We live in a time when the word “war” always seems too big, too brutal to be used outside the noise of bombs or the steel of tanks. However, there is a war unfolding before our eyes, without visible trenches, without maps of advance or retreat, but no less devastating because it is instigated by multimillionaires, who read the market, who incite the poor to recognize the poor as their enemy.

The battlefield of this war is the market, that modern fetish that presents itself as natural and inevitable, but which is, in fact, the most sophisticated machine of domination ever built. The market not only regulates prices, but it also governs the destiny of humanity and the survival of our planet. Contrary to what we are led to believe, the market does not just distribute goods; it spreads misery, populism, and despair in its wake. And when it fails, it always fails on the side of those who have the least, those who carry the burden of daily survival on their shoulders.
There is a silent perversity in this war. Workers see the enemy in the unemployed, not in the boss who relocated the factory. It is the migrant neighbor who is the focus of hatred, not the investment fund that manipulates housing prices. It is the woman who receives a subsidy who is the target of frustration, not the businessmen, corrupt politicians, or bankers who hide millions in tax havens. The real enemy does not show itself; it hovers invisibly, like a faceless shadow, and its greatest victory is to make its victims fight each other.
Every GDP statistic, every percentage point of growth, is also an index of the hidden misery of the homeless person who has lost their home, the child who arrives at school without breakfast, the mother who lives on two precarious jobs. The market, erected as the measure of all things, ultimately becomes the most effective instrument of social exclusion.
The trap is set when the market wears the mask of neutrality, speaks the language of rationality, and promises efficiency and abundance. But its true purpose is to perpetuate inequalities, produce winners and losers, and show that poverty is a consequence of laziness or bad luck. Perverse and manipulative, the market knows how to feed off a system that needs margins and surpluses to sustain itself.

In this war, peace is not the silence of weapons, but the resigned acceptance of the imposed order. It is the peace of those who, crushed by a media at the service of market-dictated policies, do not recognize the true enemy and direct their anger against their fellow human beings. It is the peace of servitude disguised as freedom of choice. Peace is imposed by manipulated and uncontested decisions because they originate from the truth that comes from the vote. A peace that is nothing more than the war declared by populism and the far right against all workers.
The hope of seeing this war end lies in a fragile, almost improbable, but still real possibility: the failure of the machinery that sustains the market as a total machine of domination. This machinery will only cease to function when the poor, scattered and fragmented, understand that their adversary is not the other poor person, the unemployed neighbor, the migrant who crosses the seas, the woman who receives a subsidy, the young person who accepts a precarious job, but rather the market, which, like a cruel referee, pits them against each other in constant competition, feeding the illusion that there is only room for a few and never for everyone.
That is why words such as fraternity and empathy, so often forgotten in today’s political lexicon, are now more revolutionary than any party banner. Only the logic of fraternity and empathy can dismantle the gears that the market needs to lubricate with the permanent conflict between the poor. Where there is fraternity, there will be no blind competition; where there is empathy, there will be no exclusion; where there is recognition of the other as an equal, there will be no room for this invisible war that consumes us.

The market fears the moment when the poor cease to see other poor people as rivals and begin to recognize them as allies in the construction of peace. Not the peace of cannibals, which is built on the silence of the vanquished and indifference to the misery of the excluded. But the peace of equals, a peace woven from the sharing of bread and common dignity.

Societies ruled by market-driven politics paradoxically call themselves falsely Christian. They preach freedom and equality, but are structured on exploitation and exclusion. Christianity, in essence, teaches brotherhood and sisterhood, sharing, caring for one’s neighbor, and defending the marginalized. At the same time, the market, on the contrary, spreads throughout the world the logic of competition, accumulation, and indifference to the suffering of others. Thus, what presents itself as civilization and faith becomes a distortion of Christian morality, replaced by the cold calculation of profit, which sacrifices the human community on the altar of capital.
This chronicle is not a lament about misery; it is an appeal to conscience. May the poor look at the market and see in it the true battlefield, and not in the weary face of their fellow man. Only then will peace, which is nothing more than the administration of suffering, cease to be the rhetoric of the rulers and become the project of the ruled. A collective creation of those who refuse to be instruments of the wealth of others.
Peace, when it is between equals, will not be an imposed agreement, but a shared achievement.

Henrique Levy – Poet and Fiction Writer, residing in the Azores.

Translated by Diniz Borges