Initial conditions for a development and environmental policy: an approach based on concrete rights to life

Abstract

This paper attempts to analyze, in a critical way, a crucial issue concerning every development proposal: the formal criteria of decision and their respective theoretical frameworks, whether we talk about economic development, human development, or just development. These criteria are necessarily inserted in a social labor coordination system and determine the ends and goals of action. Moreover, we emphasize those structural features of underdeveloped capitalist countries that are urgent to address and overcome: unemployment, social and regional inequalities, social exclusion, and environmental destruction. We conceive the human being as a person with concrete rights deriving from his position in the whole of the social division of labor, and therefore, from his position in a concrete social community. Every society, in order to be a free society, must assign these concrete rights to life for every human being.