Author of The Unrest of the Cities (Arpa Editores), a treatise on how the culture of the movement preys on large cities, modifies their activity, destroys common spaces and expels their inhabitants, Jorge Dioni López (Benavente, 1978) He became one of the political essayists of the moment with his previous book, La España de las Piscinas (Arpa Editores), a debut that earned him the Madrid Booksellers Guild award for essay of the year. Experienced in sports journalism, political analysis and an experienced opera critic, in just two years López has become the most prominent thinker on the dialectic of political urbanism / urban policy. His eloquence in saying and writing sharp and lucid statements sets the tone for this extensive interview, in which we propose a collection of his sentences for you to develop.
If it’s okay with you, I’m going to bring you phrases that you have said or written about your new book and we will simply comment on them.
OK.
“Stoicism is a philosophy that has always worked very well for high incomes.”
Yes, this idea comes to me from a wonderful book, The Assassination of Julius Caesar, by Michael Parenti, where he explains the conflict that occurs between the large holders of Rome and the party of the small holders, supporters of redistribution because they are more in contact with the soldiers. And how the former use philosophies that defend that one has to be austere because one’s fortune is produced by oneself. And of course, it is an explanation of “how things have gone well for me, I need an explanation that concludes that I am very smart or that I have behaved very well.” I see a translation with the work ethic of the 19th century or with the meritocracy of today.
And with the Protestant idea of ??predestination.
Yes, also with predestination. It is a story of “it has gone well for me and I don’t want that to have to do with the context.” That is to say, with the fact that I have had a family such that I have not had to start working at the age of 13, I have been able to read, I have been able to do things, they have helped me, they have not hit me, they have respected my sexual choices. .. All those things, which are the context in which your fortune occurs, you take them out of the equation. And luck, which is the fundamental factor in life, there is nothing more important than luck, you also get that. And you say “no, no, no, all this has happened because I am very smart.” This thought usually produces big blows later because you were not as smart as you thought you were and when the context changes, you hit yourself.
“Europe is the PAU of the world.”
Well, this is something that is becoming more and more evident. I thought about it because of classmates from the school of writers who come mainly from Latin America, sometimes from places with security problems. Here you can go through all the neighborhoods at all hours. Despite the alarmist discourse that exists, I invite you to go to other places in the world to see that this is a very safe place. And it is a very safe place for money too. You put the money here and the State is not going to take it. The legislation is not going to change from one day to the next, there is not going to be a coup d’état, there is a very stable legislative framework. That is to say, it is a fantastic place that increasingly, I suppose, will attract high incomes from all over the world, everyone who can afford it will want to have a house in Europe and a European passport. It’s like an expanded Switzerland.
There are two quotes of his that are related: “The middle class is the working class in summer.” And another: “Low-price tourism always combines two precariousness.” Although he also establishes a hierarchy between them.
Well, actually, as a descendant of a man who had a bar, sitting down and being served is not the same as being served. They are two emotional roles that even Freud, Lacan or Jung would tell us have even erotic-festive connotations. Even if you have little, you always want someone to give you that plate of chips. And yes, tourism, like all low-cost dynamics, always brings together two precariousness, always brings together someone who charges little to make your shoes, which in turn will cost you little. But that, of course, causes there to be a constant consumption of that precariousness. You don’t realize that your salary has stagnated because the shoes that previously cost you X now cost half or a third as much. You can continue buying shoes, although they will last less.
“Fraga is the inventor of Spain.”
Fraga is the inventor of Spain. Nations are an invention of story, a narrative invention, like religions. They work because we really like narratives, we need narratives. Nations are a narrative that was created in the 19th century. From Mazzini or Wagner, they create myths, “this is our language, this is our flag, this is our religion, this is our past, these are our myths.” Walter Scott explains why we are Scottish or English, the Wars of the Roses, how we defeated the foreigners who came to impose their language and religion on us and we managed to get ahead, etc. All this discourse in Spain is established through the fight against Napoleon’s invasion and the creation of the idea of ??the Reconquista, which is a concept that was born in the 19th century with the idea of ??linking it with the War of Independence: the noble Spanish people fight against invaders, whether French or once Muslim. To do this, we have to create the idea that there was a Muslim invasion, which historically is not true. It was an invasion of very few people that converted those who already existed to the Muslim religion, just as the previous ones had converted to Christianity. This process requires a tool that is the school. That is, ensuring that several generations have a common language, culture, literature and history is done at school. And there you establish a blank slate. The number of Italians who spoke Italian in the 19th century was few, but by the end of the 20th century they were practically all of them, and that happens in many places. In Spain, this is attempted with an education law, which is that of Ruiz Zorrilla, which does not succeed. So, in Spain conservative thought makes a pact with the Church. If you make an agreement with the Church on education and culture, you will not be able to create a nation. Because the nation is the enemy of religion: the Catholic Church controlled Europe and when the nation-state appears, it stops controlling it, it stops controlling the infrastructure. Except, as I said, those countries such as Spain, countries where conservative thought reaches an agreement with the Church. That is why they are countries where their languages ??are preserved, such as Catalonia or the Basque Country. How do they preserve it? Through religion. Religion is fundamental to understand why Spain is a country that preserves its languages. Other places have not had the same fortune because they did not have strong conservative blocs that agreed with the religious bloc. And religion has its map and it has its time, it doesn’t matter if it has to preach in one language or in fifteen. That’s what the mystery of Pentecost is about. And of course, all that national unification that did not occur in the 19th century had to be done later, first by force, with the repression after the Civil War. But repression always works in a very relative way, something festive is needed. You have to assume the narrative for the narrative to work, and tourism achieves that.
Let’s get to the core…
Tourism always makes a distillation of the customs of a country’s culture to offer it as a product. That is to say, Mexican food or music is probably much more diverse than we think, as is the case with Italian music or food. But you need a small summary to put it in the travel brochure and that is what Manuel Fraga does. I use Manuel Fraga as a metaphor, but in reality the tourist process does it. That is, you have to tell tourists “What are you coming to see? You are coming to see Carmen. “It is what you have seen.” And paella prevails because, compared to the most traditional food, which is stew in its various local versions, or even bread with tomato, which ranges from pantumaca, or pa amb tomàquet, to hornazo. Paella prevails because it is also a very cheap dish, it is very delicious, it is very practical, it is very festive and it is very aesthetic. The pot is not aesthetic, you cannot take a photo of a pot from above, but on the other hand, the paella has that aesthetic vision that pizza also has, it is very pretty and it is very festive: Paella is happiness.
And it is round, to share, communal.
Of course, the paella, the wooden spoon, everyone around the fire. It’s wonderful: paella, beer, happiness.
“We have to devour ourselves to grow.”
This comes because the two main economic sectors of Franco’s regime, with the stabilization plan – which is based on foreign investment – ??are construction and tourism. The two most reliable sectors, the most powerful sectors, the two legs that will always work were construction and tourism under Franco. They are two sectors that need territory and need people. Many people who work at a low price, very intensively, in short periods of time. That is, now summer is coming, we need 100,000 people to come to Alicante, the Costa del Sol, the Balearic Islands or the Canary Islands. With which, we eat territory and we eat people, we eat people’s precariousness.
That is why “the raw material of Spain is Spain and the Spanish, until they are exhausted.”
Of course, one thing is opposed to the other, because you cannot need 100,000 people to come to work in the Balearic Islands and then also sell the Balearic Islands. Because those people who are going to work cannot buy the Balearic Islands, that is, they cannot have an apartment. I read this year that there are several hotel companies that are going to offer a house to people who go to work. It’s a Downton Abbey system. The service will work in small rooms that will be in the basement.
I think I have written down some of his quotes about this here. Yes: “Ibiza ages because the pensions of the old economic model are stronger than the salaries of the new one.”
I have seen news about how consumption capacity has changed. Who has money to consume? The older people. The pensions that come from salaries and collective agreements prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall are much more powerful than the salaries and agreements after the fall of the Berlin Wall. This is not a defense of the Wall, it is a defense of the system that existed in Western Europe when the Wall existed, due to the contrast of two economic models. That is, the fear that there is an economic model that could be an alternative makes you say, “well, I have to go somewhere else to offer something more than what I am offering.” When that is over, you no longer have to offer anything, they can make do with whatever they have. And this, of course, affects who can buy houses, who can move, who can travel, who can go to the theater, who can go to the cinema, who can listen to music. Old people.
Even who goes to political events.
And in political events, of course. Who is the client? They are the old people, they are the political activists.
There are only older people at the rallies, but in a brutal proportion.
Well, yes, there is also an idea of ??ancient militancy that consists of you have to go, you have to collaborate. Yes, as is. Yes Yes.
Another shocking one: “The great political change of recent decades is that the right became bold and the former revolutionaries began to resist.”
People of order have become people of disorder. Yes, it has become very revolutionary and wants to change absolutely everything. When you start from a model in which things more or less work, based on the more or less agile redistribution of wealth and a certain equitable system, obviously, if there is a project that wants to change it, it has to become very bold because You have to change things that are good for many people. You have to have a very, very revolutionary and very, very powerful speech. You, who have always thought that the tap water is going to continue coming out and that you will be able to drink it all your life, a day comes when it doesn’t, a day comes when that doesn’t work, that there is no night school, that you go to the doctor and there is no doctor. That whole world that you thought existed, little by little it ceases to exist. And those who want to change it have appropriated the words. The word “change”, the word “reform” are words that have been absolutely captured by the right.
I have written down another version of this: “The arrival of international funds or exotic millionaires follows the failure of local elites, who change production for the extraction of rents, something that allows us to abandon the boring conservative spectrum and try more risky political thoughts. , even lysergic.” I think it’s not just the process that speaks…
It is not only the process, it is also Brexit. But it is an idea that came to me through the process, the idea of ??the local elites… The shopkeeper disappeared, the entire industrial fabric of Poblenou disappeared, the entire industrial fabric of Barcelona disappeared at the turn of the century, and the final touch was the crisis 2008-2011. That little factory for making cattle that I had here on Vizcaya Street is gone, but hey, the lot remains and now the city council is building the 22@ district and we can build some flats so that people can come here to the beach. Moving on from those needs of production, which needs social stability, a training system so that there are workers and needs people to live nearby and not raise chickens and can dedicate themselves to working and not thinking about whether they will be shot when they leave work… All those things don’t matter to you, you have some apartments that are going to work with people who come and go and you are going to live in Palau de Plégamans or anywhere, in the Palau Tordera… And you don’t care exactly what happens in the city because your movement is that of the cruise ships, it is that of the airport, it is that of the Hard Rock Cafe, that is, it is another industry, it is another thing. So, you can try other things, other ideas. What’s more, the stability that exists, which is the legal framework, bothers you because they are telling you that you could earn much more if that entire legal framework ceased to exist. That entire legal framework, which is what makes the water come out of the tap and be drinkable. But you don’t care, because maybe the tourist buys bottled water. It is Andorra with sea.
And one version of this is: “Christian democracy had French omelette for dinner, but Forza Italia had Viagra for breakfast to get laid before going to mass.”
Yes, they are two cinematographic scenes. He is the Aldo Moro of… What is the name of the series?
Exterior night.
That seemed terribly benevolent to me towards Aldo Moro, no one becomes president of the Christian Democracy being such a good person, I’m sorry but you can’t. Like Papa, no one becomes Papa by being a good person. And there is a very strong contrast with the rest of the party structure dealt with in the series. He tells the child a story, worried about everyone, he goes to bed, doesn’t sleep, makes himself an omelette… Oh my goodness, but this man is a Berlinger! He is a Franciscan! And I don’t think anyone would become president of such a collection of Godfather characters while being such a good person. But it came to me because of that scene in which the guy makes a potato omelet and eats it while listening to the radio. And then, Berlusconi’s Villa Certosa party with the president of Czechoslovakia getting a boner, running from sun lounger to sun lounger. These are the heirs of that one. What a mental leap you have to make to go from one thing to another. From the hair shirt as suffering to the whip as bondage, or to the opening scene of The Great Beauty. Well, of course, that is a terrifying leap. In that film, as you often say, deeply reactionary in its message, all the people who are having a good time are right-wing people. The former leftists who gather on the roof are talking about the past all the time: “I was, I did, I wrote, I such” in a penthouse in Rome. It’s like Orpheus, it’s a journey of the dead, a journey of dead people. That is the literary version, the political vision is reactionary. But it is an aesthetically very beautiful film that represents very well what we were talking about about the PAU of the world. That is, what can Europe sell? History. We are history. We are history that dazzles all those people who come and stare: a thousand years have been contemplating you.
“Crises reorganize and are more profitable than stability.”
Yes. As in The Shock Doctrine, by Naomi Klein. It is an idea from David Harvey, well, and from more thinkers, but in my book I have used David Harvey’s thoughts and I have done with him what Luis Cobos did with Verdi.
Hahaha, “we ride on the shoulders of giants.”
Harvey says that one of the fundamental elements is the crisis, the management of the crisis. Because? Because what crises do is take all the money that is on the table, say “no more” and make a player keep it. Like in poker, we are all playing and suddenly there is one who knows how to hold the hand, who is the investment fund, the great player, and he takes the hand and says “good afternoon, see you next time.” All those little players that came in are left hanging. It works like this, that is, it’s the tour de France, who makes it to the last stage? It is very narrative and what the narration aims to do is identify us with the character. The meritocratic narrative aims to identify us with the self-made character. “Hey, if you put your mind to it you are going to succeed and this concerns you.” And there goes another bold idea for another book, which has to do with the change that porn has brought: porn has started to be told from the man, in the first person. And this is the same: “José Ramón, you are not going to have Rocco Siffredi’s cock either, even though now the stories are shot by Rocco Siffredi.” The same as now the economic story is based on Elon Musk. But you’re not going to be Elon Musk.
The “POV” is called that, right?
Yes. Before it was a look from the outside and now it is from the inside. And from within, who are you if you are the actor? But you are not going to be the actor, in this movie you are not going to be the actor. Neither in the meritocratic film nor in the porn…
We jump to another idea: “The metropolis is in the cloud and the city is its colony.”
I read several books about colonialism, but in the end I didn’t end up getting into this book. But yes, I do believe that there is a colonial system. That is to say, the investment fund, the cloud, is like a dispersed metropolis, a metropolis that may be in the center of Frankfurt but that is connected to the City, which is connected to Silicon Valley, the great metropolis of the world. And it extracts resources from all over the world. That’s it. It is a system similar, as I said, to that of colonialism.
He talks about the Company of the Indies.
Yes Yes Yes. In fact, Karim (Rubén) Juste’s book The New Ruling Class tells how capitalism was born from these colonial companies. And it seems to me that it is a book that should be read more because it is very interesting how at that time, even the monarchies, as powerful and absolute as they were, also became shareholders of those companies at the level of the rest of the investors. . That is, before there is democracy, there is economic democracy. And yes, today there is a World Indies Company that is exploiting the world.
Now let’s go with something he said regarding the local and about which very little cultural anthropology or sociology has been done: “The disappearance of the savings bank system that provided each province with a financial center was a shock, the decline of the provincial mesocracy.”
Perhaps it is because I am from Castilla y León, I am from a place that is emptying, where no one is left and there is a terrible feeling that this is sinking, that it is already the end. And when there were two boxes, the idea remained that there was still something here, Caja España and Caja Duero. I have relatives who have worked there and in my town there were both Caja España and Caja Duero. They were powerful places where people went to ask for credit for their small business, my grandfather went to ask for transportation…, but that disappeared. And there is a very emotional and very aesthetic issue that was seeing the headquarters of the box in Salamanca with the For Sale sign, the headquarters of my box. And see the box building in Soria, which is a very beautiful brutalist building, also with the For Sale sign. It was one of the places that articulated all this, that still conveyed the feeling that things are being decided here, that something is happening here. This emotional issue is fundamental. Mesocracy means that in Soria or Salamanca or Zamora there are also restaurants where there are people who meet and decide things. That feeling of deciding things, that I don’t have to be Mr. Smith’s going to Washington, that I don’t have to go to Madrid or to Valladolid to ask for it was essential to maintain the self-esteem of the place. And the fact that that emotional pole disappears is key. I believe that Teruel Exists, Soria Now and all these things come because here we still want to give our opinion. And I am very surprised that places like Valencia do not react to the commotion. Valencia is a place that had two savings banks, a bank, a very powerful industry and a very strong football club. And all that has disappeared. All that is gone and I am not sure that the change that this represents has yet been accepted.
It is very difficult to accept decline. Look at the English, with the loss of the empire. For a century they have not given any acknowledgment of receipt of the end of all things.
Of course, all this makes you see why now someone comes and tells you “things are going to go back to the way they were before.” And they are not going to come back, they are never going to come back, it is all a lie. But it’s a story you can buy because you really want it to happen.
Distantly related to this, another sentence of his: “In the 21st century, rural does not exist, at least not in Europe.”
It is a thought that comes from the idea that every time there are elections, we talk about rural votes and urban votes, and by rural votes we refer to everything that is not Madrid or Valladolid. I come from a town, Benavente, which has 18,000 inhabitants. When I grew up, there were 8,000 or 9,000 of them and that place was no longer a rural area. I could distinguish it because when I went to my grandmother’s town, in Tierra de Campos, that was a rural area.
There were no sidewalks or traffic lights.
Of course, there were no sidewalks or traffic lights. There was a traffic light where the national roads crossed. And sidewalks, there were some, but most of the town was not paved. But in my town, there were movie theaters and most people did not work in the fields. I have given a writing workshop several times called “Empty Spain”, but it is actually about rural literature and I have read a lot on the subject. The rural world is a world in which time, space and the conception of the family are different. Time is circular based on the seasons, the harvest, and the family is the extended family, which is the one dedicated to the land. It is a world based on attachment to the land, because that is where fertility comes from. And the urban world has nothing to do with it, it is a world based on the individual, on the freedom of the individual, on creativity and on the precariousness of relationships. That is to say, the rural world must always be the same and the urban world must not. And then, that whole world changes. And beware, it happens throughout Western Europe. In France, the peasant world is destroyed by the French revolutionaries. In England it is the conservatives, who make the enclosures and force people to migrate. In other places, in the USSR, it is the revolutionaries who carry out collectivizations. That is to say, in each place there is a change that ends peasant life, that ends the rural world. And currently, I believe that in the United States, in Europe, in Argentina, in Colombia we cannot speak of the rural world. Or maybe in Colombia yes, because it is a larger country, I mean, with more dispersed people. In the elections of Castilla y León, there is talk of the “rural vote”. No, hell, Carrión de los Condes is not a rural vote, that Béjar is not a rural vote. I mean, really, these are not people who get up to milk the cow. No, it is not Mr. Cayo’s disputed vote. Before, movies took longer to arrive and music took longer to arrive, but nothing takes longer to arrive anymore. The people in my town are seeing the same things and hearing the same things as me. That is, my children can have conversations with the kids in my town, while I had a difference with the people who lived in Madrid or Valladolid. You read or it appeared on TV, in the News, that E.T.: The Extraterrestrial was premiering and you knew that it was going to arrive in two months. But it’s funny, nobody was going to León to see E.T.. It will come. It will come.
Another: “The goal of the neo-restoration is for the grandchildren of the middle class to be raised again.”
We tend to think that neoliberalism and neoconservatism are like opposing forces, like pendulums. Polanyi said that capitalism strips people of their social identity and provokes a conservative wave, which gives them that lost identity. I read a woman, Melinda Cooper, who said “it’s not like that, right now neoliberalism and neoconservatism operate at the same time.” That is to say, neoliberalism says “I am going to take away all your aid and you are going to support yourself with your family. The family is going to be the place. And in fact I am going to support the family, that is, if you do not have a family in conditions, I will not give you help.” In the United States, much of the aid, especially subsistence aid or school aid and such, falls on African-American families, and then the idea is created that there are African-American women who have children without stopping to have aid and buy the most extraordinary televisions. . Here that story is transferred to Maghreb migrants. They are not emigrants from other places, but Maghrebs. Latinos are like us, we cannot dislike them, and those who come from Europe are Europeans, they are also a little like us, we cannot dislike them either. Who are the ones we dislike? Those who come from outside, who also have another religion, a religion that has been aggressive. We focus it there. The immigrants who receive a lot of help are always from there. And that, I return to the thread, this neoliberal idea creeps in and neoconservatism says: “Perfect, because I want to recover the family.” That is to say, the family is there both to dismantle well-being and to reintroduce the family as an element that restores hierarchies that did not exist. Above all patriarchal hierarchies of men versus women, but also hierarchies from parents to children. The hierarchies that had been questioned in the sixties by the student movements and by feminism. No, no, we must return to the family, to a hierarchy that is of the father with respect to the mother and of the father and the mother with respect to the children. And that operates at the same time, simultaneously. And that combination of neoliberalism and neoconservatism is the neo-restoration.
Follow.
Neo-restoration is a proposal of inequality. We tend to think: “but what idiot is going to want inequality?” Well, there are thinkers who maintain that inequality is good because it promotes initiative, it promotes creativity, and equality or equity encourages us all to end up in a global USSR. These thinkers, who wrote it like this in the 50s, with that anti-communist paranoia, find that their project is carried out in a situation in which that alternative economic model of the Cold War no longer exists and their entire proposal can be develop, that inequality and inequity that occurs in things like eliminating the night high school can be displayed. But why? To create inequality. But for what? Damn, because there are no people who want to work as a waiter. Your children are going to want to work as a waiter because they are not going to have anything else. The welfare state is what ends the system that allowed a million English people to work as servants. They no longer want to work as servants. And that in Downtown Abbey can be seen quite well, how, as the welfare state advances, the house can no longer pay servants and the service under the house decreases. The idea is to end the welfare state to once again fill the basement of the house with servants. “What a pessimistic guy.” Yes, well, I say that that is a project. I’m not saying it’s going to come out. But I do say that inequality is not a research effect. It is a sought-after effect.
This is shocking: “The Opus Dei, helped by Fraga, came decades in advance to the same conclusion as the Chilean Communist Party later: the system born of the revolution cannot be maintained, so the bikini must be allowed in exchange.” that no one checks the property registry.”
This is an idea that also usually occurs in the story, it is often said that tourism was a great challenge for Franco’s regime, a challenge to Franco’s regime, it was an opening. But what the hell! The Franco regime was the great instigator of tourism, the great enhancer of tourism, at the level of requalification.
In the book he mentions one thing related to that period: that many of everyone’s squares were built.
Yes, everyone’s plazas were built. There were no bullrings in the towns. No, there were, but in places where there were none, they were built. This comes from a book by Alicia Fuentes Vega, I think. I’m not saying that bullfighting wasn’t a hobby, it was. In Barcelona there were two places for everyone and during the season they worked Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I say this because the grandparents of my friends, Catalans from the procés, being Catalans from the Macià League, had the season ticket and went Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Four runs per week in season, that is, from May to September. But what that meant by building bullrings was that the bullfighter is the star, he becomes a superstar of the heart. That idea that tourism was a clash against Francoism… That is, Francoism provided tourism, it carried out institutional campaigns throughout Europe to attract people, because it was also good for it to say Spain is diferent, “Spain is different.” . It means that Spain is a country that is like everyone else, but there is no democracy. But how are you going to establish democracy in this very passionate country where people run in front of bulls, where there are civil wars all the time, where knives are thrown at operas…? These people need a little waist, otherwise it will get out of hand. That is the idea of ??Spain is different. But as I said, the Francoists did business with tourism and tourism is at the center of the Francoist economic model.
And of national identity, we said.
And national identity. So to say that he challenged the Franco regime… No, and he does not challenge it with a question that is actually very Berlusconi, that is, uncovering. Which, as we all know, Catholicism accepts quite… well, with little subtlety, which is to say, there is no problem at all. It is the Casita Blanca of Barcelona: mass, aperitif, family meal and sex in the Casita Blanca or with Mrs. Rius. And so, we have already made pujolist Christian democracy on Sunday.
We have actually already gone through this, but the phrase is very nice. “The mass graves were buried with the sand from the beach.”
Clear. There is another book by Max Aub called The Blind Hen, I think, in which he, at a given moment, may return to Spain, in the 60s, and discover that this is another country.
Gregorio Morán also tells it in The Priest and the Mandarins.
Yes Yes. It’s another country. In other words, no one remembers that there was a war here anymore. Rafael Chirbes also talks about this: prosperity is what makes us sign the agreement that all that did not happen. Let’s see, to go somewhere else, Deng Xiaoping’s prosperity makes us forget all the deaths of the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution. That is to say, prosperity always makes us forget the past. This is also something that draws a lot of attention: I did a war novel workshop and people were very surprised that, once the wars were over, people did not want to talk about them, they did not want to judge anyone who had participated in them, there was no no recognition of the survivors of the concentration camps of World War II. What’s more, they didn’t even return their houses, they didn’t return their properties…
Levi could not find a publisher for his account of the Holocaust.
Levi couldn’t find an editor, people don’t want to hear that, they didn’t want to talk about it. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the people who had survived the bomb were stinkers, people did not want to take care of them, they did not receive any recognition until the 60s. Twenty years after it happened, we started to think about that. That is to say, prosperity always makes you forget. Now that I’m reading a little about how we tell ourselves about our lives, both on a psychological level and on a narrative level, we tend to forget traumatic memories. Either we hide them or they come out in the form of autofiction. It is difficult to face it in a harsh way, or we need to have a certain prosperity, a certain stability so that from there we can reinterpret what happened. If I am fragile, I cannot face that because it can destroy me.
Explain what you call “the many-man model,” which I assume has to do with this other phrase of yours: “Not a centimeter of coast without urbanization, not a mountain without a hunting reserve, not a wetland without a golf course or irrigation, nor a square without a terrace. “Spain’s raw material is Spain until it runs out.”
Eat territory all the time. Madrid is a city that has the same resident population, in theory, as it did fifty years ago, but it is a city that has built an incredible amount in those fifty years, an incredible amount. It doesn’t matter, because it is not built to live, it is built for something else. Building is the slash, slash, burn system. I have already destroyed this forest, so now I am going for the next piece of forest, the next piece of forest, the next, the next…, until in all of Castilla, where there is nothing, there are no trees. That is to say, the same thing that was done with Castilla for the cereal and the mesta, I did it centuries later for tourism, that is, destroying the coastline. This is not a metaphor: there was still a plot of land to be developed in Playa San Juan, it is going to be developed. In Benissa, which is an inland municipality… (This is also very curious, in Valencia or Alicante, the city was in the interior, but the municipal area reached the coast, and on the coast there was a small town that It used to be quite poor, because the land that is near the coast was poorer because of the salt. There has been a revenge from those who lived next to the coast because they were able to sell that). Well, in Benissa, he said, there was a plot of land left and it is going to be developed. In Cádiz there are a lot of golf courses. This project has been done and this one, this…, which are next to this other course, this other, another, another… I mean, is there so much demand for golf courses? Are there that many people coming? Really? Sure? Are you sure Albania isn’t going to build golf courses too? Are you sure Croatia can’t be an interesting rival?
“Franchises are like sharecropping and platform workers are day laborers.”
In the center of the city you have Sports Fidel, like there was in my town, which is run by Fidel and has his workers. All those people who had a company lost money, but they still have capital and can invest in a franchise. A franchise is a brand, that is, it is subletting land and you hire day laborers to work that land. It is a system that is The Holy Innocents with Naomi Klein’s No logo. What does Nike have? Nike has nothing, it is a brand. They are gentlemen in a company that is in New York, Los Angeles and London and they hire companies that make the shoes, take them from one place to another and market them. But the brand does not have those companies, it can dispense with that supply chain and hire another. You are not tied to anything, really.
“A sustainable society does not have to be fair, democratic or egalitarian.”
There is a confidence in change that, well, is fine, but if the economic model does not change, any technological change or change in the way of doing things will adapt to the economic model. To make it clear, I give an example, the Internet. 20 years ago, when the Internet arrived, there was a great explosion of optimism: “The Internet is going to create a more decentralized place, it is going to enhance popular power, we are all going to be able to intervene in decisions, anyone is going to be able to create their literary work.” , artistic, theater, such, and it will be put on the network, we will stop depending on the musical or artistic industry.” Well no. The business is done by Airbnb, Uber, Spotify, etc., etc. That is, if the economic model does not change, an economic model based on accumulation, what the Internet promotes is accumulation. If you want it to not promote accumulation, what you have to do is change the economic model. The technological model alone is not going to change anything for you. And with this there is great optimism, such as “the Green Revolution is going to provide us with a more just and equitable world.” No. And if you have been reading the economic press for five years, green is today one of the big sectors. I think that green and real estate are the two major sectors of the economic press. They are the sectors that have the most information. They are already telling you that theirs is the land, the urban land and the rural land. Rural land to power the urban system. And if the property is going to be owned by large companies, large investment funds and large fortunes, what do you think? They are going to distribute it? Yes, it will be cheaper and it will be more sustainable… but you will pay the same or more because your profit rate will be higher. Again, I’m sorry to be so gloomy, but capitalism is a system that tends to accumulation, tends to cartel, tends to oligopoly and at the political level tends to imperialism. The people who put the capitalists in charge in Russia 20 years ago, what did they expect? That it wasn’t an imperialist country? Of course it is going to be an imperialist country as soon as it can.
Another: “We have already seen what has happened with soccer clubs on beaches or sidewalks, dispossession is the model. And if democracy is a problem for the market, it will be privatized.” Related to this also: “Institutions have been assumed by the economic model as resources for creating consent.”
The thing is that every day, for many years, we do not stop hearing about the problems of bureaucracy, the legal framework and blah, blah, blah… And how institutions either facilitate investment or are seen as an obstacle, something that must be eliminated. And that is something that, drop by drop, creates an idea that this is indeed the case and that everything today would go better for us if all those obstacles and obstacles were removed – the semantic field of the “wall” is used, the semantic field is always fundamental. to convey a story, always – it is said that everything would flow if all that disappeared. But all that is what makes the houses have a regulation that prevents them from catching fire, from catching fire. You replace control with “the responsible declaration” – I come from the time of the “responsible declaration” regarding the sale of oil, I knew it, and I remember my mother being scared by what she bought–…
It is the tuberculosis revolution of Castilla y León.
I already know the world of “responsible declaration” regarding the production and marketing of food. I already lived that. So…
When butchers died from eating the liver of the very cows they sold.
But of course, drop by drop, you bring that. Management is seen as something aseptic, as something that will work better, something without conflict. When has democracy been something without conflict? Democracy is conflict because life is conflict and democracy is the peaceful resolution of conflicts. That is precisely what it is, the absence of conflicts…, people tell you about the tranquility of Franco’s regime. Yes, of course Franco’s regime was a quiet place and you can also tell me how it happened with Stalinism, I am convinced that if there were a Russian man – the same has already been done – he would say “the good times of tranquility, it didn’t happen nothing, we were all happy.”
In the past nothing ever happened.
Or in the time of Mao, nothing ever happened… well, people disappeared from time to time… but they were people who were looking for trouble and such.
We continue: “Once again the conquerors keep the energy, communications, housing, infrastructure and public services, while they leave us the Bible, the flag and a playlist from the eighties.”
Yes, nostalgia. She recently spoke with Alberto Mayol, a Chilean sociologist…
I know him, he published this year The 50 Laws of Power from ‘The Godfather’.
That is. And he explained to me that in Chile, Tell me how it happened takes place in the eighties, in fact, it is called The eighties. In the eighties in Chile there was a dictatorship. Well, it has also caused a certain nostalgic phenomenon regarding that past. And yes, with respect to the conquerors, public services have a great capacity to create value. Let’s see, headphones have to be good for you to buy them or you have to create bad headphones all the time so you have to change them, you have to be effectively competitive and from time to time offer an increasingly better product. But with the doctor, no. The doctor creates value alone. Because when your son got sick in the fifties – again I go back to the past, the past that really existed –, when your son got sick, he said, if you lived in Madrid, you went to Chicote and bought penicillin from the black market. This is so. Of course, it has an enormous creation of value, it is like a drug. What makes great value creation? The heroine. Because the junkie will buy it from you at any price. The fact is that being unwell or your children’s education or your home have an enormous creation of value, because you cannot do without it.
An inelastic demand, as the economist Manuel Portela would say.
Of course, public services are where the private sectors are going to set up, of course. How much are you going to pay for radiotherapy? You mortgage the house with a reverse mortgage, of course.
“The peculiarity of Spain was the final victory of the old regime in the 20th century, which allowed Arrese to think about the possibility of having a bucolic agrarian society in the 1950s.”
Yes, the initial plan of the phalanx was for people to stay in their towns. In fact, there is a movie…,
Grooves?
Yes, Surcos, even today people are surprised by what a beast he is. In other words, it is pure and simple neorealism. But it is a neorealist movie that could be filmed today… is there a neorealist director? Could León de Aranoa sign it? Or the one about Roof and Food… I don’t know who directed it, I’m a little disconnected from current cinema.
An Andalusian filmmaker, Juan Miguel del Castillo.
Of course, you can film Surcos today with a family that comes from Senegal. Because also the grandfather becomes a mantero and sells things in El Retiro, the boy becomes a taxi driver and the girl goes on duty and then ends up in a brothel, in a house of sexual exploitation. As is, the story continues to work the same. And the message was “don’t come to the city.” In fact, the poster at the beginning of Surcos was “many people go to the cities with the demand for an easy life. It’s not like that, dreams are destroyed and I don’t know what…” The idea was “don’t come here.”
Like in the United Kingdom before the Industrial Revolution.
Clear. In the fifties it was “stay in Tierra de Campos and don’t come.” Ah, but the stabilization plan arrives, the industrialization of the countryside and people come. And once he comes, I think that a very good change occurs, which is that the small agrarian property is changed to small urban property and without the intermediate step of Vito Corleone, so to speak: the emigrant who works, his son works and Then the grandson is the one who is already established. No, here he is the emigrant, he comes to the city and ends up having an apartment in Nou Barris or in the Pilar neighborhood. I had a plot in Carrión de los Condes or in Villar de Fallaves, which is my grandmother’s town, and now I have it in Moratalaz. Pam Pam. It is the victory of the Old Regime – it is something that I believe is forgotten and we do not take into account – because Spain is a place where there is a Restoration and then there is a Civil War. In Portugal there is a coup d’état, but a coup d’état is not a civil war. A coup d’état is a coup d’état, it causes suffering, it causes disappearances, it causes deaths, it causes repression… But a civil war is a revolution, it is the social substitution of one group for another. And when I say “from one group to another” I am not referring only to socialists or communists, as there were practically no communists in 1935. There were socialists, there were republicans, more or less from the center, and there were conservatives. I have written some text about this: my great-grandfather was conservative, he was from the CEDA, from the Agrarian Party. And my great-grandfather, at first he thought that what happened in ’36 was a coup d’état and he supported it. When he saw that a war was starting, he did not support her and she almost took him away. Well, he was a person who was left out, because there was a group that had become a phalanx.
I have read to you that your grandfather said that the most scoundrels had become members of the Falange.
Yes, it said: “The most shameless people in each town have joined the Falange so they can steal and kill.” To be able to steal. Being a conservative, property mattered a lot to him. Stealing seemed to him the most absolute subversion. So, what had been stolen… – “a lot was stolen in the war”, was another phrase that he repeated: “A lot was stolen in the war” –, and of course, this is also memory. In other words, memory is knowing that in that town, that one, that one and that one, everything they have was stolen. Very unpleasant, that is very unpleasant.
“The Neo-restoration does not want to return to 1945, but 1789.”
I believe that the great parenthesis opened in 1789, even earlier in the United Kingdom…
And in the American Revolution.
Yes, the American Revolution, the Glorious one in the United Kingdom, but well, the French one is more drastic. And that is the parenthesis that opens consists of “well, now we are going to begin an era of redistribution.” Which was economic redistribution and social redistribution. This seems important to me, because there is also a discourse that has become a bit powerful that wants to separate them and says “we have to focus on economic redistribution, and be careful with social redistribution because it confuses us.” That is to say, “we are going to put the brakes on the expansion of rights and we are going to focus on the economic because the other things confuse us.” No. They go at the same time. They go at the same time because the reaction goes at the same time. If you let them attack you on this flank, you won’t be able to defend the other.
Well, because in reality, if I have understood correctly what you explain about political rights in the book, the hypothesis you launch is that restricting political, sexual rights, etc., is not done for a moral or ethical issue, but also to create a payment market.
On the one hand, a payment market and on the other hand, hierarchical control. That is, suppressing the right to abortion means “women are minors and cannot decide.” Yesterday a man on television said it again: “Women are minors, they cannot decide.” This is what abortion means. “You have to keep them under control.” This is what patriarchy is. Women cannot decide and have to be under supervision, in private space, under supervision and cannot occupy public space. And we have to remind them periodically, whether it is attacking the right to abortion or harassment on networks. We guys don’t receive harassment online, maybe you, who are more combative…
Nothing serious or comparable to what women receive.
I wrote a book two years ago and two journalists received harassment online for my book, two women. Not me, them. Because it is a way of remembering that you are occupying a space that is not yours. And the right to abortion is the same. That is why they are social rights that go at the same time. That message of “we are going to focus on this and we are going to neglect this” is dangerous because everything is democracy.
Everything comes from the Enlightenment.
That is, everything is democracy, everything is redistribution, everything is expansion of rights, the majority of rights for the majority of people, so that they can enjoy their lives and make their lives. If you say “not migrants, excluded,” it doesn’t work. There is no such thing, if you are going to exclude people, your project is no longer that project.
“Many people making decisions in their small area does not constitute a change, but a market.”
Yes, this is a bit provocative, because I am very refractory to the discourse of “you can do it, you at home, with whatever you do, you can do it.” No. “Then, you are saying that everyone should do what they want.” Well no, I’m saying that I believe we have to recycle, I do it, I try to behave like a civilized person, but that is not going to change the economic model, which is what causes the big problem. If you don’t change the big problem, the only thing you are doing is calming the conscience. It is a system that religion has used for centuries with excellent results: examination of conscience, heartache, telling one’s sins to the teacher and performing penance. And all that changes and is going to bring the Kingdom of Heaven? No, but it is saving. Works? No. So, a lot of people doing this, do they have any power to change the global model? No. What has power is the vote and changing the economic, social and political model through the State. What changes things? What changes society? Equal marriage. “My two friends come here and I treat them like a married couple.” No, no, no, what changes is that the law treats them as a marriage. Not me.
Before we talked about “if democracy is a hindrance, then it will be privatized.” And I find this very powerful: “The first to request a constituent process ten years ago was the Morgan Bank.”
It was just like that. This was something that Enric Juliana recalled in an article, that the Morgan Bank had a report that considered that the constitutions of ’45, post-World War II European constitutions, for example, the Italian or the German one, had too much “socialist bias.” . As such, they had an anti-fascist bias. The German constitution says “property binds.” You have this property, but there is a common good, which can sometimes be applied, it is not usually applied, but the law says it can be applied. The Spanish Constitution says that the State could expropriate everything in a situation like the pandemic, it could have expropriated the private health system and it would have complied with the Constitution. This is what Morgan Bank says: “Careful, careful, careful.” Because we are creating inequality and inequality, if we create it very quickly or very strongly, maybe all those people, who have not yet, reorganize and have a legal framework to carry out a project. So, let’s change the legal framework. There is a very good book called Globalists, by Quinn Slobodian – it has a title that is like an insult right now. “Globalist, Judeo-Mason!”, which speaks of neoliberalism being above all the legislative system, consists of constituting a legislative system above the State that prevents the State from acting. And of course, that should be completed with the dismantling of the legislative system articulated by the State through the constitutions.
“A financial district is a colony within the metropolis, which welcomes a new metropolis and turns the territory into a colony.”
Yes Yes Yes. That is, there is a place that does not belong to the place. I invite anyone who wants to realize this to walk through Canary Wharf in London, the center of Frankfurt, it is absolutely wonderful. It’s like entering Jerusalem for a medieval pilgrim. That is to say, here is God, who can do everything. Incredible. And the feeling that that place does not belong there, that is, there is a moment when you leave Frankfurt and enter there. And oh, wonder. And of course, all those people are the Indies company and they manage everything. Run the world. You have the world on your computers.
“We must sell the city is a phrase that most municipal managers have in their mouths, forgetting that, when one does not have a plan, it is never a sale, it is a scrapping.”
The phrase appears in a report by Arthur Anderson about Bilbao. Well, everyone who knows Bilbao – I knew him because I had relatives in Amorebieta, I know him very little – all the people who saw Bilbao in the eighties, that’s where the atomic bomb had fallen. It was a city that probably needed regeneration, reconstruction. And a well-thought-out reconstruction plan is made that says we have to sell the city, yes, but also that we have to produce within the city. That is, we have to attract people but we are also going to reactivate all the industrial GDP that we had, because if not we are going to become a city of services. And we already know how service cities work. I find it very interesting that the second city that says “I want a Guggenheim” is Santiago de Compostela. Because Santiago de Compostela is a city that already has an emblematic building, which is the Obradoiro, and you are not going to surpass it, no matter what you do, you are not going to surpass the Obradoiro. Unless you burn it, since it doesn’t work, you won’t get over it. And it already welcomed people, who already have a personality.
Yes, a city that was not in crisis.
Of course, he wasn’t in crisis. What’s more, Santiago had had a mayor who was an architect or urban planner who placed a building here, a building there, a building here. That is to say, we are going to make the city grow on all sides, with points of interest, we are not going to make a megasite here so that everyone can go and live there. No. And it is that place that was already working well, there was no need to fix it because it was already working well. There are many places like this that worked well. If you have a session of chemotherapy and you are not sick, you are going to end up badly. If you put the same system in a city that is not bad, so to speak, what you still do is create dysfunctions. I’m going to add construction, three shopping centers, two theme park centers, I don’t know what. You are creating a movement industry around that place, which may just dismantle things that already existed.
“When your savings accounts were blown up and the money disappeared, the festivals arrived. “We wanted a calatrava, but we have a Sonorama.”
Clear. The City of Culture model of Galicia, like the Calatrava model, so to speak – now Calatrava will come and complain to me –, which aesthetically is fine, that is, it is beautiful, but I believe that there is an architecture, the architecture of the Wow, we have become detached from it because we visualize it with the extra cost, but it is an architecture that is aesthetically beautiful. I would also like you to think about that. But all this needs a financial system that pays for it, that supports it. The moment that goes to hell, you can no longer build a City of Arts and Sciences in Torre Don Jimeno or in Alcorcón. Here we built a City of the Circus, City of the Arts, which has been closed for 20 years. Since it is built where one of the most important ufological sightings in Spain took place…
Ummo’s?
Yes, that of Ummo, that of the Ummitas, the Castle of Valderas. It is built right there. I have always had the hope that the Ufological Interpretation Center would be built with Pablo Vergel at the head of it. That’s not going to happen, I know, but let me dream. Well, it’s next to Ummo’s trout UFO. And all that was a wasteland, the castles were in ruins, there was nothing. You could do the UFO trick without anyone seeing you. Not anymore, it’s built and there it is, more or less that’s where the city of the arts is built. Building that takes…
Bank of Madrid.
Bank of Madrid. The same as the entire urban world needs boxes. In my neighborhood, each block was named after whoever built the block. La CAM, la Caixa, Bankinter, Banco Pastor, BBVA, Ibercaja, Caja Madrid. Clear.
“A hangover does not work as a vaccine, it is a parenthesis between two binges.” Someone should have told Tximo Puig. I think it was Enric Juliana who explained that the return of the PP in Valencia went like this: “Well, we’re out of jail, we’re here, get out.”
I don’t know who I heard, maybe it was Enric Juliana talking about Italy, the idea that corruption is a system that also redistributes money.
“Organized crime is an informal distribution system,” I have noted here.
That. I have the feeling that our generation, when it has had children, has forgotten its youth. I have come to hear that there are many drugs now. And I thought, “I guess never in the history of Spain will I see as many drugs as when I was 18, which was in 1992.” Never. Not so many or so cheap. Never, ever, that will not happen again. And that was the world I grew up in, a world where it was possible to get high at a very affordable price every weekend, and that was done. There was a bakalao route, a route in Valencia, but there was a route in Benavente too, there was a route in León, there was a route everywhere and people left on Friday and returned on Sunday. But that is forgotten. And we forget that this is pendulum, and a time of stability also requires a time of instability, in which you want to try things to see what happens. The people in charge like sado, it seems.
This one drives me crazy: “The expression ‘quality tourism’ is ‘Dr. Mengele, come to reception.’”
The expression “quality tourism,” which everyone loves, means “let the rich come.” Does that mean that only the rich travel? Because you forget that you, mayor of Barcelona, ??when you say “let quality tourism come” are also a source of tourists. So what do you mean by that? That only people with money leave your city? The expression “quality tourism” means that there are quality people and people who are quality. And that path, which seems very cool and is going to give us a lot of money, is dangerous because there are places that are very clear that this is the case. For example, the countries of the Persian Gulf. They are very clear that there are quality people and people who are not. And what decides what quality people are? The money. Well, apply it. “I want quality tourism.” Very well, apply it: you don’t go on vacation. Think about it, think about your own city, as mayor of Barcelona or mayor of Malaga, think about your own city and think about what that means. I understand the basis, of course, which is that civic people come, we don’t want people to come to piss there… They tell you “we don’t want people to come to do drugs and party and prostitute.” It’s not true, what you don’t want is for people to come and do all that with little money, because you don’t care about people with a lot of money who come to get high. Do drug checks in the urbanizations of Marbella, if you care about drug consumption and quality tourism, right?
“The toll to enter a city is the neoliberal solution. The democratic solution is to pedestrianize it.”
Is the same. I have spoken with people who tell you that you have to put tolls, that way you limit who enters. Sure, but you establish a limitation system…
Of castes.
Exactly, caste. Even if it’s not very expensive, what you’re saying is that mobility is a product, like everything. Health is a product, training is a product, mobility is a product…, because it has a price. Whoever can pay it, let him move. That is quality tourism. There are people who can move, who are of quality, and people who are not of quality, so they cannot move. Again, my age allows me to remember times when this already existed: my grandfather’s family had a liquor company in a town next to Zamora. To enter Zamora you had to pay for consumption.
Well, quality tourism for the vacationer. I am from a town where in the summer people went and worked at the fruit counter and I have always had to talk about the difference between the tourist and the vacationer. The vacationer is a family that has been coming since time immemorial, normally they own the house or they always rent it. They are the hundred and the mother, they come in droves and the whole family and it is an orderly tourism. Tourists are something else, they are not vacationers, tourists are a bus that goes to the Jurassic Museum with 57 people and then the bus leaves them in the middle of the town.
They are experiences that escalate and that is also good, that is also part of the model that we like. But, be careful, for the tourism invented by Manuel Fraga, for that Spain invented by Manuel Fraga that we were talking about, there is a word that is at the beginning: “Fiesta”. Hemingway. Party. This country is San Fermín, it is drinking and fucking. Be careful not to take the word “party” out of the equation.
I have several about utopias: “Utopias end badly, heaven on earth is not possible.” “The city has to be chaos.”
Right now it is interesting that the countries that are carrying out great projects for ideal societies, for social laboratories, are China, Kazakhstan, the Gulf countries… Egypt is building a new capital. Or El Salvador, which also has projects linked to Silicon Valley, the crypto city. Of course, all utopias have systematically ended in ruins. There are several paths, and it is also a world that interests me a lot because it is how a closed society works, it doesn’t matter El Palmar de Troya, or Wild Wild Country, whatever. That is to say, all that stuff about people who get along very well, even the family forced to live together for a long period of time, ends up being so-so. That is to say, all of us who have children know that there is an age at which they begin to be adults and at which coexistence is complicated, it is very complicated. As long as they are children, fine, but coexistence as adults is complicated. These utopian societies end with people killing each other, with people leaving or with very strong hierarchies, which is how families end. Fortunately, people leave home or end up arguing deadly or very strong hierarchies are established and people end up a bit there, as we saw in Big Brother.
“Historically, inequality creates problems, even in primates. If you don’t want problems, share.”
You want a stable society, yes? Well, it needs a redistributive system. A redistributive system, in 30 years, in one place in the world, Russia, took man to space, and in another place in the world, the United States, took man to the moon. Redistribution took humans to the moon and humans to space. As it is. Because it is the system that works. But all this does not lead to cities collapsing, what it does, as we like narrativity, is give a clear point, a turning point; I mean, from here on there’s another scene, right? And the story is usually not so clear…
History is not full of major disruptions.
Clear. Even though we’ve been looking back for a few years and everything seems to be one historical moment after another. Well hey, maybe in a hundred years people say that there was a historic moment that was the 2020 pandemic and until that moment, since 9/11, nothing happened in the world. How not? Well no, I’m sorry. When you read memoirs of people who lived a hundred years ago, people talk about events and historical events that you don’t even remember. Of course, for everything to be bad, for unrest or for inequality to take hold, you need, I’m sorry, an ideological organization. Because if not, there are only explosions. France has been exploding periodically for many years and nothing happens.
Since the banlieu, which burned Paris, fifteen or twenty years have passed.
France periodically has outbreaks, the yellow vests, police racism, over pensions, diesel. I know that Lenin is not a thinker who enjoys his best moments, but he called this “the cult of spontaneity”, thinking that because of an explosion things are going to change is a cult of spontaneity. They are not going to change. If one looks at the history of humanity, history is full of peasant revolts. The revolt I don’t know what, the revolt I don’t know which, the revolt such and such, the revolt which. There was a plague and a military levy, the peasants, I don’t know what, burned the castle, killed the duke, and so on and I don’t know what. Two years later, we played again, we dealt cards and… Rural society has transferred to urban society, just as the fight for rural space is going to transfer to urban society, “the homeless will be the new landless ”, which is another of those round phrases that says that the homeless are going to have riots, of course. But for that to materialize into a movement that changes things, we need to know what we want, why, and we need to have people, we need to have Pikettys. And we also need to consider something that we sometimes forget: that not everything has to be new. That is to say, the French Revolution triumphs because it makes a pact with part of the past. And in the Russian Revolution, an agreement was also made with people who were already there. That is to say, in every revolution there are people who know how the papers are done, people who know where the bathroom is and know how the State is doing, how things were going. I mean, you can’t kill everyone. If you want the cart to go one way, you cannot kill the one driving the cart, the one helping him, and the two horses. No. Because if not, now you have the car, now what? You have to redo according to what was there and above all know where you are going.
The transition?
No, transition is leaving everything as it was, it is Spain. Well, it’s not everything as it was, but it’s “let’s not touch anything, let’s not touch anything.” I had a neighbor who was super organized and sometimes invited us to have coffee or eat. And of course, I had the whole house full of things, the whole time it was “be careful, don’t touch anything, don’t break something.” That is the transition.
What he said about the PSOE, the mentality of the guards.
Well, but be careful with all the people who wish for the disappearance of the PSOE, their wishes will not come true. And the PSOE is the base that supports…
The conservatism that disappeared under Franco.
The base that supports the entire structure of the State is the PSOE. Starting with the monarchy. And the PSOE right now is Sánchez. If Sánchez does not exist, the PSOE does not exist. And then there will be another one similar to Sánchez who takes another step towards modernity. Because if he takes a step towards anti-modernity it will be a step towards disappearance, as in France or Greece.
Will you continue living in the city forever? Well, in the PAU.
I guess so. In some kind of city, but yes. There is a practical, very practical issue there: I don’t have a car. As I go to the countryside I will die in horrible suffering, as the one from The One That Is Coming says. Let’s see, I’ll tell a particular anecdote. When we live through the boom, at a given moment it is asked at home whether we should go to a chalet, which is not the typical dynamic. Let’s go to a chalet. We went to see it twice and I wasn’t convinced at all. The question was “since you want to write, this is cool, because here you will be able to write, you will have time and you will be able to have peace of mind to write.” And there was a moment when I said, leaving the last place we went to see, “if I get here to write, I’ll end up like I’m in The Shining.”
Get your license, man.
The thing is, I’m like Lopetegui, I have a dyslexia problem. Basically, the things I correct in a book are phrases or syllables that are changed. I don’t know how to dance. “You have to go to the right.” Which? “Turn right.” Which? I look at the mirrors and I don’t know where she is. My grandfather had three trucks and he transported them. They tried to teach me how to drive, because in my family people learned to drive very young. My father learned to drive when he was 15, both the car and the trailer, the three-axle. We had a three-axle Barreiros, the first one, which was amazing to move that gear. And my father learned to drive in that, and my uncle learned to drive in that when he was 15, like El Torete. My uncle was trying to teach me how to drive and we were about to kill each other. And he said, “We have come this far.” What I do believe is that I want to live next to the sea again.
