A final argument against the damage caused by "market society"

After writing the prologue to fellow nonagenarian Stéphane Hessel's surprise best-seller Get Outraged - a 12-page pamphlet in which the former French resistance fighter exhorts his fellow citizens to express their indignation about the state of things - José Luis Sampedro, one of the leading lights of Spanish left-wing thinking, has produced his own call to arms, Reacciona (or, React), with Hessel returning the favor of writing its introduction.

"Conscious, involved, and indignant, as, from the pinnacle of my own life I can recommend you be, the authors of Reacciona, this compact compendium, have come up with some very interesting ideas for the future based on their analysis of the present, dark, situation," writes Hessel in his latest book.

Our warnings were dismissed as the ramblings of elderly demagogues

So why, at 94, has Sampedro decided to express his indignation, and to call on people to react? He says that Hessel's message is directed at the youth of today. "He is a fighter, and he has fought for the cause of human rights and social improvement throughout most of the last century, and we feel that those achievements are being eroded during these first decades of the 21st century."

Like that of his colleague Hessel, Sampedro's anger is not simply the rant of an angry old man who feels that time and events have passed him by. Both books are the result of a cogent analysis of the times in which we live. Sampedro says that there has been concerted attack on the achievements of the last half of the 20th century, with the media and politicians conspiring to convince us that we are powerless in the face of the new financial order. "I am indignant, and I am reacting in the face of the repeated lie that the only way out of the current crisis is through more neo-liberal measures," he says.

So what is to be done? "As I have said on many occasions, money is the measure of everything. We confuse the market economy with the market society, converting everything into goods to the point of accepting corruption - that is to say the sale of people as something normal, and that is backed by our system of democracy. Brought up in such an environment and with the sole goal of being competitive, productive, and innovative, meaning that we shove each other out of the way, it is hard to retain our dignity unless we do so through by re-educating ourselves."

Sampedro has long been critical of the way that Spanish society has developed in the four decades since Franco died. He admits to having had his doubts about how best to achieve the fairer society he believes in. "It depends, though, on what you mean by doubts," he says. "All thinkers find themselves doubting at some point, particularly in the face of decisions that involve others, particularly our loved ones. In general, I can say that rather than being sure of what I should do, I have always known what I shouldn't do."

He believes that the political systems of Western democracies have run out of ideas, and that a new way of carrying out politics is needed. "It is politics that has let us down. The mistakenly named globalization means that politicians have abdicated their political function in favor of the financiers, which has resulted in a deficit of democracy, and of course the current crisis. The financial crisis has eclipsed the food and energy shortage, as well as problems with the environment, because the financial crisis has come to represent the crisis of the system we live in," he says. The current situation is, he believes, making more and more of us angry, even if we don't know how to channel that anger: "War, hunger, unemployment... The answer is clear: humanity has advanced a great deal in technological terms, but there has been little progress in terms of knowledge and humanism."

Sampedro also rejects the idea that somehow, the current crisis was unforeseeable. "Despite the perpetuation of the idea that nobody could have predicted the current crisis, many of us have been warning of this for many years; but nobody wanted to listen. Our warnings were dismissed as the ramblings of elderly demagogues. I remember an article that I wrote in 2002 called El Mercado y la globalización (or, The market and globalization), warning in very clear and concise terms what the consequences of globalization would be. The response from the media was ridicule. Equally, my collection, Economía humanista (or, Humanist economics), a collection of essays dating back to 1947, was also dismissed by many. But anybody who bothered to read those essays can hardly be surprised at the mess in which we now find ourselves," he says. "I am calm, and at the same time indignant, like anybody would be who is now in the final stages of their life, and who is largely removed from what is going on."