Total Dead End.

Vasile Ernu is in Chisinau, Moldova.

Fragmented, individualistic, antisocial - and we don't know why. But we do not lose hope. Meditations from the flea market

Through my job (writer), I move around in many radically different environments: in terms of social status, age, and outlook on life.

It's something like: in the morning or Sunday I'm with the conservatives, at noon or Thursday with the liberals in the evening and on Friday with the progressives. With all age categories – from 12 years to 89 years. I also go to church and the discotheque, to the corporation and to the flea market, because that's the job of acquiering knowledge. I do this systematically for about 3 months a year. I like it, it gets me out of depression.

What is very difficult: you have to know how to listen a lot – people are sometimes hard to turn on but if you turn them on you have to listen. And this is quite difficult because you are limited especially emotionally. It's like a glass: it has liquid capacity limits. It overflows if it's too much. And sometimes you have to listen because you can't use people and press the button when you want them to start and stop.

I've always felt best closer to anarcho-collectivist Narodnik forms. Romantic narodnicism attracted me the most. It looks a lot like the Pauline evangelicalism characteristic of the family I come from - very anarcho-collectivist.

I also like the Pauline principle of universalism in communication and practice: to be with Jew - Jew, with Greek - Greek without losing your identity. I have never liked the fiercely puritanical individualism typical of American Protestant culture and more recently of neoliberal progressivism.

It's just that things got mixed up badly. What I see now is the incredible fragmentation on all levels.

It is very difficult to find coagulated groups - and when they are coagulated, they are based on marketing and financing principles, not beliefs.

Or if their beliefs are very individualistic – a group like a person: exclusive marketed puritanism is making waves – I and only I can stand on this supermarket shelf even if there is no difference from the other goods except for 1% of E- hate.

With conservatives, things are simpler: they have few marks of differentiation – race, blood, family, clour, religion. And this is easy to connote and use. They work with simple matters: water, stone, air, fire – that style. It's just that conservatives want change - that's an interesting fact: they are perhaps the most radical group for change. The war in the east also has this substance. It seems that the new upheaval, the new "revolution" will be conservative.

The liberals are somehow radically opposite: they are the only structure that does not want change - because it is now a form of hegemony - we want reform, which reform means preserving the current state of power at the global level. Liberalism as a form of preservation of the current hegemony. You see this at all levels: from politicians, to NGOs and from bureaucracy to corporations. Where there is power, change is excluded - all wrapped up in the liberal democratic language of rights whose basic purpose is to preserve power.

With what we call progressivism, it is even sadder: I think that nothing has been hit more cruelly by neoliberalism than this sector which has become a kind of total cultural individualist puritanism - it fights the hegemony of neoliberalism by preserving and protecting it. Progressivism is increasingly becoming a cultural design, devoid of social and economic content, which denies the hegemon while protecting it.

Its diversity has become a kind of puritanism of exclusion not inclusion: if you are a feminist you have to say which of the 33 forms you belong to and if you are a y you have to say which species of the other 22 branches you are from? If you match in 99 cases and 1 doesn't match, I'm totally pissed off.

Everything becomes sectarian, deeply puritanical, anti-universalist, commercial and individualistic. The exact opposite of what socialist progressivism was based on. This direction is a total dead end.

In reality these things suit the general situation very well. Because at the base is a profound social and economic inequality. And in the East we are witnessing a total destruction of the minimal social state that produces perhaps the most unequal society in the last hundred years. And behind it smolders a lot of violence, frustration and injustice in a sea of poverty and ignorance.

And when you arrive in the Republic of Moldova - being a small country - this is monstrous, it jumps out at you, it attacks you with a very violent radicality. You meet her from 12-year-old children to 80-year-olds, from kindergarten to hospitals, from school to the street, from the park to the market and shop.

And despite this violent and unjust, antisocial and antihuman jungle in which we live, you meet people and oases of normality that in this context work wonders. And that gives hope. Really very hopeful.

P.S. They still entrust me with a stall run by a grandmother at the flea market- relying on intellectuals: more with words than with deeds...