After two successful and fascinating albums, Pink Floyd released ‘Animals’ in 1977, which became famous for its coverage of the pig flying over chimneys. This is Pink Floyd’s most political album, designed by Roger Waters as an anti-capitalist parable. Inspired by George Orwell and his ‘Animal Farm’, this album portrays the ultra-conservative ruling class as fattening exploitative pigs; the emerging middle class without morals as guard dogs of order and ordinary people as tame and exploited sheep.
With this scheme Marxist, Roger Waters has an artistic response to the atmosphere of social and political upheaval that the West lived after the oil crisis and the increase in unemployment and youth unrest (punk forward) what would end expelled leftists from power. The neoliberal law soon after he would come to rule with Thatcher and Reagan with an intense scouring campaign and culture war against taxes, unions and the public. It meant the end of industrial capitalism and full employment that smeared a powerful social elevator on the ‘Keynesian’ capital-union treaty, which was in effect throughout. 30 golden years of the Welfare State and reducing historical inequalities like never before.
Since then, social and income inequality has skyrocketed, especially from globalization and the rise of the digital world and amazing technology. In fact, the social elevator started blocking between 2000 and 2014, falling 14 points among 30-year-olds in the United States, according to Chetty and Grusky. The dramatic thing is this that social elevator decline was the largest in the declining industrial midwest (the ‘Rust Belt’ or rust belt) which was crucial for Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory. That is, the aspiration frustration and closure of opportunities is the best breeding ground for the far right with its promises of security and authority permeating among young people and working classes.
Today, billionaires pay one-sixth of taxes compared to 1953, says the economist Robert Ryk. The greed of the pigs and dogs of Pink Floyd’s ‘Animals’ has reached such abusive and polarizing limits that, once again, inequality became politicized and gave rise to new left parties and governments. But with a support that can be fragile and has not finished curling, and less under the anomie and fatigue that such a long pandemic leaves behind.
Want, this is the key to prioritizing employment, housing and welfare policies among young people to reverse his hopelessness and his growing support for parties like Vox. In Spain, Vox has as much support among young people as the PSOE, even though it is the party with the greatest inequality that defends it the most anti-social agenda of the entire European extreme right.
It must be acknowledged that young people in Spain are a unique and exceptional generation that has accumulated four scars of social counter-mobility very biting: a) chain of three adversities (Great Recession, Sobriety and Great Pandemic); b) with greater uncertainty and lower salaries than the previous generation X; c) with higher costs of access to housing and rent and d) with less middle class niches to achieve given its structural deterioration.
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Not they or those who follow them are a lost generation, but generations waiting for ambitious policies of social mobility and income redistribution, even demanded today by the Davos Forum in light of the systemic violations committed.
The best vaccine against the extreme right is restore hope for young people from a reformist and effective left with credible narrative capacity (and not just management). After ‘Animals’, Pink Floyd published ‘The wall’ where the bohemian protagonist is sublimated into a Nazi after accumulating frustration bricks. The communication policies of Moncloa and the government need to be sharper if they do not want to be another brick in the growing wall of the far-right.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com