Is it possible to overcome capitalism, to advance towards social justice and equal rights and opportunities without democratising communication?

The answer is categorical: No, it is not possible. Media concentration produces wealth concentration. The evidence is abundant.

When the media is concentrated in the hands of and at the service of capital, it cartelises its discourse, both in traditional media and in the digital space, with the aim of obstructing the flow of human emancipation from capitalist objectification.

The phenomenon is strange and paradoxical: the capitalist failure to guarantee equitable well-being for the world’s population is presented to common sense as a successful and unique model, transferring to the public imagination a distorted and self-interested view of the facts.

This vision is repeated over and over again, clouding the subjective horizon every time organised social forces lead and promote possibilities for change. The deeper and more real the proposed change, the more brutal the attack.

In other words, capital attacks people’s rights not only with the aim of maximising its profits but also tries to appropriate individual and collective subjectivity to prevent any transformation.

As indicated in the Humanist Document: ‘Big capital dominates not only objectivity thanks to its control of the means of production, but also subjectivity thanks to its control of the media and information. Under these conditions, it can freely dispose of material and social resources, rendering nature unrecoverable and progressively discarding the human being.’

In this way, it turns out that the need to recover the common sense appropriated by a minority is inherent to the social and political struggle to achieve better living conditions for all. Redistributing, democratising, freeing communication from the monopolistic trap of capital is a requirement for a humanist revolution.

The Humanist alternative for Communication

Now, what is the guiding image, what is the humanist model that we propose? And even more, does the alternative already exist?

A society of distributed power requires decentralised communication. If one of the main objectives of a humanist revolution is to give back to the people the sovereignty that has been taken away from them, the same is true for communication, which should be in the hands of the organisations that emerge from the people.

And this has been one of the main motivations for grassroots, community, alternative, citizen, cooperative or sectoral communication: the defence and advancement of the rights won by the people. This type of communication, diverse and close to the social base, is the only one that guarantees the right to information and freedom of expression. Therefore, this is the media model that should be supported, strengthened and promoted.

At the same time, there is a clear need to articulate diversity in order to strengthen communication work in solidarity networks for the production and distribution of content and to modify the unfair balance of power that currently exists in the construction of narratives.

This is where we encounter difficulties. One of the main ones is how to make effective articulation in a world of increasing fragmentation. This works against the need for convergence in common political and communicational projects that serve as a framework for overcoming economic and social violence against the majority and for the expansion of rights and opportunities for every human being.

Thus, communication should not only be a mouthpiece for denunciation, vindication and permanent critical reflection, but also a vector for connecting and reconstructing the social fabric.

In addition to strengthening the articulation of spaces for popular communication, by increasing alliances with social actors made invisible by the dominant discourse, we believe it is essential to emphasise the need to establish a public-community alliance to replace the disastrous public-private association typical of neoliberalism.

This public-community alliance is a way for States to collaborate effectively with the decentralisation of communication and the promotion of transformative communication without seeking to control it, which will undoubtedly contribute to achieving the greater real democracy that is being demanded today, above all, by the younger generations, who are fed up with the manipulation and betrayal of formal democracy.

It is therefore particularly important that progressive political movements and leaders set their sights on a horizon of distributed communicational popular power, the only guarantee of social empowerment consistent with deep and permanent transformation projects .

Similarly, the advance of digitalisation makes decisive critical action by our movements and media necessary against the commercial logic that characterises corporate monopolies, aiming on the one hand at the effective limitation of their power, but also underpinning the development and use of those free tools that coincide in their design and are suitable for strengthening the organisational base of communities and their mobilisation.

The Fediverse, a federated universe of free digital platforms

In clear contrast to the wrongly named social networks, which are mere corporate technological apparatuses of surveillance, social control, data extraction and commodification of attention capture, there are already very interesting alternatives, which are growing day by day.

These are the free digital platforms, with a decentralised and federated design that make up the ‘Fediverse’. In contrast to the ‘digital latifundia’, free platforms represent the kind of ‘digital community garden’ that needs to be cultivated.

These networks are based on the collaborative and common heritage logics of the free software culture and contribute to transparency, care for privacy and autonomy and decentralisation in their management.

Finally, these spaces promote a techno-political conception that is not limited to a simple technological fetishism or a modification of habits in the individual sphere, but includes the use of non-corporate tools as part of an ethic of coherence and non-collaboration with the system, while trying to foster a different type of equal relationship as a substantial element of action in the digital sphere.

Non-violent communication

Likewise, the Humanist Revolution requires strengthening and extending the premises of non-violent communication, understanding that the intentional propagation of violence is inherent to the system and to a way of representing the human condition that does not allow us to go beyond oppressive conditioning.

This type of non-violent communication, present today in the intentions of many communicators and media, is taking on an increasingly systematised form in the daily work and training material developed by the international news agency Pressenza.

This mode of communication is, above all, an ethical commitment to the Human Being and to society as a whole. Its most important element is an active stance of denouncing and not collaborating with any violent practice, together with the vocation to communicate everything that encourages a constructive and solidary direction among human beings.

The crucial role of direct communication

But the most important communication for Humanism will always be direct communication, the one we establish between ourselves and our environment, overcoming differences we have not chosen.

To overcome the barriers that hinder direct communication, it is necessary to deepen the dialogue with our own interiority and understand the root of our personal beliefs, strongly influenced by the formative landscapes of our time, events in our biography and cultural parameters that are not always easy to observe, hindering creative confluence with others. In Silo’s words: ‘If you dig deep within yourself and I dig deep within myself, we will meet there’.

In short, developing models of Humanist communication at all levels, contributing to a growing convergence of the best aspirations of the Human Being, is fundamental to leaving human prehistory behind.

Full text of the speech by Javier Tolcachier, researcher at the World Centre for Humanist Studies and communicator at the Pressenza agency on the occasion of the 4th discussion of the Humanist International, 1/3/2025