In March 1986, in the referendum campaign that those in favor of continuing in the NATOGustavo Bueno intervened in favor of the no before a hundred miners in the well Background of hunosaat seven in the morning. It was a time in which the philosopher still aligned himself with the left, especially with the communist, who listened to him with fervor from the anti-Francoism, for which the Rioja professor was a reference. Later came his turn to the right and towards Spanish nationalism, although in reality it is debatable that Gustavo Bueno has substantially changed his thoughts. He came from Falangism, was always in favor of a strong State and did not hide his pride in the Spanish Empire, so that his opposition to NATO controlled by the United States was as natural as his sympathy for the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
Accompanied by a few journalists, television cameras and technicians, Gustavo Bueno He turned that historic well into a university classroom or a workers’ athenaeum, something not foreign to popular culture in the mining areas. The miners, wrapped in their overalls, with their lamps and utensils at hand, listened attentively to that elderly philosopher, with a fine appearance and a beak, who attacked the PSOE and militarism. After his intervention, a discussion began and the miners were invited to speak. I think someone did it previously, but I only remember the words of a veteran miner whose colleagues ridiculed him with ridicule as soon as he opened his mouth. They emphasized with some humor that he was right-wing. He must have been the lone conservative miner, or at least the only one who recognized him, on that morning shift at the well, who would arrive late to the pit, breaking his work day, to listen to that intellectual with glasses and academic oratory. His intervention was shorter and more mundane. I remember it more or less like this:
– What you are telling us will be very good, but what are we doing with NATO? Who is going to pay me the salary that they will deduct from me when I come to work late for listening to you talk about NATO?
Supported by the rest of the miners and by the union members who supported him, Gustavo Bueno, who could be choleric, appealed to irony that day, causing great laughter in that very proletarian audience:
– You don’t like NATO at all? You don’t care about NATO? You remind me of some rich people, very wealthy people, who traveled on a large ocean liner, in a luxury cabin. A big storm broke out and they were told to abandon ship. For those of us who care about the storm, with how good it is in the cabin, they responded. And so, enjoying that cabin, the champagne and the exquisite food, they went down with the ship. They did like you, who doesn’t care about NATO, only the salary they won’t earn.
Lately I think a lot about that scene and that response because it seems like a metaphor for the times we are living through. Climate change caused by man and polluting emissions from industrialization is already a real threat, an example of the progressive self-destruction of the planet, which manifests itself in major environmental disasters, such as this last one in the Spanish Levant. But the human being remains insensitive to the destruction of the Earth, greed and ignorance devour him, he prefers to attend his own end in his luxury cabin, dedicated to consuming wildly and squandering shamelessly. In short, it will arrive in eighty or a hundred years, say the most optimistic, oblivious to another world other than their own, even the one that their descendants will inherit.
Marx He was one of the most important and influential personalities in History, his thinking conditioned recent history, since the 20th century. He was a great philosopher, his analysis of the evolution of humanity and the emergence of capitalism was accurate and brilliant. He cannot be blamed for the totalitarianism, barbarism and monsters that the communist utopia generated. The problem was not Marx, it was the Marxists. Or many of them, disciples who interpreted the teacher as Catholics do with the Pope, the infallible leader of a religion, where faith prevails over reason.
As he was not infallible, Karl Marx, whose analysis of the past is impeccable, erred in some of his predictions, such as believing that the socialist revolution would break out in the most advanced countries by the force of the proletariat, when it did so in the backward, medieval and peasant Russia of the tsars. But he was not wrong about others, such as the self-destruction of capitalism due to its unstoppable dynamic of growth. We are in it.
The logic of the growth of capitalism is leading civilization to the abyss. Marx pointed to the economic contradictions of the process rather than the environmental disaster, which was more difficult to perceive at the beginning of industrialization. We are already at the beginning of the end. Nature rebels, it can no longer bear it, it sends messages in the form of environmental catastrophes, to the poor and the rich, the most recent in the most developed countries in Central Europe, the United States and Spain. Without any response, emissions continue to increase and a climate change denier, who identifies the American way of life with the car and consumption, sweeps the elections in the most powerful country on Earth, one of the main responsible for environmental suicide, who plans to accelerate.
Nature rebels, it can no longer bear it, it sends messages in the form of environmental catastrophes
There is no longer a choice, or degrowth or death, but the world continues betting on self-destruction. In the luxury cabin you don’t want to see the storm. Decrease? That’s from hippies or communists. You have to grow, get fat until your body bursts, as in “The big bouffe”the movie Marco Ferreri. Distribute instead of grow, to tackle the growing inequality between social classes? Demand that large soulless multinationals with scandalous profits stop polluting and assume the cost by tightening their belts? Change social habits, travel less, not aspire to have several cars and settle for one? That belongs to fools and losers who do not know how to enjoy life, that is, consumerism and developmentalism, marginalized people who do not accept that capitalism has conquered people’s hearts forever.
They are right, it conquered them and poisoned them. So many philosophers, before and after Marx, so much thinking, although now it is retreating towards the world before Reason and the Enlightenment, so much reading to understand the complex social dynamics…to end up agreeing with those who see above all the explanations. in the human condition. So simple, so Manichaean, so real. People in the abstract, like people, are good or bad. Or rather, the same person is good or bad throughout their life, in the same day, depending on the situation, the interlocutor or their mood. The same thing happens with societies, they are historical cycles. Now it seems that the worst of the human condition is emerging, narcissism, selfishness, lack of solidarity, ignorance. Mete miéu, we say in Asturias.
I was always an optimist, the world is better than the one my parents lived in, let alone my grandparents. I am from the first generation that did not suffer a war in Europe. Humanity has advanced enormously since the caves of the first artists, since the Middle Ages to which so many people seem determined to return. Even if it’s taking one step forward and two steps back, as I said Lenin in a harangue, because the advances always exceeded the setbacks. But now the step retracing the path seems so great that it threatens to let us fall into a bottomless pit, infected, terrifying, terrifying like a story of HP Lovecraft.
And that has been clearly marked for a long time. But from the luxury cabin of the liner you can’t see it.
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