I feel like a total fool for not reading Cristina Fallarás’s A la puta calle earlier. After Rafael Chirbes’s On the Edge, it’s the strongest Spanish crisis book.
When the working classes were devastated by deindustrialization and moving jobs overseas, workers suffered in silence. Deaths of desperation, opioids, collapse of family structures – this was all an object of study for the intellectual classes but not a personal, visceral experience.
In 2008-12 in Spain, the intellectual classes were hit by the same kind of dispossession. But unlike manufacturing workers, they can speak. They have a voice, an audience, and a skill to express themselves instead of self-destructing in silence.
Spain is ahead of the US or Canada in terms of neoliberalization. We haven’t yet experienced what the Spaniards have. We need to read Fallarás’s book and memorize it if we don’t want the same to happen to us. It hasn’t been translated, unfortunately. Probably because it’s too dark and disturbing.
Clarissa's Blog 
I don’t see how Spain can be compared to the US. You could compare the EU to the US and Spain to an individual state, but in this case Spain is far behind since they don’t have the same kind of democratic representation and financial redistribution that US states enjoy while being part of a currency union.
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“Deaths of desperation, opioids, collapse of family structures – this was all an object of study for the intellectual classes but not a personal, visceral experience.”
Yeah, I would agree, but add alcoholism, which appears to be a bit of a bête noire of yours. I also agree that the social disaster has largely been ignored by “the intellectual classes”; when the truckers rose here in 2022 there was little support, the only two academicians that I know of were Jordan Peterson and David Solway. But there were millions of ordinary Canadians cheering them on, moms took their kids out of school to watch, even apolitical Hutterites, western Canada’s equivalent of the Amish.
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