You don’t have a house when no one offers guarantees that you will be able to continue living in the house you pay for. You will never have a house when you can’t even afford to pay rent. Just as the land belongs to those who work it, the house belongs to those who live in it.
Socialists have a fundamental problem, an original sin, and that is that today’s world is not socialist, nothing is socialist anymore, and no one remembers what socialist means, but they continue to call themselves that because, otherwise, they would stop to be what they are, even if they are not clear about what they are. They are socialists.
Now, the parties are no longer defined in their acronyms by ideologies, they are no longer called communists, socialists, social democrats or conservatives, nor is that unmentionable word, which those on the extreme right hide, although it oozes out in spurts. Modern parties have in their acronyms words that refer to desires, to wills, rather than to ideologies.
Socialist is a fossil word, in the most beautiful of senses. It has become the amber where a way of seeing life is eternally preserved. In religion, this is called the soul. Amber can be as much an aristocratic sign of distinction as a bead. Today, a socialist has to dedicate himself to a thousand things (that is also called managing), rather than being a socialist. It doesn’t give him life. He no longer has time for that.
Because managing is the opposite of claiming. It is not even a way to defend an ideology, although it may seem that way through an intermediary. In Spain, the most similar thing to doing business has been running errands. Running errands is the next step on the way down the ladder. The errands are done by the children and the porters. The arrangements are made by the middle class, the people with zipper wallets; Today, people carry a computer in their purse instead of a notebook. To carry out procedures you have to lose an entire morning of work or dedicate an entire free afternoon to it. The Government does not take action, the Government commands. Managing is for when someone puts on the jacket of sitting and waiting.
For this reason, tenants denounce and complain, and no one manages their demands. Because they have to do the arrangements themselves when they finish the demonstration. Broadly speaking, there are two types of tenants, those who cannot pay the rent and those who cannot even dream of renting. So, they call for a rent strike, even though this right is not recognized. Refusing to pay is a dramatic idea, it is in Dario Fo’s theater, which in the 70s premiered Nobody pays here. In this work, it was in a supermarket where payment was not made, in protest against inflation. Almost a quarter of a century after writing Nobody pays here, Dario Fo was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. It is always like this, managing is doing things late. And doing them in due time is acting, which is what happens in theater. Dario Fo performed. An artist is a person of action, he always knows when to act.
Since Romulus and Remus, the Italians have been more temperamental than the Spanish. Resignation can take over for us. We are not Catholics of Peter, who laid the first stone in Rome, but of Santiago, who arrived corpse to our shores to evangelize us. In Spain, battles are always won after death. The same thing happened with El Cid. And with Adolfo Suárez. When an Italian gets angry and, between grand gestures, exclaims: Nobody pays here!we Spaniards are content to say: There is no one who lives here. We prefer other types of programming. We have another way of seeing things. We are more patient people, more willing to endure anything if, in return, they make us smile. In a country where there has never been money, except for the powerful, people on the streets have historically had to settle for being paid by making them smile. This happened to Mr. Troncoso, from the Triana song.
Being a tenant has meant being a second-class Spaniard all my life. Because, in our country, what everyone aspires to is to own an apartment so that no one can kick you out of your house. Here, we have driven entire communities from their homes. It has been done with the Jews, with the Moors, with the gypsies when they were settled. And also with the itinerant people. A car is a house. A cave is also a house, those in Guadix are in fashion.
Likewise, an economic migrant is someone who has been kicked out of their home. We Spaniards know a lot about all this. All the industrial emigration from Barcelona who, first, lived in shacks, on the slopes of Montjuïc and Carmel, or in shacks on the seashore, until they could buy a freshly painted apartment in the middle of an open field, are people who They were expelled from their home in the town, due to hunger, misery and underdevelopment.
It remains that way. The majority of homeless people who come to our cities previously had a home in their country of origin. These tenants are another shadow army, when I say this I think of the unemployed as an industrial reserve army, according to Marx, and in the chronicle of the French resistance, which Joseph Kessel told in his novel The army of shadows (Later, Jean-Pierre Melville made a very good film of it). But tenant is a chimerical word (Topor saw it), a technical term, even a euphemism, because in Spain tenant, above all, means homeless people.
You don’t have a house when no one offers guarantees that you will be able to continue living in the house you pay for. You will never have a house when you can’t even afford to pay rent. Just as the land belongs to those who work it, the house belongs to those who live in it. I am not referring to the property deed, but to the confidence in continuing to belong to it. I am referring to the deeper right to belong to a house, even above the fact that a house belongs to you. People belong to the house where they live.
Just as in the 15th, 17th and 18th centuries, today the vulture funds, and the rest of the real estate speculators, are expelling the population from the cities en masse. They do scorched earth policy, but they don’t burn their wheat but our houses. Displacing the inhabitants to the neighboring cities of the large capitals, they turn the people into flames of fire, since they are also going to burn the places they reach. And when rents and apartments are unaffordable in neighborhoods where everything was cheaper, they will once again move people even further away, reproaching them for not having a great idea of what Barcelona is. In the mouths of speculators, the words great Barcelona reek of Milošević. For housing speculators, Barcelona does not exist, the cities do not exist, they are just land to burn.
The tenants who have come out these days to demonstrate represent the small tip of an unfathomable iceberg that penetrates to the abyss of the patera apartments, of the neighbors’ stairs where no one knows anyone, of the old men and women who commit suicide because they have run out of cards and they don’t know how they are going to continue playing that long, exhausting game called getting ahead. Abyssal fauna. Monsters that cut off the light. Ours. That’s why socialism was born.
#homeless #people
