The Humanists are a political group inspired by the "International Humanist Movement". The Humanist Movement first appeared on the 4th of May 1969, with a public presentation by its founder, the Argentinian writer and political activist Mario Luiz Rodriguez Cobos (Silo), known as "the Harangue of the Healing of Suffering", given in an outpost in the Andes called Punta de Vacas, close to the border between Argentina and Chile.
The Humanist Movement is based on the current of thought known as New Humanism, or Universalist Humanism. This current can be found expressed in Silo's works and in those of the diverse authors who are inspired by it.
This current of thought, which also implies a sentiment and a way of life, takes shape in multiple fields of human endeavor, giving rise to diverse organisms and action fronts. All of them are applied to their specific fields of activity with a common aim: to Humanize the Earth, thereby contributing to increased liberty and happiness in human beings. In themselves they have in common the methodology of Active Nonviolence and the proposal for personal change as a function of social transformation.
Other organisms to emerge from the Humanist Movement are the Community for Human Development, the Convergence of Cultures, World without Wars and without Violence, and the World Center of Humanist Studies and "The Message".
The Humanist Party was created in mid 1984 by the Secretariat of Social Affairs of the Community for Human Development and its first International Congress was held in Florence in 1989. "The Humanists" are a new political group created in New York (USA) in December, 2019, by Marco DaCosta, one of the founders of the Brazilian Humanist Party, in 1984.
Basic ideas
The proposals of the Humanists start from the need for liberty that we experience as human beings and aim towards social transformation and overcoming of violence that, in its different forms, generates suffering and contradiction in individuals and peoples.
Human beings have the capacity to transform the world and themselves, thanks to the intentionality of their consciousness, advancing and accumulating historical achievements.
We are born into a social and historical environment that imposes conditions within which we develop our existence and among which, we must, necessarily choose. In turn, this generates new conditions that are experienced with coherence or contradiction.
Contradiction has its personal correlate in the register of suffering.
Social contradiction is the product of violence. This violence manifests itself in the action of divesting a human being or human groups of their intention (and certainly of their liberty). The appropriation of the social whole by one part is violence.
Personal and social suffering must be overcome by modifying the situations of illegitimate and violent appropriation that have produced contradiction in the world.
In the process of growing humanization, human beings direct their intentionality towards nature and society in order to transform the conditions that bring pain and suffering to themselves and others with whom they can identify. This struggle gives continuity to the historical process and meaning to life, as they affirm their intentionality in front of non-meaning and oppression.
This intention, which rebels against sickness, inequality and injustice, considers rebellion against death as the height of disobedience before an apparently natural destiny, giving coherence to human life and allowing the projection of its own liberty beyond all limits.
Proposals for political action
The Humanists advocates the upholding (or the achievement, where necessary) of a democratic regime as a means of transition from formal democracy to real democracy, in which a real separation of powers, respect for minorities and direct democracy can be guaranteed.
It rejects the violation of human rights, the use of violence as a means to resolve conflicts and the concentration of power.
Regarding its methodology of action, Humanism is governed by nonviolent action.
At the same time, it denounces all forms of violence: physical, economic, racial, religious, sexual, psychological and moral.
We aspire to a Universal Human Nation, in which the enormous human diversity of; ethnicities, languages and customs, localities, regions and autonomous territories, ideas and aspirations, beliefs, atheism and religiosity, will all converge.
In coherence with this aspiration, the group can count on a worldwide federation which allows it to articulate positions and campaigns of international scope, maintaining autonomy and creativity in different levels of action down to the social base where it has its roots.
Within our proposals at a worldwide level we highlight, due to the urgency: the task of nuclear disarmament, by alerting the whole of humanity of the need for it and by generating a consciousness that demands it; the immediate withdrawal of invading troops from occupied territories; the progressive and proportional reduction of conventional weapons; the signing of non-aggression treaties between countries; and the renunciation by governments of the use of war as a means to resolve conflicts.
The Humanists denounces the ecological catastrophe and its promoters, namely big capital and the chain of destructive industries and businesses which are the offspring of the military-industrial complex.
It highlights economic violence as the cause of suffering in people, especially that which is due to the concentration of speculative financial capital. In this sense it advocates for tax reforms that give incentives to the progressive distribution of wealth and new cooperative models of self-management and co-management that give coherence to the relationship between capital and labor, increasing productivity and avoiding the diversion of resources to speculation. Likewise, it advocates the creation of an interest-free public bank which will help to acquire these objectives by avoiding the illegitimate concentration of resources and power currently in the hands of present day banks.
Different forms of discrimination are intertwined with economic exploitation and acquire a violent character. The group highlights the violence that is specifically exercised against women and young people; who have historically been discriminated against, together with the discrimination exercised against other human groups which are excluded for economic, racial, cultural or religious reasons.
The Group advocates the decentralization of political power down to the base of society, extending guarantees of respect for minorities and making effective the principle of equal rights and opportunities for all.
Universal access to free, high quality Education and Healthcare at all levels is the priority for the Party.
The Humanists upholds the principle of choice as the concrete political expression of liberty and, thus, it struggles against all forms of authoritarianism and economic, organizational and ideological monopolies.
