By
Mark Featherstone
After spending the last few weeks watching austerity
matches and riots across Europe and reading about the situation in Greece which
has catapulted the far right group Golden Dawn into the political mainstream, I
came upon a story about Uruguay’s peasant president, Jose Mujica, that makes
startling reading for anybody who has grown cynical about the incestuous
relationship between political power and money in Britain, Europe, America,
China, and pretty much everywhere else. This cynicism is, of course, well
founded because the core principle of neo-liberalism, the political-economic
ideology introduced by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the late 1970s /
early 1980s, is that political freedom is inseparable from economic freedom. In
other words, in a functioning democracy, the individual’s main concern, and
main way of expressing themselves, should be economy. Elections are, thus,
elections concerned with economy, rather than any abstract principles about
social justice or such like. This is how it is today. In the west, at least, we
imagine that democracy and capitalism are inseparable.
In reality this does not quite work out because the
result of too much economic freedom or what we might call, following the late
Andrew Glyn, capitalism unleashed, is a profoundly undemocratic turn caused by
the need to manage increasing levels of inequality and unrest. This is the case
because capitalism produces inequality and, in the dark days of contemporary
capitalism, little sense that a belief in the modernising aspect of capitalist
economics will ever really deliver the good life for the majority. Instead,
what we have today is a majority who no longer believe in the pot of gold at
the end of the rainbow, and a minority who desperately and cynically cling to
the fantasy that capitalism can work for everybody because it has worked for
them and made them extremely rich off the backs of the labour of the poor and
those living in a state of endless precariousness where poverty is always
potentially just around the corner. In the face of this condition, democracy is
not really an option, as the Greek situation has shown. Instead, what is
required is a bureaucratic, authoritarian, brand of capitalism organised and
run by technocrats who have absolutely no sense of political theory or ethics,
but a good working knowledge of Machiavelli and the other classic theorists of
power and manipulation. Contemporary China
is the classic example of this shift, which involves the separation of
capitalism and democracy and the new marriage of capitalism and
authoritarianism, and this is why many commentators now speak about the Beijing, rather than Washington consensus.
How, then, does this relate to Mujica, president of Uruguay? The
reason Mujica is such an interesting, and important, figure is because he flies
in the face of the conventional, and cynical, wisdom which says that today,
under conditions of neoliberal globalisation, capitalism and democracy, money
and politics, are inseparable, and that no politician can see further than the
obsession with economy – profit and growth are essential to the good society.
According to this model, we cannot be happy unless we are labouring, making
money, spending money, and living the good capitalist life. Mujica shuns this
life. As the BBC report, he lives on a ramshackle farm on the outskirts of Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, and looks after cattle
with his wife. He donates most of his salary to charity, drives an old VW beetle,
and spends time with a three legged dog. Explaining his outlook on life, Mujica
reflects upon the 14 years he spent in prison because of his membership of the
communist guerrilla group, the Tupamaros National Liberation Movement. He
explains that he was forced to live a more basic life and that he grew to see
that one does not need to be a consumer. Indeed, he notes that this is
impossible for most of the world, because the American consumer society model
is completely unsustainable as a global socio-economic model. This, then, is a politician who is absolutely
not part of a global technocratic elite who cannot see beyond the idea of
growth and the expansion of capitalism. On the contrary, I think the Mujica is
the model of a new, more, humble politician, a man who stands outside of the
cynical western elites, and is willing to point to a new more sustainable,
human, future. He is absolutely not trapped by the old Thatcherite logic, There
is No Alternative!
In this respect, Mujica’s story reminds me of the
story of the Ancient Greek kynic Diogenes, who was famously called Diogenes the
Dog for his simple living habits, and because he set up house in a barrel.
According to the German writer Peter Sloterdijk, who has written a biography of
Diogenes, he lived in a barrel and was called a Dog because he behaved like an
animal. Does this mean, then, that Diogenes was an uncivilized beast? Perhaps,
but this is not really Sloterdijk’s point, nor the value of thinking about
Mujica, because the real beasts of contemporary society are us, the masses who
are wedded to the infernal cycle of production and consumption which means that
we never do anything, but simply reproduce the conditions of life. I cannot
live without my luxuries, so I must work all hours God sends in order to keep myself
in this situation. This is truly a natural condition, a metabolism, because we
have no time to do anything other than work and shop. By shunning this
life-style, what Diogenes offered, and Mujica offers, is ironically a vision of
a more human life, where we have time to think, and live, without feeling like
the end of the world is just around the next corner.
It is, of course, not easy to do this, and break away
from the capitalist metabolism. As Sloterdijk explains, the opposite of the
Ancient kynic, who basically walks away from the society that turns him or her
into a beast of burden, is the contemporary cynic, who knows how bad things are
but continues to behave in the same way anyway, simply because that’s how it
is, and what one does. We follow the plan, because there is no other plan. But
I think that now, under conditions of austerity riots and a general state of
disbelief about the value of capitalism in realising people’s hopes for the
future, we stand somewhere between Sloterdijk’s cynics and kynics. On the one
hand, people know things are very bad, that capitalism does not work, and so
on, but they are carrying on regardless, but on the other hand, they realise
something must change, that the world needs to be organised along more human, sustainable,
lines, simply because the alternative to doing nothing, and cynically carrying
on may be complete social, political, and ecological devastation. This is,
then, the question, today – cynically keep going, or leap into the unknown? Who
would have thought that the answer to this most pressing of questions would
reside with a contemporary Diogenes living on a ramshackle farm on the
outskirts of Montevideo who would, I’m sure, absolutely reject the view that he
has anything particularly learned to say about the problem of contemporary
global society?
The Santander grant will allow Andy to focus
on the particular and specific experience of graffiti in some selected Spanish
cities. Spain has a long history of wall art in the form of political murals
and sloganising dating back to the Civil War and this has been carried through
to the present day. 
This ‘reading of the city’
through the signs and symbols written and painted on its building and streets
reflects claims and demands for a more inclusive understanding of urban
experience that prioritises a more democratic and inclusive ‘right to the city’,
and one that emphasis an aesthetics of play, fun, humour, etc. instead of
merely acts of anti-social vandalism. 
