From the region of proximity

"Whoever believes that, whatever the appearance,
fascism is dead and buried, he will have it
to think twice before saying it"
Judith Skral, The Liberalism of Fear (1989)

Whenever there is talk of the far-right as a "new" phenomenon or it is presented to us as a radical, sudden novelty, we should be deeply skeptical. One only needs to consider that the first breakthrough of the first Le Pen of the early French FN dates back to the distant year of 1984 in the European Parliament. It obtained 11% of the votes, more than two million votes and ten parliamentary seats –today the far-right parties already occupy 25% of the Eurochamber and Marine Le Pen is ready to contest her fourth presidential election–. In 1992, when memory burns, shelters for refugees were already being set on fire in Rostock –and today the AfD is the leading force in Saxony-Anhalt, with 44% of the vote–. In the early nineties –1991, 1992, 1993– the fascism that did not wear a tie was still murdering Lucrecia Pérez in Madrid, Sonia Rescalvo in Barcelona and Guillem Agulló in Montanejos –and now the beatings of migrants wear a military uniform in Ceuta–. At the end of the 90s, the Italian MSI of Gianfranco Fini, already converted into the National Alliance, was entering the incipient governments of Berlusconi, and Fini himself, il fascista del Duemila, would end up being vice president and minister of Foreign Affairs. Today Meloni governs the Italian state with a plenipotentiary vocation and announces an authoritarian electoral reform in the name of governability.

And even more. It was the year 1999 when Haider and the FPÖ became the second political force in Austria. Reviewing the newspaper archives is chilling; it reveals the change in direction and certifies the evident anti-democratic acceleration. Back then, the EU exerted pressure and blocked Haider's nomination as chancellor, with warnings of sanctions included. Today, it has completely normalized them. The archive endures, detailing the prolegomena and cataloging the accumulated cartography of absences, losses, and disasters. As an X-ray of the sociopolitical, socioeconomic, and sociocultural timeline of how we have gradually lost everything until we reached this point. When what is done and what is not done always brings bills and fractures. Some quite expensive; others too painful. There has been a molecular transformation of European societies towards fascism, as lucidly dissected by Santiago Alba Rico. Recalling Gramsci, he reminds us that, on dry land, we would all refuse to be cannibals in a shipwreck on the high seas. Until the shipwreck happens, of course. Then there is a silent process of metamorphosis in which we move from the responsibility of 'us' –the collective ethical self-control– to the threat of 'them' –every defensive conspiracy that fuels so many verbal and real acts of violence against others–. We should never be cannibals, and yet we can end up being so. We would never devour anyone until it happens. It is when cruelty lands and the morality of evil returns –lynching migrants is correct and done in the name of the 'good'– until it penetrates people who have always considered themselves just and reasonable. Alba Rico reminds us, with urgency and in the midst of these times, that the opposite of a shipwreck –where one must choose binarily, without a continuous solution, between death and autophagy– will always be a port.

Retrospection, looking far into the rearview mirror, forces us to reflect on everything that has happened, with so many people adrift in search of safe paths for the present and hospitable ports for the future. To address which gaps, errors, and shortcomings have consolidated projects of retrotopia (a perfect past that never existed) in the European era of solastalgia: no longer recognizing the place where we were born, grew up, and lived together following the accelerated changes introduced by turbocapitalism. Now that the distance between the space where our lives are decided and the time in which we live them has become so abyssal. Sometimes I am exhausted that, in the name of the essential battle against the fascism that has been coming for a long time, there is an attempt to tiptoe around the enormous and crucial irresponsibility of European social democracy. Those who, as with the violin, took power with the left and played it with the right. Because monsters grow in deserts, and these have grown over the vast wastelands that the official left has left behind. Casting aside those common institutions that gave structure to social projects of transformation and emancipation, that wove solidarity networks based on mutual support, that built daily alternatives at the street level and at the level of life, and that projected a political project of free people among equals. In this black hole of yesterday is where the far-right has expanded and where the thousand faces of social fascisization and global technofascism have accelerated in a bad way.

This is nothing new either. 30 years ago, in classes at the UAB, they already made us attend to Offe and Wallerstein, criticizing that carelessness of the left in power that had persistent traits contributing to the mess: arrogance and pride, connivance –if not corruption– with the powers that be, negligence towards the dispossessed sectors, a vertical and non-delegative culture, bureaucratic management without any social transformation, and scarce sensitivity to emerging issues. Today, the bad joke and the terrible reality return in a paradigmatic aphorism: those who are now running out with all the fuss, sounding the alarm, to save democracy are the ones who for years have contributed badly to devaluing it in times of demolition. And one will go to vote, and before that will support the general strike, of course. Without naivety: knowing that the next day one will continue voting every day, knowing that the struggle is a long one and is much deeper than the electoral appointment. Striving, however, so that in the last eight days we have to hear everything they will do while they have had eight years to do it –a single simple example: repealing the gag law.

Worried at the same time by what they have (not) done in there and, above all, by what they have not done outside. Because it is on the outskirts, in the region of proximity, where in the meantime a cooperative imaginary has been deployed, where spaces of freedom and solidarity have been built and where communities, neighborhoods and regions have organized themselves. The most solvent opposition is once again the squares. And it is the much that we have left: the handles that have survived, the thousand ports that we still have available and the lifebuoys to get out of the shipwreck. And the fact is that there is no other way, I fear. Faced with the times of the rise of fascism, from where to rebuild the plot? From the only place really available. One learned from Howard Zinn that the most fertile and liberated space at our disposal is our daily lives and practices, in a sense as broad as it is concrete: the exact and useful space to not let a single thing pass, the democratic refuge from which to propose every general reconstruction and the most effective way to annul the fascism that can nest in each of us. The gorge has become so narrow that it depends on a vote, agreed, but above all on what we do and stop doing every day between each electoral contest. As things stand, I am already weighing voting blindly this time: choosing two ballots, tearing one up and not knowing what is on the other. Not even knowing what I have voted while knowing for sure that I have voted anti-fascism. We shall see.