La Jornada: The left also has to create wealth

Mexican runs to the left a risk that almost no one wants to discuss: you can win the moral battle against neoliberalism and yet lose the political battle of development. Not because it redistributes too much, but because it fails to create enough wealth to sustain that redistribution. That may become the main contradiction of the Fourth Transformation for years to come.

For decades, the left was right to denounce the limitations of the neoliberal model. Growth was insufficient, inequality persisted, the State lost strategic capabilities and trade liberalization did not produce the promised development. But proving that one model failed is not the same as proving that a better one exists. Sooner or later, every political project must answer the same question: how to create more wealth in a sustained manner?

That is the point at which the Mexican debate usually deviates. A false dilemma is often raised between market and State, between growth and redistribution, between efficiency and social justice. None of these oppositions explain how a nation develops. Wealth does not appear because a government distributes it, someone had to create a new product, open a new market, develop a new technology, introduce a different way of organizing production or found a company capable of competing. That is true innovation and, at the same time, the ultimate source of growth.

Mexico never managed to build a system that made innovation a permanent practice. First we protected companies without requiring sufficient learning from them, then we opened the economy hoping that international competition would solve the problem. Neither strategy created an economy capable of continually generating new products, new companies, and new technologies. We export more than 40 years ago, but we continue to depend on knowledge, financing and a good part of the strategic decisions that are made outside the country.

That is why the real challenge of the Fourth Transformation is not only to expand social programs or raise salaries. It consists of building an economy capable of sustaining these advances for the coming decades. Present well-being matters, but it does not guarantee future well-being. This will depend on Mexico strengthening its national companies, incorporating innovation into production, developing competitive suppliers and ensuring that the financial system – including commercial banking – finds it profitable to finance long-term productive projects instead of privileging almost exclusively short-term activities.

That requires a different State. Not a State that replaces the market or an entrepreneurial State, but a State that organizes incentives so that innovation is more profitable than importing technology, competing through low wages or living off protected incomes. A State capable of coordinating universities, companies, governments and the financial system; use public procurement to develop markets; support strategic sectors, but demand results; temporarily protect activities with potential, but withdraw support when there is no learning or productivity.

The national discussion should focus precisely on these capabilities. Are new products being developed? Are Mexican companies capable of competing internationally emerging? Does innovation reach the productive apparatus? Does commercial banking finance long-term investment? Do universities actively participate in the technological transformation of the country? These are the questions that distinguish an economy that manages the present from one that builds the future.

The left won the argument about the need to better distribute wealth. Now he must win a much more difficult one: show that he also knows how to create it. If it does not produce visible results in productivity, innovation and growth, its social support will inevitably begin to erode. Impatience will appear first; then, the doubt; finally, the search for an alternative. Not because the right necessarily has better answers, but because no society maintains its trust indefinitely in a political project that fails to expand the material opportunities of the majority.