Isabel Díaz Ayuso, illustrious liberticide

The public bathrooms, actually private, at the Atocha station and so many other stations make me very angry. They relax, there is soft music and warm light, curved and shiny finishes. You could die in them. Above all, they are very clean, as station bathrooms usually are, as squalid as trenches. You pay a euro to cool off or do those secret things that we all do. A euro that not everyone can or wants to pay. A big piss for pissing. Neoliberal capitalism manages to make everything profitable, even the excretory system: cash from piss.

This privatization of bathrooms, which serves to enrich a company and segregate the most disadvantaged, is a public failure and perfectly illustrates the strategy to let it fall: the neglect and consequent devaluation of services (in all their polysemy) until it seems that the private works better for the mere fact of being private. It is hard to believe that the state machinery, which manages a national network of high-speed trains and tracks, was not capable of maintaining a clean toilet, perhaps due to the complex technology of the mop, even though it was a Spanish invention.

The same thing happens with education or healthcare when it is allowed to deteriorate until some private company comes to profit, braving its chest to do it better… when it is impossible to do it worse. Now Isabel Díaz Ayuso, president of the Community of Madrid, is trying to strangle the six public universities of Madrid, in a country in which private universities (and pseudo-universities) have metastasized in recent years until they are equal in number to the public one.

Curiously, Ayuso had been named an illustrious student of the Complutense last year, where she defended a “public university for everyone” that, at this rate, will soon be for no one. He argues that universities are the breeding ground for the left, like the conspiracy international of the extreme right, obsessed with cultural Marxism. Intelligence dies.

Public services were the backbone of the welfare state in the second half of the 20th century, a pact between classes, a conquest of the workers, which achieved the highest levels of equality and social well-being known (now they tell us that hunter-gatherers did). who lived well), without undermining economic growth. From the university came the middle class, the Spain that gets up early.

No one in their right mind can think that a country is better without public services, as historical and current evidence dictates, but it turns out that there are more and more people who seem not to be in their right mind. And more and more of those people are in governments, because other people, through the arts of mesmerism, vote for them en masse.

The attitude of Isabel Díaz Ayuso, which not only suffocates health care, but also education or museums (she prefers to finance bullfighting), is a liberticidal attitude, because public services offered the freedom to decide how to live a dignified life without suffering the threatened of precariousness, poverty, vital disaster. When it came to maintaining the privileges of concerted education, the right winged the argument of freedom without embarrassment. That is why it is striking that the champions of freedom in absolute terms, freedom in capital letters, the freedom of the canes, are the liberticides when we talk about so many concrete freedoms beyond economic ones.

Freedom in the abstract is a useless concept, typical of adolescent discussions. When you hear about freedom, ask for whom, for what, against what. Politics is the art of discerning and combining the freedoms of some and the freedoms of others, between, for example, the freedom of dismissal and freedom of association. However, the word is so beautiful that, like an empty shell, the right has appropriated it so that the fascist trolls (now “liberals”) can boast about it in X, the network of the dark reverse. But the left must reconquer the word freedom: the increase in salaries or the reduction of the working day, now under discussion, as well as the defense and expansion of the public sphere, are unequivocal struggles for greater freedom.