By TARSUS GENUS*

Ken Loach makes his director's camera talk to us the whole time, to tell us that the way out is difficult, but not impossible.

Zygmunt Baumann tells: when the University of Prague awarded him the title of Doctor Honoris Causa, the Hungarian academic authority asked him which anthem he would like to be played at the award ceremony: the English anthem, the country that had granted him nationality as a professor, after he had been granted asylum on British soil, or the anthem of Poland, the country that had expelled him from its land for political reasons?

Zygmunt Baumann preferred the European anthem, which was simultaneously “inclusive” of both countries, in another political space, and “exclusive” of the other original spaces, which were still particularized. This choice kept him away from the moral (and political) dilemmas, guided by the choice between the country of birth and the host nation. Zygmunt Baumann said that “people in search of identity invariably find themselves faced with the daunting task of achieving the impossible”, because “it is a task that cannot be accomplished in ‘real time’”.

The liberation of human beings from the impositions of nature — to live in community — is what begins to give rise, in individuals, to moral (and political) judgments that, guided by a dominant culture in the community, flow over all classes. But they are not necessarily judgments aimed at choosing between what is “good” and what is “evil”: they can simply be choices with a specific “purpose”, devoid of a moral (or political) conception that seeks only to resolve an adverse situation.

Being an employee in a coal mine usually comes from a need for survival, but being a militant environmentalist is — almost always — a choice that stems from a political (moral) judgment about what is best (or worst) for the future of Humanity. Margaret Thatcher and most of the capitalists of our late modernity did not understand or do not want to understand these universal questions of History, which today stifle planetary survival.

In the 1980s, the English miners' strike, which resisted the closure of 20 coal mines by Margaret Thatcher, was severely defeated (1984), a historic event that remained in the memory of the coal miners of old England, who later celebrated her passing on the same day she passed away. The Prime Minister had won the arm wrestling match with the workers who were the fathers of the British railways, but who later became her illegitimate children, abandoned in the maturity of the 2nd Industrial Revolution.

A National Coal Board closed 75 mines, despite the resistance that mobilized a strike of 120 thousand workers. Fierce police raids and campaigns in solidarity with Thatcher in the traditional media guaranteed the defeat of the workers in March 1975: desertion, an uncertain future and a low level of job creation in traditional industry recycled the English economy to a new level, suited to the new system of capital. It was delirious “rentierism”, accumulation with a low supply of living labor, underemployment and income concentration: the England of “Proposed referendum on United Kingdom membership of the European Union".

The Last Pub (The Old Oak) is Ken Loach's third and best film, after Me, Daniel Blake (2016) and You were not here (2019). The English director's feature film deals with the life of a community in the English countryside, impoverished by the effects of the closure of dozens of coal mines in the “Thatcher era”, whose workers — without policies to jointly defend their fundamental rights, suffered first-hand the family imbalances and the consequences of real estate speculation in the devastated small town.

The arrival of Syrian refugee families, decades later, triggers a series of chain reactions: sexist, racist and xenophobic, with forms of reaction that antagonize the poor who arrive and the mining workers who are there. It is a struggle between those traumatized by social desertion and those purged by a dictatorship, who seek Europe to survive a Civil War. The poor are divided and thus — among them — both charity and solidarity can flourish, in opposition to rejection. 

In its wake comes fascism and violence, as the struggle of interests — regulated by political democracy — turns into a conflict between expropriators and expropriated: between the expropriated of different nationalities, who defend a way of life that was once oriented and stable, and those who arrive, made enemies, from “outside”. Who will win? This is what worries TJ Ballantyne, the lonely and decadent owner of a pub on the verge of bankruptcy, who comes to the conclusion — by organizing a soup kitchen aimed mainly at children — that the time is for solidarity, not charity.

Yara, the Syrian refugee, who gets off the bus carrying a camera in her hands, which is soon snatched away by a violent local unemployed man, records in images what she cannot explain as the tragedy of all the oppressed people in the world. Ken Loach, however, makes his director's camera speak to us the whole time, to tell us that the way out is difficult, but not impossible, re-establishing the proletarian solidarity of the defeated strikes to a new level of humanism.

That which is the ultimate limit of existence: for solidarity that may not immediately change the world, but changes our attitude towards it, which can always bear fruit in the future. That which is done, is not given.

Tarsus-in-law he was governor of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, mayor of Porto Alegre, Minister of Justice, Minister of Education and Minister of Institutional Relations in Brazil. Author, among other books, of possible utopia (Arts & Crafts). [https://amzn.to/3ReRb6I]

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