FROM MY DEAR FRIEND AMBASSADOR GAJENDRA SINGH
To most Indians , brought up on western
thought and ideas , directly or indirectly , first from the Colonial British
viewpoint and now from USA's manifest destiny and exceptionalism and
its obedience
to tools liberal capitalism and globalization , there is litte idea about what
exists in continental Europe , the
barbarians who were the first recipient of Greek thought, a lot of which
evolved and developed in what is now Turkey* , with origins from Mesopotamia
and Egypt .
After the current continuing degeneration of
India's political life with a feudal polity which remained frozen by the
British , after independence ,soon morphed back ,after the first few decades of
the Anglo-lSaxon tefelon of rule of law to weak Moghul emperor and powerful
subedars like the Marathas, Rohillas , Sikhs , Jats and others , now re-emerging
as political barons like Pawars, Krunanidhis Patnaiks ,Mamtas, Mayawatis ,
various Yadava formations and Lals of Haryana and Reddys and others in Deccan ,
we are in a cusp of splintering away as a coherent Union of states.
Such political ignorantis ruling India choose
heads of historical , scientific and other organizations , bodies and
universities
.The result is deadly degeneration .The corporate barons are daily looting the
peoples assets and complaining through media and corporate whores that it is
not being speeded up , India can look to difficult times even like the concept
of united Europe coming apart as written below .
* Turkey , known as Asia minor is the birth
place of Herodotus ( Bodrum) ,Diogenes (Sinop) ,Strabo and first thinkers near
Ephesus and Vransehir of the first stoics , my favoured places to
visit .But Ataturk's
Turkey is getting sucked into Saudi/US objectives and policies .
Some food for thought below , an interesting
and stimulating piece from Asia Times which needs a serious look into , the
point not only where the western world but India too has arrived at.
My take
http://tarafits.blogspot.in/2012/02/short-history-of-decline-of-american.html
INTERVIEW
The 'limitless horizon" of capitalism
By Claudio Gallo Asia Times 23 May 2012
TURIN - Costanzo Preve, 69, born of
Italian parents and with an Armenian grandmother,
never had it easy; he chose the path of
uncompromising philosophy, away from academic
circles and cultural fashions.
He
graduated in Turin, but his intellectual journey
was really accomplished later in Paris, with
teachers like Jean Hyppolite, Louis Althusser,
Jean Paul Sartre, Roger Garaudy and Gilbert Mury.
Nothing today seems less attractive to the
literary salons than his critical thought that
inextricably links two great German thinkers that
the second part of the 20th century has
definitely
shelved: Karl Marx and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel.
Unlike what most school textbooks
continue to teach, in line with
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Cold War communists,
Preve argues that Marx never really committed
"parricide", bringing Hegelian dialectic "down to
earth", but instead he is essentially Hegel's
pupil.
Preve interprets Marx as "a
superfical materialist and a structural
idealist".
He stresses that, "crucial to Marx is the idea of
universal history, seen as the drama and tragedy
of human emancipation. While Hegel, wisely,
maintained the historical balance in the
relationship between past and present, Marx took
the risk to talk about the future, characterizing
it as communism. The relationship between Hegel
and Marx is structural for me, something
denied by
most of the so-called Marxists who recognize an
influence, but don't admit the idealistic
character of Marx's philosophy.
"Quite
another thing is Marxism, that is a systematized
'ism', but Marx never systematized his
thought. It
was produced in 20 years, 1875-1895, by
[Friedrich] Engels and [Karl] Kautsky. The primal
scene of Marxism, to use [Sigmund] Freud's
language, is a form of leftist positivism
inscribed in the progressive tradition of the
Enlightenment."
Preve begun to recognize
the historical failure of communism very
early. He
also has carved out for himself a role as critic
of the "Bad Infinity" of neo-capitalist
globalization, based on the Greek concept of
limit, taken in the light of Hegelian-Marxian
dialectics.
His freedom of thought, which
cuts across his huge bibliography, also
led him to
a dialogue with an undefinable thinker
with remote
far-right roots such as Alain de
Benoist, a choice
that the sharp-eyed censors of the
mainstream left
did not like at all.
Claudio Gallo: Professor Preve, is it possible to say, according to
your Marxian perspective, that globalization is the final stage of
capitalism?
Costanzo Preve: This Final Stage obsession led to a lot of errors in
the past, we must be careful to use that word. History categorically
denies any diagnosis of Final Stages. Is globalization the Final
Stage of capitalism? I really don't know, I would not use that
expression. Unlike man, who passes from youth to maturity and then
enters a final stage, history proceeds while the Earth keeps circling
around the sun.
I would say that globalization is a
new standard, a qualitative leap in the
production
of the capitalist world. The imperialism of the
19th century was also a kind of globalization: if
one studies [Fernand] Braudel and [Immanuel]
Wallerstein, one sees that world trades existed
already in 1500, but even if Spanish, Portuguese,
British and Dutch ships could reach every port,
evidently that trend was not yet of the purely
economic kind. Globalization is the logic of
capitalist production at its purest.
CG: So historical development had to wait for modern technology?
CP: It lacked technology, sure, but perhaps above all, there were
still large areas of the pre-capitalist world - community, slavery,
feudal, aristocratic. So it is not just a problem of technology but
of geographical saturation. Globalization is a capitalistic
saturation of the whole world: I do not think that it's a final
stage, but it certainly is a crucial moment in human history.
CG: In your review of the dialectical history of capitalism, you set
capitalism as "limitless horizon" against "metron" - the Greek sense
of limit and armony. What you suggest is a dialectic reappropriation
of "limit" as opposed to the endless hunger, the unlimited desire of
accumulation of globalization. Don't you think that this dialectical
path, all inside Western culture, may sound extraneous to the Chinese
or the Indian world?
CP: The Greek culture and then the Roman and Medieval Christian
culture are internal to the Western world. Colonialism exported them
militarily during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries to areas outside
Europe.
In Asia there were ancient
civilizations with their own identity that
developed along lines completely
different to what
we call Jewish-Christian civilization (the hyphen
should be replaced with an "and", and should be
added "and Greek, and Roman, etc").
The
impressive success of capitalism in
countries like
China, India, Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea,
shows that we are not observing a Calvinist
secularisation because this would make sense only
inside a kind of Western history. In my opinion,
it's rather a sign that capitalism has
evoked deep
dynamics that already existed in these cultures,
even if main national traditions were completely
different. I am convinced that globalization has
produced a storm, an economic tsunami that maybe
has not melted the world in a unique
mould but has
created a series of common problems that in the
past centuries did not exist.
CG: Marxist theory rules that capitalism brings inside itself the
contradictions that will lead to its overcoming. However, Marxist
predictions never materialized and globalized capitalism (unlike
states) apparently enjoys an excellent health.The working class,
formerly considered as a possible engine for change, is in disarray:
on which collective identity is still possible to establish an
alternative to the world of the Megamachine, as Latouche defined it?
CP: Neo-capitalism carries many contradictions within itself. For
example, it is incompatible with any form of Keynesianism. Coping
with crisis a national state devalues its currency or depreciates its
labor force. The case of Europe is crystal clear.
The Union was
founded on a neoliberal model, certainly not
social-democratic. That means balanced
budgets and
a fight against inflation as the main enemy. If a
state loses control over the national
currency and
its depreciation, the only thing that can give a
competitive advantage is devaluation of labor. We
are in this situation and this is why I
am against
this Europe. I see no other alternatives to the
future return of national currencies.
The
euro was a historic mistake. Its
apparent goal was
to make Europe a competitive subject in
globalization. As a result, however, the
continent
is not able any more to deal with globalization,
but it's sucked to its most perverse logic: the
devaluation of human work. Globalization
has meant
decentralization of production, labor
flexibility,
job insecurity and lack of future. The very fact
that these things are proclamed only by
marginalized forces such as Beppe Grillo in Italy
or Marine Le Pen in France, means that the
establishment - the left and the right - the ones
that have access to the media, decided to support
the euro, hiding the true consequences of this
choice. That's why we live in a
schizophrenia that
is likely to worsen in the next years.
CG: A leit motiv of globalization is human rights; at first sight
that appeared to be a positive form of universalization. In your
book Ethical Bombing you attack the philosophy of human rights as
"variable geometry".
CP: Human rights perform the same function of the "white man's
burden" during the colonial era: to spread Western civilization
against barbarism, through missionaries and gunboats. I consider the
politics of human rights unconditionally negative.
Theoretically
speaking, human rights derived from
Natural Law, a
theory already known by stoics and taken over by
Christianity, which took its main form in
1500-1600 in the works of many thinkers.
The concept began to decline in 1800 with
the advent of juridical positivism. The
founder of
modern political economy, David Hume, criticized
the theory of natural rights. He claimed that
there is no such a right, the only thing that
exists is people's inclination to exchange.
Those who speak of human rights make a
pointless exercise of metaphysics. Why
these human
rights that were destroyed on the dawn of English
political economy are now recovered, especially
after Nuremberg's Trial [of Nazis] , as a Western
ideology of control?
Human rights is an
ideology at variable geometry, because to decide
what is human and what is not are the major
economic oligarchies through their executives:
university professors and journalists. The left
has fully adopted the theory of human rights at
variable geometry.
It is a theory that
makes impossible any analysis of the structural,
economic and social world. We are always faced
with a dictator against whom there is a whole
people in revolt, it may be [Slobodan] Milosevic,
Saddam Hussein, [Muammar] Gaddafi and now [Syrian
President Bashir al-]Assad.
So it is less
and less impossible to analyze historical
contradictions, social and religious reasons. To
real people they artificially superimpose this
view apparently of doing good but in reality
evil-doing because it is the premise of a bloody
military intervention.
We live in a pure
Orwellian time: war is called peace, the Italian
soldiers in Afghanistan are called peacekeeping
troops but they are deployed against Taliban
insurgents on behalf of US geostrategic
interests.
In reality, human rights politics makes its own
goal impossible: a true universalization of
humanitarian conditions of the world. It's the
modern equivalent of Hitler's racial theory. I
realize that this phrase may seem crazy, extreme
and paradoxical, but I believe it is true.
CG: Is mainstream media just describing globalization, or rather, as
Noam Chomsky puts it, playing an important ideological role in its
support?
CP: Cicero wrote: I don't understand how haruspex [the Latin
divinator] do not burst out laughing when we meet. I wonder why
journalists don't do the same. Mainstream media are telling for over
a year now that the Assad government is falling down, but Assad still
clings to power, and among the opposition someone, maybe al-Qaeda or
not, started to use bombs against civilians.
We have the paradox that our
guys are the evil ones while their guys seem
comparatively normal. The media have created a
parallel universe to guide the real universe into
the direction desired by oligarchies. Media have
today the function the oratores, ie the
priests, had during the Middle Ages.
Today
the Church is a great social charity
acting inside
the crisis of the welfare state. The new
clergy is
composed of two categories: the secular, the
university professors who are (I speak of social
sciences, not about physics-chemistry-biology),
with their weltanschaung, homogenized and
politically correct.
There are of course
important exceptions but they are not relevant.
Then there is the regular clergy, ie the
journalists. The society we live in is always
tripartite: bellatores, oratores and
laboratores. The first layer is the great financial oligarchy, in
many aspects transnational, but substantially rooted nationally.
Then there is the clergy, as we've just seen. And then an immense
mass of workers that are internally divided, because obviously there
is nothing in common among guaranteed workers in Europe and the great
mass of Third World poor knocking at the gates of the US and Europe.
CG: It is now commonplace thinking that the center of world power is
shifting towards the East. The [Barack] Obama administration is
adjusting its strategic doctrine to confront China in the Pacific and
Africa. Is it true that Europe's decline is inevitable?
CP: Before answering, let me say that despite its great
international growth China is not a country wanting to export its own
model: in Chinese culture there is no trace of the Protestant
mission to bring the truth to others in a world where there are no
borders but only frontiers.
The expansion of China in Africa is purely
economic. Since Africa has ceased to be the
backyard of France and England, Beijing
is looking
for raw materials in geostrategic
competition with
Washington. It's interesting in this perspective
to see the position of Italy, which once a minor
colonial power, has just made in Libya a war
against its own interests.
The American
interest in the East began to take shape
with Word
War II. The vast network of American military
bases from the Atlantic to the Pacific shows that
Washington remains anchored to the old scheme
despite the decline of Europe. Indeed, Europe has
committed suicide and no longer exists as a
political actor. Europe lost in 1989, with the
collapse of communism, a chance to gain its
independence.
CG: Speaking recently on Europe's Day, the president of the European
Council [Herman] Van Rompuy said that the United States of Europe
will never exist ...
CP: The existence of the United States of Europe would entail the
dismantling of US bases; how could there be in fact Athenian
democracy with Spartan bases on the Acropolis? Europe decided to
politically disappear as a consequence of the sense of guilt for the
Holocaust.
The Holocaust religion (to be
clear, I do not deny the Holocaust, I'm talking
about its ideological dimension) has brought
Europe into a state of permanent immaturity. The
message is: if they left we Europeans alone we
will surely return to commit horrible crimes, we
cannot be left to ourselves, we need always
someone to control us, because fascists or
communists are always ready to materialize and
take control. That "someone" is obviously the
benevolent American empire.
Claudio Gallo is the World News editor of Italian daily La Stampa.
(Copyright 2012
Claudio Gallo.
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