critica2

Robinson and the wild capitalism

MANUEL VÁZQUEZ MONTALBÁN

Several literary supplements of European newspapers, December 1997

I've never read Robinson Crusoe like the first time again, as the fascinating adventure of a white man, a black one, me and a flame in a deserted island to the one that from time to time cannibals go to eat up to their victims. The myth of the free man in the nature gets rid it had possessed, now I know that forever. The second reading was motivated for an university work, through the filter of a pretextual synthesis among this that now would call the deconstruction of the text and the ideological analysis. Then already I knew that the Robinson Crusoe is a metaphor and one moral and ideological parable about the individual's value abandoned in the nature, without another guarantee, neither another real sanction that his direct bond with the Providence. In the parable, the philosophy of the world of the bourgeoisie through propagandist, one of the most brilliant and tenacious of his upward conscience, is reflected: Daniel Defoe. Marx knew how to capture very well the moral, and political intentions, of Defoe's Robinson and of all the robinsons that appeared for Europe trying to reproduce the pattern:

«The 'robinsonadas' don't express in any way, like the historians of the civilization imagine it, a simple reaction against an excessive refinement and the return to a not well understood primitive life.
As neither The Social Contract of Rousseau that relates by means of a convention and it communicates to independent fellows by nature, it rests on similar naturalism. That is the appearance, and the aesthetic appearance only, of the small and big 'robinsonadas'. These advance the rather bourgeois society that got ready in the 16th century and in the 18th century went to enlarged steps toward its maturity.
In this society of free competition, the individual appears as removed of the knots of the nature that make him an integral part of a conglomerate in times previous of the certain history, defined human».

This long appointment, extracted of Contribution to the economic politics's critic, it would be enough by myself to outline one thesis on the real significance of Life and extraordinary and prodigious adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, mariner. But they are not significances what I look for, but recovering the magic reader of one of the ten books that I would select as makers of my reader condition and of mitómano.
If I cannot approach it with the innocence of the first time, in the same way that I will never be able to smell people and the things like forty years ago and for blame of Contribution to the aesthetics of Henri Lefebre isolates never again the colors like when I found a historical joyfully, I need to find the synthesis among the naivety of the one reader also heady to a deserted island and the cynicism of the intellectual millennium end that the low Robinson has read suspects of having been the secret agent of Margaret Thatcher from the origin of the neoliberal species. Defoe believed to have written a puritan allegory: the shipwreck in a deserted island is the punishment to which the Providence subjects to Crusoe for his sins against the paternal authority, his 'poquedad' in the face of God and his scarce trust in the Providence.
But Defoe, believing to be a puritan, is already an utilitarian and announced the not well wild of the wild capitalism.
But not, this understanding so posmarxista doesn't satisfy me, perhaps dictated by the spite before the evidence of the one irreversible end of the adventure in this galaxy. The books that were good to create imaginary of all new order, the free man's mythology in the free market, they would deserve the postmodern pity and the right to be object of
dramaturgia materialised in thematic parks financed by the Walt Disney Corporation, to mention a company
dedicated to embalm mythologies, bigger and smaller gods.