Cotarelo ramon

palinuro cotarelo

Since its expansion at the end of the 20th century, the Internet has transformed so profoundly and at such a speed the social action in all orders, that today it is almost impossible to imagine the world before the predominance of the digital as our contemporary. And political systems are the ones that have most clearly felt the impact of the Internet. Democracies are undergoing a substantial mutation thanks to politics 2.0 and 3.0. From traditional forms of participation and mobilization to the practice of government and its categories (accountability, transparency, decision-making, public debate) there has been no area of politics that has not been forced to adapt to rapidly changing conditions: a new public sphere, new forms of activism and organization, and even new parties have emerged. The relationship between rulers and ruled has changed, as evidenced by the fact that when democracies collide with authoritarian practices, the first thing authoritarian rulers try to do is to shut down the network, only to find that this is no longer possible. To the extent that democracy is, among other things, identity of rulers and ruled and freedom of expression, it is due to the Internet that we can speak of 21st century democracy as something qualitatively different.

nordic cat twitter

I seem to see Cotarelo everywhere, you know, the one from ‘Cotarelo and Talegón against the Chicharrón gang’, since a few days ago he published an article accusing all lacist politicians of thinking more about their benefit than independence. Poor man, he is a bit pitiful, maybe he really believed in lacism. He came from Madrid, where he was nothing more than an old dinosaur from whom everybody stayed away for fear that the big bore would tell his old stories, thinking he knew the Catalans.

Old age, revolutions. How little he knew about the Catalans. Be a professor, rub elbows with the best in politics, to look like a professor as soon as you get off the train in Barcelona-Sants. I imagine you with a beret and a basket with a chicken sticking out of it, asking the station porter how to get to the revolution.

krls twitter

Author and compiler of more than forty books, translator of almost twenty authors, essayist, writer, Cotarelo does not rest in his vocation to understand and question the political reality of his time. His most notorious and sustained commitment has been in the construction of a democratic left, rooted in the concrete experiences of social democracy but with a view to a future of profound uncertainty marked by an increasingly inequitable capitalism and the advance of ostensibly reactionary ideologies. On these and many other issues Ramón Cotarelo has generously dialogued with LA VANGUARDIA.

To the insecurity generated by the crisis, which is not a crisis but one more episode in the class struggle between capital and labor and which the former is winning because, contrary to Marx’s prophecy, it is he, capital, which has become internationalized and not the working class. Along with the insecurity of the crisis, the precariousness of working life and the rampant xenophobia due to the demagogy of refugees and immigrants.