I’m reading History of the Spanish Far Right by Gerardo Muñoz Lorente, and it’s fascinating how, until the moment of Franco’s death, there was an enormous number of groups, organizations, and associations of right-wing and conservative nature in Spain. And then they all become completely irrelevant in a blink of an eye. (Neo)liberalism won easily and massively.
The left in its traditional sense also got destroyed at that very moment. Neoliberalism wipes out both the traditional left and the traditional right. Its grand bargain is the complete removal of traditional morality in exchange for an acceptance of the neoliberal economic policy. You get to have tons of consequence-free sex with strangers, and nobody cares. In return, you gradually move towards the gig economy, an exploding precariat, and exclusion from many forms of private property.
In Spain, this is said completely openly. How dare you complain about the existing economy? What are you, against sexual freedoms? The best-selling Spanish novelist Almudena Grandes wrote a string of 800-page novels making exactly this point.
The pre-neoliberal stage of capitalism needed stable, sedentary populations that were tied to their communities. Neoliberalism needs the exact opposite.
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