Cao de Benós: 'One phone call and it's done' to nationalize housing

Cao de Benós: 'One phone call and it's done' to nationalize housing

Nationalize housing, abolish the monarchy, close foreign military bases. All of that, according to Alejandro Cao de Benós, can be solved with 'one phone call and it's done'. The message, posted on his account and shared on a current affairs forum, doesn't ask for votes: it asks for people 'willing to give their lives for their ideas' because, he warns, when the time comes 'capital won't sit on its hands'. This isn't Netflix, he implies.

There's something amusing about the pitch: a revolutionary maximalist program dispatched with a plumber's logistics. And that's where the debate begins.

Who is Cao de Benós and why is he saying this

Cao de Benós is known for his long public ties to North Korea, a country he has defended in media appearances and conferences for years. His profile — that of a North Korean regime enthusiast operating from Spain — explains the tone of the message: trench-style epic rhetoric, contempt for the ballot paper and a promise of an iron fist against capital when the moment comes.

The concrete proposal is a cocktail: nationalizing housing, abolishing the monarchy and expelling foreign bases. Three measures that in any European democracy require parliamentary majorities, constitutional reforms and years of litigation. He packages them in a tweet and a phone call.

'This isn't Netflix': the rhetoric of the assault

The core of the message isn't the program, it's the warning. Anyone who believes change happens through votes and ballots is mistaken; it will take people willing to withstand capital's reaction. It's the old scheme of storming the heavens, with the difference that here the heavens are an apartment in Carabanchel.

The reaction was swift. Some dismissed him as a 'rich kid' who wants to impose a dictatorship on us, while others told him to get a job and do some exercise, even if it was just walking to buy bread. The irony about his physique was recurring: a second tweet of his, in which he claimed that anyone who needs to see him muscular to change their future 'is in love with me', was trinc by comments about elbichito and how offside such messages are.

The problem with the 'call': who makes it and to whom

The most fragile detail of the plan is the verb. Who calls? Whom? Nationalizing housing isn't confiscating a country estate: it requires valuing an entire housing stock, compensating or not depending on which article is invoked, and then managing millions of contracts. The call, in any case, would be made by a state with administrative capacity, not a group of volunteers with their lives ahead of them.

Beneath it all lurks the usual suspicion: the communist paradise promised to others and billed in hard currency. One commenter asked, with a smirk, whether you can get cocaine in that paradise; another called him a fraud outright. There is no evidence in the material for any of that, and it should be said: these are opinions thrown out in the heat of the message, not facts.

From housing to Mars: the rest of the repertoire

The conversation soon drifted into the absurd. A base on Mars, the fishmonger, his resemblance to other leaders. When debate abandons housing and settles into jokes, it usually means two things: the proposal isn't taken seriously and no one expects a coherent alternative.

And yet, the message strikes a real nerve. Housing is the economic problem that hits Spanish households hardest, and anyone promising to solve it with a stroke of a pen always finds an audience. The difference between promising and governing fits in a phone call.

The uncomfortable question remains: if everything can be fixed with one call, why has nobody picked up the phone yet?