A boy in Bangladesh assembles smartphones for eight dollars a day, and next to him a billboard extols the latest model that boy will never be able to afford.
This image repeats the same liturgy of exploitation for centuries, because the West has always called development the plunder of continents, democracy the imposition of its own rules, and humanitarian aid the control of others’ debts.
Today, as the ice melts, as inequalities dig bottomless chasms, and as millions of humans flee wars financed with taxes from wealthy countries, the great ones of the earth gather in sumptuous summits on sustainability.
They arrive on private jets, move with fleets of armored cars, discuss happy degrowth while outside the operational rooms police charge protesters.
No one finds this procession of hypocrisies strange, because hypocrisy has become the only religion still practiced with fervor.
The new czars of finance own houses on three continents and watches that measure a time they do not have the courage to live.
They speak of philanthropy, name libraries and museums after themselves, while their funds speculate on commodities, on the health of the sick, on schools for the poor.
They have understood that true freedom is dangerous, because a free people would stop consuming, and without consumption the entire castle would collapse.
Better a distracted citizen than a troublesome thinker. Better a screen always on than a mind turned on.
The Left has betrayed its history, unions have transformed into service agencies, and workers’ parties into consortia of political professionals. The Right never had a shadow of different intention.
The game is rigged because the players wrote the rules before the match began, and the only choice left to people is between two brands of toothpaste or between two smiling faces that alternate in power without changing a comma of the laws that protect the rich.
The tired and frightened people applaud, because an applause costs less than a thought.
Thought wounds, the wound generates consciousness, and consciousness is a serious illness that takes away sleep, prevents peaceful consumption, and transforms every supermarket into the vision of a forest razed to the ground to make room for shelves.
The system fights this illness with massive doses of entertainment, artificial anxiety, and small fears that divert the gaze from the great fear.
The great fear has a simple name: this world, as it is, has no future.
The cursed poets of the late 19th century already knew it, today the farmers who guard ancient seeds and the teachers who teach the names of plants before the names of jeans know it. But their voice is a whisper in a hurricane of chatter.
Yet, amidst the putrefaction, some signs of life resist.
Entire communities have chosen to live without money, neighborhoods where objects are exchanged instead of bought new, workshops that repair what others have already thrown away.
Every bacterium of resistance is crushed or, worse, absorbed and transformed into merchandise, so that even degrowth becomes a brand, spirituality is sold in crystals, and rebellion in t-shirts with slogans.
Capital digests everything, even its enemies, even dreams, even hope.
But capital cannot digest the silence of those who stop applauding, who turn off the screen and look around, who choose not to buy the latest useless object.
The point is not to despair. The point is to see clearly.
As long as someone believes this system can be reformed, they will remain complicit in its slow agony.
A cannonball cannot be reformed; it is dodged, abandoned, built elsewhere even with bare hands and without permission.
The true revolution will not be seen on television; it happens in homes where heating is turned off to avoid paying energy multinationals, in fields where ancient seeds challenge patents, in silences where a person decides not to respond to provocation.
The king is naked, and his body is covered only by our rags.
Throw away the rags, exit the procession.
Stopping is already an act of war, and in this war the only weapon that counts is lucidity.
RVSCB
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Note: The bibliography follows ISO 690:2010 standards. Original titles are provided where relevant for reference.
