Trump's irresistible rise in the recent American presidential elections
and the influence that Elon Musk, the well-known richest billionaire inthe world, seems to have on him are worrying world public opinion.
Liberal-democratic politics and information seem to be the most worried,
fearing a serious danger for democracy and peace. In Italy, a broad
debate has developed in recent weeks in which the most widespread media
outlets have carried out a real anti-Trump media campaign, denouncing
his excesses, his brusque ways, even calling him a "bully".
Now there is no doubt that the Trump-Musk duo represents a serious
threat to democracy, even to that semblance that so-called Western
democracy is, and jeopardizes that semblance of peace enjoyed by a part
of the world, the "progressive and developed" one, while the same cannot
be said of much of the other part, given the warmongering direction that
"central" governments have given to world politics in recent years, with
a heavy acceleration since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine. That the
general situation is veering dangerously towards increasingly heated
conflicts between states and blocs and that all this is somehow part of
the decline of American imperialism, pressed by the now other dominant
imperialism, the Chinese one, backed by Putin's Russia, in a variable
geometry interlocking in which small and medium regional powers (Turkey
or India, for example) participate, seems established.
However, how credible is the great effort by liberal democrats to
distance themselves from Trump? And, above all, does it really represent
a barrier to the unfortunately widespread fascist drift? Can liberal
democracy today guarantee the condition of peace and development with
which it believes itself invested? Without resorting to the creation of
enemies and continuous threats, Putin, Islamic terrorism, Chinese arrogance?
In the days in which Trump was taking office at the White House, in
Davos in Switzerland, as every year, the World Economic Forum was
underway, which brings together the elite of finance and politics. "If
last year the gap between hopes and fears was evident, the context of
Davos 2025 is no less worrying. Geoeconomic uncertainty, trade tensions,
cultural polarization and climate anxiety are skyrocketing. But there is
also the prospect of rapid innovation - AI, quantum computing and
biotechnology - to increase productivity and quality of life", was
written in a press release from the Forum. Ignoring the
hyper-technological solution, the only one always proposed, the
agitation, which seems to have run through the days of the meeting and
made many European political leaders apprehensive, was mainly due to
Trump's threat to introduce heavy customs duties. Echoing the bad
feelings (so to speak) that were creeping in among heads of state and
government, between CEOs and managers of multinationals, the
right-thinking and "democratic" Italian press sold us the tale of a
clash in progress between a good capitalism and a bad one. Good
capitalism gathered in Davos, intent on finding solutions to the serious
crisis in progress, opposed by the rampant and arrogant capitalism of
Trump-Musk. That capitalism is not compact and that it is crossed by
ferocious internal conflicts is certainly not news, that it pursues
benevolent ends however is to be demonstrated: its long secular history
does not speak in its favor.
So who are Trump and Musk? Two madmen that history delivers to us from
time to time, something convenient to make believe by those who do not
want the system to be brought into play, or the product of systemic
logics inherent in the "nature" of capitalism itself? Rhetorical question.
So what democracy does our local progressivism want to appeal to and not
that which is now tearing its clothes for the impending danger? For some
decades the spirits of the market, of competitiveness, of abuse have
totally infected the elite and reduced the subaltern classes to a pure
economic variable. No political party has opposed this drift: either it
has taken it as a banner behind which to march compactly, peoples and
nations, to affirm their rights and prerogatives; or it has internalized
it as a necessity to cross unscathed (who?) the stormy waves of
globalization.
Exactly Trump and his acolytes, from the digital magnates and new
masters of the economy to any Meloni, proliferate in the social and
ideas vacuum, on which all the instances of the system have worked hard:
politicians, institutions, bankers, financiers, magnates. In the chaos
of a capitalism that, if not in crisis, is nevertheless shaken by a
profound phase of readjustment - digital revolution, transition to a
"green" economy, conflict and remodeling of imperialist blocs - Trump
offers an immediate and easy response, in his crudeness and arrogance,
to try to ferry American and Western capitalism in a moment of
transition and acute geopolitical conflict.
So what should sincere democrats do, if they are such? Among other
things, not invoke any defense of a crumbling and apparent democracy
that has lost all legitimacy, reduced as it is to an empty shell, within
which the powerful proliferate and the popular masses are used as a
cover to perpetuate the system and exploitation. To escape the grip of
resurgent fascism, a radical and determined fight will be necessary
against wars, militarism, racism, machismo, exploitation that make the
existence of capitalism and its emulators possible.
In 1967, in a public speech against the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King,
as reported by Jason W. Moore in the book Beyond Climate Justice: Toward
an Ecology of Revolution, spoke of the theory of the "three evils". "We
must begin rapidly[...]the transition from a thing-oriented society to a
person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and
property rights are considered more important than people, the three
giants of racism, extreme materialism and militarism cannot be defeated".
Angelo Barberi
https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
_________________________________________
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