The fusion point between left and capital
The wall with which the new government will collide will be the union between the left and economic power, the crucial axis of the system. Who knows if he will have the courage, intelligence and strength to face it but it is decisive if he really wants to govern.
When did the left pass from counterpower to power, from Piazza to Palazzo? What happened that transformed an antagonist force of capital into a red guard of capital and an integral part of the ruling class? We say it many times but we miss the key passage. The surface clues are manifold and all too well known: in the east the failure of communist experiences, in the west the collapse of welfare statism; on the intellectual level the decline of Marxand of the idea of revolution and on the social level the inclusion of militants, agents and officials of the left in the public apparatus, in the private sector and in the judiciary, in schools, universities, publishing and entertainment. Inclusion that, in addition to the well-known political and ideological effects, also entailed the inevitable "bourgeoisie" of the progressive class and the upgrade in the establishment .
We can also periodize this process: it took place after '68, throughout the seventies, then expanding in the following years to integrate and interpenetrate with the powers and institutions. The advantage is reciprocal: it has given Capital an ethical “good conscience” and cultural legitimation on the level of emancipation and defense of human and civil rights; and it gave the Left a power of influence and interdiction, and cultural and civil leadership.
But all this still does not explain the central reason for the union between the left and the capital, the welding of two hegemonies, between economic power and cultural power. What brought about that convergence? It is the common purpose of replacing the common world based on reality with the uniform world based on induced desires;the desire for a new world for the left and new markets for capital. How does this change happen? Erasing, despising and breaking the bonds, the borders, the limits. What on the left they call emancipation, liberation, progress; and in capitalist jargon they call development, consumption, modernization. The key word of both is uprooting, identity dissolves: he is considered a free man who has no ties or belonging, fluid in a liquid world, projected into his desires rather than anchored to his inheritances and to his nature; connected to his time and the web but disconnected from his place and his community ties. In this way he becomes a citizen of the world, a man without borders (even sexual), an emancipated and global individual, according to the converging dream of left-wing internationalism and capitalist globalization.
The world to be demolished is not called for what it is - the reality of religious and civil, family and community ties - but is renamed negatively as racism, fascism, homotransphobia, antifeminism.
This convergence has a precise social impact: declaring war on the common world, on reality, on nature, on the context in which man has always lived, means breaking with the peoples and starting over from the elites. Economic and financial, political and intellectual oligarchies, enemies of common sentiment, popular roots and ties. It is the rebellion of the elites of which a lucid American sociologist, Cristopher Lasch , wrote about the rebellion of the masses by Ortega y Gasset (1930) in 1994.
In his works Lasch noted what acute local observers of opposite extraction such as Augusto Del Noce and Pierpaolo Pasolini had already grasped: the protesters, the revolutionaries, the radical left declared war on capitalism but then fought patriotism, religion, the traditional family, thus believing to hit the heart and the rear of capitalism. Their struggle, on the other hand, was entirely functional to capitalism, which wanted to break down precisely those banks and get rid of those bonds that opposed the establishment of a completely eradicated society of lonely individuals, easy prey to consumerism. Also Marx in the Manifestohe explained that with capitalism "all stable and fixed social relations are dissolved, with their following of traditional and venerable conceptions and ideas". Out of dullness, presumption or bad faith, the left has ignored Marx's Manifesto (not a reactionary author) and has become the hitman of traditional society, with the blessing of capital ... By erasing believers, family members, patriots, only consumers remain ; of goods and ideologies. “We are freed from tradition only to bow to the tyranny of fashion” notes Lasch in the essay Against Mass Culture (now published by Eleuthera).
Freedom consists in choosing between brands, products, “pre-packaged opinions and ideologies designed by opinion makers”; the process will take place, Lasch noted thirty years ago, "destroying the collective memory, replacing a responsible authority with a new star system", today we would say with the influencers and the factories of manipulated consent. The "mass narcissism" of which Lasch wrote in The culture of narcissism will remain as an illusory gratification: it is the new opium of peoples, reduced to single format in front of the mirror (aka a smartphone).
Lasch called for an alliance to resist assimilation, uprooting and forced modernization. For Simone Weil who is uprooted uproots; for Lasch "uprooting uproots everything, except the need for roots".
Here is where the fusion point between left and capital is: in the dissolution of natural, religious and community ties passed off as emancipation and liberation from monsters. They take everything away from you and then they tell you: you have less weights and constraints, now you are free to run. Then they also tell you where to go, what to buy and which way to go ...
The Truth - October 14, 2022. http://www.marcelloveneziani.com/articoli/il-punto-di-fusione-tra-sinistra-e-capitale/