INTERVIEW The 'limitless horizon"
of capitalism By Claudio Gallo
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
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.
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