The “system” stronger than ever
If power succeeds in dividing, then it can loosely command, often without even being named: the traditional vertical master-slave struggle is replaced by the horizontal confrontation of slaves fighting each other.
Within the false dichotomies through which the dominant order consolidates itself by fragmenting and manipulating dissent, the old topological opposition between left and right is also noteworthy. The single thought of the transnational financial oligarchies is right-wing in economics (the power of money), center-wing in politics (the power of consensus) and left-wing in culture (the innovative power of custom). The progressive and leftist dismantling of bourgeois and proletarian lifestyles, always in the name of modernity, serves to expand the market and, at the same time, the power of the money right.
The left and the right, after having traveled through much of modernity transmitting two different worldviews and fueling an agonal confrontation between different and mutually exclusive ideologies, can now be considered interchangeable.
They turn neoliberalism into an eagle with a double wingspan. The anti-communitarian and globalist “right of money” dictates the economic-financial rules and protects the interests of the stateless post-bourgeois global class. The “left of custom” imposes the patterns and lifestyles necessary to reproduce the system of market fundamentalism (individualistic enjoyment, relativism, nihilism, absolute secularism, abandonment of anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism, etc.).
The right of money establishes the structure, the left of custom the superstructure. The right of money physiologically needs the anthropological profile of the consumer atom which, constantly stripped of utopian and anti-adaptive passions, believes in nothing except the market.
The left of custom, on the other hand, is in charge of spreading the culture of nihilism and disenchantment, favoring the transition from a conception of emancipation as a social and political revolution to a freedom understood as the property of the isolated individual and bearer of civil rights, who realizes himself by narcissistically modeling his own isolated self and enjoying himself without inhibitions.
The right of money aspires to propagate without limits or obstacles commodities and the code of exchange value.
The left of custom, for its part, spreads the nihilistic program of suppression of traditional values (the Nietzschean “transvaluation of all values”); market fundamentalism itself pursues this program with a view to breaking down all limits - ethical and religious - that might prevent, or even slow down, the ever more pressing acceleration of the hyperhedonism of universal commodification.
If the right wing of money, with labor deregulation, seeks to make young people precarious until the age of seventy or, worse still, unemployed, and prevents them from forming a family, the left wing of custom justifies at the superstructural level these processes by delegitimizing the family as a bourgeois and obsolete institution, and glorifying precariousness as a way of life, without ethical limitations of bourgeois matrix.
If the right wing of money says that the nation states are an invention - the “Ministry of Truth”, as Orwell teaches, falsifies history and rewrites it again ad usum sui - and that the only existing reality is the one world of the globalized world reduced to the smooth surface of the international sovereign market that delocalizes labor, volatilizes capital and suppresses rights in the name of the competitiveness imposed by the “challenges of globalization”, on the other hand, the left wing of custom will justify all this at the superstructural level by praising globalization as a paradise of cheap travel and English for all, praising the united colors of a false multiculturalism.
For its part, the customary left will justify all this at the superstructural level by praising globalization as the paradise of cheap travel and English for all, praising the united colors of a false multiculturalism where all cultures are subsumed under the single market model, but then also through the conceptual elaboration of the new anthropological profile of the migrant man, deterritorialized and rootless.
If the right wing of money affirms that religion is an obstacle to the diffusion of the commodity form and that it is necessary to get rid of it in order to convert to the monotheism of the market as the only legitimately recognized theology, then the left wing of custom will justify all this by compulsively defending the liturgical forms of religious atheism, enemies of any divinity other than the economy.
If the right wing of money decides that “society does not exist”, and that only the individual consumer exists, then the left wing of custom will remove legitimacy from all forms of community, sanctifying the individual atom as the bearer of civil rights and fostering in every possible way the culture of narcissism.
But, in addition to this, if the right wing of money aspires to reduce humanity to a dust of monads without identity or cultural depth, infinitely manipulable by advertising and the consumer society circuit; the left wing of custom will delegitimize the very idea of human nature as intrinsically authoritarian and will silence, accusing it of being homophobic and sexist, anyone who thinks that, by nature, there are men and women, fathers and mothers.
From a different perspective, the left of custom today administers dissent against everything that can restrict or limit the right of money, the integral commodification and global economization of everything that exists.
The act of dissent, on whose foundations the left of custom rests and educates, is posited as the indispensable foundation for achieving the consensus of class society and planetary alienation.
By Diego Fusaro, in Pensar diferente. Filosofía del disenso (2022). Compilation and graphics by Emiliano M. Ayusa.