By PEDRO DE ALCANTARA FIGUEIRA*
What is really new today is that the dominant technology in China works at the pace of class elimination. Therefore, this technology does not serve capital.
1.
To make America great again, we advise adopting the Chinese method. China has shown that anything is possible. So the question arises: why then do we remain in the Stone Age in terms of social development?
In fact, retrograde forces unite with the sole purpose of preventing free access to modern productive forces. We have here an internal process of struggle that is currently widespread throughout human society. We can say that there is no personal or collective manifestation that does not draw from this source.
We are living, as in all times of great social transformation, a conflict that leaves nothing and no one out. These are times that leave in our memories great deeds and repugnant demonstrations. We have an endless list of the latter in Latin American dictatorships. Anti-communism, a hallmark of these demonstrations, has armed itself with an arsenal of arguments that justify all types of violence, including wars. Genocide, converted into a political weapon by Nazi-fascism, has returned with full force as a military resource of the American empire.
To justify its barbarity against the gigantic transformation that is announced throughout the historical horizon, capitalism, in its critical phase, that is, this last century, has engendered an anti-communist fable that is correctly called ideology.
The lie on which it is based was successful until recently, that is, until the last quarter of the 20th century. The new social form taking shape in China and the worsening of capitalist decline have been reducing the deleterious effects that were once effective by contributing to the delay of the transformation process.
We are entering a phase in which the decline of the old mode of production, of the old civilizational system, is showing daily signs of its inability to recover. It is necessary to pay attention to the process of profound changes in the laws that guaranteed, until approximately the 1920s, the robustness of this system, which is now showing its total impotence in the face of a newly-born competitor.
What this competitor reveals is that those laws, powerful until recently in historical terms, have lost their validity, and that all attempts to activate them have shown that their results contradict their former objectives, that is, to reproduce themselves according to a profit rate consistent with the capital invested in production.
2.
At this point, it is important to make it clear that a process of decline of such magnitude has very little to do with political errors or the incompetence of rulers and authorities. What we need to understand in this regard is that rulers, in fact, have their existence guaranteed and shaped by the laws that support a specific form of organization of societies.
Until the first two decades of the 20th century, the laws that governed the capitalist universe were on the rise. This rise was evidently marked by permanent upheavals that led one to believe that its existence would not escape accountability to history, as had happened with two other systems, classical slavery and feudalism. In fact, it was the system that is now in its final stage that defeated feudalism. We cannot forget that, in its final victory, it stamped its glory on the terms freedom, equality e fraternity.
This new society, which guaranteed its existence in both Europe and America, revealed that the existence of poverty, also newly created, did not hinder social progress. Quite the contrary, poverty sustained it. Thus, bourgeois society took shape, so called because it is the capitalists, that is, the bourgeoisie, whose interests shape its way of being.
The upheavals that this society has experienced in recent times have found solutions that correspond exactly to its impossibility of continuing the former strength that it had achieved at a certain point. It is from this point on that this social form begins to decline. From the middle of the 19th century onwards, attempts to contain its strength within the limits of bourgeois society have been increasing. Given the current state of decline, it is reasonable to believe that these attempts are no longer capable of functioning to the point of preventing the gigantic transformation that is being announced in all political manifestations of society.
It is precisely at this point that the struggle taking place in society between historically antagonistic forces acquires a dimension never experienced in previous eras.
3.
Without wanting to get into the controversies regarding how China should be classified socially, but considering that there is a lack of history in attempts to explain the Chinese phenomenon, I consider it necessary to establish the degree of development of the productive forces available in specific historical situations.
I think that is where we should look at what is happening around the world. In China in particular, what we see is nothing more than a gigantic struggle against the multiple obstacles to the advancement of productive forces. New productive forces are being created, creating a technological development that bears a certain resemblance to the Industrial Revolution and what industrial production with machines meant in social terms.
It is precisely the victory of these revolutionary productive forces over all attempts to impede economic development that allows us to think of a political classification of Chinese society. Since this struggle focuses preferentially on the elimination of all forms that preserve the most varied manifestations of class society, socialism certainly presents itself as a historical solution.
In a recent article – “Decline of the American Empire” –, posted on the website the earth is round, we said, in opposition to what economists think about the production process, that from a factory, along with the utilities, also the social classes come out.
Well, when it comes to China, we have a slightly different phenomenon. Let's think about chip manufacturing. Along with the thousands of chips that leave a factory in China, comes, in special packaging, the "consumer dream" of a large part of humanity: the end of social classes.
What is really new today is that the dominant technology in China works at the pace of class elimination. Therefore, this technology does not serve capital.
Here we find precisely the crux of the current historical question, that is, faced with a world whose problems cannot be resolved except by changing the laws that governed it until recently, transformation has become the only possible solution.
In the face of what China has demonstrated as the possibility of infinite progress, the obstacles placed in the way of a new social order point to the danger of an ideology that has the apology of barbarity as its political principles. This is what is manifesting itself in genocide as a political practice of the empire, and interpreted as normal by the State of Israel, which, as Israeli General Yair Golan stated, reminded him of Germany in 1933, that is, Hitler's Germany.[I]
* Pedro de Alcantara Figueira he holds a doctorate in history from Unesp. Author, among other books, of History essays (UFMS).
Note
[I] In a long article published by the newspaper The Globe On May 05.05.2016, 70, entitled “Senior Israeli Military Officer Says He Sees Signs of Nazi Germany in His Country,” we read some strikingly current statements: “If there is one thing that worries me about the Shoah commemorations, it is seeing these nauseating processes that occurred in Europe in general, and in Germany in particular, 80, 90, 2016 years ago, and seeing traces of them among us in XNUMX,” he said in a speech at the beginning of the commemorations. “After all, there is nothing simpler and easier than hating the foreigner (…) arousing fear and intimidation (…) and becoming a monster, forgetting your principles and being happy with yourself.”
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