Now I wonder what I was thinking between the beginning of this century and around 2008, between the fall of the Twin Towers and the outbreak of the great crisis whose culprits never paid the consequences of the irresponsibility and monstrous greed that unleashed the disaster. A 90-year-old grandmother can be evicted any day for not paying her rent, but the bankers, high-finance pirates and politicians who facilitated their scams have not, as far as is known, lost a cent of their profits, and despite ruining so many lives, none of them has suffered the slightest legal displeasure. They accuse the State of all the evils of bureaucracy and impertinent regulations, which apparently hinder the dynamism of the market, but, when that dynamism quickly leads to disaster, it is the State that must support everything, and cover with tons of public money the embezzlements committed by the powerful untouchables.
In these same pages, Andreu Missé recalls almost every week the many billions that the State continues to spend in Spain to fill the insatiable debt gap left to us by the geniuses of the neoliberal economy, and the shame that in no other European country the figure is so disproportionate. The abstraction of numbers says little to the mathematical illiteracy of us who dedicate ourselves to the humanistic and literary disciplines, but when we discover that the enigmatic “bad bank” will cost us 16 billion more than it has already cost us, it would be better for us to do one of those calculation exercises in which Missé is expert: how many teachers, doctors, nurses, social workers, firefighters, scientists could be hired; How many schools, hospitals, laboratories, public housing, public parks could be built, or saved from the degradation to which they are subjected, by political leaders whose exclusive interests, in addition to power, are the shameless promotion of private education and healthcare and real estate speculation.
Many years later, the State continues to pay the debts of a financial failure whose main causes triumphantly announce greater benefits every year. Andrés Rodríguez, director of the magazine Forbes In Spain he declares with his best smile: “54% of the country’s wealth is in the hands of 28 octogenarians”. One imagines, Dickens-like, these twenty-eight landowners from half of Spain gathered in the twilight in a conclave of gerontocracy and money-drunk lust, with tortoiseshell humps who know neither peace nor satiety, devising tricks to pay even fewer taxes, harboring resentments for the ingratitude of an ignorant citizenry that neither trusts them nor admires them as much as it thinks it deserves, with the resentment of those who have everything, much more terrible than that of those he has nothing.
In global terms, the accumulation of world wealth far exceeds our limited ability to understand figures that seem more typical of astrophysics than economics. In an interview with Silvia Laboreo Longar, Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz summarizes the report of a group of highly qualified economists led by him on behalf of the president of South Africa: “Between 2000 and 2024, the world’s richest 1% captured 41% of all new wealth, while only 1% went to the poorest 50% (…) Today, the wealth of billionaires is equivalent to 16% of global GDP, reaching the highest level historically high. In contrast, 25% of the world’s population, or 2.3 billion people, face moderate or severe food insecurity.”
The question I ask myself is no less accusatory because it challenges the great majority of progressives, who at a given moment, and without realizing it, abandoned the core of what had been their political ideology since the 19th century: the critique of capitalism; workers’ rights; social justice; universal emancipation. It was an ideology that after more than a century began to include new rights and new sensitivities, from the urgency of equality for women and sexual minorities to the rigorous criticism of colonialism and its contemporary survivals.
What were we thinking in the last decade of the last century and the first of this one, precisely when capitalism was accelerating more than ever its domination over the world, over exhausted natural resources, over every aspect of life, over the human mind? The loss of social conscience and sense of justice has been accompanied by governments of figures who, under a cosmetic aura of progressivism – Bill Clinton, Tony Blair – have actively contributed, and with great personal benefit, to facilitating the triumph of money and to undermining the last redoubts of public affairs and the dignity of workers.
It seemed that things were more or less okay and could stay that way. In Spain, the economic model of José María Aznar’s governments remained the same when the socialists governed, allowing themselves to be carried away by speculative prosperity, in which trade union organizations seemed as obsolete as the idea of class struggle. It was the era in which President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero assured that the lowering of taxes was progressive.
What I thought about above all was the daily threat and tragedy of terrorism, and the fanatical nationalism that justified it, subjecting an entire society to fear and pain without consolation or recognition for the victims, a sort of apartheid in which even democrats not protected by identity orthodoxy were confined. It seemed to me a priority to reclaim constitutional patriotism, in the wake of Manuel Azaña, egalitarian and secular citizenship, to which neither the Spanish left nor the right have paid much attention, both engaged in a competition of traditionalisms and official folklores.
It was a worthy cause, and still is, but I realize now that it wasn’t enough. Without a foundation of social justice, equal rights are illusory, as Martin Luther King discovered in his final years. If twenty-eight elders control half of a country’s wealth, national sovereignty will largely be in their hands. I saw with my own eyes the collapse of New York in 2008, and I also saw the frivolous blindness with which he ensured that its consequences did not reach Spain. But what really opened my eyes was a book by Tony Judt that I read as soon as it came out, in 2010, and then published in Spain with the uninspired title of something is wrong. It was a passionate and entirely personal defense of social democracy: it had been written by someone who, coming from a working-class family, had been able to study at an elite university thanks to the welfare state founded by British Labor governments after the Second World War. Judt, magnificent historian, political polemicist, writer in the rebellious wake of George Orwell, suffering from ALS, claimed without complexes everything that the neoliberal epidemic had discredited and destroyed since the time of Ronald Reagan: universal public services, egalitarian activism, progressive taxation, first-class education for all. I remember the criticism of New York Times was no less ferocious than that of the Wall Street Journal. Tony Judt died a few months later. Fifteen years and many injustices and excesses later, that book is even more than then a drumbeat of conscience, an urgent invitation not to close our eyes and not to submit to what seems inevitable.
