How to break, how to end up things decently, actually without breaking them? And why is breaking the word that we use when precisely breaking is not what we want to do? Can we split, can we separe from those who once we loved… without breaking everything? Is it possible to transform, to improve, to change! even to evolve, without having to actually break?
I did start writing thinking about relations, but the question transcends them. If you want, this is the fundamental split (sorry) between older marxists and Social Democrats, between revolutionaries and reformists. Is it possible to improve whatever societies we have without breaking them? The answer is obvious for me, it is not only possible, but it is actually the only way. But is it truly an improvement what we do when, for example, increased access to public education? (or created public education, for what matters) Or have we perpetuated the problems and vices that predate the reform and the change? Of course it is an improvement that more people today have access to knowledge than in any other time in history was even thinkable. But don’t we live still in societies that are profoundly inequal, perhaps as inequal as they were couple of centuries ago? Don’t we know that the kid born in a migrant ghetto in any of our big cities is extremely unlikely to achieve whatever the kid born in the center of the same city, in a well-off family that has been living in the same house for few generations will achieve? Is the fact that we have improved the welfare of all of us through -long term and painfully achieved- political and societal reforms enough? Or should we have revolve when Marx call us to do so? Should have we traced a line in the sand then and started again, afresh?
The clearer I formulate the option, the more ridiculous it sounds. We know that people is people and doesn’t change because their leaders change. We have seen, too many times, that revolutions shake societies so that the dominant group is exchanged by another dominant group. If we are unlucky enough, like Venezuelans were from twenty years ago to today, revolutions are going to make things unbelievable worse. We lefties talked, for quite some years, about the achievements of the Cuban revolution, the advances in literacy and health care. But since also quite a while ago we have been aware of the terrible costs that they carried. And it is not like the results have endure. You have to be fairly stupid to believe that today the life standards of Habana are higher than the ones of Miami. So it is quite clear for me, and apparently for the mayority of thinking entities in this planet, that revolutions bring us nowhere better, in the short or the long term.
And yet, if we go thinking into relations again, pretty much all of us think precisely the opposite. How many relations have each of us ended? How many times have we told ourselves that we will be starting with a clean slate? How come that we are so capable of fooling ourselves? The break ups that we have staged, at best, have come back to haunt us, to cry for resolution. At worse they are ongoing source of frustration and pain. Have we not heard, so many times, that strange pidgin-mix of buddhism and western common sense “karma is a bitch”?
So, as you perhaps have read here, I am ending my long relation with the green party. I am all in for a break. I can’t see chances for the needed reforms. But I neither believe in revolutions. Whatever I do from now on will not be from a blank slate, from zero. So… how to split decently? How to evolve and not to revolve? how to be constructive, leave behind the pain, the frustrations and also, all those great moments, the successes, the new friends and the comrades that I have gained along the way?
I always thought that doing politics is an act of love, and now that I am breaking from it, it is but more obvious.