Across Europe, preparations are in train for a day of demonstrations in protest at unemployment. I wrote the blog reproduced below in response to a request from a group of trade unionists.
The extremely grave economic and financial crisis now rocking the world brings with it the acute sensation that we are now reaching the end of an era without being able to see what will be coming next.
What do we do: watch impotently while the vast economic and financial powers, obsessed with acquiring more and more money, more and more power, through every legal and illegal means at their disposal, clean or dirty, official or criminal, advance to crush us all?
Can we really leave finding a way out of the crisis in the hands of the experts? Aren’t they the very same bankers, world-dominating politicians, directors of the major multinationals, speculators, who are all hand-in-glove with the mass media, who, with the arrogance of people who consider themselves endowed with ultimate wisdom, told us to quiet down whenever—at any point in the past thirty years—we timidly raised our voices in protest, telling us we know nothing about it, and are therefore fair game for ridicule? It has been a period of absolute rule by the market, that conceitedly self-regulating and self-adjusting entity that describes itself as given over to the immutable destiny of preparing and defending forever and a day our personal and collective happiness, when reality busily gives it the lie with every passing hour.
So what about now, now that every passing day sees an increase in the number of unemployed? Are the offshore havens and secret accounts finally going to come to an end? Will the origins of outsized bank deposits, the clearly criminal financial swindles, obscure investments that, in many instances, are nothing better than a massive laundering of black market money, drug-trafficking and other rogue activities, now be relentlessly investigated? And what of the crisis itself, skillfully manipulated in the interests of directors and shareholders, and against the workers’ interests?
Who is going to resolve the problems of the unemployed, these thousands of victims of this so-called crisis, who through avarice, ill will or stupidity on the part of the powerful are going to remain unemployed, piteously subsisting from hand-to-mouth on miserable state benefits, while the fat executives and directors of businesses deliberately driven to failure flaunt how they live off the many millions guaranteed by their binding contracts?
What is happening is, in every sense, a crime against humanity and should be examined from that specific standpoint in public forums, and in our conscience. This is no exaggeration. Crimes against humanity are not restricted to genocides, ethnocides, killing fields, tortures, extrajudicial killings, deliberately precipitated famines, pollution on a massive scale, or humiliation used as a means of annihilating the victims’ identity. It is also a crime against humanity when the financial and economic powers, with the active or passive complicity of governments, coldly threaten to deprive millions of people across the world of what little remains to them, putting them at risk of homelessness and insolvency, when they have already lost their only and often scant source of income, by which I mean their jobs.
To say “No to Unemployment” is an ethical duty, a moral imperative. As is the denouncement of any tendency to blame the workers, who are not responsible for their situation, and should not be made to pay for the follies and the errors of the system.
To say “No to Unemployment” is to resist the gradual but relentless genocide by which the system condemns millions of individuals. We know that we can emerge from this crisis, we know that we are not asking for the moon. And we know we are all given a voice for a purpose. Confronted by the arrogance of the system, we can summon up our right to criticize and protest. They don’t know everything. They were wrong. They have cheated us. We won’t allow ourselves to become their victims.
Maria João Pires has not been fortunate in the land of her birth. A career lasting sixty years (and what an extraordinary career that has been) would require an act of national homage in order to come near to expressing our gratitude at being able to tread the same earth and breathe the same air as her. It would appear, however, that this is not to be, even though she has had many other demonstrations of admiration and respect on Portuguese soil. I heard her first at the house of some friends, when she was no more than a teenager who, with her delicate body, appeared scarcely to have emerged from childhood, and I was concerned as to whether her arms and hands would reach as far as the giant keyboard. The upright family piano was not perhaps perfectly tuned, but the first notes leapt limpidly from the keyboard, crystalline, offering the sensation they were more than the mere shock of the hammers on the strings, more as if they sprung directly from the fingers of the pianist herself. It was my baptism into the artistry of Maria João Pires. Thereafter, down the years that followed, and with her having become a distinguished world traveler, whenever she appeared to give recitals in Lisbon I was there, beseeching the celestial powers to protect her from the evil eye, or even from the smallest draft of air that might disturb her. Possibly thanks to my petitions and the accumulated credit I have acquired with the heavens, every concert and recital performed by Maria João Pires that I attended happily achieved its goal. This time, for reasons of distance and also of health, I cannot be present to bestow laurels and kiss those hands so filled with music and beauty and humanity. For all you have made me hear and feel, Maria João, I thank you.