The following is an interview with Spanish philosopher Carlos Fernandez Liria. He and his colleague Luis Alegre Zahonero recently won the international Liberator Prize for Critical Thinking for their book, El Orden de El Capital (The Order of Capital).
This is one of the highest honors offered at the international level for a published work, but as Fernández Liria says, “news of the prize has not been carried on any of the Spanish news media, in spite of the fact that it is an international essay prize (with a cash award that is double what our own redoubtable Prince of Asturias gives for his famous prizes) a price which, after all, has been awarded to two Spanish university professors.” In this interview, Carlos speculates about this silence, the contents and purposes of his intellectual work, and its relationship to current crucial events.
----
In Venezuela you just won, together with Luis Alegre, the Liberator Prize for Critical Thinking, perhaps the most important prize for Spanish-language Left intellectual production, a prize that has been won by such renowned thinkers as István Mészároz. What is your reading on this fact, and how do you think this will help spread the thesis that you defend throughout your written work?
Luis and I are very grateful. Of course, we thank the Venezuelan government, the Ministry of Culture, and President Chávez, who created this prize which allows left and critical thinking to be recognized, breaking with the cultural hegemony of neoliberalism. We also want very much to recognize Atilio Borón, who we’ve never met, but a person whom we admire very much, plus all the other members of the jury. We want to give special thanks to Farruco Sesto and Carmen Bohorquez, who for the last few years have honored us with their confidence.
As you say, the best part of the prize is that the book will now have a broader distribution. Our hope is that it will serve as one more little grain of sand in the struggles that we must soon confront, which I think will be very hard. What we are facing at a worldwide level is a head-on battle with capitalism itself. In the next twenty years we will have no other option.
This stuff about “socialism or death” is about to gain a whole new meaning, because either we put an end to capitalism or capitalism will put an end to us. Look at what is happening in Japan, for example. If the tsunami wave had been ten meters taller or the earthquake one point stronger (and who says it could not have been!), a dozen nuclear reactors would have melted down and that would have been curtains for tens of thousands of people. It might have become necessary to evacuate Japan. We are sitting on a powder-keg controlled by madmen and criminals. Who, really, are those who we call “the markets?” No matter how you put it, they’re madmen playing Russian roulette with the planet, sacrificing whole peoples, changing their minds every minute, sinking or saving countries like kids playing with toy boats. There have never been dictators who were any deafer or any more demented than these. Not even Caligula or Nero were as spoiled as they, or had anywhere near this much power. .
In several of your books, your own as well as those you authored with Luis (and this one seems to be no exception), you have insisted on a critical analysis of the concept of citizenship and a subversion of what is traditionally understood as the “state of laws,” and you try to show the impossibility of its realization under capitalism. Now you do it through an analysis of Marx’s most studied work, Capital. What do you change or deepen in this book as compared to your earlier works?
I think that the theses that Luis Alegre and I have insisted on maintained in all our previously published works do not need more clarification. As you say, we have made an effort to show that democracy and a state of laws are impracticable under capitalist conditions of production, but, on the other hand, are perfectly doable under socialist conditions. This implies as well that we Communists don’t need to invent anything new or better with respect to the concepts of the republican tradition and the thought of the Enlightenment. Very much to the contrary: What we have to do is claim the ideas of “citizenship” and “state of law” as our own, rather than cede them to the enemy as bourgeois trash destined for the ash-heap of history. All this, as you point out, we have already repeated in different formats, always trying to be as instructive as possible. But there was something very important that we still needed to do: to demonstrate that these theses were compatible with Marx. And to do this we had to read Marx and offer a rigorous interpretation of his work. It has taken us fifteen years to do it. But I think that we’ve demonstrated that Capital can be understood much better if we see it as an integral part of the Enlightenment tradition and republican thinking, something which we do find in the framework of the Marxist intellectual tradition. And what is more, the result becomes much more useful for understanding the human disaster that we are now facing under capitalism.
In its evaluation of the book, the jury that awarded you the prize was appreciative of the fact that “with explicit transformatory purposes you set yourselves to create a reinterpretation of the critical theory of capitalism, in consonance with the challenges of a world that is growing more complex, thus aggravating and increasing the sophistication of its contradictions.” The implications for revolutionary processes like those of Venezuela (To Understand Venezuela, Think of Democracy: The Moral Collapse of the Western Intellectuals, also written with Luis Alegre) or Cuba: (Cuba, the Enlightenment and Socialism, jointly authored with Santiago Alba) have been a constant in your work. You are a tenured university professor and you collaborate with alternative publications like Rebelión. How do you see this relationship between the production of theoretically rigorous thought as in The Order of Capital and the concrete political action that is so urgent at this moment?
When you are trying to theoretically understand something like capitalism it is impossible to remain indifferent. If right triangles would be a monstrous injustice, if the square of the hypotenuse would not be able to be the sum of the square of the other two sides unless it would condemn half of the world population to misery and drive the planet toward ecological and human suicide, professors of mathematics would have a lot more subversive inclinations and the field of mathematics might end up being as persecuted and censored as the works of Marx are among economists. The more we understand what capitalism really is, the more monstrous it becomes. And then it becomes impossible to stand there with your arms crossed, doing nothing.
Your work in the 1980’s on a TV program, “The Crystal Ball,” that became a classic of Spanish audiovisual imagination, or a book like Education for Citizenship, with a heavy graphic component, shows your interest in passing on to younger generations in the most attractive and contemporary manner possible the tools that are necessary for critical analysis. How do you think we can make use of spaces like the Internet in this direction?
What is happening on the Internet is a unique revolution. In just a short span of time, television, which had been the most powerful instrument of ideological control in human history (even more so than the church, for instance), has been transformed into an antique, a household dust-catcher like the sewing machine or the typewriter. Young people don’t get their information from television; they don’t even get their entertainment from it any more. Their world is on line, and this opens unparalleled possibilities for the revolutionary struggle. The Arab revolutions and the Spanish 15-M movement are examples.
In spite of your having a solid publication record, and in spite of your being a professor at one of the most important universities in the country, on several occasions you’ve suffered censorship in the media. Has this prize changed anything in this sense?
Look, I could care less, but news about the Prize hasn’t been covered in any of the Spanish media, in spite of the fact that it’s an international prize (with an award that’s twice what our redoubtable Prince of Asturias gives out with his famous prizes), which, after all, has been awarded to two Spanish university professors. We’re not so much talking about censorship, but about something much worse: The media have been kidnapped by their owners, vast commercial corporations that can’t see any further than their own interests. There are no truly public media that escape this reality. Here there is no more freedom of expression than that which a few multimillionaires can afford to pay for.
In a recent contribution to La pupila insomne [The Insomniac Pupil] you say that “capitalism can no longer allow a society worthy of the name,” and you conclude that the so-called “Spanish Revolution” has only just begun. A few weeks after making this statement, you repeated it. Why do you say this?
We are in a blind alley with no way out, so it can’t be any other way. This doesn’t mean that we’re necessarily going to win the battles that are to come, but I have no doubt that the peoples are going to put up a good fight. Everyone now recognizes that, economically speaking what is happening worldwide is class struggle, pure and simple. The first ones to recognize it have been, as business magnate Warren Buffett said, “Those who are winning,” that is, the rich and powerful, the very same speculators who are dragging the world to the brink of disaster while they amass more and more money. The great Wall Street economist Michael Hudson has been repeating this endlessly: What is happening is called class struggle, just plain class struggle. And the lower and middle classes are getting soundly whipped. But there will be a fightback. In Greece they’re putting up a good fight. It’s going on in the Arab countries, in Latin America, in Iceland, in Portugal. In Spain it is still impossible to predict how the 15-M Movement will develop, but for now it hasn’t stopped growing. But I’m telling you that this fall will bring us a lot of surprises.
(Published in CubAhora / Rebelion.org | Translated by Owen Williamson)
