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2 INTERVIEW Beyond left and
right By Claudio Gallo
Alain de Benoist is one of the most
interesting European critics of neoliberalism and
its classical liberal roots. Born in the north of
France, he is author of numerous books that
describe and analyze the decline of Western
civilization. Starting in his youth on the far
right, he has arrived at the concept of the end of
the categories of "left" and "right" in our
post-modern world, which he sees as now dominated
by "Single Thought". He maintains, in the words of
Italian Marxian philosopher Costanzo Preve, the
values of the right and the ideas of the left.
Claudio Gallo: In your recent Au
bord de gouffre ("On the Edge of the Abyss")
you speak about "the announced bankruptcy of the
money system". In our globalized world, however,
the dissolution of modern political and economic
forms seems to assume a paradoxical stability, as
if the world system could hang in a state of
permanent disintegration.
Alain de
Benoist: You are raising an interesting point.
Some authors believe that capitalism feeds itself
with its crises, that they reinforce it (every
time they are triumphantly overcome), rather than
weaken it. The deep cause of this paradox should
lay in the "naturalness" of the logic of capital,
based on the automatic balance of supply and
demand, costs and prices. The market should
correct itself under the effect of Adam Smith's
"invisible hand"; merchant exchange should be
considered the natural form of exchange, and so
on. You may conclude that all the hurdles to free
trade, any form of protection or regulation,
should be suppressed.
I don't share these
views. I don't think that there is anything
"natural" in the process of over-accumulation of
capital or in the wild leap forward that
summarizes the unlimited expansion of the market.
Not only the market doesn't regulate itself, but
it doesn't even appear spontaneously in history.
It was established in the late Middle Ages
by public powers that were eager to monetize
non-market exchanges that were eluding taxation.
It gradually imposed itself at the expense of the
old system of "giving, receiving and returning",
starting from a Western matrix that you can
perfectly position in space and time. About
capitalism, I think it is afflicted by internal
contradictions that will lead faster and faster to
its fall in so far as it will be given full
freedom of movement. As Nietzsche said: "What does
not kill me, makes me stronger".
Until now
capitalism adopted this slogan, but this attitude
will have in the end a limited span. Even though
capitalism's crises should keep it in life for
long time, what matters will be the last crisis.
The current financial and monetary crisis sprung
precisely from the progressive destruction, since
the days of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher,
of any form of economy regulation. Left to
themselves, the financial markets are obeying
their very logic.
Today we are witnessing
the result of this: rising inequality,
implementation of unbearable austerity programs,
the colossal debts of states, delocalization,
rising unemployment, destruction of ecosystems,
etc ... At the same time, what we may call the
economic illusion is unveiled: goods are not
considered if not in terms of market value and
immediate utility. The capitalist world is a world
voided of all qualities that characterize human
nature. But they inevitably return.
The
"paradoxical stability" you speak of is by
definition fragile. Many people have not yet
realized the full extent of the current crisis
because they are not yet personally touched by it.
But this crisis is just beginning. From the
political and social point of view, we are living
in a sub-chaotic situation. Actually, chaos has
not arrived yet, the social bodies remain
relatively controllable through surveillance and
control systems that are constantly developing,
but the general atmosphere is increasingly
resembling that of a "pre-civil war" (Eric
Werner). What makes me pessimistic is the
persuasion that there are no global solutions
within the current dominant system. The capitalist
system is neither "moralizable" nor reformable. It
will not collapse under the blows of its
opponents; it will collapse by itself.
CG: You are one of the few
people today who criticize the principles of
neoliberalism, a practice implicitly prohibited in
"democratic" systems where the horizon of freedom
is limited by the dominance of the economy. Do you
see in our world social forces and a world vision
that may become the subject and instrument of an
alternative?
AdB: I am
surely not the only one who criticizes
neoliberalism, both in its praxis or in its
theoretical foundations. Thanks to the current
crisis, it seems rather that such criticism is
popping up everywhere. What is true, however, is
that an economic criticism of liberalism is not
enough, for me at least. I make also a
philosophical criticism (whose roots date back to
what Aristotle said about chrematistics!), and
also an anthropological one.
It would
indeed be a serious mistake not to see that the
liberal ideology also carries an implicit
conception of man. This is the conception of homo
economicus, the man reduced to its producer and
consumer functions, whose only interest in life is
continuously seeking to maximize his best material
interest. Finally, beyond this very critique of
liberalism, I also offer an economic criticism,
that is, the way in which economic activity, which
was once built - "embedded", said Karl Polanyi -
in the social body, gradually emancipated from all
constraint to become hegemonic in the life of
human societies.
When all values are
solely focused on market value, the symbolic
imagery is colonized by the axiomatics of
interest. The economy becomes one's destiny, and
the consumer replaces the citizen. Under these
conditions, to talk about democracy hasn't much
sense. Democracy is a political system based on
the sovereignty of the people. To function
normally it requires that politics has a sovereign
rule over the economy, that is to say the exact
opposite of what we see today. It is not a
coincidence that, thanks to the crisis, financiers
and bankers have already seized power in several
countries. Qui judicabit, who
decides?
The answer to this old question makes you
understand why states today are no longer
sovereign. The way I see it, an alternative vision
of the world is mostly definitely possible. Many
writers and theorists have already traced its
outlines. But if the critical thinking has its
merits, it also has its limitations, which are
those of all thoughts. To define what should be it
is not enough to transform this "must be" in
concrete reality. The most difficult question is
there. To put the question of "social forces"
which could embody a new practice is to assume
again the issue of the historic subject of our
time.
In the era of absolute capital, both
post-bourgeois and post-proletarian, which is that
of the omnipotence of what I called the
capital-form, this historical subject cannot be
the old proletariat. The historical subject today
is the peoples - not the peoples in the sense of
ethnos or even the demos, but the peoples
considered in terms of their cultural diversity,
now threatened in their political and social
dimension as well.
You can see it in all
countries that have been afflicted by the crisis:
the main clash is between the people and the money
system, represented by banks and financial
markets. At the right moment, the new social
forces will necessarily appear, because, also in
politics, nature fears the void!.
CG: First Kosovo then Libya
and now maybe Syria: the history of "humanitarian
intervention" is the preamble of a new world order
that emerges from the decline of national states.
Is it really a more human world?
AdB: The current wars are
mostly ideological wars, as such reminiscent of
the old religious wars. Presented as "humanitarian
interventions" or international police operations,
undertaken in the name of the defense of "human
rights", they are also wars that are essentially
intended as "moral" wars when in fact their only
purpose is to defend certain interests, expand
areas of influence, control territories or energy
resources.
In this sense, they represent a
return to the "just war", as conceived by the
theologians in the Middle Ages. Just war, or war
"with just cause" (justa causa) is a war
that criminalizes the enemy, because he is
considered the defender of a bad cause, and
therefore unjust. This conception of war led to
the old religious wars that ravaged Europe in the
17th century. After the Westphalia Treaty (1648),
this conception of war was replaced by a new one,
associated itself to a new form of international
law (jus publicum europaeum), which sought
to replace the notion of justa causa with
the one of justus hostis, just enemy. The
enemy was defined as an opponent who might as well
become later an ally.
It was believed that
each belligerent party had his reasons. The
"humanitarian wars" put an end to this more human
kind of war. Freed from the limitations that the
ancient theologians still assigned to jus ad
bellum and jus in bello, they went
along with the virtual disappearance of any form
of international law. Indeed, legitimized by the
ideology of human rights, they consecrate in fact
the power of the stronger, starting with eternal
North American imperialism.
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