Ricardo Forster: "The humanity has never been so desired …

"Mankind has never been as unequal as it was at that time," he says. the philosopher Ricardo ForsterWhat? just posted The greenhouse society (Akal / Inter Pares), a fundamental book for analyze the plot of contemporaneity and its strategies of domination; an intellectual journey exploring various legacies and traditions – from David Harvey to Immanuel Wallerstein, including Joseph Vogl, Wolfgang Streeck, Slavoj Zizek, Ernesto Laclau, Fredric Jameson, Mark Fischer, Boris Groys, Nicolás Casullo and Wendy Brown, among others – unravel the dangers of neoliberalism, the paradoxes of freedom, the factory of subjectivity, neo-fascism and the digitization of the world.

"If we look at the evolution of social capitalism to neoliberal capitalism, from the 1980s, inequalities have widened dramatically and have generated a growing process of precariousness that has increased poverty rates" says Forster, author of Criticism and suspicion. The chiaroscuro of modern culture, Messianism, nihilism and redemption, The death of the hero and The Kirchner anomaly, among others. "Neoliberalism disarms the welfare state and fails to contain the exponential fall of the middle classes and sectors that, as part of the popular world, have not been excluded from the system, but with precarious jobs and the exponential increase in prices become mediocre without the state having the instruments, resources or the purpose of containing them, "Forster explains in his interview with Page / 12. "Peronism prevented poverty from becoming natural and generated what we could call an egalitarian memory," warns the philosopher.

– Progressive movements in Latin America have applied rights extension policies, but favored sectors have subsequently voted for rights. How to avoid falling back into the same trap?

Neoliberalism is a conspiracy that generates common sense, social discipline and new forms of subjectivation. Until the late 1970s, upward social mobility was a virtue also related to increased consumption. This mobility was always associated with a project in which the state played a fundamental role in the fields of health, public education and access to housing, with very high unionization rates that implied a culture of work . Since the 1980s, there has been a shift in societies that has transformed the relationship of the individual to social and cultural belonging. Neoliberalism is the fragmentation of the public and the exacerbation of self-referentiality. This implies that the relationship with ascending social mobility no longer has the same characteristic as in Argentina in the 40s, 50s and 60s, where, due to the peculiarities of Peronism, the relationship with consumption was very mediated by an awareness of equality and belonging. Society accelerated its fragmentation and the state accelerated its decomposition. Faced with the monumental crisis of the 1990s, which literally upset society, the reaction of Kirchnerism was a recomposition of those who had been brutally excluded, with a problem that could not be solved: the problem of subjectivity. Unlike Cardenism in Mexico, from Peronism in Argentina to European Social Democracy until the 1970s, there was a direct link between the construction of the welfare state and social and egalitarian consciousness. This is what dismantles neoliberalism.

– Before citizenship was built now that consumers?

-Exactly. In Latin America, the first generation of populism has expanded citizenship in the form of civil and social rights. The second generation of populism, that of the 2000s, had to not only attack the brutal causes of neoliberalism in social life, but also extend civil citizenship in the form of gender policies, equal civil marriage, law on mental health and voting. 16 years old, and tried to bring together what progressivism in the 1990s had separated: civil rights and social rights. The neoliberalism can extend the civil rights – for example, the macrismo allowed the debate to the congress on the right of the abortion – but it tries to limit the social rights. The great problem of the democratic-popular governments of this generation was that they had succeeded in reconstructing part of the social world in the logic of upward social mobility, but with the immense impact of the consumerist imaginary of the society of the spectacle . The citizen consumer stops thinking about the other to look at life through the mirror that returns his own image. There is no consumption altruism, solidarity; there is an individual enjoyment, a desire to continue to enjoy, and also the introduction of guilt: once this enjoyment that seemed an indefinite end, the system responds that you are guilty of having benefited too much . Popular governments are obliged to improve the living conditions of those who have less, especially when they inherit – as will happen with the government of Alberto Fernández – a huge social destruction. -economic.

-In the book you refer to the neologism equal freedom. Rights are more interested in freedom than in equality, is not it?

-Yes, but it's a false freedom. In societies that were increasingly moving towards neoliberal models, the idea of ​​freedom was increasingly associated with a legacy – freedom of ownership – but at the cost of destroying the forms that previous capitalism had achieved in terms of d & # 39; equality. One of the hallmarks of neoliberalism is that it dramatically punishes equality. Mankind has never been as unequal as it was at that time. The challenge of an emancipatory project is to know how to develop equality by developing freedom. In the case of the second-generation governments of Latin American populism, the increase of civil rights as well as social rights seems to me to work. But the problem is that at one point, equality of equality is disengaged when consumer demands increase rapidly and when different types of restrictions are applied to distribution projects. The most troubling is what some have called "the factory of subjectivation", ie the discussion that Jorge Alemán has set when it raises the difference between subjectivity and subject. Capitalism in its neoliberal form could not penetrate the heart of the subject, which is the heart of language, but it managed to penetrate deep into forms of subjectivation. Capitalism is a logic of the infinite that left nothing out. but we are living a very deep crisis of this logic of the unlimited. At all stages of development, capitalism has managed to appropriate the inputs of its adversaries. he made that what was critical became for him a contribution of his own development. The clearest example of the second post-war period is the construction of the welfare state, the result of negotiations with socialists, social democrats and the Keynesian tradition of a role that traditional liberalism not recognized by the state; a capitalism in which there existed a kind of balance or distribution link, quite favorable for the sectors of labor.

-What happens when neoliberal capitalism does not have any more opponents?

Neoliberal capitalism becomes autophagous and begins to devour itself; It weakens social life, makes work more flexible, increases inequality and poverty. Fredric Jameson said that it was easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Neoliberalism is the most exacerbated point of an exhausted civilization project, even though it still has a huge capacity for seduction and production of mainstream technologies. The world of politics can debate the logic of domination, but the big problem in Argentina is that every time the right fails to govern, society leans a little more to the right. The frustration and crisis generated by macrismo do not imply the extension of a society that discovers the values ​​of emancipation and equality, but are the subject of a blackmail of a possibility, of a kind emergency situation: "that's what can be done", "left us an impossible situation. "Today, in the ranks of the opposition, Kirchnerism and Peronism, there is a certain return to the possibility, because macroism leaves a colossal debt, destroyed the industry, harmed society and the world. Another behind the speech, there is still the virus of a society right, which seems to me to be the great challenge of the government of Alberto Fernández Alberto has a progressive look at life cultural and social and, economically, it evolves between moderation, negotiation, democratic liberalism and the refoundation of a state functioning at least as a welfare state.

-Alberto Fernández made it clear that he was planning to pay the debt inherited from macrismo. If he had suggested otherwise, his electoral chances might have been darker, is not it?

-It is probable that Alberto moderated the offer and the tone with which he addressed society to build this very broad front, which managed to shelter virtually all sectors of Peronism. I do not think it is bad that politics can also be seen as an exercise in dialogue. What is happening is that another fundamental element of the political universe is knowing how to deal with conflict. The Argentine society has not been able to break the tension that has generated a conflict over the distribution of income, a conflict that has generated the first Peronism, which in turn has affected the deepest awareness of the popular sectors. . That's what they mean by macroism when they talk about seventy years of the negative life of Argentina. If we are not able to think of a society beyond capitalism, destiny will be more and more rude. But my immediate horizon is now the joy of the night of October 27th. Then we will see …