branches industry was divided into agriculture, livestock-breeding, manufacturing, trade, services, banking and mining.

One expresses private needs, and the other social, proletariat and patrician or employer needs, respectively.

One expresses the need to execute the other and the need to direct or manage motivated by the mutual misunderstanding of their respective social duties.

As human society cannot be reduced to a single class, either the proletariat class (communism) or the employer class (capitalism or individualism); the issue that needs to be addressed is how to create harmony between these classes so that they cooperate as needed.

That is why the communists proclaim that since social capital is in their origins and their destiny, it must belong to society. This reveals the error of communism, because it is tantamount to admitting that there is a social function that needs to be exercised not by individual organs but by the collective body itself, which is absurd! Furthermore, this violates Aristotelian principles because it makes convergence annul individual independence, which hampers progress.

Anarchy or capitalism, which is characteristically individualistic, works in the opposite way, because it depresses social convergence by exaggerating individual independence, which also violates one point made by Aristotelian social ethics: if everyone stops being an employer, what happens to social relations?

Only positive sociology addresses independence and convergence at the same time, by harmonizing them since they are indispensable for social existence.

Good is only achieved when altruism rises above selfishness in human behavior, and bad is achieved when the reverse happens, when selfishness predominates and personality becomes subordinate to sociability.

The logical path of reason is “to induce to deduce, so as to construct” for the purpose of “knowing to foresee, so as to provide for”, because otherwise it is “a flood of words falling on a desert of ideas.”

The positive appreciation of labor capital, the two main essential functions of material activity, as in any other sociological analysis, must always take the following principles into account, which at heart refer more to moral than to social issues:

1. The basic Aristotelian principle of the division of labor combined with a convergence of efforts;

2. The conviction that all phenomena have foundations and that therefore, in sociology, as in biology, there are no functions without organs, and no organs without functions;

3. In sociology, social functions can only be exercised by individual entities;

4. As these entities are endowed with unequal doses of altruism and selfishness, it should not be forgotten that socially, altruism, not selfishness, is the efficient force.

5. Therefore, sociology, which studies collective human phenomena, cannot be properly conceived without considering morals, which individually study the organ of all social function, namely humankind.

Through this short presentation, we can now visualize that the proposal to separate all enterprise into small or microenterprises, in which the employer is not the employee, is an adequate social solution, as there would be no competition and human beings would already be in a phase of wanting to do good to others, as they would be trying to produce the best for others at a lower cost. Utopian but not chimerical.

Small enterprises, large material problems, due to waste and human sacrifices, the issue of how many enterprises open and how many remain. Therefore, establishing oligopoly, with antitrust and antidumping laws, would make it easier to control waste so as to attain the rational use of resources in response to the shortage of raw materials and the pollution that are worsening in our world. But given this whirlwind of capitalism that we are witnessing, we cannot suddenly break the chain because we would be causing immeasurable damage. It is better to now propose changes in this area (which needs to be rethought) and to devote ourselves body and soul to a globalization of positive morals to go hand in hand with the material globalization we currently have.

 


 
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