were not followed by the radical economic, cultural, or social changes that the results of the vote had promised. Today, calling a government socialist, social democratic, conservative, or liberal is to ascribe power to it, that is, purport to identify something in it that is not really there but in some other place far out of reach—a place where you can see the filigree outlines of economic and financial power, a power that invariably eludes us when we try to get closer, that inevitably counterattacks if we whimsically wish to reduce or regulate its domain, subordinating it to the common good. In other, clearer words, then, what I’m saying is that people do not choose a government that will bring the market within their control; instead, the market in every way conditions governments to bring the people within its control. And if I talk about the market in this way it is only because today, and more with each day that passes, it is this that is the instrument par excellence of authentic, unitary, simple power, global economic and financial power, which is not democratic because the people never elected it, which is not democratic because the people do not govern it, and finally which is not democratic because it does not have the people’s happiness as its aim.
Our forefathers in their caves would say, “It is water.” We, being a little wiser, warn, “Yes, but it is contaminated.”
September 30: Hopes and Utopias
A lot has been written and much more chattered about the virtues of hope. Utopias have always been and always will be Paradise as dreamed of by skeptics. Yet not only skeptics but also fervent believers, the Mass and Communion kind of believers who look forward to Heaven, still ask the compassionate hand of God to shade their heads, protect them from rain and heat, and deliver in this life at least a small portion of the rewards that he has promised in the next. Which is why anyone who isn’t satisfied with what has fallen to his lot in the unequal distribution of the planet’s assets, especially the material assets, clings to the hope that it won’t always be the devil who is at the door and that one day—sooner rather than later—it will be wealth that comes in through the window. Someone who has lost everything, but has been lucky enough to retain at least his sad life, considers that he is owed the most human right of hoping that tomorrow will not be as wretched as today. Presuming, of course, that there is justice in the world. Well, if in this place and in these times there did exist something worthy of the name justice, not the mirage of a tradition able to deceive our eyes and our mind but a reality that we could touch with our hands, it is obvious that we wouldn’t have to carry hope around with us every day, cradling it to us, or be carried around cradled by it. Simple justice (not that of courtrooms, but the justice of that fundamental respect that should preside over relations between human beings) would take charge of putting things in their proper places. In the past, the poor man asking alms would be denied with the hypocritical words “Have patience.” I don’t think advising someone to have hope is all that different from advising him to have patience. It is common to hear recently elected politicians say that impatience is antirevolutionary. Perhaps so, but I incline toward the view that, on the contrary, many revolutions have been lost through an excess of patience. I have nothing against hope, obviously, but I prefer impatience. It’s time for impatience to make itself felt in the world, to teach a thing or two to those who would prefer us to feed on hopes. Or on dreams of utopia.
October 2008
October 1: Where Is the Left?
Three or four years ago, in an interview with a South American newspaper, from Argentina, I think, I came out with a statement I subsequently thought would provoke discomfort, discussion, even a scandal (such was my naïveté), beginning with local left-wing groups and continuing, who knows, like a wave growing in concentric circles, out into the international media—at least such political, trade union or cultural organs of the media that are the tributaries of the said left. The paper reproduced my argument word for word, in all its harshness, not shying away from actual obscenities, as in the following: “The left has no fucking idea of the world it’s living in.”
The left responded to my deliberate challenge with the iciest of silences. No communist party, for instance, beginning with the one of which I’m a member, emerged from its stockade to refute what I had said or simply to argue about the propriety or the lack of propriety of my language. Even more to the point, nor did any of the socialist parties then in government in their respective countries—I’m thinking especially of those in Portugal and Spain—consider it necessary to demand a clarification from the impudent writer who had dared to throw a stone into a fetid swamp of indifference. Nothing of anything at all, absolute silence, as if there were nothing but dust and spiders in the ideological tombs where they had taken refuge, or nothing more than an ancient bone that was no longer solid enough for a relic. For several days I felt as excluded from human society as if I were carrying the plague, or were the victim of a kind of cirrhosis of the mind, no longer able to speak coherently. I even ended up thinking that the compassionate line going the rounds among those people who were keeping so quiet was something like, “Poor thing, what can you expect at his age?” It was clear that they didn’t think my opinions worthy of their consideration.
Time went on, and on, the state of the world grew increasingly complicated, and the left continued fearlessly to play out the roles, whether in power or in opposition, that had been handed to them. I, who had in the meantime made another discovery, that Marx was never so right as he is today, imagined, when the cancerous mortgage scam broke in the United States a year ago, that the left, wherever it was, if it was still alive, would finally open its mouth to say what it thought of the matter. I already have an explanation: the left doesn’t think. It doesn’t act, it doesn’t risk taking a step. What happened then has gone on happening, right up to today, and the left has continued in its cowardly fashion not thinking, not acting, not risking taking a step. Which is why the insolent question in my title should not cause surprise: “Where is the Left?” I am not suggesting any answers; I have already paid too dearly for my illusions.
October 2: Enemies at Home
That there is a crisis in the family is something nobody would dare to deny, however much the Catholic Church might seek to disguise the disaster with a mellifluous rhetoric that doesn’t even deceive itself. Nor can we deny that many so-called traditional values of family and social cohabitation have gone down the drain, dragging with them even those values that ought to be defended from the constant attacks coming from the highly conflictive society in which we live; nor that today’s schools—the successors to those old schools that for many generations were tacitly charged (in the absence of anything better) with making up for the educational failings of the family unit—are paralyzed, riddled with contradictions and mistakes, disoriented by successive pedagogical methods that are not in fact pedagogical methods, that too often are no more than passing fashions or amateur experiments doomed to fail. They are doomed by the very lack of intellectual maturity of those who formulated them, without being able to formulate or answer a question that to my mind is essential: “What kind of citizens are we trying to produce?”
The social landscape is not a pretty sight. Strangely, our more or less worthy rulers do not seem as concerned with these matters as they should be, perhaps because they think that since these are universal problems the solution—whenever it is found—will be automatic, for everyone.
I disagree. We live in a society that seems to have made violence a way of social interaction. The aggression that is inherent in this species of ours, and which at times we think that we have managed to control through education, burst brutally up from the depths in the past twenty years, manifesting itself right across the social sphere, prompted by modes of idleness that have stopped using simple
