Cunning Hired Knaves

This is a translation of an essay by Amador Fernández-Savater. It was published on 16th October 2015 in eldiario.es, amid growing anticipation with regard to the Spanish general elections that were held in December. It explores how electoral politics takes shape as a spectacle, and explores the consequences for struggles against neoliberalism. It maintains its relevance in the present.

The skin and the theatre: exiting politics

Amador Fernández-Savater

‘There has never been so much talk about politics as there is now!
‘And so little about life…’

(A conversation with friends, in the ‘year of change’)

How might we understand the fundamental nature of the political management of this economic crisis? I think we can find inspiration in an authority on neoliberal matters such as Margaret Thatcher. In 1988, the Iron Lady said, with absolute frankness: “Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul”.

It seems to me that it is from precisely this viewpoint that we can best think about the policies that have been implemented in Europe since 2008. It is not merely a matter of introducing cutbacks or severe austerity measures in order to “come out” of the crisis and return to the point we were before, but rather of radically redefining ways of life: our relationship with the world, with other people, and with ourselves.

Seen from this angle, the crisis is the ideal moment for undertaking a process of “creative destruction” of everything, in institutions, in the social bond and in subjectivities, that stands in the way or defies the logic of growth and neverending output: whether it is what remains of the welfare state, formal and informal mechanisms of solidarity and mutual aid, non-competitive or non-productivist values, and so on. By destroying or privatising public systems of social protection and driving down wages, a state of indebtedness and a no-holds-barred struggle for survival are incentivised. Out of this emerges a type of individual for whom existence is a constant process
of auto-valorisation. Life itself is turned into work.

Does this sound too abstract, too conspiranoid, too ‘metaphysical’, even? On the contrary, it is completely banal and everyday, and that is why it prevails. To give one possible example among thousands: what is entailed by the Royal Law-by-Decree 16/2012, which was approved by the Partido Popular and which excludes tens of thousands of people from medical care? Activists from Yo Sí Sanidad Universal, who fight against it daily, explain it to us like this: it does not mean there will be fewer X-rays or fewer surgeons. Rather, it is a qualitative change, whereby health is no longer a right for everyone, rich and poor, but instead depends on whether you have insurance. The decree is the method, but the object is to reprogramme society’s imagination regarding the right to health. That is, we are to incorporate, as an everyday way of feeling and thinking, through changes that very often pass unnoticed (talking about ‘having insurance’, having to go to the Social Security Offices to pick up one’s medical card), the terrible fact that health care from now on is a privilege of those who deserve it. And we are to act accordingly: war of all against all, and each to his own.

The skin…

In this perspective, one of the most politically interesting moments of recent years was just at the end of the 15M camps. That is, when the immense quantity of energy that had been concentrated in the space-time of the squares spread out and metamorphosised through the different domains of life. First neighbourhood assemblies are set up, then come the mareas [tides] formed in defence of public goods and services, the PAH [Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca – Mortgage Holders’ Platform] grows and multiplies, and seething and swarming into every corner come a thousand capillary initiatives: co-operatives, urban farms, time banks, solidarity-based economic networks, social centres, new bookstores, etc.

Let’s say that the 15M event spread a kind of ‘second skin’ over the whole of society: an extremely sensitive surface in and through which one feels as one’s own what happens to others unknown (the clearest example was no doubt the evictions, but let us also recall how the struggle of the Gamonal neighbourhood was greeted by society); a space of the highest conductivity in which various initiatives proliferate and resonate upon one another without referring back to any central binding entity (or at any rate, to open umbrellas such as the terms “99%” or 15M); a nameless lamina or film in which there circulate unpredictable, ungovernable currents of affect and energy that joyfully cut through established social divisions (be these sociological or ideological), and so on.

We would be wrong in thinking of this ‘second skin’ in terms of the classical concepts of civil society, public opinion or social movement. In any case it is society itself that has begun to move, creating a climate of politicisation that does not know any inside and outside, above and below, centre or periphery, and so on.

Why, then, would this be a particularly interesting moment? Because it is when we took up the challenge laid down by neoliberalism (as synthesised so well in Thatcher’s dictum) both in its breadth and its intensity. The struggle is over desirable and undesirable ways of life, and the fight takes place in every corner of society, without privileged actors, times or places.

In every hospital threatened with closure and every school notified of cutbacks, in every neighbour under eviction and every migrant at the door of a health centre without a medical card, the question of how we are going to live is at stake. And this is not on a rhetorical or discursive level: it is practical, made flesh and palpable. What matters to us and what we are indifferent to, what appears to us as decent or indecent, what we tolerate and what we can tolerate no longer. Do we want to live in a society where anyone can die from a bout of flu, be thrown out of their home, be left without the means to educate their children…?

Open skin, extensive skin, intense skin. Against the war of all against all and the ‘each to his own’ fanned necessarily by the logic of profit above all else, the common dimension of our existence is activated: solidarity, care and mutual aid, bond and empathy. Against the passivity, guilt and resignation sown by the strategy of shock, there is a contagion everywhere of a strange joy: “we’re fucked but happy”, a friend said to me in the midst of those days of assemblies and mareas. Happy to share discontent instead of swallowing tears in private, to turn it, even, into potency of action.

In a very short time, this “change of skin” achieved some truly impressive feats (that only the stubbornest of gazes refuse to see): the delegitimisation of the political and cultural architecture that had been dominant in Spain for decades, the transformation throughout society of the perception of key issues such as evictions, concrete victories in the case of Gamonal [a neighbourhood uprising against the construction of a boulevard, leading to demonstrations of support throughout the country], the white marea [against health service privatisation] or Gallardón’s abortion law, the neutralisation of the emergence of macro- and micro- fascisms that is always a latent possibility in times of crisis, and so on. It is not down to having any kind of power (whether institutional, economic, or media, or other) but rather its strength to alter social desire, to spread a different sensibility and expand new affects horizontally. This sensitive strength is, and has always been, the power of the powerless.
…and the theatre.

Where are we today, with regard to all this? The predominant reading of the impasse that the post-15M movements entered towards the second half of 2013 highlighted that they had hit a ‘glass ceiling’: the tides hit against a wall (the institutional lockdown) but this wall does not give way. There is no tangible change in the general orientation of macro-politics: the evictions go on, as do the cutbacks, privatisations, impoverishment and so on.

This diagnosis came with its own prescription: the electoral route was set forth as the only possible way to go beyond the impasse and break the ‘glass ceiling’. First came Podemos, and then the municipalist candidacies, to channel (in very different forms and styles) social dissatisfaction and the desire for change in that direction. (In Catalonia it seems to be the independence process that diverts/railroads discontent, but analysis of this situation is beyond the reach of this article and this author).

How might we interpret the results of this ‘electoral turn’? My reading and the feeling I get are ambivalent: we won but we lost.

We won, because with hardly any resources or structures, and despite the campaigns of fear, the new formations have competed successfully with the big machines of the classic parties, and have undone an electoral map that appeared immutable. There are now reasonable hopes that the new governments (municipal ones for the moment) might crystallise basic demands of the movements (with regard to evictions, cuts etc) and alter some of the normative frameworks that reproduce the neoliberal logic of competition in different areas of life.

We lost, because what has been reinstalled in society’s imagination are the logics of representation and delegation, centralisation and concentration that were called into question by the crisis and the impetus from the squares.

Let’s say that the centripetal force of elections and all that goes with them has folded this skin into what we might call a ‘theatrical heap’, that is, a kind of (material and symbolic) space organised on divisions of inside/outside, actors/spectators, pit/stage, stage/backstage.

To sketch it out very roughly: a way of doing that is highly rhetorical and discursive, that brings to the fore the ‘most capable players’ (leaders, strategists, politicians), polarised around very specific spaces and times (the electoral conjuncture, the future time of the programme or the promise) and focused upon winning over public opinion (the famed ‘social majorities’), has taken the place of a way of doing that was based far more upon action, within the reach of anyone, that unfolded in times and spaces that were heterogeneous, self-determined and attached to the materiality of life (a hospital, a school, a house) and directed towards other people, not as voters or spectators, but rather as accomplices and equals with whom to think and act in common.

If 15M placed the problem of life and ways of life at the centre, the ‘assault on the institutions’ has once again placed at the centre the question of representation and political power. And each option has its implications. The inside/outside division installed by the theatre involves a reduction, in terms of breadth and intensity, that weakens the fight against neoliberalism.

On one side: what remains outside the walls of the theatre loses value and potency, and winds up cut short and devalued. To give a very clear example: the movements are the object of mere rhetorical reference or are interpreted as claims or demands to be listened to, synthesised or articulated by a higher entity (party, government), thereby completely erasing their essential dimension of creating of a world in the here and now (new values, new social relations, new ways of living). The theatre renders absent what it represents. And in this way the living relation with the creative energy of the movements is lost.

On the other side, what is seen outside the theatre comes projected from the inside. Here I mean something very concrete and everyday: the complete occupation of the social mind (thought and gaze, attention and desire) with what is taking place onstage. How much time of our lives have we wasted lately speaking about the latest act of one of our superheroes/heroines (Iglesias, Monedero, Carmena, whoever)? With the new politics, the plays and the actors are changed, there are new sets and scripts, but we go on just as reduced as before to spectators, commentators and reviewers in front of their screens, thereby losing contact with our centre of gravity: ourselves and our problems, what we are prepared to do and what we already do, the practices we invent more or less collectively, and so on. Hypersensitive to the stimulation that comes to us from above, indifferent and anaesthetised to what is happening around us (closed skin). And it is useless to criticise the theatre: one goes on focusing attention on it, even if it is to be against it.

Re-opening the skin

To recap. Neoliberalism is not a ‘political regime’ but rather a social system that organises the whole of life. It is not a ‘tap’ that spills its policies downward that we can simply turn off by conquering the central spaces of power and representation, but rather a dynamic of production of affects, desires and subjectivities (“the object is to change the heart and soul”) from a whole range of focal points.

The electoral-institutional route brings with it its own ‘glass ceilings’. And perhaps it is this that we can learn from the tragic soap opera of Syriza: within the established frameworks of accumulation and growth, the room for maneouvre for political power is very limited. And turning toward other models (think about degrowth, for example) cannot be ‘decreed’ from above. Rather it requires an entire redefinition in society of poverty and wealth, of the good and desirable life, that can only be generated from below. Hence to constitute power by dissolving strength (passing from the skin to the theatre) is catastrophic. It is always new processes of subjectivation, new changes of skin, that redefine social consensuses and open up what is possible, for governments as well.

It is a matter then of reopening our skin (yours, mine, everyone’s). At an intimate level, this demands that each person resists the capture of attention and desire, of thought and gaze, by the logics of representation and spectacle. The theatre is erected every day by the deathly marriage of political power and communications media (including, unfortunately, alternative media, also hypnotised by ‘the conjuncture’) but all of us reproduce it, in any conversation among friends or with family, when we allow the frame of our questions, preoccupations or options to become organised: populist or movementist? confluence or popular unity? This guy or that guy? We need to reverse this centripetal movement and flee [in Spanish, fugar] from any centre – centri-fugue. To retrieve our bearings. To start from ourselves. To look around.

On a general level, it is a matter of starting once again with experimentation at ground level and at the level of ways of life: thinking and trying out new collective practices, inventing new tools and instruments so as to maintain and expand them, imagining new maps, guides and vocabulary for naming and communicating them. The impasse of 2013 had a lot to do, if we look within what we were doing and not merely outside (the impact in terms of political power) with the radical inadequacy of our schemes of reference (forms of organisation, images of change, etc) to go along with what was happening.

To rise to the challenge posed by neoliberalism entails deploying an ‘expanded politics’: not reduced or restricted to certain (media or institutional) spaces or certain times (the electoral conjuncture) or to certain actors (parties, experts), but rather in the reach of anyone, attached to the multiplicity/materiality of life situations, that creates values capable of rivalling the neoliberal values of competition and success.

Of course, this is and will be a long road, difficult, frustrating at times, but also real and in this sense satisfying. Because the promise made to us from the stage about a ‘change’ that demands nothing of us except going out to vote for the right party on the day of elections is a bottle of smoke.

The word ‘politics’ itself perhaps no longer goes far enough to name something like this. It seems to always betray us, by displacing the centre of gravity towards power, representation, the State, politicians, the theatre. This is not a matter of a change of regime, but rather of feeding a multiple process of self-determination of life. Politics is the method, but the challenge is to change our souls and our hearts.

My rough guess is that over the past few months, for every minute scrolling through my Facebook timeline, an image of Donald Trump has confronted my eyeballs four times. The vast majority of the images come from links about some vile or ridiculous or outrageous thing he has said or done, or simply how outrageous or ridiculous or vile he is, with accompanying commentary. I try not to pay it much attention. I thought a recent New Yorker cartoon captured this feeling well. So I shared it.

Then it occurred to me that my attempts at not staring into the abyss was not going well. What if the New Yorker cartoon was part of the abyss too, and now the abyss was sharing photos for me?

Trump is a monstrosity, a grotesque, and so it is easy to outline where you stand on him and his followers. As another New Yorker contributor puts it: Palin Endorsement Widens Trump’s Lead Among Idiots. Trump is a monster and his followers are idiots. Maybe a more interesting question is where you stand in relation to Donald Trump. I mean, the fact his horrible face crops up everywhere with such appalling regularity must mean that there is a constituency interested in how atrocious he is, right? Maybe you and me form part of an ad hoc public of sensible, reasonable, enlightened people who, however much we might differ on other matters, are appalled at this rough beast, this array of desperate morons who have anointed this puffing, preening turd as their chosen leader?

You might have subscriptions to The Economist, I might have a Rosa Luxemburg t-shirt, but perhaps we are at one when it comes to Trump’s remarks about deporting Muslims or persecuting so-called ‘illegal immigrants’ or bombing the shit out of Iran or wherever. Does Trump not provide us with a common bond, one that we might otherwise never realise existed? Does he not provide us with a shared perspective on things, a sense that whatever else might be wrong with the world, we should set all that aside so this dreadful threat can be forestalled? Or maybe you and me disagree on the scale of the threat posed, but we can at least agree on the fact that he is a terrible creature?

You can see how this kind of shared feeling works its way into the realm of elections. Since it is unthinkable that someone like Trump should be afforded the reins of political power, it is preferable -or so it is suggested- that Hillary Clinton be given the job instead. In reality, given Clinton’s history and her donors, this translates into rejecting the overtures of one billionaire in favour of the representative of the billionaire community at large. This is the logical course of action, on which our newfound community must surely agree. It boils down, as elsewhere, to the choice presented between stability and chaos. This stability, in reality, is the continuation of rule by big business, of perpetual war, of environmental destruction, the dismantling of each and every institution founded on collective solidarity and its replacement by subjection to the market, of the stripping away of social and labour rights. That is what figures like Clinton stand for, and the fundamental thing they have to propel them is nothing other the sense that the alternative is worse.

Sarah Palin made a speech yesterday. Or was it the day before? I can’t be sure. I’ve seen several articles from mainstream sources parsing her speech, the images she used, her syntax and so on. Yet as Jon Schwartz notes, some of it made quite a lot of sense. But the consensus arising from this critical analysis is that she fell short, way short, of the standards demanded by reasonable people like us. Only the brutes and the rubes of our imagination will like it.

Those would be the same brutes and rubes who are, in sum, the product of decades-long media stereotyping of working class people. You know, the people who can’t read or write or think properly and who never proved capable of making their way in the world the way you did. But suppose you were to go looking for someone who fits such a stereotype. Suppose you had to fetch just one from the hundreds of millions who are supposed to fit it, one single person who, on close examination, demonstrates that your model is correct. You would not be able to find a single one who continued to fit the stereotype after an hour’s conversation and closer examination. If you examine Sarah Palin’s rhetoric properly, you can see how it is tailored to appeal to people who know very well they don’t fit the stereotype created for them.

It’s true enough that neither Sarah Palin nor Donald Trump actually gives a shit about such people and see them only in terms of getting just enough of them as a means to their end. But the sense of being caricatured and denigrated is likely based on real experience. It wouldn’t be unexpected for such people on occasion to identify with an aggressor and project their own fears onto someone else who may be in a far worse position: black people, ‘illegal immigrants’, Muslims, and so on. Trump and Palin, like many other demagogues, amplify people’s fears and then promote themselves as just the people to do something about it. Then figures like Trump and Palin appear, in turn, as the threat to the reasonable consensus, even when it is precisely this reasonable consensus that has done so much to produce and maintain these fears in the first place. And even then, the journals of respectability that would have no difficulty in describing Islamic State, say, as ‘the terrorist group Islamic State’ would never make mention of ‘the racist US presidential candidate, Donald Trump’.

Fortunately, the billionaire community at large is far too sensible to allow these things to get completely out of control. That is why it is so important to vote for whoever stands for stability in the next elections in a Western democracy near you. Voting will save us in the end. Share if you agree!

The Angels Over The Body Of Christ by William Blake

The other night my son asked me if angels were real. He looked worried. No, I said. Then he looked relieved.

I said, well, there is no such thing as men and women flying around with wings. He smiled.

But, I went on, sometimes people use images of things to express the way they feel about stuff, the way stuff affects them. And so people might talk about angels because it’s a way of talking about good things or feelings that you find hard to describe.
-What?

I said, do you know who Winston Churchill is?
-No.

Winston Churchill was the prime minister of Great Britain during the Second World War. He used to have depression. Do you know what depression is?
-No.

Well, depression is when you feel really bad and anxious about things and you find it all overwhelming. Winston Churchill used to get depression, and he would call it the ‘black dog’. Of course the black dog didn’t exist. There wasn’t a black dog sitting in the room that made him feel depressed. (He laughed)

But it was a way of talking about things. Well sometimes when people talk about angels, that’s what they’re really doing.
-What?

Well people often use images to express things instead of just describing them, like in poems.
-What?

OK, let me show you. Here’s a poem that talks about angels. (I open a webpage showing Timothy Winters by Charles Causley. I start to remember the scene from some Jimmy McGovern TV drama where a character played by Christopher Eccleston gets worked up while explaining the poem to a class, banging out the rhythm of the lines on the table. I decide to play it cool. I start reading)

‘Timothy Winters comes to school
With eyes as wide as a football-pool’

-What’s a football-pool?
Do you know what football pools are?
-No.
Well, back before people played the lottery lots of people used to enter a competition every week. They’d get a list of all the football fixtures for the weekend, and they’d have to pick out score draws. If they picked out enough score draws they’d get a prize. It used to be that eight score draws would give you the biggest prize you could get.
-So you would be like Man Utd are going to draw against Arsenal?
Yes.
-Why are his eyes like that then?
Well his eyes are wide. When are people’s eyes wide?
-Em, when they’ve got a big face?
Maybe, but not really. When you see someone with their eyes wide open, what does that say?
-Em, that they’re afraid?
Yeah, sometimes. But sometimes it can be because you’re looking at something really big and exciting and new.
(Pause)
-Yeah but he’s going to school.
That’s right. And you never know. Maybe the school is like a big shiny new building. Or maybe he’s never seen so many people in one place. Or maybe that’s just how he looks at the world.
-Why are they like a football pool then?
I don’t know, you tell me.
-Because he likes football? I mean, because he’s thinking about football?
Yeah it could be. But think about the football pools. You would fill out a form and it had the names of towns all throughout England. And all those towns were full of people-
-Was it just the Premier League?
They didn’t have the Premier League then. They just had Divisions One to Four.
-Was Stevenage in it?
I don’t know. Maybe they were in the Conference or whatever it was called.
-Was Bournemouth in it?
I think so. So anyway, when-
-Was Northampton in it?
Probably.
-Maybe his eyes are big because he’s thinking about all the money he’s going to get.
Yes, could be.

I go on.

‘Ears like bombs and teeth like splinters’
-Haha.
What?
-Ears like bombs.
What do you think of that?
-He has really big ears. They go all over the place, like bombs.
Could be. Or maybe he has heard bombs going off. Maybe they were very loud, and the noise stayed in his ears.
-No, I don’t think so.
What about teeth like splinters?
-They’re small and made out of wood, like cocktail sticks?
Could be. Well I don’t think they’re really made out of wood. They’re like splinters, but that doesn’t mean they *are* splinters.
-Maybe they’re broken.
Yes.

‘A blitz of a boy is Timothy Winters’.
-What’s a blitz?
A blitz is a German word.
-Like the reindeer.
Yes, like Blitzen the reindeer. It comes from the same place. ‘Blitzen’ means flash, I think. And ‘blitz’ means lightning. But in the Second World War the blitz was the name people gave to the bombs that got dropped by the Germans on British towns and cities. They dropped them on Belfast and Dublin too.
-Was it like in Star Wars when they attack the village?
Yeah, it was, a bit. So what does that tell you about Timothy Winters?
-Em, that he runs around wrecking everything?
Maybe. But maybe it also says that he was around when the bombs were being dropped. During the war lots of children were moved from the big cities out into the country. But not all of them, some of them stayed with their parents.
-And did lots of people die?
Yeah they did.

We go on, line by line. Maybe the wind blows through his trousers because they are full of holes. Or maybe the wind actually blows between his legs because he has rickets. We figure that maybe he licks the pattern off his plate because he’s so hungry but also maybe because he likes the food. Maybe he has bloody feet because he walked on a nail on the way to school. Or maybe he has no shoes.

Maybe he lives on Suez Street because Suez is the name of a big canal that was built so goods could be shipped from South Asia to Europe and so the people who live on that street are a bit like the goods carried along the canal. Yes, maybe the bombardier Timothy’s mother ran off with is a bit like an X-wing fighter pilot. The Master is another name for a teacher, but a master could also be someone who owned you, like a slave.

And the Master talks as if he was the same as the rest of the children but he really wasn’t, not if they were like Timothy Winters. And ‘Amen!’ means ‘I agree’ but maybe Timothy Winters isn’t really agreeing but he’s really just shouting out because that’s what you’re supposed to say and he’s bored. But maybe he does agree and he thinks there are people who have it harder than him.

We get to the bit about the angels some twenty minutes after I planned. Why is the poem calling on the angels? -So that they look after Timothy Winters? Maybe. Or maybe he is picking a fight with them, planning to take them all on. Or maybe it’s children like Timothy Winters that angels should really be worried about.

Do you know what a verb is?
-Yeah.
What is it?
-It’s a doing word.
That’s right. It’s words like jump or look.
-Or eat.
Yeah. Well, look at the name Timothy Winters.
-What?
Look at the name.
-OK…
‘Winters’, that could be a verb.
-What?
Winter. It isn’t just the name of a season. It’s also a verb. You sometimes read about people wintering somewhere. That means they spend the winter there. So ‘Timothy Winters.’ could be a sentence. Like ‘Timothy spends winter’.
-Yeah but where is he spending the winter?
I don’t know, wherever he is, I suppose. Maybe it’s always winter for him.
-Maybe there are storm troopers there, like in The Empire Strikes Back.
Yeah maybe.

Yesterday I took my on to see the new Star Wars film (I feel obliged to point out that what follows may contain spoilers).

I didn’t feel any great urge of my own to go and see it, but he had been caught up in the excitement. I’m glad I did: it’s a great film. I’m not exactly a Star Wars fan: the last time I watched one of the films from start to finish was when I went to see Return of The Jedi in the cinema. I guess that one of the most striking things for people like me is the original actors reprising the same roles, more than thirty years later, a sort of epic time-lapse cinematography. I think movie characters linger in our imagination as some sort of immortal figures –even when they die on screen- so there was something unsettling for me about the way the normal ageing process had continued after the original films had ended. Usually when I’m sitting in the dark in the cinema with the images up on the big screen I’m not so aware of my own presence, or my own age. Then there was the fact that I was there with my son, who was watching the film at roughly the same age as I was when I went to see Return of The Jedi.

I wouldn’t say the film is a family movie, though, and that’s a good thing. One of the themes of the film is the way the expectations of family life, its established norms and roles, can prove too great a burden for people to bear. Han Solo and General Leia may not have meant to send their son the way of the Dark Side, but they did, and Kylo Ren has found it hard to resist the lure of the old-style hats and coats and patriarchal lineage that his mother appears to have rejected, but which is now promised by the First Order.

Meanwhile, Rey, the main protagonist, is rooted to the site of the disappearance of her parents in the hope that they will return, and is unable to proceed with a life of her own. For her the decisive moment of personal liberation comes when she realises they won’t be coming back. But she has also grown up unburdened by the baggage of family history and expectation that turns Kylo Ren into a monstrosity. Whereas Kylo Ren seeks the imprimatur of patriarchal power, she is self-reliant. As “scavenger scum”, she has lived outside the patriarchal family structures that traverse both the First Order and the Republic. No-one has ever trained her to think that flying a starship is beyond her or not for her. Kylo Ren gets sent to the equivalent of a posh military finishing school (training with his uncle, a Jedi knight) to set him on the straight and narrow, and he worries he will never be as strong as his grandfather Darth Vader.

Rey (incidentally, the word for ‘King’ in Spanish), on the other hand, is effectively an orphan who has lived free of what Simone De Beauvoir calls the ‘mysterious prestige’ of the father, or the ‘demands, rewards and punishments’ administered by a mother in the father’s name. Whatever ‘The Force’ might be, it is no longer something passed from father-figure to adoptive son. At the end of the film I found myself hoping that the sequels do not seek to introduce Rey’s long-lost parents. They would ruin everything.

Maybe these things would not have resonated with me so much if I had not been subjected, along with the rest of the audience, and, I imagine, a great many other audiences in Ireland, to an advertisement that preceded the film. It’s for a private health insurer.

There’s a woman who’s up before dawn. To get the breakfast, to clear and wash and work and tend and play. A woman who works all day and returns home to put in another shift. And then takes the time to read a story, or listen to yours. There’s a woman who will sit up all night with a sick child and will not rest until the fever is broke. Who waits at the school gates, rain, hail or shine. Who feeds the pets, makes the beds, puts the candles on the cake, and makes your wishes for you. There’s a woman who spends all her time, all her money, all her love, on the things and the people that matter. And through every hour, she will always feel that she is not giving, not doing enough. Mothers: you do enough. Now let us do something for you. Mothers – you’re amazing. GloHealth. My cover, my way.

In The Anti-Social Family, Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh and observe that ‘many of the catch-phrases of conservative politics – individual choice in education or in health care ‘…’ mask a defence of paternal as against social responsibility and authority’. This ad, with its gravelly masculine voice, with its implicit suggestion that all these domestic tasks are the sole preserve of women, its suggestion that the “we” who must now do something for you are the men who are in control over everything else in the world and that basic health care in exchange for money is the epitome of generosity, would appear, right after watching the movie instead of before it, like something from a First Order broadcast. That is, if the First Order had such a thing as television stations. It isn’t just in the landscape of the Skellig Islands that The Force Awakens resembles Ireland. Our celluloid dreams might well consist of the abolition of the family, but on Earth we are confronted, still, with an order demanding travail, famille, patrie. 

This is a translation of a piece by Olga Rodríguez, originally published in eldiario.es, 23rd December.

The bright side of the force, in politics and life

There is an image that has lived with me for years. It is the memory of a woman in a hospital in Baghdad, in 2003. The war was striking hard and US bombs had left terrible physical and psychological wounds on the population.

Doctors were carrying out surgical operations right in the foyer of the hospital, on the floor, due to the lack of space caused by the avalanche of casualties. The garden had been converted to an improvised cemetery where the doctors themselves dug plots for the dead and placed cardboard notices with details on the deceased:

‘Unidentified girl aged six found in the Adamiya neighbourhood, wearing a blue dress’.

Or:

‘Family with three children found in Karrara after a bombing. No details’.

In the corridors of the hospital people wandered around like zombies. No matter where you were you could hear the screams of the wounded, and of the families of the victims. I had been in the country for nearly three months and the war had gone deep inside me.

It was then that I saw her. In the maternity room. In her arms she was holding her baby, prematurely born, and it looked to me as if she was surrounded by a different light. What was there in this woman that caught my attention so much? I quickly realised: she was smiling in a city in which nearly no-one had smiled for many weeks.

Outside, in the street, the war went on. But there, inside, at that instant, this beautiful woman was able to maintain a smile, as if nothing else existed in the world, or perhaps as if this much love could defeat the war that continued on the other side of the windows.

That image still reminds me to this day of the power of love in the face of war, the power of affection in the face of violence, the resoluteness of a smile in the face of aggressiveness. I do not think it by chance that it was a woman who was doing it.

From 15M up to now people speak more and more of the need to feminise politics and life. Wars have traditionally been a man’s thing. Not only wars of guns and missiles, but also the other wars, those fought over money and power in the workplace, in homes, in politics. Patriarchy’s servitude wins out in a range of scenarios and it obliges both men and women to behave with aggressiveness, as if the only meaning of life were to always come out on top.

Against this other ways, other messages, other values are being introduced in our society that prioritise human rights and people’s concrete happiness over the abstraction of victory. Ada Colau, Manuela Carmena and Mónica Oltra are a few of the figures who represent and stand for these more serene, more peaceful, more grounded ways of doing things. “There is another way of doing politics, a different politics, that has to do with agreement, with peace, effectiveness…”, Carmena frequently says.

Ada Colau

Here is how Ada Colau expressed it recently in an election meeting: “There is an unstoppable transformative power, and it has to do with the feminisation of politics, placing co-operation ahead of competitiveness, with empathy as its highest value, with care, life and people’s dignity as the highest priority, for the happiness of all.

Neither co-operation nor empathy are the sole preserve of women. Obviously there are men who are not at all competitive or aggressive, and there are women who are, and greatly so. But in a patriarchal world masculinity -not in terms of sex, but in terms of a socially constructed position- has incarnated and represented values of domination and competitiveness and it is in this sense that Colau and so many others call for feminisation.

Women who conceive of empathy and co-operation as the highest of priorities have been key in the social movements of recent years, in the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (PAH) and now in institutional politics, to the point that Pablo Iglesias says he has learned from Ada Colau and from Carmena to “call for change with a smile, with greater pedagogy, with a less aggressive style”.

Something is changing. It is the irruption of power conceived in a different way, and it is indispensable in order for us to understand each other more and fall out with each other less. No transformation will be enough if it does not improve our human relations, if it does not soften us, if it does not make us happier.

As the scriptwriters of the new Star Wars film might say -whoever has seen it will understand why I mention it-, there is an awakening of the bright side of the force. And this awakening can give vital lessions in the midst of the aggressiveness in which we live day to day. It is only in this way that we can truly win: without competitiveness eating us up, without us getting lost along the way, without us being corrupted in the struggle. There is nothing more revolutionary than a smile in the middle of a war. And there are women who know a great deal about that.

This is a translation of the speech given by Pablo Iglesias following the election results on Sunday night. I do not have a satisfactory English translation for ‘patria‘ (‘Fatherland’ has other connotations) so I’m leaving as is. There are two words in Spanish that both translate into English as ‘people’. ‘La gente‘ refers to people in a general sense, and is often best translated as ‘ordinary people’ or ‘everyday people’, depending on the context. ‘El pueblo‘ is in the sense of a collective subject in political terms, as in ‘the will of the people’. I have included links to provide background to some of the references made.

Buenas noches. Gabon. Boas noites. Bona nit, Madrid, capital of fraternity. We are still here, knocking on the doors of heaven. 76 years ago, very close to this square, my great-uncle said to his sister: whatever happens, we will always have the gardens of Atocha. He was on the verge of losing a war, and a few months later, my uncle was shot by firing squad in Valencia. That man met a socialist fate, (as) one of the boys of La Motorizada [a socialist youth militia] that always accompanied Don Indalecio Prieto. The sisters of that man raised my mother and me, and they always spoke to us of the gardens of Atocha. They never spoke to us from a place of rancour or vengeance, but from love. It is said that the heroes of the patria are those who die and kill in wars. I do not agree. The heroic feats that make a patria are not acts that go down in history, but the everyday acts. A grandmother who bursts with joy when she sees her grand-daughter, clean and wearing a good pair of shoes, with her schoolbooks in her bag, running towards her when she comes out of a well-equipped public school, is the image of a decent country. That is what makes a patria.

Tonight, I want to pay tribute to the anonymous heroes and heroines who with their small acts, have shown us what it means to change a country. The grandmother who teaches her grandchildren that toys are for sharing, the activist who loses hours of sleep because he is out putting up posters in his neighbourhood, the (female) magistrate who applies the law knowing that it is the only guarantee that the weak have against the strong, the (male) nurse who knows that his tenderness is the dignity of the sick elderly woman. The (female) teacher who strives so that despite the cutbacks, all children learn and are happy learning. The (male) police officer who does not lose his patience and puts up with whatever comes along and does his job without reaching to his belt. The (male) banking employee who refuses to sell preferential shares. The (female) worker on strike who does not lose her smile. The (male) public defender who gives his all for his defendant. The (male) small business owner who treats his employees as comrades. The grandfather who stretches his pension to pay his daughter’s university fees. Behind those everyday acts lie the heroes who change a country. Revolution does not consist of flags. It is in the small things, like in the gardens of Atocha.

Today’s events are historic. A new political time has opened up in our history, one that puts an end to the system of taking turns. 15M marked the beginning of a new transition in our country, led by ordinary people. In moments such as this one, the democratic abundance of our history breaks through. Tonight we can hear the voices of the people of Madrid resisting invasion. We can hear the voice of General Riego, defending the constitution with sword in hand. The voice of Torrijos, disembarking in Málaga. We can hear the voices of the liberals and the democrats of the Glorious Revolution. The voice of Joaquín Costa, and the voices of the Free Educational Institution. The voice of Rosalía de Castro and the ironic laughter of Valle-Inclán. We hear the voice of the working class and of the women struggling for their right to suffrage. We hear the voices of the Republican reformers, the voices of Clara Campoamor, Margarita Nelken, Dolores Ibárruri, Federica Montseny, Victoria Kent. The voices of Miguel Hernández, Federico García Lorca, Machado and Alberti. The voices of the Asturian miners. The voice of Companys, telling Madrid: it is your brother who speaks. The voice of Durruti. Of Largo Caballero. Of Azaña. Of Pepe Díaz and Andreu Nin. The polyglot voices of the International volunteers who by defending our patria, will be Spanish forever. We hear the voices of those who raised the flags of freedom against terror. The voices of the prisoners of the dictatorship. The voices of the working class who won their rights through strikes. We hear voices in Basque, in Catalan, in Galician. We hear the immortal voice of Carlos Cano singing to the emigrants. The voices of Serrat, of Paco Ibañez, of Rosa León, of Imanol, of Lluis Llach and also the voice of Soledad Bravo and of Pep Botifarra. We hear the voices and we read the words of Manolo Vázquez Montalbán, and all those who struggled for a better future, along with the voices of you tonight, who are the leaders of political change in Spain.

I want to thank my family, all my comrades, and all those of you who are here, but above all, the people [las gentes] and the peoples [los pueblos] of Spain. There is a lot of work to do starting tomorrow, and it won’t be easy but something has changed. Never again a Spain without its peoples [pueblos] or its ordinary people [gentes] . Today from here we commit to push towards a new historic settlement that defends social justice and decency. Democracy must reach the economy, so that there can be no more violations of human rights and dignity. Tonight we hear once again the immortal voice of Salvador Allende: history is ours, and it is made by the peoples. ¡Sí se puede!