From Risk Society to Dismantlement of Welfare State

Abstract

Globalization focuses on the development of new productive, trade, and economic techniques. However, this process, evolutionary technologically, has involved, paradoxically, an involution in important roles of our political, social, and cultural life, basically, about the misinformation in administrative procedures, the lack of legal security, and an atomization of the individual wills. That"™s Ulrich Beck has called "the global risk society". A society where organized irresponsibility and power relations of some international actors with political and enterprise weight govern important financial and economic resources for their own benefit. "The risk society" has imposed its own political rules of control and loss of control, defining new ways of organization -out of citizens or politicians- governed by those economic forces. In this new scenario, the past does not determine the present events but the future, uncertain and fearsome, makes conditional on the present courses of action. A kind of prevision or precaution on impending disasters determines our future which nowadays does not depend on us but on those in economic and technological control. The new precautionary scenario begins with threats and ends with the demolition of social gains made in recent decades. The outcome of this risk society is the systematic destruction of public values like solidarity, trust, or common good, and their replacement by the primacy of economics over politics and the consideration of the market as the only effective means of allocating resources. Some resources, public in many cases, that are managed in a totally private way, and whose benefits are given up from traditionally considered public goods: education, health care, dwelling, social services, pensions, and indeed justice. Against this, the most consistent solution, most daring and the most difficult passes to reassign new powers to the states, to reinstate the sovereignty of citizens in decisions that affect us, and to share goods and public resources with parameters of ethics and social justice. A task that is not limited to simple political choice of our representatives, but in a personal involvement in all areas of our political, economic and social life.