Political essayist obsessed with social transformations that transcend the material, Esteban Hernández (Madrid, 1965) has laid bare in titles such as The End of the Middle Class or Perverted Time the processes by which social structures have been modified in decades of neoliberal hegemony. and strengthening of inequality, composing an atlas that is now expanded with The Heart of the Present: Map of an Unknown Society (Círculo de Tiza) in which it proposes new social gaps, beyond those accounted for by per capita income.
He builds each chapter of his book with opposite pairs, that is, from dialectics. Is it for a methodological issue or does it respond to the fact that Western societies have become dual?
The second question is to focus on gaps, on separations, which are not those that have been present in public discourse. It seemed necessary to put on the table another type of distance, of peers, through which to read a little about the public society of the present.
It uses two anecdotes at the start, one related to automatic response mechanisms (how a protocol that is launched cannot be corrected) and the other more grounded in the present, which are the unexpected results of 23J. Both illustrate the obvious gap between the automatisms of management and reality, between policies and the real world. Do you think that the second, the tremendous error regarding the country’s political sentiment, has to do with the first?
When you operate politically and need to find results, you make a reading of the society from which you send your messages. Of course, when these responses are automated and are a product of your bubbles, of the spaces in which you move, you generate, first, an ossified view of society and, secondly, a way of interpreting society closely linked to intelligence. artificial.
An automatism.
Which offers very banal answers. That is sometimes useful, but in many others, not. This has been the case: the left’s interpretation of how to approach the 28-M regional municipal campaign and the right’s interpretation of the July general campaign are both erroneous because they are a product of this type. of trivialized thought from which we confront everyday reality.
Later in the book, he talks about the tremendous “absence of talent,” of know-how, of the current right in the exercise of politics. Do you think that is symmetrical with the left?
No, everyone has their problems. The evolution of right-wing thought ideologically, but also communicatively, in Spain and elsewhere, is practically the same as 20 years ago, since 2004, and what we have seen have been steps forward in the type of discourse which has been maintained since then. Since the loss of the government in 2004, the right insists on an aggressive, hostile, confrontational communication policy, which only stops at a certain moment: when they come to power. But they intend to gain their electoral position through frequent hostility towards each other. And this has happened in the United States. If you see the line of evolution since George Bush, the neocon tendencies are developing, they are perfecting, and that also leads to a quite evident intellectual relaxation: you begin to think that ideas do not matter, that the construction of reality matters, you begin to think that reflections are useless because they give you much less returns than appealing to emotions. And then, well, when these elections arrive, Feijóo thinks that he has won them simply by having eliminated all social appreciation for the figure of Pedro Sánchez. And from there, the choice is made. but it turns out not. Of course, on the left it has been different. Let’s say that if in the line of succession of the right, Reagan, Bush Sr., Bush Jr., Trump…, there has been an upward trend, increasingly stronger, increasingly aggressive, more risky, not on the left. The left has been declining in the positions it had and has also been losing a certain part of its social roots, but above all it has begun to…
…Be kind? Starting with the third Clinton-Blair way, as an ideal son-in-law.
Completely. So, you have the aggressive mood and the conciliatory mood, as two political positions. What happen? That in this development, the left also begins to think that war is only in the media, that intellectuality is of no use, that culture is useful to the extent that it is communicated as entertainment and entertainment, etc., etc. And the reflective mechanisms of the left are very limited to certain university environments, which do not have a great social impact either. They are two different options, but they are also a product of the fact that one position has been growing and the other has been taking steps back.
A senior official of the PP told me a few days ago that he saw another victory of the left in four years as more likely because on the right side there was an absolute absence of strategic intelligence, a total absence of thought, and on the other hand he saw a certain intelligence among the progressives. operational and respect for accumulated political knowledge.
That is undoubtedly. I think two things come together. One has to do with the fact that being in power gives you access to more talented people because you have something to offer them. The opposition party always has fewer weapons. And, for example, one of the problems that the PP has in Europe is exactly this. The current PP is not credible in Europe because they do not perceive that it has the vision, the talent, the expert group, the perspective necessary to face the times compared to what Sánchez has. That is why the PSOE has more credibility in Europe. And it is an endemic problem on the right, which has been losing talent.
Do you think it is because the right replaced all political talent with technocratic arrogance, which went to hell with the crash of neoliberalism in 2008? That is to say, the only expertise that has existed on the right for almost three decades was that of the economist, and he fell into disgrace for bringing ruin.
The thing is that here there was a curious phenomenon: while it was true that the economy completely marked the politics of the right, and furthermore there was no need for more things because by managing the economy everything was already managed, you arrive at the moment of crisis and you continue promoting the same policies wrong, which are counterproductive for many people, even for those who apply them. But along with that, a kind of common technocracy was created, in which there were people from the PSOE, people from Ciudadanos…, which is the one in which the European Union still operates. Let’s say it is the language that can be spoken. There is a very relevant example: suddenly the discourse on inequality is put on the table because Thomas Piketty, an economist, makes a text with many graphics, publishes it in France and it doesn’t matter. But when he arrives in the United States and presents it there, in New York, surrounded by the top staff of technocratic economists, inequality has become an issue. Inequality had been addressed profusely by many academics and non-academics, but it only became an issue at that moment, when it was presented in the language of technocracy.
I understand.
This technocracy persists in Spain also on the side of the PSOE. What happens, and we see this in Donald Trump, is that the first thing he does when he comes to power is try to put an end to technocracy. Let’s say that it is a revolt against that already somewhat deteriorated order. Trump says “no, here things are going to be managed as they really are, with order, with vision, if a guy is worth it, fine; If not, to the street.” And that is something that Americans initially valued, because it was the typical figure of success for the businessman: the elimination of obstacles, of regulation… Somehow, the fact of remaining anchored in that technocracy allows you to provide answers. few to the problems…
But there was also technocratic debate. During the first months of government, in 2020, with the pandemic underway, everyone was talking about tensions between Unidas Podemos and the PSOE, but in reality the great struggle was between José Luis Escrivá and Nadia Calviño, who wanted to apply antithetical recipes during the pandemic. It is curious because Calviño, when saying goodbye in Congress, talked about all the good things she had done during the pandemic as head of the Economy, but the truth is that exactly the opposite of what she maintained in the CDGAE meetings was done, which It was a revival of the recipes applied in the 2008 crisis.
As usually happens. You point out your merits and those of others. Yes, but it’s true that it counts. Today I believe that that has already ended as a proposal for the future, not because of technocracy itself – we always need experts, obviously, and people who know how to do things – but technocracy is linked to a specific historical moment, which is the moment of globalization, of the happy world population, and we are already in a different position. And that has enormous consequences. Orthodox recipes are not going to turn out well for you. But no one is using them, except Europe… and in that way. To give a recent case, the Saudis would not have dared to enter Telefónica 10 or 12 years ago. And we are talking about a country that has a lot of money, that is developing, but that is not a great power. And yet, it enters Spain in such a determined way that the Government has to provide public money to buy shares and defend a strategic company. It was unthinkable.
Both things are unthinkable: the aggressive action of Saudi Arabia and the reaction of the Spanish government.
Clear. They are not orthodox actions, so orthodoxy is of no use to you. And we still have a technocratic part that remains anchored in orthodoxy when the wind pushes it in another direction. Balances are made, we take some measures in one direction, then others in the opposite direction. And when they turn out well, we say that we are the technocrats, that we have done well, as Nadia Calviño does now. Times have changed and not only economically. For example: how do you expect to drive green conversion without a significant public presence and push? You can not. Absolutely.
Since you mention it, there is a tremendous debate, outside the media, around SEPI: what to do with it and how to use it to promote a certain reindustrialization of a country that has completely deindustrialized. And not only is it discussed who is in charge, who presides, but even what ministry it should depend on. Cristóbal Montoro took it to the Treasury in the middle of his policy of cuts, to tie it up short, but there are many, within the PSOE I mean, who maintain that today the Treasury, a ministry of accountants, lacks the management resources and the political and strategic intelligence to stay ahead.
If that is. That’s what it’s about.
Let’s go with the first pair of opposites from his book: “Aspirational vs. shameful.” Is it a gap in some sense prior to or prior to the others?
No, not for me, for me it is a time parallel to that of the other pairs, the other gaps, because that occurs especially in very large cities like Madrid or, if you want, in Barcelona. You have a city where the large communication, legal, and consulting companies are located…
The famous railway interruption: you can go from the extreme south of the country to the extreme north of the country by high-speed train and there are only seven kilometers where until very recently there was not even a railway line: from Atocha station to Chamartín station . The Castellana. Where power resides.
It is the great dividing line of Madrid. And here you also have the high administration of the State and you also have the universities. So, you create a climate where there are investors, people in power, where there is hustle and bustle, job possibilities, etc. At the same time, a large part of the people from the interior cities and small and intermediate cities come to Madrid because it is where they have the possibility of work opportunities that do not exist in their cities. The people who come are middle class people, that is, they are the people who can afford to stay in Madrid, not just the studies. I mean that if you are working and you are young, your salary is not going to be enough to live here, which is why you need help. And in addition, immigrants come, who obviously come here to work and earn less, they live in worse conditions, but they all come here to do well. Everyone expects it to happen to them at a certain time, they hope to achieve it. Therefore, it is an aspirational activity, people have to be bidding. Sure, what’s happening? That there are many people who come to that and fail. In those people who fail there can be many social humors.
You see it a lot in journalism: it’s like being in the hallway of the house, cheating every day, waiting your whole life to enter into job stability. People get gray hair when they are promising.
You get old there. You think, “But when is it my turn?” When you realize that you are no longer going to have it or you no longer have enough money, you have to leave or live poorly in the city. Or change your profession and go to a profession, let’s say, of social discredit. So people tend to hide, because they feel that shame, let’s say, of the middle class: “I should be doing something else, if others see me working as a sworn guard, I lose my social face.”
That is why he talks about two types of invisibles, the one that is invisible due to its perpetual movement and the invisible due to its static nature, because it has remained stranded in the sand.
Yes, there is an invisibility consequence of the activity. You move everywhere and you are nowhere. They are the white vans of the M40. And then, the other invisibility is that of people who become invisible because they do not want to be seen in those circumstances. Madrid is a city where success produces both and therefore you will have completely different social routes, ways of seeing the world, within the same city. Small and intermediate cities are something else.
It is a gap that occurs specifically in the city of movement.
Of course, in the provinces it doesn’t matter, they will see you. I mean, you find them on the street, you can’t hide.
I went through that problem of almost having to return a few months after deciding to come to Madrid, but in 2001 there was a lot of movement and I found a job in a few weeks.
Daily life is made, and now much more so, of those things, of those personal circumstances that seem not to exist in a society like this and that are our daily bread. It is something that with the 2008 crisis became very evident, very visible, and that is at the basis of declassification.
You are always one bad day away from falling, from being washed away by the sewer with the rain. Of having to return.
That’s why there were many marriages where he was an X, whatever, and she was a civil servant, or vice versa, because at least one wasn’t going to fall. But the problem with competitive exams is the same: they also require having a lot of network behind them, if not, you can’t dedicate yourself to it.
In the book he talks a lot, in this regard, about “coagulation”, that all these anomalies are coagulating. Are we at the end of the “liquidity” of societies that Zygmunt Bauman described?
Yes, we are in that transition. Just as he told you before that technology is leading us towards something else, liquid society is becoming something else.
Another of his peers: “Connected versus immobile.”
It has to do with the configuration of the network and the interior territories, which goes beyond the limitation in provinces. You have a central nucleus in Madrid around which other territories develop. It is becoming a border, because many people go to the city to be able to live in better conditions. And of course, the further you go from the core, the less connected you are to the core of the network, the less possibilities you have. This happens in every sense. Here we have a lot of tourism, because communications are good, you have the AVE, airport, anyone can settle anywhere… But of course, in terms of work, it is exactly this: of the cities in Toledo that are connected to Madrid, there are those that have the most vitality and those that are poorly connected… And this is how it works. Of course, this aspect of communications, connection and distance occurs in many more things. At work, if you live in the provinces and you don’t have money, you won’t have connections. Money, connections and location. You need at least two of the three things: you have money and connections, or you have money and you live in the right place and that makes connections easier. Of course, when you live in the interior territories, you live well, life is kind, the cost is lower, but you suffer from that lack of activity. Each city has its history. In the capitals you have retirees, you have public employees, some small businesses and bars and little else. The city that has a factory or capital, like Zaragoza or Valladolid, well, they have more population and more activity. But there are many places that have good life connections, so to speak, but they do not have opportunities because they are not connected and whoever wants to connect goes to the place where those connections can be established. Politically, it divides society greatly because being in a city where you think you can have a future is not the same as being in another where you see that the city has less and less of a future. And you are fine, you live well and maybe you have good purchasing power, but the feeling you have is that things are not going well and you are afraid that everything will go to shit if there is no capital, for example, due to the power of the civil servant class.
And even with capital status, you can see cities like Oviedo whose small businesses are dying and who only gather people where there are terraces and large hospitality areas.
For me this element is decisive because in general, in the West, politics has been defined by this fight between the core of the network, which absorbs resources, and the rest of the territory. This is France with Paris and the United Kingdom with London. And they are the coasts of the United States versus the interior. It has happened in Argentina, where Buenos Aires is one thing and the most deteriorated provinces, which are almost all of them, are another. Buenos Aires has voted Peronist and the rest, Javier Milei has voted. It has happened in the Netherlands, it has happened almost everywhere. For us, the great territorial dividing line is not the global city and the rest is the Ebro line. In the elections it has been clearly seen, from the Ebro line down, the presence of Vox with the PP has not frightened, they have cattle in all territories. On the other hand, there are the Basque Country, Navarra and Catalonia. Here the territorial problem has been different. And it has also been a product of the confrontation between a state that has two global cities, Madrid and Barcelona, ??where one goes up and the other goes down, and there is a huge point of friction. This territorial element, due to these humors it creates, is decisive in politics.
You point out that if the political debate is a moral debate, that political debate is of no use. And later he states that if this debate revolves around the state of mind, he is also completely intoxicated because he turns the politician into an emotional coach.
Of course, of course, yes, yes. And each one channels a type of feelings.
It is a bit of the denial of the Enlightenment, giving up knowledge and reason for emotion, mood and morality.
It is a much deeper renunciation than we believe. We think that those springs of enlightened reason are still present but are disappearing by leaps and bounds. Part of the Government’s options have consisted of telling the population that things are going relatively well and will be better in the future. Or when things go wrong, we have to be optimistic because we are going to get ahead. And the other part consisted of channeling the discomfort and raising it to maximum power to… It’s normal. Javier Milei would not have come to power without knowing how to channel the existing unrest. And we’ve played with those elements all the time.
Regarding morality, it speaks of the disappearance of the “center”, not of the political center in terms of left and right, but of the center as a space where the common is dealt with: there is no longer “the common”, even among moderate parties, social democrats or conservatives, but the debate, being moral, is annihilating. That is, the debate is won by surrendering to the rival.
Because the fact that you and I can maintain a different position, let’s say it is the beginning of a debate. But when you represent evil and I represent good, there is no possible debate. The only action is the annihilation of evil, that’s it. Since politics in general has become a question between good and evil, and we have seen it clearly here but in many other places as well, then the debate does not exist. And if there is no debate, there is no possibility of meeting. The gap has opened socially, economically and ideologically and there is no longer the possibility of getting closer and maintaining a confrontational dialogue. It is tremendous, because if someone who has a position that you do not like represents evil and you are entitled to attack him, because he is an evil person. And of course, it should be the opposite: I don’t like your positions, but you can perfectly well be my friend and in no case do they legitimize me to attack you, neither verbally nor physically. Well, that’s broken too.
He talks about particular cases and compares Santa Coloma with Badalona, ??and their different political and electoral reality due to the concept of “triangulation”. Explain this concept a little.
Triangulation is the mechanism through which you can convey the grievance. Think about Brexit. The Brexiters think they have come out worse because they are British lower middle classes. There the essential element is not so much the appearance of immigration as a vehicle for channeling discontent but rather that the European elites were aligned with that immigration to put an end to the United Kingdom. Of course, without this third element, the evil European elites, the confrontation with immigration does not work. You need a third element that justifies the entire environment. Badalona is a clear case with respect to Santa Coloma from this point of view, because in Badalona triangulation does occur and in Santa Coloma, it does not. The entire political drift has had to do with the appearance of a strange element from which one could feel legitimated their discomfort. Immigration is one element, although there have been others.
Yes, like the incorporation of women into the workforce, seen as a factor that reduces salaries.
It works like this: I want to take my son to public daycare because I can’t pay for a private one, but I can’t take him because immigrants take away the aid. And who does this? Whose fault is it? From the progressive Minister of Education. That completely changes your perspective. Without that third element, to blame, the other one doesn’t work. Of course, there is a relatively simple solution, which is to promote more public daycare centers so that we all have places. But when that doesn’t happen and passion comes, there is someone responsible. This is who is responsible, and once located and indicated, from there everything works. The case of Santa Coloma is different for that reason, because the third element of the triangle is missing. In Badalona that element was the population that had prospered and continued to live there. You have a nucleus of people from there, with a geographical distribution also typical of the old city, the incorporation of the national immigrant classes and then the incorporation of foreign immigrants. Of course, the previous Badalona government had been supported by a grand alliance that caused the perception that the wealthier classes of Badalona were allying with the immigrant classes against the Spanish immigrants, so to speak. And that already generates a completely different climate. As in Santa Coloma this did not happen, because the government is of a very different color, because the third element is missing.
In the chapter “Optimists versus fed up” he describes optimism as a form of bad politics, something beyond a certain social humor.
Yes, but it is also a kind of secular version of religion. Before you prayed to the Lord, because now it is an arrow of progress. It is a form of fantasy, also a way to forget problems. Among the national enlightened classes, you put a problem on the table and they told you “well, it’s true, it’s true, that’s happening, but it’s temporary, we’re going to have ideal solutions soon.” And of course, the peak is technological fantasy: “I’m going to take rockets to Mars and in ten years the cars will drive themselves.” All these kinds of inflated expectations that a lot of people have made a lot of money off of.
In the movie Leaving the World Behind, when the middle-class American family tries to escape the apocalypse towards the highway, they encounter the traffic jam caused by the self-driving Teslas.
Yes, that scene is fantastic. This political optimism has been a way of evading problems, a way of not facing them, of not finding a solution to them.
The philosopher Javier Gomá maintains that optimism, the belief that societies do indeed progress and that there is a historical vector that indicates this, is a position that leads to lowering our arms and letting things evolve on their own.
I agree, yes, a way of giving up contributing, let’s say. Optimism is necessary: ??if you have an illness and they treat it, the first thing is the moment of diagnosis: they tell you that what is happening to you has this treatment and you think that it will turn out well. And you are right to be optimistic because that is much better than thinking that it is going to go wrong, and sometimes it is even a help. But because the treatment is underway and you are carrying it out. Being optimistic without diagnosis and treatment would be absurd. Well, that happens to us a bit. That is to say, a large dose of realism is needed because they are what will later allow you to be optimistic. If you skip the realism of the treatment, then optimism is a fantasy. And this has been the problem of social democracy, for example. Of social democracy and neocons: when you think you can establish an eternal global regime based on optimism and suddenly, history comes back to you.
In the post-Berlin Wall world this brings us back to what I was talking about before about triangulation. There was a great virtue in the West of the Cold War, which was that it had externalized the problem. That period had these two virtues for the West: on the one hand, the existence of the other side justified a powerful Welfare state and on the other, the distresses could be attributed to the other side.
For me they are two different moments in a sense: If you look at it geographically in the Cold War in Europe, the closer you were to the wall, to Eastern Europe, the better standard of living you had. And when you were moving away, well, you lived well, but less. The welfare state was very intense where there was a border. Because of course, there was also an element of political struggle, it was the comparison between the standard of living of some and others, the level of freedom of some and others. That worked very well. When the Soviet Union disappears and you are left without an enemy, everything is much more fluid. But the enemy has returned today. To a certain extent, China is one of the few things that Americans agree on, everyone is going to be against China. But at the same time, the great political division of Israeli society has evaporated since October 7, when there is a very great ideological recomposition, based on a very clear enemy, such as terrorists. And from there, society is redirected. Of course, we are in the process of once again having enemies to point out for what is happening, which in the European case is not accompanied by a position of economic progress that makes you think about a better future, but on the contrary. You are the geographical space that lives well, but less and less well, while the others are growing. There the externalization of evil works for you for a while, but in the end the internal problems return permanently.
As for the fed up, this brings me to one of my favorite cinematic discussions, whether the movie Joker reflected the social revolt of the left, let’s say, the fed up with the dismantling of the Welfare state, or rather it was a germ of far-rightism. Because the right has had enough. The right has become the patron saint of the fed up.
Yes, that’s right, that’s right. And I also believe that until now he has lived by better identifying the existence of these focuses and channeling them towards his positions. Spain is a special place in this regard, but in the West it has been like that. Joker draws a lot of attention to me because I also saw a significant class element there, which is the question that was asked, or the perception that they had, the classes that were doing well with respect to social problems. People are dissatisfied and it is enough for him to appear disturbed and to be media relevant for everything to go up in flames. That tranquility that the middle classes saw in their environment was contrasted with a society that was inflammable for anything, there was no concrete demand. In fact, I think what’s powerful about the film is that he doesn’t really claim anything.
Nothing, actually. She is a victim, but she claims nothing.
There was a latent fear that I think the films express well on the part of the social classes with more resources. Because of course, you don’t know your society and you wonder why they revolt. If you eliminate all social explanation you eliminate all possibility of social recomposition.
The cult of spontaneity, which Lenin spoke of and which Dioni López cites: revolts without an ideological structure to drive them, as we see in France, which is making fruitless remakes of the French Revolution every two years so as not to change anything.
And that’s how it is. In the end, if the revolt is articulated there may be elements of negotiation, not only confrontation, but if it is not, it exhausts itself.
Let’s go with the last pair, the last gap: “Innovators versus experienced”. The experienced ones are children of the Cold War, from the point of view of the agreement, of the production model. And innovators, well, there are many categories there, because the entire world of entrepreneurship and startups is basically a world of generalized failures and specific successes.
I wanted to go a little further than that discussion, because of course, you can quickly redirect it to the axis of old/young, older people/younger people. And I don’t perceive it exactly that way for two reasons: One of them has to do with the difficulty of asserting what has already been done. And in that aspect it doesn’t matter if you have a lot of experience.
I understand, it means always having a zero account. The knowledge account, the validity account. And it doesn’t matter if you are 25 years old or if you are 50.
For example, you have completed a degree or you have been working as a waiter for seven years, whatever you want.
You already have the knowledge and an experience, you have done something, right? But then it’s of little use to you. And when you are 50 years old, you are also already old.
Yes that’s what I mean. There is no accumulation. The thing is that processes in general are cumulative, that is, people who grow are because they are advancing. A footballer can be great at 16 and be better at 25 because he has developed, the starting point is not the arrival point.
And it happens to film creators and music bands.
You start with a potential and then maybe you develop it a lot. There are people whose career is most brilliant, they do it at the beginning and they never return to something like that. But that has to do with activities closely linked to ingenuity or spark. In the rest of the activities, which require method, normally you always go further and need that accumulation. But that accumulation today is biased, because any moment can put you at zero, the learning that you do is not a learning to improve the activity you are doing, it is an improvement in how to survive.
It’s flexibility. I understand it.
You don’t learn to do your job, you learn to be flexible, because what you have learned is no longer useful, you learn to navigate the codes of the company or the sector. And if you know how to do that, then you’ll do well. Then, your task is better or worse, but that is a secondary element, the important thing or the other. That totally changes the framework. Because? Because that experience does not accumulate. And I insist, it doesn’t matter if you are 25 years old or 50. That recognition has now been placed in another area, in innovation or flexibility. Many professionals, including engineers, know today that expert knowledge has to do with cutting back, lowering costs and not with doing things well. Which is also very significant for the moment we are in in general. It is an obvious element. The other, the second, has to do with artificial intelligence and the entire systematization of processes.
explain yourself
For me it is a dispossession of experience. The moment you turn the accumulated knowledge into a system, a protocol, an organization, everything that human experience can contribute disappears, because the protocol is the lowest common denominator, the prescribed situations, the most common. Many times, when you encounter problems, they are complex problems, which you cannot solve with prior success.
Yes. I would say that the previous step to the introduction of artificial intelligence and automatic protocols was human robotization: the conversation routes of telephone services. He opens his book with a scene in which a false medical alarm at a school causes a medical helicopter to take off, despite subsequent warnings that there is no such urgency. But the protocol cannot be stopped. In some ways, those humans are already roboticized. Which is the opposite of what we are all looking for when we are assisted by a sales assistant or a care service.
Don’t doubt it. The thing is that it is difficult to formulate these things because they do not work in terms of an economic formula and when you express it it seems that you are someone who is anti-technology, anti-knowledge. It’s like you throw a book at my head and then ask me what I have against books. I love the book, what I don’t like is when you hit me with it. And with artificial intelligence they are hitting us. It is not an instrument that helps us improve, which it could be, it is an instrument with which they are hitting us, economically, of course, but also in our reasoning capacity. Its impact is brutal.
And at the same time, you maintain that the disappearance of the future is death in politics.
Clear. Yes, it is not about having a teleological vision either, but there is a need to build, moving forward is essential. Before you had that element, let’s say Catholic, of life, of the future…
The promised land, the heavenly Jerusalem, or the communist ideal. They are the same.
And that disappears. And we all become presentists, and by becoming presentists, what we try is to survive. But there is no longer a purpose that helps you look beyond, there is no purpose to build something towards the future. And that disappearance of the future is another policy, because it consists of solving the problems that I have now. And let those who come after fix themselves. This is hugely negative. I insist that this is not about returning to teleology.
The idea of ??progress, of material and moral progress, resists the historical form better than the biographical one. I mean, it’s the presentism of the urgency of my life that prevents me from paying attention to progress in historical terms, even though progress is happening. In other words, biography conflicts with history.
Definitely. The thing is that for me there is an important biographical element when it comes to building political options, which is the element of community. If one thinks, for example, about how the German Socialist Party was built at the beginning of the 20th century, it is through physical networks, meeting points, schools or bars where people meet. And of course, you don’t know where you are going, it is not your fight, it is a fight shared with others. There is an element of daily support, daily reinforcement, that has now disappeared. It has disappeared as an instrument for the future, as an instrument of present fight to build a future, but it has also disappeared as a community moment. I don’t know if you’ve seen the latest movie on Ken Loach.
I have not seen her yet.
I like it precisely because it affects this, the aspect of being together, which is what helps us look toward the future. And we don’t have this. And secondly, the fact that the ideological, that ideological future, has disappeared is converting political options into territorial options. That is, India or China. The way the political program is managed is: if as a State we count much more, our nationals will do better. And the specific political form does not matter. But the bet for the future is that, we are going to make India bigger and more powerful, the United States bigger and more powerful. That whole ideology of pure territory is being rewarded. But of course, that is a confrontational project, because if you want to grow, you are going to do it at the expense of someone else. And this is not an ideological project, it is a national project. And, well, Spanish politics has also been this for a long time.
It is tribal, it is a tribal point even more than a national one.
Of course, and the ultimate type of ideology, well, it is much more dangerous.
About this there is a paradox, which runs through several chapters of his book, regarding the territory: the return of the maps. And he reproaches, with great intuition, the left for disbelieving in geopolitics because he considers it a hindrance to his program. The point we have reached is that globalization created supranational norms, and at the same time, the economic model resulting from the technological revolution, when neoliberal globalization is already gasping in the center of the park, is a model that has a lot to do with these geographies. of connection, which are not the geographies of the territory. There is a paradoxical conflict, the State is greatly weakened by the previous process and at the same time the maps return from the point of view of the story. She looks very good listening to Isabel Díaz Ayuso, that the territory comes back as a story.
I’ll give you a parenthesis: the story works in the West. In other countries, politics does not work as a story.
But the paradox is this, that the maps return, the need for the State returns, as we saw when the pandemic reveals how we have disarmed ourselves by trusting in globalization, which has left us without masks to breathe. And at the same time, there is not exactly a rearmament of the State in terms of power either. There are lukewarm things, like the EU fining Elon Musk…
The European case is paradoxical because it is where this contradiction has struck expressly. The United States does not have this contradiction, nor does China, nor Türkiye. Europe does have it. What happens is that it is also a very complicated context in which the United States does not fully understand, in this project of American national reorganization that has been launched, which also breaks previous consensus of its ties with Europe and other territories.
Universalism is prior to globalization.
So, of course, to strengthen yourself nationally you deteriorate your relationship and worsen the conditions of your partners. From my point of view, it cannot go well, even in terms of defending the West. You can’t do well if you act this way, because even the United States, which is the great hegemonic protection and is far above the others, is not going to be able to work against the rest of the world. Much of what is important in the situation with Israel is this. That is to say, can we, due to our economic, military and cultural capacity, be in a position where the rest of the world is increasingly less comfortable? Maybe yes, but probably not. The paradoxes are many because as long as all this works, the EU has two possibilities: either you begin to act as a State, confederally and with its own foreign policy, defense policy, etc., etc. or you are going to dissolve, because each one is going to start making their alliances. This is the moment and the EU is balancing and thinking that the previous world still exists. But it has disappeared.
He closes his book of pairs and gaps with a balance proposal. You could be called an optimist.
This is historical, it is Aristotle or Machiavelli. Machiavelli has some wonderful texts in that sense. In all societies, and it doesn’t matter whether they are capitalist or communist, there are people who have a lot of power and people who have little… And this has been repeated throughout history. Of course, the difference between some regimes and others, and this was true for Pericles as well, is the ability for these differences to be shorter and manageable through certain agreements. A farmer who wants to defend himself against a lawsuit from a corporation is not the same, because the difference in power is going to make it much more complicated for him. Well, when all these agreements are broken and societies are divided, not only do they have strong internal tensions, but they tend to suffer enormous temptations to dominate by force what they have not been able to dominate by consensus. And that is our moment. Of course, the other position, for me, is the position of integration. I often cite Roosevelt, because he is the most recent example. There are those who say that Roosevelt’s policies cannot be applied now. It doesn’t matter, it’s not the policies, it’s the spirit. Roosevelt was not only Keynesian, he also had this ability to reconvert economic powers and put them at the service of the country and its people. That is, we are talking about a capitalist environment, obviously, but also about working together and not in a merely extractive way. For me this is the key now too, if we manage to put these enormous masses of financial capital at the service of productive activity instead of pure extraction we will do better as a society. And furthermore, it would avoid enormous strategic weaknesses. Because since you have not built anything of your own, because you have been playing with money on a large scale, well now you find that you have almost nothing. And this is the European case, which is expressed in a brutal way. Therefore, this specific moment of ours is historic for me. That is why Machiavelli spoke of the Republic, of the consensus between those who have and those who do not, between those who have power and those who do not. And that makes one society tend to last much longer than another. And I am convinced of that position.
