We believe this magazine must echo one of the most profound and exhaustive sociological studies conducted in this country. We refer to the Foessa 2025 Report, fully aware that another sociological study has also been published by the government of Spain.
In a way, for most of the people we live among including those of us who take the train, the subway, and the buses (if we live in a large city) the study serves to confirm, with statistics and data -which is very important- what forms part of our normal life. We live in the microeconomics of each day, in «our daily bread.» Without belittling the macro, it proves very difficult to identify in day-to-day life with the profit and loss accounts of banks and large corporations, especially when you go to the market and proteins have risen in price by more than 20% while your salary has gone up by 3.5% (that is, if you are covered by some Collective Agreement).
It is wrong to want to wrap reality in catastrophist discourses, and much worse if done with dark intentions, but it is not much better to offer it in grandiloquent, self-justifying, perfumed speeches that describe the life of nobody knows very well whom unless you belong to that tiny percentage of CEOs and major shareholders of large companies, government advisors, high-ranking officials, or those households or entities that, Foessa dixit, concentrate greater wealth every day.
The report brings us back down to earth. And it points out something that has been telling us for a long time, to us and to all the governments that have passed, whatever their colour: that the problems of exclusion and poverty are not conjunctural but structural, systemic. This means that none of the challenges identified can be addressed separately, as if each one had a solution from a single perspective (or Ministry).
We find it important to highlight some that are very familiar to us.
We find it important to highlight some that are very familiar to us. The housing problem has already become the primary factor of social inequality. Beyond a sociological datum, we cannot overlook that housing is a fundamental factor in the construction of a home—that is, in the possibility of living in and as a family. Another very worrying indicator is that of employment (and unemployment). Precarity affects nearly 50% of the active population. The unemployed person, contrary to all mythology, is not predominantly the «passive parasite» painted by some employers. The report demonstrates this in black and white. Everyone can imagine, because this is the life of more than half the Spanish population, what it means to live as a worker and poor.
The precariat lives in uncertainty, on the edge of a precipice, in the anxiety and exhaustion of not being able to make the slightest plan for tomorrow, on a playing field without clear rules to hold onto, not forgetting either the level of exploitation or slavery that this entails. Another fundamental indicator is access to the healthcare system of which we have boasted so much. We are told of evident deterioration. A healthcare service increasingly exclusive (and privatized) for the most vulnerable, with such profound problems as care, dependency, chronic illnesses, and mental health. And we could go on. Nevertheless, we cannot dispense with the corollary. Because if anything threatens and calls into question any economic and political model, it is the progressive process of decomposition and disarticulation of family and social life, with the consequent political disaffection («All idiots!», as the Greeks would say). We conclude this brief overview with one more datum that we find very worrying: young people currently constitute the most vulnerable group, more so than pensioners. Perhaps the crisis of generational replacement has something to do with this. But it would be best to read the report. The magazine offers a simple and accessible summary.
The crisis of traditional socialization processes (family, work, neighbourhood, parish) has been trivialized and ridiculed in the project that «scientific-technological progress» had prepared for us. The family, said those who worked from the people toward the projection of a more just world, is the basic cell of the social edifice. Since we have been left with no cells capable of forming tissues, and we continue to revel in isolated individualities that must flaunt competitiveness, autonomy, and independence in order to «empower» themselves, the result we are reaping presents anything but a healthy appearance. To a very great extent, the disorders of all kinds that we are suffering ultimately derive from a pathological solitarism, a breeding ground for an epidemic of mental and social ill-health.
The report not only identifies the challenges; it also insists on urging the joint involvement of institutions, organizations, and citizenry to address them. It underlines the need to create spaces for encounter and dialogue that allow for finding common ground to address political differences. But in its proposal, there is also an important novelty, since it puts forward a new paradigm of intervention that makes clear that neither social assistance nor state paternalism are adequate responses to the symptoms presented. Perhaps it is our mission to say that there will only be Political options with a capital P, that break out of the game of polarizing politicking, if processes of education and promotion of the people are initiated so that they may assume their protagonism. Without rebuilding the political community, it will be very difficult to reverse and reorient this escalation in which we find ourselves.
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