Ángela Stella Matutina<p>Buen día, miserables.</p><p>Fresco día en el Río de la Plata, así como en el centro y este de la provincia de Buenos Aires. Bienvenido después de sudar como testigos falsos en lo que va de febrero.</p><p>Se me escapó, pero el pasado domingo 16 hubiera cumplido setenta y un años <strong>Iain Banks</strong>, a quien recordamos no sólo por la utopía socialista galáctica de sus ficciones, la <em>Cultura</em> , sino por ser un tipo despierto y ante todo decente:</p><blockquote><p>Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive--and more morally desirable--than one left to market forces.</p><p>The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what-works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was <em>absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources</em>. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is--without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset--intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.</p><p>It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values and considerations that humankind displays most convincingly both its present intellectual [immaturity and]--through grossly pursued selfishness rather than the applied hatred of others--a kind of synthetic evil.</p><p>Intelligence, which is capable of looking farther ahead than the next aggressive mutation, can set up long-term aims and work towards them; the same amount of raw invention that bursts in all directions from the market can be--to some degree-- channelled and directed, so that while the market merely shines (and the feudal gutters), the planned <em>lases</em>, reaching out coherently and efficiently towards agreed-on goals. What is vital for such a scheme, however, and what was always missing in the planned economies of our world's experience, is the continual, intimate and decisive participation of the mass of the citizenry in determining these goals, and designing as well as implementing the plans which should lead towards them. </p></blockquote><p>(Iain M. Banks, <a href="http://www.vavatch.co.uk/books/banks/cultnote.htm" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">A Few Notes on the Culture</a> (1994); las itálicas son mías.)</p><p>Desgraciadamente, en los últimos años nos venimos acordando de Banks no por sus méritos propios, sino por los delincuentes forrados en plata que lo han <a href="https://bloodknife.com/culture-war-iain-m-banks-jeff-bezos/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">leído con ignorancia y mala intención</a>. Valga entonces esta reivindicación.</p><p><a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/CienciaFicci%C3%B3n" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>CienciaFicción</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/socialismo" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>socialismo</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/capitalismo" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>capitalismo</span></a> <a href="https://social.treehouse.systems/tags/utop%C3%ADa" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>utopía</span></a></p>