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This remobilisation of Spanish society, lulled into comfort and complacency during the boom years, in some senses recalls the fevered political and street activity of the transition to democracy after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco in 1975. Yet it is more amorphous and experimental, bypassing politics and Spain’s increasingly tarnished institutions.(…) A salient feature of the present crisis – beyond the immediate drama of Spain’s cost of borrowing and the broader eurozone crisis – is the extent to which Spain’s institutions, the linchpins of the vibrant democracy Spaniards painstakingly built after Franco, have been battered. Financial Times
Street Protest in Madrid (Photo: Popicinio / Flickr)
I don’t usually like to blog here about Spain, where I live, because I would have to spend too much time explaining the context of a very complex reality to the majority of my readers, who probably come to that reality burdened with a multitude of cliches about Spain, cliches that I find too boring to clear away. I write about politics, I’m not a travel writer.
I’ll make a bit of an exception now in order to explore the advantages that come wrapped in Spain’s weakness and the disadvantages for the American people inherent in America’s enormous natural strength.
Spain, unlike the USA, is by nature poor, with few natural resources, with practically no rivers of any commercial use, a dry, rocky, challenging terrain that has always made communication between its regions difficult. It is also an extraordinarily beautiful land, but as any farmer of Iowa’s flat, boring landscape will tell you, “pretty land is bad land to farm”.
It is a landscape that breeds hardy, fibrous and energetic men and women. This ungenerous, hardscrabble, land is what drove the conquistadors to discover and conquer the Americas, take its gold and create what was then the world’s largest empire.
When that empire fell apart Spain languished until Europe’s post war prosperity lifted all the boats and finally provided Spain with the capital necessary to modernize its infrastructure and give opportunity for the Spanish people, called “the Prussians of the south”, to express again their native energy by building Europe’s fourth largest economy.
Today Spain is trying to dig itself out of the debris of an enormous real estate bubble created out of the euphoria of finally finding low interest money in their pockets after centuries of privation.
As the snippet from the Financial Times above indicates this has led to a massive questioning of the basic construction of the Spanish state. In other words, in the midst of disaster the Spanish people are discovering, in the words of Marx and Engels that,
“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
And I would maintain that such a facing with sober senses the real conditions of one’s life and the relations with one’s kind, is one of the most beneficial exercises a human being could undertake in the short time he or she is given to live. I think it was Socrates that said that an unexamined life wasn’t worth living. And it is trying to imagine the American people en masse ever waking up to the extent that Spanish people are waking up now, that leads me to meditate on the advantages of weakness and the deadening, sluggish, tyranny of strength.
I have observed over the years that those who can drink large quantities of alcohol without showing its effects are the ones who die of cirrhosis, that the boxers that can’t be knocked down, no matter how hard they are hit, are the ones that end up punchy and I wonder if this also applies to the living flesh of the common people of a country whose elites are the most wealthy and powerful and self satisfied in the history of our species.
The United States of America is so big, so populated, so rich, with such a smug and layered plutocracy, so tyrannized by endless interest groups that I cannot imagine the American people ever taking to the streets in a general strike or even more tragically, I cannot imagine that it would ever make any difference at all to their reality if they did.
15 Comments
Wow. Write more on Spain, comrade.
The past century also has a great deal to do with Spaniard’s resistance to the capitalist ideological warfare. The Civil War, the communist betrayal, Franco’s oppression, and their short, brilliant, neo-liberation. A lot of learning in there.
I’m sure the Francotards have not learned their lesson well enough, though. Good thing they don’t have the resources the monsters here do.
So, are you for the international alliance of the proletariat, or do you want Spain to secede along with Greece, et. al?
Do not give up entirely upon the US. Occupy may yet experience its second coming…
The US has lived since WWII in a state of government subsidized euphoria and happiness courtesy of military spending and little competition. A fake laissez faire economy built entirely on lies and propaganda.
Only in the last 15 years or so has this facade begun to come apart such people have become aware.
But there are still those who are functioning nicely in this fantasy world. For whom the fairy story still seems real.
Like a drug addict or alcoholic, they do not feel the pain enough. For long enough.
Only when the vast majority knows what it’s like not to know where or it their next meal is coming from, will the people of this country begin to take action.
Capital is international, but this seems beyond the left… except as a song.
Ah well. Andalucia is to be a desert in 40 years, no?
For me, I will keep singing.
I wouldn’t bet on Andalucia becoming a desert, it is a big place with a lot of variety, deserts, marshes, rivers, mountains…
Sinking In A Sea Of Sand
Just glad I have no kids… the future has taken no hostages.
Echoing Ludwig, your thoughts are most welcome. Rec’d
I suppose that Spanish success or failure to appease the Banking Gods will be the signpost for EU survival. How many countries must sacrifice themselves on the financial alter is the question.
America’s biggest problem is that the elites use the principles behind the Southern Strategy to keep the rest of the people at each other’s throats.
One of Spain’s interest groups, the historically impoverished and put-upon Basques, are now ironically enough the prime beneficiaries of the prosperous and democratically-run Mondragon Corporation. Now that Mondragon is wrestling with the question of how to introduce non-Basques as full voting members of the collective, it will perhaps provide lessons for the US on how to get past the race, gender and other non-class tensions that have been deliberately inflamed by the elites.
That was done in 2009 — right as the world depression cut pollution worldwide as well. The depression bought us another 18 months. The Eyafjallajokull explosion probably bought us another two to three, much as the Mount Pinatubo explosion temporarily lowered global temperatures.
Furthermore, the Chinese have been using the hiatus caused by the downturn to shut down for good some of the worst-polluting of the old plants and replace them with more efficient, less polluting plants, even as they have ramped up domestic solar and wind installs. The Chinese have been watching with alarm the shrinking of the Himalayan glaciers that feed their major rivers, both because of the resulting loss of arable land and because they are counting on water power, particularly the Three Gorges Dam, to provide a sizeable part of their energy resources.
The big question will be: Will there be a critical mass of elites who realize that they cannot rely on growth on this planet, nor on exploitation of lunar or other off-planet resources, to save their vision of capitalism — and that they will have to learn how to share their wealth in order to create a sustainable future for their descendants as well as ours?
Mondragon was set up by the failing Catholic priest, Arizmendi. A critical mass of elites have already consolidated around “austerity” for their new regime. Surely there is a guru of austerity. Who and what is he?
Capitalism isn’t that forward looking. Capitalism doesn’t sacrifice instantaneous gratification for long-term interests- even its own interests. Capitalism perfectly embodies the infantile id, gimme now or tantrum.
BINGO !
That is a core idea, that the actors are not doing what they are doing because they are “evil”, but because they have no other choice, in the same way that you cannot use a rubber duck in a chess game. The system, if the the theory is correct, will simply destroy itself.