EL CATO – I read some time ago in El Mundo some interesting statements from the former mayor of Madrid, Manuela Carmena, who stated:
“The capitalist system generates inequality (…) But I have confidence in history. Since the vocation of equality of human beings has been made explicit in the French Revolution, things have been achieved.”
Does capitalism generate inequality? I trust that when Mrs. Carmena worked as a judge, she would analyze the data better. In recent decades, inequality in the world has been reduced, because hundreds of millions of people left extreme poverty behind, especially in Asia and Africa. This is recognized by leftist economists, such as Thomas Piketty, who have therefore changed the discourse and now concentrate on inequality within developed countries, as if proletarian internationalism was no longer a progressive flag. Capitalism and socialism
Speaking of slogans on the left, a hallmark of socialism is the appropriation of history. In fact, Karl Marx himself presumed to have discovered his laws, nothing less – one of the many things that I owe to my teacher Pedro Schwartz is that he advised me to read Karl Popper’s misery of historicism more than forty years ago.
When Manuela Carmena alludes to history I thought of that “fatal arrogance” on the left, and I looked at another of its characteristics, perhaps the most outstanding since the fall of the Berlin Wall. When the people on the left talk about capitalism now, they have stopped considering what their alternatives are. For good reasons, of course. Because if capitalism generates inequality, what would we say about anti-capitalism?
Finally, it was revealing the explanation that the egalitarian vocation of humanity was explained in the French Revolution, as if there had been no egalitarian ideas explained before. And as if communism, the most sinister and criminal achievement of socialism, was not a derivation of that Revolution, whose brutality is often ignored. Like that of real socialism.
The truth is that the admiration of the communists for revolutionary France was such that, for a long time, even after the International was composed, the Communist Party meetings concluded at the sound of La Marseillaise.
This article was originally published in Libertad Digital (Spain) on November 4, 2019.
