A curious trait of our society is that the powerful ideas of some authors remain marked by their name. Thus, we give the qualifier of Machiavellian to some action taken where the end justifies the condemnatory character of said action. In the same logic we can find other qualifiers such as Malthusian, Orwellian or Kafkaesque, and on that last one I will stop a little today to refer to the Mexican energy sector.
Yes, the Mexican energy sector in our days is, to say the least, Kafkaesque. The term is derived from Franz Kafka, an author born in Prague, known for his work The Metamorphosis, and is usually used in situations with oppressive, complex or illogical qualities, which for the author was exemplified with the soulless bureaucratic machinery of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Are you beginning to imagine something?
Frederick Karl, Kafka’s biographer, gives us a better definition of the meaning of Kafkaesque. He says that a Kafkaesque situation is one in which you find yourself in a surreal world where all your patterns of control, all your plans, the complete way in which you have configured your own behavior begin to fall into pieces and you begin to fight against it with all your resources, with everything you have and, however, it is evident that you have no opportunity whatsoever.
That is Kafkaesque, whether it is turning into a beetle, as in The Metamorphosis, or facing the new configuration of the electric sector proposed by the initiative of constitutional reform in matters of electricity.
“If the reform is approved, we would enter a surreal world, perhaps unique in the world.”
The Kafkaesque nature of the matter cannot be denied. If the reform is approved, we would enter a surreal world, perhaps unique in the world. Where a public company becomes the only buyer of electricity and the only seller of electricity and where citizens have no options, where we enter into the soulless bureaucratic machinery, complex, illogical and oppressive.
As surreal as the above is the fact that said company self-regulates, creates the energy transition policy and is outside any of the controls of the federal public administration. Even more, in this surreal world, citizens and companies, we see how our patterns of control, our plans and our own behavior fall into pieces.
And it is that companies that have invested for years in the electric sector in designs, payments of permits and rights, expansions of the network, studies and construction of plants, which are carried out with a budget and a debt with national and international funds, will see how their plans fall into pieces.
Not only the inanimate components of the companies, but their employees, suppliers and the communities with which they have a relationship will be affected in a magnitude that it is still not possible for us to imagine in its fair dimension, those who make up millions of Mexican families who will see their ways of life affected.
What to say about those families that invested their savings to install solar panels on their roofs to reduce their consumption? They will see the models of consideration contracts modified with a stroke of the pen, absorbed within the complex structure of a State organism.
And yes, although there have been efforts of struggle through debates, positions and amparos before the constant onslaught, before a constitutional change it will be evident that citizens, families and companies will have no opportunity whatsoever. We will remain under the shelter of a superstructure called CFE. That, friends, is Kafkaesque.
This article was originally published by Energía a Debate.
Date: October 25, 2021
Link: https://energiaadebate.com/una-reforma-electrica-kafkiana/ [Online]
