Progress towards equality is not a beautiful dream, perhaps desirable but sadly impossible.
Radical changes do not have to come very gradually over centuries, nor do they have to be imposed through bloody revolutions.
For at least several thousand years the superiority of men over women was an immovable fact legitimized by laws and legends, founded sometimes on religious tradition and sometimes on alleged scientific evidence: but in the course of a few decades, In the realm of recent memory for many of us, what seemed natural and immovable collapsed very quickly, it is true that in restricted areas of the world, Europe and America, and progress was so rapid and so overwhelming that now it seems to us Unbelievable what until not many years ago was so natural that almost nobody noticed.
Now we see photos of Spanish political life in the seventies, or even literary life in the mid-eighties, and the first thing that strikes us is something that we didn't even see then, the absence of women.
Of course, in a large part of the world the position of women has not improved, and that even in ours there is still a long way to go for full equality, and there are no guarantees that progress will be irreversible: but we have seen, we are seeing daily with our own eyes, that one of the most entrenched and fiercely defended inequalities can be remedied.
Progress in the emancipation of women is one of the examples that César Rendueles shows to prove that inequality is not an inevitable feature of human societies, a necessary and even legitimate consequence of a market economy model that, by guaranteeing the flourishing Private initiative would reward the best and most competitive and promote general prosperity.
The stale fatalism of "there will always be rich and poor", or that of the genetic superiority of the ruling classes, is replaced by the "inspirational" message of meritocracy: to get to something you have to be the best;
He who succeeds has tried harder than anyone to deserve it.
With public intervention in the economy discredited as well as communist statism, and union movements subjected to irrelevance, the only horizon of justice that seems legitimate is “equal opportunities”: the ground must be cleared, as in a sports competition, so that all aspirants are trained and strive according to their best faculties, so that those who reach higher obtain their position not by virtue of obsolete privileges, but by their own proven and indisputable merit, which will be confirmed below by the success.
To refute so many lies, César Rendueles has just published what he himself describes as a pamphlet:
Against equal opportunities
.
It is a pamphlet because it is radical, passionate and forceful.
But it is also brimming with solid information about the scandalous growth of inequality and injustice in recent decades, and with reasoned and sensible arguments in favor of social change that serves not to equalize everyone in a barracks or bureaucratic monotony, but to ensure that a maximum number of people can have "the good life": equal to each other not by decree, but by agreement and by common interest, capable of enjoying a freedom that is not locked or despotic and a sufficient and austere well-being, with in accordance with the primacy of the common good and the just limitations necessary not only to preserve the environment, but to overcome as much as possible the destructive consequences of climate change.
Rendueles is not a utopian: the proof that the extreme inequality that now prevails is not inevitable is that it did not exist in Europe or the United States until the late 1970s, when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher brought economic recipes to the first world ultraliberals that they had previously tried thanks to the terror in Chile and Argentina.
But the triumph of the right and the economic powers was more complete because the social democratic left also wanted to join it.
From Tony Blair in the United Kingdom to Rodríguez Zapatero in Spain, there was no nominally progressive government that did not endorse the policies of liberalization of the economy, weakening of public sectors and services, and tax cuts.
As inequality advanced and the possibilities of resistance and vindication of the workers weakened, the emphasis of the progressive discourses was centered, Rendueles writes, on "the values related to freedom, at least understood in its most individualistic sense."
They are not abstract questions.
"Inequality has got into our bones," writes Rendueles with his eloquence as an illustrated pamphlet.
"Societies with higher income differences have poorer health, shorter life expectancy, and higher rates of infant mortality, mental illness, obesity, and illegal drug use."
The mirage of equal opportunities and meritocracy conceals a caste system in which the children of the privileged are convinced that everything they own they have achieved through their own efforts and at the same time benefit from social and educational advantages of the world. all inaccessible for the children of workers or immigrants.
As shrewd scoundrel Cary Grant jovially puts it in
Suspicion
, "the secret to success is starting from the top."
César Rendueles is a professor of Sociology, but his book is free of all traces of university or ideological jargon.
The characteristic of a good pamphlet is the clarity of the writing, as well as the spirit of demolition.
One must speak and write clearly not to be understood, but to exercise the clarity of thought, which is inseparable from practical activism.
César Rendueles does not quote the supreme pamphleteer of the 20th century, Simone Weil, but there is an echo of her in her assertion that the true language of progressive transformation is not that of rights, but that of duties: “What we committed to emancipation are the shared responsibilities that we are willing to collectively assume ”.
In days of extreme civil desolation, this pamphlet has strengthened me.
Neither injustice nor abuse nor unreason are always inevitable.
And in the same way that systems of exploitation and cruelty are built, it is also humanly possible to organize "so that everyone can develop their best capacities in an enlightened, free and fraternal society."
Hopefully.