class struggle reflections from the hippy beach parking lot

20 december, undisclosed location on the spanish coast

i have more evidence for my theory of the existance of a ‘lumpen aristocracy’

in the Deprogram episode with Ben Norton (https://podcasts.apple.com/nl/podcast/the-deprogram/id1596666465?i=1000736742037)

they mentioned a ‘class’ of people who.. live in the global south and work for western liberal NGO’s , making 1 or 2k USD/EUR a month and just.. immediately being just below the oligarch class in terms of local purchasing power.

this causes a brain drain: talented locals get NGO’ified instead of working for the betterment and or liberation of the local community. They also end up with reactionary politic.s

however, that’s not really who i’m referring to when i say ‘lumpen aristocracy’

by that i mean people like myself; relatively well educated individuals / failsons who live on the margins of the imperial core, benefitting from state pensions or incomes .. this includes some of the boomer vanlifer ‘Vanpires’ - but i’m picturing this class to still have revolutionary politics.

There’s a guy here on the parking from Norway. Norway has a 3k EUR/month basic income public dividend going on. THis guy lives in a huge modern camper on the parking lot here forever and just.. plays with gadgets. he has a crazy solar system, like, many african villages would praise god every day for the next several decades if they got to share his setup. Here, he’s the go to guy if you need to charge your laptop. Apparantly he gets handsy with the brothers when he’s had a few too many, and he has at least a few most days.

all sponsored by the norwegian’s sovereign wealth fund.

Life is so cheap here (you don’t need to heat your house and spanish supermarket prices are VERY reasonable) you could probably survive just on 1x kinderbijslag (dutch child support) as long as you’re practical.

I see people here living without any money. the lumpen class hippy slackers who end up here .. collectively live off dumpsterdiving and donations. THat takes care of food and clothes. Even the coldest nights are far from freezing, and it rarely rains. Shelter is.. while nice, almost optional, and easily constructed out of tarps or.. the cheap decathlon tents people leave here when they fly back home. (it’s a symbiosis of class-solidarity to some extent.. one group living off the trash of the other. The vanlifers can stay here because the hobo’s hold the space. The hobo’s repurpose the vanlifers trash as well as the leftovers from the markets in nearby towns. Someone always takes the role of selling marijuana grown by friends in the hills.. and

the boars live off the scraps of everyone / clean up the mess. They woke me up one night , and then again in the morning, as i was sleeping under a fallen tree next to the beach. I hid the bag with bananas and mangoes while they were busy disappearing my cookies. A bold move, because boars are dangerous creatures in the wild. These ones are halfway domesticated. No tusks but still hairy. There’s yoga on the beach in the morning, i’m looking at it happening right now. a circle of about 15 people. A structural solution to the ‘where do people shit?’ question would really have to be found. and the cops are never THAT far away for long. And yet, more people raise kids here than many other places i’ve been. Maybe it’s just because once you’re here, there’s nowhere left to run?