The Russian World and its Cathedral

On the threshold of the jubilee congress of the World Russian People’s Council in the Kremlin, which is dedicated to the Russian World, it is necessary to address the very concept of “Russian World” in a little more detail.

The very combination of the Russian World caused a lot of controversy and heated politics. Everyone tried to interpret it arbitrarily, and depending on the position of individual authors changed the very meaning. Some turned it into a caricature, others, on the contrary, glorified it in every possible way, but often to the detriment of the content.

First of all, the most important distinction should be made: the Russian World does not mean the same thing as the Russian Federation as a nation-state. This is probably recognized by everyone. But some believe that the Russian World is broader and larger than Russia, others that it is narrower and more localized, while others place it in a somewhat intermediate position.

In the first case, and this is the most correct and meaningful use of the term “Russian World,” we are talking about Russia as a civilization. And it is in this sense that it is understood by the World Russian People’s Council, as an association of all people who consider the Russian civilization as their own—regardless of where they live and what state they are citizens of. In this case, the Russian World coincides with the Russian civilization, but this in turn does not exclude other peoples united with the Russians by the community of destiny, but includes them. Hence the closeness of the concept of the Russian World to Russia-Eurasia, as Eurasian philosophers understood it. It is not just a country, a state, but the whole world, a flowering of ethnicities and cultures, a spiritual historical cosmos, united for centuries around the core of the Russian people. To be part of the Russian World in this understanding means to share the spirit and culture, manifested in all its splendor in multidimensional and multipolar forms of historical creation, encompassing politics, economics, art, industry, ethics.

In this understanding, the Russian World is inextricably linked to the Orthodox Church, but by no means to the detriment of other traditional faiths. Here again we see a direct connection with the World Russian People’s Council, whose head is His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of All Russia, but in which the heads of the main confessions of Russia invariably participate.

Of course, the basis of the Russian World is Russia as a state, and this is clearly seen in the fact that the President of the Russian Federation himself takes part in the most significant events of the All-Russian People’s Congress, turning in fact such solemn national and all-voluntary meetings into a kind of analog of the Zemsky Sobor. But the Russian World is wider than just the state, and the Russian people is bigger than the totality of Russian citizens. In this sense, the Russian World is formed around Russia, and its President and the First Hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Church are symbols and axes of the entire civilization, a magnet of attraction and the core of a complex and non-linear community of peoples, cultures, and individual citizens.

It is worth mentioning two other—not true, but quite common—interpretations of the Russian World, because any concept acquires its true meaning when it is compared with what it should not be understood as.

Thus, under the Russian World in no circumstance can be understood only the totality of ethnic Great Russians, i.e., Eastern Slavs, concentrated historically in the eastern regions of Ancient Russia, where Vladimir, later Muscovite Rus’ was formed and where at some point was moved the capital together with the Grand-Ducal throne and metropolitan cathedra. Such interpretation completely distorts the initial sense, excluding from the Russian World both western Russians (Belarusians and Malorussians), and all non-Slavic ethnoses of Russia itself. Strictly speaking, practically nobody understands the Russian World in this way, but its opponents, on the contrary, try to artificially distort the meaning and endow this expression with a completely inappropriate meaning. Therefore, it will not be superfluous to emphasize once again that under the “Russian World” are understood all Eastern Slavs (and therefore, not only Great Russians, but also Belarusians and Malorussians), as well as all other ethnic groups that have linked their fate at one stage or another with the Russian people. Therefore, the Russian World can include, for example, Georgians, Armenians or Azerbaijanis, who, although they are currently outside Russia, retain their belief in historical closeness and spiritual kinship with Russians.

Here, however, the main thing is not whether these or those ethnic groups consider themselves part of the Russian World, it can change and depend on many factors, including some may consider themselves part of it, and some may not, and others do not consider themselves part of it now, but tomorrow they will. The main thing is that the Russian World itself is always open to brotherly peoples. It is important that Russians themselves are ready to consider as part of the Russian World those who want it, strive for it and share with us our common destiny. And this openness does not depend on the historical moment or historical mood. When we talk about the Russian World, this openness is a fundamental axiom. Without it, the Russian World is not valid. This is its semantic deep axis. The Russian World does not exclude, but only includes. We can call it by the Western term “inclusiveness,” but only we are talking about a special inclusiveness—about Russian inclusiveness, and in fact, about Russian love, without which there is no Russian person.

Therefore, the Russian World can in no way be narrower than Russia, but only wider.

And finally, it would be wrong to identify the Russian World with the three branches of the East Slavic tribe, that is, only with the Great Russians, Belarusians and Malorussians. Yes, we three East Slavic peoples make up the core of the Russian World. But it does not mean that other non-Slavic peoples are not its organic and integral part.

Thus, having fixed the correct interpretation of the Russian World, and having rejected the wrong ones, we can continue thinking about it.

The question immediately arises: what are the boundaries of the Russian World? After we have defined it, it becomes clear that these borders can be neither ethnic, nor state, nor confessional. These are the boundaries of civilization, and they are not linear and strictly fixed. How can we place Spirit, culture, consciousness within strict physical boundaries? But at the same time, when we get too far away from the core of the Russian World, we cannot help but notice that at some point we find ourselves in a foreign territory, in the space of another civilization. For example, Western European, Islamic or Chinese. And it is not only the language, phenotype and mores of the local population that is important here. We have left the limits of the Russian World; civilization has crumpled, we are in a new cultural circle different from ours.

Darya Dugina drew attention to such a concept as “frontier.” It is not a linear border, but an intermediate strip, a no-man’s or neutral territory that separates one civilization from another. The property of the frontier is to change constantly, shifting in one direction or another. Moreover, the frontier has a life of its own; its territory is a place of intense exchange of cultural codes, where two or even more identities converge, conflict, diverge and enter into dialogue again. Darya experienced the frontier in Novorossiya, while traveling through the new territories. She shrewdly captured the very life of this area, where the fate of the Russian World is being decided today. Undoubtedly, Ukraine, Malorossiya belongs to the Russian World. Historically, it is its cradle. But later, as the center shifted to the east, it itself turned into a civilizational frontier, became an intermediate zone between Eurasian Russia and Europe. Hence the intersection of influences—in language (influence of Polish), religion (influence of Catholicism), culture (influence of liberalism and nationalism, deeply alien to the Russian code). Thus, the Ukrainian frontier in turn became an area of tension between two centers, poles of attraction—between the Russian World and the European West. This was clearly seen in the electoral politics of Ukraine (while there were still elections there), and led to a terrible fratricidal war.

Another example of the borders of the Russian World is brotherly Belarus. Its people were also separated from us, the Great Russians, for a while, and became part of first the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, then the Polish state. With all the originality and authenticity of the established Belarusian identity, peculiarities of language and culture, this frontier was not divided into two poles of attraction. With full sovereignty and independence, Belarus is an organic and integral part of the Russian World, remaining quite an independent state.

Thus, the Russian World does not necessarily mean either absorption, or war, or the presence or absence of state borders. If the Ukrainian frontier would behave the same way as the Belarusian frontier, no one would attack the territorial integrity of Ukraine. The Russian World is open and peaceful, ready for friendship and partnership on various grounds. But it cannot respond to acts of direct aggression, humiliation and Russophobia.

President Putin once answered the question where Russia ends, and in this case “Russia” meant the Russian World: there, where a Russian person can reach, where we will be forced to stop. And it is quite obvious that we will not stop before we restore the integrality of our “Russian world” lands; the natural contours and harmonious (albeit complex) fronts of our civilization.

The Russian World is based on the Russian Idea. And this Idea, of course, has its own peculiar unique features. Its construction is determined by traditional values, absorbing the historical experience of the people. The Idea cannot be invented or developed, it grows from the depths of our social consciousness, matures in the people’s depths, seeks an outlet in the insights and masterpieces of geniuses, military leaders, rulers, saints, ascetics, laborers, simple families. The Russian Idea applies to everyone:

  • Russian families who answer its call with fertility and creative labor;
  • our army that defends the frontiers of the Fatherland at the cost of their lives;
  • the state apparatus, which is called upon to serve the country on the basis of ethics and loyalty;
  • the clergy, not only praying incessantly for prosperity and victory, but also tirelessly enlightening the people and educating them in the foundations of Christian morality;
  • the rulers who are called to lead the state to glory, prosperity and greatness.

The Russian World is that ideal which is always above us, forming a horizon of dreams, aspiration and will.

And finally, what does the Russian World mean in International Relations? Here this concept acquires even more significant weight. The Russian World is one of the poles of the multipolar world. It can be united into a state (like China or India), or represent several independent states, united by history, culture and values (like the countries of the Islamic world). But in any case, it is a State-Civilization with its own original and distinctive identity. The multipolar world order is built on the dialogue of such “worlds,” State-Civilizations. And the West in this context should no longer be perceived as a bearer of universal values and norms, universally binding for all peoples and states of the world. The West, NATO countries are one of the worlds along with others, one State-Civilization among others—Russia, China, India, Islamic bloc, Africa and Latin America. The universal world is made up of a set of separate poles—large spaces, civilizations and fronts, separating and connecting them simultaneously. It is a delicate construction that requires delicacy, subtlety, mutual respect, tact, familiarity with the values of the Other, but only there can a truly just world order be built. And in this world order it is the Russian World, and not only Russia as a state, that is a full-fledged pole, the center of integration, a unique civilizational entity, based on its own traditional values, which may partly coincide and partly differ from the values of other civilizations. And no one can tell from the outside what to be and what not to be for the Russian World. It is decided only by its peoples, its history, its Spirit, its path in history.

All these are the main topics of the World Russian People’s Council dedicated to the Russian World.

Alexander Dugin is a widely-known and influential Russian philosopher. His most famous work is The Fourth Political Theory (a book banned by major book retailers), in which he proposes a new polity, one that transcends liberal democracy, Marxism and fascism. He has also introduced and developed the idea of Eurasianism, rooted in traditionalism. This article appears through the kind courtesy of Geopolitica.

Land and Sea: Globalization as a Fluid Realm

Uncontrolled and uncontrollable, the sea is the realm of immoderation and universal transience, of pirate nomadism and uncontainable wandering: “in the sea it is not possible to sow or even to dig straight lines. The ships that sail the sea leave no trace behind them.” The trails that are drawn in the sea disappear almost instantaneously, without being transferred to the future. They are, precisely for this reason, the symbol of the universal transience of the global liquid society.

Unlike terrestrial spaces, regulated and subject to geographical differences, to natural roots and borders, to rooted and territorialized communities, the open space of the sea is literally uninhabitable. It is crossed without the possibility of being able to inhabit it stably. It is, by its essence, the space of free and perpetual omnidirectional circulation, devoid of barriers and borders, of norms and limitations.

To cross the thalassic surfaces implies the abandonment of terrestrial stability and the acceptance of the possible dangers linked to the absence of solid ground and the eventual encounter with pirates who, in the same way as those of finance and the banking system, carry out raids in the absence of laws to control and limit them.

Without land there is neither political power nor frontier. In a word, there is no νόμος; that is why the thalassic expanse appears as the natural place of deregulation and, consequently, of that falsely libertarian anarchy which in reality secretly coincides with the uncontrolled domination of the strongest, with their freedom to preserve without restrictions their own self-interest.

Marine expansion, like the financial market of planetary flexibility, knows only waves, ebbs and flows, sudden storms and unexpected turbulence. “The trembling of the sea” (Purgatory, I, v. 117) offers no protection and, instead, exposes to the permanent risk of storms, shipwrecks and pirate boardings.

Indeed, it has been the financialization of capitalism that has played a decisive role in its post-bourgeois metamorphosis, which has led it to transit from the solid to the liquid element: finance, in fact, is volatile and unpredictable, the enemy of stability and rootedness.

The sea thus becomes an absolute metaphor for flexible and post-telluric production, aeriform for its immateriality and thalassic for its liquid movement and freed from the political power of the νόμος.

This is true not only for the liquid condition characteristic of cosmo-marketing, but also for the convergent process of deterritorialization—to take up a notion dear to Deleuze and Guattari—that distinguishes the epoch of planetary uprooting, set in motion by the expansion of the globalized market: the sea is perennially unstable in its incessant becoming and, at the same time, prevents any stabilizing action from being implemented. It forces those who venture into it to the perpetual dynamism of navigation and displacement, of nomadism and instability. It is the place of wandering and vagrancy, not of citizenship and communal territoriality.

Hegel already, anticipating Schmitt, had contrasted terrestrial rootedness, centered on the idea of frontier, to maritime limitlessness, where barriers are lacking and the dimension of schlechte Unendlichkeit, the “bad infinitude” of permanent mobility, prevails:

“The sea is something indeterminate, unlimited, infinite, and man, feeling himself in the midst of this infinity, is challenged to cross the boundary. The sea invites man to conquest and rapine, but also to profit and gain. The dry land, the river plain, fixes man to the ground, from which multiple obstacles arise. On the contrary, the sea pushes him beyond these limited circles.”

In Hegel’s perspective, the oceanic extension, open and uncontainable, corresponds to the infinite evil of excessive growth, to the rage to transcend all limits: it is the emblem of Modernity which, forgetting the Greek value of the just limit and of the sacred measure, always ventures recklessly “beyond these limited circles.”

It is in this sense that, in Elements of the Philosophy of Right, as an anticipation of the dichotomy that will be at the center of Schmitt’s reflection, Hegel maintains that “a condition for the principle of family life (Familienlebens) is the earth, a foundation and a stable ground” (§ 247); in contrast, “for industry” (für die Industrie) the “natural element” (natürliches Element) is the sea that opens towards infinity.

The telluric stability of the “ethical roots,” with its solid and solidary dimension, which sinks deep into the earth, draws a space of permanent enmity against the vacillating flow of the thalassic extension of the “system of needs,” where everything is relentlessly subjected to the uprooting of trade and bargaining, of competition and exchange of one and all.

Ethical roots aspire to regulate the anarchic space of the system of needs, subjecting it to the νόμος of communal control. Such a space, for its part, aims at the opposite goal: that is, at its own integral liberation from the power of the νόμος connected with the ethical roots. Moreover, it explicitly tends to produce the uprooting and, therefore, the devitalization of those roots, so that the self in its interest, and with it every human relation, are redefined according to the thalassic logic of unsociable sociability and piratical deregulation.

From this point of view, turbo-chrematistics globalization could rightly be understood for all intents and purposes as the triumph of the thalassic principle over the telluric one and, therefore, as the successful destruction of all surviving ethical rootedness: from that of family life to that of ethics linked to the State form, passing through the intermediate bodies of the population (from schools to trade unions and public health).

We know that the Greeks feared the sea as a mobile space of limitlessness and as a very concrete place of infinite openness, before which Achilles, their most powerful hero, wept: “bursting into tears, he sat far from his own, apart, on the shore of the whitish sea, gazing at the infinite expanse” (apeiron) (Iliad, I, 349-350).

Let us note that in the Homeric poems it is commonplace to associate the sea with the term apeiron, which literally means “without border,” “without limit” and consequently, by extension, “infinite,” “unlimited,” “indeterminate.”

The uniform space of the thalassic immensity, with its structural absence of borders, appears as the opposite not only of the mainland, where roots and ethical communities distributed over the territory and different in culture and traditions prevail; additionally the increasingly unequal “financial integration of the world” is producing the destruction of the properly geographical element, i.e., of the plurality of differentiated and unequal locations, according to what has been defined as the end of geography.

Oceanic expansion is also presented as the antithesis of that sea, limited and perimetered by the land, that is the Mediterranean, where limitlessness is literally “contained,” delimited, because it is enclosed within precise confines that allow, at least to a certain extent, the control and management of the territory.

Unlike the infinity of the ocean, the Mare Nostrum comes to be defined as a figure of that politicized economy that constitutes the essence of the ethical life thematized by Hegel. The Mediterranean then stands as the living image of a sea regulated and subjected to the power of the νόμος, because it is surrounded by land and, to a certain extent, controlled by the latter and subordinated to its demands.

Absent in Hegel, the clear conceptual differentiation between the bounded sea and the borderless ocean-like sea is found in Kant’s work. In The Metaphysics of Morals (1797) he distinguishes between mare clausum and mare liberum.

The former is the sea close to the land, subject to the control of the latter and defensible “as far as the guns that guard the shore can reach.” It is, so to speak, a regulated and disciplined sea, subject to the jurisdiction of the continent and controllable by the political force that governs it.

Such is the essence, as we have recalled, of the Mediterranean, the closed and limited Mare Nostrum, open to plurality and difference, a fertile, pluralistic and multicultural space—as Braudel has exemplarily shown—of the origin and gestation of civilizations (Greeks and Romans, Christians and Muslims).

Thus, in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, the mare clausum of the Mediterranean is celebrated as the axis of Weltgeschichte, as the space for the flowering of the greatest civilizations that have traversed the history of the human race:

“All the great states of ancient history rest around this navel of the Earth. It is here that Greece, the brightest point of history, is located. In Syria is Jerusalem, the center of Judaism and Christianity. To the southeast of it are Mecca and Medina, cradles of Islam. To the west lie Delphi and Athens, and further west Rome and Carthage; and so to the south Alexandria, which is even more central than Constantinople, where the spiritual fusion of East and West is completed. The Mediterranean is, then, the heart of the Old World, being its motor, its condition of life.”

The mare liberum, on the other hand, is the sea free of controls, indefensible and physiologically uninhabitable: as Kant points out, “no domicile is possible in the open sea” or, we would say, no citizenship. The denied territoriality is accompanied by the thalassic wandering, which turns the navigator into mobilis in mobili.

And also according to this hermeneutic key, which links illimited and mare liberum together, the story of Dante’s Odysseus can be understood: “I launched myself toward the open high seas,” Odysseus declares in the presence of the Florentine poet, confessing his own guilt, which is, in all evidence, a guilt of ὕβϱις, derived from the surpassing of the just limit.

It is not by chance that Dante’s Inferno imagines the death of Odysseus when he sets out “toward the high open sea,” venturing on a voyage impossible because it leads toward the limitless. The Dantesque is one of the possible readings, if we consider that, for example, Elias Canetti of The Tongue Set Free (1977) reads the character of Odysseus in the opposite key, that is, as a figure of diminution and measure, as could be deduced from the gesture with which the hero of Ithaca makes himself “nobody” (οὐδείς) in order to defeat the Cyclops.

Because of its uncontrolled and uncontrollable, unregulated and unregulable nature, the open sea of the oceanic type gives rise to a sort of bellum omnium contra omnes of the aquatic type: by virtue of the absence of political regulation, the open sea remains a space attributable to the logic of status naturae.

It is, therefore, the sign of post-telluric anomie, where only the anarchic logic of piracy can prevail, that is, the status naturae that the globalist animal kingdom of the Spirit has generated by dissolving the telluric framework of ius publicum europaeum.

On the maritime surface, just as on the horizon of the commercial anarchy of the de-sovereignized market, the logic of the strongest prevails once again: that is, the possibility for the latter to “compete” freely and without restrictions with the weaker, according to the rule of free trade in free seas. A quintessential expression of the anomic energy of thalassic extension, the maritime conflict is ab origine unlimited and exempted from legal obligations.

As Schmitt has specified, “the sea does not constitute a state territory,” it is subtracted from the legal order and from the jurisdictions guaranteed by the political: its extension is intrinsically depoliticized and open, and “is, therefore, free from any type of spatial authority of the State.” The thalassic extension appears, then, as the space taken away from state power and its fundamental functions, from law to citizenship.

“The maritime realm knows no borders, no obligations, no rights, no control. It is presented as the unregulated space par excellence, as the locus naturalis of pirates, corsairs and all those who recognize no law other than that of the strongest: precisely because ‘no law applies at sea,’ it is inaccessible to law and human order, forming the space for a free confrontation of forces.”

The boundless vastness of the open sea “constitutes a free zone of free predation. Here the privateer, the pirate, can exercise his evil trade with a good conscience” and, above all, without legal impediments. Perhaps it is also from this perspective that the text composed by Hugo Grotius in 1609, programmatically entitled, Mare liberum and directed against English monopolistic pretensions, can be explained.

Indeed, as we know, the capitalist economy, which begins to develop also in the Mediterranean capital of Genoa, arises mainly in the oceanic spaces of the “English ports” evoked by Bloch, where the thalassic dimension (mare clausum) is overcome and we venture into the oceanic (mare liberum) in search of an unlimited expansion of profits. In the words of Carl Schmitt in his Land and Sea:

“England became the queen of the sea, and around her maritime dominion over the entire globe she built a British empire spread over every continent. The English world thought in terms of footholds and lines of communication… The age of free trade was also the age of the free display of England’s industrial and economic superiority. Free seas and free world markets were united in an idea of freedom of which only England could be the bearer and the guardian.”

Like the navigator, at an unprecedented distance from the mainland and at the mercy of storms, the precarious man navigates “by eye” between drifts and shipwrecks, be they labor or existential, in what, with Guicciardini, we could rightly characterize as “a sea agitated by the winds.”
Uprooted and subjected to the gales that constantly batter the sea far from coastal protections, the cybernaut of thalassic globalization is projected into a dimension of constant insecurity and piratical competitiveness, which will strike at the very possibility of his existence. The latter does not adopt solid and stable forms, always fluctuating between the waves of the market, on which it has been transformed into a dependent variable.

In the framework of the “vulnerable society,” it is the markets, like the sea for the cybernaut, that decide the survival of the inhabitant of the thalassic late-modernity, deprived of any communal roots and of any frontier that could protect him and provide him with a certain stability in his daily life.

Diego Fusaro is professor of the History of Philosophy at the IASSP in Milan (Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies) where he is also scientific director. He is a scholar of the Philosophy of History, specializing in the thought of Fichte, Hegel, and Marx. His interest is oriented towards German idealism, its precursors (Spinoza) and its followers (Marx), with a particular emphasis on Italian thought (Gramsci or Gentile, among others). he is the author of many books, including Fichte and the Vocation of the Intellectual, The Place of Possibility: Toward a New Philosophy of Praxis, and Marx, again!: The Spectre Returns. [This article appears courtesy of Posmodernia].

Featured: Sail through Rough Seas, by Henry Moore, no date.

Of Fictions and Lies

My dog—our dog, my wife’s and mine, although he is more hers than mine—besides being a dog has the misfortune of being called Claudio (and hereinafter Claudio). As I was saying, Claudio spends about seventeen or eighteen hours a day in a lethargic state, something normal in animals of his species, and he also dreams. We know this because from time to time he starts barking in his sleep, throwing urgent but muffled, half-drowned and rather high-pitched barks while slightly moving his front legs as if he were galloping or defending himself from dreamlike enemies. Then he wakes up and the bad time passes.

What is reasonable, I think, is to think that Claudio, in his psychological, mental and cerebral condition of a canine entity, does not distinguish the world of dreams from the realm of the real; for him, passing from dream to wakefulness is an inconsequential shift, like a blink of an eye or something, without further break in the only category of the factual perceptible that he knows and distinguishes. In fact, for him, as for many people, the perception of the environment supposes everything, it is integrated into his vital experience without distinctions of rank established by situational opposition; in short, what is dreamed is as real as what is lived; what is felt and integrated into his world of sapiential references during sleep is as important as the same elements developed in the waking state. This leads to two conclusions that I find disturbing. The first one: my wife and I are a small and non-determining part of Claudio’s life; and the second one: his main nucleus of knowledge is based on the improbable and vague sphere of dreaming. Thus, I can conclude and I conclude by affirming that the good Claudio, in his transit through the real shores of existence, lives a life founded on false learning, illusory experiences and misplaced knowledge. In spite of which he loves us very much, something to be thankful for.

Naturally, if we transfer these observations to human behavior, we will reach identical conclusions. We leave aside, of course, the descriptive erudition of those anthropologists who enlighten us about lost tribes in the Amazon whose members, aborigines in an adamic state, believe that the territory of dreams is the academy of the jungle and the great temple of truth in which the gods speak to them and dictate to them about what is good and what is bad, the future that suits them, the cosmic sense of the past and the joys and sorrows of their ancestors, who contemplate the tribe’s wanderings in this world and celebrate or grieve for them, as they go. All this we take for granted. It is necessary to look for another empire of the unreal that is not the oneiric to find those spheres of the fictitious that nourish solid ideologies in so many and so many people who live like the faithful Claudio—subject to the powerful law of the imaginary, the fiction turned into obligatory dictate and in a manual of use for daily conduct. These spheres cannot but be concentrated in the immense map of ideologies, the conceptions of the world structured on granite moral conceptions or, vice versa and with equal generating force, the systematic absence of categorizations on what is ethical or convenient—some call it relativism, as others might call it, the annihilation of the sense of reality. There are people who go through life “with the upfront,” that is, with their “principles” like Attila’s horse; and others who trust everything to karma, to “I’ll be seeing you” and to sit at the door of the house to watch the corpse of the enemy pass by, etc.

Bubble makes bubble. That is the question that almost always determines our positions with respect to measurable reality based on immediate perception. The facts themselves have a minor—relative—importance; what matters is, in the first place, to what extent they fit in our emotional acceptance system; then the interpretation we make of them prevails and how they are classified in our scale of what is acceptable, from the very adequate to the extraordinarily reprehensible. This filtering of the factual concludes with the relevance of our reaction, from indifference to outburst, passing of course through the demonstrated capacity of negotiation that we are capable of maintaining with ourselves to convince ourselves of the future goodness of the present displeasure, the lesser evil and other sentimental alibis with which we human beings conform and adapt to practically everything.

Of course, if everyone does the same thing and we all establish the same system of relating to the world “outside the bubble,” then any position taken on any controversy seems legitimate. Indeed, it is. Everyone has the right to err as they please and no one is entitled to deny others their free will in this regard. What is not valid is deceit. Claudius cannot pretend to sleep and bark while pretending to sleep; it is no good to say that we dreamt that we threw ourselves off a cliff into the sea and fell into the realm of the mermaids and, therefore, in the real world we have to be named king of the mermaids. It is not worth arguing that the same deception is, in itself, an inalienable right—the right to change one’s mind. It is not a question of rights or principles but of verisimilitude—if yesterday’s certainties must be changed because circumstances have changed, then those certainties were worthless; it is logical: ideas that only serve when nothing happens are not ideas properly speaking but figurations, more or less well-intentioned, more or less interested conjectures. That is to say—a useless reverie transposed to the world of truth remains ob-scene—outside the scene—outside dream and reality, in the sterile territory soaked with the emptiness of the lie. And the lie, however it is said and however it is painted, will serve for many things but it is worthless. The theorist said that a lie is “a fiction whose verisimilitude is bankrupt and which contributes nothing to reality;” on the contrary, it debases it. And in the end, for what but to end up in nothing. For nothing.

José Vicente Pascual is a writer and novelist, living in Madrid. La Hermandad de la Nieve (Brotherhood of the Snow) is his latest work of historical narrative. This articles appears through the kind courtesy of Posmodernia.

Featured: Bridge in London, by Mstislav Dobuzhinsky; painted in 1908.

Freedom as a Fetish

Paraphrasing Ernst Jünger, it seems undeniable that we are at the midnight hour of history, and that, the clock having already struck twelve, we contemplate in the twilight the contours of what has not yet been unveiled, or what is the same, in the words of Antonio Gramsci: “the old world is dying. The new is slow to appear. And in that chiaroscuro monsters emerge.” Engaged in a blind flight forward, we barely glimpse, from the desolation of wars and general bewilderment, a future without a proper name or defined features, which, when we try to apprehend it, fades away, ungraspable, in the mist of our own demons.

This midnight, an instant full of signifiers, and emptied of meanings, makes our fortunes emerge from the lack of intentions, and the randomness of the lack of reasons, resulting in living for the sake of living, beating around the bush, Macbeth’s ” petty pace from day to day;” the tale of a fool, full of noise and fury, signifying nothing.

A consequence, in fact, of having renounced some time ago to fight the battle of ideas, in exchange for the single thought that pays obeisance to the golden calf of profit and loss accounts and pursues the myth of commutative justice, based on social relations mediated by normative and contractual links, which, although they protect us to freely carry out individual transactions and mercantile interactions between people, overlook the personal and moral dimension of human interactions; dignity and rights in personal relationships, in order to, turning Wittgenstein on his head (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1.1), enthusiastically accept that the world is the totality of things, not of facts, which we detest to the point of fabricating tailor-made “alternative facts.”

It would seem that we have taken Theodor Adorno so literally (“after Auschwitz there is no place left for poetry”) that we have immersed ourselves in legalistic prose to normativize the moral, perhaps because, as Erich Fromm said, we take refuge in political structures and legal systems that provide us with peace of mind by sparing us from personally facing the consequences of ethical judgments, and so we let the asepsis of the civil code be the guide of our social behavior.

We have reached, in short, a state of affairs whose crux was already vehemently answered by Donoso Cortés in his important speech of 1849 (“Discurso sobre la dictadura”), in which he replied to Don Manuel Cortina, then Minister of the Interior, that, faced with the litany of the Government of the time of “legality, everything for legality, everything for legality, legality always, legality in all circumstances, legality in all circumstances; legality on all occasions,” he placed “society, everything for society, everything for society, society always, society in all circumstances, society on all occasions.”

Underlying this statement of Donoso’s principles, so applicable to today, is the conviction that “formal freedoms” are insufficient to maintain stability and justice in society, and that a legal codification cannot serve as a moral basis against injustice and inequality because of its “lack of spirituality” (Geistlosigkeit).

We find, one hundred years later, this same concern for morality as the foundation of life and society in the work of the Madrid philosopher George Santayana, Dominations and Powers, in which, following Donoso, Santayana questions formalist liberalism, centered on adherence to abstract principles and rules, which, by emphasizing the notion that the individual and his rights prevail over society and its needs, weaken cohesion and collective well-being. The Englishman Scruton more recently maintained the same thesis as Donoso and Santayana, affirming that the value of individual freedom is not absolute, but is subject to other higher values that arise directly from the sense of belonging to a continuous and pre-existing social order, which is fundamental in determining the virtue of our actions.

There is in all these assertions a more or less veiled criticism of Pelagianism, the thesis that “the possibility of defection from the good belonged to the essence or perfection of freedom,” or what is the same, the sacralization of the freedom of the will, safeguarding the right of each individual to exercise self-determination, deciding what is morally right, and the conditions for satisfying appetites—rational or irrational—since, whether these are in accordance with morality or transgress it, every personal choice is an expression of free will. This position contrasts radically with the doctrine of the Catholic Church, which holds that freedom makes man a moral subject, responsible for his actions, and that the conscious and deliberate decisions we make as individuals are susceptible to positive or negative ethical judgments (Catechism of the Catholic Church, PART THREE: LIFE IN CHRIST. In: The vocation of man: life in the spirit. Chapter One: The dignity of the human person. Article 3: The freedom of man. Paragraph 1734).

This essential principle is made clear in Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum novarum, expressly rejecting the idea that consent between employer and worker is sufficient with respect to wages or working conditions: the worker’s freedom does not lie in being able to accept an agreed wage, but in receiving fair remuneration for work that corresponds to his dignity, i.e., “To consent to any treatment which is calculated to defeat the end and purpose of his being is beyond his right.”

We can thus clearly glimpse the ultimate intentionality of the title of Santayana’s book, Dominations and Powers: Starting from this allusion to the angelic order, in which the Dominations form part of the hierarchy of celestial beings, and the Powers play the role of maintaining cosmic equilibrium, as well as overseeing the boundary between the spiritual and physical worlds, Santayana emphasizes the Virtues, which in the aforementioned celestial hierarchy represent moral excellence; purpose, and adherence to universal ethical principles. This position contrasts radically with the premises of Pelagianism already alluded to, on the one hand, and Lutheranism, on the other, insofar as both reaffirm the human capacity to discern religious truth and morality independently.

On the contrary, the philosopher from Madrid argues that genuine values live only in the vertical perspective, in a deeper dimension of human experience that cannot be reduced to a mere by-product of aggregate subjective constructions, but have a profound and universal nature, which Santayana connects with the concept of virtue.

Santayana, who abhors the idolatry of reason and the cult of individual autonomy (which is not without fundamentalisms that advocate being free, even to stop being free, as long as it occurs within the framework of the law), stresses that this Pelagianism made political does not primarily aim at the pursuit of prosperity, but centers its focus on the pursuit of progress; a progress that is closely linked to individual freedom, which implies that each individual has the full capacity to make spontaneous and independent decisions to move in the direction he chooses, supported by those who share his vision, and free from coercion by those who do not.

Ironically, the myth of progress has become a dogma of secularism, endowed with a metaphysical perspective, based on the belief in following a teleological path in pursuit of a higher stage, whose benefits are renounced by those who voluntarily marginalize themselves by not following the direction prescribed by the determinism of transcendental freedom, hypostatized as ultimacy, as an end that dispenses with the use of moral means to achieve it. It is freedom as a fetish; freedom for freedom itself. Against this naïve idealism, Santayana argues that, on the contrary, it is the individual who claims unlimited power over his own life who alienates himself from virtue, because it is virtue, after all, that embodies shared ethical values, interwoven in reciprocity and social interdependence.

Turning again to Roger Scruton, it is worth noting that he, along with the Englishman Philip Blond, holds postulates basically analogous to those of Santayana, as regards the importance of cultivating institutions, culture and traditional values in order to reap the fruits of social cohesion and stability, just as strong roots ensure that the tree bears fruit, according to the popular Vietnamese saying, gốc có mạnh cây mới tốt.

All of these thinkers are supported in a more organic way by Pope Benedict XVI in his encyclical, Caritas in Veritate, emphasizing that without these strong roots, without “social capital,” we fail to understand the underlying causes of social injustice, presenting it as an inevitable and immutable phenomenon that does not concern us, something that leads us to collective irresponsibility and indifference to inequity.

This attitude of detachment manifests itself in the need to justify our own inhumanity to society, rationalizing the lack of charity and compassion, attributing poverty to the fatalism of natural causes. We also tend to assign personal responsibility for misfortune to those who suffer from it, diverting attention from the social and economic structures we use to evade responsibility for their existence. Thus, not only do we tend to blame the most unfortunate, but in an exercise of manifest myopia, we allow impoverishment to become a socially acceptable form of precariousness based on mirages that are often accepted or even desired by those who, although vulnerable, are dazzled by the glitter of a superficially opulent technological society, built on illusory images, disconnected from human existence, behind which lurks a reality hostile to society.

In this regard, the Italian philosopher and thinker Danilo Castellano characterizes these mirages as the tendency to create an illusion of individual freedom and material well-being, disassociating these notions from the complex social interactions and responsibilities that make us human (Castellano, “Qué es el liberalismo,” in Verbo, 489-490(2010), pp. 729ff).

The Italian argues that the emphasis on subjectivism as an axiological foundation generates results contrary to the ideals it proclaims, since in practice, the exaltation of the drive to submit reality to the will in order to shape it according to subjective desires ends up making us too human, to the point of distancing us from the Aristotelian “rational animal” (Aristotle, Politics, 1253: “The human being is a ‘political animal’ because he has logos”: διότι δὲ πολιτικὸν ὁ ἄνθρωπος ζῷον, δῆλον… λόγον δὲ μόνον ἄνθρωπος ἔχει τῶν ζῴων), in order to satisfy the irrational part of our nature, disintegrating along the way our human condition, reducing it to a set of disjointed impulses, which makes good Hume’s statement that “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them” (A Treatise of Human Nature, 2.3.3 p., 415). But what this implies, in fact, is to separate desire from any other element, such as the good, reducing wanting to a purely instinctive force; unreflective, which is equivalent to equating wanting with power, thus distorting the capacity to want the good and to be able to desire it.

All of which ultimately leads to Nietzsche’s “will to power,” which focuses on seeking power for the sake of power itself, without the need to attain something additional such as truth or value. What is pursued is the ability to will and to have the capacity to desire more, which implies an increasing relationship between will and power—to seek more power in order to desire more. This notion includes wanting not only what is desired, but also the act of desiring itself, with the purpose of increasing the capacity to desire, or desire itself as a form of power.

None of this escaped the insightful Santayana, who noted that, although the ideal of the cult of reason does not lie in a return to nature, if the inherent premises of transcendental freedom are taken to their ultimate consequences; animals—especially non-gregarious ones—could be granted a status of perfect freedom, because these beings follow the dictates of their inner impulses completely and unrestrictedly, enjoy complete autonomy of consciousness and expression, and are intrinsically motivated by their own interests.

That is, they are precisely in that “state of radical independence and autonomy” to which Hobbes alluded, to justify the need to codify human relations by means of a social contract in which people give up much of their individual freedom in favor of sovereign government, in exchange for security and order necessary, for negative liberty and free trade.

Santiago Mondejar Flores is a consultant, lecturer and columnist on geopolitics and international political economy. This article appears courtesy of Posmodernia.

Featured: Invidia (Envy), by Giotto; painted in 1306.

Gaza, A Reflection

On Dissent

Why is it so difficult, even impossible, to accommodate Palestinians in the Jewish understanding of history? Why is there so little perceived need to question our own history and the one we have given others, preferring instead to embrace beliefs and sentiments that remain unchanged?

Why is it virtually mandatory among Jewish intellectuals to oppose racism, repression, and injustice almost anywhere in the world, but unacceptable—indeed, for some heretical—to oppose it when Israel is the oppressor?…

****

…I tried to remember my first real encounter with the occupation. One of the earliest was a scene I witnessed standing on a street with some Palestinian friends. An elderly man was walking along leading his donkey. A small child of no more than three or four, clearly his grandson, was with him. All of a sudden some nearby Israeli soldiers approached the old man and stopped him. One of them went over to the donkey and pried open its mouth. “Old man,” he asked, “why are your donkey’s teeth so yellow? Don’t you brush your donkey’s teeth?” The old Palestinian was mortified, the little boy visibly upset.

The soldier repeated his question, yelling this time, while the other soldiers laughed. The child began to cry and the old man just stood there silently, humiliated. As the scene continued a crowd gathered. The soldier then ordered the old man to stand behind the donkey and demanded that he kiss the animal’s behind. At first, the old man refused but as the soldier screamed at him and his grandson became hysterical, he bent down and did it. The soldiers laughed and walked away. We allstood there in silence, ashamed to look at each other, the only sound the sobs of the little boy. The old man, demeaned and destroyed, did not move for what seemed a very long time.

I stood in stunned disbelief. I immediately thought of the stories my parents had told me of how Jews had been treated by the Nazis in the 1930s, before the ghettos and death camps, of how Jews would be forced to clean sidewalks with toothbrushes and have their beards cut off in public. What happened to the Palestinian grandfather was equivalent in principle, intent, and impact: to humiliate and dehumanize. In this critical respect, my first encounter with the occupation was the same as my first encounter with the Holocaust, with the number on my father’s arm. It spoke the same message: the denial of one’s humanity.

****

…the Holocaust and the Palestinian issues in a sense are related. Among the many realities that frame contemporary Jewish life are the birth of Israel, remembrance of the Holocaust, and Jewish power and sovereignty. And it cannot be denied that the latter has a critical corollary: the displacement and oppression of the Palestinian people. For Jewish identity is linked, willingly or not, to Palestinian suffering and this suffering is now an irrevocable part of our collective memory and an intimate part of our experience, together with the Holocaust and Israel. Thisis a linkage that informsthe core of Ellis’s work.1 How, he asks, are we to celebrate our Jewishness while others are being oppressed? Isthe Jewish covenant with God present or absent in the face of Jewish oppression of Palestinians? Isthe Jewish ethical tradition still available to us? Isthe promise of holiness—so central to Jewish existence—now beyond our ability to reclaim? For the answers, at least in part, I look to Gaza.

****

… Gaza is a place, Israel argues, where innocent civilians do not exist. The presence of such civilians in Gaza is suspect, they say, because Palestinians elected a terrorist organization to represent them. Retired Israeli Major General Giora Eiland stated, “[T]hey [Gazans] are to blame for this situation just like Germany’s residents were to blame for electing Hitler as their leader and paid a heavy price for that, and rightfully so.” The goal is to use “disproportionate force,” said another official, thereby “inflicting damage and meting out punishment to an extent that will demand long and expensive reconstruction processes.” According to this logic there is no such thing as a civilian home, school, hospital, mosque, church, or playground in Gaza; all these places are therefore legitimate targets of Israeli bombs since every home is a non-home; every kindergarten a nonkindergarten; and every hospital a non-hospital.

During Operation Cast Lead (OCL), Israel’s 2008–09 offensive against Gaza, Reserve Major Amiran Levin similarly stated, “What we have to do is act systematically with the aim of punishing all the organizationsthat are firing the rockets and mortars as well as the civilians who are enabling them to fire and hide,” while the IDF spokesperson Major Avital Leibowitz argued that “anything affiliated with Hamas is a legitimate target.” Not surprisingly the UNcommissioned Goldstone Report whose mandate it wasto investigate all violations of international human rights and humanitarian law that might have been committed during OCL found that the “humiliation and dehumanization of the Palestinian population” were Israeli policy objectivesin its assault on Gaza, an assault that was nothing less than “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.”

That the area being bombed was urban, with over 20,000 human beings per square kilometer, does not weigh on the majority of Jewish people. That my friends and their children were among those being bombed, people who have always welcomed me as a Jew into their homesin Gaza, is of no consequence. “22 members of my family huddled under the stairwell,” describes Hani, who lived in the heart of Shejaiyeh, one of the areas that witnessed the greatest destruction that summer.

For General Eiland, Majors Levin and Leibowitz, and too many others, there are no parents in Gaza, there are no children or sisters or brothers; there are no deaths to mourn. Rather, Gaza is where the grass grows wild and must be mowed from time to time. The desolation inflicted on Gaza is powerfully seen in the almost complete destruction of Khuza’a, a village once known as Gaza’s orchard.

…

This begs the question, can Jews as a people be ordinary, an essential part of our rebirth after the Holocaust? Is it possible to be normal when we seek remedy and comfort in the dispossession and destruction of another people, “[o]bserving the windows of [their] houses through the sites of rifles,” to borrow from the Israeli poet, Almog Behar?

How can we create when we consent so willingly and with such complacence to the demolition of homes, construction of barriers, denial of sustenance, and ruin of innocents? How can we be merciful when speaking out against the wanton murder of children, of whole families and of entire neighborhoods is considered an act of disloyalty and betrayal rather than a legitimate act of dissent, and where dissent isso ineffective and reviled? How can we be humane when, to use Jacqueline Rose’s words, we seek “omnipotence as the answer to historical pain?”

Instead we condone the cruelty, even celebrating the murder of Palestinians while remaining the abused, “creating situations where our victimization is assured and ourinnocence affirmed” as seen in the words of General Eiland: “Because we want to be compassionate towards those cruel people [in Gaza], we are committing to act cruelly towards the really compassionate people – the residents of the State of Israel.” In this way, Gaza speaks to the unnaturalness of our own condition as Jews.

Will we one day be able to live withoutthe walls we are constantly asked to build? When will we be obliged to acknowledge our limits?

Sara Roy is a Senior Research Scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. She is also a leading authority on Gaza and Hamas. This is an excerpt from Prophetic Voices on Middle East Peace.

The Original Significance of the Rite of the Red Cow in Numbers xix

In Num. 19 we have the well-known description of the preparation of the ingredients which are to be used for the water of purification. A red cow without blemish, which has never yet borne a yoke, and has, therefore, never been used for profane purposes, is to be killed outside of the camp. The priest is to take some of its blood and sprinkle it seven times toward the sanctuary. Then the cow is to be burnt to ashes, skin and blood and all. The priest throws cedar wood, hyssop, and scarlet thread into the fire as additional ingredients. After the whole is entirely burnt to ashes, the ashes are collected; they constitute the ingredients for the water of purification which is used for cleansing persons who have become defiled by contact with the dead. Every one who has participated in the ceremony becomes unclean.

The law is incorporated in the Priest-code, but that does not mean that we do not have here an extremely ancient practice. What the rite meant to the Priest-code is clear from the above outline. But what did the rite of the red cow mean originally?

It will hardly be denied that the impression which the ceremony makes is that of a regular ancient whole burnt-offering. The cow must be without blemish and must not yet have borne a yoke; that is, it must be fit for purposes of worship. It is burnt completely and all together. The strange feature is that the blood also was burnt with the rest. We shall probably not be wrong if we assume this is a survival from primitive times, when the people burnt every portion of the animal, even the blood, in a whole burnt-offering.

This whole burnt-offering was originally not offered by the priest, but by any one who chose to offer it. The priest does not kill the animal, nor does he burn it; he does not collect the ashes, nor does he bless them; he simply sprinkles some blood in the direction of the sanctuary, burns the cedar wood, hyssop, and scarlet thread, and looks on; he does not even wait till the ashes are procured, but leaves before the end of the ceremony. It seems likely, as Holzinger has suggested in his commentary on Numbers, that he [the priest] had originally nothing whatever to do with the matter. Indeed the act of sprinkling the blood seven times in the direction of the sanctuary, which the priest performs, has come in because this rite was included in the category connected with the sin-offering. It was no part of the original ceremony. The cedar wood, hyssop, and thread did belong to the original rite; only it was first necessary that a priest should throw them into the fire.

To whom was the sacrifice originally offered? Not to Jahve [Yahweh], for it is not offered on his altar. Herein is still contained the hint that it was originally a sacrifice foreign to the Jahve-cult. The connection with that cult was made later, by the sprinkling of the blood in the direction of the sanctuary of Jahve. To whom then was it offered? The fact that the ashes are used for purification from uncleanness contracted by contact with the dead, points in the direction of a sacrifice to the demons or spirits of the dead. And here it is, perhaps, not without significance that the sacrificial animals offered by the Greeks to the chthonic deities had to be of red color, and that the person who was pursued by the Erinnys bound scarlet threads around his hands. May this not be the reason for specifying so distinctly that the cow must be red ? We find this specification, so far as I know, nowhere else in the Old Testament.

If this is so, we shall probably have to think that in primitive times a whole burnt-offering of a red cow was made when death occurred in the family or tribe, this offering being to the spirits of the dead; then the ashes, being regarded as sacred, were used for getting rid of the taboo which men and things had become infected. The ashes would, perhaps, not all be needed at the time; what was left over was probably from the very beginning preserved and afterward used when some one had become taboo by contact with a corpse. But of course the original occasion for the preparation of the ashes was a death in the family or tribe; the whole burnt-offering was the important thing, the ashes at first merely incidental. The Jahve-religion incorporated this ancient offering into its cultus, and in doing so transformed it and lost the old conception completely; but there remained indications that it was originally not connected with Jahve’s sanctuary and religion.

The rite in Num. 19 cannot be considered without reference to the rite in Deut. 21, where we have in a sense a parallel case. Here it is in connection with the corpse of a man who has been murdered in the open country and whose murderer cannot be detected. The elders of the city nearest to the spot where the dead man was found, must take a heifer which has never been used for any profane work and bring it to a running stream, where they are to slay it. Then they must, in the presence of the priest, wash their hands over it and declare before God that the city which they represent is guiltless of the murder, and entreat God to forgive his people for the crime which has been committed in their midst.

Now here also, as Bertholet has already pointed out in his commentary on Deuteronomy, we have originally a sacrifice. Here also the priests are a later addition, for the elders of the city offer the sacrifice. And they offer it, not to Jahve, but to the spirit of the dead, who might, if not appeased in this manner, avenge himself upon the nearest city. Deuteronomy, however, does not any longer regard the ceremony as a real sacrifice, exactly as the Priest-code does not in connection with Num. 19. It has become merely a symbol.

In both cases, in Deuteronomy and in Numbers, we have examples of the power of the ancient Jahve-religion to assimilate the various customary rites, and, in assimilating, to transform them so that they are brought into harmony with its own spirit.

Julius A. Bewer (1877-1953), a highly acclaimed biblical scholar of his time, was professor of biblical philology at Union Theological Seminary, New York. This article first appeared in the Journal of Biblical Literature, 24 (1), 1905.

Homo cosmopoliticus: Adam Smith and Globalist Subjectivity

“The proprietor of stock is necessarily a citizen of the world” (Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Book V, Chapter II, Article II).

The perverted universality of globalism can be considered fulfilled in the verification of the logic that was already outlined by Smith in The Wealth of Nations:

The proprietor of stock is necessarily a citizen of the world, and is not necessarily attached to any particular country. He would be apt to abandon the country in which he was exposed to a vexatious inquisition, in order to be assessed to a burdensome tax, and would remove his stock to some other country where he could either carry on his business, or enjoy his fortune more at his ease (Book V, Chapter II, Article II).

Following Smith’s thesis, it goes without saying that the liberal Right of Money is cosmopolitan and vocationally non-border. Capital is, by its essence, stateless and deterritorialized (“not necessarily attached to any particular country”).

Moreover, if we venture beyond Smith, it is founded on the reduction of the whole world to its “homeland” of reference: it is cosmopolitan precisely because, in order to realize itself in an “ab-solute” form, it must neutralize national barriers and saturate the globe, reducing it to a smooth plane for the omnidirectional displacement of the flows of commodities and commodified persons, of speculative capital and consumer desires.

The possessor of capital is, therefore, “necessarily a citizen of the world,” free to move and circulate in order “carry on his business, or enjoy his fortune more at his ease.” And this, as is evident, according to that logic of profit which, if during a historical period coincided with the space of imperialist nationalism, today finds its own ubi consistam in denationalization and in the opening of all material and immaterial frontiers.

From this point of view, homo cosmopoliticus seems to be the most genuine product of that cosmomarket anthropology and of that rootlessness inscribed in its original code, against which De Maistre’s theorem remains largely valid, according to which we never find the “man” qua talis, but always the Frenchman, the Italian or the Russian (and since Montesquieu—De Maistre ironically added—we learned that the Persian also exists).

Once again, the Left of Custom, trapped in the “Ptolemaic phase,” deludes itself into thinking that it fights against power, when in reality it sustains it, fully defending its interests and intervening against any project of emancipation of the oppressed with respect to the auri sacra fames of turbo-capital.

It fights the very idea of national rootedness, confusing it with its pernicious and dangerous drift that was capitalist nationalism, without realizing that today it has been completely surpassed by the new non-border globocracy, which is the first to use the anti-nationalist rhetoric to demonize, no longer the nationalist imperialism that for a time it supported, but the very idea of Nation and, with it, of the Gramscian national-popular as the basis of cultural, identitarian, political and social resistance of the oppressed against the intrinsically undemocratic market cosmopolitanism.

In this scenario emerges, with clear outlines, the structural incompatibility of capitalist cosmopolitanism with proletarian internationalism or, more generically, of the classes today dominated. Internationalism implies a nexus of socialist solidarity inter nationes and, therefore, the opposite of the cosmopolitan annihilation of nations carried out by global-capitalism following Smith’s theorem and, if you will, according to Trotsky’s cosmopolitical perspective of communism, as deconstructed by Gramsci in the Prison Notebooks.

The internationalism of the national-popular Servant does not coincide, then, either with the conquering nationalism of the historical Right (which was the expressive function of imperialist capitalism in its dialectical phase), or with the capitalist cosmopolitanism of the de-sovereignized and post-national market (which is the project defended in our day, structurally, by the liberal Right of Money and superstructurally by the libertarian Left of Custom).

From what has been exposed, it is again inferred that, in order to break the yoke of liberal Glebalism, we must first of all deconstruct the hegemony of the single thought that sanctifies the really-given power relation. In particular, it is necessary to dismantle the ideological architecture of the champagne Left of Custom, which superstructurally legitimizes the structure of the dominance of the financial Right of Money.

The ideological fraud of the nationalist Right—if it still intends to use, for heuristic purposes, the obsolete and, in fact, “useless” Right-Left dichotomy—lies in presenting a certain authoritarian and non-democratic sovereignty, as if it were the real opposition to capitalist cosmopolitanism, which is precisely its other face (rectius, the culmination).

The imposture of the champagne and rainbow Lefts consists, on the other hand, in smuggling in as socialist internationalism what, strictly speaking, is liberal cosmopolitanism; that is to say, the sphere of conflict favorable to the competitivist Lord.

With an attitude that always oscillates between incomprehension of the power relation and its active legitimization, the champagne Left surreptitiously believes—and here is the core of its error—that “the contrast of cosmopolitanism implies a repudiation of internationalism;” on the contrary, it is socialist internationalism that carries implicitly a firm rejection of both imperialist nationalism and liberal cosmopolitanism. There can be no socialist internationalism in the absence of national States which recognize each other as free and brotherly.

By the way, it was the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 that certified the acknowledged “conversion of the Italian communists to neoliberalism.” On that occasion, the definitive and integrally cosmopolitan forma mentis of the market-friendly Left was forged, now convinced that any opposition to non-border globalism was no longer the possible defense of the dominated classes against the offensive of the unified market without borders, but the path of identitarian and regressive closure, which would necessarily have to be combined with the right-wing quadrant of politics.

Bobbio was undoubtedly right when, in his successful book, Destra e sinistra (Right and Left), he pointed to the “great problem of inequality between men and peoples” as the unresolved knot in the post-1989 world. However, this impeccable diagnosis coexisted, in Bobbio’s works, with the unreal ideal-typical identification of the Left with the defense of that equality, with respect to which the really-existing new Left, converted to liberal cosmopolitanism, had already said goodbye in an evident manner for some time.

If historically the Left—as Bobbio also admitted—was based on the connection between freedom and equality and used the action of the State as an instrument of action upon reality, with a view to implementing that end, how could the post-Marxist new Left still call itself “Left,” which to the questions of equality and labor rights had now placed individualist liberalization and the rainbow rights of the individual consumer before the questions of equality and labor rights; that to the struggle for equality and freedom of colonized peoples had preferred unconditional support for the abstractly humanitarian and concretely imperialist interventionism of the dollar thalassocracy; and that, even before the eticizing power of the State as a means to achieve equality, had chosen to adhere to the de-sovereignizing globalization which is the means that guarantees the ever growing hegemony of the ruling class?

Diego Fusaro is professor of the History of Philosophy at the IASSP in Milan (Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies) where he is also scientific director. He is a scholar of the Philosophy of History, specializing in the thought of Fichte, Hegel, and Marx. His interest is oriented towards German idealism, its precursors (Spinoza) and its followers (Marx), with a particular emphasis on Italian thought (Gramsci or Gentile, among others). he is the author of many books, including Fichte and the Vocation of the Intellectual, The Place of Possibility: Toward a New Philosophy of Praxis, and Marx, again!: The Spectre Returns. [This article appears courtesy of Posmodernia].

Featured: Folio 13 from The Nuremberg Chronicle, or the Schedelsche Weltchronik, or Liber Chronicarum (Book of Chronicles); published in 1493.

Religious Residue and AI: The Eight Rugby Players

On the first Saturday-Sunday in October, tens of thousands of Argentines undertook a pilgrimage, known as a “la Peregrinación,” to the Marian Basilica of Lujan, under the theme “Holy Virgin, make us one.” Sunday evening saw the first debate between five presidential candidates, three weeks before the general election of 22 October. All the parties preached unity, union, common strength, under a variety of slogans, as opportunistic as they come. Galloping inflation, obsidional crime, Rosario as the new Colombia of drugs, half the population in a state of poverty—while, on Saturday, a Kirchnerist oligarch, seen strutting around on a yacht with a callipygian “model” in Marbella, told his critics to go to hell by imitating, in Spanish, the vulgar American retort, “Get a life.” Sure, but what kind of life?

One response to that question was the pilgrimage. Under the leadership of the young Archbishop of Buenos Aires, the “Peregrinación” was a response to the political class — to Peronists in power (Peronism like historical Gaullism is an emotional belief system, straddling a wide spectrum), to the legacy bourgeoisie of Buenos Aires, and to the Chavist socialists. The political class paid lip-service to or ignored the pilgrimage and its message of good will.

With one discordant voice: the man who upset the usual suspects’ playbook, Javier Milei, portrayed by Western medias as “extreme right,” is an anti-Statist economist and a formidable rhetor in the long tradition of Argentine politics —emblematized by Juan Perón’s famous 1973 re-election address, “Gobernar Es Persuadir.” So Milei went frontal : one of his teammates mooted to suspend relations with the Holy Sea, the utmost meddling, invisible “state” in their view. Anti-statism and anti-clericalism are indeed congruent – but don’t tell that to Anglicans (conservatives or not) in the UK, cossetted protestant churches in Germany, or even French “liberals.” Not to mention US conservatives.

To grasp further the multi-layered religious residue in Argentine public life: when Pope Francis was elected, labels bearing his effigy on the streetlamps of Buenos Aires rubbed shoulders with a massage parlour advertisement (and an unintended joke): “Two for the price of one.”

That being said, how do you measure religious residue and mediatization of a public event, and the use of AI? Let’s look at one case.

At the beginning of the year, in the middle of the southern hemisphere summer vacation, a resounding trial fascinated Latin America: that of the ocho rugbiers, eight young rugby players who, at the same time three years before, had murdered a young man, Fernando Báez Sosa, outside a nightclub in Villa Gesell, a seaside resort south of Buenos Aires.

For weeks, the trial, held in Dolores, an old and dignified town on the pampas, was broadcast live on Argentine TV and followed daily from Peru to Mexico. A continental media phenomenon. A judicial phenomenon. A popular, if not populist, phenomenon. Ignored everywhere else, of course.

First mediatization : an extensive coverage by open access medias, such as La Nacion+ , which not only had reporters on the spot all day long, but also organized panels of legal experts who explained each stage of the proceedings with verve but clarity. One reporter stood out: “Carla,” who never lost track of events, maintained admirable calm and exemplary accuracy—she deserves an Oscar for court reporting.

Second mediatization: publicly available CCTV footage of the murder, bearing directly on the judicial process. People wondered: was it a pelea, a brawl involving the exchange of blows (the defense)? Or was it a patada, kicking and punching a victim (the public prosecutor and the family lawyer)? You only have to look at the numerous footage reels to see that it was not a brawl. In Argentina, surveillance cameras are ubiquitous, and there seems to be no law against making public what they record. Every morning, on the 7 a.m. news, you can watch burglaries, and even murder attempts, being committed.

From the very start of the investigation, anyone with access to YouTube or the Web could see what had happened. There was no blurring, in the style of false American prudishness (the “fig leaf” camera) or European-style hypocrisy (“some images may be harmful to sensitive viewers”). Living in society also means seeing what is going on. How can we witness this famous communal life if we cannot see what disrupts it? Even YouTube has not censored anything. From this point of view, Latin America is free.

So, the public had the obvious, right in front of them. The obvious — in the sense that to see is to be convinced of/by the obvious —was freely available, and in no way reserved for the courtroom. The violent crudity of the images was, and remains, public. As a rhetorician, I approve.

And then, a novelty: mediatization using AI. In order to tease out the (concealed) obvious of/from the images of the murder, the Báez Sosa family lawyer resorted to computer analysis: each of the eight assailants was represented digitally. The lawyer brought out this AI mapping at the end of the trial, in his recapitulation. The presiding judge immediately indicated that this could not, at this stage of the trial, be a prueba but she accepted the argument (supported by a reminder of the procedural code) that it was just another visualization of the video which per se was a building block of the proof already argued. As a rhetorician in a law school, I approve.

This digital reconstruction of the video made it possible to follow exactly the movements and the gestures of each assailant. It stunned everyone (and again, all that was broadcast live). We see the victim raising his hand in a plea for mercy, which drew cries from the victim’s mother. AI provided a dis-closure of the video. This is where “mediatization” takes on a whole new meaning. It harks back to the rhetorical concept of aletheia, de-concealment, dis-closure, of the truth, that is the exhibition of what cannot be seen without being mediated, here by AI.

At this point in the trial, the public had indeed judged. Even though the lawyer’s digital ex-planation (in the strict sense of unfolding) was not judicial evidence (at this concluding stage of the trial), it had now become more than a procedural support ; it is energetic evidence (in rhetoric, the Greek energeia translates into evidentia in Latin). That is how aletheia operates.

But what about the three judges (there is no jury)? Digitizing the video had the effect of transforming their naive viewing (however logical in terms of points of argument) into something else: a logic of the gaze.

Watching is necessarily naive: few people are taught to watch, just as they are taught to count or read. Because looking or watching is supposed to be natural. We hardly ever educate people (except specialists in classical painting, for example) in the logic of the gaze. Now, with digital reconstruction, the naive, emotionally-charged —in short, reactive— evidence produced by “watching a video” is replaced by a rational, cold, categorical evidence of a learned gaze. It is a cognitive effect, produced by digitization. The judges had watched. But AI taught them now how to watch. Now they really know : they have a concept of what happened, but was, on their part, a naive, natural act of perception.

Indeed, as we all know, there are two types of knowledge: instinctive knowledge (perception) and constructed knowledge (conception); perception is unstable, perverse, subjective knowledge. But when you glue a strong element of “design” (in this case, AI) onto perception, you have graduated from “percept” to concept.

Lawyer Fernando Burlando’s persuasive strategy was subtle. He played on two rhetorical, audience-centered registers. On the one hand, he targeted the public who had watched the assassination videos, reinforcing their naive certainty (“wow, they’re killing him”) with a logic of movements and gestures (“wow, now I can see what’s going on thanks to the digital markers”). On the other hand, he approached the judges, telling them, without actually saying it, “Of course you have seen the video and analyzed it, but all the same, between you and me, people of good character, you know the value of AI, and having now watched it accurately you have gone beyond a naive perception: you have been introduced to the logic of the gaze.”

In short, he used the extreme media coverage of the case, the avalanche of videos, to supplement a video that is not a video at all, but the purified, perfect, irrefutable version of an exact medium subject to the logic of the gaze. That is aletheia at work.

To sum, so far: mediatizing an event always has a hint of cheating (you cut, paste, edit, have your own angle), and it is even the rule of visual media; otherwise, all agencies would produce the same images, identically; and that is not the case, of course. But transforming media coverage into a certified, accurate, scientific and intelligent mediatization, exhibiting, in this case, the logic of the gaze, is to move to another level.

So, it is understandable that the mother of the main culprit, Máximo Thomsen, accused the media of being responsible for her son’s life sentence (he and four others, the remaining three received a 15-year sentence). But she got the wrong media. It is the use of AI mediatization that established the concealed obvious. Certainly, the accumulation of evidence (DNA, material objects, various videos, autopsy, eyewitnesses, WhatsApp messages) led to a conviction—but for what? For first or second degree murder, or manslaughter (as it was argued) or even non culpable homicide ? But it was the transformation of the video of the attack into an irrefutable object and subject to the logic of the gaze that won the judges over. Intelligent digitization was not proof, but was better than proof. It taught the judges how to watch.

And that is where the religious residue returns.

The “Justicia por Fernando” slogan that guided Fernando Báez Sosa’s family is explicitly religious. His family is pious, and the reference on the networks to Fernando as an “angel” is not a figure of speech. “Justice” then became a rallying cry against all the injustices, judicial and social, poisoning Argentina from below, at a time when the Kirchnerist government was leading the country to ruin. There was an outpouring of vigils, marches and interfaith services, which doubled up as “justice” hearings. The street became an ekklesia. The religious took over the judiciary, and the political as well (the country was experiencing several cases of infanticides, the atrocious result of poverty).

Yet, in the face of this vocal surge of the religious, the eight defendants remained impassively silent throughout the trial (except for one brief interjection), refusing to answer any questions, adopting a stiff stance, and staring fixedly. This was perceived as class contempt, and to a large extent it was: you do not talk to the poor. Their non-gestures, their non-spoken words projected the image of this contempt: “They refuse even to talk to us or look at us. In their eyes we don’t exist. They are beyond justifying themselves.”

But when the sentence was passed, the mask of contempt for justice fell off. But it fell into a religious evocation. When the young men understood what the convoluted pronouncement of the sentence meant, “prison perpetua,” three of them reacted oddly, breaking their weeks long impavid posture: one wept, his head in his hands; another, lionized as a “heart-throb,” fainted dramatically; a third, who had only been sentenced to fifteen years, raised his face to Heaven.

Suddenly the eight rugbiers proffered a religious tableau, worthy of the great altar paintings of Latin American Baroque churches, of three villains facing Judgment, and in various states of what classical painters called “passions,” from despair to imploration and terror. This is the screenshot at the top of this article. So, by instinct and atavism, the condemned placed themselves in the same logic of the gaze and religious representation as the angelization of martyred Fernando. A surprising, Baroque indeed, Pietà tableau came up next: after recovering from his dizzy spell, the dejected accused had his torso and head across the knees of a companion who held him gently like a Mater Dolorosa would hold her Son at the Sixth Sorrow. Gestures like that are residues.

However, to understand the agency of such residues, you have to know how to look, to accept the logic of a particular gaze, Christian or more precisely, Catholic. In fact, Baroque iconicity operated as AI did: the tableau brought out what was concealed, the religious residue, which is now dis-closed and colours the entire event.

In conclusion, it would be good to reflect on the religious substrate on which AI operates, and its insidious and vulgar intrusion in the cultural residues of audiences who, through ignorance and consumerism, see AI only as a practical tool. The inscription of AI in a particular cultural milieu, such as South American religiosity, provides food for thought. We must be wary of treating AI as independent of cultural contexts, residues as Pareto calls them. Its aura of neutral machine is a mercantile ploy. A vending machine knows nothing. Try to make a machine pray, or go on a pilgrimage.

French philosopher and essayist Philippe-Joseph Salazar writes on rhetoric as philosophy of power. Laureate of the Prix Bristol des Lumières in 2015 for his book on jihad (translated as, Words are Weapons. Inside ISIS’s Rhetoric of Terror, Yale UP). In 2022, the international community of rhetoricians honoured him with a Festschrift, The Incomprehensible: The Critical Rhetoric of Philippe-Joseph Salazar. He holds a Distinguished Professorship in Rhetoric and Humane Letters in the Law Faculty of the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

Featured: A screen capture (at 1:17) of the verdict.

Saint Michael, The Angel of Religion

The new esoteric fashions that are springing up to fill the void left by the retreat of Christianity and the forgetfulness of the sacred, feature angels who supposedly connect us to invisible energies. Far removed from such figures, and far from maintaining our tendency towards egocentricity, the Archangel looks upwards, and invites us to do the same. Saint Michael teaches us to rediscover our sense of God. Abbé Paul Roy introduces us to this Archangel, whom we can only invoke more fully if we know him better.

After the centuries of Enlightenment, rationalism, scientism and faith in progress, our era marks a return to the sacred. Alas, the eclipse of the religious has not come to an end—rather than returning to the faith of the ancients, people remain radically modern, willing to do anything but acknowledge themselves as heirs, and prefer to build their own spirituality. Consciously or unconsciously, most are joining the ranks of what used to be known as the New Age, and what some today refer to as magical thinking. Esotericism is on everyone’s lips, attracting many souls clumsily in search of God.

Angels, spiritual beings halfway between man and heaven, are making a strong comeback in the contemporary imagination. A quick search on the Internet, however, leaves us wondering about the contemporary conception of angelic spirits: angels—in particular the “72 guardian angels”—seem to have become a means of connecting to energies and to an invisible world in which we are bathed without being aware of it, of developing our capacity for empathy and personal creativity.

This is reminiscent of the emanatist doctrine of the Platonists, who saw man as a quasi-divine being fallen to earth and enclosed in matter, separated from the original One by a ladder of intermediate beings, to be traversed in an upward direction, by illumination, to return to fundamental harmony. Thus conceived, angels are no longer ministers or auxiliaries of God, but obstacles in man’s relationship with the true God. Like the esoteric doctrines that flourish everywhere today, they lead our contemporaries down blind allies, distracting them from the profound religious quest for the true light that leads to a profound change of life.

A Powerful Defender

We have come a long way from the true nature of angels, and the figure of their prince, Michael. Far from keeping us in the egocentric attitude that characterizes modern religiosity, the archangel looks upwards, and invites us to do the same. Mi-ka-El, in Hebrew: “who is like God.” His name is a program. Saint Michael is an effective intermediary, a powerful defender of the human race, but a messenger who steps aside, so that man can once again be directed towards his Creator. The archangel thus appears on mountain tops—theophanic places par excellence in the Old Testament—to remind us that his role is none other than that of a hyphen, a signpost.

From Mont Gargan to Mont Tombe, now Mont-Saint-Michel, the sanctuaries where the Prince of Angels is venerated are invitations to contemplation of celestial things. The Prince of Angels is named in the Old Testament as the one who fights for the people of Israel (Dan 10:13), the “one of the chief princes.” In the Epistle of Jude (Jude 9), he is mysteriously designated as the one who disputed with the Devil over the body of Moses, who expired on Mount Nebo, in sight of the Promised Land, without anyone ever finding his remains. In the Book of Revelation (Rev 12:7), he leads the angels to fight the dragon—despite the latter’s counterattack, he has the upper hand, and from heaven, hurls Satan down to earth.

Saint Michael’s role in the history of the Church does not end there—soon the object of popular veneration in the East (the Copts dedicated up to seven liturgical feasts to him), then in the West (with a few excesses that the authorities were obliged to curb, as witnessed by certain letters of Saint Augustine), he appeared at Mont Gargan in the 5th century; then at the beginning of the 8th to Bishop Aubert of Avranches, to whom he gave an indication, by means of a strong pressure of his finger on his skull (the relic preserved in the church of Saint-Gervais d’Avances still bears witness to this), to build a sanctuary at the summit of Mont Tombe, an isolated rock in the middle of the large sandy bay bordering his diocese.

Centuries later, Christian peoples’ veneration for the Prince of Angels has not waned, and God allowed him to continue to intervene visibly on their behalf. When France found itself in distress, he was the messenger sent to Jehanne, the Pucelle of Domrémy, soon to be the liberator of Orléans. To prepare the children of Fatima for the apparitions of Our Lady, the angel appeared to them three times, taught them to pray and mysteriously gave them Holy Communion. St. Michael’s close relationship with the Eucharist is still visible in the rites of the Mass, where the angel is invoked on numerous occasions—in the Confiteor, in the blessing of incense at the offertory in the traditional Mass, and even in the Roman Canon (implicitly in the Supplication prayer), where the holy offering is even asked to be carried by him to the heavenly altar. On the Last Day, Saint Michael will again be our intercessor, as well as taking part in the judgment (1 Thess 4:16), as he is often depicted holding the scales that weigh our souls by the weight of their charity.

Saint Michael thus has a dual function, which is an important teaching for our spiritual life: tradition identifies him among the seven angels who stand continually before the face of the Lord (To 12, 15), and his very name is a praise of God’s infinite glory; but the archangel also presents to Him the prayers of pious men (as Raphael presented the prayers and religious acts of old Tobias, cf. To 12, 12), and he willingly serves as a messenger and intercessor.

As a divine sign, Saint Michael shows us that there is no creature too high or distant to condescend to support our misery, since God Himself became man in Jesus. An angelic model, he teaches us to keep our eyes raised to heaven, full of gratitude and admiration for the Divine Majesty, proclaiming with him: “Who is like God?” In a world so far removed from religion and yet so versed in spiritualities, could St. Michael, duly presented and venerated, serve as a bridge to bring our contemporaries back to the unity of truth and faith?

Father Paul Roy is a priest of the Fraternity of Saint-Pierre, and moderator of the site and training application Claves. This interview comes through the kind courtesy of La Nef.

Featured: Saint Michael, by Guariento di Arpo; painted ca. 1350.

Neoliberal Globalization: A New Religious Faith

Using Gramsci’s syntax, ideology exists when “a given class succeeds in presenting and having the conditions of its existence and of its class development accepted as a universal principle, as a conception of the world, as a religion.”

The culmination outlined by Gramsci is entirely relevant if reference is made to the ideology of globalization as a nature that has always been given, irreversible and physiological (globalismus sive natura). In the framework of the post-1989 New World Order and what has been defined as “the great chessboard,” it is presented to all intents and purposes as a “universal principle,” because it is indistinctly accepted in all latitudes of the planet (it is what we could call the globalization of the concept of globalization) and, at the same time, it is also embraced by the pole of the dominated, who should oppose it with the utmost firmness. It is presented as an unquestionable and universally valid truth, which only asks to be ratified and accepted according to the modality of an adaequatio that is both cognitive and political.

Globalization shows itself then, as a “conception of the world;” that is, as an articulated and all-embracing system, because it has been structured in the form of a unitary and systematic perspective, centered on denationalizing cosmopolitanism and on the elimination of all material and immaterial limitations to the free circulation of commodities and marketized persons, to the flows of liquid financial capital and to the infinite extension of the competitive interests of the dominant classes.

Finally, it takes the form of a “religion,” because it is increasingly experienced as an unquestionable faith and largely situated beyond the principles of rational Socratic discussion: whoever does not unthinkingly and with fideistic credentials accept the new globalized order will be immediately ostracized, silenced and stigmatized by the language police and the gendarmes of thought as a heretic or as an infidel, dangerously threatening the stability of the mundialist catechesis and its main articles of faith (free movement, integral openness of all material and immaterial reality, borderless competitiveness, etc. ). Globalization thus coincides with the new idolatrous monotheism of the global market, typical of an era that has ceased to believe in God, but not in capital.

In general terms, globalization is nothing other than the theory that describes, reflects and, in turn, prescribes and glorifies the post-Westphalian class-based New World Order, which emerged and stabilized after 1989 and—to take up Lasch’s formula—was ideologically elevated to the rank of true and only heaven. Such is the world entirely subsumed under capital and under the American-centric imperialism of liberalized private capital markets, with collateral export of free market democracy and free desire, and of the anthropology of homo cosmopoliticus.

The symbolic power of the concept of globalization is so invasive that it literally makes it impossible for anyone who dares to question the concept to gain access to public discourse. It is, in this sense, more akin to a religion of obligatory creed than to a theory subject to free discussion and hermeneutics embedded in dialogical reason.

Through categories that have become cornerstones of the capitalist neo-language, any attempt to curb the invasiveness of the market and to challenge the absolute domination of the globalized and American-centric economy is demonized as “totalitarianism,” “fascism,” “Stalinism,” or even “rojipardismo” (red-fascism), the diabolical synthesis of all three. Liberal fundamentalism and globalist free-market totalitarianism also evidence their inability to admit, even ex hypothesi, the theoretical possibility of alternative modes of existence and production.

Any idea of a possible control of the economy and of an eventual regulation of the market and of the open society (with built-in financial despotism) would lead unfailingly, according to the title of a well-known study by Hayek, towards “The Road to Serfdom.” Hayek states it without euphemism: “socialism means slavery.”

Obviously, the theorem of von Hayek and his acolytes does not take into account the fact that totalitarianism is not only the result of political planning, but can also be the consequence of a private competitive action of political rules. In the present Europe, by the way, the danger is not to be identified with nationalism and the return of traditional totalitarianisms, but rather with Hayekian market liberalism and the invisible violence of the subtle club of depoliticized economics.

It is therefore imperative to decolonize the imaginary of current hegemonic conceptions of globalization and try to redefine its contents in an alternative way. To this end, it is necessary to re-understand Marxian social relations as mobile and conflictive, where the gaze flooded with ideology only registers things that are inert and aseptic, rigid and immutable.

In other words, it is necessary to deconstruct the hegemonic image of globalization, showing its non-neutral but class-based character.

When analyzed from the perspective of the globalist ruling classes, globalization may indeed appear enthusiastic and very worthy of praise and empowerment.

For example, Amartya Sen celebrates it most insistently for its greater efficiency in the international division of labor, for the fall in production costs, for the exponential increase in productivity and—to a decidedly more questionable extent—for the reduction of poverty and the general improvement in living and working conditions.

Suffice it to recall, at a first glance at the new millennium, that Europe has 20 million unemployed, 50 million poor and 5 million homeless; and all this while, in the last twenty years in the same Europe, total income has risen by between 50 and 70 percent.

This confirms, in a way that is difficult to refute, the class character of globalization and the progress it generates. From the perspective of the dominated (and thus seen “from below”), it is identified with the very concrete hell of the new technocapitalist power relation, which was consolidated on a planetary scale after 1989 with the intensification of exploitation and commodification, of classism and imperialism.

To this hermeneutic duplicity, which presides over the duplicity of classes in the very fractured post-1989 context, returns the endless debate that has interested and continues to interest the two foci of this frontal contraposition: on the one hand, the apologists of globalization; and on the other, those engaged in the elaboration of the cahier de doléances du mondialisme.

The former (who as a whole can be called “globalists,” despite the kaleidoscopic plurality of their positions), extol the virtues of making the world a market. On the contrary, the latter (who only partially coincide with those whom the public debate has baptized with the name of “sovereigntists”), emphasize the contradictions and the eminently regressive character with respect to the previous framework centered on national sovereignties.

In short, and without delving into the intricacies of a debate that is practically unmanageable because of the quantity of content and diversity of approaches, the panegyrists of globalism insist on how globalization extends the industrial revolution, progress and the conquests of the West to the entire world; or, in other words, how it “universalizes” the achievements of a humanity somehow understood as “superior” and, therefore, entitled to organize the “single file” of linear development of all the peoples of the planet.

Even the most soberly skeptical authors on the axiological value of globalization, such as Stiglitz, seem to suffer from a magnetic and ultimately unjustified attraction to the work of turning the world into a market. In the view of Stiglitz and his reformist optimism, this process, which at the same time also “planetarizes” capitalist inequality and misery, deserves not to be abandoned because of the developments and changes to which it might give rise.

Diego Fusaro is professor of History of Philosophy at the IASSP in Milan (Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies) where he is also scientific director. He is a scholar of the Philosophy of History, specializing in the thought of Fichte, Hegel, and Marx. His interest is oriented towards German idealism, its precursors (Spinoza) and its followers (Marx), with a particular emphasis on Italian thought (Gramsci or Gentile, among others). he is the author of many books, including Fichte and the Vocation of the Intellectual, The Place of Possibility: Toward a New Philosophy of Praxis, and Marx, again!: The Spectre Returns. This article appears courtesy of Posmodernia.

Featured: Playing Chess. Cafe “Dominic,” St. Petersburg, by Hugo Karlovich Bakmanson; painted in 1909.