Radical chic: Gabriel Albiac on Madrid's Puerta del Sol squatting

Gabriel Albiac's article in El Debate uses Tom Wolfe's term "radical chic" to describe privileged young people's fascination with rebellion and the lumpen. Albiac recalls that Marx and Engels already warned in the nineteenth century that this lumpen-proletariat is venal and reactionary.

The well-off classes' fascination with society's margins has had a name for more than half a century. Tom Wolfe coined "radical chic" in the late sixties, and Gabriel Albiac revives it in an article published in **El Debate** to analyse the occupation of Madrid's Puerta del Sol. The thesis is uncomfortable: the young campers who settled in the square had homes to return to for a shower every morning. They handed their rags over to those who truly have nowhere to retreat.

## The nostalgia for the mud and its literary tradition

Albiac traces this attraction to the lowly back to **Émile Augier**, a forgotten nineteenth-century French author who in **1855** coined the expression "nostalgie de la boue", nostalgia for the mud. The formula endures while its author fades away. **Baudelaire** dedicated intense verses to him and **Fitzgerald** delicate lines. The underlying idea is Aristotelian: every body seeks to return to its natural place, and the mud, in the end, succeeds. It is carved into **Genesis, 3:19**. In literature it works. In life, when the cold arrives, it is rather unpleasant.

The article points out the mismatch between the aesthetics of rebellion and its material consequences. The Sol campers retreated to their homes. The desperate vagrants who inherited the rags have nowhere to go. The fable ends when the thermometer drops.

## Marx and Engels already distrusted the lumpen

The text draws on two quotations to dismantle the romanticisation of the outlaw. **Karl Marx**, in **1848**, wrote that the lumpen-proletariat is "that passive product of the putrefaction of the lower classes" and that its living conditions lead it "rather to sell itself to reaction". **Friedrich Engels**, in **1870**, was harsher: he called it "that scum of corrupted individuals from all classes" and "of all possible allies, the worst", a category "absolutely venal and shameless".

Albiac spares us **Vladimir Ulyanov**'s formulations for being excessively cruel. The message is clear: those who intend to make the revolution with those who only want to loot shop windows are choosing the wrong ally. The expropriation call on Halloween night failed, and the author attributes it to an elementary reason: you cannot loot a modern city with advance notice. Surprise is the looter's only advantage.

## The failure of the announced assault

The fusion between children of the easy life and professional pickpockets was left for another day. Albiac mocks the notion that those with nothing to lose dream of revolution. They have neither the time nor the peace of mind for such grand words. They want to take for free what shop windows display as desirable and unattainable. The rest is mockery.

The article closes with a literary recommendation: the story by **Tom Wolfe** that gave the phenomenon its name, written towards the end of the sixties, in which the privileged dream of being bandits. Albiac describes it as acid and hilarious, and adds that it seems written for today. The fable is over. All that remains is the cold and the nostalgia for the mud, which is all very well when a hot bath awaits at home.