May 1, 2021
In Return to the Prison Cell (Regreso a la jaula), Roger Bartra--one of the most lucid intellectuals of our time and perhaps our most original thinker--takes up the ideas of The Melancholy Prison Cell, (La jaula de la melancolía) which he wrote in 1987. (MV Translation Note: una jaula is literally any cage, but is used colloquially in Spanish like the English "clink" or "slammer" to mean a jail or prison cell).
The main thesis (of the new book is): López Obrador is not a leftist or a liberal - not even a nineteenth-century liberal or reincarnation of Benito Juárez, as is presumed. Instead, he is a right-wing populist, a reactionary, a conservative who has repeatedly deceived his followers and voters promising them something that he will never be willing to grant them.
In effect, López Obrador always disdained the left's own social agenda, which he has said time and again seems irrelevant to him. So, he has not deceived anyone by disdaining issues such as abortion or the legalization of drugs. But to that he has added:
**Roger Bartra Murià, born in 1942, is a Mexican sociologist and anthropologist, recognized as one of the most important contemporary social scientists of Latin America. Bartra, is well known for his work on Mexican identity in The Cage (or Prison Cell) of Melancholy and Identity and Metamorphosis in the Mexican Character, his social theory on The Imaginary Networks of Political Power and, recently, for his anthropo-clinical theory of the “exocerebro” (exo-brain), that argues that the brain is partly constructed by its “cultural prostheses”, external socio-cultural elements that organize it.
He earned his undergraduate degree in anthropology in Mexico and his doctorate in sociology at La Sorbonne. He is an Emeritus Research Professor at Mexico´s National Autonomous University, where he worked since 1971. In 1985, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the Birkbeck College of the University of London. (Wikipedia)
His work focuses on public economics, in particular income and wealth inequality. He is the author of the best-selling book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), which emphasizes his work on wealth concentrations and distribution over the past 250 years. The book argues that the rate of capital return in developed countries is persistently greater than the rate of economic growth, and that this will cause wealth inequality to continue to increase in the future. To address this problem, Piketty proposes redistribution through a progressive global tax on wealth. In 2019, his book Capital and Ideology was published, which focuses on income inequality in various societies in history. (Wikipedia)
The book is largely to be read more as a fierce diatribe than as the sociological and philosophical The Melancholy Prison Cell that preceded it. Perhaps this is because, as Bartra, himself, reveals in the first pages, the President took it upon himself to attack him personally from the halls of the Palace.
Even so, the analysis is crystal clear: none of the measures that AMLO (the acronym for Andrés Manuel López Obrador) has implemented since coming to power (on December 1, 2018, for a six-year term) coincide with the agenda of the left.
Even so, the analysis is crystal clear: none of the measures that AMLO (the acronym for Andrés Manuel López Obrador) has implemented since coming to power (on December 1, 2018, for a six-year term) coincide with the agenda of the left.
His only concern has been to combat corruption and support the underprivileged, but he has done so through actions that either flatly contradict any progressive idea or that in the long run will be counterproductive for the very sector that he aims to benefit.
For Bartra, the 4T - with its grandiose nomenclature - does not seek the transformation of the country. Rather, it seeks a return to the worst moments of Mexican statism and nationalism, even if that return is impossible today.
MV Note: AMLO has named his administration the Fourth Transformation of Mexico, succeeding the War for Independence [1810-20], the Period of Liberal Reform under President Benito Juárez [1857-72] and the Mexican Revolution [1910-17].
Thus, Bartra sees Morena (the Movement for National Regeneration, the party founded by López Obrador in 2014) as the fourth reincarnation of the PRI (Party of the Institutional Revolution, which was the sole party in control of the government at all levels from the 1930s to 2000), rather than as its alternative.
In effect, López Obrador always disdained the left's own social agenda, which he has said time and again seems irrelevant to him. So, he has not deceived anyone by disdaining issues such as abortion or the legalization of drugs. But to that he has added:
- The greatest militarization that the country has known, thus exacerbating what (President Felipe) Calderón (2006-12) had already done.
- MV Note: AMLO did this by creating a National Guard, composed mostly of soldiers and marines transferred from the Army and Navy, to replace the Federal Police in the War on the Drug Cartels and appear to remove the Army and Navy from the War, as, under the Mexican Constitution, they are prohibited from being involved in domestic security.
- He has also reduced the government's capacity for action in all other areas by thinning its personnel with an impulsive austerity.
- He has then concentrated resources on direct welfare assistance programs to the poor that inhibit economic growth and
- He has steadfastly refused to undertake a tax reform placing higher taxes on the richest that would result in a true redistribution of wealth.
Bartra dedicates a good part of the book to reviewing each stumbling block, mistake, and slip of the President,
- from the ridiculousness of the Moral Primer ("educational" document issued by the administration regarding "good" values and behavior of citizens)
- to the mishaps committed in the pandemic (denying its seriousness and refusing to take public health measures to reduce its spread),
- or from the cancellation of the Texcoco airport (new Mexico City International Airport, initiated by former President Enrique Peña Nieto and with construction underway)
- to the obstinacy of (building a new oil refinery at) Dos Bocas (an oil, industrial, and commercial port near oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico and located in Paraíso, in the state of Tabasco, López Obrador's home state.)
Where, perhaps, his vision is less balanced is when it comes to evaluating the role of the other parties in our ill-fated democracy. Bartra still seems to see a crucial role for the PAN (National Action Party, that of Presidents Calderón and Peña Nieto) or the PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution, a coalition of old leftist parties. AMLO was its candidate for president in 2006 and 2012.), and, to a lesser extent, the PRI, in the alliance that they have now created, as the only way to limit the excesses of the 4T.
If one accepts the parameters of formal democracy, there would be no other choice but to opt for these opponents of the ruling party. But it would be to vote for those who destroyed the country, the PAN - with the war against drugs - or the PRI - with its immense corruption. Such a choice is a forced and hardly defensible choice, rather than a real remedy to catastrophe.
The most passionate part of Return to the Prison Cell is found in its last pages, where Bartra makes a resounding commitment to social democracy and - unlike many of his allies, liberals who barely disguise their neoliberalism - for an authentic and powerful left-wing agenda that, with Piketty's** hand, reorganizes the distribution of wealth by means of a strong state in order to achieve precisely what López Obrador only promises but does not achieve: the end of the disgraceful inequality in which we live.
*Jorge Volpi, born in Mexico in 1968, is the author of the novels In Search of Klingsor, The End of Madness, It Will Not Be the Earth, The Devastated Garden, Dark Dark Forest, The Shadow Weaver and Memorial of Deception. And of essays like Contagious Lies, Bolívar's Insomnia and Reading the Mind. In 2009, he received the José Donoso Award from Chile for the whole of his work. His books have been translated into 25 languages. @jvolpi
The most passionate part of Return to the Prison Cell is found in its last pages, where Bartra makes a resounding commitment to social democracy and - unlike many of his allies, liberals who barely disguise their neoliberalism - for an authentic and powerful left-wing agenda that, with Piketty's** hand, reorganizes the distribution of wealth by means of a strong state in order to achieve precisely what López Obrador only promises but does not achieve: the end of the disgraceful inequality in which we live.
*Jorge Volpi, born in Mexico in 1968, is the author of the novels In Search of Klingsor, The End of Madness, It Will Not Be the Earth, The Devastated Garden, Dark Dark Forest, The Shadow Weaver and Memorial of Deception. And of essays like Contagious Lies, Bolívar's Insomnia and Reading the Mind. In 2009, he received the José Donoso Award from Chile for the whole of his work. His books have been translated into 25 languages. @jvolpi
**Roger Bartra Murià, born in 1942, is a Mexican sociologist and anthropologist, recognized as one of the most important contemporary social scientists of Latin America. Bartra, is well known for his work on Mexican identity in The Cage (or Prison Cell) of Melancholy and Identity and Metamorphosis in the Mexican Character, his social theory on The Imaginary Networks of Political Power and, recently, for his anthropo-clinical theory of the “exocerebro” (exo-brain), that argues that the brain is partly constructed by its “cultural prostheses”, external socio-cultural elements that organize it.
He earned his undergraduate degree in anthropology in Mexico and his doctorate in sociology at La Sorbonne. He is an Emeritus Research Professor at Mexico´s National Autonomous University, where he worked since 1971. In 1985, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the Birkbeck College of the University of London. (Wikipedia)
***Thomas Piketty is a French economist, Professor of Economics at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (French: École des hautes études en sciences sociales: EHESS), Associate Chair at the Paris School of Economics and Centennial Professor of Economics in the International Inequalities Institute at the London School of Economics.
His work focuses on public economics, in particular income and wealth inequality. He is the author of the best-selling book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), which emphasizes his work on wealth concentrations and distribution over the past 250 years. The book argues that the rate of capital return in developed countries is persistently greater than the rate of economic growth, and that this will cause wealth inequality to continue to increase in the future. To address this problem, Piketty proposes redistribution through a progressive global tax on wealth. In 2019, his book Capital and Ideology was published, which focuses on income inequality in various societies in history. (Wikipedia)
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