From yellow vests to farmers; from retirees to raped women; from the dominance of gangs to daily terror; from moral collapse to existential cynicism; from demographic death to cultural disaster. Everything seems on the verge of collapsing, but it’s an illusion. It’s not the system that is collapsing, it’s society. And it’s not true that the system needs a healthy society, as the crudest imperialisms and capitalisms, from the original English one to the American, Chinese, and Russian ones, have always been founded on brutal societies with masses of brutalized slaves.
Today, for example, American power has returned to its peak with a counteroffensive that in two years has led it to dominate in politics and finance. The United States, in just over twenty years, has increased its population by sixty million and has now largely redesigned its economic policy. However, the social costs are extremely high, and there are entire segments of the population at the mercy of the drug of zombies or alcoholism. Exactly like in Russia, which, on the other hand, has absolutely failed in its counteroffensive, costing it credibility and international weight. In China, the state of mass slavery is well known.
In comparison with societies that have never reached our level of civilization, Europeans, in their individual nations and in the Union, are also regressing, albeit much more slowly, towards the brutality of their competitors. There are many reasons for this decline, from low birth rates to the transformation of the welfare state into parasitic assistance; from the cultural and spiritual AIDS that has infected the formation of the ruling classes in the last fifty years to the managerial philosophy’s managerial incapacity to solve problems with Excel logic.
And that’s not all. We who remain at the top as excellence and potential find ourselves prisoners of the free market. No one, like the Europeans – former absolute locomotive and still a locomotive in any case – has founded its wealth, diplomacy, and politics on the free market. The result has obviously been the entry of products from the third and fourth worlds that win competition for prices, but also, for the same reason, the attraction of companies for outsourcing.
To keep production on site, the formula has not yet been found because the cost of labor here is immensely more expensive than elsewhere, and because one cannot compete without zeroing out the welfare state, i.e., our own conditions of privilege and justice.
We are drifting along. The ruling classes struggle to postpone problems; the advanced points of the oligarchies draw strategies with managerial logic (like in Excel program), without giving importance to side effects and timing. Hence the logics of the green economy, which, in itself, is not the madness it appears to be but becomes immediately so due to its speculative but abstract approach.
Then there are the miraculous solutions of “Yesterday is another day,” on which populisms that chase after obscure formulas are based, such as protectionism, which is good in an expansion phase, but certainly not in the current one, both because – as Trump found out at his own expense – more than on the object of the measures (China), the costs fall on local businesses that depend on hyper-taxed materials, and because if you tax the shirts coming from China, they might start costing 30 euros each, but the european ones will still cost more, and those with tight budgets – and there are many – won’t be able to find them at 5 euros anymore.
Certainly, the strength of things and a minimum of common sense still remain. Therefore, we observe a trend towards decoupling and the establishment of alternative international networks that, moreover, connect with each other and engage in the new logic of “interdependence” + “multialignment”.
This entails the needs that we must capitalize on. The affirmation of an integrated European reality, complete with Euro-African geopolitics and connections with Asia and Latin America in competition with China and Russia, and, of course, the United States. Above all, however, there is already a search for a new logic suitable for the times, which the current and inadequate oligarchies already perceive as “Fortress Europe” and which not only can but must move in the right direction.
To move in that direction – which will likely find excellent allies in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics – we must not only prioritize, indisputably, mythically, and even sacredly, our EUROPEAN positioning (without kidding ourselves with dismantling today and rebuilding tomorrow) but we must be able to take three essential steps:
1) Develop a comprehensive, realistic, concrete, non-masturbatory political program that is qualitatively and spiritually alternative to unrestrained capitalism and its ideological premises.
2) Be in a position to bring the protests of various social classes to a meaningful and common sense, which, left to themselves, tend towards nothingness and disorientation.
3) Rebuild social bodies by creating communities and autonomies, organizing them financially, economically, even in the self-produced welfare field, not limiting ourselves to animating separate groups that watch the ship sink from inside the hold.
And now, instead of asking me how, ask yourselves and start finding an answer. Many of the answers we try to give will be wrong, but through persistent searching, we will find and, above all, embody the right one. If we fail, someone else will take over because that’s how it has to be. And that’s okay.
In this sunset, let’s glimpse the dawn!
