Although the most powerful Marxist political structures have collapsed or are in a moment of disintegration, I understand that we fall into an ingenuous illusion when considering that Marxism can disappear overnight as if by enchantment. It would be an irresponsibility to let history lapse in a deterministic way without intervention by free human creativity. The erroneous of that ideology is not only its statements and conclusions in the strictly economic field, but especially its selfsame philosophical and cultural ideas that, propagated for more than one century all over the world, have penetrated into a large part of the economic and cultural mysteries of people, institutions and societies.

As an example the foreword from Contribution to Criticism of the Political Economy (1859) can be quoted: "In the social production of their existence, men contract necessary, resolute relationships independent to their will. These production relationships correspond to a certain degree of development of their material productive forces. The group of these relationships constitutes the economic structure of society, the real base on which a legal and political superstructure is raised (...). The form of production of material life determines, in a general way, the process of the social, political and intellectual life."

As opposed to what Marx proposed with his economist and mechanistic vision of man and history, what is being demonstrated is exactly the opposite: that it is ideas that move the economy and not the economy that determines the ideas. It is not the material world that configures the spiritual one, but rather the spiritual which is the flexible, free and creative designer of the material universe. Precisely because of this, the current situation is more serious and impoverishing, and more time and energy will be necessary to renew our bad intellectual and economic habits established in an erroneous and therefore non-scientific vision of man.

An example of those bad habits is the monolithic pigeonholing of our ideas, trying to impose them at any cost and hardly leaving any margin for self-reflection and rectification. It seems as though recognizing one's own errors were a sign of intellectual poverty, when in fact it constitutes an act of positive recognition of our wealth and flexibility in human contact. The engine of authentic economic development that consists of progressive humanization of the material conditions of life, is not born from rigid and lineal physical structures, but rather the whole process needs interdependent harmony of the different sciences, technology and mainly, human resources. As the book Human Resources in the Modern Company (1991) says, recourse in this case means the capacity to respond to a necessity. A man of great resources is a man of many and great capacities of responding to varied and difficult situations. In a world in continuous and accelerated change, a rigid intelligence that only has one perspective of observation and understanding that is its own, is not useful. That rigidity that only sees its truth, transforms the greatest intelligence quotient into clumsy failure.

Flexible intelligence, on the contrary, is characterized by its capacity to see things, one's own and other people's ideas, from diverse perspectives. Flexibility allows a reflexive remodelling of intelligence in itself. With that free personal ease responsible for thought, the not very imaginative structural intelligence as well as the not very intelligent conceited imagination are avoided. The secret, in definitive, is in intrinsic collaboration of the most advanced technology with the deepest humanity, to enter the horizon of a new economic era with ease and security because it will be a new richer and more hopeful cultural era that will rebound on the very bases of economic systems in spite of the crisis, or maybe, because of it.

Joseph John Franch Menéu
Expansion, Tuesday January 5th 1993