We are on the way, not at the end of the journey. That is the optimistic message that Nicolás Sartorius (San Sebastián, 1938) has expressed in his ambitious essay Expansive democracy, how to overcome capitalism (Anagrama), an excuse for his long talk with La Vanguardia. Socialism defeated by the cold war, he states , is nothing more than Stalin’s erroneous and paranoid interpretation of Marx’s dictates, omitted one of the German thinker’s main teachings: socialism is a state or a model of society that is later and superior to industrial capitalism, and therefore alone. It can occur in those societies that have covered all the stages of capitalist development, never in a backward and poor country that has barely emerged from feudalism, which is the case of Russia at the beginning of the 20th century. For this reason, Sartorius says provocatively, perhaps the United States can become the first truly socialist country in the world.
I wanted to start with a question, I would say, of the ontology of the book. A purposeful and even, I would say, edifying, future-oriented book is very rare in a person of his career and age, because it seems that we are living through a period devoted to settling accounts with the past, to rewriting one’s own biography. and anger with the present and the future.
Well, I am an optimist by nature. I often say that if I had not been optimistic in life, I would look very bad. Returning to that famous phrase by Antonio Gramsci, “the optimism of the will and the pessimism of intelligence”, perhaps it is that I am less and less intelligent and more and more willful. But in any case, I try not to always think that the past was better, more interesting, that we have to go back to it. No, I believe a lot in mutations. The word “mutation” appears a lot in the book because people mutate the economy, capitalism, the State…, everything changes. The important thing is to know how to analyze what these mutations consist of and be up to date with how everything is evolving because if not, you will become stagnant. And then, the reading. The readings are very important. When someone tells me, complaining, that there are people today who are ignorant, I always think, “well, these are things that can be cured by reading.”
That does not mean that there is not a look at the events of the last century, although it is not to settle accounts with them but to provide a re-reading, to take a career, let’s say, in what is then the thesis of the book on the expansion of democracy. . And that review contains a few provocations. Starting on the first page, he argues that World War II was a success for the working class against capital.
Yes, well, the book begins with a somewhat provocative sentence that says: “The workers won the Second World War.” In social terms. And it starts there because there is a certain reckoning there. It is often forgotten that the Second World War was a war started by Nazism, by Hitler, by the invasion of Poland, by all that, but behind it, behind Nazism, behind fascism, Mussolini, Franco, Petain, there was more. They weren’t people who suddenly appeared out of nowhere. That is to say, there was a time in Germany, in Munich, when Hitler was considered a bar counter charlatan and people made fun of him saying: “But where is he going? If this one is not going to achieve anything.” There is a very good novel about that, when the rich said: “This is a charlatan, we’ll settle his accounts later ourselves”…
Which doesn’t remind us of anything we’ve seen recently.
Exact. Those charlatans and those demagogues, like Mussolini, who was another demagogue, there comes a time when they seize power. But behind them there are very powerful social forces. There I do settle accounts, in some way, because I give the names of those who were behind Hitler in Germany, of the companies. Today we all buy things from them, because they are all still out there, all the companies that financed Hitler and all the companies that financed Mussolini. There were very powerful forces, financial capital, landowners, nobles and all powerful sectors, frightened by the advance of the Soviet Union, of Bolshevism… They came to the opinion that Bolshevism was more dangerous than fascism and Nazism. That is, the Nazis are creatures of powerful forces of big capital. Therefore, when there is an alliance between the United States and the USSR – with England, which is the only one left, along with some resistance movements – and they defeat the Nazis, the fascists, it is evidently a triumph for the workers, because Of the 30, 35 million people who died, 99% were workers of all classes. When World War II ends, I give the example of England, Winston Churchill appeared as the great figure who had won the war, but when the English vote, they kick Mr. Churchill and the Labor Party wins. And the same thing happened in France: the government that was formed was with De Gaulle, but there were also communist and socialist ministers in that government. And the same thing in Italy, where the communists also participated in the first government after the war. They all made enormously advanced social policy. They practically nationalized almost all the large energy, banking and transportation companies. And they began to establish the welfare state, education, health…, what we have later known as the welfare state. It was actually a great success for the workers, they made enormous progress. The left-wing parties experienced very strong growth and so did the unions, which had millions of members, the communist parties, the socialists, etc. I have a reflection: the so-called Glorious Thirty, which is the period from the year 1945…
Until the oil crisis.
Until the crisis of ’73, that is. In those years, in Europe there was very strong economic and social development. This is when the economy has worked best, there was very strong growth with greater rights, etc. And it was thanks to that Keynesian policy, we could say, in the case of Western Europe, because it represented a spectacular advance. Until the oil crisis. Therefore, in my opinion World War II was won by the workers. Although it seems like a somewhat provocative phrase, it has an important part of truth. The workers on both the Western and Eastern sides, in the socialist countries, which later failed, evidently won the war. That is to say, the USSR won the war, because for many years, until the opening of the second front in 1944, with the landing in Normandy, the war was practically between the USSR and Nazi Germany.
There are two things about what follows, the Cold War, that are also provocative in the book. One is the thesis that if Roosevelt had not died and the conservative sector of the Democratic Party had not imposed Harry Truman as vice president, perhaps the Cold War would not have happened. It was not a fatum, but a deliberate contingency of a specific North American administration that has to do with Roosevelt’s death. And I would like you to develop it. And associated with this, another question: Would there have been deployment of the welfare state and those Glorious Thirty without the Cold War? I know I asked a counterfactual, but I would like to know his opinion.
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Whether the virtuosity of those Glorious Thirty and the deployment of the welfare state in Europe would have occurred if there had not been the Cold War.
Oh yes, I understand. I think so, it is a double phenomenon. Because? Because just as I explain that in the USSR, the moment of disaster is when Stalin, in the year 28, decided to advance what was called “socialism in one country.”
After the revolution failed in Germany.
That is. After the revolution fails in Germany, in Hungary and everywhere else, it is clear that in the West there will not be a revolutionary process. Popular fronts fail, everything fails. Then, with Lenin dead, Stalin opted for socialism only in Russia. That goes against all Marxist theories, because it was the poorest country there was. You are not going to build socialism in the poorest country in the world, because that is totally contrary to everything that had been theorized on the subject. And I think that the moment of rupture, the moment in which Stalin, let’s say, fails and enters a cycle that leads to disaster, is when they liquidate the NEP, the New Economic Policy. Bukharin, Lenin and other theorists said that socialism cannot be created on misery and lack of development and therefore, what had to be done was to develop forms of capitalism. They open the Soviet economy to a mixed economy in which, yes, large companies are in the hands of the State, but then all private business enters, businesses open. And there is great economic growth again, there is beginning to be production, there is beginning to be consumption… If the NEP had continued, as the Chinese have done…
Yes, that’s what I was thinking, that’s exactly what the Chinese have done.
Exactly that. I was very surprised when I went to China that they spoke very highly of Bukharin, who was shot. The whole theory of the book is that you can’t build a post-capitalist society, call it socialist or whatever, from poverty. You have to overcome capitalism, not end it, overcome it. That is why the subtitle is “how to overcome capitalism.” Because until now the theory of the left was to say that what we have to do is destroy capitalism, put an end to it. That doesn’t happen. It has never happened.
In any case, this argument is almost classicism, because in reality that is Marx’s thesis from the beginning.
Well, in a way, yes. Capitalism was a necessary stage. Marx speaks very well about capitalism, he says that it is essential to develop productive forces and that wealth must be created. And you can only move to a higher society, provided you have exhausted all the possibilities of the previous one. In the end we will get to that, because it has to do with the present, with the digital revolution. Because the capitalism we are experiencing is the capitalism of the Industrial Revolution subjected to a new mutation due to everything linked to digitalization, what I call artifacts. There comes a time in the digital society when this capitalism is no longer valid. It’s not worth it, because it endangers three key things. Equality, the environment and democracy. It creates brutal inequality, destroys nature, and undermines democracy, that is, it minimizes it. We are seeing it now with the illiberal regimes and all the destruction of democracy that we are seeing. It is a capitalism that reaches the limit of its possibilities, and that is why we have to move on to something else. That has always happened, but what happens is that things that are important have been forgotten: for example, when we went from slavery to feudalism, no one said: “We must end slavery in France.” It was a historical process for all countries.
Let’s get into this matter. You explain that the successive systems, productive and exploitation models, etc., models of society, in the end, have not been replaced by a great disruption, but rather that these disruptions, which appear in the form of revolutions, from the British or the Dutch to the Soviet one, in this cycle, are processes of coexistence and gradual substitution. We simplify history when we interpret it, there is the idea that they are all milestones and that slavery ended in the Civil War, that democracy begins in the French or North American Revolution.
Of course, all models overlap. I don’t talk so much about what could be the most primitive part, what Marx called “primitive communism”, which were tribes, etc. Let’s think about the slave system in which Rome and Greece operated. Slavery did not end with a revolution, slavery has existed until 1800 or so. And it has been overlapping with other forms of production, and although it stopped being dominant with feudalism it continued to exist. There were slaves in Spain, in the colonies, until 1860. And in England, until 1813, that is, the 19th century. They were no longer slave societies, but there were elements of slavery that endured. The same goes for feudalism. No one can say that feudalism ended on such a date. Is not true. There were centuries of feudalism of various types and within feudalism, as well as within slavery, a new society is developing. New societies develop on old ones, until they become dominant at some point. When feudalism began to be dominant, slavery was a residue. Then it was the other way around: mercantile capitalism began in the feudal period in Holland. I maintain that Holland was the first country to create a mercantile bourgeoisie, a mercantile capitalism, a bourgeois revolution, to understand each other. It wasn’t England, it was Holland. Curiously, in her fight against the king of Spain. Well, better than against Spain, say against the Habsburgs, that would be more precise.
As an anecdote, I will tell you that at the end of the book I was reviewing the conflicts that are listed and it would almost seem that waging war against a king of Spain is one of the repeated vehicles of modernization that Europe has known over the centuries. We were always on the wrong side of history.
Holland, of course, and England too. In the book I explain why Spain has had this difficulty with democracy. The fact is that systems, modes of production, etc., slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism… are not things that are suddenly created or sprung up. There are revolutions that accelerate them and there are wars that delay them, but many times they coincide within each other, and that is very important to take into account. I give some examples of how today there are already elements of post-capitalism within dominant capitalism. If in Western Europe 47% of the wealth created is taken by the State, through taxes, that is already a logic that has nothing to do with the logic of capitalism. Because it is money that the State then distributes to have education, healthcare and everything we know. There are examples that are already outside the commercial sphere: everything that is free, all the services that you do not have to pay for, such as healthcare, for example, or public education, are elements that go against the logic of capital and that already They live with her. If all things were like healthcare and education, it is clear that we would not be mired in capitalism as we know it. One thing is price and another thing is value and when they merge, capitalism is left out. When I go with a card and get free entry on all buses, on the subway, on Cercanías, that goes against the logic of capital. That does not mean that it does not have a cost, but it is being paid socially. And I use it profusely for free.
And you give business examples of large companies outside of those logics.
That is, for example, Volkswagen. Volkswagen or the Norwegian Sovereign Fund. Norway has a huge amount of oil and it did not occur to them to put it in private hands. What he did is create a state sovereign fund, the Norwegian State earns enormous amounts and distributes it. It is what allows Norway to have a wonderful social system.
It has not been given to Lehman Brothers to manage.
Of course, he has not given it to Lehman Brothers nor has he given it to a private capitalist, he has kept it. Those are post-capitalist forms. And the same thing happens in the case of Volkswagen. If all large multinational companies worked like Volkswagen, we would already be in another galaxy, that is, we would be in something else. Call it socialism, call it whatever you want, but it would already be a model of post-capitalism. That’s a bit of the mechanism. Meanwhile, in the orthodox, communist and partly also socialist tradition, it has always been thought that no, what had to be done was to make a revolution and put an end to capitalism. Well, we have already seen what happens when you end capitalism without having generated wealth, that you end up in Cuba, you end up in the Eastern countries, you end up in the USSR, which, of course, are not socialist at all. People have called it that, but they are not at all socialist. Socialism is a higher stage than capitalism, therefore we are still very far from having arrived there.
Following this thread, in the end he argues that there is a conflict between the nature of available capitalism and the nature of the economic model to which the digital revolution leads us. We talked about marginal cost and the theses of Jeremy Rifkin in a book that was literally called that, The Zero Marginal Cost Society. He said that we would end the 21st century with more than 80% of productive activity outside the laws of industrial capitalism, thanks to the collaborative commons. But shortly after we saw that Uberization, the rider economy, means the return of labor. Science brought a better future with less inequality, but in reality, as Jorge Dioni López announced, the opposite has happened: the old daily wages are back, the needy people who are in the town square (now digital) waiting for the little gentleman to pass by. with the wagon and offer some work to eat that day.
Clear. The thesis of the book is that this change is an opportunity to face this improvement, that zero marginal cost digital society, but also that it is a risk and that in that sense it depends on the political channels acting. That is why a central thesis, for me, is that changes do not occur only due to technological and scientific advances, but they need politics. My formula is democracy plus science. Hence the expansive democracy. That is to say, changes do not occur just because technological advances produce them, but they have to be linked to who controls the direction of these advances. Because of course, today there is a digital revolution, global, instantaneous, it is global capitalism and that is not because capitalists are bad, it is because science and technology have led to globalization. And of course, it would be stupid for a progressive or left-wing person to be against the advances of science. It seems ridiculous to me.
There are people who are against it. There is everything.
The problem with globalization is not that digitalization leads to that, the Internet and all the instruments we have are fantastic, the problem is who controls and directs that, that is the battle. These advances are not enough, there must also be an advance in democracy. That is why I talk about “expansive democracy” as a concept.
What does expansive democracy mean?
Expansive democracy must be horizontal and vertical. Horizontal, because we must fight for it to spread throughout the territory, in all countries, because today democracy is everywhere in the world. But democracy is the exception in the history of human societies. I maintain with data that democracy is very new. People behave as if democracy had always existed. No, democracy is brand new. Let’s see, I place democracy from the moment in which women can vote, because of course, 50% of humanity did not vote or participate in nda. And that happened in France, a country as advanced as France, in 1946. Be careful, here until 1977. Well, except for the three years of the Republic, from 33 to 36, because the Republic established the female vote, but until 33 could not vote. Democracy is a young, weak plant, it takes a lot to conquer and it can be taken away from you in 48 hours. All of this is what makes the extension of democracy a fundamental battle, not only horizontally, but also vertically. What does vertical mean? That the entire democratic process has been a political process, but democracy has never entered the economy. That is to say, democracy has not entered companies…
And since the 80s, such a thing has been anathema, too.
Yes, then it is beginning to be anathema. Digitalization, the digital revolution, very urgently proposes that democracy begin to enter the digital economy because if not, the digital economy will end up destroying democracy. That’s what I try to show in the book. Not only me, of course, I have taken things from many theorists who have written wonderful things. This female Harvard academic, Shoshana Zuboff, has written a fantastic book called Surveillance Capitalism. She demonstrates how digitalization, algorithms and everything that artificial intelligence means are going to have a much greater development and absolutely control democracy. In the United States, he maintains, large technology companies know more about individuals than themselves and, therefore, they know what you are going to vote before you vote. They have such a quantity of data about you that they know which movie theater you are going to go to, What books are you going to buy? Data is the oil of digitalization. Obviously, the current model of data alienation must be addressed, because it is manna and we will provide it for free. But the available models that we have are the Chinese one, which is kept by the entire State and you don’t know what it is doing, like a big brother, let’s say, hypervigilant or the American one, which is the one in which we operate now, with the big companies staying our data for free. It would be good if Europe proposed a model that was neither Chinese, the big brother that can control you, nor American… Being in the hands of the State or being in the hands of Google, I don’t know which is worse
Yes, or a real Elon Musk.
Well, they are both models, the American model and the Chinese model. I maintain that the good thing would be to have a European model where democracy participates. Ultimately, we are the subjects of democracy.
The subjects and not the objects.
Europe has always had a different model from the ultra-liberal North American or the state-run Chinese one. That is the welfare state, the social state. But the contradiction that is beginning to be created, and that is why I say that the combination of democracy and science is where the future lies, is that with the digital revolution neoliberal capitalism, the capitalism that we have known, has already given everything it had to give of yourself. What you are doing is clearly entering into a crisis. For me, the crisis of 2008 is a terminal crisis of capitalism. That is to say, that crisis was a disaster, a disaster, it created unemployment, wealth was lost and what has come of it? Because the left, of course, has not had the strength to overcome it. But what has come out of it? Well, more and more inequality, which is a way of eroding democracy and freedom.
Unless we believe in the freedom of drinking beers.
When I hear this about drinking beer from Mrs. Ayuso’s freedom, I start to laugh. During the dictatorship they also drank beer. It was the only thing you could do, drink beer. With which, she is telling me little less than the same thing that the dictatorship told me. The problem is that there is, on the one hand, the terrifying inequality that exists, scandalous if you see the figures of the profits that companies are obtaining. In the United States there are three investment funds that have assets greater, far greater, than the gross domestic product of the United States. Only three. That is already an enormous accumulation of capital and power. These funds are the ones that control a part of the IBEX-35. The concentration of power is enormous and logically influences politics. Then, on the other hand, we hold conferences in Paris and scientists tell us that climate change, the destruction of the environment, the destruction of the oceans, the melting of the poles are unstoppable. As soon as we go up a few degrees, this goes to hell, but we are incapable of stopping it, because the system allows it. I am in favor of recycling and depositing waste where it should be deposited, but it amuses me that people take it very seriously because it is a lie that we, individuals, pollute. It is the system that pollutes, because we are people of the system, we are citizens of capitalism. We, no matter how much we reclassify our things, are not going to solve the problem of climate change. But only Saudi Arabia and the countries that exploit oil pollute infinitely more. It is evident that everyone knows that decarbonization and the use of renewable energy is essential, and yet we are stuck there and there is no way, no capacity to impose a brake
I agree that in 2008 neoliberalism died in some way, but then came the five years of austerity and people said, “what is it like that it died?” Their hegemony dies, because the hypothesis was that, by setting up the casino and financializing everything, we were all going to be much richer and we all believed it. Neoliberalism worked to the extent that it is a common sense of the time, a hegemonic thought that everyone shared. The day that the gamblers in a casino in southern Manhattan blow up the future of the countries of southern Europe, the hegemony of that thought dies. Austerity, let’s say, was an inertia, an absence of recipes because neoliberal dogma had been the only common sense available in 30 years. But, and this is alluded to in the book, there is a reason for optimism, which is the speed, I would almost say, silent, with which in the pandemic, the European Union reacted in the opposite direction. And there was no political renewal. It is not that before the pandemic there was a neoliberal political class at the head of the European Commission and with the pandemic we removed and inserted others, but that deep down there is, I would almost say, an awareness of the need for the survival of the political model, which He clearly said: “Well, the austerity recipes are going to go in the trash for a while, because we have to move this forward.” It invites a certain optimism about the collective intelligence of the European project.
I think that neoliberalism, what we have called neoliberalism – which had very little new, but oh well –, the so-called ultraliberalism, which has been imposed since Reagan and Thatcher, has theoretically died. He has been defeated. What happens is that you have to bury it. Is different. Today it has returned, especially in some sectors, to policies that we could call neo-Keynesian, of State intervention. They have realized with the COVID crisis and the successive economic crises that the State has to intervene because otherwise this will go to hell. But there is a fight to the death in that sense, it is a battle. In Europe we have made a lot of progress in this regard. For example, New Generation funds represent a mutualization of debt. That seemed inconceivable to me in the period of austerity. There has been a positive advance in the sense that if the State does not intervene, capitalism by itself will only generate disasters, wars and crises. That already seems to be moving forward here, but in the United States there is a battle to the death because Donald Trump may return. It is important to keep in mind that denialism teaches you a lot: they deny climate change because they know that if they accepted that there is climate change, capitalism would be dead. They are very aware that if they accepted that climate change is a reality, capitalism is what is generating this and they would have to change the system, the model, because this leads to disaster.
And politics would be required to take the reins.
Of course, democracy would have to take the reins somehow. And they deny inequality saying that it is an alternative inequality because the important thing is to create wealth, which is then distributed. That is to say, there is a denialism of many things and that is the battle we have: the deniers are recognizing something very serious. Trump and company are convinced that the day they say “yes, this climate change thing is true,” they would have to change the system, because it is leading us to disaster. And then there is the third element, and that is that with the current system of concentration of power in the economy of digitalization, democracy is jibarized. I use the term jibarizar, because it was what a tribe that reduced heads did, the jíbaros. Jibarizing is reducing democracy to something purely formal, in the worst sense of the term, with the control of individuals through data, through artificial intelligence algorithms. The proof is that Europe has had to release an Artificial Intelligence standard, because it is a danger to democracy, if you do not control it it represents a very serious danger. And to what extent is it a necessity to move to forms that are not strictly capitalist? We have seen it very recently here in Spain with Telefónica. Why does the State suddenly say “I have to put 10% in Telefónica”? Because it is a strategic industry for data. I maintain that strategic industries, companies that cannot fail, because if they fail we pay everything, and companies that work under a monopoly regime, therefore they are not in a market system, would have to be controlled or participated in in some way. by the State, by its workers and by society. Nor would it be a question of nationalizing them in old terms, but for example, that there be a participation of those who work in the company and another participation of the State. They have to be democratically controlled. At least in those three cases, the strategic ones, the too big to fail ones and those that are in a monopoly regime, should be controlled. 90% or 95% of companies would continue under a market regime, of course you are not going to nationalize SMEs and microSMEs. We at Fundación Alternativas have more or less calculated that 100 companies worldwide control the large economic sectors, it is not true that this is a market economy, the market does not exist and now it is becoming less and less.
In fact, from the beginning, both in the theory and practice of liberalism, the great theoretical enemy of capitalism was not the State, it was concentration, oligopoly and monopoly.
Of course, because that is what destroys the market. The market no longer existed, let alone now that the market is in the cloud. Someone said that these companies are themselves markets controlled by themselves. The State has to intervene. And now the way is opening, in some way people are starting to talk about it and some measures are starting to be taken.
There are two anathemas of the last 35 years, of which at least the left, not only politicians, but also academics, already speak openly: taxes and the democratization of the economy, in that sense of prevention or self-defense.
But there is a very tough battle between sectors that do not want that, that consider it Bolivarian or consider it social communist. They say that taxes must be lowered, and if you lower taxes you put the welfare state and, therefore, democracy at risk. It is a very tough battle that is going to be fought in the United States, between Biden and Trump, and between the right and the left throughout Europe.
Before leaving the question of American states, I want to comment on two things about the book. One, for me it was a surprise, Biden’s victory, an exhibition of resilience of North American democracy. The left half of the country does not vote for Biden, but rather the half that is in his right mind, the democratic half, votes for him. That is why he achieves unprecedented numbers in the Democratic Party. The book postulates that there is a kind of new socialism unprecedented in the United States, that the Democratic Party is beginning to work with ideas that were unthinkable 25 years ago. And you play with an idea, which is also a bit of a provocation: that the United States can be the first socialist or truly socialist country in the world.
It is a provocation, but it has a basis. I insist a lot on the concept of overcoming: overcoming capitalism, moving to a different phase, has to occur in countries that have reached the limit of capitalism’s possibilities. And I think that one of the most advanced countries in that sense is the United States, a very dual country. On the one hand, it is a super advanced country from a technological point of view, it is number one, although threatened by China. And yet, in social terms, it is an underdeveloped country. With tremendous wealth, it does not have free universal education, it does not have healthcare
It is enough to see the infant mortality that it has, practically African
Of course, mortality, crime… In the United States, if you are poor and you get sick, consider yourself dead. Being the richest country that could do the most advanced things, however, in many things it is very backward. Perhaps that is why the most advanced authors in the world today are some North Americans, much more than Europeans. For example, Senator Bernie Sanders, who ran for president and received millions of votes, is not a minority as the American Communist Party or the Socialist Party was traditionally, which has almost never existed. And there is a group of congresswomen, like Elizabeth Warren or Alexandria Ocasi Cortez and five or six others, who they call The Squad, with very advanced ideas. You take their program and this thing about Spain, social democracy, is a joke next to the things they propose. There are five or six wonderful young women who propose, for example, that 20% of the shares of large companies must be in the hands of the workers. Well, if you control 20% of a company, you control the company. And that university education should be free. That is, a lot of things that here would sound like Bolshevism. That is a trend that exists in the United States…
With a recovery of post-war taxation.
Of course, they say that all these large companies that do not pay taxes are thieves. There have even been groups of large American millionaires who have a league, a kind of club, who demand that the State impose more taxes. Buffet said: “Hey, but I pay less than my secretary.” And the guy is one of the great millionaires in the world. There are a whole series of interesting currents there. I maintain that the United States, if it were led by these highly advanced sectors, could carry out much more advanced experiences than the European ones because it has the conditions to do so. Let’s imagine that Google or Facebook and all these big ones were in the hands of democracy. It would be amazing.
You imply that this very high concentration of oligopolies or quasi-monopolies, while being a problem, is an ease, an advantage. In some ways they are single column bridges, very vulnerable.
What they have done to summarize it a lot – a lot would have to be explained – but to simplify it: they have socialized production and they have privatized the result, but it is much easier, let’s say, to control or nationalize five companies or three, than five thousand. That’s where the idea of ??the 100 companies came from. Taking the 10 most important sectors of the economy and the top 10 companies in each of them, with 100 companies you run the world. If you controlled that at a global level, you would be in a different phase to capitalism as we know it, it would be a post-capitalist phase. There has been such a concentration process that there are sectors that are only two or three companies worldwide. You take Airbus and Boeing and you have the entire aeronautical sector, that’s it. And at the banking level: there were many banks but not anymore. In Spain they have been reduced to five and there were forty-somethings. That is to say, there has been a great process of concentration. Marx already analyzed this a long time ago: it is the natural tendency of capital, to concentrate, logically. And every time there is a crisis, it becomes more concentrated. Because? Because thousands of companies disappear, they call it “creative destruction.” Now, this battle is not a battle that is going to take place objectively. Because we are seeing machines that produce machines and in the United States they have already said that taxes should be imposed on robots
And that they pay Social Security is also a proposed debate.
Of course, because, then, who creates the surplus value? Who creates the surplus value in these cases, how is the relationship between value and price? Who creates the value? These new technologies that are beginning and about which we are going to learn amazing things, totally collide with the logic of capital as we know it. Marx was a visionary, utopian, etc., and he said: “The problem is not property, the problem is scarcity and abundance.” If you go from the world of scarcity to the world of abundance, capitalism ends. Capitalism is a system of scarcity.
He even makes it when it doesn’t exist.
Of course, because you are not interested in things not being paid, it goes against your logic. But capitalism is still a system from humanity’s childhood. Because it doesn’t make sense. That is to say, there will come a time when things will be produced in such quantity that they will be free. That’s why I joke in the book and say that the day you can download a ham from the internet, capitalism will be over.
It is very interesting and very provocative.
That is why I dedicate part of the book to the United States and another part to China. It is a very important experience, because we talk a lot about Europe, but we are 5% of the world’s population. Soon we will be number four or three. And we talk all the time about our democracies as if it had been something that has happened all over the world. China has 1.4 billion people, India has another 1,400, give or take. Between the two there are 2.8 billion, that is, humanity. And China is developing fundamental experiences. What happens is that it has.
You maintain that you are doing everything the opposite of Gorbachev, right? First, abundance and growth, then freedom.
Absolutely the opposite. The problem it has is democracy, of course, because the Chinese, when you talk to them – and I have had the opportunity to do so sometimes, because I have been there two or three times talking to academics and people from the party about all this –, They do not quite see clearly why democracy is a productive force. I always told them that democracy is a direct productive force. Without democracy, you slow down, because you have no elements of correction. And that is what led the USA to disaster, because they did not correct, because there were no elements of collective intelligence, there was no democracy. The Chinese have enormous development in the electric car, for example, they are making very interesting experiences, but they continue with everything very controlled and that will be a problem. And then they have a very serious environmental problem. They have to get out of there, I hope.
This brings us to Europe’s moment. And there are two aspects here. One of the things about which the book is very critical is the lack of a clear vision from the left about the urgency of the European project, which has not always been seen clearly. You avoid the settling of accounts, but hey, in Spain we live through the Julio Anguita phase in Izquierda Unida. But in general, the case of Spain is not an anomaly either, it is in the British Labor Party, which is quite complicit in the Brexit disaster. You maintain that the only solution is scale: the economy has jumped scale and the Nation-State is no longer useful for politics to govern it and, therefore, we must change scale. The European left has not been able to see this clearly, to put it kindly.
On the left there have been voluntarist Europeanists, let’s say, like the Eurocommunism of Enrico Berlinguer. But it lasted a very long time, they were very brief experiences. Yes, it is a part of criticism, but without making a lot of blood. But the reproach is very clear. Europeanism has been key for me all my life. In the book I mention an article that I published in Cuadernos para la dialogue, still in Franco’s time, saying that the future was in Europe and that we had to enter Europe. And it almost cost me the anathema. They called me from Paris, from exile. They said: “Let’s see, this and such and such is interesting.” But soon after, the PCE, in a subsequent congress, established that we had to be in Europe and that we had to vote in Europe. It is true that there has been a very important delay on the European left, very important. There has been a very interesting phenomenon, and that is that the left-wing parties, workers, etc., that grew up with the idea of ??“proletarians of the world, unite”, but here those who have united have been the capitalists. And on the other hand, those who have been divided have been the workers, installed in a very localist vision and many do not come out of it. There has been no way to create an effective European unionism. We already know that the European Trade Union Confederation exists, but it remains to be seen whether it will call for effective mobilization at the European level or whether it will have a serious presence in European events. Not at all. There are many difficulties in uniting unions. And the games, well, the games have been a disaster. Not only English Labor, it is French socialism that is destroying the European Constitution. And that’s how it went. And then, in other places, everything that has been the left of the Socialist Party is still…
With self-sufficiency?
The thesis that “sovereignty must be recovered.” But what sovereignty are you talking about? They think that the European Constitution is a loss of sovereignty, when what is done is sharing sovereignty, which has nothing to do with it. You talk to people who are very left-wing and they view Europe with a certain Eurocepticism. It happens in Greece, in many countries.
Well, Greece has reasons because they ate the lesson. They were scapegoats.
As that one said, they repeat that “Europe is the Europe of the merchants.” And he said “well, yes, Spain too, and that’s not why you’re going to leave Spain.” It’s just nonsense. In case we already know, it is the Europe of capitalism, of course, and Spain and all the countries. But that doesn’t mean you have to stop fighting in that field as well. Because if not, you’re lost. If you give it only in your country, you have nothing to do. I think that the left has had a delay there and one of the first to realize it was Palmiro Togliatti, of the PCI, in Memoria de Yalta [Il memoriale di Yalta, 1964], which is a very interesting document in which he says that the great The problem we have is that the labor movement has not understood the issue of Europe, it has not united at the European level. Now it would be necessary to unite on a global level, but hey, that is worth noting, of course. Because of course, how do you unify the interests of Chinese, European and American workers? Very complicated, because they consider that their interests are often conflicting, when the truth is that they would not be like that.
But in the European case, perhaps with the exception of some very undeveloped Eastern economies, it is quite obvious that there are common interests of its working class.
Yes, but when I talk to friends who have been in the European Trade Union Confederation, and they tell me what happens there, you realize that Swedish or northern European workers are afraid of going to a leveling of rights with respect to to the rest, because they understand that for them it means going down. They don’t want to know anything about that. It’s already going very well for them there to vent their shit with the capitalists there. There is a division in European unionism in that sense. The point is that you have to unify interests, but the interests of European workers at this moment are not so much in the classic aspects, salary, hours, etc., but in the socio-political aspects, where you could unify the interests of the workers. there, in a political agreement, which would not only be the strict labor issues of a collective agreement, but, for example, education, taxation, health…, that type of issues.
We return to the democratization of companies.
That is, the democratization of companies, the fight against climate change… That would be what could unify. I even propose – I don’t know if the unionists will like this very much, because they haven’t told me anything, but well – that the same thing that the big capitalists who make up the G-20, the G-7 do, we unionists would have to do the same in the unions. Create the S-equis. Because? Because if you try today to bring the 27 to an agreement – ??which is more because in each country there are several unions, put 52 unions – it is impossible. So, what you would have to do is take the older ones and create a group where they would begin to set lines of action that the others would then follow. You take France, Germany, Italy and Spain, the big four, you take the unions of these countries and perhaps some more and you would create a group of very powerful unions, which would already be, they could set the agenda, unify some aspects, setting trends. I think it would be good. I see the unions in that sense with a deficit of real Europeanism and enormous internationalism. They don’t have any punch.
And from the chapter dedicated to it in the book I deduce that it is not a problem, in this sense, particularly Spanish.
No no no. In Spain is where they have it clearer. It would be very good to go towards more European formulas, but go to Germany and go to the Nordic countries and they don’t even want to hear about it. They are very involved in their things that are not going badly for them, more or less, and they are afraid that homogenization will be downwards instead of upwards. And when they talk about a European minimum wage or pensions, they tell you: “Yes, yes, well, but all of this is going to be leveling downwards. We are going to have to pay so that the Greeks, the Italians, the Spaniards, those from the East and all those rise.” We must look for formulas that unify objectives. And in general there is a problem in globalization, in the world we live in: that the unions are very national, they are very involved in each country. I know it is not easy, but large multinationals, when you take the boards of directors, those who lead them, you find a very important German company that is directed by a Greek or a Finn. They are people who have two things that unify them: a language, which is English, and interests and technologies. If someone is good, they put them in and that’s it. It doesn’t matter if it’s Greek, Portuguese, Spanish, whatever. On the other hand, that would be inconceivable in the union world or even in that of political parties. That is, there is no transfer of experience. It would be very good, I say, to do a kind of union Erasmus.
Yes, it appears in the book.
Well, an Erasmus, a union. That is, getting unionists from other countries to come here for a period of time to learn about the experiences here and for us to go to other countries. That is, unifying the union or political culture of the left, because the capitalists do it.
Now that we are talking about unionism, you mention an issue that is actually very little commented on by the left, which is the constitutional heritage of Spanish unionism. That is to say, Spanish unionism appears in the Constitution as extraordinarily protected and as one of the agents of democracy, something that does not occur in any of the constitutions after the Second World War.
In many cases they do not mention it and in other cases, they are generic mentions recognizing the right to freedom of association, and that’s it. But in the case of Spain, unions and employers already appear, it seems to me, in article 7. That is, in the most important articles of the Constitution, where the regime is designed. The unions are already there as fundamental institutions at the same level as Parliament, parties, etc. And another thing that does not exist in all countries, far from it, apart from the fundamental right of the right to strike and organize, is that the Spanish unions and employers’ associations have been given a certain legislative power because the collective agreements, at Being effective erga omnes (for everyone, whether affiliated or not) gives enormous power to the most representative unions. That is to say, a very important part of the legislation, let’s say, that affects people’s lives, is done by the unions with the employers. What you earn, the hours you have, the vacations you have, the dismissal… are already legislated there. It is something that has not been valued. Even on the left there has been the impression that the Constitution was some kind of spurious negotiation that took place on high, so that there would be a king, and I don’t know how many. There is a kind of contempt for the Constitution when it has not been read to you. They haven’t read it. What’s more, there are articles of the Spanish Constitution that have not been developed that say that all the wealth of the country allows the economy to intervene.
The entire economy. Yes. Taken to their ultimate consequences, these articles allow us to build a socialist country.
Obviously, evidently.
It is true, the instruments are in the Constitution. You can very aggressively legislate a brutal intervention in the housing market, for example, without touching a single comma of the Constitution to do so, our Constitution is extraordinarily enabling compared to those after World War II. Politics often does not do its job and wants to make what it likes or dislikes constitutional or unconstitutional.
Yes, but people don’t read the Constitution. And it’s not that long either, it would be great to read it.
I didn’t count them, but you still allude six or seven times in a non-sarcastic way, both to those who talk about Marx and do not read Marx and to those who talk about the Constitution and do not read the Constitution.
Yes, well, maybe it’s unconscious, but it’s true. The Spanish Constitution is a great constitution. I am a great defender of the Constitution. It can be improved, of course, and some things need to be improved, but it is a very advanced constitution. But very advanced. I make a comparison with the constitutions, the French, the German, the Danish or the Italian and ours is much more advanced, like from here to Lima. And yet, which is also a certain irony, people love the constitution of the Spanish Republic, the Second Republic, of course, because the one before was not a republic. The current constitution, yes, it is a monarchy, but it is much more advanced than that of the Republic, but much more advanced. No constitution in Spain, nor in the Republic, has a catalog of fundamental rights up to article 29 or 30, in which you can go to a judge to say: “They are violating this article and I want you to do so.” That didn’t exist. It was all declarative. They were declarations of rights, but you could not claim them in court. The Spanish Constitution has it. And the role of unions, or that the entire economy must be at the service of general interests. All that is in the Spanish Constitution. You can do whatever you want. It is true that if you publish that article now, they will call you Bolivarian, they will call you everything, yes. But hey, it’s in the Constitution and that was approved by the right, the left and the center. That’s there. Therefore, let’s use it
To finish, because I am abusing it, although I would continue all afternoon…
Until twelve, we can continue.
OK. To what extent are we risking our lives in this year’s European and American teams? You insist that these European elections are important because of the advance of the ultras and ahistorical nationalism. In the book the adjective “ahistorical” always appears when it talks about nationalism.
Yes, but very dangerous
To what extent is the hour agonizing? Do we journalists dramatize too much?
Well, it is logical that journalism seeks a bit of the short term, current headlines. This book, as you may have seen, is not a book for three months, but goes much further. But I also touch on some current issues, such as a very tough fight between the forces that want to advance and others that do not want to, that resist. On the very obvious topics. In the United States, whether Joe Biden wins or Donald Trump wins, we have a lot at stake. The shame is that we don’t vote in the American elections. only they vote. But the result is a global result and will affect the destiny of humanity as a whole, whether we are aware of it or not. When Trump said “America first”, America first, which is something that President Calvin Coolidge had already said I don’t know how many years ago.
Hundred.
Yes, in the twenties. That means a complete change because after “America first”, came Brexit, the Deutschland Uber Alles has returned, which was what they said in the time of Hitler, Germany above all. Curiously, Trump is defending borders, nationalism, American products, fumigating immigrants and, on the other hand, Xi Jinping, the Chinese, who is a communist, says “market freedom, market opening.” The Chinese. China defends the global economy. Why? Because what Trump is representing are the most defensive interests of a capitalism that notices that it is losing the battle. They are no longer the world’s factory, they no longer make products that sell. It is China, India, it is Asia who do it. It is a very defensive and very dangerous policy, like all nationalist policies, because at the extreme of nationalism, as Mitterrand said, is war. Trump is a very dangerous guy. May Trump win or Biden win, it’s not that he is a genius or a person in a great way, but the man does what he can. The change is enormous, because Biden, despite everything, has made a very interesting social policy in the United States, he has protected unions, certain rights have greatly increased, etc. He tries not to go to the disaster of wars all this. Therefore, we have a lot at stake there, but hey, we don’t have much to do. And in the American elections.
Biden is, in European terms, the most social democratic president the United States has had since Johnson.
Of course, he doesn’t get to be Sanders, but he does. Biden is a man who comes from the union world, very close to the unions. He even had the gesture of going to a picket line and standing there with the megaphone. He is a man closely linked to American unionism, it would be great if he won, but things are raw.
In the case of Europe, we will vote, we have a lot at stake. For example, the elimination of austerity, the mutualization of debt, the creation of control instruments for artificial intelligence, of certain policies that could one day illuminate social and fiscal Europe.
That is, social Europe, which is its fundamental. That could come to nothing if the ultras make much progress and ally themselves with the traditional right of the European People’s Party. There may be a shift towards certain forms of austerity and lower taxes. What has been making progress since the pandemic and the crisis of 2008 could become a setback. And I have my doubts that citizens are aware of this.
Our fault, this. We always regret that in the European campaign there is little talk about Europe, when in reality there is a lot of talk. But we always choose the only phrase that is at a rally about domestic politics, which is the bait to appear on the news.
I insist a lot, I think it is also said in the book. I don’t know if people are aware that around 60% of the decisions that are made in Spain are not made in Spain, they are not made by the Spanish Government, they are made in the European Union. And on top of that, when you tell someone, they tell you that it’s bad. The CAP, let the farmers tell it, the currency, the European Central Bank, Schengen…, in short, everything. Now we are entering the phase in which you cannot make budgets if they are not approved in Europe. The budget, which is the most important thing that is done in a country parliamentaryly. And we are talking about how it is essential to have a common defense, because if Trump comes, let’s see what are we going to do? Because maybe he’ll let us fall. I’m sure not, but you might probably be tempted to say “hey, either you pay what I say or I’ll let you down, get invaded by Putin.” Maybe it is the responsibility of the media or it is something that does not interest people to be aware of how important the European Union is and what we are at stake in the European Union. Return to austerity again, disaster again or advance along the line we were on now, which was a line that was not bad, despite the fact that socialist parties do not govern in many countries.
Well, in population… they actually rule a lot of Europe, although after the fall of Portugal, I don’t know.
I’m not sure, because it’s Germany, Spain, and there are already 40.
Where do we put Macron?
No, Macron belongs to no one. You can’t put him in there, no, no. But no way. Apart from the fact that they are not in the international.
But he comes from the PSF.
Because he was a minister with the previous one.
Well, like Melenchón, which is also…
Well, and Melenchón… Ugh. Overall, we have Germany and Spain, and then a few small ones, but no, in the European Parliament, the popular parliamentary group is larger.
I wanted to bring this question to something else, other than our vote. I have the feeling that the battle is not so much or only for the European Parliament in general, but for the soul of the European People’s Party. That is to say, there is a war between two souls in the European People’s Party. What does the European conservative right want to be tomorrow? Which is as or more decisive than the meaning of the vote expressed by European society.
But I think Urseula von der Leyen was the most advanced, and they have already begun to push her to the right. She has been chosen, but even she is called into question. But in any case, the European People’s Party, which has two souls there, has to choose, we’ll see what it does, if the extreme right rises a lot in Germany, there is Meloni in Italy, we have Mrs. Le Pen in France. I mean, of course, the European game is very much Germany-France, make no mistake. So, what happens in France-Germany is what is fundamentally going to happen. And things are not looking good, neither are they looking good in France nor are they looking good in Germany. That is why I say that they are very important elections and people take them as elections to punish the Government, as if nothing was happening and it is quite the opposite. What matters to people, of course, is their everyday lives, but there is a very close relationship between everything coming up and these elections. It has to be explained, it has to be done. “What a punishment the left is going to have in Spain with the issue of the European elections.” Well, it would be a disaster, because as it is like this in all countries, we are going to find out. As there is a majority of the right and far-right in Europe, what is going to happen to our lives, because it has advanced a lot, and it is one of the most important chapters of the book, nationalism.
I want to go to it for a reason. Now we were talking about the two souls, about the right, I mean, the conventional right, the conservative right, the Christian Democrat, etc. Exact. I have the feeling that in part, that the conventional right or the conservative right is falling en masse across the planet into this type of national-populist discourse because the collapse of neoliberal technocracy has left them without other political material. The right has spent 30 years saying “we are the technocrats, we are the ones who know the recipes, we manage the economy, the rest is ideology.” And 2008 has left them in lesser rags. This is seen very clearly in Spain, in the Popular Party, there is no country project, there is no discourse on the main issues of the time, there are nationalist tics and “tax reductions.”
It is that late capitalism, which is what we are in at the moment, which is neoliberal capitalism, is exhausted after the 2008-2009 crisis. And it produces those phenomena. Because? Because since you are in a globalization, which is not inclusive, it is a very exclusive globalization. Some are enriched, but many are impoverished, there is no harmonious development of the whole, but rather it is a kind of casino, which is a disaster how it is organized at a general level. Of course, there has been a defensive nationalist reflex, which Trump begins with the famous phrase and then has continued everywhere, a typical defensive nationalism: when you do not control globalization from a democratic point of view, you entrench yourself in what you have the most. nearby, which is your country, “here I defend what is mine.” Of course, that’s a disaster.
the process
The process, for example. So, that nationalism is one of the great enemies we have, which the left has to defeat theoretically and ideologically. That is why I dedicate many pages to nationalism.
Well, because it has been a temptation of the left.
Sure, but there is another thing that I think I’m the only one saying out there, so I imagine it must not be true if I’m the only one who defends it. If you are the only one who defends something, it will mean that you have gone crazy. But I want to say it: the Spanish State, the French State, the Italian State, are no longer national States as before. We are Eurostates. What does it mean that you are a Eurostate? That a part of your sovereignty is no longer yours, but you share it. Nothing less than the key elements of sovereignty. The currency is no longer yours, it is a currency that you share, with which you have a central bank that controls all monetary policy, it is no longer the Bank of Spain or the Bank of France. But not only that. You have a multitude of things.
Borders and the transit of people.
And capital trafficking. But in addition to that you have Schengen, you have the CAP, foreign trade policy is already in the hands of Europe, trade agreements, no less, in the world they are made by Europe, not each country. And let’s not say the courts, because you see that the courts are Europe
Ask Judge Llerena, they make him happy.
The European courts are the ones that are going to give you the stick in the end. That is to say, they are very important things about sovereignty. And there the nationalists or independence supporters still continue to talk about independence, but whose independence? That question is what should be asked. Who do you want to be independent of? From Spain? The fact is that the independence of Spain is the independence of Europe, because they will never accept you. If you become independent as has been attempted. In the Lisbon treaty – I said it the other day at the event we held at the 21st Century Club – in the Lisbon treaty, article 3 bis says that the European Union has to guarantee, above all, territorial integrity of the nations that make up the Union. When the process took place there was not a single party, not a single country that said “man, let’s listen to them.” It was complete and worldwide rejection. I think Fiji was the only one that said something in favor. But that is not said to the Basques and Catalans. If you hold a referendum, you never tell them: “Hey, if you leave, you leave. I don’t know”
I don’t think the PNV’s sensitivities are about to be independent right now.
No, no, no, well, that’s of course. I am referring more to the Catalans, who continue to insist.
I have skipped one of the topics that no one talks about when we review the history of our democracies and the last century and a half, to which you devote a lot of attention and give the left a slap in the face: decolonization.
That is a lifelong workhorse of mine.
I just remembered self-determination because of the invocation of the United Nations recognition of self-determination.
But from the colonies or from situations of oppression, etc. Not in democratic countries, which are also in a process of union at the European level and globalization. There is one of those ironies that you say appear in the book sometimes: there is a thing called dialectic. A thing that is good at one time may be very bad at another. When there were colonies, man, self-determination was a fight that everyone defended, that the left, the progressive people, defended. But now it’s the other way around. There was a time when nations had to become independent from the central empires, the French or English colonies, and then, not to mention, from the empires, the Russian or the Austro-Hungarian. And that was very advanced, the famous People’s Spring of 1848, all those struggles that the bourgeoisie had to form nations. But now you are in a phase that is the other way around, now you don’t have to form nations, what you have to form is confederations or federations of nations, because if not, you don’t matter, you don’t matter at all. It has always been said here, you know, Pedro, there have been two great monsters: fascism and Stalinism. I always say 2no, there has been fascism, Stalinism and colonialism.” But here people don’t like to hear that, because colonialism, if you take the figures of the massacres and genocides that have occurred in these countries… I’m not going to say now that Stalin and Hitler were little sisters of the charity, because they were absolute monsters, but colonialism has produced genocides, but terrible genocides. The English, the Dutch, the Belgians.
Belgian!
Much has been said about Leopold, of course, but in Indonesia you don’t see what the Dutch did and you don’t see what the English did in Burma, in India, or the French in Algeria. A true disaster of genocides, but complete genocides. Well, and that’s not usually talked about. But that had a tremendous influence because the liberation of the colonies was very important. I review in the book, as you may have seen, the Cold War, which was disastrous for the USSR, but not all of them were triumphs of American capitalism.
They tied in Korea, lost in Vietnam. An X and a 2 in the pool.
That’s right, they tied in Korea. But he lost in Vietnam, he lost China. Imagine what it’s like to lose China. And then, in other cases, it was an elephant in the china shop. And I start with Mosaddeq, in Persia, that is, in Iran, I continue with Árbenz in Guatemala, I continue with Guillard in Brazil, I continue with Lumumba in Congo… The operations they carried out to overthrow all of these, who were not communists at all, were a disaster. . And that has led to multiple disasters. And then they lost the Vietnam War, which means losing the entire Indochinese peninsula, and they lost the war with Mao and look at what China has been and what it is. You have to do an analysis of what the Cold War was, which was a disaster for the USSR, but if you go to Asia, it was not the same at all. There is a phrase like that from Mao that he once said: “When the west wind ends, the east wind will come.” There is a chapter that I call East Wind, East Wind. “You will fail there, but we will win here.”
And this brings us back to the role of Europe. In this new axis, between East and West, between China and the United States, from our mental, geographical perspective, we are in the middle, but in reality we are not in the middle, we are outside, because the axis is in the Pacific Ocean
Evidently.
We are a satellite. We have the risk of ending up being a tiny theme park there.
This is something I’ve talked about with several authors over the last few years. However, we continue to propose ourselves as the most developed degree of civilization in Western Europe, for rights, for freedoms, for that combination of the State, well-being and creative and productive economies. And there is the possibility of returning to occupy a central role. In that sense, a central role, I mean irradiator. Only if there is political integration, only if there is European political integration. I maintain that the welfare state is a civilizational leap, it is a superior civilization that has elements that surpass liberal capitalism. We are not liberal states, we are social states. The proof is that our Constitution speaks of a “social state”, not a “liberal state”. It is the European social model, a spectacular leap with respect to what exists in the world. In other words, when you travel through countries in North Africa, Latin America, the United States…, next to the European Union, everything is a disaster, they have no rights to anything. And we don’t value that enough. When you go to any country in Latin America and say that you have free education and free healthcare, they don’t believe it. They think you’re cheating on them. You have the problem of taxes, which is the key, because you do not have an advanced social status if you do not have taxes at a certain level, which is more or less around 35, 40% of the GDP. And that is not in any country, in any. They are all below. All of this is an enormous achievement, an example. What the presidents of Latin America want is to look like Europe. Lula is in love with European construction. And the same goes for any advanced party in Latin America. When you read this Senator Sanders and the congresswomen, what they are proposing as very important things is to look like Europe. Europe has a very strong potential in this sense. That is the great battle that must be fought. The great battle is a democracy with social rights like in Europe, Canada has something, New Zealand and perhaps Australia… Europe is the model, we can neither imitate the Chinese model nor imitate the North American model. The one they wanted to get us into is the American one, of course, saying that the welfare system is unsustainable, that pensions are unsustainable, that the money where best is in the pockets of the taxpayers. There is an entire media, political, and academic apparatus that fights in that direction, pointing out that Europe is something that cannot be sustained. Well, because it is true that it cannot be sustained if taxes are not paid. Therefore, what is the policy of the right in Spain at this moment? The only thing they say clearly and concretely is that taxes must be lowered. I don’t see anything else about them. Why is there, for example, all this struggle by certain sectors, here in Spain, but also in Europe, to privatize healthcare, create private hospitals and deteriorate public healthcare? So that you say, “I don’t want to wait I don’t know how long and I’m going private.” Because that is what public health and education are: they call into question the capitalist model. They are post-capitalists and that is what they want to get rid of above all else. And this is what will happen if the extreme right and the right win in Europe. Because we must remember that the extreme right is super liberal. Pinochet was super liberal.
José María Lassalle in Wounded Liberalism links the neoliberals with the original free traders, extremely opposed to the classical liberals. And he argues that liberalism needs democracy, political liberalism, and economic liberalism. But neoliberalism not only does not need democracy, but democracy is a hindrance to it and the only thing it needs is forces of order. Neoliberalism will naturally tend towards authoritarianism
That is totally true. Radical liberalism, in the end, ends in authoritarianism, in what is now very modestly called illiberal regimes.
Javier Milei said that he would remove all the ministries, except Defense, Interior and Justice. The guns and the togas.
Of course, that’s what was here. I give the figures of what the fiscal pressure was before World War II, around 10%, 7%. In Franco’s time, it was 8%, it never went over 8%. That is, to pay the military poorly, pay the police poorly and the judges well and little else. And from there we have gone to 37% in Spain.
Democracy is taxes. And we are still low in Europe.
Six and a half points, below the European average. France has 47% tax pressure. That is, 47% of all the wealth that France produces is collected by the State for education, health, for everything. Well, that’s what they want to get rid of. That is your main enemy. And there is a way to do it brutally, which would be with law and another is to deteriorate public services so that people go towards private ones. “That my pension is shit? Well, private pension”, “I don’t like my school because there are many immigrants? Well, the private one.” “That I don’t like healthcare because I have to wait I don’t know how long for them to treat me?” Well, private insurance and I’m going to private.” That is the mechanism that is being done, for example, in Madrid and Andalusia. Of course, and when people say “look, the best thing of all is that the money is in your pocket, not in that of the State.” Of course, that is fine for a rich person, but for a person who earns a salary, if I take less money from your payroll, but you pay for your healthcare and education, for the vast majority of people it is a catastrophe.
I have a vain hope that the madness, the hyperbole, the final boss of neoliberalism, which is Javier Mieli, will serve a little as a lesson to the world in other people’s heads.
What happens, Pedro, is that the option that Argentines had was either Mirei or Peronism, corrupt to the hilt. Up to the eyebrows. And furthermore, he has never resolved anything. But the great battles we have are those. Taxes, the welfare state
That is why the figure of Thomas Piketty is very important, right? Because he has put the issue of taxes at the center of the left’s agenda
Very important. It was very important to point out the problem of taxes and that capitalism leads to inequality. But there is one thing that is not valued enough, which I believe should be valued more, and that is the relationship of forces. He is a bit mechanistic.
Jacobin?
Yes, a bit Jacobin, and he gives economic laws as if they were immutable, like formulas. And there, he eliminates the force that mobilization, unions or parties of the Left can have. I don’t know, people, the strength they can have at some point to make things change something. That’s a bit mechanical. “This leads to this, and this leads to this.” Well, yeah, but then things happen in the story, a lot of things sometimes. And you have to take them into account. That is why I insist a lot on the topic of science: yes, science yes, but democracy. Democracy is key, because if not, mechanism is not true. There are forces that are there, negative, positive, half-pensioners, everything.
Yes, the mesmeric power of seduction of nationalist songs in this era, for example.
Imagine, a totally sentimental and ahistorical element, in the sense that it has nothing to do with reason. We have a lot at stake in the June elections, much more than the Catalan, Basque and Spanish elections, although people don’t know it, much more. Because imagine now that in Europe an alliance was created between the extreme right and the classic right-wing parties, and the left was little less than laminated. I have some hope of….
I’m afraid I think it’s easier for Biden than for Europe.
I also believe it. Because I believe that in the United States there is much more awareness of what Trump means. After the previous experience and all these trials that they are putting him through, which is terrible, they are going from trial to trial and they are asking him for I don’t know how many years and he is going to end up in jail and people say: “yes, but if he is going to jail, they will vote for him more.” Is not true.
Another possibility that some American authors contemplate as a possible future for the country is another civil war, another war of secession.
Of course. And there are others who are talking about a dictatorship, because Trump has made statements saying: “If I lose, there will be a bloodbath.” And he has even said: “I am going to be a dictator one day.” Imagine this guy, one day as a dictator.
