A giant named Pablo González Casanova

or years, every night, before going to sleep, the researcher Pablo González Casanova read poetry or drama. From a very young age, as an inheritance from his father, he memorized some poems. With them, he nurtured his dreams and counterpointed the social science concepts he worked with during the day.

From this mixture thus emerged an original and powerful language to name the world, in which the theoretical arsenal of various humanities, the most outstanding works of universal literature, the mathematical language and the infinite wealth of life itself were mixed creatively. Like Karl Marx in the capitalused mathematics –the goddess of sciences– as a method of reasoning and, later, as a tool to deal with the possible and the impossible.

–Don Pablo: how do you work? How did his intellectual concerns come to him? How does he make them? I asked him one morning, in the middle of a long interview in his cubicle at UNAM’s Social Research Institute, intrigued by his reflections on the confusion of peoples or the history of the use of lies in academia, such as a form of mystification.

Smiling, he explained: I have a very bad memory, although my old secretary told me that I have a good memory when I feel like it and for everything else I have a bad memory. She probably had a point. It’s hard for me to remember people’s names. But my associative memory is strong. That is the one that allows me to establish links and, in addition, corresponds to my training from a long time ago.

And he added: “The moment in which most things occur to me is when I am shaving. It is in the morning when I begin to establish links that seem attractive to me to continue thinking about them. It corresponds to information processes that come from different sources and that suddenly come together. That is the most frequent but not the only moment.

“No wonder you always shave so well,” I replied, amidst his laughter.

Author of 24 books, and coordinator, editor or director of another 32, in addition to innumerable academic articles, his work shows that those mornings in front of the mirror, with the razor in hand, were truly fruitful.

He never joined any political party, although while studying for his postgraduate studies in Paris, he entertained the idea of ​​joining the ranks of the French Communist Party. A man of ideas, but also of action, who navigated his entire life in the turbulent waters of the left without capsizing in them, he defined himself as an organic intellectual from the university. In Latin America, he said, the university plays an extraordinary role. So much so, that he left the university, to a large extent, on Cuban July 26.

Con Democracy in Mexico, Don Pablo invented a new way of understanding and studying the country. As Lorenzo Meyer has pointed out, the book is the first major general study of the contemporary political system by a Mexican, from a Mexican and academic perspective. The work placed a research agenda and a methodology to get to know the country at the center of the national debate.

It inaugurated lines of research and reflection on the national reality in force today, and established a key moment in the development of sociology: that of the full maturity of the social sciences and the end of the monopolies of foreign studies on the country.

When the work was published, Carlos Madrazo was the president of the PRI. In it, González Casanova integrated, with great imagination, American sociology with Marxism (whose essence, according to him, is the theory of exploitation), history and statistics. He creatively reflected on marginalism, internal colonialism, dual societies, to analyze the relationship between modernization and democracy, and between economics and politics. He concluded that the lack of democracy caused by exploitation and internal colonialism prevented the country from moving towards representative democracy and development.

Those same theoretical tools, which he continued to develop throughout his academic life, served to analyze South America and the Caribbean in another way. They were a central tributary of the flowering of Latin American sociology, which, as Don Pablo told Claudio Albertani, is one of the most original thoughts of our time, not only in the academic field, but also in the political and revolutionary field.

Together with thinkers such as Immanuel Wallerstein, Samir Amin and François Houtart, Don Pablo dedicated himself, looking from below, to building the appropriate instruments to read societies through the eyes of the oppressed. His work allowed us to put together the theoretical puzzle to understand alterglobalism and the new national liberation struggles in Asia and Africa.

However, despite his enormous intellectual weight, González Casanova developed an extraordinary capacity to listen simply and patiently to the simplest people. And he reaped something that very few intellectuals can boast of: speaking to a motley mass of social and political leaders belonging to the most diverse organizations, and getting them to listen to him in silence and with interest.

Convinced of the need for an independent press, he contributed time, energy and dedication to the founding of The Conference. “I remember in my dreams – she wrote – that night when several friends arrived. More than my memory, his consternation awakened me. They had just resigned from a newspaper that was becoming more and more difficult to work for… When they told me about their resignation, I remember that I said to them with a certain irresponsibility: And why don’t we found another? It was one of those outbursts of youth that sometimes have real effects. This one had them thanks to the fact that Carlos Payán and Carmen Lira would be in the group of founders”.

At nightfall on February 29, 1984, more than 5,000 people gathered in a room at the Hotel de México. It was the presentation in society of the project to found The Conference. Don Pablo took the floor. Because we are optimists we fight. Because we have hope in a destiny we are critical, said. And he concluded in the middle of a long ovation: We have decided to found a national society, which will carry out its tasks in the written press. The first task will be to found a daily newspaper.

Since then a close relationship was established between the medium and the intellectual. His love and admiration for Carmen Lira and for The Conference They remained unscathed over the years.

Always committed to the fight for democracy, independence and socialism, Don Pablo made the defense of the Cuban revolution and the vindication of the thought of José Martí one of the great causes of his life.

She was not the only one. Another of them was the struggle of the native peoples and Zapatismo. In 2017, the Deputy Commander Galeano He presented him as a man of critical and independent thinking, who is never told what to say or how to think, but who is always on the side of the people. For this reason, he explained, in some rebellious communities he is known as Paul Contreras.

And at the high point of that relationship, on April 21, 2018, González Casanova, 96 years old at the time, became the Commander Pablo Contreras of the CCRI-EZLN. To be a Zapatista -explained the Commander Tacho– You have to work and he has worked for the life of our peoples. He hasn’t gotten tired, he hasn’t sold himself, he hasn’t given up.

When, in 2018, at the presentation of one of his books, Don Pablo was asked to share his recipe for reaching 96 with such intellectual strength, he replied: Fight and love. participate. We are facing an unprecedented period in the history of humanity. Our fight is no longer just for freedom, justice and democracy, it is in fact for life itself.

Loyal to the cause of the wretched of the earth, Pablo González Casanova explained that what is new in politics is not being moderate, left-wing or ultra. What is new is consistency. If something was that giant known as Don Pablo throughout his life, he was being a consistent man.