Before suffocating (or breathing) in the prison (or paradise) of a postcapitalist global empire or a postcapitalist global market society, humanity could burn in the horrors (or glories) of the growing violence that accompanied the liquidation of the Cold War world order. In this case, too, the history of capitalism would come to an end, but this time through a stable return to the systemic chaos from which it originated six hundred years ago and which has reproduced itself on an ever-increasing scale with each transition. Whether this will mean the end of the history of capitalism or the end of the entire history of humanity is anyone's guess.
(G. Arrighi, "The Long 20th Century" 1996-2014, p. 392)"Everyone knows everything about the beginning but no one can talk about the end"
(F. de Gregori. "Air disaster over the Strait of Sicily", 1976)
ONLY ONE THING WE CAN SAY
It can be thought that knowing history is useless and irrelevant to making predictions about the future based on the present. Especially if we have understood history as a rectilinear, homogeneous, teleological, and almost theological path. However, given that humans have only appeared on this planet for an extremely short time, we cannot avoid analyzing the present by starting from what we already know, which often appears to repeat itself periodically, or by presenting new content in old containers (or vice versa).
This is also because there is no other way than to grope in complete darkness, in an abyss of reason that is difficult even to fathom.
However, even admitting that history is not a completely legible and sensible path but a reconstruction of a bumpy journey in which we try to grasp at least some thread that unites and makes a rough sketch, a sinopia, comprehensible, it is truly complicated to navigate contemporaneity using only the usual tools.
WE SAW THEM COMING
The birth of fascism comes to mind, for example, a birth that very few were able to grasp in all its overwhelming novelty. And where single-key analyses failed to grasp a magmatic movement (magmatic for the founders themselves) that ultimately paved the way for the absolute novelty of an unprecedented totalitarian project.
Not the purely economic analyses, not the liberal ones, not the patriotic or para-Risorgimento ones (all these were absorbed by fascism's anti-ideological path, later spewed out in an almost mythological figure: the hircocervus).
And yet we cannot help but work with the material we have, avoiding oracular tones but also not being frozen in the face of the world before us.
We are faced, today, with something unprecedented, whose roots, however, must be sought in the past thirty years.
Let's be clear: everything could have gone differently, but what didn't happen could perhaps be of interest for counterfactual analyses and parlor games, or in some parallel universe according to string theory.
But in the context we're in, that's how it happened, and we can only analyze it that way.
The path that led to the end of the universe of so-called "real socialism" was not at all a triumph of some libertarian wave. It was instead the crushing and vengeful victory of the most violent capitalism. Salt was poured on the ashes of socialism, achieved or possible, and not even the honors of war were granted. De André understood this well from the start, so much so that in 1990, in that masterpiece "Sunday of the Dead," he said: " The pyramid of Cheops wanted to be rebuilt on that feast day, rock by rock, slave by slave, communist by communist." That battle was fought, it should be remembered, not (or not only) by the fascist and post-fascist right, but, above all, by the liberal component of society and its leading mercenaries.
THE MARKET GOD
Now, I don't want to bore the reader here with things that have been written a thousand times, but it is essential to remember that the fuse that led us to the current situation was lit in those years. What re-emerged from the depths of the sewers into which it had been thrown was not only the fascist horde, but also (and I would say fundamentally) an economic theory that had been given up for dead and buried: ordoliberalism.
I certainly cannot go into the guidelines of this true capitalist dystopia here[2], but it should be remembered that, unlike liberalism, this totalitarian ideology does not approach the economy according to the dictates of the now outdated "free market", but goes to integrate the whole of society. Not "less-State" but, rather, "more-State" and placed at the service of capital (capitalism is not a state of nature and therefore its ideology must be constructed). Competition placed at the service of all human knowledge (from healthcare, to schools, to universities, to the world of work). This is the dominant ideology on which the EU was built.
The US Empire had already experienced it in the coup in Chile, with the Chicago Boys. In that case, unlike the EU, as has often happened in the history of capitalism, unbridled neoliberalism was accompanied by bloody and brutal repression. Capital never disdains the use of force when moral suasion fails. This is why the state is fundamental, contrary to what amateur economic theorists believe.
That capital lacks the "reasoning" to advance its own "rationality" (in the theological sense of the term) should be clear to everyone by now, even if its hegemony seems to have won hearts and minds.
After 1989, a triumphant capitalism also becomes the master of the world and poses as a benevolent but also punishing God.
I AM THE LAW
In this sense, the massacre of the first and second Gulf Wars against a Third World country today appear not as examples of a reaffirmation of "international law," but of the creation ex nihilo of the law of empire.
A signal that was missed, except by a few (Danilo Zolo, for one). But when, after the euphoria of the dismantling of the wall (which fell entirely upon the lower classes) and the foaming mouths of the liberals, as always accompanied by the fascists, new and not secondary players appeared on the world stage, the Empire began to falter. China, with an extraordinary performance (to use the neo-speak) became in just a few years the major player on the global economic scene; Russia, after the humiliations of global pariahship suffered under Yeltsin, reemerged as an authoritarian state, but one that no longer asked for "permission," not to mention the other gigantic countries that today make up that strange and composite entity known as BRICS.
CHAOS IS ME
This new dislocation of the world has brought an unprecedented backlash to the Western world. And if the first Trump appeared as a demagogue battling the globalist elites, after the foolish election of the less-than-lucid Biden (responsible for the military escalation in the Ukrainian conflict), the second truly presents himself on the scene as the epitome of a declining empire, a sort of Social Republic a thousand times more virulent. Having cast aside every idea of "soft power," he has, through gangster-like language, demolished every vestige of "international law," even the imperial law of his predecessors, throwing himself headlong into creating chaos that, upon closer inspection, truly gives the impression of absolute and devastating nihilism.
Although, obviously, history, as important as individual personalities are, certainly does not advance in the shoes of one man alone. Enormous military interests, the need to pave the way for the final conflict with China, the conquest of resources...this new hircocervus truly contains everything, but it's so tangled that it's difficult to grasp its meaning. This is also because we are in a period in which a genocide committed live and on all networks has not only gone uncondemned, but has received the support of the entire (or almost entire) Western world. We are truly, to quote the philosopher, at a "transvaluation of all values," even those that for 80 years have been served up to us as "never again."
But we know that liberals, the ruling classes, when forced to choose, will always consider Hitler the lesser evil if forced to do so.
VOLUNTARY SERVITUDE
I have remained silent about Europe, or rather the EU. Because there is nothing to say about it. The political insignificance of this euro-shaped entity now seems clear. And if we wanted to say something, it is that never before, not even in the harshest years of the Cold War, has there been such submission, far beyond decency, to a master who now openly despises us, and the more we subserviently act, the more (rightly) we disgust him.
A group composed of the lowest level ever reached by an inept, ignorant, arrogant, and cowardly ruling class that will drag us into the abyss.
Andrea Bellucci
[2]The bibliography on the subject is now vast. A fundamental text remains that of Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, The New Reason of the World. Critique of Neoliberal Rationality , Derive Approdi, 2013
https://www.ucadi.org/2026/03/28/caos-dopo-la-postmodernita/
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Source: A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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