Foreword first edition.

This essay is meant especially for all those social researchers, who are after alternative analytic ways in the study of the present national and international scene.

Being an essay, it summarizes densely, perhaps even in excess so, a whole set of suggestions in the different fields of the economic, political and social life. It is not then neither a vulgarization book, nor a complete treatise. It is simply a minimally technical and systematic exposition, written to excite criticism and co-operation. The ideas we submit give rise to multiple questions, both from a theoretical point of view and from their practical application in the political, social, national, individual, economic, ecologic... life. In fact, the research of the wording of these questions, and the possible co-operation from specialists, individually and in group, is one of the aims of this essay.

The Joan Bardina Studies Center has been working -with very meagre means- on the most obvious and worrying social phenomena, looking for actual suggestions which, within a new reference framework, may become feasible, without any need for discontinuous social changes.

We shall be grateful for all the suggestions and all the critique you may wish to send to us. Our gratefulness will be as great as the extent of the objective rigour of your criticism.

1st edition. Barcelona, May 1984.