Los millonarios en la otra Venezuela

Paladares. Vista panorámica del exclusivo restaurante Buddha Bar, en Caracas, que ofrece comida fusión y una coctelería de alto nivel. (Fotos- Luis Robayo / AFP)

En los bares y en los restaurantes más caros de la capital venezolana existe un mundo paralelo y muy distante del que se vive en las convulsionadas calles

Sinónimo de lujo en todo el mundo, Buddha Bar se instaló en Caracas, el único en Sudamérica, donde por unas horas algunos olvidan la crisis política, las penurias y las protestas.

“Disfrutas en Caracas lo mismo que disfrutas en Nueva York, en Dubái, en San Petersburgo”, se jacta Cristhian Estephan, uno de los dueños del local, dominado por la enorme figura de un Buda en posición de loto.

Desfilan platos insignia como el atún Buddha Rey, las costillas de cerdo grilladas a las doce especias o los tacos de mero a las tres pimientas.

Es casi imposible imaginar que el país está en medio de una brutal crisis económica, social y política, marcada por falta de alimentos básicos, como la harina o el azúcar, más de dos meses de protestas en las calles y varias ciudades semiparalizadas.

Sufren la falta de alimentos o la inflación disparada, pero admiten que “nada en comparación” con los embates del venezolano común. Pertenecen a un grupo privilegiado con acceso a dólares que les permiten disfrutar de otra Venezuela, donde los restaurantes de moda se siguen llenando.

“Nosotros de día tiramos piedras y de noche venimos acá”, cuenta Ahisquel.

Esta mujer se toma una noche a la semana para salir con su marido, director de producción de una petrolera internacional.

“Después de ir a las marchas, es bueno tener un momentico de relax, aunque el relax nunca lo vas a tener hasta que este gobierno se vaya”, aclara esta mujer que no trabaja y vive en un barrio en el este de Caracas. “Donde están los escuálidos, los golpistas”, ironiza al referirse al mote que reciben por parte de los chavistas.

“It’s very difficult”, agrega su marido con un inglés perfecto. “Si tú en este país no ganas dinero en moneda extranjera, es imposible vivir”.

Muchos de los ricos venezolanos han abandonado el país hacia Madrid, Los Ángeles o Miami, desde que comenzó la revolución bolivariana con el fallecido presidente Hugo Chávez.

Pero varios decidieron quedarse, entre ellos el empresario Lorenzo Mendoza, uno de los hombres más ricos del país, a quien el gobierno considera uno de los principales actores de la “guerra económica” contra el régimen.

La empresa encuestadora Datanálisis calcula que este sector representa el 16 % del total de los 31 millones de venezolanos. Y según los expertos, la mayoría son “boliburgueses”, el mote acuñado a quienes se han hecho ricos durante los gobiernos chavistas.

“Es un socialismo que ha producido multimillonarios muy poderosos, en su mayoría funcionarios del gobierno o afines, que actualmente son uno de los principales sostenes del gobierno” de Nicolás Maduro, opinó la socióloga Colette Capriles, de la Universidad Simón Bolívar.

Y todo gira alrededor de la industria petrolera. “La estructura de la riqueza en Venezuela es la de un Estado rentista dependiente del sector petrolero. El Estado es el que distribuye esa renta y el gobierno chavista la utiliza para favorecer a los que haga falta”, estimó.

Pero no todos se reconocen como afines al chavismo, sino al contrario. Es el caso de Carlos, un abogado de 49 años, socio del Caracas Country Club.

“Huimos cuando vemos boliburgueses, los reconocemos a la distancia”, dice al borde de la piscina rodeada de árboles y de un campo de golf.

Este país “está carísimo, solo ellos (los boliburgueses) pueden pagarlo y vivir por aquí u otros barrios”, añade. Entre estas urbanizaciones menciona Lagunita (donde está el Lagunita Country Club, con un campo de 18 hoyos), una de las zonas más coquetas de Caracas, con ostentosas mansiones rodeadas de vallas eléctricas y fuertes medidas de seguridad.

Precios en restaurantes solo para los ricos

Para la mayoría de los venezolanos los precios de los restaurantes son prohibitivos. En el Buddha Bar, ocho piezas de sushi de salmón y langostinos cuestan 55.700 bolívares, poco más de la cuarta parte del ingreso mínimo, de 200.000 bolívares (unos $ 90,9 a la tasa oficial más alta y unos $ 24 a la cotización del mercado negro).

Al caer el sol, da miedo salir a la calle: Caracas se vacía y ya casi no se ve a nadie. Con una de las tasas de homicidios más altas del mundo (70,1 por cada 100.000 habitantes en 2016), la inseguridad es considerada uno de los principales problemas por los venezolanos, sean ricos o pobres.

Aunque “la clase alta no deja de salir”, asegura Estephan. Si bien admite que desde que se iniciaron las protestas el 1 de abril, la vida nocturna decayó.

De todas maneras, cree que pronto recuperará el ritmo de antaño.

The Most Radical Aspect of Jeremy Corbyn’s Program? Democratizing the Economy

A few months ago, a group of Labour Party researchers quietly delivered a report titled “Alternative Models of Ownership” to Shadow Chancellor John McDonnel 

A report from the Labour Party outlines plans to democratize models of ownership.

This story was first published at Jacobin. 

So much about the 2017 Labour election campaign has been heartening: the energy, the conviction, the full-throated embrace of remaking government in the service of the many.

All of the main campaign pledges — from free tuition to thousands of new homes to a stronger National Health Service — will change where money and resources flow in the UK, from those who need them least to those who need them most. But one set of proposals, if implemented, would go further, starting to transform the foundations of the economy.

A few months ago, a group of Labour Party researchers quietly delivered a report titled “Alternative Models of Ownership” to Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell. Its core message is simple: the Left must begin to democratize the economy.

An abandoned creed

And democratizing the economy means challenging the most important fundamental of capitalist economics: the primacy of private ownership. In particular, private ownership of capital, of all the things — the buildings, the machines, the tools, the hardware, and the software — that we use to make other things. Without a say in how tools are used, workers themselves become passive tools. Being able to actively participate in decision-making and ownership go hand in hand. Democratizing means taking ownership.

These ideas are not new, but they have been suppressed under the decades-long advance of right-wing ideas, including within traditionally left-wing parties and movements. In the UK, one of the last major proposals for democratizing the economy was the Lucas Alternative Corporate Plan. It was put forward by unionized workers at the Lucas Aerospace in 1976 in response to imminent restructuring that would see many of them fired.

The unions at Lucas canvassed their members and produced a detailed plan for an alternative kind of restructuring that would see the company transformed: from one with half of its output going to the military, to one producing socially useful products. Expanding on existing technology, workers proposed retooling to make everything from sorely needed kidney dialysis machines to early solar cells to hybrid power drives for vehicles.

Despite a global campaign, the Alternative Plan failed without adequate government pressure on Lucas. With the election of Margaret Thatcher a few short years later, the window on any similar push for economic transformation was shut.

“Alternative Models of Ownership” is one example of the window’s reopening. Many of the document’s ideas have subsequently found their way into the Labour Party election platform. The right-wing press has used it as evidence that Corbyn would “take Britain back to the ’70s.” But they’re wrong: the plans are firmly oriented to the future.

Why take control

The UK today is in a low-investment, low-productivity trap. And workers are feeling the brunt of it: long-run wage growth is hitting lows not seen since the nineteenth century. Inequality has grown steadily since the financial crisis. The economy, in short, is not working for most people.

“Alternative Models of Ownership” makes the case, rarely heard today, that we can tackle the roots of economic injustice and inequality, not just manage their effects. Democratizing ownership can move the UK economy away from the short-termism of the rich, who profit from unproductive, low-wage work. Socialists have always sought a high-productivity economy, where common ownership translates productivity gains into less work, more leisure, and a better life — as Corbyn says — for the many, not the few.

Instead of the usual fearmongering about robots taking jobs, the report argues that we can, and should, share in the benefits of automation and technological progress. Owned in common, technological advances of the future could free us of drudgery, rather than merely leave us unemployed and destitute.

And while it still makes too much of the dreaded automation, which has yet to show up in the productivity statistics, the document avoids uncritically repeating the wildest prognoses of imminent catastrophic unemployment. Democratic control over production, it says, is a goal regardless of whether robots are doing 20 percent, or one day 90 percent, of the work. Automation can be a threat or a promise depending on the structure of the economy:

The bigger immediate challenge is not the imminent rise of the robots but that too many people will remain trapped in robotic, drudgery-filled and low-productivity jobs. In this context, accelerating automation is a key political project. The goal should be to embrace the technological potential of modernity, accelerating into a more automated, productive future with all its liberating possibilities, while building new institutions around ownership, work, leisure and investment, where technological change is shaped by the common good.

How to take control

So if more economic democracy is the end, Labour’s plans focus on three means of reaching it.

First, there are co-ops, membership organizations where ownership and decision-making are shared by the members. There are many types of co-ops, from consumer co-ops where members do nothing more than elect boards of governors every few years to fully worker-run co-ops where shop floor decisions are subject to democratic deliberation. At their best, co-ops ensure new technology is implemented quickly but work is redistributed so that jobs are not lost.

Unsurprisingly, the Labour document focuses on worker co-ops. It relies on three main examples — plywood processing in the US Northwest, the region of Emilia-Romagna in Italy, and the Mondragon network from Spain — to make the case that worker co-ops can be as efficient (if not more efficient) than their privately owned counterparts. This argument is key to presenting co-ops as a cure to the diagnosis of low productivity.

Next there is “municipal and locally-led” ownership. This broad category includes everything from community shops to farmers’ markets and development trusts to social enterprises. Many of these are halfway houses between capitalist enterprise and direct economic democracy. The important fact is that they are responsive to their communities, are limited, partially or totally, in using profits for anything other than reinvestment in the community, and have broader social or environmental goals.

Because of their generally small size and precarity as outcrops of democracy in rough capitalist seas, both co-ops and locally led institutions require other “anchor institutions” to sustain or protect them. For instance, co-ops have a harder time accessing finance because lenders cannot gain rights of control if things go wrong. Local social enterprises, on the other hand, often find it difficult to get off the ground without procurement contracts from local authorities for what they produce.

The third category of economic democracy, national ownership, is usually on a vastly different scale. Where co-ops or social enterprises are most often quite small, state-owned enterprises are usually found among the “commanding heights” of the economy.

Even conventional economics grudgingly admits that there may be “natural” monopolies, sectors where fixed capital costs are so high that any number of firms greater than one is too costly. The post service is one example: a network of post offices that serves the entire population is a very costly thing to create. Not only does it not make sense to have two; anyone trying to create a second one will most likely fail, consumed by the high start-up costs (unless, of course, the government goes out of its way to hamstring or dismantle these monopolies).

“Alternative Model of Ownership” argues for state ownership where natural monopolies exist, in sectors where only the government can carry out the long-term and risky investment that scares off private investors, and where high-quality services are needed. This third category is — rightly! — kept quite broad. Economic democracy is not a narrow niche.

While state-owned enterprises give the government direct control over such things as pricing and production, there are no guarantees that they will be significantly more democratic, neither for their workers nor the citizens who use their goods or services. Labour’s report holds out the promise for a different kind of state, one that recognizes public ownership is a means for more democracy, not an end in itself.

In a more democratic state, workers might elect front-line managers within a national railway company whose board included representatives from unions, passenger rights groups, and local government. Community councils of patients could help chart the strategy of a public hospital — an idea the NHS briefly flirted with in the 1970s. Economic democracy is far more than public ownership.

What to control

Of the ideas within “Alternative Models of Ownership,” the one that figures most prominently in the Labour manifesto is nationalization. Or rather, renationalization. Corbyn has pledged to take crucial services such as rail and mail back under public ownership.

The privatization of the British railroads has been a textbook disaster: service has decreased, fares have skyrocketed, and ridership has dropped. The UK is a total laggard in the construction of high-speed rail — precisely the type of high-cost, high-risk endeavor with huge social and ecological benefits that is largely undertaken by state-run rail companies elsewhere.

The Royal Mail has seen some of the same dynamics in service quality and cost since becoming a for-profit business. Labour has committed to taking both back into public hands step by step: taking over rail companies as their franchises expire and reversing Royal Mail privatization.

A third major sector of the UK economy that’s gone from public into private hands is power generation and distribution. Unlike the cases of rail and mail, the pledge to bring the energy system back under public ownership draws on the second plank of “Alternative Models of Ownership”: Labour has said it will create a decentralized system where a single nationally owned grid is framed by a network of new municipally owned energy providers. The plan is to create new municipal entities alongside existing private providers, outcompeting and eventually replacing them with a combination of lower costs, better service, and mandated green power.

Moving the debate forward

John McDonnell has also spoken regularly about expanding co-ops, especially in cases where companies are failing and workers risk being laid off. Additionally, McDonnell has spoken of the “Right to Own,” a key proposal of Alternative Models of Ownership, which McDonnell says would give workers “first rights on buying out a company or plant that is being dissolved, sold, or floated on the stock exchange.” Labour is right to include co-ops as a potential source of economic democracy but its report isn’t as critical as it should be. In the first instance, there are times when businesses are struggling for good reason, whether due to technological obsolescence, a change in fashion or some other cause. Funds should then be directed not just to taking over the firms but to reorienting them.

This is what the precursors to Labour’s current policy at Lucas Aerospace wanted — and it is a much bigger project, one that may require far more than just buy-out funds: retraining, technical expertise, retooling, perhaps at least temporary nationalization to obtain funding.

More broadly, co-ops under capitalism often end up adopting capitalist business practices, even against the best wishes of their members. Wage disparities, an increasingly professionalized cadre of managers, arbitrary shop floor discipline — all of these are symptoms that have come to plague long-standing co-ops, for example ones in the Mondragon network. Others, such as those in the US plywood industry, have slowly died as the industry transformed.

There is nothing inherently good about small scale. It can, sometimes, root producers in communities and create some semblance of democratic ownership. But it can also generate inefficiencies, smaller cushions for risk, and provincialism — more parochial management or a lack of innovation.

Starting small may be easier, but ultimately more control over economic decision-making means more control over investment across the economy. Democratic planning has always been dogged by the question of directing investment. Alongside local experiments, we must be thinking about the heights of the global economy, the heart of our modern capitalist planning apparatus: the financial system. That it is missing from “Alternative Models of Ownership” shows the long road to more wholesale transformation.

In some sectors, economic democracy will be easier at the local level, in others larger entities will be more stable and resilient. There is an old left argument that capitalism creates its own conditions for being surpassed. Today’s enormous corporations pay poverty wages, despoil the environment, and are run as personal fiefdoms. But they also increase technical productivity and bring masses of people together, revealing the unquestionably social nature of work.

Despite the myth of meritocracy, workers in today’s global supply chains and massive service operations can see immediately that no one person, no Sam Walton, no Richard Branson, is responsible for making them run. We are bound together by a grand machinery. Under capitalism, the machinery distributes its growing bounty unequally, destroying human lives and nature in the process.

“Alternative Models of Ownership” returns to a key demand of the Left, one posed since the nineteenth century: that we take over the machinery and fundamentally retool it — that we take a private system of production and transform it into a social organism under democratic control.

Doing so requires steeling ourselves for a big fight. The report offers many proposals for democratic end goals, but we must also devise strategies for the inevitable struggles to achieve them. We cannot fall into a technocratic trap. Nationalizing industries or instituting municipal control are not neutral proposals but class demands. Labour’s surge in the polls and its fantastic campaign are a start – but we need a long-term focus on building the power that will be capable of making these ideas reality.

“Alternative Models of Ownership” is a real step forward, reviving the demand for economic transformation. It is an ambitious document and, undoubtedly, one of the most radical we have seen in mainstream politics for a long time. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour is proposing not just that we have a bigger slice of the pie, but a bigger say over how it is made.

Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person

By ALAIN de BOTTON

MAY 28, 2016

IT’S one of the things we are most afraid might happen to us. We go to great lengths to avoid it. And yet we do it all the same: We marry the wrong person.

Partly, it’s because we have a bewildering array of problems that emerge when we try to get close to others. We seem normal only to those who don’t know us very well. In a wiser, more self-aware society than our own, a standard question on any early dinner date would be: “And how are you crazy?”

Perhaps we have a latent tendency to get furious when someone disagrees with us or can relax only when we are working; perhaps we’re tricky about intimacy after sex or clam up in response to humiliation. Nobody’s perfect. The problem is that before marriage, we rarely delve into our complexities. Whenever casual relationships threaten to reveal our flaws, we blame our partners and call it a day. As for our friends, they don’t care enough to do the hard work of enlightening us. One of the privileges of being on our own is therefore the sincere impression that we are really quite easy to live with.

Our partners are no more self-aware. Naturally, we make a stab at trying to understand them. We visit their families. We look at their photos, we meet their college friends. All this contributes to a sense that we’ve done our homework. We haven’t. Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating.

For most of recorded history, people married for logical sorts of reasons: because her parcel of land adjoined yours, his family had a flourishing business, her father was the magistrate in town, there was a castle to keep up, or both sets of parents subscribed to the same interpretation of a holy text. And from such reasonable marriages, there flowed loneliness, infidelity, abuse, hardness of heart and screams heard through the nursery doors. The marriage of reason was not, in hindsight, reasonable at all; it was often expedient, narrow-minded, snobbish and exploitative. That is why what has replaced it — the marriage of feeling — has largely been spared the need to account for itself.

What matters in the marriage of feeling is that two people are drawn to each other by an overwhelming instinct and know in their hearts that it is right. Indeed, the more imprudent a marriage appears (perhaps it’s been only six months since they met; one of them has no job or both are barely out of their teens), the safer it can feel. Recklessness is taken as a counterweight to all the errors of reason, that catalyst of misery, that accountant’s demand. The prestige of instinct is the traumatized reaction against too many centuries of unreasonable reason.

But though we believe ourselves to be seeking happiness in marriage, it isn’t that simple. What we really seek is familiarity — which may well complicate any plans we might have had for happiness. We are looking to recreate, within our adult relationships, the feelings we knew so well in childhood. The love most of us will have tasted early on was often confused with other, more destructive dynamics: feelings of wanting to help an adult who was out of control, of being deprived of a parent’s warmth or scared of his anger, of not feeling secure enough to communicate our wishes. How logical, then, that we should as grown-ups find ourselves rejecting certain candidates for marriage not because they are wrong but because they are too right — too balanced, mature, understanding and reliable — given that in our hearts, such rightness feels foreign. We marry the wrong people because we don’t associate being loved with feeling happy.

We make mistakes, too, because we are so lonely. No one can be in an optimal frame of mind to choose a partner when remaining single feels unbearable. We have to be wholly at peace with the prospect of many years of solitude in order to be appropriately picky; otherwise, we risk loving no longer being single rather more than we love the partner who spared us that fate.

Finally, we marry to make a nice feeling permanent. We imagine that marriage will help us to bottle the joy we felt when the thought of proposing first came to us: Perhaps we were in Venice, on the lagoon, in a motorboat, with the evening sun throwing glitter across the sea, chatting about aspects of our souls no one ever seemed to have grasped before, with the prospect of dinner in a risotto place a little later. We married to make such sensations permanent but failed to see that there was no solid connection between these feelings and the institution of marriage.

Indeed, marriage tends decisively to move us onto another, very different and more administrative plane, which perhaps unfolds in a suburban house, with a long commute and maddening children who kill the passion from which they emerged. The only ingredient in common is the partner. And that might have been the wrong ingredient to bottle.

The good news is that it doesn’t matter if we find we have married the wrong person.

We mustn’t abandon him or her, only the founding Romantic idea upon which the Western understanding of marriage has been based the last 250 years: that a perfect being exists who can meet all our needs and satisfy our every yearning.

We need to swap the Romantic view for a tragic (and at points comedic) awareness that every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us — and we will (without any malice) do the same to them. There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness. But none of this is unusual or grounds for divorce. Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for.

This philosophy of pessimism offers a solution to a lot of distress and agitation around marriage. It might sound odd, but pessimism relieves the excessive imaginative pressure that our romantic culture places upon marriage. The failure of one particular partner to save us from our grief and melancholy is not an argument against that person and no sign that a union deserves to fail or be upgraded.

The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn’t exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently — the person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the “not overly wrong” person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.

Mujica: La política debe aportar la justicia social que falta al capitalismo

El expresidente José Mujica, afirmó hoy que la política debe aportar la justicia social que le falta al capitalismo en un seminario sobre el futuro del trabajo, organizado por la Organización Internacional del Trabajo (OIT) y celebrado en la capital chilena.

"Debe haber un interés de la sociedad en el bien común. El capitalismo no lo va a hacer porque está en su naturaleza ser depredador. Es la política la que debe aportar la justicia social que le falta al capitalismo", destacó Mujica.

El exmandatario pidió no elegir como representantes del pueblo a aquellos que les gusta demasiado el dinero.

"No hay que elegir a los que les gusta demasiado la plata. Hay que combatirlos. Que se pongan a generar plata y no se metan en política porque la desacredita y es la única que nos distingue como especie para avanzar", afirmó.

Y añadió: "Hay que escoger a los que sienten que los logros sociales son suyos, que creen en la política como una función de carácter colectivo".

Mujica explicó que concibe esta contraposición entre capitalismo y política como un "enfrentamiento" y sostuvo que el objetivo de esta tendencia económica es simplemente multiplicar el valor de los bienes.

"Solo quiere cuadrar los números, no le pidamos igualdad social. Por eso los trabajadores tienen que tener una posición política que les permita defenderse y tener conciencia de esta realidad", incidió.

Durante su alocución, puso como ejemplo a nuestro país resaltando que hace años se tomaron las decisiones políticas adecuadas para proteger a la sociedad.

"Fuimos el primer país del mundo que estableció derechos para los trabajadores, en considerar a los sindicatos como los abogados del pobre, de forma que el capitalismo no afectó tanto y eso contribuyó a crear una sociedad rica en bienes públicos. Hubo un reconocimiento profundo del trabajo y la distribución de sus frutos como la madre de las políticas sociales para generar igualdad", dijo.

Y agregó que "así empieza un mundo de más equidad, menos concentración de la riqueza, más justicia social. Al capital hay que decirle 'frene querido, voy a tener que meter mano al bolsillo para tapar agujeros'. Alguien tiene que pararlo porque somos muy depredadores. Ese es el papel de la política".

Además, Mujica criticó la falta de liderazgo de las instituciones políticas e insistió en que estas deben conducir el mundo.

"Hemos generado una civilización global de la cual somos prisioneros porque no tiene conducción política. Creo que este es el peor cataclismo de nuestro tiempo. Tendríamos que estar discutiendo medidas sobre economía global o el cambio climático. Tendríamos que estar tomando decisiones y no lo hacemos", aseguró.

El ex mandatario uruguayo aseveró que el poder se ha trasladado desde los gobiernos a las empresas transnacionales, que son las que ahora mismo manejan el mundo.

"Sabemos lo que hay que hacer y no lo hacemos. Podríamos acabar con el hambre y la miseria en el mundo. Sin embargo, esta discusión no se puede dar porque no hay nadie con capacidad de decidir en ningún lado. Las Naciones Unidas (ONU) no hacen nada por impotencia política y se ahogan en burocracia", opinó.

EFE

Depeche Mode’s Dave Gahan: why I don’t understand my own band

How one frontman died three times.

When Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys was the assistant editor of Smash Hits, he made the following observation:

Dave Gahan has become an accomplished bum wiggler on stage, as well as shaking his pelvis in a very suggestive way. If you think that Depeche Mode are a bunch of solemn, synthesiser-programming boffins, you’d be amazed at the waves of screaming that they arouse. A lot of the credit must be taken by Dave whose energetic performance is one of the most sexy to be seen on a stage anywhere.

Tennant’s words might not have helped the cause of a band roundly mocked by the ­so-called serious music press and trapped in a world of suburban, teenage, sticky-floor synthpop. But he put a finger on something about the man the critics once called Plain Dave from Basildon. He was sexy, but he hadn’t always been.

Gahan sits in the windowless conference room of a Knightsbridge hotel, elbows on the table, his flexible wrists sprouting out of his leather jacket and whirling about like two little trees in a strong wind. He has silver chains, hair like a spiv, and eyes creased by years of chemical abuse and sudden, explosive smiling. Somewhere under his singlet there is a giant tattoo of angel wings which took ten hours to complete. There are piercings on him, too, not visible. One goes through his “guiche”, or perineum; he once said he had so many holes in his male apparatus that he weed like a watering can. Gahan has nearly died three times. The first was a heart attack on stage in 1993. As he was stretchered off, his bandmates finished the encore.

Two nights before we met, the accomplished bum wiggler, bathed in blue light and wearing a leather waistcoat over his naked torso, played a special gig at Glasgow Barrowlands, Depeche Mode’s smallest, most exclusive crowd in thirty years. He instinctively scanned the front row for a particular fan he sees at fifty European shows a year, and eventually spotted him. “My sight!” he mourns. “All my sunglasses are prescription. I can see the stars at night but nothing else. We have a house way out on Long Island, and in the summer you can lay in the garden and the stars are just – bang.” His fingers flash in a re-creation of astral beauty.

He speaks and thinks at the accelerated pace of an ex-addict, and his Essex accent is spiced with American Rs. Across London, his bandmates Martin Gore and Andrew Fletcher do a joint interview at a different hotel. Because Depeche Mode and Dave Gahan don’t get on.

No one could have known, when Tennant wrote his ode, that the band would outgrow Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet or Culture Club. Today, Gore and Gahan live on opposite sides of America. They meet only when they have to – coming together to roll out their vast electronic rock show around the world, playing to stadium crowds of 60,000 a time.

Depeche Mode fans aren’t like ­Coldplay’s. They are a race, a diaspora: a Gothic mass of supporters viewed by the band with a mixture of gratitude, obligation and fear. There are more people wanting to see Depeche Mode live now than there ever were before – and no one is quite sure why.

A successful band is a life sentence. The human animal is a different creature at 18, 25, 40 and 70, but rock stars pass their lives together and, to a certain extent, are contractually obliged not to change. They are frozen at the age at which they began their strange journey. I ask Gahan – 55 years old, three times married, three times almost dead – whether going to a different school from his bandmates was part of the problem.

“They definitely have some strange pact that I have often tried to bash my way into.”

“They’ve definitely got that,” he says. “Fletch and Martin definitely have some strange pact that I have often tried to bash my way into.” He waves to imaginary colleagues. “Hey, I’m here, too! Just not feeling the love right now! But I don’t yearn for that any more. It’s taken a long time – but I am fully aware of my place.”

Gore, chief songwriter, and Fletcher the synth player attended the James Hornsby School in Basildon. Alison Moyet was a classmate; she was, Fletcher once said, the best fighter in the school. They had a band with their friend Vince Clarke, who left to form Erasure and Yazoo. Fletcher and Clarke were Christians; they didn’t know Gahan, who was a pupil at the Barstable School three miles away – periodically, spending his weekends at an attendance centre in Romford as payback for joyriding and theft. He eventually gained a certificate from Southend Technical College that qualified him for window dressing.

Gahan was spotted by Clarke while performing David Bowie’s “Heroes” at a jam session, and joined the band “because I had absolutely f*** all else going on”. As a child, he had done Jagger impersonations on Top of the Pops nights for the benefit of his aunts.

Depeche Mode were signed to one indie label – Mute Records – for three decades. Mute’s founder, Daniel Miller, called them futurists, but Bananarama called them wimps. As Don Watson wrote in the NME: “Describe a member of Depeche Mode? Well, one of them’s got a blonde fringe, but then so have I . . .”

“Oh, they hated us!” Gahan cries. “They hated us. We were a joke. But we were also misunderstood.”

***

In 1992 Gahan travelled to meet Gore and Fletcher at a studio session in Spain. He had not seen them for nearly two years; he’d been living in Los Angeles, where he’d moved from England, leaving behind a wife and son. He tells me his bandmates were surprised by what they saw. He had grown his hair long and was bearded and covered in piercings. He was talking about American rock music – Jane’s Addiction and Alice in Chains. His weight had dropped to nine stone, and he had developed a heroin habit.

Gahan says brightly: “Although I was wither­ing away, I was really empowered. I was cocksure. Our manager looked right at me and said, ‘Great. This is what we need!’ I said, ‘Guys, everything’s changing. We’ve got to step it up.’ When I think about it now it must have been quite shocking. All of a sudden I was throwing my weight around. Sporadically, mind you.”

In America, Basildon didn’t mean anything. Depeche Mode were not small-town boys: in 1988 they had played to 60,000 at the Pasadena Rose Bowl. They had a huge Goth following, and were mobbed by clubbers in Detroit.

In the sanctuary of the Spanish villa where the band and engineers would live together to work on a new album, Songs of Faith and Devotion, the thin new Gahan let his dark vision percolate. The only problem was, he wouldn’t come out of his room. The photographer Anton Corbijn, hired by the band to record their changing image, would go to check on him. When he wasn’t in a heroin stupor, his creativity was being applied in directions other than music.

“I started oil painting!” he says. “Mostly portrait-type things. Anton come into my room once, and I was painting this portrait of my cat at the time. The cat was just kind of floating in space. It was all purples and greens on this big canvas. [Photos remain on the internet.] Anton said: ‘I can’t paint – that’s why I take photographs.’ He admired my painting. He would say: ‘You’ve been up here a few days. They really want you to come down and maybe do some singing.’ [He giggles.] And I would come down. I think they hated me, but I really didn’t care. There was something really freeing about being hated.”

Down in the studio, Gore was writing new songs – stark electronica produced with a rougher, industrial rock sound. Corbijn’s intense black-and-white videos lifted Depeche Mode into the cool hierarchy of European electronic music – in Sweden and Finland today, you’d think they were the biggest band in the world. And in Gahan’s bedroom, the biggest part of the transformation was taking place.

For an entire generation, the new-look Gahan was all they knew. In suburban living rooms, on The ITV Chart Show, a strung-out character with black pools for eyes was wringing his hands against desert backdrops or following dodgy women down darkened corridors. At the back of the adolescent mind, there was a dawning knowledge that the story was real, somehow – that the man who sang “Personal Jesus” was undergoing his own strange process of self-flagellation. The little news bulletins on the ITV Chart Showflashed: Depeche Mode’s lead singer was rushed to hospital last week after a suicide attempt.

Suddenly the rock press, which loves nothing better than someone who appears to embody their art, couldn’t get enough of Plain Dave. He was given lengthy features in all the titles that had mocked Depeche Mode in their early years; and, for news lines or therapy, he talked – a lot.

In 1997 he told the NME, in an article headlined “Dead man talking”, that the self-abuse had all been part of a master plan:

“I consciously thought, there’s no f***ing rock stars out there any more. There is no one willing to go the whole way to do this. So I created a monster . . . and I dragged my body through the mud, to show that I could do it.”

It was a human experiment, a kind of rock-star Method acting

The way he describes it, it was a human experiment - a kind of rock-star Method acting. “I wasthat guy you saw in those songs. I was living that life, and it was working. I felt empowered, I really did. So it was cool, and suddenly I felt cool, too. I felt like I was king of the castle.”

The problem was, it was an experiment he could not control. One of the most memorable stories from the time is the rumour – during a 1993 tour that Rolling Stone called “the most debauched of all time”– that Gahan had bitten the British journalist Andrew Perry on the neck, like a vampire. Depeche Mode were touring with Primal Scream, also heavily involved in heroin; their entourage included both a drug dealer and a psychiatrist. I called Perry at home in Kingston Upon Thames; he told me of a backstage scene where Gahan, amid groupies and bondage folk, was brought in on a purple throne and placed in the centre of the room. The attack on the neck was “really more of love bite”. Months later the two met again and Gahan said, “You know, you were the only person that night who thought to ask me if I was OK.”

If Gahan hadn’t been able to score, he would inject water. In 1994, his mother and son Jack, visiting from England, found him on the floor in the bathroom with his works round his arm; he said he was injecting steroids, for his voice. In August 1995, he called his mother and, as they talked, he slit his wrists, returned to the sofa and sat down, allowing himself to bleed. At the Sunset Marquis hotel in Los Angeles he overdosed on a speedball – cocaine and heroin – and his heart stopped for two minutes.

I have been told before our interview that memories of those days are painful but Gahan brings them up almost immediately, in his own, strange way.

“I had a lot of fun in LA, I tell you,” he says, eyes twinkling. “My second wife, who I married there, Teresa, we had a great time. There was nothing wrong with us – it was just me: I was really a mess. And she divorced me, rightly so. And I knew if I stayed there I was probably going to die.”

He left LA shortly after his overdose and moved to New York, where he had one friend, the actress Jennifer Sklias, now his wife of twenty years.

“I sort of went there and latched on to her, really,” he says, almost apologetically. “She liked Billie Holiday and John Coltrane. All of a sudden I realised I needed to be around people who couldn’t care less about being around Dave Gahan.”

***

When Gahan was ten years old, he came home from school to find a man sitting at the kitchen table who, his mother told him, was his father. The person he thought was his father had died a year earlier. The man at the table took him and his sister out for the day – “bought us a gift; I think he bought me a sweater” – and didn’t come back.

The man, a bus driver called Len ­Callcott, of Malaysian ancestry, had left the family when Gahan was six months old. “I am told I sort of knew about this?” he says, with an upward inflection. He later found out that Len used to call a neighbour, Mrs Clarke, one of the few people in the neighbourhood who had a phone, and ask after him. The messages were not relayed by his mother. “I could have done with that information, probably!” he laughs. “But everyone has these stories, don’t they? My mum was raised by an aunt she thought was her mum. It was a generational thing. And Martin has a similar story.” Martin Gore discovered, as an adult, that his father was a black
American GI.

The only other thing he and Gore have in common, Gahan says, is a love of David Bowie and peas. Recording sessions for their new album, Spirit, were the “spikiest” yet, and involved a mysterious kind of ­intervention, organised by producer James Ford, in which Gore and Gahan sat down and had it out with each other in some way. Gore, he says, is not confrontational, “whereas I am like this”– he raises his hands like a bear and growls.

The arguments, even after all these years, usually revolve around Gahan’s desire to be taken seriously as a songwriter. “I said, ‘Martin, I need to be your partner in the studio. I can no longer just be the guy who sings the songs – a very overpaid vocalist for you.’”

Gahan co-wrote a song on the new record called “Cover Me”. He becomes very intense talking about the track, which is about a man who has the opportunity to go and find another planet. When he gets to his new planet, he finds it’s exactly the same – he just failed to appreciate the beauty of the old one.

“It’s about that dread of realising it’s not them, it’s me,” he says. “It’s about the beauty of communication, of wanting to be understood and loved. I’ve spent most of my life trying to get that. But sometimes when I get it, I don’t know what to do with it. When I feel that side of me that is yearning for connection, I try to get it – and then it goes away again.”

He took the song to Gore who, he says, didn’t understand the metaphor.

“I’m like, ‘What the f*** do you know?’” he cries. “‘I never question your songs, Martin, I just sing them!’”

***

Sometimes, when you’re watching Gahan on stage, you think to yourself: this shouldn’t work, but it does. His metrosexual moves are swollen to cartoon proportions to hit the back of huge stadiums. Traces remain of the Personal Jesus, his arms thrown out, the holes that once peppered them now healed into scars. There is a pout as big as Freddie Mercury’s, an arse looser than Jagger’s and a huge, deep baritone voice that always felt at odds with his compact, sinewy frame.

He may chase artistic integrity but he is a frontman in the classic sense: in the service of something, in need of love, tricky, trapped – and fully aware of his place.

“It horrifies me to think that I might be on stage at 70 years old,” he says. “It really horrifies me. I’ve got the idea of me walking on some remote beach somewhere, hopefully still with Jennifer, and a couple of dogs [“dawgs”], and a beard that’s down to here.”

When I ask if this is just a fantasy, a little surge of energy goes through him. “I feel like I’m getting close to the point where I will actually have to stop doing this,” he says. And then, not for the first time in our conversation, one thought seems to bring about its opposite.

“There is a sort of . . . calling with Depeche Mode,” he says. “It’s different. And Martin and I have this relationship that has been strange for years and years and years. The stage is the only place where I don’t feel my age. We have so many songs, I see them in different blocks, for each era, and they’re all different senses for me. They are all different colours and feelings. But I guess
music’s like that for everyone, isn’t it?”

He says it took him ten years to become the singer he wanted to be – around the early Nineties, then, when he ran his own human experiment. “I wanted to get to the place where even someone else’s songs would become mine if I sang them.” Gore has always enjoyed that kind of personal satisfaction, Gahan says, “because he found himself through his songwriting.”

“I’ve been married three times. I’m the one that ups and leaves. And Depeche Mode is the only thing that I haven’t left.”

Why is that?

“Because I haven’t really understood it yet. I don’t understand it, and I probably never will.”

Does Gore understand Depeche Mode?

“Yes, I think he does. I think he understands it very clearly. And he made that very clear to me.”

I ask him if there are any bands that actually get on.

“I can’t imagine there are, if they’re being truthful in any way,” he says. “We all have huge egos. The trick is to work out: are those egos destroying what could be magnificent, or are they creating it?”

As our interview ends he gets up, silver chains jangling, and beckons me in for an quick little platonic, leathery hug. On my way out he asks for another and says, “I’m sorry – it’s what I do!” 

Depeche Mode play London Stadium on Saturday 3 June