There are no citizens anymore, we are consumers.

And the shopping list defines us. Our entire social life depends on trade relations. It is true that almost all societies have known trade, but as a reality that has a very limited weight in life among individuals. However, in recent decades, sophisticated forms of consumption have appeared that structure our way of being: we are the result of a set of variable priorities.

Are communication technologies the paradigm of this?

They're the most complete kind of consumerism. They offer us opportunities that don't compromise us. Other options compromise us: relationships that cannot be abandoned whenever you want, family, friends, associations, trade unions, political parties; from a hedonistic point of view ask you for undesirable processes, negotiations, lights and shadows, gray. And that disappears in the area of consumption: what I prefer, when I prefer, and how I prefer.

20. At the origin of the great conflicts of the twentieth century, you place the superiority of market competition, and the excess power that has been given to the economy.

They are the result of a series of tensions that accumulated in the 19th century. The nineteenth century, in which the development of capitalist relations took place, lived peacefully, in Europe at least the victory of the economy left behind the political and religious conflicts of previous centuries. Clearly, it was the consequence of the expulsion of conflicts to the periphery, to the colonies. But rather than disappear, social, political and economic conflicts were gathering up, and a terrible crisis erupted that was the result of the impotence of the ideal of the free market.

The free market is neither good nor bad, it is impossible.

It's incompatible with our lives. The truth is that it has never existed, the market has always needed gigantic expulsions from the state, a savage social orthopedics, is a utopia. And it was some happy moments of the 20th century that limited this utopia, developing a state of well-being.

What is the relationship between capitalist organization and slavery?

Paid work is a historic novelty, people have never lived this way. When markets began to appear, the models applied in the new fields of work came from slavery: it was unskilled work with repetitive and fragmented tasks. Because the opposite was skilled work, that of craftsmen, that of unions, hard work, but linked to great autonomy. It's not the same thing to be a slave as a wage worker, but there's a straight line from one side to the other.

Capitalism has destroyed many things, including traditional social relations.

The thing is that we recover them: traditional social relations are full of domination, sexism, superstition. But we need to rebuild a denser connection than the mass market offers us, at least from a liberating perspective. However, mass societies have not eliminated social ties equally. More egalitarian societies have stronger social ties. We have more room for manoeuvre than we think.

Time of crisis, in the words of Gramsci: the old has not died, the new is not born.

But in many cases, normality is the crisis. The question is whether we will be able to get out of the crisis. And if we go out, we shouldn't believe that we'll have a lot of opportunities in front of us. The options are now deciding, it is we who have to make the decisions that lead us in one direction or another. It is at stake to close the crisis above, maintaining the benefits of the elites, or to help something new emerge.

Apathy, distancing, skepticism with processes of social change.

The greatest triumph of neoliberalism, combined with a different distribution of wealth, is, of course, the dismantling of society, the destruction of civil society. It is no coincidence: the most competitive countries, the ones that are best able to cope with the crisis, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, are the countries with the most union membership in the world, above 70%. Otherwise we do not have the resources to intervene, to act, which is a very difficult alternative.

And we still want to mimic the life of the elites.

Since the 1970s, millions of working-class people began to support projects of addiction to the economic elites, which opposed their material benefits. Dressing up, eating, traveling and talking like an idiot with a full pocket stopped being ridiculous and became our model of life. In England and other countries there is a sense of failure. We, on the other hand, regard it as a natural development, and that is more demobilising than failure.