I have been twenty-four hours at home without electricity. It has been an intense and rewarding experience. I recommend everyone to spend a few hours at home without electricity, they would realize how dependent modern life is on electrical energy distributed through sockets scattered throughout the rooms of the house. Living without electricity is like traveling, but not in space, but in time. These last few hours I’ve had to recover chrematistic skills from earlier times, and this has given me a greater level of independence than the appliances in my house allow me. I even read on paper, not on screen.
Not only have I obtained analog logistic resources for home management, but I have also saved twenty-four hours of electricity consumption. In Spain, this is today, a real feat. Electricity prices have been out of control for more than two years, and there is still no consensus on how the price of electricity should be calculated, nor what is the correct formula to align the price of electricity production based on renewable or non-renewable energy. But just in case you are charged the higher production cost. The problems in the electricity market are not new, for many years the Spanish population has seen how the big energy companies have abused their power by charging users undue fees. No government has decided to enforce consumer rights, because the links between these companies and political power are strong and close, often blurring the line between a public institution and a private company.
Putin is the scapegoat
The systematic defenselessness of the Spanish consumer before the public and private organizations is structural. The best way not to suffer abuse was not to receive any service at all from large companies. However, the war in Ukraine has left Spanish politicians with a scapegoat to blame. All structural abuses of power in Spain are now the responsibility of Vladimir Putin.
And the strategy is working. Few people remember when the parties currently in power charged against the government of M. Rajoy because the rise in the price of electricity created “energy poverty“. There were special reports on all the TV stations about how the corruption of the right wing was to blame for the helplessness of the population. Now, all those leaders of the new left (plus the PSOE) say that inflation and the energy crisis are the fault of the situation in Ukraine as if there was no past time to find the roots of the problem.
The synchronization between all the left-wing parties with parliamentary representation in Spain with the US/NATO discourse is curious. The Spanish left has abandoned all the international causes that linked it with other leftist groups abroad; they no longer defend Palestine, nor the Sahara, from Venezuela they only want the economic benefits they get from giving talks and council. And of course, Russia is guilty! as Ramón Serrano Suñer would say decades ago when he sent the Blue Division to fight against Russia.
As I write these lines, I remember how well I have been at home, living analogically, reading on paper about actors in the past who linked their actions with their ideas.
Spanish left run after the globalist
What the Spanish left does now is going to Washington, and all countries with an undefined left focused on promoting the globalist agenda on behalf of shadow financial powers. They have exchanged class struggle for gender struggle, social welfare for private welfare, and the fight against energy poverty for the fight to promote it. And they have exchanged the majority will of the people for the controlled will of minority collectives, artificially created groups that are a perfect tool to subjugate the majority. There is no political party in Europe dismissing these groups’ (supposed) welfare in their programs.
This is what Spain has been reduced to; the imposition of minority rights over the majority, and the primacy of foreign strategic interests over national ones. Where did critical thinking and respect for the population go? They are already things of the past, it does not matter to finance a war conflict where thousands of people die, nor does it matter that this conflict is counterproductive for the interest of the country. The underlying reason for political decisions is hidden in a web of lies and spurious interests.
Now that the world crisis is inevitable, the revolutionary parties become reactionary, because their goal was not social revolution, but the deconstruction of an obsolete order for their goals. And the new left politicians do it pretty well from their new luxury homes in wealthy neighborhoods ruled by the right wing.
For twenty-four hours I have been living in analog, feeling responsible for and benefiting from the verifiable reality in front of me, detached from this orchestrated machinery of social destruction that is European politics, for twenty-four hours I have been better connected with reality than now online. I have been able to see who is coming from where and heading where. The current geopolitical situation has served to reconfigure teams, and the Spanish left has returned to the house that financed it and saw it grow. It has returned, meekly, to the fold. Right now in Spain, members of the Ukrainian army are being trained in military facilities. Soldiers who, regardless of their extreme ideology, will use this training to make the problems of the Spanish population more incisive. The four hundred military personnel to be trained in Toledo are only a part of the donations that the Spanish government, in a coalition, makes to Ukraine. The geopolitical situation has boosted the Defense Ministry’s spending, but this does not seem to be a problem for the once anti-militarist, pacifist, environmentalist, and feminist political forces. Spain is, across the political spectrum, allied with the EU and the US.
The obedience to the Atlantic
The term ally is very kind since it is a clear situation of subordination according to realpolitik. That Spain has been making decisions inappropriate to its national interest and beneficial to the interests of other nations is obvious. Spain has made its subordination to the Atlantic axis a modus vivendi. It makes no rational sense in national terms, but the political elite is very well paid for subjecting the future of the Spanish population to the interests of its “allies”. It has taken many months and many scandals for voices to be raised within Europe against the submission to the US, and against the benefits that the American country obtains from the dramatic situation in Ukraine. Europe is the actor that is losing the most in this conflict. Christine Lagarde, head of the European Central Bank affirms that inflation has not reached its peak, and the European decision to limit the price of fuel that is bought from Russia has been senseless; now it is Russia who announces that it will stop selling fuel to Europe this year since it will not sell below the market price. In short, prices will continue to rise and supply will continue to shrink.
In an electrified world one click away from the Middle Ages
Spain is amid a national, continental, and global crisis. The country’s politicians are limited to traveling from one place to another to receive instructions, the country lacks sovereignty, therefore, an independent international presence. We are approaching a world of blocs in which only large conglomerates of public and private alliances will be present, and nation-states will be part of one of these conglomerates. That is why political parties are already making decisions for a new reality, for a new scenario.
If paying double the gasoline price and forty percent more for electricity at home does not cause energy poverty now, it means that limiting the movements of the population and its energy consumption is a goal. Few families can cope with the high level of decapitalization caused by inflation, many families have to choose between taking the car to go to work or to go to the market, they have to choose strategically what their expenses will be, and they cannot cope with unforeseen expenses. The population is monetarily and energetically dependent, and the political decisions that are taken are focused on making this dependence total and irreversible.
Within two hours of being without electricity, my house had become inoperative. Everything that makes it run is electrical, nothing was of any use. The dependence on electricity in my home was total. And Putin had nothing to do with it. The worst part was that there was not a fault in the domestic electrical system but in the company’s distribution system. After a long day of reinventing my over day life, everything was solved online, by telephone; the operator only had to click a button on his computer to restore the electricity. In an electrified world, what happened in my house can happen in a neighborhood, a town, a city, or a country. As with Kanye West, everything can be disconnected with a click of a button. In an electrified world, we will live one click away from the Middle Ages, and Putin has nothing to do with it.
