Soon after meeting P in 2011, I read his first book. The overall mood was utopian, yet pragmatic. Fable-like methods were used to depict bleak truths while avoiding finger-pointing: Once upon a time, farmers cleared a forest; the water table fell, so they dug a well, and it fell some more, et cetera. Red herrings abounded. One memorable paragraph lamented the extinction of Steller’s sea cow, a sluggish 30-foot behemoth that could have provided truly socialist quantities of meat and milk.
What leftists usually call the AKP’s “neoliberalism” may be better described as a religious corporatism. Having sold state-owned industries to its friends and allies, the government now seizes the businesses of political undesirables, and plans to pool the profits of industry through a sovereign wealth fund whose investments will benefit favored companies. Facing a patrimonial state that blocks proletarian agency while rewarding loyalty with favors, workers are encouraged to seek the party’s good will while accepting that ultimately their lives are expendable: playthings of fate. Appeals to religion cement this resignation, spiced with a resentful dig at the old professional and bureaucratic class, i.e. “the secular elite.”
In the late ’90s, when I moved to the city of Monterrey, people made jokes about my origins: surely my father carried a gun, surely I was coarse and crude—I was from a border town. In turn I was certain that Monterrey, that industrial metropolis where I went to pursue my studies, was perfectly safe. Nothing would scare me away from there.
