“The disease of the century is an insatiable thirst for wealth,” declared Simón Rodríguez, analyzing the dynamics that defined modernity. His diagnosis, published in 1842 in the edition of American Societies of 1828, was not merely a moral critique, but a political X-ray of a system that was beginning to consolidate itself under the logic of unbridled accumulation.
Rodríguez questions the relationship between the infrastructure (the material base) and the superstructure (the ideology and institutions) of nascent capitalism. He identifies three delusions that still resonate with unsettling relevance: traffic mania, colonomania, and cult mania. He describes a mechanism where commerce allies itself with the sciences to dominate the arts, understood here as the modes of production. This is an early intuition of the alliance between industrial capital and technological development, which seeks to subordinate human labor to the demands of an insatiable market. For the Caracas-born politician, the economy is not an isolated entity; it is a structure that requires science and ideology to ensure that the producing class remains, paradoxically, bound to poverty.
The critique of the state is equally forceful. The “king” he describes is not a figure of lineage or pedigree, but rather an instrumental figure: an administrator of commercial affairs at the service of the “company.” Rodríguez anticipates the vision of the state as a capital management committee. Furthermore, by dissecting the division between the “cultured”—which protect raw materials abroad—and the “sciences”—which manage transformation at home—he foreshadows the current center-periphery divide, where control of resources is the vital mechanism for fueling the system's engine.
Today, rereading these lines, Simón Rodríguez's insight is astonishing. Capital's plan continues to rely on seduction or, when that fails, on force. However, Rodríguez offers us a tool for emancipation: “the century has its disease; but it also has its Genius.” That genius resides in the “enlightenment” of the individual, in their capacity to subject the capital project to critique.
Inviting criticism is not an academic exercise, but a political imperative. Faced with the "insatiable thirst" that threatens to collapse our society today, Rodríguez's proposal remains a beacon: we will not emerge from the crisis with more mercantile delusions, but by recovering the critical consciousness that allows us, finally, to stop being vassals of a plan that does not belong to us.
