jeudi, 23 octobre 2014
Machiavelli in België: de particratie en haar trukendoos
Door: Paul Muys
Ex: http://www.doorbraak.be
Machiavelli in België: de particratie en haar trukendoos
Op het moment dat Charles Michel voor de camera's bevestigt dat er een regeerakkoord is, stelde professor-emeritus politologie Wilfried Dewachter een paar honderd meter verderop in het Vlaams Parlement zijn boek over de Belgische particratie voor. Met onderbouwde argumenten en grondige kennis van 30 jaar politiek reilen en zeilen noemt hij die particratie een regelrechte schande.
Verontwaardiging en ergernis, maar ook geloof in wat democratie kan en moet zijn. Dat zijn de motieven die Wilfried Dewachter, hebben aangezet tot het schrijven van zijn boek over De trukendoos van de Belgische particratie. Een Europese schande (Pelckmans, 285 blz.). De emeritus-hoogleraar, dertig, veertig jaar al bevoorrechte getuige van de politieke gang van zaken in ons land, had liever een heel ander soort bestel gezien, dat ons behoed had voor de situatie waarin we nu bijna zonder het te weten verzeild zijn geraakt. Alhoewel, indicatoren van de politieke decadentie zijn er te over. De doorsnee-burger wéét dat onze parlementaire democratie niet werkt, dat de staatshervorming, hoewel nog in de steigers, een misbaksel is. Hij keert zich af van de vriendjespolitiek en de partijpolitieke benoemingen (tenzij hij tot de groeiende groep begunstigden behoort). Hij kijkt weg wanneer hij iets verneemt van de vleespotten waaraan de Parteiangehörigen zich gretig te goed doen. De gemiddelde Vlaming brengt braaf zijn stem uit, ziet mensen aan de macht komen voor wie hij niet gekozen heeft, of zelfs niet kón kiezen, hoort beloften die niet worden gehouden. De onverschilligheid waarin dit resulteert is groot en een droevige zaak. De antipolitieke sentimenten zijn ook niet ongevaarlijk.
Partijen en particratie
Maar zie, daar is dit boek waarin Wilfried Dewachter een diagnose brengt en remedies aanreikt, vooral door te verwijzen naar buitenlandse voorbeelden.
De politieke partijen hebben zich de macht toegeëigend. Al beroepen ze zich graag op de Belgische grondwet, voor hen is die inderdaad niet meer dan het ‘vodje papier’ waarover Leo Tindemans het destijds had toen hij het ontslag van zijn regering indiende. Artikel 42 van de grondwet luidt dat de leden van beide Kamers de Natie vertegenwoordigen en niet enkel degenen die hen hebben verkozen. Dat klopt niet echt. Voortaan lezen we beter: ‘De leden van beide Kamers vertegenwoordigen enkel de partijleiders die hen hebben laten verkiezen tot zogenaamde parlementsleden, door ze in nuttige volgorde op hun kandidatenlijsten te plaatsen. Zij volgen de steminstructies van hun leiders getrouw op , binnen hun taalgroep. Hun mandaat reikt niet tot in de andere taalgroep.’
Al zegt de grondwet over de partijen helemaal niets, ze bestáán, ze zijn nuttig en nodig in een goed functionerende democratie. Maar dat een democratie zichzelf kan vernietigen wist Jean-Luc Dehaene al. Partijen willen steeds meer macht, tot ze het eindpunt bereikt hebben en de democratie uitschakelen, of haar reduceren tot een leeg, hooguit symbolisch ritueel. In plaats van een middel, zijn de partijen volop bezig een doel op zich te worden, gebrand op macht, inkomen en status, op MIS : een herhaaldelijk in dit boek terugkerend letterwoord. Ze hebben de macht vrijwel helemaal naar zich toegetrokken. De democratie is een particratie geworden.
De laatste beslissende aanslag op onze toch al amechtige democratie gebeurde tersluiks, ‘en stoemelings’ in de marge van de onderhandelingen over de Zesde Staatshervorming. ‘Met acht mensen hebben we de staatshervorming onderhandeld. In het parlement voerde iedereen nadien een show op’, dixit de toenmalige sp.a-voorzitster. Een onthutsende en cynische mededeling, schijnbaar argeloos gedebiteerd door Caroline Gennez.
Free, fair & frequent elections: dat kennen we hier niet
Zo werd en petit comité niet de Senaat, maar werden wél de Senaatsverkiezingen afgeschaft. De Hoge Vergadering is een machteloze praatbarak. Men had daarom, zo pleit Dewachter, beter de 40 (tot 2010 bovendien rechtstreeks verkozen!) senatoren naar de Kamer overgeheveld, te meer omdat een eenkamerstelsel performanter zou zijn dan een tweekamerstelsel. Maar daar hadden Di Rupo en zijn zeven kompanen geen oren naar. De rechtstreekse verkiezing van de senatoren werd afgeschaft omdat die te duidelijk de echte wil van de kiezer aan het licht bracht, die zo in zekere mate richting gaf aan de regeringsvorming. Als men de score van 25 mei van Bart De Wever in de kieskring Antwerpen extrapoleert naar heel Vlaanderen zou hij uitgekomen zijn op zo’n 950.000 stemmen, ‘wat zelfs door een kloeke particratie niet kan worden opzij geschoven’. Afschaffen dus die handel!
Voorts werden alle verkiezingen (op die voor gemeente- en provincieraden na) op één hoop gegooid, iets waarvoor de federale legislatuur diende verlengd tot vijf jaar. Volgens Dewachter komt dit neer op ‘de versterking van de houdgreep van de traditionele macht op de gewesten en de gemeenschappen.’
Er volgde ook een reeks ‘niet-beslissingen’ : er komt geen federale kieskring, de stemplicht blijft behouden (inclusief de boetes voor wie niet opdaagt) en ook zullen in een parlement verkozen ministers zich als vanouds kunnen laten vervangen door ‘tijdelijke’ opvolgers, in plaats van door de kandidaat die na hem/haar het hoogste stemmenaantal binnenhaalde.
Dit alles gebeurde zonder voorafgaand referendum, zonder een andere verkiezing. Terwijl toch deze aspecten van de staatshervorming de democratische mogelijkheden van de kiezers afbouwen. Ongelooflijk dat men dit zo maar liet gebeuren.
Door het afzien van een federale kieskring ‘verschrompelt’ het Belgisch federalisme of wat daarvoor moet doorgaan tot een provinciaal systeem met 10 + 1 kieskringen.
Deze wetswijzigingen en niet-beslissingen, stelt Dewachter, waren helemaal niet nodig voor de zesde staatshervorming, Integendeel, ze werken de overdracht van middelen en bevoegdheden zelfs tegen. ‘Sterker nog: deze maatregelen houden het federalisme onder controle van de particratie.’
Daarom was de stembusgang van 25 mei 2014, de ‘moeder van alle verkiezingen’ àlles, behalve een feest van de democratie, al hebben we toen in totaal zes parlementen ‘verkozen’. Maar neem nou nog maar alleen de federale Kamer. Hoeveel van de 150 vertegenwoordigers heeft u er kunnen kiezen? Afhankelijk van de provincie waren dat er hooguit een goede 20. De 63 Franstalige Kamerleden heeft u alleszins niet verkozen, net zomin als onze Waalse landgenoten ook maar iets te zeggen hadden over de Vlaamse kandidaten. Meer nog, als een verkozene geroepen wordt tot andere verantwoordelijkheden, versta: een ministerpost of zo, dan laat hij zijn zetel nog steeds aan de opvolger. De verkiezingen zijn ook al voor de helft beslist (wie mag kandideren en op welke plaats krijgt hij/zij op de lijst, op welke financiële steun kan hij rekenen, in ruil waarvoor ?) nog voordat de kiezers één stembiljet in handen krijgen.
Die kiezer brengt dus zijn stem uit (op straf van boete !, dat terwijl haast alle landen de stemplicht allang hebben afgeschaft), maar dat is niet meer dan een rituele handeling. ‘Les électeurs s’expriment, et puis on ferme la porte’, dan is de particratie aan zet, dat is al jaren zo, al mislukt dat soms wel eens. Tenminste één Franstalige partij heeft het ‘Nooit met de N-VA’ achteraf moeten inslikken. Als negatie van de wil van de kiezer kon die oekaze in elk geval tellen.
We zijn al van in 1978 een confederatie !
De ene kieskring werd al in 1978 gesaboteerd door de Franstalige partijen die het initiatief namen tot afsplitsing van de unitaire partijen. Van dan af zijn de Franstalige partijen de bescherming van de minderheid uit de eerste staatshervorming van 1970 gaan misbruiken als veto’s (de ‘wetten met bijzondere meerderheid in elke taalgroep’) met politieke verlamming als gevolg. Dewachter spreekt van de vierendeling van het parlement, waardoor het door toedoen van de particratie monddood wordt gemaakt. Want in een extreem geval zou 17 % van de stemmen (ongeveer PS + cdH) in het federaal parlement volstaan om de meerderheid van 83% te blokkeren. Met deze ‘bijzondere wetten’ is een nieuwe Belgische grondwet geschreven (er is ook al herhaaldelijk gebruik van gemaakt): ‘deze van de onveranderlijkheid, van de eeuwige veto-capaciteit’ (…). ‘Niet de NVA splitst het land,’ zo stelt Dewachter, ‘maar lang geleden scheurden de Franstalige partijen het al in tweeën, bij hun (1) afscheuring van de nationale partij , en (2) hun misbruik van de minderheidsbepalingen van 1970 als veto’s’. Natuurlijk, wanneer dat de PS zo uitkomt wordt gedreigd met een ‘institutionele atoombom’. Een voorbeeld hiervan is de overheveling in 1991 van de controle over de wapenuitvoer, een federale bevoegdheid, naar beide gewesten, zonder boe of ba opgelegd door de Franstalige socialisten. Zo confederaal hebben de Vlamingen het tot nu toe nooit gespeeld.
‘België’, aldus Dewachter, ‘is verworden tot een non state, tot een anarchie, in de betekenis van afwezigheid van doorslaggevend beleid.’
De ene kieskring is belangrijk en wenselijk. Maar is hij ook mogelijk ?
We hádden tot 1970 al een federale kieskring. Bedoeld wordt: een nationale kiesinzet met dezelfde keuzemogelijkheden voor alle 7 miljoen Belgische kiezers. Dat veronderstelt dat alle kandidaten zich presenteren voor de hele kieskring, dat alle kiezers dezelfde keuze hebben tussen de programma’s die de partijen via deze kandidaten voorstellen en tussen de mogelijke oplossingen. De stem van elke kiezer dient even zwaar te wegen. Op die manier kunnen de burgers rechtstreeks hun regering verkiezen, bijvoorbeeld naar analogie met de Franse presidentsverkiezingen. In een eerste ronde stellen de partijen hun kandidaat-premier voor. In de tweede ronde komen de twee kandidaten die de meeste stemmen kregen tegen elkaar uit. Vóór de tweede ronde werken die een voorstel tot federale regering uit met haar programma. Eén van beiden behaalt de absolute meerderheid en is vrijwel onmiddellijk klaar om te besturen. De kiezer voelt zich op die manier direct bij de keuze betrokken en kan de regering als ze hem tegenvalt bij een volgende verkiezing doen vallen. Dat gebeurt in heel wat landen min of meer zo. Na een stembusgang duurt het in het Verenigd Koninkrijk hooguit een dag of twee voor de nieuwe regering aantreedt.
Deze gang van zaken is natuurlijk te onvoorspelbaar voor de particraten. Die hebben dan ook de mogelijkheid tot vorming van de ene kieskring zonder meer afgeschaft. Maar op het Vlaamse en het Waalse niveau ligt dat anders. ‘De deelstaten krijgen de morele opdracht om de democratie in België nog enigszins te redden, indien België binnen het Europese beschavingspatroon nog wil kunnen functioneren.’ Dit is voor de Vlaams regering en het Vlaams Parlement een uitdaging van jewelste. Toch zou het niet voor het eerst zijn dat beslissingen worden genomen tegen de grondwet in. Dat deed Albert I toen hij het algemeen enkelvoudig stemrecht invoerde. Dat deed België toen het volwaardig en stichtend lid werd van NAVO en EGKS. Dat deed ook Achiel Van Acker, die zijn kolenslag won door stakingen te breken en krijgsgevangenen in de steenkoolputten te laten afdalen, en die via besluitwetten de sociale zekerheid liet uitbouwen. En waar hadden Wilfried Martens en Jean-Luc Dehaene in de jaren ‘80 gestaan zonder ‘bijzondere machtsbesluiten’ ?
Laten we hopen dat de hoofdarchitect van onze nieuwe regeringen, onmiddellijk na zijn terugkeer uit Shanghai dit – overigens uiterst leesbare – boek ter hand neemt, of tenminste één van zijn naaste medewerkers opdraagt het grondig door te nemen.
00:06 Publié dans Belgicana, Politique, Théorie politique | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : belgique, élections, politique, théorie politique, politologie, sciences politiques, partitocratie | 
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samedi, 18 octobre 2014
Les États des peuples et l'empire de la nation
Il existe une confusion permanente entre le mot « nation » qui désigne une association contractuelle de personnes liées à une constitution et la notion de « peuple » qui renvoie à une identité, c’est-à-dire un fait donné, une appréhension de soi résultant de l’histoire. Le peuple est donc le produit du déterminisme — nous ne décidons pas de notre appartenance —, tandis que la nation est le résultat volontaire d’un choix — nous élisons notre citoyenneté.
L’État-nation, dont la France est l’archétype, désire l’égalité, l’uniformité, la centralisation ; il établit une loi unique sur l’ensemble de son territoire. Il ne reconnaît pas la diversité des coutumes et tend à la suppression des différences locales. Il suppose que tous les peuples sous son empire adoptent les mêmes mœurs et s’expriment dans sa langue administrative.- [1] Sur l’abbé Sieyès, cf. BREDIN (Jean-Denis), Sieyès, La clé de la révolution française, éd. de Fallois, 1988.
- [2] BAUER (Otto), Die Nationalitätfrage und die Sozialdemokratie, Vienne, 1924, (1er éd. 1907), XXX-576 p. (Marx Studien, IV). Edition française : ID. , La question des nationalités et la social-démocratie, Paris-Montréal, 1987, 2 tomes, 594 p.
- [3] JACQUES (François) et SCHEID (John), Rome et l’intégration de l’empire (44 av. J.C. - 260 ap. J.C.), tome 1 Les structures de l’empire romain, Paris, 2e éd. 1992 (1er : 1990), p. 209-219 et 272-289 (Nouvelle Clio. L’Histoire et ses problèmes).
00:05 Publié dans Définitions, Histoire, Théorie politique | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : empire, peuple, nation, empire romain, antiquité romaine, culture classique, rome, rome antique, théorie politique, sciences politiques, politologie, définition | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
vendredi, 17 octobre 2014
Il filosofo Diego Fusaro: “Sto con Putin perché ho letto Kant”
Il filosofo Diego Fusaro: “Sto con Putin perché ho letto Kant”
Il più interessante dei nuovi filosofi italiani legge Marx & Schmitt e appoggia Putin perché riavvicina l’Europa alle radici della sua cultura giuridica e politica.
Diego Fusaro (Torino, 1983) è il più interessante tra i filosofi italiani di giovane generazione. Sua è una rilettura del pensiero di Marx al di là di ogni vecchia scolastica o tentativo di “rottamazione” (Bentornato Marx! il titolo del suo libro). Tra le sue opere ricordiamo anche “Minima Mercatalia. Filosofia e capitalismo” e il recente “Idealismo e Prassi. Fichte, Marx, Gentile”. Fusaro è stato allievo del grande (e misconosciuto) Costanzo Preve e proprio Preve gli ha trasmesso l’interesse per la Russia. Costanzo Preve – ci dice Fusaro – scrisse un saggio intitolato “Russia, non deluderci!”.
In che senso?
Preve si aspettava che la Russia potesse opporsi allo strapotere del capitalismo americano e alle sue pulsioni imperialiste, e dunque garantire l’esistenza di un mondo multipolare. Se la Russia non delude in questa sua missione naturale, essa svolge una funzione fondamentale anzitutto per noi Europei.
La Russia di Putin a differenza della vecchia URSS non esprime una radicale alternativa “di sistema” al mondo liberalcapitalista.
Vero, ma dal punto di vista geopolitico la Russia rappresenta pur sempre un freno all’agire di una super-potenza che ormai tende a sconfinare nella pre-potenza. Il mondo post-1989 è esattamente questo, la tendenza americana a dominare il mondo in forma unipolare.
Nel parlare del necessario “multipolarismo” lei fa riferimento a Kant.
Sì, in un mio scritto: Minima Mercatalia. Filosofia e capitalismo. Kant diceva, nel 1795, che per garantire una stabile pace è meglio che vi sia una pluralità di Stati (diremmo noi: meglio più blocchi, anche contrapposti) che una Monarchia Universale. Oggi la “monarchia universale” è quella dello “one way”, del pensiero unico americano che mira ad annullare ogni diritto alla differenza e ogni modo alternativo di abitare il mondo che non sia quello americano.
Oggi la Russia tende a scontrarsi con l’Occidente sul tema dei valori e dei cosiddetti diritti individuali.
Quella dei diritti individuali è una vera e propria ideologia, nel senso deteriore del termine. Tale ideologia afferma i diritti di un individuo astratto, mentre i veri diritti sono quelli dell’individuo all’interno della comunità. Individuo e comunità esistono reciprocamente mediati, non ha senso pensarli astrattamente, come fa l’ideologia dei diritti civili, la quale è poi un alibi per non parlare dei diritti sociali.
Diritti individuali magari bilanciati anche con i doveri, come diceva Mazzini.
Certamente. Mi rifiuto poi di pensare che matrimoni gay, adozioni gay e eutanasia rappresentino i simboli della massima emancipazione possibile. È una presa in giro, anzitutto per i precari e per i disoccupati. I diritti devono essere anzitutto diritti sociali: quelli che garantiscono una sopravvivenza dignitosa dell’individuo all’interno della sua comunità, permettendogli di potersi pienamente esprimere in tutte le sue potenzialità.
Putin si appella a quel diritto naturale che affonda le sue radici nel grande pensiero europeo: lo stoicismo, i padri della chiesa.
In tempi più recenti possiamo ricordare Grozio e Pudendorf come alfieri di questa concezione. Se Mosca oggi ci aiuta a riavvicinarci a questi temi, allora è davvero auspicabile che essa sia forte e ci sia vicina. Infatti, appare evidente come la Russia, anche per via della sua straordinaria cultura, rappresenti una realtà molto più affine allo spirito europeo di quanto non sia l’America, che è invece il regno della tecnica (Heiddeger) e del capitale smisurato (Marx).
E dunque…?
Dunque l’Europa dovrebbe staccarsi dall’America, e dovrebbe schierarsi nel blocco euroasiatico. Impresa utopica… se pensiamo alla presenza delle basi militari USA in Italia, a ben sessant’anni dalla fine dei nazifascismi e a vent’anni dalla fine del comunismo. L’Italia è oggi una colonia statunitense, anche se nessuno lo dice.
In campo economico e sociale sembra che l’“utopia si stia realizzando: flussi di studenti, di merci, di turisti. Interscambio energetico e tecnologico. Anche per questo forse si producono “crisi” … per suscitare un nuovo clima da guerra fredda e impedire la piena integrazione.
Gli Americani devono necessariamente dividere gli Europei per conservare il lorodominio unipolare. Dividere per comandare meglio. Le basi americane che costellano vergognosamente il territorio europeo servono esattamente a mantenere in uno stato di perenne subalternità militare, geopolitica e culturale gli Europei.
C’è anche un ritardo della cultura europea o perlomeno di quella italiana nel capire i cambiamenti epocali in atto.
Dopo il 1989 si è verificata una ondata penosa di riflussi e pentimenti. In questo scenario si inserisce la vicenda tragicomica della sinistra italiana e di quello che, con Preve, chiamo l’orrido serpentone metamorfico PCI-PDS-DS-PD: dal grande Antonio Gramsci a Matteo Renzi. Ormai da venti anni, senza alcun infingimento, la sinistra sta dalla parte del capitalismo, delle grandi banche e dei bombardamenti “umanitari”. Per questo io non sono di sinistra: se la sinistra smette di interessarsi a Marx e Gramsci, occorre smettere di interessarsi alla sinistra.
Se la sinistra ha assunto questa posizione è stato appunto in nome della nuova Ideologia dei Diritti umani
Affermava Carl Schmitt : l’ ideologia diritti umani è utile per creare un fronte unito contro chi viene individuato come “non umano”. Contro un nemico che viene dipinto come un mostro, ogni strumento di annientamento è lecito: si pensi agli strumenti utilizzati contro Saddam Hussein, contro Gheddafi. Si deve sempre inventare un nuovo Hitler in modo da legittimare la nuova Hiroshima: dove c’è il dittatore sanguinario, lì deve esserci il bombardamento etico. È il canovaccio della commedia che, sempre uguale, viene impiegato per dare conto di quanto accade sullo scacchiere geopolitico dopo il 1989: il popolo compattamente unito contro il dittatore sanguinario (nuovo Hitler!), il silenzio colpevole dell’Occidente, i dissidenti “buoni”, cui è riservato il diritto di parola, e, dulcis in fundo, l’intervento armato delle forze occidentali che donano la libertà al popolo e abbattono il dittatore mostrando con orgoglio al mondo intero il suo cadavere (Saddam Hussein nel 2006, Gheddafi nel 2011, ecc.). Farebbero lo stesso contro Putin…
… se Giuseppe Stalin non avesse innalzato attorno alla Russia una palizzata di bombe atomiche.
Esatto, proprio per questo è opportuno che Putin conservi il primato militare come arma di dissuasione: per poter svolgere una civile funzione di freno alla super-potenza americana. Per questo, l’immagine simbolo di questi anni è quella che vede contrapposti Obama che dice: “Yes, we can” e Putin che idealmente gli risponde: “no, you can’t!”. Frenare gli Americani significa frenare la loro convinzione di essere degli eletti, di avere una special mission, che consisterebbe nell’esportare la democrazia, come si esportano merci, a colpi di embarghi o di bombardamenti. Sulla scia di questa convinzione è stata dichiarata una guerra mondiale a tutto il mondo che non si piega ai diktat e la guerra è stata portata di volta in volta in Irak, in Serbia, in Afghanistan, in Libia, attraverso la guerriglia in Siria. Solo la Russia resiste. È questa la “quarta guerra mondiale”. Essa, successiva alla terza (la “Guerra fredda”), è di ordine geopolitico e culturale ed è condotta dalla civiltà del dollaro contro the rest of the world, contro tutti i popoli e le nazioni che non siano disposti a sottomettersi al suo dominio, forma politica della conquista del mondo da parte della forma merce e della logica della reductio ad unum del globalitarismo,
Putin stesso viene definito come una sorta di despota asiatico antidemocratico… anche se le percentuali del consenso di cui gode, espresso in regolari elezioni, sono eclatanti.
Come dice Alain de Benoist, l’ideologia liberale occidentale è una “ideologie du meme”: riconosce e legittima solo ciò che percepisce come uniforme a sé stessa. E in nome di questo unilateralismo si glorificano anche fenomeni ridicoli come quello delle Pussy Riot, come espressioni di “dissidenza” e di “lotta per i diritti”! Il capitale odia tutto ciò che capitale non è, mira ad abbattere ogni limite, in modo da vedere ovunque sempre e solo la stessa cosa, cioè se stesso. Con le parole di Marx, “ogni limite è per il capitale un ostacolo che deve essere superato”.
Come considera la proposta formulata da Vladimir Putin di una “Europa unita da Lisbona a Vladivostok”?
È un concetto interessante. E’ necessario che l’asse dell’Europa si orienti altrove rispetto all’Occidente americanizzato. Ed è necessario immaginare una Europa più ampia dei confini imposti dalla UE: quella UE che rappresenta il trionfo dei principi di capitalismo speculativo di stampo occidentale. La UE è oggi la quintessenza dell’americanismo, del neoliberismo americano e della vergognosa rimozione dei diritti sociali. È, direbbe Gramsci, la “rivoluzione passiva” con cui, dopo il 1989, i dominanti hanno imposto il neoliberismo.
E come si definirebbe Diego Fusaro oggi?
Sono uno allievo indipendente di Hegel e Marx, Gentile e Gramsci, ma mi considero abbastanza isolato nel panorama culturale italiano, perché la sinistra in Italia è passata dalla lotta al capitale alla lotta per il capitale. I suoi nomi di spicco sono Fabio Fazio e la signora Dandini, Zagrebelsky e Rodotà. In questo senso, non ne faccio mistero, mi sento un dissidente e un ribelle, e propongo un pensiero in rivolta contro l’esistente. La sinistra oggi è contro la borghesia ma non contro il capitalismo globale: ma dal 1968 è il capitalismo stesso che lotta contro la borghesia, cioè contro quel mondo di valori (etica, religione, Stato, valori borghesi, ecc.) per loro stessa natura incompatibili con la mercificazione universale capitalistica. Per ciò, lottando contro la borghesia, dal 1968 ad oggi la sinistra lotta per il capitalismo. Io ritengo che si debba invece lottare contro il capitalismo e che sia ancora valido un ideale di emancipazione del genere umano inteso come un soggetto unitario (la razza umana), che esiste solo nella pluralità delle culture e delle lingue, delle tradizioni e dei costumi, ossia in quella pluralità che – diceva il filosofo Herder – è il modo di manifestarsi di Dio nella storia.
All’atto della sua prima elezione Obama veniva accolto – e non solo dalla sinistra – come una sorta di Messia. Vi è chi lo definì come “il Presidente di tutto il mondo libero”.
Quello fu un tipico caso di provincialismo italiano ed europeo: la festa per l’incoronazione dell’Imperatore Buono. Oggi i tempi sono cambiati, c’è piùdisincanto non solo verso Obama, ma anche verso la costruzione verticistica dell’Unione Europea. Mi pare che la Francia si sia rivelata “l’anello debole” della catena eurocratica. O meglio: il punto in cui la catena si può spezzare. Chi è contro il capitale, nel senso di Gramsci e di Marx, non può oggi non essere contro l’imperialismo americano, ma poi anche contro l’Europa dell’euro e della finanza, del precariato e del neoliberismo.
00:05 Publié dans Entretiens, Philosophie, Théorie politique | Lien permanent | Commentaires (0) | Tags : diego fusaro, politique internationale, russie, poutine, entretien, italie, philosophie, philosophie politique, sciences politiques, politologie, théorie politique | | del.icio.us | | Digg | Facebook
dimanche, 05 octobre 2014
Une histoire du libéralisme
Archives de "Synergies Européennes", 1985
- Les Libéraux français, 1814-1875, L. Girard (abrégé d'un cours sur le libéralisme en France, 1966), Aubier-Montaigne, 1985
- Essai sur le libéralisme allemand (Jean de Grandvilliers, 1914)
- Le Contrat social libéral (SC Kolm, PUF, 1985)
- Tocqueville et les deux démocraties (JC Lamberti, PUF, 1983)
- Histoire intellectuelle du libéralisme (P. Manent, Julliard., 1987)
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vendredi, 03 octobre 2014
Du bon usage du référendum...
Du bon usage du référendum...
par Ivan Blot
Ex: http://metapoinfos.hautetfort.com
Nous reproduisons ci-dessous un point de vue d'Ivan Blot, cueilli sur La voix de la Russie et consacré à la question du référendum comme outil démocratique. Président de l'association "Démocratie directe", l'auteur a récemment publié L'oligarchie au pouvoir (Economica, 2011), La démocratie directe (Economica, 2012), Les faux prophètes (Apopsix, 2013) et L'Europe colonisée (Apopsix, 2014).
Du bon usage du référendum
Le référendum est l’outil démocratique par excellence. Mais il est comme la démocratie : il ne fonctionne pas dans n’importe quelles conditions. Déjà Aristote écrivait dans sa « Politique » que la démocratie ne fonctionnait que là où les classes moyennes sont nombreuses.
En effet, des classes moyennes de propriétaires, si possible formant des familles avec des enfants, représentent des hommes et des femmes qui ont des choses à perdre (leur patrimoine, les perspectives d’avenir de leurs enfants) et qui par conséquent ne se comporteront pas de façon irresponsable. C’est vrai aussi du référendum, l’instrument le plus démocratique pour légiférer puisque chaque citoyen pourra donner son avis à partir de sa condition concrète, de son « vécu existentiel » que le bureaucrate n’a pas, fut il brillant dans les études abstraites.
Les deux révolutions sanglantes qui ont marqué le monde, la révolution jacobine en France et la révolution bolchevique en Russie, sont parties de deux grandes villes aux populations pauvres fortement déracinées : Paris et Saint-Pétersbourg. A Saint-Pétersbourg, des centaines de milliers d’ouvriers vivaient seuls sans famille pour travailler dans des usines géantes. Les soldats et marins constituaient une population analogue, guerrière, masculine, prêts à tous les excès dès lors que la discipline de l’ancien régime s’était effondrée. Les Bleus en Vendée, les Rouges en Russie furent des armées efficaces mais brutales, souvent criminelles.
La démocratie comme le référendum exigent des citoyens enracinés dans des traditions morales éprouvées : c’est le cas en Suisse depuis le Moyen Âge.
Deux gouvernements viennent de donner des exemples de mauvaise gestion démocratique, certes de façon contrastée : l’Ukraine et le Royaume Uni.
En Ukraine, les populations russophones ont été détachées de la mère patrie par le hasard des frontières tracées par les Soviétiques, hasard devenu destin lorsque l’URSS a éclaté. Curieusement, l’Occident se fait une religion de respecter ces frontières issues de décisions d’un régime totalitaire sans la moindre consultation des populations concernées. Ces populations ont réclamé des référendums. Sauf en Crimée en raison de la protection russe, non seulement ces référendums n’ont pas eu lieu mais leurs partisans ont été déclarés « terroristes » par le gouvernement de Kiev. Et ce dernier s’est résolu à les ramener à la raison à coups de canons ! Où sont dans un tel cas les fameux droits de l’homme ? Ils sont piétinés dans l’indifférence du Conseil de l’Europe, notamment.
Au Royaume Uni, heureusement, la situation est moins tragique. Toutefois, les gouvernements successifs de Londres n’ont pas voulu prendre en compte le mécontentement de la population écossaise. Le résultat est clair : presque la moitié de la population écossaise veut désormais se séparer de l’Angleterre. 45% ont voté pour l’indépendance. Même si celle-ci n’est pas acquise, le problème va demeurer car ce chiffre pour la scission est considérable. Le Royaume Uni devrait réfléchir sur une solution fédérale. On notera qu’une fois de plus, le résultat du référendum est modéré puisque l’Ecosse ne prend pas son indépendance. Mais c’est un bon avertissement pour le gouvernement.
Cette gestion catastrophique (Ukraine) ou médiocre (Royaume Uni), ce déni de démocratie ou cette insuffisance de dialogue trouve son contre –exemple, celui de la Suisse. Tout le monde ou presque a oublié la crise séparatiste du Jura qui a secoué la Suisse dans les années 1970. Les francophones du Jura ne voulaient plus être gouvernés par les germanophones du canton de Berne. Ils formèrent une milice : les Béliers. Des attentats terroristes se multiplièrent (ce ne fut le cas ni en Ukraine ni en Ecosse). A coups de référendums on se mit à définir les frontières d’un nouveau canton. Une majorité se prononça pour la scission d’avec Berne en 1974 dans les trois districts du nord du Jura. On créa alors un nouvel Etat fédéré jurassien : le canton du Jura, et dans un référendum ultérieur au niveau national, ce nouveau canton fut accepté dans la confédération. Voilà une gestion de conflit ethnique et régional admirable dont personne ne parle jamais.
L’histoire est aujourd’hui ignorée de la plupart des hommes politiques qui n’ont de formation que juridique et un peu économique. Sait-on que dans les années 1930, un vrai parti nazi s’est développé en Suisse sur le modèle allemand. Il s’appelait le « National Front ». En Allemagne, grâce au régime dit « représentatif », Hitler avec moins de 40% des voix a pu prendre le pouvoir à la tête d’une coalition parlementaire. En Suisse, les nazis locaux voulaient transformer la Suisse en changeant la constitution par un référendum. Mais voilà : dans un référendum, il faut dépasser le chiffre des 50% et c’est impossible avec un programme extrémiste. Les nazis suisses ont perdu leur référendum et n’ont jamais pu prendre le pouvoir. La démocratie directe a protégé la démocratie à la différence de l’Allemagne et de l’Italie où les parlements ont voté les pleins pouvoirs aux dictateurs.
Si la population est composée de classes moyennes majoritaires, de familles et de petits propriétaires très nombreux, le référendum donne toujours des résultats raisonnables. Les citoyens collent à la réalité plus que les bureaucrates qui manipulent les parlementaires. On voit le résultat : les pays qui pratiquent fréquemment les référendums déclenchés par une pétition populaire sont prospères et connaissent dans l’ensemble la paix sociale : c’est la Suisse, le Liechtenstein, la côte ouest des Etats-Unis, et à un moindre degré l’Allemagne (référendums au niveau local et régional seulement) et l’Italie (référendums contre des lois mais pas pour en initier des nouvelles). Dans ces pays, la bureaucratie est moins forte et les impôts moins lourds (un tiers en moins d’après les études des professeurs Feld et Kirchgässner). L’endettement public est plus faible.
En France si l’on excepte les personnalités que furent le professeur Carré de Malberg, le résistant anti-nazi et juriste René Capitant et le général de Gaulle, le référendum est négligé par les gouvernants et les intellectuels. On parle de société bloquée ! C’est vrai mais pourquoi s’obstine-t-on à ignorer l’instrument le plus efficace pour sortir des blocages et faire des réformes : le référendum ?
Ivan Blot (La voix de la Russie, 22 septembre 2014)
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mardi, 30 septembre 2014
Totalitarianism: A Specious Concept
Totalitarianism: A Specious Concept
By Dominique Venner
Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com
Translated by Giuliano Adriano Malvicini
The American historian George Mosse has pin-pointed the specious nature of the theory of totalitarianism: it “looks upon the world exclusively from a liberal point of view”. In other words, totalitarianism is a concept elaborated by liberal thought in order to present itself in a favorable light, contrasting itself to its various enemies, all of which are confused together in a single, unholy category, according to the binary opposition of “us and them.”
The theory of totalitarianism reveals the intensely ideological character of liberalism. It generalizes and reduces very different realities to a single category, hiding everything that distinguishes the different anti-liberal systems from each other. How can one compare the blank-slate, egalitarian, internationalist communist system, responsible for millions of deaths before the war, and elitist, nationalist Italian fascism, to which only about ten executions can be attributed during the same period?[1]
This immense quantitative difference corresponds to essential qualitative differences. What liberalism refers to with the blanket term “totalitarianism” includes distinct realities that have only superficial appearances in common (“the one-party state”). The liberal theory of totalitarianism utilises an ideological patchwork to justify itself negatively, by asserting its “moral” superiority. It is a kind of ideological sleight of hand that is devoid of scientific value.In an interview dealing with this subject, Emilio Gentile – having defined himself as “a liberal critiquing the liberal historical interpretation of totalitarianism” – recognised that this interpretation involves three serious errors: “It first assimilates two very different things to each other, fascism and bolshevism. Furthermore, it considers rationality to be an exclusive attribute of liberalism, denying any form of rationality to the three anti-liberal experiments. Finally, the third error consists in transforming merely apparent similarities into essential similarities. In other words, one might consider fascism, bolshevism and nazism as three different trees with certain similarities, while liberal theory wants to make them into a single tree with three branches.”[2]
This amounts to asserting that the use of the word “totalitarianism” as a generic, universal term is scientifically abusive. As soon as the concept indistinctly covers everything that is opposed to liberalism, only paying attention to this negative criterion, it is emptied of meaning. It can now be applied to anything: Islamism, various exotic tyrannies, and why not the Catholic church? This polemical device is as reductive as that used by the communists, when they wanted to reduce everything that opposed them to “capitalism” or “imperialism.”
Notes
1. We have already noted that beyond a few rare actions that can be imputed to the Italian secret service, the assassination of Matteotti and the street violence following the civil war of the twenties, and also excluding the war and colonizations, there were only nine political executions in fascist Italy from 1923 to 1940 (and seventeen others from then on until 1943). Cf. the American historian S. G. Payne (Franco José Antonio. El extrano caso del fascismo espanol, Planeta, Barcelona, 1997, p. 32).
2. A conversation between Emilio Gentile and Dominique Venner in La Nouvelle Revue d’Histoire, 16th issue, January-February 2005, pp. 23-26. On the same subject, I also refer the reader to my interview with Ernst Nolte (Éléments, issue 98, May 2000, pp. 18-21).
Source: Dominique Venner, Le Siècle de 1914: Utopies, guerres et révolutions en Europe au XXe siècle (Paris: Pygmalion, 2006).
Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com
URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2014/09/totalitarianism-a-specious-concept/
URLs in this post:
[1] Image: http://www.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/vennerstudy.jpg
[2] Image: http://www.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/mussolini-stalin-hitler-e1411246314185.jpg
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lundi, 29 septembre 2014
La contracultura como ideología capitalista
La contracultura como ideología capitalista
Sobre La revolución divertida de Ramón González Ferriz
por José Andrés Fernández Leost
La contracultura es la cultura de los ricos y bien formados. La rebelión es una tradición del sistema capitalista a la que se premia. Estas dos frases, extraídas de su libro, podrían resumir las conclusiones a las que llega Ramón González Ferriz en La revolución divertida, expresión que emplea para referirse a Mayo del 68 y, por extensión, a todas las «revoluciones culturales» que se ha producido desde entonces en Occidente.
La tesis de fondo no es inédita: apela a la capacidad de adaptación del capitalismo democrático ante las transformaciones socio–morales –encauzadas por los medios de comunicación masivos– deslizando de paso una leve crítica a la generación de los años sesenta{1}. El autor no olvida referirse a las «guerras culturales» que desde hace casi medio siglo enmarcan el debate público, sin cuestionar –y esto es clave– las instituciones políticas. En este sentido, subraya la eclosión de un conservadurismo renovado que, al igual que la izquierda libertaria, construye mitos (los dorados y tranquilos cincuenta) para competir en el mercado de las ideas y venderse mejor. A su vez, el libro tiene la virtud de analizar el caso español, cuyas tendencias tras el fin del franquismo no hacen sino replicar las pautas de transgresión sistémica propias de la cultura pop (verdadero marco ideológico del capitalismo), llegando hasta el 15M.
Pero volvamos al principio, esto es, al 68. Fue entonces cuando alcanzaron visibilidad social temas que en gran parte continúan definiendo la agenda político–mediática del presente (feminismo, ecologismo, homosexualidad…). También cuando se rompió el consenso cristiano–socialdemócrata de postguerra, pero solo para generar otro nuevo, en el que convergen la liberación de las costumbres y la economía de mercado. Así, pese a su fracaso político, el 68 triunfó en la calle puesto que, en lugar de una revolución a la antigua usanza –de asalto al poder–, fue un movimiento de ascendencia artística, más pegado a los beatniks y Dylan que a los tratados de Althusser o Adorno. Los «niños de papa tocados por la gracia» que la protagonizaron (de acuerdo con Raymond Aron) constituían la generación mejor tratada de la historia, legatarios de las políticas bienestaristas implantadas por los De Gaulle, Attlee, Roosevelt, etc., en un contexto de boom demográfico. En vez de tumbar al sistema, la revolución divertida tan solo exigió al cabo, en sintonía con la canción de los Beatles, una apertura («interior») de la mente, un ensanche del consumo de experiencias voluptuosas que no hizo sino expandir el capitalismo. Y actualizar su percepción, que pasó de una imagen conformista a otra bohemia, diferente, cool, gradualmente acomodada a la del «genio informático». Entretanto, las reivindicaciones clásicas de la izquierda se fragmentaron al punto de abandonar la lucha de clases y desplazar el núcleo del debate a un terreno de juego estético, identitario. De puro marketing. En consecuencia, la izquierda quedó varada en el callejón sin salida en el que se metió, defendiendo modelos de vida libertarios al tiempo que reclamaba más Estado. Ello no impidió una reacción –asimismo decorativa– de una derecha puritana que, envalentonada por los medios, ha desembocado en el Tea Party. De este modo, mientras el mainstream ha consolidado una hegemonía cultural sincrética, lúdica, tolerante e individualista, se ha abierto un espacio en los márgenes destinado a la retórica radical, intelectualmente confortable y sin mayor repercusión que la que le concede la moda.
La tardía incorporación de España al sistema de democracias representativas apenas retrasó la adhesión de su sociedad al mismo imaginario. Retrotrayéndose al inicio de la transición, el autor subraya la prevalencia que acaparó la Nueva Ola –corriente postpunk antecesora de la Movida madrileña, sin mayores ambiciones políticas– frente a la izquierda ácrata afincada en Barcelona, más «sesuda» (ciertamente, ni la dimensión hedónica que cultivaba esta corriente casaba con el viejo espíritu cenetista –reflejo de una clara ruptura generacional– ni su maximalismo utópico implicaba efectos institucionales). Sea como fuere, el ajuste de los valores postmodernos a las nuevas estructuras de decisión terminó cuajando con la creación del Ministerio de Cultura, el cual –poniendo en ejercicio el concepto de simulacro de Baudrillard– se convirtió en el mayor patrocinador del anti–establishment toda vez que, al amparo del radicalismo estético, la agitación política quedó desactivada. Es lo que algunos etiquetan como «Cultura de la Transición» que en los ochenta encarnaron mejor que nadie los «intelectuales pop»: un conjunto de personajes vinculados a la socialdemocracia procedentes de la esfera universitaria, literaria o periodística (Tierno, Aranguren, Vázquez Montalbán…) a la que se incorporaron figuras del ámbito artístico, siguiendo la estela del resto de Occidente (Bob Marley, Bono, Manu Chao, etc.). Un fenómeno que –también al igual de lo que sucedió fuera de nuestras fronteras– tendrá su contrapunto ideológico, cuando a mediados de los años noventa el partido conservador alcance el poder en España y los intelectuales de derechas, esgrimiendo asimismo un discurso transgresor («políticamente incorrecto») reciban su cuota de apoyo estatal.
Bajo el signo de una conflictividad ideológico–cultural normalizada, en gran parte abolida, el tramo final del libro repasa los últimos ecos del 68 que resuenan en los albores del siglo XXI, al compás de la antiglobalización, la revolución de las nuevas tecnologías y la crisis financiera. La proximidad de estos acontecimientos no ocultan su «lógica divertida», inofensiva en términos políticos y diáfana a poco que se examinen sus características. De hecho, en el caso del movimiento antiglobalización –que alcanzó su mayor cota de popularidad en las manifestaciones de Seattle y Génova de 1999 y 2001– nos encontramos ante un ideario amorfo e inconsistente, rápidamente fagocitado por el capitalismo cultural, vía productos «indies». Pese a su vocación purista por recuperar la esencia mística del 68 –frente a quienes la traicionaron– la multitud de causas que acumulaba (etnicismo, antiliberalismo, animalismo, etc.) acabó por diluir su congruencia. Tanto más por cuanto la única reivindicación de peso, más o menos compartida, solicitaba una mayor presencia estatal, en detrimento del libertarismo genuino. Quizá más coherencia guarden las batallas abiertas por la revolución cibernética, siempre que se acentúe su naturaleza apolítica. Según subraya González Ferriz, la juventud de los líderes y emprendedores del universo digital{2} se plasma en el entorno laboral que han construido: informal, desprofesionalizado y flexible. Ajeno a la agenda política. Y aunque es verdad que internet ha posibilitado la creación de un espacio capaz de impulsar cambios sociales e incluso intensificar los grados de participación (Democracia 2.0), lo cierto es que los fundamentos del régimen representativo permanecen indemnes, escasamente erosionados por la actividad de plataformas «hacktivistas» como Anonymous o WikiLeaks. En cambio, el impacto de internet se ha dejado notar en el circuito de las industrias culturales, cuestionando el alcance de la propiedad intelectual, fracturando los filtros de autoridad y desarbolando el modelo de negocio establecido. Esta brecha ha introducido una cierta mutación ideológica, en el sentido de que los antiguos progresistas se han convertido en los nuevos conservadores, nostálgicos del viejo orden, mientras que muchos partidarios del libre intercambio de contenidos simpatizan con el libertarismo individualista. Con todo, cabe matizar la magnitud de este fenómeno, en tanto no ha alumbrado un sistema alternativo y el rol de las empresas culturales (editoriales, productoras, etc.) sigue vigente.
Por fin, la última estación del trayecto nos lleva a las manifestaciones del 15M español y al movimiento Occupy, en las que confluyen rasgos de la antiglobalización con el empleo eficaz de tácticas digitales, a través de redes como twitter o facebook. Su instantánea instrumentalización mediática amortiguó la carga de su ideario más auténtico, ligado a la corriente «okupa» y al libertarismo de izquierda de los setenta, aunque también colocó en un primer plano de interés sus planteamientos de base (autogestión, asamblearismo…). No obstante, la heterogeneidad de sus integrantes y la fragilidad de sus referentes teóricos (encarnados en el endeble panfleto de Stéphane Hessel) han acabado por desinflar un fenómeno que tampoco estaba exento de contradicciones. Y es que en su trasfondo –debajo del agotamiento provocado por la crisis económica– nos topamos con una nueva quiebra generacional, protagonizada por una juventud que no busca sino vivir en las mismas condiciones de desahogo y estabilidad que sus padres. Estaríamos por tanto ante una suerte de revolución conservadora, presumible nicho de futuros políticos y empresarios de éxito, llamada a perpetuar en una nueva vuelta de tuerca el «entretenimiento–marco» en el que se desenvuelve la dinámica política occidental. El teatro de su mundo. Quizá el desencanto y la desafección social expresada en las encuestas hacia las principales instituciones (dicho de otro modo: la atracción por la anti–política o el populismo) represente su indicio actual más evidente, síntoma de la enfermedad que supone desconocer la reconfiguración de un mundo emergente más complejo, más rico, con más clases medias y, en consecuencia, más sometido a la presión, al riesgo y a la competencia global por los recursos materiales y energéticos. Pero este otro debate carece de diversión.
Notas
{1} Dicho razonamiento encuentra soporte en una creciente bibliografía desmitificadora en la que destacan títulos como Rebelarse vende, de Joseph Heath y Andrew Potter (2004) o La conquista de lo cool (1997), donde su autor, Thomas Frank, ubica en las reconversiones de la industria publicitaria de los años cincuenta–sesenta el germen de la contracultura, detonante del consumismo individualista posterior.
{2} Sus máximos exponentes apenas superaban los 30 años en el momento en el que fundaron sus proyectos.
Fuente: El Espía Digital
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mercredi, 17 septembre 2014
Pour mieux comprendre la Révolution Conservatrice allemande
Pour mieux comprendre la Révolution Conservatrice allemande
par Georges FELTIN-TRACOL
En dépit de la parution en 1993 chez Pardès de l’ouvrage majeur d’Armin Mohler, La Révolution Conservatrice allemande 1918 – 1932, le public français persiste à méconnaître cet immense ensemble intellectuel qui ne se confine pas aux seules limites temporelles dressées par l’auteur. Conséquence immédiate de la Première Guerre mondiale et de la défaite allemande, cette mouvance complexe d’idées plonge ses racines dans l’avant-guerre, se retrouve sous des formes plus ou moins proches ailleurs dans l’espace germanophone et présente de nombreuses affinités avec le « non-conformisme français des années 30 ».
Dans son étude remarquable, Armin Mohler dresse une typologie pertinente. À côté d’auteurs inclassables tels Oswald Spengler, Thomas Mann, Carl Schmitt, Hans Blüher, les frères Ernst et Friedrich Georg Jünger, il distingue six principales tendances :
— le mouvement Völkisch (ou folciste) qui verse parfois dans le nordicisme et le paganisme,
— le mouvement Bündisch avec des ligues de jeunesse favorables à la nature, aux randonnées et à la vie rurale,
— le très attachant Mouvement paysan de Claus Heim qui souleva le Schleswig-Holstein de novembre 1928 à septembre 1929,
— le mouvement national-révolutionnaire qui célébra le « soldat politique »,
— il s’en dégage rapidement un fort courant national-bolchévik avec la figure exemplaire d’Ernst Niekisch,
— le mouvement jeune-conservateur qui réactive, par-delà le catholicisme, le protestantisme ou l’agnosticisme de ses membres, les idées de Reich, d’État corporatif (Ständestaat) et de fédéralisme concret.
Le riche ouvrage d’Armin Mohler étant épuisé, difficile à dénicher chez les bouquinistes et dans l’attente d’une éventuelle réédition, le lecteur français peut épancher sa soif avec La Révolution Conservatrice allemande, l’ouvrage de Robert Steuckers. Ancien responsable des revues Orientations, Vouloir et Synergies européennes, animateur aujourd’hui de l’excellent site métapolitique Euro-Synergies, Robert Steuckers parle le néerlandais, le français, l’allemand et l’anglais. À la fin des années 1970 et à l’orée des années 1980, il fit découvrir aux « Nouvelles Droites » francophones des penseurs germaniques méconnus dont Ernst Niekisch. Il faut par conséquent comprendre ce livre dense et riche comme une introduction aux origines de cette galaxie intellectuelle, complémentaire au maître-ouvrage de Mohler.
Vingt-cinq articles constituent ce recueil qui éclaire ainsi de larges pans de la Révolution Conservatrice. Outre des études biographiques autour de Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, d’Arthur Mœller van den Bruck, d’Alfred Schuler, d’Edgar Julius Jung, d’Herman Wirth ou de Christoph Steding, le lecteur trouve aussi des monographies concernant un aspect, politologique ou historique, de cette constellation. Il examine par exemple l’œuvre posthume de Spengler à travers les matrices préhistoriques des civilisations antiques, le mouvement métapolitique viennois d’Engelbert Pernerstorfer, précurseur de la Révolution Conservatrice, ou bien « L’impact de Nietzsche dans les milieux politiques de gauche et de droite ».
De tout cet intense bouillonnement, seuls les thèmes abordés par les auteurs révolutionnaires-conservateurs demeurent actuels. Les « jeunes-conservateurs » développent une « “ troisième voie ” (Dritte Weg) [qui] rejette le libéralisme en tant que réduction des activités politiques à la seule économie et en tant que force généralisant l’abstraction dans la société (en multipliant des facteurs nouveaux et inutiles, dissolvants et rigidifiants, comme les banques, les compagnies d’assurance, la bureaucratie, les artifices soi-disant “ rationnels ”, etc., dénoncés par la sociologie de Georges Simmel) (p. 223) ».
La Révolution Conservatrice couvre tous les champs de la connaissance, y compris la géopolitique. « Dans les normes internationales, imposées depuis Wilson et la S.D.N., Schmitt voit un “ instrumentarium ” mis au point par les juristes américains pour maintenir les puissances européennes et asiatiques dans un état de faiblesse permanent. Pour surmonter cet handicap imposé, l’Europe doit se constituer en un “ Grand Espace ” (Grossraum), en une “ Terre ” organisée autour de deux ou trois “hegemons ” européens ou asiatiques (Allemagne, Russie, Japon) qui s’opposera à la domination des puissances de la “ Mer ” soit les thalassocraties anglo-saxonnes. C’est l’opposition, également évoquée par Spengler et Sombart, entre les paysans (les géomètres romains) et les “ pirates ”. Plus tard, après 1945, Schmitt, devenu effroyablement pessimiste, dira que nous ne pourrons plus être des géomètres romains, vu la défaite de l’Allemagne et, partant, de toute l’Europe en tant que “ grand espace ” unifié autour de l’hegemon germanique. Nous ne pouvons plus faire qu’une chose : écrire le “ logbook ” d’un navire à la dérive sur un monde entièrement “ fluidifié ” par l’hégémonisme de la grande thalassocratie d’Outre-Atlantique (p. 35). »
Robert Steuckers mentionne que la Révolution Conservatrice a été en partie influencée par la riche et éclectique pensée contre-révolutionnaire d’origine française. « Dans le kaléidoscope de la contre-révolution, note-t-il, il y a […] l’organicisme, propre du romantisme post-révolutionnaire, incarné notamment par Madame de Staël, et étudié à fond par le philosophe strasbourgeois Georges Gusdorf. Cet organicisme génère parfois un néo-médiévisme, comme celui chanté par le poète Novalis. Qui dit médiévisme, dit retour du religieux et de l’irrationnel de la foi, force liante, au contraire du “ laïcisme ”, vociféré par le “ révolutionnarisme institutionnalisé ”. Cette revalorisation de l’irrationnel n’est pas nécessairement absolue ou hystérique : cela veut parfois tout simplement dire qu’on ne considère pas le rationalisme comme une panacée capable de résoudre tous les problèmes. Ensuite, le vieux-conservatisme rejette l’idée d’un droit naturel mais non pas celle d’un ordre naturel, dit “ chrétien ” mais qui dérive en fait de l’aristotélisme antique, via l’interprétation médiévale de Thomas d’Aquin. Ce mélange de thomisme, de médiévisme et de romantisme connaîtra un certain succès dans les provinces catholiques d’Allemagne et dans la zone dite “ baroque ” de la Flandre à l’Italie du Nord et à la Croatie (p. 221). » Mais « la Révolution Conservatrice n’est pas seulement une continuation de la Deutsche Ideologie de romantique mémoire ou une réactualisation des prises de positions anti-chrétiennes et hellénisantes de Hegel (années 1790 – 99) ou une extension du prussianisme laïc et militaire, mais a également son volet catholique romain (p. 177) ». Elle présente plus de variétés axiologiques. De là la difficulté de la cerner réellement.
La postérité révolutionnaire-conservatrice catholique prend ensuite une voie originale. « En effet, après 1945, l’Occident, vaste réceptacle territorial océano-centré où est sensé se recomposer l’Ordo romanus pour ces penseurs conservateurs et catholiques, devient l’Euramérique, l’Atlantis : paradoxe difficile à résoudre car comment fusionner les principes du “ terrisme ” (Schmitt) et ceux de la fluidité libérale, hyper-moderne et économiciste de la civilisation “ états-unienne ” ? Pour d’autres, entre l’Orient bolchevisé et post-orthodoxe, et l’Hyper-Occident fluide et ultra-matérialiste, doit s’ériger une puissance “ terriste ”, justement installée sur le territoire matriciel de l’impérialité virgilienne et carolingienne, et cette puissance est l’Europe en gestation. Mais avec l’Allemagne vaincue, empêchée d’exercer ses fonctions impériales post-romaines, une translatio imperii (une translation de l’empire) doit s’opérer au bénéficie de la France de De Gaulle, soit une translatio imperii ad Gallos, thématique en vogue au moment du rapprochement entre De Gaulle et Adenauer et plus pertinente encore au moment où Charles De Gaulle tente, au cours des années 60, de positionner la France “ contre les empires ”, c’est-à-dire contre les “ impérialismes ”, véhicules des fluidités morbides de la modernité anti-politique et antidotes à toute forme d’ancrage stabilisant (p. 181) ». Le gaullisme, agent inattendu de la Révolution Conservatrice ? Dominique de Roux le pressentait avec son essai, L’Écriture de Charles de Gaulle en 1967.
Ainsi le philosophe et poète allemand Rudolf Pannwitz soutient-il l’Imperium Europæum qui « ne pourra pas être un empire monolithique où habiterait l’union monstrueuse du vagabondage de l’argent (héritage anglais) et de la rigidité conceptuelle (héritage prussien). Cet Imperium Europæum sera pluri-perspectiviste : c’est là une voie que Pannwitz sait difficile, mais que l’Europe pourra suivre parce qu’elle est chargée d’histoire, parce qu’elle a accumulé un patrimoine culturel inégalé et incomparable. Cet Imperium Europæum sera écologique car il sera “ le lieu d’accomplissement parfait du culte de la Terre, le champ où s’épanouit le pouvoir créateur de l’Homme et où se totalisent les plus hautes réalisations, dans la mesure et l’équilibre, au service de l’Homme. Cette Europe-là n’est pas essentiellement une puissance temporelle; elle est la “ balance de l’Olympe ” (p. 184) ». On comprend dès lors que « chez Pannwitz, comme chez le Schmitt d’après-guerre, la Terre est substance, gravité, intensité et cristallisation. L’Eau (et la mer) sont mobilités dissolvantes. Continent, dans cette géopolitique substantielle, signifie substance et l’Europe espérée par Pannwitz est la forme politique du culte de la Terre, elles est dépositaire des cultures, issues de la glèbe, comme par définition et par force des choses toute culture est issue d’une glèbe (p. 185) ».
On le voit, cette belle somme de Robert Steuckers ne se réduit pas à une simple histoire des idées politiques. Elle instruit utilement le jeune lecteur avide d’actions politiques. « La politique est un espace de perpétuelles transitions, prévient-il : les vrais hommes politiques sont donc ceux qui parviennent à demeurer eux-mêmes, fidèles à des traditions – à une Leitkultur dirait-on aujourd’hui -, mais sans figer ces traditions, en les maintenant en état de dynamisme constant, bref, répétons-le une fois de plus, l’état de dynamisme d’une anti-modernité moderniste (p. 222). » Une lecture indispensable !
Georges Feltin-Tracol
• Robert Steuckers, La Révolution Conservatrice allemande. Biographies de ses principaux acteurs et textes choisis, Les Éditions du Lore (La Fosse, F – 35 250 Chevaigné), 2014, 347 p., 28 € + 6 € de port.
Pour commander: Editions du Lore
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Dugin on the Subject of Politics
An agent of chaos: Alexander Dugin with the chaos star, symbol of Eurasianism[1]
Dugin on the Subject of Politics
By Giuliano Adriano Malvicini
Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com
Dugin’s Social Constructionism
The claim that there is no biological basis for the concept of race, or that it is not useful in explaining contemporary reality, is of course patently false. But Dugin follows postmodern thinkers like Foucault and Althusser in arguing that not only race, but all political subjects are constructs.
Race is a product of society, rather than society a product of race. Man, he argues, exists as a subject only within the political realm. “What man is, is not derived from himself as an individual, but from politics. It is politics that defines the man. It is the political system that gives us our shape. Moreover, the political system has an intellectual and conceptual power, as well as transformative potential without limitations” (The Fourth Political Theory, p. 169). In other words, the subject does not create itself, nor is it a natural given like race or the individual. The subject is a construct, existing only within a political system.
It follows that ultimately, there is no master subject who creates or exercises conspiratorial control over the system. On the contrary: subjects exist only as functions, produced by subjectless political structures. As the political system changes, shifting from one historical paradigm to another — from traditional society to modern society, for example — it constructs the normative type of subjectivity it requires to function. “[T]he political concept of man is the concept of man as such, which is installed in us by the state or the political system. The political man is a particular means of correlating man with this state and political system. […] We believe we are causa sui, generated within ourselves, and only then do we find ourselves within the sphere of politics. In fact, it is politics that constitutes us. […] Man’s anthropological structure shifts when one political system changes to another” (The Fourth Political Theory, p. 169). In other words, the subject does not bring about a political paradigm shift on its own — it is the new paradigm that will call a new subject into being through a process of “interpellation.”
The study of the anthropological shift from the type of man belonging to traditional society to the type of man belonging to modern society leads to the relativization not only of modern man, but of modern rationality as such. This relativization of modernity is “postmodernity.” The modern idea of progress towards a humanity unified on the foundation of universal Reason is shown to be an illusion, and this implies that traditional societies are placed on the same level as modern society.
Dugin’s reasoning appears to be as follows: the subject cannot radically break through the system (carry out a revolution or “paradigm shift”) and go beyond it if it is itself a product of the system, and can only exist within the limits of that system. This was why class, race, and the individual, all of which are subjects constituted and defined within the horizon of modernity, failed to overcome the crisis and impasses of modernity. In other words, the subject would have to be grounded in a reference point outside of the political system, in order to have the leverage needed for any radical political agency. There would have to be a “radical subject,” and for Dugin the “radical subject” seems to be chaos [2]. Chaos is freedom beyond its capture within the limits of the bourgeois or humanist conception of the individual. The shattering of the liberal individual is not the negation of freedom, but the revelation of the essence of freedom as anarchic, sovereign chaos, a chaos that will be mastered only through the emergence of a new kind of subject.
The political subject acts within the realm of politics, but must be founded in a realm beyond and before the political – in the case of modern, secular ideologies, the realm of nature. The subject of politics must transcend the sphere of politics in order to be able to master it, define it, and set its boundaries and goals. For example, liberal ideology posits the existence of the individual as a natural given, prior to the existence of the social order. Only in this way can it found the political order on the individual and its universal, natural rights.
Analogously, National Socialists view race as a biological given existing prior to and beyond the political, and the state as possessing meaning only insofar as it is an instrument through which a race is protected, preserved and its potentialities are actualized and enhanced. This means that for National Socialists, race transcends the political realm, subordinating it to itself. The political consciousness they strive to awaken others to is racial self-consciousness, much as Marxists attempt to awaken the proletariat to class consciousness.
For Marxists, the means of production transcend the political realm, forming its material basis and driving force. A class constitutes itself as a political subject by taking control of the means of production. Marx defined labor as “the metabolism of nature.”
“The definition of a historical subject is the fundamental basis for political ideology in general, and defines its structure” (The Fourth Political Theory, p. 38). For example: for nationalists, the real subjects of history are nations, viewed as a sort of supra-individuals with a will and a destiny of their own. History is the history of nations. Identity is primarily national, and the friend/enemy distinction (which is constitutive for the political) goes along national lines. For racism, on the other hand, the true subjects of history are the various races, locked in a Darwinian struggle for life. This view of history is determined by the modern concepts of biological evolution and progress. Identity is primarily racial, and the friend/enemy distinction goes along racial lines. For Marxism, the subjects of history are classes, again viewed as forms of collective subjectivity, and consequently, the whole of history was interpreted as the history of class struggle. Identity is class identity, and the friend/enemy distinction goes along class lines.
The political subject is also an historical subject. This means that each modern political ideology corresponds to a “grand narrative” — an over-arching interpretation — of history. History as a whole is viewed as created through the agency of a certain historical subject. It then becomes obvious that political ideologies are secular substitutes for a theological interpretation of history, and that the historical subjects posited by them are substitutes for divine Providence as the transcendent subject of history. As Carl Schmitt argued, all the fundamental concepts of politics are secularized theological concepts.
The place of the political subject — a kind of vacuum left by the withdrawal of God from the world and history — is the site of contestation between the various modern political ideologies. Each of them fought to occupy that vacant place with their own concept of the political subject. Each of them claimed to master the destructive and creative forces liberated by modernity, bringing modernity to its full actualization. Communism saw itself as the final, inevitable and culminating phase of modernity, towards which industrial capitalism had only paved the way. Liberalism views the progressive liberation of the individual, along with the processes of secularization, modernization, and globalization, as an historical necessity. Fascism saw itself as an avant-garde, revolutionary movement, dismissed liberal, bourgeois democracy as a doomed residue of the nineteenth century, and claimed that the organic state was the only adequate form through which the masses could be mobilized in modern societies. Both Italian Fascism and German National Socialism modernized and revolutionized their respective nations, and would not have been politically successful if they had not done so. Early Fascism was influenced by the avant-garde modernism of Futurism, which called for the nihilistic destruction of the past and unconditionally worshipped modern technology and “progress.” (This lead Evola to reject Futurism as a form of “Americanism.” Marinetti retorted that he had as little in common with Evola as with “an Eskimo.” Bizarrely — for someone who claims to be a traditionalist — Dugin views Futurism as one of the admirable elements of early Fascism that he wishes to recuperate.)
Each of these political systems, then, claimed that it was the most appropriate form for modern, technologically advanced society. This form corresponded to a certain figure or human type, an embodiment of a certain political project, the normative “man of the future”: be it homo sovieticus, the new Fascist man, the racially purified Aryan superman, or the enlightened, bourgeois individual. In other words, each of these ideologies or “political theories” posited a normative subject as the basis of its political vision and its interpretation of history. The transition into fully realized modernity was not only a political revolution, but also an anthropological revolution: the production of a “new man.”
According to Dugin, in the crisis of the end of modernity, not only race and class, but also the nation-state ceases to be an authentic political subject, even though he recognizes that the will to preserve national sovereignty is, in the current situation, a natural locus of resistance to globalism. The de-sovereignization of the nation is its de-subjectivization. After 1945, European nations ceased to be sovereign, independent historical actors, and effectively also ceased to exist as historical subjects with a real identity.
However, Dugin sees this de-sovereignization/de-subjectivization as inevitable, even inherent in the nature of the nation itself. He fully accepts the postmodern idea that the nation is an artificial, ideological, and political construct, an “imagined community” created as a means of unifying fragmented, modern societies. The nation is, in his view, merely a simulacrum, an artificial substitute for the lost totality of traditional society (presumably, he views race similarly, as being a modern simulacrum of the “ethnos”). Historically, its emergence corresponds to the precise moment when traditional society enters into crisis. It is a compromise, a transitional form, a ruse.
Moreover, he views the function of the nation as a device for facilitating the transition from pre-modern, traditional society to fully modern, liberal, civil society. As a result, it cannot constitute an enduring force of resistance to liberal globalization. He views the nation as a dispositive of power geared to producing a certain standardized, normative type of political subject: the bourgeois individual (citizen). In doing so, it destroys regional, organic, ethnic communities (for example, through the suppression of regional autonomy, traditions, and linguistic variation in Italy and France, and the imposition of a standardized national language) as well as liquidating the last residues of traditional elites (the aristocracy).
Thus, the concept of “ethno-nationalism” is, in his view, ultimately an absolute contradiction in terms: the nation is inherently “ethnocidal [3].” It destroys the ethnos and replaces it with a “demos.” Nationalism, according to Dugin, must be condemned not just because it has been the cause of pointless, destructive wars, but because the nation itself is inherently violent — violent in the sense that it is an arbitrary construct without any sacred, transcendent basis. Its violence is the violence of modernity itself. (Certainly, this is true of many nations, perhaps most notably of the nation of Israel, which is an entirely modern, artificial construction, as is perhaps the idea that Jews are a unified, homogeneous race or ethnic group.) Nothing, however, so far assures us that the idea of Eurasian empire dominated by Russia would be less artificial, violent or “ethnocidal.”
(The new European post-war order projected by the dominant faction of the Waffen SS was not based on the nation-state, but on a pan-European federation of culturally autonomous regions. Dugin fails to mention this fact, but his characterization of National Socialism is tendentious.)
In any case, the ultimate incompatibility of Eurasianism with ethno-nationalism is clear. David Beetschen of the Eurasianist artists’ association has given poetic expression to this incompatibility in the following (stirring!) lyrical effusion:
Have you dreamt of the eurasian parliament
for which all energy we have joyfully spent.
There isn’t any discriminatory segregation
in class, race, sex or in any form of a nation.
As for the fascist concept the organic state, based on Hegel’s philosophy of the state, Dugin does not discuss his reasons for rejecting it as a credible candidate for the political subject. In general, Dugin simply takes the defeat of both the second and third political theories as axiomatic, without providing much in the way of substantial argument for this. The third political theory simply does not exist after 1945. “Each and every declared fascist after 1945 is a simulacrum” (The Fourth Political Theory, p. 174). In his view, modernity has been fully actualized in liberal society, and consequently, the ideological contest of modernity is over.
This view is more credible with regard to communism than with regard to fascism. The death of communism was, as Dominique Venner has written, an “inglorious demise.” Its collapse was due to its own bureaucratic inertia and utter failure to effectively manage economic development. Fascism and National Socialism, on the other hand, were spectacularly successful as political experiments, and, perhaps for this very reason, had to be militarily destroyed by their international rivals.
Dugin clearly views the defeat of National Socialist Germany as a consequence of its anti-Russian and anti-communist policies. Since Dugin views both of these policies as connected with the infection of National Socialism by atlanticism and Anglo-Saxon, biological racism, he views the defeat of the third position as a consequence of ideological errors, and not simply as an historical contingency. Not only was Nazi Nordicism a vulgar, materialist misinterpretation of the traditional doctrine of the north as the pole of tradition, National Socialism was anti-communist and anti-Slavic because it was anti-Eastern, that is, pro-Western (modern).
Today, according to Eurasianists (who in this respect are inheritors of National Bolshevism), European nationalists are repeating the disastrous errors of the German National Socialists when they again oppose “the East” in the form of Islamisation. Generally, Eurasianists try to downplay the idea of a “clash of civilizations” or any claim that there is a sharp opposition between Islam and European civilization. They accuse nationalists who view Islam as incompatible with European values of confusing “Europe” with “the West.”
Any interpretation of European history that sees some enlightenment values as rooted in the European tradition itself — in classical Greece, for example — is accused of trying to legitimate “the West” by inventing historical precedents and falsifying the true European tradition, which is rooted in Eurasia and in no way opposed to Islam. This is undoubtedly consistent with a Traditionalist position, which only recognizes those elements of European civilization as valid that are derived from the unitary, universal Tradition, of which Islam is viewed as a part. However, the exclusivist claims of Islam, especially in its modern, radical form, are wholly non-Traditional.
Dugin sees the triumph of liberalism as a necessary, fatal triumph, in a sense. Liberalism has triumphed because it can legitimately lay claim to being the most successful actualization of the potentialities of modernity. Liberalism did indeed succeed in modernizing the West to a much greater degree than communism succeeded in modernizing the countries of the Eastern bloc, so much so that “the West,” and particularly the United States, is today more or less synonymous with modernity. In the decades after the second world war, capitalism, using economic means, modernized Western European societies to a degree undreamed of by fascism, making the third position ideologies seem archaic and obsolete by comparison. In a sense, liberalism is the origin of the other ideologies of modernity – both communism and fascism emerged as attempts to overcome liberalism, while mastering the forces liberated by modern industrial capitalism and technology. It has also outlived the adversaries it engendered.
Dugin Contra Nationalism
Why does Dugin reject nationalism? His negative view of nationalism differs to some extent from that of Evola, who saw it not only as destructive of the traditional European order, but also as leading towards modern collectivism (Dugin, on the contrary, sees collectivism as something positive). Does Dugin follow Heidegger in viewing nationalism as an “anthropologism” (cf. “Letter on Humanism”)? What Heidegger mean by this is that nationalism, like Marxism, places man, rather than Being, at the center of history. Nationalism is a “subjectivism,” in the sense that it views man as the subject of history. In this sense, nationalism is indeed a modern phenomenon, since modernity, for Heidegger, is essentially an epoch in the history of metaphysics that was initiated with Descartes’ cogito: with the rational subject as the secure foundation of philosophy and science. Descartes identifies the subject with reason (ratio). This became the metaphysical foundation for the Enlightenment and its anthropology.
However, Dugin does not, unlike Heidegger, reject subjectivism as such. On the contrary, the whole point of the fourth political theory is that it is the search for a new “political subject,” an alternative to the individual as a political subject.
Why does Dugin give Heidegger’s concept of “Dasein” the pivotal role in the “fourth political theory”? Heidegger elaborated his analysis of Dasein as an attempt to overcome the abstractions of the metaphysical concept of the subject. Hence, his “analytic of Dasein” offers the possibility of going beyond the modern political ideologies based on various interpretations of the subject. Dasein is beyond, or prior to, the subject-object split. Dasein is not the rational subject as the abstract basis of the concept of universal man. Dasein is the historical, spatio-temporal structure of concrete existence. The subject is outside of the world, relating to the world as a system of objects. Dasein is always already in the world, involved in it, struggling within it. The world, as Heidegger uses the term, is a totality of relations of meaning. Each thing refers to other things in a circuit of relations. Dasein’s relation to things is one of understanding and interpretation, not (primarily) one of objectification.
The subject is reason, that is, it is defined by its relation to an ultimate cause and foundation (Grund). Dasein is defined by its relation to finitude, death, and the abyss (Ab-grund). However, all this means that it is not clear how Dasein, which according to Heidegger is precisely not the subject, can be called “the subject” of the fourth political theory. Dasein is not a subject that arbitrarily imposes its will, creates itself from nothing or freely makes history. Instead, it is part of a cosmic process that transcends man and his agency. Man does not decide the history of Being. Heidegger is not interested in re-elaborating or modifying the concept of the subject, nor is he interested in returning man to “God and Tradition” in the sense of metaphysical foundations, but is trying to overcome metaphysics itself, that is, all thinking in terms of the Being of beings as a “foundation” (Grund). This also means that Heidegger is far from the metaphysical conceptions of Traditionalism.
If Dugin invokes Heidegger and the analytic of Dasein, we must assume that behind the critique of liberalism and the West, he is attempting a critique of modernity as such (identified with the West). Heidegger’s critique of modernity is linked to an attempt to overcome the philosophy of the subject. In Heidegger’s view, modernity, when the humanitarian masks of the Enlightenment fall off, is technological nihilism, and this nihilism is the fatal consequence of Western metaphysics. Western metaphysics, however, is the foundation of Western civilization as a whole.
Heidegger’s critique is not simply political. He is criticizing bolshevism, liberalism (which paved the way for bolshevism), and other modern ideologies for failing to understand not only their own essence, but the essence of modernity itself: technological nihilism. According to Heidegger, the emancipation of the subject (humanity interpreted as subject) is not the purpose of technological development. It is the other way around — the emancipation of the the subject is a means through which technology emancipates itself. Here, Heidegger’s interpretation of modern technology draws on Nietzsche’s concept of the Will to power. According to Nietzsche, the self is not the subject of the will to power, but is brought into being by the will to power. The last glimmers of transcendence are extinguished from the world so that technology can pursue, unobstructed and on a planetary scale, the endless, circular self-enhancement of its productive power, drawing everything into its vortex, with no ultimate goal or end other than power for its own sake. The West becomes “das Abendland,” the evening-land, the realm of the darkening of the divine, the withdrawal of the gods. Technology as “Ge-stell” is not mastered by man (the subject), but an impersonal destiny of Being itself. Man as a subject can never master technology, since the essence of technology as Gestell constitutes man as a subject. Technological development has no intrinsic, immanent limit, and no boundary can be arbitrarily set to it as long as thinking remains within the horizon of the philosophy of the subject (humanism) and of technological calculation (the final deviation of the Western logos). But as modern technology reaches the full actualization of its dominion, the subject that it once called into being enters into crisis, begins to “vanish.” It is liquidated in a system of purely functional relations without a center, without fixed norms or foundations. The essence of the subject reveals itself to be a kind of limit, which initially functioned as a necessary ground or condition, but now becomes only an obstacle to be overcome. For Heidegger, this crisis, this ultimate threshold of nihilism — brought about by technology itself — opens up the possibility of thinking the essence of man and Being in a much deeper dimension, beyond or before the subject. Instead of man as subject, Heidegger tries to think the historicity of Dasein. This is why the “inner truth” of National Socialism for him meant the confrontation between modern technology and historical man (that is, not man as subject).
For Heidegger, Western modernity and materialism are not, as traditionalists claim, the consequence of a fall from the normal, traditional society of medieval Europe. On the contrary, he views the transition from the Middle Ages to the modern age more as a development than as a radical break with the traditional past. For Heidegger, medieval scholasticism, with its misinterpretation of the Greek logos as “ratio” and its onto-theological synthesis of Greek philosophy with Christianity, prepared the way for Descartes’ rationalism. In a sense, Heidegger develops Nietzsche’s idea that nihilism is not so much a break with Christianity, but instead a revelation of the nihilistic essence of Christianity. As a Christian and a traditionalist, however, Dugin consistently avoids the anti-Christian aspect of Heidegger’s thought, without, however, being able to articulate a critique of it. For Heidegger, as for the majority of the conservative revolutionaries, the origin of modernity is Christian, or rather, it lies in the “onto-theological” synthesis of Christianity and Greek metaphysics. It is the Christian conception of the “sovereignty” of God with regard to the world as creation that is at the origin of the modern concept of the subject, just as the Christian notion of the free individual with a personal relation to God and the Christian concern with the salvation of the immortal soul of all individuals is the origin of modern mass individualism. It is God as the “highest being” — both causa sui and causa prima, the first cause, sovereign over all other beings and the “maker” of the world — that is at the origin of the sovereign subject whose relation to things is one of instrumental manipulation and objectification. Modern secular humanism is onto-theological: it has its origin not in Greek thought, but in the Christian interpretation of Greek thought.
We may add that the Evola of Revolt Against the Modern World also sees Christianity as a primary cause of the involution of the West. He does not view modernity as a fatality somehow inherent in the nature of the West. For Evola, the Western mode of spirituality, which is primarily an active rather than contemplative spirituality, was cut off from the dimension of transcendence by the Semitic, lunar, self-mortifying type of religiosity of Christianity, which ultimately lead to the Western drive to activity being deviated, finding an outlet only on a purely material and human plane.
In any case, whether from a Heideggerian or Traditionalist view, one may agree that race, insofar as it is conceived as a purely human, biological characteristic, is ultimately insufficient, or rather, that it is too narrowly anthropological, and must be integrated into a deeper conception. This is not the same as liquidating the concept of race. It does mean the rejection of certain narrow forms of racism, where the biological concept of race plays an analogous reductive role to the Marxist concept of a material base that determines the ideological superstructure (culture, mentality etc.) of a society.
Man is not the unconditioned, self-creating subject of modern metaphysics. Human existence is conditioned and finite — men are, as Jünger wrote, “sons of the earth.” Race is one of the earthly conditions of man’s existence. An historical world is not an unconditioned, arbitrary “construct.” There is, in Heidegger’s terms, an historical world is always founded through a struggle between world and earth — the world, an articulated, historical space of possibilities and decisions, and the conditions set by the un-objectified, elemental forces of the earth. Blood and soil are given the meaning of a destiny in an historical world (this is not at all the same as claiming that it is an arbitrary historical and social construct). For Heidegger, the limits set by the biological potentialities of human beings are not arbitrary historical creations — what is historical is the particular “figure” or constellation of relations that gives them meaning.
We can also note that the statistical concept of race referred to by race realists today is very different from National Socialist racial theories, which were based on the idea of racial purity. The modern concept of race is not on its own sufficient to non-reductively account for the specificity of our or other civilizations or cultures. The differences between the mentality of Americans of European descent, on the one hand, and the mentality of Europeans, on the other, underscores this clearly. However, it is more than obvious that race plays a role in shaping the general character of civilizations.
Editor’s Note
1. On the chaos star, see Wikipedia [4].
Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com
URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2014/09/dugin-on-the-subject-of-politics/
URLs in this post:
[1] Image: http://www.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Dugin-chaos-star-e1410484135489.jpg
[2] chaos: http://against-postmodern.org/dugin-necessity-metaphysics-chaos
[3] ethnocidal: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdH6JgqNsPo
[4] Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbol_of_Chaos
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samedi, 13 septembre 2014
Dugin Contra Liberalism
Dugin Contra Liberalism
By Giuliano Adriano Malvicini
Ex: http://www.counter-currents.com
Editor’s Note:
This is a beginning of a series of more or less self-contained articles on Alexander Dugin drawn from a larger text, “Race, ‘Ethnos,’ and the Fourth Political Theory.”
Alexander Dugin has designated “liberalism” as the enemy of the “fourth political theory.” Or rather, since the enemy can only be an actually existing group of people and not an idea or ideology, he has designated as the enemy all those are in favor of the global hegemony of liberalism (the hegemony of “the West” and “atlanticism”): “If you are in favor of global liberal hegemony, you are the enemy.”
What does Dugin mean by “liberalism”? Is it the ideology of the people referred to as “liberals” in America? Calling someone a “liberal” in Europe means something quite different from calling someone a “liberal” in the United States. “Liberals” in the United States are on the left: they vote for the Democratic party and are in favor a welfare state and a regulated economy. In Europe, they would be considered social democrats. Ideologically, they are egalitarians and tend to be critical of laissez-faire capitalism. They oppose “racism,” “sexism” and “homophobia” from an egalitarian point of view. They view prison sentences as therapeutic and socializing rather than as forms of punishment. They believe in “social justice” rather than justice through retribution. They believe that human beings are basically good and can be redeemed through “social work.” They believe in social conditioning rather than personal responsibility. They tend to be in favor of a strict separation of church and state, while at the same time advocating an egalitarian world-view that is essentially a form of secularized Christianity.
In Europe, “liberals” are on the right: they are generally opposed to the welfare state, in favor of free markets, the privatization of the infrastructure and a largely unregulated economy. Traditionally, they also support various conservative social policies, placing an emphasis on individual responsibility as the correlative of the notion of individual rights. In other words, liberalism is a bourgeois ideology, favoring a capitalist economy, based on the enlightenment concept of individual human rights.
Today, however, the polarity between left and right is becoming much less sharp, and is gradually being replaced by a general consensus. The social policies of European liberal parties often coincide with those associated with the post-1968, libertarian left. Liberal, pro-capitalist parties oppose “racism,” “sexism,” and “homophobia” from the point of view of individualist libertarianism. Everyone is supposed to be treated as an individual, in an unprejudiced” way. Forms of collective identity — national, religious or racial – are declared passé. National borders and ethnic communities, insofar as they limit the freedom of the individual, are to be abolished. The freedom of the individual must be defended as long as it does not interfere with the rights of other individuals. This is the liberalism that Dugin has designated as the enemy: globalist capitalism founded on the ideology of human rights. The fourth political theory is anti-capitalist, against globalism, and against the ideology of human rights.
Today, the common foundations and origins of the social democratic, egalitarian left and the bourgeois, liberal right in the enlightenment ideology of human rights has become clearer, as “the left” and “the right” become increasingly hard to distinguish from one another. Both left and right-wing mainstream parties today tend to favor multiculturalism, immigration, gay rights, and the separation of church and state. They share fundamental views about gender equality and sometimes drug liberalization. These policies are legitimized by the “right” from the point of view of individual rights, and by the “left” from the point of view of egalitarianism. Moreover, the middle-class leftist “revolutionaries” of the late ’60s and early ’70s have often made a transition from the communist left to the libertarian right, realizing that their adherence to the left was based on an ideological self-misunderstanding. They were essentially bourgeois, left libertarians who briefly mistook themselves for communist revolutionaries.
In other words, the differences between the left and the right in Europe today are only differences of interpretation of a single legacy: the enlightenment. It would more correct to talk about “liberal-egalitarian hegemony” rather than simply “liberal hegemony.” Both liberalism and egalitarianism are based on the ideology of human rights, but emphasize different aspects. Right-wing liberals emphasize the individual aspect of human rights. Leftist egalitarians emphasize the universal aspect of human rights. Both conceptions of humanity — universal man and individual man — are abstractions, that is, defined only in negative terms. Both universal man and individual man are defined as not belonging to a particular group or category (ethnic or otherwise). Insofar as man is universal, “he” cannot belong to any particular ethnic group, gender or other category. The individual, on the other hand, cannot as such be subsumed under any category or defined as belonging to any collectivity (nationality ethnicity, gender, etc.) since this would violate his or her absolute singularity. “The individual,” then, is any and every human being and potentially corresponds to all of humanity. The individual is universal (as a representative of “humanity” as such) and all human beings are, as human beings, individuals. In other words, “universal man” can only be “individual man.” Egalitarianism and individualism ultimately boil down to the same abstract conception of man.
All established, mainstream political parties in Europe today gravitate towards this liberal-egalitarian center. This leaves all other groups marginalized. This center is the rational, humane, bourgeois individual, monopolizing the legacy of the enlightenment, with reason itself as the defining trait of humanity, it follows that those who deviate in some way from the center are non- or less-than-human (monsters), irrational and unenlightened. The marginalized are de-humanized and dismissed as irrational, “mentally ill” or “extremist.” They are denied a voice, the capacity to think and a right to participate in the political sphere: in other words, they are in various ways deprived of political subjectivity.
These groups include the various losers of liberal modernity, such as religious conservatives who oppose gay rights and the separation of church and state. Christian religious conservatives are not completely marginalized — they still have a presence within established political parties, albeit one that is steadily weakening. Communists, who oppose the idea of individual rights, free enterprise, and private property are not entirely marginalized, especially within academia and cultural institutions. When necessary, they post-communist parties in Europe are allowed to form parts of coalition governments. Leftist activists, in the form of “antifa” groups are tolerated insofar as they perform functions as the watchdogs of the system, when measures are required that lie outside of the limits of legality. They also share a common basis with the established political parties in the egalitarian, universalist aspects of their ideology, which has its roots in the enlightenment.
Much more marginalized and demonized are nationalists, who oppose, in varying degrees, universalism (to the extent that they value national identity), free trade (to the extent that they want to protect national economies), and individualism (to the extent that they view national and ethnic identity as in some cases having primacy over individual identity). Finally, the most marginalized and demonized group of all are racialists and racial nationalists, who oppose not only universalism, but also egalitarianism. However heterogeneous these groups are, they are sometimes placed in the same category – that of “totalitarian” or “anti-democratic” movements – by the liberal center.
It is on this basis that Alain de Benoist, Dugin, and Alain Soral have wanted to create an “alliance of the periphery against the center,” that is, of more or less marginalized groups against the dominant political establishment. In their case, this has so far meant not so much an alliance between the radical left and the radical right as an alliance between religious conservatives (to a large extent Muslims) and ex-communists. A good example of this in Western Europe is Alain Soral’s “Egalité et réconciliation” (“Equality and Reconciliation”), which rejects the repatriation of immigrants, instead embracing “communitarianism,” and attempts to build an alliance between Muslim immigrants and French “patriots.” The name of Soral’s movement already makes it clear that a critique of egalitarianism is not part of the agenda. Neither, of course, is racialism or racially-based nationalism.
It is noteworthy that Dugin, too, avoids any critique of egalitarianism. To the extent that opposition to egalitarianism is the essence of the true right, this means downplaying the real differences between left and right by focusing entirely on attacking “liberalism.” The concept of “liberalism” — intentionally left ambiguous, referring at times to capitalist economic individualism, at times to the moral individualism of gay rights activists and secularists — is meant to function as a central pole of opposition that will artificially unify into a single, cohesive front groups that are otherwise profoundly heterogeneous.
It is crucial to understand that Dugin, who calls for a “crusade against the West” is not opposed to liberalism because it is leading to the destruction of the white race. On the contrary, he frequently identifies “the West” with the white race (since he does not view Russians as white, as will be explained later). His primary stated goal is to destroy liberalism, even if that means destroying the white race (“European humanity”) along with it. As he puts it in The Fourth Political Theory:
. . . liberalism (and post-liberalism) may (and must – I believe this!) be repudiated. And if behind it, there stands the full might of the inertia of modernity, the spirit of Enlightenment and the logic of the political and economic history of European humanity of the last centuries, it must be repudiated together with modernity, the Enlightenment, and European humanity altogether. Moreover, only the acknowledgement of liberalism as fate, as a fundamental influence, comprising the march of Western European history, will allow us really to say ‘no’ to liberalism. (The Fourth Political Theory, p. 154)
He also defines the race of the subject of the “fourth political theory” as “non-White/European” [Ibid. p. 189]. He has predicted world-wide anti-white pogroms as retribution for the evil deeds of the white race, pogroms that Russians, however, will be exempt from, since they are not, according to him, fully white [2].
Article printed from Counter-Currents Publishing: http://www.counter-currents.com
URL to article: http://www.counter-currents.com/2014/09/dugin-contra-liberalism/
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[1] Image: http://www.counter-currents.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Dugin4.jpg
[2] not, according to him, fully white: http://www.arcto.ru/article/1289
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