THE STOLEN IMAGINARY: (part two). The future cannot be seen.
Some of you will remember that we spoke of human impotence towards those who unleash a war and towards the irreversibility of the consumption of planetary resources from which the very serious current climatic problems arise. Next, on the first part of this "stolen imagery", we discussed how today's science fiction writers have given birth to monsters that are too far from us, unable to give us an idea of a possible future and how, the "abolition" argument as a deterrent of these planetary evils, is widely used by the media, but certainly inapplicable. In this second part we focus on some "new" aspects of capitalism which confirms how it is the powerful author of this state of constant danger of the living. (By living means any active organism on planet earth). The perception we have is that all of humanity is like a high speed train that is about to arrive at the end station, without brakes and launched at full speed. Feeling of helplessness therefore, due to inability to imagine any possible future. We ordinary people without political and economic power feel bad, we are afraid, we can only hope and we vote, we elect someone like us who immediately after being elected betrays us, immediately sides with that very powerful minority who says we will solve it with technology. The technique, which solves the problems created by itself, does not reassure us at all. It's like giving candy to a child who hasn't eaten in four days. In the hope of finding some novelty, some foothold in this trend of the last few decades, I looked for new ideas and at least I understood something more. I browsed several interesting essays released in the last 10 months (beginning of the war in Ukraine to today) that analyze the new geo-political situation and reflect on possible international trends . I won't mention them all because it's complicated but I'll list the most significant authors: Emiliano Brancaccio, Giammetti Raffaele and Stefano Lucarelli, the title: The capitalist war . The book is divided into three parts. The first part is disconcerting because it shows us how today Karl Marx is at the service of the historical enemy, i.e. capitalism. Yes, gentlemen, while the left embarrassed by the phenomena that have produced disillusionment with social justice, have distanced themselves from Marxism, reducing it to a reliquary, here is capitalism adopting the "law of centralization", so dear to the post-war European left, to make it a very original interpretation. The second part delves into the empirical evidence of the tendency towards capitalist concentration, this evidence starts from the use of modern proprietary "network" techniques, with reference to share ownership. Since this phenomenon mainly affects the United States and Anglo-Saxon countries as well as China and Russia, the analysis carried out rightly highlights how speaking of oligarchy referring exclusively to Russia is not only improper but also misleading, since the oligarchic structure is by far prevalent in the United States and Western countries. The third part contains revised and updated excerpts of interviews and articles by Emiliano Brancaccio alone inspired by the war in Ukraine, but centered on the more general question of the relationship between centralization of capital and military conflict and on the two most important imperial blocs that emerge: on the one hand , the consolidated imperialism of the debtor countries (USA and UK in the lead), with Europe in tow, on the other hand the nascent imperialism of the creditor countries, starting with China and India. Why did I waste so much time with this book? Because the thesis of the book is very simple and clear. According to the authors, in contemporary capitalism, data in hand, a "law" tending towards the centralization of capital can be discerned, which inevitably leads to the destruction of democracy and foments war. This reading is therefore not aligned with the dominant journalistic interpretations relating to the ongoing war, which exclusively underline Putin's aggression against the independence of a state and its sovereignty and thereby justify the sending of arms by the countries so-called "friends of democracy" in order to support the Ukrainian resistance and its battle for civilization in favor of the freedom of the peoples. The political context in which war is born has much deeper and more complex origins. This thesis is very reliable, we pass from market concentration (competition between financial forces that tend to take possession of larger shares), to "centralization" understood as the "conquest of the markets" , i.e. the conquest not so much of market shares but of ownership . This process is analyzed with examples in the second part of the book, where the thesis of centralization is put to the test with the facts. In this completely new situation in history, not even the human sciences are able to regulate the movements of financial, proprietary values that determine political decisions. Here, we can conclude, that the absence of an idea, however fanciful of our future, is closely connected to the impotence that affects us humans. Stunned by the clamor of the media servants of the various powers, this very heavy sense of not counting for anything, of being a nothing, is ever more present and tragic for us mere mortals. We are overwhelmed by the inevitability of events we loathe. The intrusiveness of the media repeats to us: poverty that is always incurable, war that is always necessary, the mourning of disasters caused by a mad climate are elements of today's life to which we are getting used to and adapting. It is an "inhuman" life that we fear, loathe and condemn, but we have no weapons to fight or change it, indeed in many ways we feed it.