Empty time (Peru under the pandemic)
- PDF / 397,376 Bytes
- 5 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 12 Downloads / 185 Views
Empty time (Peru under the pandemic) Mijail Mitrovic 1 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Illustration by Fernando Nureña. In the midst of the lockdown, a mother and her daughter move from the so-called periphery of Lima to better-off neighbourhoods to ring bells from building to building. They ask for something, whatever someone in a better position can give them. The streets show the helplessness of those who do not even have the prospect of working for someone, that is, of being exploited by someone under whatever conditions. Charity becomes the only hope in the absence of work. Another day, a poor man waits for someone to come out of his house to kneel
* Mijail Mitrovic [email protected]
1
Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Lima, Peru
M. Mitrovic
down and ask him for work. Someone appears and quickly, already from below, he could recite: “Lord/I am so poor/that the only/offering/that I could bring/is me”. Dalmacia Ruiz Rosas’ poem (from her book Secuestro en el jardín de las rosas, 1998) recalls previous crises in the country, where the notion of proletarianization—the process of dispossession of livelihoods and means of production, with its correlative reduction of the subject to a body, a mere support of labour power—acquired a very concrete meaning. Of course, in addition to the number of deaths radically higher than official records, these little more than 100 days of quarantine in Peru mean a significant drop in the GDP and a dark outlook for the country if we follow the development path imposed 30 years ago. But, above all, they account for an accelerated transition towards a mass proletarianization—not only precarization of current working conditions but also radical dispossession. It is not just raw data of job losses, which can already be seen in the last 2 months. In a country where 7 out of 10 occupations of the economically active population is based on informal labour, it is key to look beyond the data to understand the qualitative change in the life situation to which this crisis pushes us, and in particular how the working class will be compelled to go to the market to seek or beg for some solution to their misery. This situation had already come to light in recent years with the Venezuelan migration crisis, which returned the urban landscape to the image of the street as a place of indigence, ambulatory commerce and child labour prior to the so-called Peruvian miracle that boosted the economy for a decade without weaving a public network of social protection. The pandemic will end up saturating the urban space as a place of mendicancy and hopelessness. If in the last decades the idea that economic growth of the 2000s had led our social structure to transform from a pyramid to a rhombus was imposed on us, based on an alleged thickening of the middle class—measured by income and exalting its consumption capacity—, today without a doubt we assist in real time to the return of the Peruvian society to its historical pyramidal form. This is a real social collapse, beyond the accurate or tr
Data Loading...
