By Guillermo Del Valle Alcalá
10/18/2019
A
photo immortalizes the moment: an Uber Eats rider tries to pass between the
barricades of identity. It’s happening. Barcelona, Spain. The wildest
capitalism is at ease, imperceptible to the devotees of the border.
Because that’s what this matter is about once again. Imaginary frontiers, not those that, somehow, accepted democratic revolutions as historical decantations – arbitrary, potentially surmountable in a fairer tomorrow, yes – whose imperative functionality was valid, as it was to guarantee within the same units of justice and distribution where rights would be exercised and mythologies would not be revered. The other frontiers, the ethnic ones, those of the purity of blood, those that ravaged to blood and fire half the world, are the last link of indignity for any human being clean of mind. That is why an ideology as obscene and nauseating as nationalism dreams of them.
Fire and barricades, some absent-minded say, are the symbols of another
Tragic Week. But as Marx said, the second time History always repeats itself as
a farce. There is no working class conscience here, only nationalism. The
identity barricades are so alien to any social claim that, in the eyes of their
faithful, the rights of the exploited rider who tried to break through them to
earn a small retribution are no longer secondary, but directly non-existent.
The priority of the protesters, spurred by a right-wing and neoliberal government that with one hand asks them to push and with another represses them, is to make the voice of tribal supremacism sound loud: we against the others. Not because we are of an oppressed or subaltern social class and fight for rights, but because we were born here or there and that makes us different, better, to the point of believing ourselves anointed of the chilling power to deprive millions of people of their rights, of the condition of possibility to extend those rights. You know: the indignity of having the soul controlled by geography, as Santayana said. As we participate in a special identity, we can break the state, privatizing what belongs to everyone, the political territory. The privilege against equality. The reaction marching on.
There
is no left-wing nationalism, although in the wasteland of the Spanish false
left, it is still sought, like a needle in a haystack, such an impossible one.
Because nationalism is ontologically reactionary. An enemy ideology of the
concept of social class, of any claim of a social nature, of any redistributive
notion. An ideology that dreams of citizens turned into foreigners, which
understands that an Andalusian or an Extremaduran does not deserve the
solidarity and redistribution of a Catalan or a Basque. Something so aberrant
can only be at the moral height of the Northern League. At the height of the
subsoil, where ethical degradation invades everything. From a broad northern
league, the northern league there – today the Lega of Salvini, you know, the
Vox partner that supports our local racists – and here. Because in that, in the
reactionary attachment, there are no borders of any kind.
Supremacism and ethnic racism cannot admit asymmetric sentences, a no to Salvini but a yes to Torra. At least if we take minimally seriously the beautiful proclamation of the International, that which some amnesiacs and self-proclaimed leftists, despise every day: the human race is the International. The Nationalist International only fits in the head of a psychopath, or in that of an imposter. You can choose.
The
superstition he appeals to is already totally useless: let’s seduce them, they
tell us. Seducing those who crave contemporary apartheid is an aberrant idea.
Because you cannot pay homage to whoever despises the most disadvantaged, who
practices an infamous supremacism towards their peers, who does not want to
redistribute with the other Spaniards wielding a discourse of ethnic purity, to
the reactionary in short. We must fight him politically and ideologically,
without hesitation.
While
they ignore the precariousness to which their neoliberal policies contribute,
while they implement brutal social cuts and privatizations everywhere, while
they plunder public coffers to build their ethnic barbed wire, they work
continuously against any notion of internationalism and solidarity. Demanding,
at the height of hypocrisy, impunity. As the worst potentates in history, the
status of untouchables. So are the devotees of identity. The worst of the worst
right. But the worst is not that nationalist and racist right that has taken
the streets. The worst, the saddest thing is that some brainless usurped the
left to justify their excesses, and today we all suffer the consequences of
nonsense.
Revolution? It will be the idiots’ revolution. Let’s not forget Georges Brassens’ masterful song: all idiots were born somewhere.
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