Collective Rights to Life and New Social Justice: Lessons from Latin America

For a long time, the basic legitimation of capitalist power was the private power ideology revealed by the rights of the elite to privatize collective and natural resources. This privatization strategy was central to pointing out another dogma, that is, the idea of inexhaustible resources supporting unlimited accumulation. However, the social and political recognition of the exhaustibility of resources is generating some reactions that question the general rights of privatization. Additionally, they suggest a new social justice hierarchy that underline the priority given to collective and natural rights in public policy management. Latin American cases, particularly Bolivia’s, are interesting ones to reflect about this change of development paradigms.