"When you buy something, you are not paying money for it. You are paying with the hours of life you had to spend earning that money. The difference is that life is one thing money can't buy.
Life only gets shorter. And it's painful to waste one's life and freedom that way." (Jose Mujica) Jose "Pepe" Mujica, former president of Uruguay died last month on 13 May 2025, just a week before his 90th birthday.
I must admit that Mujica's death saddened me greatly. I certainly did not consider him a great revolutionary of the kind who is admired like a god on earth. He was by no means the Lenin of our times, or Che Guevara or Fidel Castro.
Pepe Mujica was simply a good man. That is how I would sum him up: a good man. It seems so trivial, and yet it is an unusual thing in today's times.
In fact, not only in the current moment, but in the world of omnipresent capitalism, this is incredibly important. Capitalism is a system that was best summed up by the irreplaceable Samir Amin. He said that capitalism is based on three values: “private property, which means private property of some and non-property of others, inequality, and competition, which is the way of giving legitimacy to inequality.
And this is why it can never have a human face, it can never stop polarization, it can never stop the destruction of nature.” (Image Credits: Matías Bergara) For me, Jose Mujica was an example, a kind of moral signpost in life. However, immediately on reading these words, my communist friends will accuse me of idealism, for referring to such “stupid” (in their opinion) ideas as “morality.” Therefore, in the further part of the article I will try to show why Pepe was not only a moral signpost, but his attitude, lifestyle and what he said have very materialistic foundations. Jose Mujica many times said things along the following lines: “Don't waste your life in consumerism, find time to live to be happy […]” “If you don't have many possessions, then you don't need to work all your life like a slave to sustain them, and therefore you have more time for yourself […]” “I don't want to be an apologist for poverty, but I can't stand waste, useless spending, wasted energy and having to live squandering stuff […]” “Does this planet have enough resources so seven or eight billion can have the same level of consumption and waste that today is seen in rich societies?
It is this level of hyper-consumption that is harming our planet.” These four quotes brilliantly sum up what I want to say about him and the materialistic attitudes of his uniqueness. Mujica lived his entire life near Montevideo, the capital of Uruguay, in the countryside, in a small, three-room house, growing vegetables and chrysanthemums sold at the local market with his wife Lucia Topolansky – also the vice president of Uruguay. As he himself said, he did not glorify poverty.
He simply lived without falling into consumerism. What he wanted to show us with his life was that consumerism – no longer Western, as it is a characteristic of the upper and middle classes of the world – will lead us nowhere except self-destruction. “I belong to a generation that wanted to change the world.
I was crushed, defeated, pulverized, but I still dream that it is worth fighting so that people can live a little better and with a greater sense of equality” This message is crucially relevant. Especially at a time when forces that consider themselves left-wing tell us – and China and Vietnam are special examples of such opportunism – that “to get rich is glorious.” These people say that socialism is a system in which people all over the world can live a Western middle-class lifestyle, consume without restraint, produce billions of tons of garbage, go on foreign holidays every year to expensive hotels, spend evenings in restaurants and parties, spend tons of money, etc. And this is just absurd, which Fidel Castro also understood when he said: "Capitalism created lifestyle and models of consumerism that are incompatible with reality […] imagine every person in China owned a car, or if every person in India, Latin America, or Africa would have the same ambition […] How long would oil last?
How long would natural gas last?" This idea was also expressed by Pepe Mujica himself in one of his last interviews, which he gave four months before his death, saying: "There are 3.5 million people living in Uruguay, and every year we import over 27 million pairs of shoes. Why do we need it?
Wouldn't it be better to create good shoes that can be worn for 10-15 years? […] Subconsciously, we think that constantly buying new things is an expression of progress, we buy, we live in a rush, we work all the time… and then… you're an old man and your life is gone", continuing that life cannot look like this: "life is not for working, we have to work to live, not the other way around." (Image Credits: Matías Bergara) In the last interview that I mentioned above, Mujica was very philosophical and conveyed many obvious, yet ignored thoughts.
There he said, among other things: "People are struggling with economic difficulties that force them to compromise. You are free when you spend your life according to your beliefs, but when you meet obligations because you need to earn money, you are not free at all – you are dependent. That is why I propose common sense in life […] I do not propose poverty – I advise against it, but you do not have to change your car or refrigerator every two years, because you do not live to buy […] I don't think people should work more than 8 hours a day.
Trade unions have won us a 6-hour work day. And what do people do? They work two jobs!!!
Where do they have time for their family, children, garden, I don't understand this world." We must beware of "false left-wing prophets" who always justify themselves by saying that if they did not promote consumerism, poor people who want to escape poverty "would never follow them." Of course, this is complete nonsense, which they only say because they themselves do not want to give up their lifestyle, because it is too pleasant to enjoy the "pleasures" of such a life.
However, we must understand that most of the "pleasures" that consumerism provides us with are nothing more than the creation of unnecessary products, attractions, entertainment created only so that capitalists can enrich themselves even more and distract people from the problem of growing inequality. “I belong to a generation that wanted to change the world. I was crushed, defeated, pulverized, but I still dream that it is worth fighting so that people can live a little better and with a greater sense of equality.” This quote, in my opinion, best sums up Pepe Mujica.
In essence, I have the impression that he was a very sad man who often smiled, was very warm and sociable, but in his eyes there was despair visible throughout his life. I think that despair stemmed from what he himself said in the above quote, that he "was defeated." In the 1960s, Mujica was a member of the communist guerrilla Movimiento de Liberación Nacional–Tupamaros, which wanted to revolutionize Uruguay by transforming the country into a socialist state.
The US overthrew the Uruguayan government as part of Operation Condor, introducing a violent right-wing military junta, which defeated this guerrilla, and Mujica himself was tortured and spent 12 years in prison in complete isolation. There was even a film about it, A Twelve-Year Night. So he was a man of great ideas – and there is no greater idea in the world than the communist idea, that is, the idea to create a just and equal world, in which there would be no competition, in which people would not compete with each other, but simply enjoy themselves and nature.
Unfortunately, however, he was broken and that is why at the end of his life, as he himself said, he fought for people to live “a little better and with a greater sense of equality.” And that was also the president he was in years 2010-2015. Not a revolutionary one, but rather a social democratic one, who introduced same-sex marriage in Uruguay, legalized abortion and marijuana, and carried out an energy transformation, thanks to which today 90% of the electricity produced in Uruguay comes from renewable energy sources (mainly biomass). Despite the fact that he was not a revolutionary president, he certainly had a revolutionary past.
It should be emphasized that he was one of the last – Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega and former Cuban president Raul Castro are still alive – revolutionaries in the world who stood at the head of the state. These were people who led glorious chapters of guerrilla warfare, risking their own lives, abandoning all comforts and their own prospects of "success" for the good of others – to build a better tomorrow. And for that I thank you, Pepe.
Rest in Power!
