Ayotzinapa, emblem of the Twenty-First Century social order

by ANA ESTHER CECENA

(for Julio César Mondragón in memoriam)

Ayotzinapa is an ominous emblem of the atrocities generated by contemporary capitalism. Ayotzinapa is anywhere in our world where a dissident voice has been raised, a demand, a sign of rebellion in the face of the devastating dispossession and plunder on which the accumulation of capital is based, as well as the networks of power that sustain it.
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Twenty-First Century capitalism

It is increasingly clear that today’s capitalism runs on two tracks. On the one hand, we have the formally recognized society, with its economy, its organization and confrontation, its morality; and on the other the accelerating growth of a parallel society, whose economy is generically qualified as illegal, that works with a morality, organization and disciplinary methods that are quite different.

There are places in this world, such as Mexico, where the crises of neoliberalism, in addition to provoking substantial changes in their position in the international division of labour, in the definition of their productive activities and in the usage of their territory, have generated a social fracture that grows deeper over time. One of the central issues is that young people have lost their perspectives and a space to occupy. A society has been created with few possibilities for absorbing them, a society in which the chances of work or incorporation have disappeared, in which the horizons have faded out. It no longer had room for many existing workers, and much less so for those arriving on the scene. Some have called this Generation X, a generation that does not know where it is going because it has nowhere to go. The current phase of capitalist concentration has eliminated spaces even as it extends its power. Land, domestic activities, even entertainment were taken over, but growing sectors of the population were eliminated from the benefits, being left on the edge or becoming pariahs.

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