Between the end of the Civil War and 1962, Santander Venetian quarter, a settlement that will fascinate Erwin Schrödinger from the moment it exists and at the same time will never exist. in the words of the author Alberto Santamaria“it was a cliff where poor families built dangerous wooden houses that were never officially recognized”.
The paradox is even greater, given that Barrio Venecia must have pre-existed in order to finally exist. “This building candina factory and homes for workers that make it possible to ‘legalize’ that area. The new neighborhood was built around the factory and on the demolition of the old wooden houses. All of this is fueled by the massive levels of corruption within the city’s Francoist elite,” says Santamaría.
Both this first officially non-existent settlement and the one that was eventually legalized around the Candina company were submerged every time the wave rose in the Bay of Biscay. As a result, Barrio Venecia was not the real name of the place, but a popular name that contained both humor and bitterness and a certain sense of defeat because “in the background, capitalism was working to engulf the neighborhood,” notes Santamaría.
socialist family
Alberto Santamaría spent his childhood and part of his youth in Barrio Venecia, built by Barrio Venecia. candina, a company dedicated to producing oil derivatives. Its industrial setting, junkyards and urban desolation have more or less inspired all the work of this philosopher, poet and prose writer. Especially his last novel. Venice quarterpart of National divisionsA collection of the Lengua de Trapo editorial examining different events or facts in Spanish history from the transitional period to the present day.
“I have no book in which these questions and images are not in one way or another, but I have decided to give a certain order to all this history that has been strewn around until a few years ago. Another rhythm, or even position it historically. The starting point or the reason it was written is the moment I realized that I was older than my father from that day on. That’s when I started writing this book. I discovered that I was putting myself in the story, it’s mine”.
While Barrio Venecia is a novel in which the autobiography of its author has great weight, “anything that memory-based narration can be at least autobiographical”The book is also a story about the closure of the Candina factory and the disintegration of the industrial fabric of the country carried out by different socialist governments. Some of the decisions that have led to unemployment and insecurity for a large part of the working class of the place, who, despite their fight to defend their job, was completely defeated.
“Every time this topic comes up, I come back to those words. Rosa Luxembourg, said something like this, and I recite: “The mistakes made by the working class in its attempt to change are of incomparably greater value than the infallibility of the best central committees.” In my case, I tried to describe a defeat but also an open door because we mustn’t stop remembering that in defeat and error there is always progress,” explains Santamaria, whose parents have gone through and suffered, remaining loyal socialist voters for years.
“There was a feeling of belonging to the PSOE in my home, as if we were part of a socialist family. My grandfather was the general secretary of the PSOE in Torrelavega and a position at UGT. I accompanied him to many rallies as a child and saw the tendency to see each other as a community, but That slowly faded. My mom had a really bad time and I was convinced she had come to cry the day she stopped voting for the PSOE a few years ago. She was disgusted with his bullshit and collusion with the ruling class. However, my mom is more to the left now than forty years ago, and I think her like, Many of his generation discovered too late the great deception of Spanish socialism.its anesthetic nature”, admits Santamaria, Venice quarter in the next interview.
One of the characters in the novel confirms: “The problem is that it was always the working class that shaped the left. […] but now it’s the opposite: the crazy, drunk and confused left trying to shape the working class.” Has there been a gap between the working class and its representatives?
I will not forget this sentence. I heard it when I was very young and it had a huge impact on me. We have great books and Marxological analyzes on the concept of class, but the key today is in the concept of struggle. We have to assume that the concept of struggle must expand and take different forms. Lukács said History and class consciousness that the working class has no ideal to achieve, but must instead create its own forms of struggle and goals based on today’s historical transformations. For this reason, a radical disinterest was fostered as well as a disconnect between class and representation. Today we are told to “improve people’s lives” as a revolutionary predicate, as if “the people” are a shapeless ghost, when in reality it is people who must take the reins to improve their lives.
Something terrible was created or promoted: street fright. In general, the fear of the other. Therefore, the desire for symbiosis is malicious and that’s when Securitas Direct tells you that there are invaders everywhere. Capitalism feeds on this.”
Another reflection in the book states that the children of the neighborhood spend the day on the street, “with almost no observation from the adults, but all the families know that the children are taken care of, they are not taken care of by anyone”. especially, but for everyone.” Was part of the defeat of the working class due to the disintegration of networks of intimacy and mutual support?
This change is interesting and symptomatic. The concept of community has changed. Now the community is basically structured around consumerism. Leisure is a time of consumption, and at the same time something terrible has been created or encouraged: street fright. In general, the fear of the other. So every move is suspicious, every shared will to live with malicious intent, and that’s when Securitas Direct tells you that there are invaders everywhere, etc. Capitalism feeds on this: it must foster the breaking of anti-competitive community bonds in order to foreground the individualistic and competitive value it smugly and slyly calls “freedom.”
What role do labor relations play in this concept of capitalist freedom?
Another of the main themes of the novel, if not strictly the main theme, is the rejection of work, a society that focuses on work as self-exploitation and is overwhelmed by work. I have always hated working because how can working make us free and independent when we are not free or independent precisely because we work? But this is how a society completely engulfed by capitalism understands freedom and independence, and so we have such an absurd thing as a “culture of effort”. It is important to rethink this idea of work, and this refusal, this hatred, and this countermeasure against all talk of work is a lesson I learned from growing up in a working-class neighborhood.
The landscape, the place, the rust-growing trees, the stacked wheels, the abandoned metal barrels…
Despite or perhaps because of having grown up in a working-class environment, ‘Barrio Venecia’ does not offer a romantic vision of that setting, quite the contrary.
I have always had a love-hate relationship with my neighborhood and I tried to reflect this in the book without idealizing anything. The landscape, the place, the rust-growing trees, the stacked wheels, the abandoned metal barrels rather than my neighborhood as a kid, the political character or context of the workers’ conflict… That was what was really fascinating to me, and by the way, labor or work that I could never adapt to, despite my love and interest. This is what sparked my interest in science fiction rather than social literature.
In fact, the narrator does everything possible to get out of the neighborhood, taking advantage of public education, one of the few avenues of social advancement for the working class, which is curiously now being dismantled.
I am a child of the public sector and a generation where working-class children go to university with a certain normality, but in principle I never thought of going to university because it was neither among my priorities nor in my family’s priorities. . . I was actually a pretty lousy student in elementary and high school, but I suddenly realized that this was the best escape. I got a scholarship and after my father died, my mother had a few jobs, which allowed me to study with government support. Therefore, we need to prevent public sabotage by those who, in theory, should defend it, because the public education system will not be perfect, but without it everything will be much worse.
How can it be understood that working-class children, who managed to leave the neighborhood thanks to the welfare state, support the political options that prevent this social rise to future generations with their suggestions?
I know people who confuse leaving the neighborhood with contempt for everything about the working class, and understand that the best way is to see oneself under the label of success. These people really embarrass me or don’t care. At the same time, we cannot idealize the working class. In my neighborhood there were not only enormous balls with those in charge, but also people with very few resources who were clearly frontlines. No inside/out, no clear positions. Only someone with weak eyes or a desire to deceive himself idealizes the working class in this sense. The economic model knows how the market and the form of consumption will shape desires and needs that only that market can satisfy. This creates a situation in which the working class does not perceive itself as a reflection of these desires and needs. This largely eliminates the possibility of conflict and change.
The history of Spain is often told in terms of centralism. Are there any distorted or hidden facts like in Barrio Venecia?
The environment has been removed from common memory and this is something that is starting to be fixed, but very, very slowly. I have always argued that if radical change is possible in Spain one day, it will not come from Madrid or Barcelona, not even from the big cities. Political transformation of the state is not possible without the environment. Without the circumference of the circumference, I mean.