Olavo de Carvalho
O Globo, May 28th, 2005

20th century’s first half witnessed the rise of planned economy; the second saw its fall, followed by the appearance of an even more ambitious domination plan: planned culture. Culture transcends and includes economy: it includes the entire range of human creations, language and imagination, values and feelings, intimate life and unconscious reflexes. The widening of the objectives shows that the activist intelligentsia learned from the eight decades experience an opposite lesson from that of classic liberal and libertarian economists: the latter believe that socialism’s failure proved Giant Government’s intrinsic madness; the former learned that Giant Government failed for not being gigantic enough.

Socialism’s final aim, as Hannah Arendt observed, is the modification of human nature. The Lenin, Stalin and Hitler generation imagined that socialist economy would create this new kind of men. The deeper socialist thinkers – Gramsci, Lukacs and the Frankfurt School – saw in this a dangerous economicist mistake. The soul of the “new man” would not be born from socialism, but should come before it and create it. This idea sounded heretical to Marxist orthodoxes of the time (although, on the other side of the socialist range, it was not totally alien to the Nazi-fascist theoreticians). It has spread only in the last decades, providing the basis for the formidable expansion of internationalist leftism, which survived even Soviet economy’s fall, and has reached its peak precisely in the years following USSR’s breakup. Today’s international socialism looks less for socialist regimes creation and more for the installation of a global complex of mutations in civil society, in morals and in family relations. The change in the order of priorities caused a harmonic change in the strategy and choice of means. Formerly, the revolutionary movement’s essential tool was an ideologically monolithic party. Today, it is a variety of leftist parties only apparently disconnected, it is the international NGOs’ networks, it is the “social movements”, it is the large international organizations. Their unity of action can only be grasped from outside by those who are aware of the cultural war’s subtleties, infinitely more complex than the older open conflict between pro-capitalist and pro-communist parties.

Once the strategic line of action is understood, it becomes easy to follow the players in the game, from the public debates’ apparent confusion to their common origin in strategic planning offices invariably linked to the UN and to a certain number of billionaire foundations with which they are associated, as well as to some national States which, discretely and not without ambiguities, give support for the process. Today there is not a single “cause”, a single revolutionary fight or “social change” slogan that has not originated in technical and consultive committees outside any popular and electoral control. These ideas are then spread throughout the many nations as if they were spontaneous products of the impersonal historical movement, if not of the divine providence itself. Feminist revolt, abortion rights, racial quotas, the gay movement, agrarian revolution, indigenism, environmentalism, antismoking campaigns, legalization of heavy drugs – all the fight flags waved in the world can be traced back from the public scene to their discrete origins on the circles of enlightened internationalism. And to spread them there are not only the “networks”, extending up to the infinite, but a whole millionaire bureaucratic system: the UN has even college courses to form technicians in “creation of social movements” in the Third World. All of them spontaneous movements, of course, and by spontaneous miracle harmonized in the conception of a whole new civilizational order.

The bibliography about this holds documentation that exceeds reasonable doubt by far, but, protected by the masses’ natural intellectual laziness, it will take some centuries to become object of common knowledge. And by then humanity will have no interest in knowing its origin: for it will have become the “new humanity”, drunken by the illusion of having created itself by way of the spontaneous forces of Progress and the Lights
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More on the New World

Olavo de Carvalho
O Globo, June 4th, 2005

From reading my previous article, one must not imagine that the strategy for global cultural mutation is simply a sordid trick invented by a group of conspirators to achieve socialism by indirect and anesthetic means. It is quite the opposite. The focus of the socialist worldview has been moved from the economic to the cultural, or more exactly, to the civilizational pole.1

Since the 40s, the recurrent impossibility of creating a working socialism has caused repeated concessions to the market economy and weakened the ambition for a radical elimination of private property amongst the activist intelligentsia.

Among the best brains on the left, substituting for orthodox socialism an effort to “save” the socialist “ideals” from the state economy’s debris dates far before the fall of the USSR. The early members of the Frankfurt school already had great contempt for the Soviet experience: they turned their backs on economics and struggled to create a new integral civilizational concept. The 60s’ “New Left” rarely talked about economic planning: they only wanted to deal in racial hustling, sexual liberation, anti-Americanism, feminist revolt etc. Meanwhile, in the UN, the crackpot Robert Mueller, inspired by the American seer Alice Bailey, who in turn was guided by infallible extraterrestrial gurus, conceived new educational parameters, today worldwide adopted, to better conform the new generations to the planetary socialism of their dreams.

The socialization of the economy, by becoming the fruit instead of the root of the “new man”, ceases to be a priority. That is why a mainstream socialist2 can naively declare that neither he nor his comrades know what kind of socialism they intend to achieve. The lack of social-economic objectives contrasts in such a way to the coherence and the practical organization in the worldwide Left’s actions, to the uniformity of the “moral” and cultural values that guide it, that such a statement3 can be considered a Freudian slip, revealing the underlying or almost unconscious intention to postpone until the Greek calends the socialization of the economy, prioritizing in the chronological order the militant organization for the popular masses’ conditioning into the “new civilization’s” values and criteria. Socialist power affirms itself in the psychological and moral, educational and legal sphere, leaving the formula for the reformed economy as the variable in the equation – to be shaped little by little as the global transfiguration os mentalities’ process advances.

The radicals who get impatient, longing for an old-fashioned brutal interventionism, do not understand the new strategy’s subtlety. This does not mean, though, that they are of no help, since they play the part of stirring up the process, knowing or not that the energy they use has been previously measured and channeled by international strategies far more intelligent than a billion agrarian reform activists.4 To cry out “socialism now” does not eliminate the socialist economy’s contradictions, but it helps to keep the masses in the proper mood. When reality’s load gets too heavy for the donkey’s back, it is necessary to cheer the pet up by showing him the utopia carrot.

Postponing a socialist economy has also the great advantage of gaining support for it from many capitalists. Under the comforting claim that “socialism is over”, conceited rich people sponsor the socialist culture’s installation, betting that, in the short term, it will not bring them any substantial harm. On the way, capitalism is not eliminated, only virtually criminalized, while at the same time it continues, well or not so well, to prosper in the material sphere. In the schools, in the books, and on TV, the entrepreneurial class is exposed to public contempt and ridicule, but, since at the same time it is tolerated and subsidized by the same governing leadership that mocks it, there always remains for it the hope to survive by flattery and adulation. Thus, it is not certain that one day a state-run economy will be achieved, but it is certain that until then capitalism, or whatever remains of it, will have been transformed into an ocean of iniquities.

NOTES:

1. By “economic pole” and “cultural/civilizational pole” the author is referring to determinations of what he calls the “nature-society axis”. This is one of the three axes that in his Philosophical Anthropology constitute the whole of the human experience of reality, the other two axes being the “immanence-transcendence” and the “origin-end”. Since these six poles are the ultimate modes of apprehension of reality, what one finds in their crossing point is not a unifying concept, but the concrete reality of each and every living human being in contact with reality itself. Thus, whenever a doctrine takes a subset of these six poles and tries to “explain” the remaining ones as secondary expressions of that subset, as is the case in Marxism, Positivism and other modernist movements, that doctrine is ungrounded in reality, no matter how ingenious such an attempt might be. No wonder then that the actual accomplishments of these doctrines when put into practice never come up to the expectations of their believers. There’s no reality sustaining them. – Editor’s Note. Back
2. I’ve adapted the text for international readers by removing references to Brazilian personalities. Here the author is referring to the Brazilian president, Mr. Luis Inácio “Lula” da Silva. The original reads: “That is why Mr. Luis Inácio da Silva can naively declare…” – Editor’s Note. Back
3. Same as above. The original reads: “…the lulian statement can be considered…” – Editor’s Note. Back
4. Here the reference is to José “Zé” Rainha, a leader of the Brazilian “Landless Movement” (Movimento dos Sem Terra, MST) who uses agrarian reform and anti-GM rhetoric to obtain the masses support for his radical projects. The original reads: “…a billion Zé Rainhas.” – Editor’s Note. Back

And I hope every bolivarian circle and block committee and factory council and farm co-operative trains endlessly with its local military and militia. We all know that the invasion — in whatever guise — WILL happen, sooner rather than later. Perhaps in an attempt to stave off the Bolivarian Revolution moving to price Venezuela’s oil in Euros this June, the same time Iran does (partly).