¿No dejar a nadie atrás? La Agenda 2030, la cooperación para el desarrollo y la construcción de la hegemonía en un mundo en crisis

This article aims to critically expose the changes in the political configuration and economic processes of the 2030 Agenda since its approval, based on the evolution of the historical bloc and the alliances that made the creation of this Agenda possible, as well as the analysis of the role of development cooperation as one of the international instruments that apparently promotes the fulfilment of the Sustainable Development Goals. The article is structured around three main axes. The first argues that what is at stake with the 2030 Agenda is the social reproduction of capitalism and the alliances around development. It analyses the direct and proportionate relationship between the accumulation of capital and the accumulation of misery, and the way in which this relationship is managed, as well as the role of development cooperation in these processes. It also presents an alternative characterisation of the actors involved in development actions and cooperation, based on the so-called position in relation to capital, and then conceptualises the so-called false community of interests around development, analysing the construction of hegemony and the alliances that have historically taken place in the international institutional superstructure to ensure social reproduction under capitalism. The second axis exposes the continuities and changes in the composition of the ruling class and its expression in the international institutional superstructure linked to development, characterising the two factions of the ruling class that are in dispute for leadership in the shaping of international alliances to manage social reproduction in general and the implementation of the 2030 Agenda in particular: the liberal and the far-right. The third section presents the main contradictions of the 2030 Agenda and sets out a series of premises for overcoming the framework conceived by the 2030 Agenda, which is inseparable from the development of capitalism. More specifically, the analysis of the changes that have taken place in the ten years since the adoption of the 2030 Agenda begins by situating the implementation processes of this agenda and those specific to development cooperation as fundamental elements in the social reproduction of capitalism. To this end, first of all, the direct and proportionate relationship between the accumulation of capital and the accumulation of misery is presented. This relationship, fundamental to understanding the processes of development, implies that the accumulation of capital inseparably leads to a series of processes that harm the working class and nature. In order to avoid the problems that this direct and proportionate relationship can generate in social reproduction under capitalism, part of the accumulated capital is allocated to what in this article we call “misery management”, a set of processes that apparently seek to improve living standards, but which, being oriented towards capital accumulation, generate situations of poverty and ecological degradation somewhere along the way. One of these processes of misery management is development cooperation, which is redefined in this article as a set of processes aimed at ensuring an expanded social reproduction for the central actors and an atrophied one for the poor countries, reproducing the logics of domination and economic polarisation linked to imperialism and coloniality. The article also introduces the concept of the “false community of interests around development”, referring to global interclass alliances between central and subordinate actors to manage social reproduction on an international scale. Its falsity is based on the use of hegemony and ideology to link actors with more or less antagonistic interests. To understand this community of interests, an alternative classification of the actors involved in the 2030 Agenda and in development cooperation processes is presented based on the so-called “position in relation to capital”, based on their dominant or subordinate position and the roles they play (funder, regulator, manager or implementer), all mediated by issues of class, sex, gender and race, as well as by the axes of imperialism and coloniality. In this way, it is possible to undertake an analysis of the growing difficulties in the construction of hegemony and alliances by the ruling class, especially with regard to the implementation of the 2030 Agenda. The article specifies that the threats to the 2030 Agenda do not come from an exogenous, anti-capitalist actor, but from the dispute between the liberal faction and the emerging ultra-right faction for global hegemony. This section exposes the problems for the liberal faction of the ruling class to remain also the ruling faction, largely because of the dissonance between its ideological postulates and its economic and political praxis, marked by the violation of international law and human rights or the inability to stop the intensification of the climate crisis. This has led to a tendentially greater inability of the liberal faction to maintain political control and to respond ideologically to the antagonisms of class, sex, gender and race and the contradictions that are generated within the framework of the development of capitalism. Because of this, and because they are part of the same dominant social class, the liberal faction is beginning to negotiate with the ultra-right faction in order to maintain its power. For its part, the far-right faction is also described alternatively in the article. In addition to the rejection to a greater or lesser degree of liberal democracy, the defence of social hierarchy, populism, nativism and globalism, a tendency towards authoritarianism when it comes to (political) power and a defence of the heteronormative family, we link the far right to processes inherent to capitalism such as racism, imperialism and coloniality. The article demonstrates that the critique of the 2030 Agenda does not necessarily exhaust the elaboration of development partnerships but will seek to eliminate those elements that harm the most powerful actors. In light of this, the repeated claim that it is the far right that is jeopardising the fulfilment of the 2030 Agenda is fallacious; not because its proposals are not dangerous or anti-human, but because the contradictions are not between this far-right faction and the 2030 Agenda or development cooperation, but between the economic and political praxis of the ruling class, which puts social reproduction at risk, and the ideological content of the 2030 Agenda, which is increasingly disconnected as the crisis of capitalism progresses and inequalities and antagonisms are accentuated. Faced with the exhaustion of the dominant theories to explain the current scenario and of the instruments and actors involved in the international agenda to try to mitigate (at best) some of the effects of the development of capitalism on nature, here we consider why both the 2030 Agenda and development cooperation fail as processes of misery management, oriented towards the generation of processes of capital accumulation and therefore of misery. To this end, it has been essential to expose the forms of mystification and fetishism that affect development and cooperation, and it also sets out a series of counter-hegemonic premises to propose scenarios that go beyond the 2030 Agenda and development cooperation as ways of managing social reproduction under capitalism. The article is constructed on the basis of an alternative epistemological framework to international relations studies. The theoretical framework is grounded in Marxism, decolonial studies and non-hegemonic feminisms and ecologies, while the methodology used is based on Marxist dialectics and relational thinking.