The State in Question I: Channeling Juan José Millás

In his controversial article “Un cañón en el culo” (El País, 14 Aug 2012), Juan José Millás effectively channels the public outrage—or simply rage—against the financial sector and the government’s drastic austerity measures that compromise residents in Spain. This detriment is equated in several of Millás’ allusions, at times vaguely and at others more explicitly, to the “terrorism” to which Spanish residents are subjected through 1) the dismantling of the Welfare State, 2) the government’s subservience to the financial sector here and abroad, and 3) the growing oppression by law enforcement officials against peaceful demonstrators in a justice system that grants impunity to corrupt politicians and bankers for their crimes. In the controversy that made the publication a trending topic in Twitter (notably, with commentary from prominent journalists such as Juan Ramón Lucas and Jordi Évole, among others), Millás charges against the main agents that uphold an economy based on speculation—supported by elites in banking capital, members of the political class, and the news media of shared neoliberal interests—understood in other contexts as the constituent bloc of hegemonic power.

Rife with allusions to the violence of historical totalitarianism and terrorism alike (e.g., ETA, the 11-M Atocha train bombings, fascism, etc.), the text shows itself, in my view, as an attempt to name an architecture that cannot be grasped in its totality (i.e., the entire complexity of a financial system, its circumstance and failure), not least by the experts and authors of speculation. Millás’s text manifests itself instead as an affective, indignant response that attempts—as it spits—to convey through a succession of analogies and references to violence in recent memory, the oppression and wrongdoing readily recognizable to readers (“the financial economy is to the real economy what the feudal lord is to the serf, what the master is to the slave, the metropolis to the colony, the Manchesterian to the overexploited laborer”). Following Millás, whether we call it feudalism, slavery, colonialism, or neoliberalism, its design and the constituent power bloc that defends it, have readily identifiable components and yet, as an incomprehensible whole, it lacks a name—a name that fails the author, but finds its expression instead through the reign of “terror” produced in subjective experience. Are we witness to a new or returning form of authoritarianism, one that is increasingly subjugated to the markets? If so, following Millás gesture, does its name really matter, given the very material, biopolitical, and exclusionary effects produced by its architecture? Perhaps more importantly then, what are the components of this architecture and how do they operate from within and outside the State to conserve the interests of the few?

The subtext of the author’s biting exposition, that billions of euros are being funneled into German banks, refers to Spain’s 100,000 million euro bailout package received from the European Central Bank (ECB) in order to pay off interest owed primarily to German and foreign banks from the Spanish banking sector. Circling back to European banks then, Spain’s bailout money received from the ECB is, in fact, destined for Spanish banks to pay off interest on its estimated 200,000 million euro debt to foreign institutions. Meanwhile, public employees in various sectors and regions, mainly school teachers, have had to wait up to three months or longer to receive their monthly salary. Economist Vicenç Navarro warns that in no way does the ECB “bailout” (a term that Spanish officials still refuse to call by name) alleviate the crisis of credit in Spain or make loans more available to small business owners, homeowners, and individuals (“The Euro Is Not in Trouble. People Are!” 17 Aug 2012). Rather, the amount of capital flowing from Spain to Germany ends up strengthening German banks and public bonds. It indirectly contributes to the growing polarization of uneven economic cycles between “northern Europe” and its dependent periphery, the so-called PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain – to use the notorious acronym coined by the Financial Times). The epithet is, undoubtedly, one palpable example of neoliberalism’s potential to conjure up chauvinist forms of nationalism.

Returning to the economic subtext of Millás’s article, Spain’s “soft” bailout from the ECB was granted under certain conditions. As Navarro summarizes, the possibility of future financial assistance from the ECB came with a directive, since made public, from its Chief Mario Draghi to Spain’s President Mariano Rajoy: “In a recent press conference (August 9, 2012), Mr. Draghi was quite clear. The ECB will not buy Spanish public bonds unless the Spanish government takes tough, unpopular measures such as reforming the labor market, reducing pension benefits, and privatizing the welfare state” (Ibid.). A project currently in progress. This is but one of the sources of outrage to which Millás alludes in his equation of “Germany equals Europe.” However strikingly, though, Millás may not be aware that this reductionist equation echoes that of Nigel Farage, leader of the rightwing UK Independence Party (UKIP) whose intervention in European Parliament (“We are living in a German-dominated Europe!”) summarizes how conflicting ideological positions can make for strange bedfellows.

I find Millás’s article unsettling on several accounts, the primary reason why I’ve chosen to focus this entry on it, aiming to identify a critical take on his choice of words. For the text shows all signs of ire and defenselessness in an acting-out, spoken from a cornered position within a power dynamic that strips a subject of one’s sense of agency and action. The violence inherent in the choice of metaphors to describe, itself, a violent stripping away of rights and protections is both real and, interchangeably, symbolic. And yet, having channeled the public outrage—and it’s worth repeating, rage—of the many factions of society to whom the article speaks, it does not cease to unsettle this reader how precisely Millás encapsulates an affective response that hedges on the confrontational fears of peaceful protesters faced with the police suited in riot gear. And, both within and outside of Spain, on the unsettling evidence that the bases for new forms of patriotism and national chauvinism—with a rise in xenophobia, racism, and discrimination already witnessed across Europe—have their foundations in economic strife.  

I've included a quick English translation of Millás's article below (all errors are my own).

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IMPOSSIBLE RELATIONSHIPS: REAL ECONOMY - FINANCIAL ECONOMY

A Gun in the Ass

The first operation that the economic terrorist uses on its victim is that of the conventional terrorist – a bullet in the back of the head

Juan José Millás - 14 August 2012

If we’ve understood it well, and it wasn’t easy because we’re somewhat foolish, the financial economy is to the real economy what the feudal lord is to the serf, what the master is to the slave, the metropolis to the colony, the Manchesterian to the overexploited laborer. The financial economy is the class enemy of the real economy, which it plays with like a Western pig plays with a boy’s body in an Asian brothel. That piggish son of a bitch can make, for example, your wheat production appreciate or depreciate in value two years before you sow it. In effect, it can buy an inexistent crop from you, and without you knowing about the operation, sell it to a third party who will sell it to a fourth, and then that one to a fifth, and according to its interests throughout this delirious process, can make the price of that fictitious wheat shoot or sink, without you making any more if the price rises, though you’ll go to hell if it lowers. If it goes down too much, maybe it’s not worth it to sow the wheat, but you’ll remain in debt without eating it or drinking it for the rest of your life. Maybe you’ll go to jail or be hanged for it, depending on the geographical region where you are, but nothing is sure. That’s what the financial economy is about.


We’re speaking about an individual’s harvest, to give an example, but what the piggish son of a bitch buys in general is an entire country for a laughable price, a country with all of its citizens in it, let’s say, with real people who really wake up at six in the morning and really go to bed at midnight. A country that from the perspective of the financial terrorist, is nothing more than a board game in which a group of Lego men are moved from one side to another, like the game pieces of slides and ladders.

The first operation that the economic terrorist uses on its victim is that of the conventional terrorist – a bullet in the back of the head. That is, it deprives him of his character as a person; it objectifies him as a thing. Once turned into a thing, it matters little if he has children or parents, if he woke up with a low-grade fever, if he’s in the process of a divorce, or if he hasn’t slept because he’s preparing his employment exams. None of this matters for the financial economy, or for the economic terrorist who just placed his finger on the map, on a country—this one, it doesn’t matter which—and says “buy” or “sell” with the impunity of one who plays Monopoly, buying and selling fake real estate.

When the financial terrorist buys or sells, he makes the genuine work of thousands or millions of people unreal. People who before going to work, left their children in a state childcare where they still exist. Children who are also products of consumption for that army of bastards protected by governments in half the world, but overprotected nevertheless by that thing we’ve been calling Europe or the European Union—or, in simpler terms, Germany, whose coffers are receiving, as you read these very lines, billions of euros that were once ours.

And these euros are not sent by a rational or just or legitimate move. They are sent in a speculative move encouraged by Merkel with the complicity of all governments in the so-called Euro zone. You and I, with our low-grade fever, our children without a daycare or job, with our father who is ill and without aid for the dependent, with our moral suffering and sentimental pleasures, you and I have already been turned into a thing by Draghi, by Lagarde, by Merkel. We no longer possess the human qualities that make us worthy of empathy from our own kind. We are already mere merchandise that can be ousted from nursing homes, hospitals, public schools. We have turned into something despicable, like that poor guy whom the terrorist par excellence is about to shoot in the back of the head in the name of God and the fatherland. 

For you and me, on the underside of the train they’re placing a daily bomb called a risk premium, or seven-year interest, in the name of the financial economy. We’re going to see a daily explosion, a daily massacre, and there are material authors for its placement and intellectuals responsible for those terrorist actions that remain unpunished, among other things, because the terrorists go up for election and even win, and because behind them are important media groups that give legitimacy to their speculative moves to which we are victim. 

The financial economy, if we understand it well, means that he who bought that inexistent harvest was card-carrying bastard. Did you have the freedom not to sell it to him? Not at all. He would have bought it from your neighbor or your neighbor’s neighbor. The primary activity of the financial economy consists in altering the price of things, an outlawed crime on a small scale, but encouraged by the authorities when its figures skyrocket off the charts. 

Here they’re altering the price of our lives every day without anyone to remedy the situation—what’s more, they send law enforcement officials against those who try. And as God lives, the law enforcement officials are used fully in protecting that son of a bitch who sold you for half price in an authorized scam, a financial product, that is, an unreal object in which you may have invested your real life’s savings. He sold you smoke, that pig protected by State laws that are already the laws of the financial economy, since they’re at its service.

In the real economy, for lettuce to grow you have to sow it and care for it and give it the right amount of time for it to develop. Then you have to collect it, of course, and package and distribute and invoice it at 30, 60, or 90 days. An enormous amount of time and energy to obtain a few cents, which you will divide with the State, through taxes, to cover the costs of shared services that are now being reduced because the financial economy faces a setback and has to get out of the rut. The financial economy does not settle for added value in classic capitalism. It needs our blood too, and that’s what it’s after. That’s why it plays with our public health and our education and our justice system in the way in which a sick terrorist plays—it’s worth repeating—by sticking the barrel of a gun up the ass of his hostage. 

For four years now they’ve been giving it to us up the ass with that gun. And with the complicity of our own.

Notes on a Genealogy of the Political Right

It is well known, yet all too often ignored, that the political right in Spain today (Partido Popular) whose founder Fraga was a minister under the Franco Regime, has its origins in the dictatorship. The Transition to democracy itself was hatched in the final years of the Regime and secured a political career for Francoists like Fraga. To a lesser extent however, to my knowledge, has rightwing political thought in Spanish democracy been traced to its historical antecedents. Recently, I’ve been interested in the threads of political theory and neoliberal thought that inform the political right in Spain today (specifically, the ruling Partido Popular). Sketching out this genealogy, my aims is to locate and analyze some of the ideological bases and strategic mechanisms operative in conservative discourse today which have served to justify the right’s self-conceived, “naturalized” right to rule and the mandate from which it legislates. This is a complex subject that deserves several blog entries, among others, on matters such as its recent measures to legislate without dialog (the PP currently has majority rule and, notably, was the only party to vote in favor of the recent austerity measures that inaugurate the dismantling of the Welfare State), as well as its increasing de-legitimization of the tenure of the socialist administrations before it (PSOE). The presumed, natural right to rule and efforts--without dialog--to roll back social reforms passed under the opposition, ultimately deny a space of dissent from which politics must inevitably emerge in democracy. This initial assessment opens up several lines of enquiry about the politics of governance from the conservative right and its hierarchical relationship to “the public," as well as alternative spaces of dissent emerging from the public, independently of the political class. As a point of departure though, I’m interested in some of the undemocratic practices that constitute the stuff of authoritarian rule.

Setting aside these subjects for now, my particular interest is to question how the conservative right conceives of social and political History in terms that, in my initial assessment, both underestimate the radical potential for change and also serve to justify its mandate. This task has led me to wade through a brief sketch or genealogy of conservative political thought in Spain, starting with leading figures in the Partido Popular: the current president Rajoy, former president Aznar, and the party’s founder Fraga, as well as the PP’s ministers and other prominent or lesser-known politicians. Behind the partisan apparatus lies a body of knowledge produced by the political right’s think tanks in democracy—all of which, to my knowledge, have been fused into one association, the Fundación para el Análisis y los Estudios Sociales (FAES), which serves as the ideological backbone of the PP today. The FAES, presided by Aznar and Cospedal, provides the PP and conservative right with an active field of conferences, publications (monographs and a journal), and reports which inform the PP of its threads of action. It is, perhaps unsurprisingly, much more Francoist than the public address of its politicians (excerpt below).

In 2001, the FAES absorbed Fundación Cánovas, a think tank founded by Fraga in 1980 during the Transition to democracy. It is no coincidence that the nineteenth-century political thought of Cánovas would serve as the conservative paradigm for the Transition to democracy one century after Cánovas’ lifetime. Cánovas was, after all, one of the founding fathers of the Constitution of 1876 which restored the Bourbon monarchy to power after the military pronouncement that ended the rule of the First Republic. Together with his notorious policies that justified the torture of “anarchist” dissidents, Cánovas is most known for having installed the partisan system known as the “Peaceful Turn” in which the left and right alternated in power. The Canovasian paradigm is one space of political theory that might provide productive to question for its role in rightwing thought today.

During the Transition to democracy in the 1980s, the Fundación Cánovas (FC), like its successor FAES, provided an essential platform of political activity and training for the conservative right before the Partido Popular’s existence (as the Alizanza Popular). The FC counted on support from the Hanns Seidel Foundation in FDR Germany, the political think tank of the Christian Social Union of Bavaria and sister party of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), whose activities predate the creation of the Alianza Popular, as El País reports (12 Nov 1984), and were aimed at providing the rightwing in a young democracy with the tools to recruit voters and train politicians. Former Director of Fundación Cánovas Carlos Robles Piquer writes in his hagiography of the FC’s activities (“Historia de un trabajo bien hecho,” published by FAES), that the Hanns Seidel Foundation provided essential support and education—especially oratory methods for the Spanish right’s politicians—during the Transition to democracy and well into the 1990s. Several announcements for its co-sponsored seminars can be found in the newspaper ABC archives. This collaboration with the FC would lead former president Aznar to bestow the Order of Isabel la Católica to the Hanns Seidel Foundation president in Madrid, Dr. Rainer Glagow, an honor that was returned to Aznar in 1998 when he received the Franz Josef Strauss Award from the Foundation. In the same memory of activities during Fundación Cánovas’ existence, Robles Piquer outlines the FC’s mission during his tenure, which echoes the ideological pillars of National-Catholicism during the Franco Regime, but with a call for united efforts to conserve these values and “renovate” them in democracy:

1º) Mantenerla [Fundación Cánovas] viva y activa, con un papel propio en el mundo nacional de los creadores y defensores de un pensamiento político-social anclado sobre los tres criterios que siguen. 

2º) La defensa de un sentido cristiano claro pero alejado de cualquier beatería y fundado en la creencia de que hay que dar a Dios sólo lo que es de Dios, que no es poco. 

3º) La práctica cotidiana de un profundo amor a España, a su obra histórica, a su pueblo y a su unidad, compatible ésta con su conocida variedad y con la descentralización autonómica, pero también atenta a que ésta no desborde sus propios límites con riesgo de devolvernos al régimen de Taifas que ayudó a la (buena) muerte de Al Andalus, lo que podría ahora, por ejemplo, terminar con la comunidad de pensamientos y expresión que nos confiere esta lengua española que algunos llegan a odiar. 

4º) Una contribución al pensamiento político-social que defiende estos dos principios y el más general de la libertad como principio creador no sólo de riqueza material sino de mucha más riqueza espiritual y cultural, unido a la conservación de cuanto merece ser conservado... y renovado. 

(“Fundación Cánovas del Castillo: historia de un trabajo bien hecho," FAES, pp. 10-11)

The Work of Culture

The arts and culture industry, as an institutional space of cultural management and education (museums, theaters, neighborhood cultural centers, art shows, etc.), is in grave danger today as austerity measures drastically reduce, if not eliminate, the public subsidiaries that fund the sector’s activities while taxes are raised in an attempt to generate revenue from the arts. Locally, regionally, and nationally, the government must prioritize spending, the argument goes, to meet the basic needs of citizens in times of crisis, whether in healthcare, education, housing, or other fiscal categories where spending is more justified. This argument seems to preclude refutation, were it not fallacious from the outset: for, the question is not how one could possibly view an exhibition as a more responsible expense than healthcare coverage—neither of which is mutually exclusive, I would add, and neither of which represents the Spanish government’s primary concern to dismantle the remnants of the Welfare State under the guise of “saving the Euro”—but rather, if the very priorities of government spending on the private sector and military constitute, in fact, responsible reasoning.

What lies behind the logic that views the arts and culture sector as a frivolous expense for the State? It is well known that the culture industry, understood as an “official” realm of institutional activities, ranks low, if not last, in the neoliberal prioritization of public spending. Culture is viewed as a frivolity that does not bear utility for the necessary functioning of society. This circumstance is not unique to Spain, or even Europe. Recast within consumerist logic, the culture industries (in which I include film) have had to survive for some time now, against the neoliberal perception that reduces it to a static—and, paradoxically, subjective—utility, regarded valuable only for the mere pleasure (superfluous “gains”) for a subject who “consumes” a cultural object or event. And, again paradoxically, the culture industries have had to survive by subscribing to the same logic, in the case of museums, cinemas, and art fairs, among others, increasingly so through revenue generated by ticket sales--the product of which often eclipses critical thought in favor of what the public is most willing to pay to see.

The reductive assumption of neoliberal thought furthermore negates the collective and more crucial role of culture for its potential to critique the complex, shifting forces (economic, social, historical, etc.) that produce it. Stated in economic terms, the “work of culture” lays bare a critique of its own sociopolitical and historical circumstance—a critique which is vital to questioning our present reality and the very possibility of imagining plural alternatives which proves a necessary task today. To deny the “work of culture” as intellectual work is, effectually, not only to imagine a society without cinema, literature, the arts, but without a plurality of voices from which to critique the present circumstance. Let’s say, in synonymous terms, it is to imagine a society in which politics goes unreported by the news media. 

However, what remains to be explained amidst the lack of transparency about the Spanish government’s austerity measures, is what, chillingly, already seems evident: that public spending itself—on education, healthcare, etc.—has been consigned, along with culture, to the same category of superfluous expenses.

From this sense of urgency, I have decided to write again on my blog (NB returning readers will note that former entries have been archived), with matters on culture, politics, and society in contemporary Spain. Many thanks for reading and, as always, comments are much welcomed.