<![CDATA[Ara Balears in English - capitalism]]> 10 <![CDATA[It's not you, it's the system]]> Good morning, tourist. I am writing these lines so that you better understand the situation. Because most likely, while you were looking for where you could go on vacation this summer, no one has told you that we are part of a perverse system, that we are a cog in a machine designed to make you work eleven months a year so that you then return this money and buy all kinds of products, including territories that are far from your home.

]]> <![CDATA[Aporophobic policies]]> When at the end of the 90s Attac warned about the consequences of the financialization of the economy, we could not yet guess how far the destructive power of today's digital and financial capitalism would go.Saskia Sassen already announced the evolution of the economic system towards a massive extractive capitalism (Expulsions, 2014). In the 20th century, the economy was based on the production of material goods and it was necessary to have citizens with the economic capacity to acquire them, which is why the political axis was inclusion, the welfare state. On the contrary, in a world where profit comes from financial speculation, people have ceased to have value as producers and consumers, and worrying about the welfare of the middle and lower classes is a waste of resources. Thus, the system now pivots around a radical logic of massive exclusion or expulsion of a large part of the population to the margins of the system. The current configuration of financial capitalism no longer generates generalized well-being, but rather the growth of inequality. While some elites enrich themselves disproportionately, the working and middle classes are being displaced towards precariousness and impoverishment. To austerity policies and reduction of public services, unemployment, and the loss of labor rights, is added the dynamic of financial capital which, in order to continue expanding, needs to commodify and appropriate the basic goods and services of life, such as housing, healthcare, education, and pensions, and cause their scarcity or elitization. The consequences of this economic evolution are incompatible with the cultural framework that has governed us since the proclamation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the UN (1948). To affirm that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights and […] should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood” has a revolutionary scope today, because capitalism needs to expropriate and undermine lives and rights to extract value.The far-right is the instrument of extractive capitalism not only to promote its deregulatory proposals and suppressors of rights and guarantees in various areas of life, but also to generate in society another mental framework that facilitates the advancement of these expropriatory economic and social policies, not only without citizen resistance, but with acceptance and adhesion, by influencing schools, education, culture, and the media. As E. J. Díez says, “neoliberalism and neofascism constitute two inseparable expressions of the same current configuration of the capitalist system”. Thus, the far right generates and generalizes discourses that break the basic consensus of equal rights based on human dignity, and legitimizes inequality and restriction of rights to some groups. Rights? Not for everyone. The far right points the finger at those who are already in an initially disadvantaged situation to accentuate it. Their apparent fight is against feminism, against migrants, against the most excluded social sectors, making them appear as culprits of economic and social problems or scarcity to justify their expulsion from the welfare system, while the real culprits are hidden. Starting to cut rights first for some, in the future for many more. In this context of growing social exclusion, aporophobic policies emerge, executed wherever the far-right and its follower right-wing parties govern, including on our island. When Mrs. Prohens, president of the CAIB, opposes the administrative regularization of migrants and says that “not everyone who arrives is a being of light,” she is saying that it is no longer enough to be a person to have rights; they are granted or not according to the power's pleasure and convenience. And in general, they are taken from the most disadvantaged. Why spend money on them? We see it nearby. For example, the massive deregistration of precarious residents in Palma, the refusal to register homeless people and caravanners. The harassment of homeless people. The dehumanization and criminalization of minors in transit to deprive them of their rights as minors. The suppression or restriction of benefits such as the guaranteed social income. The transfer of designated land (intended for services) to real estate developers with the excuse of a lack of housing. There is a future for everyone, but we must defend it today.

]]> <![CDATA[Democracies without 'demos']]> On other occasions I have written here about the crisis of democracy and its weakening at the hands of the wildest capitalism and the individualistic and consumerist culture it promotes. Today, however, and especially after the elections in Colombia on Sunday the 21st and other events happening not so far from home, I want to express my personal and political doubts about what we call 'democracy'. Or, if you prefer, about the meaning we attribute to an instrument that increasingly resembles an empty shell.

]]> <![CDATA[Post-capitalist dissatisfaction]]> Note before getting to the point: this is, clearly, the least sexy headline I've ever written. 

]]> <![CDATA[The sirens]]> Perhaps the best metaphor to understand what is happening to us has been put into writing by Chris Hayes, the American journalist, whose essay, The Song of the Sirens, has just been translated into Spanish. It is a serious, informative, and at the same time very critical work of the current attention capitalism society, when we live immersed in a sea of continuous noise and have learned to pay attention only to what makes the most noise —what stands out amidst the continuous bustle—, or to the song of the sirens. But Ulysses chained himself to the ship's mast to avoid succumbing, he imposed limits on himself to avoid falling into what could distract him from the life he wanted to lead, something we find ourselves unable to do, always looking at screens. Although in principle it is not 'the screens' that are the problem, but rather the applications designed to capture and hold our attention in a enslaved manner and then make a profit from 'our eyes', reselling our attention to advertisers who insert advertising in the midst of the content that the algorithm has discovered fascinates us. This is how we spend our hours, attention time that we could dedicate to matters that are truly useful, or that give us some measure of happiness. If the average in Spain is three and a half hours per person per day of mobile phone use, how many things could we do to recover this time in our lives? How many languages could we learn? How many instruments could we master? How much love could we give to others instead of watching strange videos or participating in useless controversies? And how could everyone's culture improve if, instead of looking at a screen, books were read; therefore, people consumed more literature, which would also benefit the publishing market? The progress of humanity was based on the idea that a day would come when, beyond work time and night rest, we would have time to dedicate ourselves to our true interests, to our inner freedom. But now that we could finally have some leisure hours: why have we uselessly given them away? Let's focus on this: the ‘masters’ of this lost time are the richest men in the world, the owners of X, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, etc. Networked capitalism has been built on the time we were supposed to emancipate ourselves from, just as industrial capitalism did on the time we were supposed to go to factories and mass production centers. Now we find ourselves even incapable of reading a short text, like this article, and let alone a whole novel, much less if it is long and perhaps a bit demanding. The only way, now, to read certain things is to ‘tie yourself’ to the mast of the ship, that is, disconnect the phone, even turn off the modem to avoid temptations to connect and check the screen every fifteen minutes. The fact that we are in this state, so interfered with, should worry us, because this is, literally, the alienation that Marxism intended to denounce. Your life is no longer yours if even the time of your freedom is blocked.       

]]> <![CDATA[The sold sky]]>

When Neil Armstrong stepped on the Moon on July 20, 1969, he uttered a phrase full of epic that would mark an era: “That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” As the past is romanticized and idealized through nostalgia, we believe today that the mission's objective to the satellite was knowledge or the conquest of space. But it was born out of pure rivalry with the Soviet Union. It was simply a geopolitical positioning within the space race.

]]> <![CDATA[Poor against poor]]>

The deception isn't sophisticated, but it is effective. The wheel of the system turns in favor of the capitalists, who always win in this roulette of bad luck. On the other hand, there are the poor, who rent out their bodies and brains by the hour in exchange for a wage they must spend to feed the 'natural' state of things.

]]> <![CDATA[Beyond growth]]> We live immersed in the conflict between capital and life. We are condemned to a profound and permanent contradiction that manifests itself in situations of extreme violence, of polarization exacerbated by bewilderment, uncertainty, and fear. And we have the feeling that everything is happening at an ever-increasing pace, and therefore, in a more alienating way. We see a multitude of emergencies erupt, becoming chronic and intensifying, while politics and states are either incapable of confronting them or, directly, operate by intensifying the dynamics of the logic of capitalist accumulation, as if the future were a secondary and even negligible variable.

]]> <![CDATA[Shark board]]>

When he arrived in 2007, the group of friends was divided between those from eight Mallorcan lineages, with a home secured by inheritance, and those of us who were children of outsiders, who only we could inherit our parents' mortgageIn my group of friends, it was an axiom.

]]> <![CDATA[Christmas lights]]> The Christmas lights have been coming on for days, and with them comes that curious effect where traffic in cities seems to intensify and become even more difficult, more aggressive, more—precisely—impassable. Traffic jams without tone or sound, cars blocking the way wherever they belong, congestion on main roads, horns, horns, horns. A dissonant symphony of horns, loudly proclaiming one of the characteristics of this time of year: the surge in all forms of incivility. People calling out, people pushing, people fighting in the street, in entertainment venues, in shopping centers. "It's the Christmas spirit," they proclaim, while then hurling insults at someone who has just passed by or walked in front of them. Meanwhile, the Christmas lights adorn the streets and avenues, the facades, the shop windows, and even the trees on the street, with those absurd condom-shaped lights that are screwed onto the trunks. Globalization makes the landscape more or less the same in all large cities of the Western world, and Palma, which thanks to tourism has all the disadvantages of a large city but none of the advantages, is an exception.

]]> <![CDATA[Everything that doesn't move, breaks]]> In the spring of 2022, I had the opportunity to interview Oriol Junqueras. He had been released from prison just under a year before. I began the interview by addressing the division among pro-independence individuals and groups concerned with preserving the unique identity of Catalan culture. Junqueras suddenly alerted me: in Europe, discussing identity issues is frowned upon, especially now with the rise of the far right and the fear that we are regressing to the situation before the Second World War.

]]> <![CDATA[Domestic Nirvana]]> For some reason I don't know, Google offers me news about Marie Kondo, a Japanese woman who has become rich with a cleaning and organizing method. The last suggested news item states: "People who don't cut the labels off their clothes are making a mistake." I feel compelled to decipher the clickbait. They say that getting rid of this textile appendage allows you to connect with the garment, increase traffic from the store to your home, and live in harmony. We must give thanks for its function, so that it continues its karmic path towards the recycled polyester route.

]]> <![CDATA[Capitalism and feelings of guilt]]> In I was here and I remembered you. (Anagrama, 2024), Anna Pacheco infiltrated the underworld of luxury hotels to try to find out how the workers of these establishments perceived their work, considering that many of them could never afford a night's accommodation in the hotels where they work.

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