With a click on a mobile phone or tablet, pieces of Mallorca or Catalonia pass from the hands of a South African investment fund to another with its headquarters in Boston. Or in Liverpool, or in Frankfurt, or in Singapore. Real estate speculation has gone global, and land, whether still rural or already housing developments, complete with a shopping center and amusement park, is bought and sold without ever having set foot there. Or with mansions with helipads inhabited by mega-millionaires, also from the most unlikely places in the world, who one day grow tired of their corner of the Mediterranean and decide to put it up for sale on the international luxury mansion market. Other investment funds do send personnel to investigate the land, and thus identify properties belonging to residents, or neighborhoods, which they buy up entirely to evict the residents and put them back on the market at a price five or six times their value. These forms of speculation are directly linked to mass tourism, a concept that perfectly illustrates what we are talking about when we talk about turbocapitalism: a so-called "traditional" economic activity injected with the urgency of an almost completely deregulated market, which does not consider the consequences of the vines.It's the market, my friend.", he said. But that's not exactly it: it's the hyperbole of the market, it's the market with myxomatosis that was born from the toxic ashes of the 2008 crisis, that of the mortgage scams endorsed by the supposedly regulatory bodies. A healthier capitalism didn't emerge from that: if anything, there's more to healthier capitalism, if anything, there's more to healthier capitalism; led by none other than Sarkozy. The pandemic crisis in 2020, and then the war in Ukraine, and now the genocide in Gaza and the West's rearmament policy, must be read in the yellowish light of this cynicism without further exception.
These are ideas we can keep in mind when we hold demonstrations against touristification, like the ones this past weekend. If the aggression is globalized, it makes sense that the protest should at least be united, and so thousands of citizens from Barcelona, Valencia, Palma (the capitals of the Catalan Countries), Ibiza, San Sebastián, Córdoba, and Naples have come out to protest against mass tourism and its pernicious social effects. Southern Europe against speculation. Cynicism invites us to diminish it: in total, more or fewer people on the streets than those gathered at one of the many music festivals taking place everywhere these weeks? We need to leave behind the rhetorical vice of systematic irony, of the autopilot joke, which is reactionary. Taking to the streets in times of global speculation has the enormous value of reminding us (and reminding them) that we are alive as a society. And that the common good, no matter how much they deny it, will continue to exist. And that it is necessary to protect it.
