"
Now in a new edition, with a preface by Itamar Vieira Júnior, Por uma outra globalização deals with globalization as a fable and as perversity.
"For Another Globalization" aims to be an independent reflection on our time, on its material and political foundations, and a desire to explain the problems and pains of the current world. But, despite the difficulties of the present era, it also aims to be a message carrying objective reasons to continue living and fighting.
Leaving aside the “copious lists of quotations” that generally characterize books that aim to study societal issues, Milton Santos directs this book to the common reader, who dispenses with the ceremonial obligation of references.
The book, first published in 2000, remains relevant throughout. An example taken from the author's introduction:
The central emphasis comes from the conviction of the role of ideology in the production, dissemination, reproduction, and maintenance of current globalization. This role is also a novelty of our time. Hence the need to analyze its fundamental principles, identifying its strengths and weaknesses. Our insistence on the role of ideology stems from our conviction that, given the same existing materials, it is both possible to continue making the planet a living hell, as we are witnessing in Brazil, and also feasible to achieve the opposite. Hence the relevance of politics, that is, the art of considering change and creating the conditions to make it effective. Indeed, the transformations that history has recently shown allow us to glimpse the emergence of more promising situations. It may be objected that our belief in human change is unjustified. What if what is changing is the world?
For Milton Santos, historical change will come from a bottom-up movement, with underdeveloped countries, not rich countries, as its main actors; the disinherited and the poor, not the opulent; the liberated individual, a participant in the new masses, not a chained individual; free thought, not a single discourse. Current globalization will not be irreversible, and universal history is just beginning.
"[This book] is a chain of reflections that invites us to consider the possibility of a new world. Together, we can develop a feeling that I call engaged hope. It is the sentiment found in the very title of this work. The other globalization that Milton Santos evokes is a human globalization to be realized in this popular period of history. Technical foundations can be at the service of the social and political foundations of all, and not just at the service of large corporations. Only in this way can we establish a new history, based on a network of horizontal reciprocity that we know as solidarity. A globalization where indigenous philosophies and thoughts will not be stifled by global capitalist rationalism." – Itamar Vieira Júnior, in the preface to the new edition.
"
