By TARSUS GENUS*
Considerations on the recently released book, organized by José Luís Fiori
“Reason absolutely condemns war as a procedure of law and, on the contrary, makes the state of peace an immediate duty, which, however, cannot be instituted or ensured without a contract between peoples.” (Kant)
The War between the Russian State and the Ukrainian State (read NATO and its European allies) is a war provoked to accommodate European, Russian, American geopolitical interests – States of capitalist countries – in search of renewable energy sources, underground, military domination of strategic regions for the expansionism of the private accumulation of the respective ruling classes of their countries, counterfeit wars with civilizing wars, as imperial and colonial countries have always done throughout the history of modernity. It is not a war for democracy, nor for democratic freedoms or against fascism, not least because it is present or infiltrated on both sides of the coin.
The book organized by José Luís Fiori (also author) that underlies this article, could have as a “pillar of its pillars”, in his political theory on war, as an alternative or analogous formulation of the Communist Manifesto for the theory of class struggle, perhaps even more universal than the formula of Communist Manifesto. This says that "the history of all societies that have existed up to our days has been the history of class struggle". José Luís Fiori has always focused his attention on another nodal point in history and its contemporary interpretation: “peace is always pregnant with a new war” and it is “almost always a period of truce that lasts as long as imposed by the expansive compulsion of the winners and by the need of the defeated” (p. 110).
Two implicit themes, somewhat forgotten in debates on the left, are currently present (as “meta texts”) in the acute criticism of José Luís Fiori and his co-authors: namely, the absence of the capacity for solidarity “underneath” the policies states, which, as a progressive accumulation, end up influencing them. The first theme is the grassroots solidarity of the anti-fascist democratic camp, which exists in both Ukraine and Russia, pressured by their authoritarian “nationalist” leaders.
The second is the absence of an organization of information in a network, in this time of horizontal relations for the transit of signals and informational data, which allows the free passage of information assembled by the State Department about the war. An irony, in the European left impoverished by the elementary difficulties of its mastered social democracy, is that – as José Luís Fiori says – in his article “A social-democracy in Europe and the war” (p. 46), “although there is no longer a need of containing (so-called) communist expansionism, most of (so-called) European socialism continued to support the United States and NATO in their (so-called) humanitarian wars in the 1990s”.
An article by Gaspar Estrada on France's relations with Latin America (Le Monde, 30/06/23) recently recalled an underground form of relationship, in international relations, which directly united peoples outside the war policies of the States, in defense against a common enemy or through scientific and cultural collaboration. France's collaboration regime with Brazil, in scientific research and in the social sciences, from the XNUMXth century onwards and the persistence of the Latin American left in resisting fascism – with its implication in the struggles in the occupied French territory – especially with the armed movements of the “Free France” and the “maquis”, in the heroic resistance to the Nazi occupiers is a good memory for these times of scarce utopias.
On the other pole of global solidarity, an article by Michael Hudson published in Quantum Bird and translated on the website the earth is round says, “Having staged a coup d'état in Ukraine in 2014, the United States sent its NATO contractor army eastward, giving Ukraine weapons to wage an ethnic war against its own Russian-speaking population and transform the Crimean naval base in a NATO stronghold, whose strategic sense is fully in line with the European social-democratic collaboration that fell into the trap: preventing Europe's dream of profiting from closer trade and investment relations with Russia, exchanging its industrial manufactures for raw materials. Russians”.
Good envy is productive envy that increases admiration and recreates it. Therefore, it is publishable, to socialize knowledge experiences. That's what I do about this enviable book by Professor José Luís Fiori, a book that unveils the present time, which escapes the common sense of compromised products from the mainstream press. A book that does not refuse to oppose the common sense that runs through the hypnotic daily life of fascist perversion.
His companions in the undertaking are no less: José Sérgio Gabrielli, Rodrigo Leão and William Nozaki, who throughout the work challenge the global complexities of War and wars, which drive humanity towards redemption or chaos. The book brings a sequence of important articles already published in academic journals or not, newspapers – virtual or real – that synthesize (or expand) the authors’ memorable conferences and interviews between 2021 and 2023.
The book is ordered to help us understand what is happening in the world and to offer us elements of analysis – without immediate passions or patron orders – on the “ontological centrality of the present”. The ideas contained here come from the roots of real and current economic and political life, geopolitics, imperial expansion and the struggle for ownership of the new energies that will shape the future of humanity.
All the articles published there are of great relevance, in addition to those that are especially relevant, such as the texts “The world after Ukraine”, “Preparation for war and energy transition” (p.63), whose determinations of NATO's geopolitical interest (as the instrument of military political diffusion of American hegemony) also reveals the strategic political poverty of the last social democratic versions in the world; “European Social Democracy and War” which are automatically held hostage by American interests throughout Europe.
Whoever starts from the principle that the cold war is not over or that Russia means barbarism, in relation to the civilized West, can be comfortable in this situation. But those who define themselves – to understand the phenomenon – from the observation of a geopolitical dispute, within the same system of capital domination over weaker countries and regions – more, or less “civilized” – cannot admit that Manichaeism “ or Zelensky or Putin”, is a reasonable choice for the destinies of planet earth and even of what has accumulated as civilization in the West.
This book should be mandatory reading for training journalists who make mistakes in international politics on a daily basis, saying that that war is a war between the bidean-zelenskian civilization of virile kindness and the putinian barbarism – which raises a General Secretary called Stalin from his evil, reddish tomb. So tired.
*Tarsus in law he was governor of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, mayor of Porto Alegre, Minister of Justice, Minister of Education and Minister of Institutional Relations in Brazil. Author, among other books, of possible utopia (Arts & Crafts).
Reference
Jose Luis Fiore. War, energy and the new world map, Petrópolis, Voices, 2023, 224 pages.
the earth is round exists thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE
