You don’t have a home when no one guarantees you’ll be able to continue living in the home you’re paying for. You will never have a house if you can’t even afford 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, which is that the world today 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 cease to be what they are, even if they do not clearly know what they are. They are socialists.
From now on, the parties are no longer defined in their acronyms by ideologies, they are no longer called communists, socialists, social democrats or conservatives, nor this unspeakable word that those of the extreme right hide, although it oozes from- blows. Modern parties have words in their acronyms that refer to desires and wills rather than ideologies.
Socialist is a fossil word, in the most beautiful sense. It became the amber where a way of seeing life is eternally preserved. In religion this is called the soul. Amber can be as much a sign of aristocratic distinction as a pearl. Today, a socialist must devote himself to a thousand things (this is also called managing), rather than being a socialist. It doesn’t give him life. He doesn’t have time for that anymore.
Because managing is the opposite of claiming. This is not even a way of defending an ideology, although it may appear that way through an intermediary. In Spain, the closest thing to doing business is shopping. Shopping is the next step on the path to getting off the ladder. The races are done by the children and the porters. The arrangements are made by the middle class, people with zipper wallets; Today people carry a computer in their purse instead of a laptop. To take steps, you have to lose an entire morning of work or devote an entire free afternoon to it. The government does not act, it orders. Management is when someone puts on the vest of sitting and waiting.
For this reason, tenants denounce and complain, and no one manages their complaints. Because they have to make the arrangements themselves once the demonstration is over. Generally speaking, there are two types of tenants, those who can’t pay the rent and those who can’t even dream of renting. They are therefore calling for a rent strike, even if this right is not recognized. Refusing to pay is a dramatic idea, this is the case of the theater of Dario Fo, who created in the 70s Nobody pays here. In this work it was in a supermarket where payment was not made, in protest against inflation. Nearly a quarter of a century after writing Nobody pays here, Dario Fo received the Nobel Prize for Literature. It’s always like that, managing means doing things late. And to do them in due time is to play, as happens in the theater. Dario Fo played. An artist is a person of action, he always knows when to act.
Since Romulus and Remus, the Italians have been more capricious than the Spanish. Resignation can take over for us. We are not Catholics of Peter, who laid the first stone in Rome, but of Saint James, who arrived as a corpse on 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 big gestures, exclaims: Nobody pays here!we Spaniards just say: There is no one living here. We prefer other types of programming. We have another way of looking at things. We are more patient people, more willing to endure anything if, in return, it makes us smile. In a country where there has never been any money, except for the powerful, people on the streets have always had to be content to get paid by making them smile. It happened to Mr. Troncoso, from the Triana song.
Being a tenant meant being a second-class Spaniard all my life. Because in our country what everyone aspires to is owning an apartment so that no one can kick you out of your house. Here we have driven entire communities from their homes. This was done with the Jews, with the Moors, with the gypsies when they were settled. And also with itinerant people. A car is a house. A cave is also a house, those of Guadix are fashionable.
Likewise, an economic migrant is someone who has been evicted from their home. We Spaniards know a lot about all this. All the industrial emigration from Barcelona who, first, lived in cabins, on the slopes of Montjuïc and Carmel, or in cabins by the sea, until being able to buy a freshly painted apartment in the middle of an open field, are people who were expelled from their homes in the city, because of hunger, poverty and underdevelopment.
It remains that way. The majority of homeless people arriving in our cities previously had housing in their country of origin. These tenants are another shadow army, when I say that I think of the unemployed as an industrial reserve army, according to Marx, and in the chronicle of the French resistance, recounted by Joseph Kessel in his novel The army of shadows (Later, Jean-Pierre Melville made a very good film of it). But tenant is a fanciful word (Topor saw it), a technical term, even a euphemism, because in Spain, tenant means above all the homeless.
You don’t have a home when no one guarantees you’ll be able to continue living in the home you’re paying for. You will never have a house if you can’t even afford rent. Just as the land belongs to those who work it, the house belongs to those who live in it. I’m not talking about the deed of ownership, but the confidence to continue to be part of it. I’m referring to the deeper right to belong to a house, beyond even 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, vulture funds and the rest of the real estate speculators are expelling the population of the cities en masse. They practice a scorched earth policy, but they do not burn their wheat but our houses. Moving the inhabitants to the neighboring towns of the major capitals, they transform the people into flames of fire, since they will also burn the places they reach. And when rents and apartments become unaffordable in areas where everything was cheaper, they will once again push people away, blaming them for not having a good idea of what Barcelona is. In the mouths of speculators, the words “Greater Barcelona” smell like Milošević. For real estate speculators, Barcelona does not exist, cities do not exist, they are only land to be burned.
The tenants who have come out these days to demonstrate represent the small tip of an unfathomable iceberg that penetrates to the bottom of the patera apartments, of the neighbors’ staircases where no one knows anyone, of old men and women who commit suicide because They’re out of cards and don’t know how they’re going to continue playing this long, exhausting game called moving forward. Abyssal fauna. Monsters that cut off the light. Ours. This is why socialism was born.
