AG

The problems that afflict working-class families in Spain are to a large extent connected to the profit motive being set above any sense of social gain or benefit. There are families who suffer the cold all winter because they can’t afford to pay their electricity bills, since energy companies have decided to raise prices during these months in order to maximize profits. Other such examples can be found in rent payments and the privatization of public health care, as outsourced emergency care is increasingly being prioritized at the expense of primary care.

This worsens people’s quality of life even in one of the countries with the highest life expectancy, just behind Japan. And all this is because market criteria are being put ahead of anything else. When the market’s priorities have to be the foremost governance criteria, we clearly have a problem — as well as a tension between the profit-seeking logic of capitalism and the needs of ordinary families.

Grasping this is at the core of what I understand communism to be. My communism isn’t a folkloric, symbolic, or aesthetic communism that simply lives through nostalgia. It’s a way of confronting the social and environmental problems we have, in the face of an economic system which is leading us to disaster. It works off the etymology of what “radical” means — that is, to get to the roots of problems.

So, my idea of communism is very open. Perhaps in other countries it is understood in another way, but in Spain the communists are those who helped bring about democracy in the 1970s and who defended the Second Republic in the 1930s. Communism doesn’t have the same connotations that it may have in Eastern Europe, or in places where anticommunist propaganda has been extremely effective.

And this vision of communism needs to understand the need to reckon with the problems that face us today. Historically socialism hasn’t taken on board questions like feminism and environmentalism, but these need to be incorporated. This isn’t new — it has been the case since as far back as the 1980s. But Spain is one of the countries in the world where feminism is currently strongest, and we’re one of the European countries that is going to be most heavily impacted by climate change and ecological collapse.

We need to build a space that I would call “eco-socialist” or “eco-communist” — although at the end of the day, labels don’t interest me that much. I’m a lot more concerned with people understanding what it is we want to do — to construct an alternative to a society dominated by the accumulation of private profit.

This country no longer has a large industrial working class in the traditional sense. Many of its social classes are disperse and heterogeneous, and many of them are radical as well as left-wing. In a recent BBVA survey, 90 percent of respondents favored higher taxes on banks and clamping down on high salaries. In this sense, it’s a very progressive society — but one which finds itself in a very different context to that of Fordist capitalism. There aren’t thousands-strong firms in the classic Fordist sense where everyone finds themselves performing their labor together in the same physical space. The workplace nowadays is not the place where people construct their life and forms of community — life takes place to a much greater extent in neighborhoods and even online.