Our socio-political institutions are vulnerable, fundamentally flawed, like “fragile walls” (Saramago 57) waiting for the perfect moment to crumble. In the beginning of Blindness, while the population goes about with their lives, dealing with their daily preoccupation, as people usually do in a democratic society, the first blind man is stricken with white-blindness. From him, the blindness diffuses like an invisible virus until every eye in the city is drowned in a “white milky sea.” Following this contagious diffusion, Saramago depicts an apocalyptic society in which ordinary citizens are transformed into barbarians.  As he has said in an interview, “With hunger, war, exploitation, we’re already in hell . . . [Blindness is] a portrait of how we are” (Guardian). In Blindness, Saramago creates situations that resemble socio-political movements that are accompanied by contemporary political ideologies; moreover, with the guidance of Karl Marx and Plato, Saramago illustrates an ideal communist society.

A committed and active member of a communist party, political ideology was a part of   Saramago’s daily life. In fact, in the book The Notebook, he says that people should search for the meaning of ideology, for it is a “fundamental question” (66). According to Lyman Tower Sargent, “[a]n ideology is a system of values and beliefs regarding the various institutions and processes of society . . . [; it] provides the believer with a picture of the world both as it is and as it should be . . .” (2).

In the political spectrum, Saramago stood opposite fascism, which is, according to Sargent, an ideology that purports the notion that irrationality is an atavistic trait of humans (227), and therefore they can only be governed or manipulated by a supreme leader that is capable of interpreting their will (232). In BlindnessSaramago paints a vivid picture that resembles the dawning Nazi Germany:

The Commission acted with speed and efficiency . . . [, and] everyone who was known to be blind had been rounded up, as well as a considerable number of people who were assumed to be infected, at least those whom it had been possible to identify and locate in a rapid search operation carried out above all in the domestic and professional circles of those stricken with loss of vision (39).

In late 1920s, the Germans are experiencing extreme poverty and anxiety because of their devastating defeat in World War I, and the Nazi Party uses the civil unrest and fear and points out to the Jews as the cause of their dire conditions. Just as blindness is a contagious epidemic, so is Judaism in Nazi Germany. Moreover, the fact that not only those who are blind are rounded but also those who are suspected to have been infected has the same nature as the rounding of the Jews. For example, those who are arrested by the Nazis are not only people with “pure” Jewish blood but also those who have any trace of Judaism in their family-tree. Also, when Saramago uses the words “domestic” and “professional,” he suggests that social stratification is of no importance in this type of scenario, which is undoubtedly the same in Nazi Germany: Jewish lay people and intellectuals are both subjected to the terrors of Hitler’s Government.

Viktor Frankl, in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, says that his life in a concentration camp is an “unrelenting struggle for daily bread and life itself” (22); comparably, in Blindness, “the poor wretches are reduced to gathering up crumbs from the filthy floor . . . [, for the Hoodlums] prefer to allow the food go bad rather than give it to those who are in such great need” (161). Saramago depicts the strife of poor people under the exploitative capitalist system at the scene where the Hoodlums control the food supply and force the rest of the internees to pay unreasonable prices for a basic need that should have been theirs in the first place. Saramago writes: “[an] order came from the Hoodlums that more money and valuables should be handed . . . [because the food] had exceeded the value of initial payment” (164). Similarly, this manipulation of the price of commodity is manifest in today’s globalized capitalist system, which is an economic phenomenon caused by the “falling cost of distance” (Sargent 49). In 2007, for example, thousands of Mexicans staged protests against the drastic increase of the price of tortilla (Bello 39). In his book The Food Wars, Walden Bello says that due to the subsidies from the government of United States, farming corn for agro-fuel is now more profitable than planting corn for food, and thus, American farmers, who export corn to Mexico, are now devoting most of their farmlands for ethanol (39). Ironically, Mexico is where corn is first domesticated (Bello 39). In his book The Notebook, Saramago says that “[a] crime against humanity is what the financial and economic powers of the United States, with the actual tacit complicity of their government, have been perpetrating in cold blood against millions of people all over the world . . .” (45). Indeed—to live in squalid conditions, to scavenge for food, to wear rags as clothing—the human degradation caused by profit-hungry institutions is as despicable as the atrocious crimes that are committed by the Hoodlums.

 Because of the degradation experienced by millions of destitute citizens, because of the huge income disparities caused by a predatory economic system, and because of the institutionalized exploitations perpetrated by people whose penchant for wealth and domination tightens like noose around poor people’s necks, revolutionary armed-struggles have transpired in every continent of the world, proletarians have responded to the call of Karl Marx: “Working men of all countries, unite!”(84). In Blindness, Saramago confirms a conclusion realized by the doctor’s wife earlier in the novel that diplomatic resolution is no longer an option when dealing with the Hoodlums (137) and writes about the nascent violent conflict between the Hoodlums and the exploited blind internees: “There is always someone who proposes collective action, a mass demonstration, using the forceful argument about the cumulative strength of their number . . .” (162). Saramago illustrates this class-conflict at the scene where the man with black eye-patch leads the despondent internees into a disastrous fight against the Hoodlums, in which two of his fellow internees—comrades—have died; consequently, in every revolution casualty is inexorable. Since the end of World War II, more than 50 nations have taken up arms and fought for liberation or democracy (Pomeroy 9), and in all these revolutionary movements, hundreds and thousands of lives are vanquished. The battle between the inexperienced, disorganized, and poorly armed internees and the better-armed Hoodlums, who Saramago has compared to a “platoon” that is armed with gun and “bayonets” (137), is parallel to the plight of proletarians, who embark on quixotic armed-struggles against well-trained armies that are equipped with advance weapons of war. In his book Guerrilla Warfare and Marxism, William J. Pomeroy comments that “[s]uch acts, whether spontaneous or carefully planned, are viewed by Marxists-Leninists as isolated cases of desperation . . . and as symptoms . . . of social problems” (10). However, although proletarian revolutions are often unsuccessful, the efforts are not in vain, for as Salud Alegbre, a Filipino peasant uprising leader has said: “No uprising fails. Each one is a step in the right direction” (Francia 71).

In his theory of dialectical materialism, Karl Marx suggests that “ideas develop through a dialectical process of thesis (first position), anti-thesis (second position) and synthesis (truth of the opposites)” (Sargent 188); for instance, water (synthesis) is created because of the interaction of hydrogen and water molecules (Sargent 189). In Blindness, Saramago has illustrated this theory in a number of situations. Early in the novel, in the opposition between the democratic society (thesis) and the epidemic “white blindness” (anti-thesis) an authoritarian government (synthesis) is created; a new society with different sets of ideas is formed as old democratic principles wither. Moreover, the opposition between the blind internees and the Hoodlums, according to Saramago is “confirmed time and time again and sublimated in the dialectic affirmation that determined wills . . .” (162). The cruel and brutal interaction of the wards has created a situation in which the introverted woman realizes that burning the asylum is the only way to end their agony and suffering, for, as Marx has said, people’s “social condition determines their consciousness” (Sargent 186-187). As the Hoodlums burn, the power that they symbolize dissolves into nothingness, and a new set of ideas is created. Hence, without a government that can organize, without hoodlums who can rule, and without churches that preach, the society is in a state of anarchy (synthesis). Anarchy here, however, does not mean “chaos” but a socio-political condition in which every form of power and domination—clerical, political, and economical—is abolished (Chomsky 119-129). 

Saramago, through his characters—first blind man and his wife, old man with black eye-patch, girl with dark glasses, young boy, doctor and his wife—illustrates an ideal communist society. Guided by basic communist principles, such as abolishing job distinction and social class, working according to each person’s physical and intellectual capabilities without payment, and practicing collective property based on altruism (Sargent 181-203), the group—commune—of seven blind internees has survived the nightmarish world they inhabit. The doctor, for example, is no longer a doctor; the girl with dark glasses is no longer a prostitute: their job descriptions, which are used to identify their social class, are now nonexistent. Furthermore the works that they do for others are free, because money no longer dictates the economy, which Saramago now calls “economy of effort” (116). The commune has professed its commitment to the spirit of collective property and altruism throughout the novel. In the mental asylum, for instance, the emphatic girl with dark glasses gives her food ration to the young boy and “looks” after him with her heart, as if he has come from her own womb. Moreover, the same can be said with the doctor and his wife, who have readily and selflessly shared their apartment, food, and clothes with the members of their commune when they are freed from the asylum.

            According to Plato, “the only men to get power should be men who do not love it . . .” (248), for “the state whose rulers come to their duties with least enthusiasm is bound to the best and most tranquil government” (247), and in Blindness, Saramago heeds Plato’s advice and contradicts the authoritarian nature of a vanguard-party (e.g. the communist party of the now defunct Soviet Union). The commune’s success is not possible without the informal leadership of the doctor’s wife, who, throughout the novel, has devoted herself to others—commanding no one, asking nothing in return; she has provided for others, who are “as dependent on her as little children on their mothers” (225).  She does not even want others to know that she can see because she does not want to be a leader: “I’m a coward . . . it would have been better to go blind than to go around like a faint-hearted missionary” (135). However, like the “seeing” person in Plato’s Simile of the Cave,who has chosen to descend back to the cave, the doctor’s wife does not abandon the blind for she is their eyes, the person Saramago is referring to when he writes: “we beseech you, eyes, a pair of eyes, a hand capable of leading and guiding us, a voice that will say to me, This way” (132). Therefore, despite her doubts and fears, she fulfills her duty as a leader selflessly.

In Blindness, Saramago has depicted situations that are parallel to a vulnerable democratic society, where people’s bourgeois lifestyles and petty comforts could vanish in an instant, without warning; an authoritarian, fascist government that subjects minority groups to social prejudices and heinous crimes; a predatory economic system that is indifferent to the sufferings and deaf to the cries of the poor; a violent revolution, which is the last resort of the desperate masses; and societal conditions that are achieved through the dialectical process. Furthermore, contrary to the work of artist Rene Magritte, The Human Condition, which suggests that humans perceive and understand reality based on what they see, Saramago proves that “it is the brain that actually does the seeing” (64) when he envisages Utopia (full communism) and depicts it amidst an apocalyptic world by using his characters as a template for an Ideal commune, offering to the reader glimpses of his Form, a world in which people transcend because of collectivism, altruism, and selflessness.

This is my term paper for an English class. Comments are very much welcome and appreciated . :)