By ROIO MILESTONES*

Excerpt from the author's introduction to the newly released book

Prologue to the end of the story

1.

The discourse about a presumed “end of history”, in the most diverse versions, theological or philosophical, is part of the intellectual cultural tradition of the West.

Its new entry onto the scene at the end of the 20th century is associated with the disintegration of state socialism (particularly the USSR) and the ideological representation of the universalization of the liberal empire of the West. Although this theme has a considerable trajectory, the generalization and universalization of capitalist modernity at the end of the 20th century gives it a concrete substrate that was not present in the previous formulations.

Currently, the ideology of the end of history in the realization of the universal empire of the West goes by the name of neoliberal globalization, coinciding, this time, with the outcome of a concrete socio-historical process of long duration. Ideology and the process of Westernization of the world seem to finally converge in the universality of the capitalist market and the egoistic individualism of property as defined by neoliberal globalism, without any alternative appearing viable.

In fact, the objective of universal empire has been pursued by the West since the 11th century, when its desire for domination was condensed into the Latin ecclesiastical institution, which became the nuclear power of the social order of feudalism, in need of a stabilizing power and a driving force for external expansion.

The identity of the West was then defined around the power of the Church, with the break with the Byzantine Church, with the superimposition of the power of the emperor and kings, with the concentration and hierarchical conception of power within its own interior and with the proposition, as a corollary, of the universal empire of Christianity. This was to cover the entire Island of the Earth, which had Jerusalem as its center, that is, all the part inhabited by human beings, since other supposed islands would be, if not deserted, populated by non-human beings.

It was in this context that the discussion arose about the existence or not of antipodes (literally, those who have feet on the opposite side, understood, however, as those who live on the opposite side), at the same time that the image of the inferior and negative other – the subaltern – was being created, projected onto everything that signified interposition or resistance to the realization of the homogeneous. world empire.

The subaltern to be subjected to extermination or resignation, and to which, by definition, an autonomous socio-historical protagonism is denied, is a social group internal to the West, this complex and multifaceted sociocultural formation, a historical bloc, which can be a gender (women or transgenders), carriers of disabilities or endemic diseases (the physically disabled, the leper, the insane), adherents of a religion (any other than that defined by the Church of Rome) or a social state (poor manual workers).

2.

The natural world and other sociocultural groups that are foreign or opposing to the West are configured as externalities, and their externality is defined by religion, the form of organization of power, or the racialization that is addressed to them. During the historical evolution of the West, the subaltern undergoes a continuous process of social and cultural recreation, both in the productive process and through institutions responsible for the ideological-cultural reproduction of the order, while at the same time composing fragmentary worldviews and forms of political-cultural action of assimilation and resistance to the current power.

Due to the significant contribution it offers to the definition of the identity of the West, the following exposition will be delimited by the political dimension of the representation of the subaltern present in the “classical” authors of political theory, emphasizing the question of the East, as a political representation of the external other.

Although this issue is touched upon (in the first chapter), this is not just another work on the imaginary East (myths, legends, literature, advertising or a specific field of knowledge), but rather an analysis of the role of the denial and subordination of the other in the construction of the identity of the West and the project of universal empire, a process in which the political representation of the East is one of the most important aspects.

The Orient is the representation of the other par excellence of the West, its true antipode, its perverse complement, considered inferior, despicable, often dangerous, sometimes an object of desire, which risks breaking into the core of the West itself, connecting with the internal other of analogous characteristics. Thus, the negation and subordination of the Orient, through its Westernization, is the very prerequisite for the realization of the universal empire.

This Orient, as reality and representation, unfolds into an internal Orient, since it originates from the same Greco-Roman-Christian cultural matrix, considered half imperfect due to the “schismatic” character of its Christianity or the despotic political regime (Byzantium and Russia), and an external Orient, holder of riches under the control of “inferior” beings and cultures that can and must be conquered, despite occasionally appearing as fearsome (Turkey, Persia, India, China).

Still within this framework of representations, America appears as the extreme West, split into two by the spread of modernity and proprietary individualism: the northern, perfected and complete West (United States of America), and the southern, inferior and incomplete West (Ibero-America). These representations are ancient, since even before Herodotus, the East and the South were considered inferior parts by the cultural representations of the world generated on the shores of the Mediterranean.

3.

With the decline of the feudal order, the project of a universal empire began to be advocated through an alliance between the Catholic Church and Iberian territorial states that emerged as a response to the crisis and as an instrument of expansion of the West, until, with the emergence of capitalist modernity, from the 18th century onwards, the driving force behind the project of a universal empire became the national state.

In a world desacralized by liberalism, merchants and soldiers, in addition to priests and pastors, are now also accompanied by administrators and naturalists. However, the principle of universality is limited by the principle of nationality, so that the trajectory of modernity is a dispute between states for economic and political hegemony within the capitalist market that provides the contours of the West and its empire over the world.

The political culture of liberalism, a constitutive element of Western capitalist modernity, through the discourse of the freedom to own things and the reason for oneself, which allows for formal equality of contracting in the market, contributed to the continuity of this imperial project of Westernization of the planet, having been successful due to its intrinsic capacity for cultural universalization and the economic and military strength that accompanies it.

By conceiving freedom from the individual and his/her capacity to appropriate things in the world, liberalism sees the other as a limit and an obstacle, which gives rise to the permanent reinvention of subalternity, justifying the accumulation of capital and universal Westernization, based on an instrumental rationality that is inherent to it. The concepts of despotism and totalitarianism emerge in liberal political theory as examples of negative representation of the other, referring in the origin, in particular, to the being of the East.

As a degree of universalization greater than the capitalist market and liberal culture, even of a democratic nature, never emerged outside and against the West, the alternative to its project of domination could only have been constructed by the political and cultural action of social subjects subjected and represented as subordinate within the West itself.

Both the heresies of the feudal era and the radical-democratic movements contesting property-owning individualism had, in embryo, a potential for sociocultural universalization greater than that of the ruling classes of the West, since they did not require the existence of subordinates, although they had a much smaller diffusion force and presented the risk of socioeconomic regression. In other words, they had a limited capacity for hegemonic construction.

4.

Only with the emergence of the communist movement and theory, in the mid-19th century, did modernity, which was in the process of consolidation, adopt a critical vision of the world that has its starting point in the subaltern West, and which sees the realization of freedom in the other.

By encouraging resistance and the formation of an antagonistic social subjectivity from the subaltern classes, Marxist-inspired critical communist theory contests the will to dominate the modern West, which is based on the accumulation of capital. At the same time, it begins to view the East as an element of emancipation, which must be dissolved as an object of power and negative representation of the West, by converging with the movement of elevation of the subaltern classes of the core of the West.

Therefore, by criticizing the project of universal empire, communist theory advocates the dissolution of the West itself, as well as of the East as its negative representation, in the common current of human cultures, by the work of the antipodes of the empire.

In a bet on its explanatory power and instigation of political initiative, categories generated by the theoretical tradition of Marxist origin will be abundantly used in the course of this exposition, particularly those formulated by Antonio Gramsci in his Quaderni del Jail, some of them redefined and expanded in their meaning. This is the case of historical bloc, to be used as an explanatory category for the whole of Western capitalist modernity, not being limited to certain particular social formations.

The notions of hegemony and passive revolution will also be used in their broadest sense, encompassing segments or the whole of the West and its areas of expansion, since only in this way can the idea to be developed, of the hypothetical realization of the universal empire of the liberal West, be understood.

Since Antonio Gramsci's categorical universe is fundamentally articulated around a philosophy of praxis, which unfolds into a theory of political action critical of capitalist modernity, there is no room for a teleological interpretation of historical becoming.

As this observation is not sufficient, we must remember (and as will be abundantly seen) that on more than one occasion the West, as defined here, ran the risk of disintegration, due to the very effect of its contradictory nature, which points to alternatives for development and indicates the possibility of both failure and varied forms of realizing universal empire.

From this perspective, since there is no static nature or a priori, the West can only be seen in the historical process in which it constructs and realizes its essence, of which the ideology of the universal empire, in its various facets, is a constitutive and active element.

(...)

The decades that have passed since the declaration of the “end of history,” the declaration that the universal empire of the West had finally been established, have in fact been decades of the advance of barbarism and of clear signs of the resurgence of the East – China, in particular – as a possible opposing force to the West, led by the United States, whose economic power is declining and whose investment in military force is increasing the threat to humanity.

The structural crisis of capital, which advances in parallel with the crisis of the Universal Empire of the West, puts at risk the very survival of Humanity, finally made concretely one.

*Marcos Del Roio is professor of political science at Unesp-Marília. Author, among other books, of Gramsci's prisms (boitempo). [https://amzn.to/3NSHvfB]

Reference

Marcos Del Roio. The Universal Empire and Its Antipodes: The Westernization of the World (and Its Crisis). São Paulo, Boitempo, 2025, 296 pages. [https://amzn.to/44pPYzT]

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