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
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.
1 comment:
Great!
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