Cristina Monge wins the Paidós Prize with an essay in opposition to the abolition of the long run: “There is a crisis of political imagination” | Culture | EUROtoday

Cristina Monge is the winner of the II Paidós Essay Prize for the work Against discontent. For an alliance to construct fascinating futures. The results of the deliberation was introduced this Wednesday on the Foto Colectania Foundation, in Barcelona, ​​and the ebook will probably be revealed in Paidós on February 25. Monge, political scientist and sociologist, is a professor on the Complutense University of Madrid, a columnist for EL PAÍS and a collaborator with Cadena SER. She can also be president of the Más Democracia affiliation. 249 works had been submitted for the award and it’s endowed with 35,000 euros.

The ebook, as its title signifies, is a name in opposition to discontent, a discontent that, though it already existed earlier than the 2008 disaster, on that date of monetary collapse (the start for a lot of of this policrisis) suffered a turning level, an awesome development that has led us to this sense of an abolished future and the rise of totalitarianism within the 4 corners of the planet, with Donald Trump, unleashed, on the head. “We know the causes of discontent quite well,” stated the winner in dialog with journalist Begoña Gómez Urzaiz. “I did my doctoral thesis on the 15M movement, which has been going on for 15 years, and many of the discomforts were already visible, but they cannot be resolved. So I think it is time to turn the page of discouragement and end this crisis of political imagination.”

Monge offers particular significance to the disaster of belief (not too long ago the thinker Victoria Camps delved into it in The society of mistrustrevealed by Arpa): “The crisis of democracy is a crisis of trust: we do not trust institutions, nor mediation, nor ourselves as a society.” As he develops within the ebook, one should belief that there’s another, past Margaret Thatcher’s previous slogan, virtually a founding stone of this period: ‘There is not any various’ (TINA, for its acronym in English, what Mark Fisher referred to as capitalist realism).

For her, there may be another, there at all times is, and that various should embrace environmental concern: “The environmental crisis is not that it destroys the planet, it is that it destroys people,” she stated, “because beyond the physical, it erodes coexistence and generates conflicts, it serves as a breeding ground for the rise of authoritarianism.” And, after all, the choice that the Iron Lady denied should embrace feminism: “Feminism is a win-win. The foundations of power are being shaken, some may think that we are going to lose power because they are going to take it, but in the long term a feminist, more egalitarian society is better for everyone: for us and them, for those who are here and those who will come.”

Monge also supports the values ​​of freedom (well understood, beyond “going out for a few drinks”), equality and solidarity. Values ​​which might be tough to vindicate, as a result of they’re these which have been upheld since that Enlightenment that the unconventional proper now appears decided to reverse. How to do it? “Rethinking them,” Monge responds, “we should rethink the concept of ​​progress, for instance, relating GDP not solely to financial development, however to individuals’s well-being. Or convincing ourselves that guidelines could be set for big know-how firms. And, above all, recognizing the place these concepts have failed.”

Although the new autocrats, like Donald Trump, seem to act impulsively, radically, without any respect for established institutions (while the networks are filled with mocking memes about the temperate reports, analyzes and statements of the European Union, of traditional politics), Monge is convinced of the usefulness of politics to solve common problems. “The factor that horrifies us about Trumpism is that it’s an train in anti-politics. So, though it’s a very counter-current thought in the present day, I’m a defender of political events. And given the state of affairs, I believe it is a crucial sufficient second to additionally contain tradition, thought, civil society… We aren’t conscious of the power of civil society within the West.”

Monge also calls to forget the confrontations that are often promoted between those who come from outside and those who are here (many times caused by aporophobia, the hatred of the poor, coined by the philosopher Adela Cortina, among the public) or between members of different generations: “The thing is not about young people against pensioners,” said the winner, who also mentioned her son Jorge, 20 years old, also among the public, as an example of that 75% of young people who do not fall into extreme right-wing tendencies: “We have to realize that, although the most striking thing is the growth of authoritarianism in that group, the majority of young people have another commitment.” He gives as an example those who camped at universities and organized protests against the genocide in Palestine.

The jury was made up of Adela Cortina, Adolfo García Ortega, Gabriel Rolón, Elisabet Navarro and the current Cervantes winner Gonzalo Celorio. The prize was awarded for the primary time final 12 months, coinciding with the writer’s eightieth anniversary: ​​the winner was the Argentine thinker Tamara Tenenbaum with the work One million personal roomsbased mostly on the well-known A room of your personal the Virginia Wool.