Israel Centeno

I was formed in Marx, Lenin, Mao. I believed those books could read the world. Surplus value, means of production, class struggle: dogmas, not categories. Today those certainties are dust: capitalism no longer fits the manuals. Agamben says we live under a machine that manages life without telos. Han says we are smiling slaves of our own self-exploitation. Slavery now wears new faces: exhaustion disguised as freedom. Yet the old slavery persists: – in Pakistan, with workers chained to brick kilns; – in Africa, where war is the daily wage; – in Asia, where children stitch the clothes the West consumes and discards. And then China: a disciplined swarm, a penal hive, eternal buzzing of production. The West is the soft society: no chains, only apps. No whips, only algorithms. Two faces of the same machine: roar and smile, martyrdom and consumption. Where are the exploited? Who are the slaves? “Proletariat” no longer suffices. Marcion suspected: the world is ruled by a strange god. Paul said it outright: we wrestle against principalities and powers. The visible is haunted by the invisible: debt, war, hunger, algorithms. Politics offers no way out: not Marxism, not liberalism, not social democracy. Even the Church’s social doctrine cannot break the circle. All stumble on the same wound: a time without horizon. Creation groans, Paul said, with the pangs of birth. It awaits more than revolutions, more than reforms. It awaits redemption. Marcion longed for a God other than the tyrant of the world. Paul proclaimed that God had already broken in through Christ. That is the crack in the machine: the eternal power already defeated. Meanwhile, the world dances with masks. It celebrates perpetual Halloween. It disguises anguish with consumption. Yet behind the carnival beats the question: – When will the specters of capital vanish? – When will the glory of the children of God be revealed?