Absolute Capitalism

by John Bellamy Foster

(May 01, 2019)
Topics: Economic Crisis , Financialization , Political Economy
 Places: Global

The Octopus, drawing by Nicci Yin. Created as part of the presentation “The
Octopus: Cognitive Capitalism and the University” with Natalia Cecire and
Miriam Neptune at The Scholar & Feminist 2015: Action on Educaiton.

JOHN BELLAMY FOSTER is editor of Monthly Review and a professor of sociology at the

University of Oregon.
This article is based on a keynote address, entitled “Absolute Capitalism: The
Neoliberal Project and the Marxian-Polanyian-Foucaultian Critique—Where Do We Go
from Here?,” presented to the 2nd Biennial Conference of the Caucus for a New
Political Science, February 25, 2019, South Padre Island, Texas.

The French poet Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1864 that “the cleverest ruse of
the Devil is to persuade you he does not exist!”  I will argue here that this is
1

directly applicable to today’s neoliberals, whose devil’s ruse is to pretend they

do not exist. Although neoliberalism is widely recognized as the central political-
ideological project of twenty-first-century capitalism, it is a term that is seldom
uttered by those in power. In 2005, the New York Times went so far as to make
neoliberalism’s nonexistence official by running an article entitled
“Neoliberalism? It Doesn’t Exist.” 2

Behind this particular devil’s ruse lies a deeply disturbing, even hellish, reality.
Neoliberalism can be defined as an integrated ruling-class political-ideological
project, associated with the rise of monopoly-finance capital, the principal
strategic aim of which is to embed the state in capitalist market relations.
Hence, the state’s traditional role in safeguarding social reproduction—if largely
on capitalist-class terms—is now reduced solely to one of promoting capitalist
reproduction. The goal is nothing less than the creation of an absolute
capitalism. All of this serves to heighten the extreme human and ecological
destructiveness that characterizes our time.
The Origins of Neoliberalism
The notion of neoliberalism is nearly a century old, although its main political
influence is much more recent. It first arose as an ideology in the early 1920s in
the face of the collapse of liberalism nearly everywhere in Europe, and in
response to the rise of German and Austrian social democracy, particularly
developments in Red Vienna.  It had its first notable appearance in Austrian
3

economist and sociologist Ludwig von Mises’s three works: Nation, State, and
Economy (1919), Socialism (1922), and Liberalism (1927).  Mises’s ideas were
4

immediately recognized as representing a sharp departure from classical

liberalism, leading the prominent Austro-Marxist Max Adler to coin the
term neoliberalism in 1921. Mises’s Socialism was subjected to a sharp critique
by another gifted Austro-Marxist, Helene Bauer, in 1923 and to a more
extended critique entitled “Neoliberalism” by the German Marxist Alfred Meusel,
writing for Rudolf Hilferding’s Die Gesellschaft in 1924.
5

For Meusel and Bauer, the neoliberal doctrine presented by Mises was far
removed from classical liberalism and constituted a new doctrine devised for the
era of “mobile capital” or finance capital, of which Mises was a “faithful
servant.”  It was expressly aimed at justifying the concentration of capital, the
6

subordination of the state to the market, and an openly capitalist system of

social control. Mises’s neoliberalism, Meusel wrote, was characterized by the
“merciless radicalism with which he attempts to derive the totality of social
manifestations from a single principle” of competition. Everything opposed to
the complete ascendance of the competitive principle was characterized by
Mises as “destructionism,” which he equated with socialism. For Mises, Charles
Dickens, William Morris, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Émile Zola,
Anatole France, and Leo Tolstoy were all “without perhaps being aware of it…
recruiting agents for Socialism…paving the way for destructionism,” while actual
Marxists were nothing more than destructionists, pure and simple. 7

In Liberalism, Mises explicitly distinguished between “the older liberalism and

neoliberalism” on the basis of the former’s commitment, at some level, to
equality, as opposed to the complete rejection of equality (other than equality of
opportunity) by the latter.  The question of democracy was resolved by Mises in
8

favor of “a consumers’ democracy.” Where democracy is concerned, he wrote,

“free competition does all that is needed.… The lord of production is the
consumer.” 9

Mises was to exert an enormous influence on his younger follower Friedrich von
Hayek, who was originally drawn to Mises’s Socialism and who attended
Mises’s private seminars in Vienna. They shared a hatred of the Austro-
Marxists’ Red Vienna of the 1920s. In the early 1930s, Hayek left Vienna for the
London School of Economics at the invitation of Lionel Robbins, an early British
neoliberal economist. Mises took on the role of economic consultant to the
Austrofascist Chancellor/dictator Engelbert Dollfuss prior to the Nazi takeover.
In his work Liberalism, Mises declared: “It cannot be denied that Fascism and
similar movements [on the right] aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are
full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved
European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live
on eternally in history.”  He later emigrated to Switzerland and then to the
10

United States with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, taking up a

teaching post at New York University.
The Great Transformation Reversed
The most important critique of neoliberalism in the early post-Second World
War years was to be Karl Polanyi’s attack on the myth of the self-regulating
market in The Great Transformation, published in 1944, at a time when the
allied victory was already certain and the nature of the postwar order in the
West was becoming clear. Polanyi’s critique grew out of his earlier defense of
Red Vienna in the 1920s, where he had identified to a considerable extent with
Austro-Marxists like Adler and Otto Bauer, strongly opposing the views of
Mises, Hayek, and others on the right. The neoliberal project, Polanyi explained
in The Great Transformation, was to embed social relations in the economy,
whereas prior to capitalism the economy had been “embedded in social
relations.”  Polanyi’s book, however, appeared in a context in which it was
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assumed that the neoliberal perspective was all but doomed, with the “great
transformation” standing for the triumph of state regulation of the economy, at a
time when John Maynard Keynes was recognized as the dominant figure in
state-economic policy, in what came to be known as the Age of Keynes.
Nevertheless, Polanyi’s deeper concerns regarding attempts to rejuvenate
market liberalism were, in part, justified. The Walter Lippmann Colloquium held
in France in 1938, just prior to the outbreak of the Second World War, with
Mises and Hayek both present, had constituted the first step at creating a
capitalist international among major intellectual figures. At the time, the
term neoliberalism was explicitly adopted by some participants, but was to be
later abandoned, no doubt with the memory of the strong critiques that arose in
the 1920s.  Still, the neoliberal project was taken up again after the war. In
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1947, a mere three years after the publication of Polanyi’s The Great

Transformation, the Mont Pèlerin Society was established. It was to become the
institutional basis, along with the University of Chicago Department of
Economics, for the reemergence of neoliberal views. A key participant in the
inaugural conference, in addition to Mises, Hayek, Robbins, Milton Friedman,
and George Stigler, was Karl Polanyi’s younger brother, Michael Polanyi, the
noted chemist, philosopher of science, and virulent Cold Warrior. 13

Keynesianism dominated the entire period of what is now sometimes called the
Golden Age of capitalism in the first quarter-century after the Second World
War. But in the mid–1970s, with the appearance of a major economic crisis and
the beginnings of economic stagnation first manifested as stagflation,
Keynesianism disappeared within the economic orthodoxy. It was to be
replaced by neoliberalism, first in the guise of monetarism and supply-side
economics, and then in the form of a generalized restructuring of capitalism
worldwide and the creation of a market-determined state and society. 14

The critical figure who best captured the essence of neoliberalism almost the
moment that it rose to dominance, analyzing it extensively in his 1979 lectures
at the Collège de France on The Birth of Biopolitics, was Michel Foucault.  As 15

Foucault brilliantly explained, the role of the state is no longer to protect

property, as in Adam Smith, or even to be an executive for the common
interests of the capitalist class, as in Karl Marx. Rather, its role under
neoliberalism became one of the active expansion of the market principle, or the
logic of capitalist competition, to all aspects of life, engulfing the state itself. As
Foucault wrote,

Instead of accepting a free market defined by the state and kept as it were
under state supervision—which was, in a way, the initial formula of liberalism,
[neoliberals]…turn the formula around and adopt the free market as [the]
organizing and regulating principle of the state.… In other words: a state under
the supervision of the market rather than a market supervised by the state.…

And what is important and decisive in current neo-liberalism can, I think, be

situated here. For we should not be under any illusion that today’s neo-
liberalism is, as is too often said, the resurgence or recurrence of old forms of
liberal economics which were formulated in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries and are now being reactivated by capitalism for a variety of reasons to
do with its impotence and crises as well as with some more or less local and
determinate political objectives. In actual fact, something much more important
is at stake in modern neo-liberalism.… What is at issue is whether a market
economy can in fact serve as the principle, form, and model for a state which,
because of its defects, is mistrusted by everyone on both the right and the left,
for one reason or another. 16
In a nutshell, Foucault declared: “The problem of neo-liberalism is…how the
overall exercise of political power can be modeled on the principles of the
market economy.” Its single-minded goal is “privatized social policy.” 17

In the neoliberal era, the state was not to intervene to counter the effects of the
system, but was simply to promote through its interventions the spread of the
rule-based system of the market into all recesses of society. It was thus the
guarantor of a self-regulating and expansive market, from which neither the
society nor the state itself were immune.  Monopoly and oligopoly were no
18

longer considered violations of the principle of competition, but mere

manifestations of competition itself.  Perhaps most important in distinguishing
19

classical liberalism and neoliberalism, according to Foucault, was the emphasis

of the former on a fictional equal exchange or quid pro quo. For neoliberalism,
in contrast, free competition, reinterpreted to embrace monopoly power and
vast inequalities, was the governing principle, not exchange. 20

The overriding of the state’s social-reproductive role in favor of neoliberal

financialization was most apparent, Foucault argued, in the demise of social
insurance, along with all forms of social welfare. In the neoliberal system, “it is
up to the individual [to protect himself against risks] through all the reserves he
has at his disposal,” making the individual prey to big business without any
protection from the state. The result of this shift was the further growth of
privatized financial assets monopolized by a very few. 21

Neoliberalism, conceived in this way, is the systematic attempt to resolve the

base-superstructure problem, perceived as an obstacle to capital, through the
introduction of “a general regulation of society by the market” to be carried out
by a state—itself subordinated to the market principle. This new capitalist
“singularity” is to be extended to all aspects of society, as an all-inclusive
principle from which no exit is possible.  Even economic crises are to be taken
22

as mere indicators of the need to extend the logic of the market further.
As Craig Allan Medlen, building on Paul A. Baran and Paul M.
Sweezy’s Monopoly Capital, explains in Free Cash, Capital Accumulation and
Inequality, today’s neoliberal order involves a systematic shift in the “boundary
line” between state economic activities and the private sector. This boundary
line has now shifted decisively against the state, leaving little room for the
state’s own consumption and investment, outside of the military sector, and with
the state increasingly subsidizing the market and capital through its fiscal and
monetary operations. 23

When neoliberalism reemerged in the late 1970s, it was thus as an

opportunistic virus in a period of economic sickness.  The crisis of
24
Keynesianism was related to deepening problems of surplus capital absorption
or overaccumulation in the developing monopoly-capitalist economy. Neoliberal
restructuring arose in these circumstances first in the forms of monetarism and
supply-side economics, and then evolved into its current form with the
financialization of the system, itself a response to economic stagnation. With the
growth of excess capacity and stagnant investment, money capital increasingly
flowed into the financial sector, which invented new financial instruments with
which to absorb it.  Financial bubbles propelled the economy forward. None of
25

this, however, removed the underlying stagnation tendency. In the decade since
the Great Recession, as distinguished from all previous post-Second World War
decades, the capacity-utilization rate in manufacturing in the United States has
never surpassed 80 percent—a level chronically insufficient to ignite net
investment. 26

All of this reflects the transition from twentieth-century monopoly capital to

twenty-first-century monopoly-finance capital.  This is evident in an explosion of
27

credit and debt, institutionalized within the system despite periodic financial
crises, leading to a whole new financial architecture for amassing wealth. The
seizure of excess profits on a world scale through the new imperialism of the
global labor arbitrage was made possible by digital systems of financial and
technological control, and the opening of the world market after 1989. All of this
has culminated in a globalized process of financialization and value capture,
directed by the financial headquarters of multinational corporations at the apex
of the capitalist world economy. 28

The diminishing role of the state both as an instrument of popular sovereignty

and of social protection has led to a crisis of liberal democracy. The greatest
inequality in history plus the undermining of the economic and social conditions
of the vast majority of the population has given rise to massive, but still largely
inarticulate, discontent.  Capital’s response to this destabilizing situation has
29

been to try to mobilize the largely reactionary lower-middle class against both
the upper-middle class and the working class (especially through racist attacks
on immigrants), while making the state outside the market the enemy—a
strategy that David Harvey has recently referred to as a developing “alliance”
between neoliberalism and neofascism. 30

Absolute Capitalism and Social-System

Failure
In Foucault’s interpretation, neoliberalism is as remote from laissez-faire as it is
from Keynesianism. As Hayek argued in The Constitution of Liberty, the
neoliberal state is an interventionist, not laissez-faire, state precisely because it
becomes the embodiment of a rule-governed, market-dictated economic order
and is concerned with perpetuating and extending that order to the whole of
society. If the neoliberal state is noninterventionist in relation to the economic
sphere, it is all the more interventionist in its application of commodity principles
to all other aspects of life, such as education, insurance, communications,
health care, and the environment. 31

In this ideal, restructured neoliberal order, the state is the embodiment of the
market and is supreme only insofar as it represents the law of value, which in
Hayek’s terms is virtually synonymous with the “rule of law.”  The hegemonic
32

class-property relations are encoded in the juridical structure and the state itself
is reduced to these formal economic codes embodied in the legal
system.  What Hayek means by “the rule of law,” according to Foucault, is the
33

imposition of “formal economic legislation” that “is quite simply the opposite of a
plan. It is the opposite of planning.” The object is to establish “rules of the
game” that prevent any deviation from the logic of commodity exchange or
capitalist competition, while extending these relations further into society, with
the state as the ultimate guarantor of market supremacy.  Foucault contends
34

that this principle was most explicitly enunciated by Michael Polanyi, who wrote
in The Logic of Liberty: “The main function of the existing spontaneous order of
jurisdiction is to govern the spontaneous order of economic life.… [The] system
of law develops and enforces the rules under which the competitive system of
production and distribution operates.” 35

Hence, the supremacy of the dominant social relations of production or

hegemonic class-property forms is encoded in the rule of a commodified legal
structure. The new Leviathan, which has discarded any precapitalist trappings,
is no longer a force above or external to the realm of commodity exchange—
that is, a superstructure—but is subordinated to the logic of the market, which it
is its role to enforce.  This, Foucault suggests, is Max Weber’s rational-legal
36

order, which turns out to be simply the imposition of formal economic relations
circumscribing the state. At the same time, the state is given the role of
enforcing this new privatized order through its monopoly of the legitimate use of
force.37

Hence, Abraham Bosse’s famous frontispiece for Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan,

depicting the giant sovereign composed of individuals who have transferred
their sovereignty to the monarch, would today take the form of a giant rational-
legal individual in a two-piece suit composed internally of corporations,
replacing the multitude.  The crownless sovereign power would now be
38

portrayed as holding not a scepter in one hand and a sword in the other, but the
fourteenth amendment of the U.S. Constitution (originally meant to ensure the
rights of former slaves but transformed into the basis of corporate personhood)
in one hand and a cruise missile in the other. The neoliberal Leviathan is a state
that increasingly has a single function and follows a single market logic—and in
those terms alone it is absolute and represents an absolutist capitalism.
Naturally, absolute capitalism is not without contradictions, of which five stand
out: economic, imperial, political, social-reproductive, and environmental.
Together, they point to a general system failure. The economic-crisis
tendencies are best viewed from the standpoint of Marx’s wider critique of the
laws of motion of capital. Economically, neoliberalism is a historical-structural
product of an age of mobile monopoly-finance capital that now operates globally
through commodity chains, controlled by the financial headquarters of the
multinational corporations in the core of the world economy, which dominate
international capital flows.  The inherent instability of the new absolute
39

capitalism was marked by the Great Financial Crisis of 2007–

9.  Overaccumulation and stagnation remain the central economic
40

contradictions of the system, leading to corporate mergers and financialization

(the shift toward the amassing of financial assets by speculative means) as the
main countervailing factors. All of this, however, simply exacerbates the top-
heavy character of twenty-first-century capitalism intensifying its already-
existing long-term tendencies toward disequilibrium and crisis. 41

Neoliberal globalization refers specifically to the system of global labor arbitrage

and commodity chains, coupled with the growth of worldwide monopolies. The
fulcrum of this form of imperialism is the systematic exploitation of the fact that
the difference in wages between the global North and South is greater than the
difference in their productivities. This creates a situation whereby the low unit
labor costs in emerging economies in the global South become the basis of
today’s supply chains and the new system of value capture.  These
42

international economic conditions mark the advent of a new imperialism that is

generating increasing global inequality, instability, and world struggle, made
worse in our age by declining U.S. hegemony, which points to the prospect of
widening and unlimited war.
As indicated above, the neoliberal regime represents a new synergy of state
and market, with the increasing subordination of the social-reproduction
activities of the state to capitalist reproduction. Whole sections of the state, such
as central banking, and the main mechanisms of monetary policy, are outside
effective governmental control and under the sway of financial capital. Under
these circumstances, the state is increasingly viewed by the population today as
an alien entity. This raises contradictions with respect to the three key social
classes below the super-rich and the rich: the upper-middle class, the lower-
middle class, and the working class.

In a broad sketch focusing on advanced capitalist society, the upper-middle

class can be seen as consisting predominantly of a professional-technical
stratum deeply suspicious of any attacks on government, since its position is
dependent not simply on its economic class but also on the general system of
political rights. It is therefore wedded to the liberal-democratic state. In contrast,
when taken by itself, the lower-middle class, made up mainly of small business
owners, middle management, and corporate-based white-collar salaried and
sales workers (particularly the white, less-educated, rural, and fundamentalist-
religious sectors), is generally antistate, procapital, and nationalist. It sees the
state as chiefly benefitting its two main enemies: the upper-middle class and the
working class—the former perceived as benefitting directly from the state, the
latter increasingly designated in racial terms.  The lower-middle class includes
43

what C. Wright Mills called “the rearguarders” of the capitalist system, mobilized
by the wealthy in times of crisis when a defense of capitalist interests is
considered essential, but represents in itself an extremely volatile element of
society.  The working class, essentially the bottom 60 percent of income
44

earners in the United States, is the most oppressed and most diverse
population (and thus the most divided), but nonetheless the enemy of capital. 45

The biggest threat to capital today, as in the past, is the working class. This is
true both in the advanced capitalist countries themselves and even more so in
the periphery, where the working class overlaps with the dispossessed
peasantry. The working class is most powerful when able to combine with other
subaltern classes as part of a hegemonic bloc led by workers (this is the real
meaning of the Occupy Wall Street movement’s “we are the 99%”).

The 1 percent thus find themselves potentially without a political base, which
remains necessary to continue the neoliberal, absolute-capitalist project. Thus,
from Donald Trump to Jair Bolsonaro, we see the emergence of a tenuous
working relationship between neoliberalism and neofascism, meant to bring the
rear guard of the system into play. Here, the goal is to enlist the white, rural,
religious, nationalistic lower-middle class as a political-ideological army on
behalf of capital. But this is fraught with dangers associated with right-wing
populism and ultimately threatens the demise of the liberal-democratic state. 46

The major gender, race, community, and class contradictions of capitalist

society today reflect crises that extend beyond the narrow confines of workplace
exploitation to the wider structures in which the lives of working people are
embedded, including the major sites of social reproduction: family, community,
education, health systems, communications, transportation, and the
environment. The destruction of these sites of social reproduction, along with
deteriorating working conditions, has brought back what Frederick Engels called
“social murder,” manifested in the declining life expectancy in recent years in
the mature capitalist economies.  It is in these wider social domains that such
47

issues as the feminization of poverty, racial capitalism, homelessness, urban-

community decay, gentrification, financial expropriation, and ecological decline
manifest themselves, creating the wider terrains of class, race, social-
reproductive, and environmental struggle, which today are merging to a
remarkable degree in response to neoliberal absolute capitalism. 48

The conflict between absolute capitalism and the environment is the most
serious contradiction characterizing the system in this (or any)phase, raising the
question of a “death spiral” in the human relation to the earth in the course of
the present century.  The age of ecological reform, in the 1970s, was soon
49

displaced by a new age of environmental excess. In absolute capitalism,

absolute, abstract value dominates. In a system that focuses above all on
financial wealth, exchange value is removed from any direct connection to use
value. The inevitable result is a fundamental and rapidly growing rift between
capitalist commodity society and the planet.
Exterminism or Revolution
As we have seen, Mises employed the notion of destructionism to characterize
the role of socialism. So important was this in his perspective that he devoted
the entire fifty-page-long Part 5 of his book Socialism to this topic. “Socialism,”
he wrote, “does not build; it destroys. For destruction is the essence of it.” It
simply carries out the “consumption of capital” with no replacement or increase.
Destructionism was best characterized, in his view, as a society that in the
present consumed to the utmost extent, with no concern for the future of
humanity—a future which he saw as residing in the accumulation of capital. 50

Ironically, today’s monopoly-finance capital is typified by the very kinds of

absolute destructionism that Mises so deplored. Although technological change
(particularly via the military) continues to advance, capital accumulation
(investment) is stagnant at the center of the system, except where spurred on
temporarily by tax cuts on corporations and privatization of state activities.
Meanwhile, income and wealth inequality is rising to stratospheric levels;
workers worldwide are experiencing a decline in material conditions (economic,
social, and ecological); and the entire planet as a place of human habitation is
in jeopardy. All this is the result of a system geared toward the most egregious
forms of exploitation, expropriation, waste, and predation on a world scale.
Science now tells us that the capitalist juggernaut, if present trends continue,
will soon undermine industrial civilization and threaten human survival itself—
with many of the worst effects occurring during the lifetime of today’s younger
generations.
A useful reference point, with which to gain a historical and theoretical
perspective on the present planetary emergency, is Marx and Engels’s analysis
of conditions in colonial Ireland from the 1850s to the 1870s.  Here, the
51

operative term was extermination. As Marx wrote in 1859, English (and Anglo-

Irish) capitalists after 1846—marking the Great Irish Famine and the Repeal of
the Corn Laws—were involved in “a fiendish war of extermination against the
cotters,” or the mass of Irish peasant subsistence farmers “ground to the dust”
and dependent on the cultivation of potatoes as a subsistence crop. Irish soil
nutrients were being exported with Irish grain, without return, to feed English
industry.  The decades immediately following the Great Famine were thus
52

referred to by Engels as the Period of Extermination.  The

53

term extermination as used here by Marx and Engels, along with many of their
contemporaries, had two related meanings at the
time: expulsion and annihilation.  Extermination thus summed up the terrible
54

conditions then facing the Irish.

At the root of the Irish problem in the mid–nineteenth century was a “more
severe form of the metabolic rift” associated with the colonial system.  With the
55

gradual expulsion and annihilation after 1846 of the poor peasant farmers, who
had been responsible for fertilizing the soil, the entire fragile ecological balance
underlying the production of crops and the replacement of nutrients in Ireland
was destabilized. This encouraged further rounds of clearances, expulsion of
the peasantry, consolidation of farms, and the replacement of tillage with
pasture geared to English meat consumption. The Irish peasants were thus
faced, as Marx put it in 1867, with a choice between “ruin or revolution.” 56

Today, analogous conditions are arising on a planetary scale, with subsistence

farmers everywhere finding their conditions undermined by the force of global
imperialism. Moreover, ecological destruction is no longer mainly confined to
the soil, but has been extended to the entire Earth System, including the
climate, endangering the population of the earth in general and further
devastating those already existing in the most fragile conditions. In the 1980s,
Marxist historian E. P. Thompson famously penned “Notes on Exterminism, the
Last Stage of Civilisation” examining planetary nuclear and environmental
threats.  It is no secret that human lives in the hundreds of millions, perhaps
57

billions, are threatened this century by material destruction—ecological,

economic, and military/imperial. Innumerable numbers of species are now on
the brink of extinction. Industrial civilization itself faces collapse with a 4°C
increase in global average temperature, which even the World Bank says is
imminent with the continuation of today’s business as usual.  Hence, the old
58

socialist slogan famously associated with Rosa Luxemburg, Socialism or

Barbarism!, is no longer adequate and must be replaced either by Socialism or
Exterminism!, or with Marx’s Ruin or Revolution!
The neoliberal drive to absolute capitalism is accelerating the world toward
exterminism or destructionism on a planetary scale. In perpetrating this
demolition, capital and the state are united as never before in the post-Second
World War world. But humanity still has a choice: a long ecological revolution
from below aimed at safeguarding the earth and creating a world of substantive
equality, ecological sustainability, and satisfaction of communal needs—an
ecosocialism for the twenty-first century.

1. ↩ Charles Baudelaire, “The Generous Player,” in Baudelaire: His Prose and

Poetry, ed. Thomas R. Smith (New York: Modern Library, 1919), 82.
2. ↩ Daniel Altman, “Neoliberalism? It Doesn’t Exist,” New York Times, July 16,
2005. Altman’s article begins by mocking frequent Monthly Review author Patrick Bond
(they apparently sat next to each other on a plane) for believing that neoliberalism exists,
and for seeing it as connected to contemporary imperialism and issues such as the
commodification of water. “The problem is,” Altman, himself clearly a neoliberal,
writes, “the real neoliberals don’t seem to exist.”
3. ↩ On the collapse of liberalism in the 1920s, see Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of
Extremes (New York: Pantheon, 1994), 109–41.
4. ↩ Ludwig von Mises, Nation, State, and Economy (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund,
1983), Socialism (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), Liberalism (Indianapolis: Liberty
Fund, 2005).
5. ↩ Phillip W. Magness, “The Pejorative Origins of the Term ‘Neoliberalism,'”
American Institute for Economic Research, December 10, 2018; Peter Goller, “Helene
Bauer Gegen die Neoliberal Bürgliche Ideologie von Ludwig Mises (1923),”
Mitteilungen der Alfred Klahr Gesellschaft 4 (2005), http:// [Link]; Alfred
Meusel, “Zur Bürgerlichen Sozialkritik der Gegenwart: Der Neu-Liberalismus (Ludwig
von Mises),” Die Gesellschaft: Internationale Revue für Sozialismus und Politik 1, no. 4
(1924): 372–83. For a more detailed discussion of the early origins of neoliberalism and a
more complete set of citations, see John Bellamy Foster, “Capitalism Has Failed—What
Next?,” Monthly Review 70, no. 9 (February 2019): 1–24.
6. ↩ Meusel, “Der Neu-Liberalismus,” 383. The term mobile capital gained currency
in Marxian theory through Rudolf Hilferding’s Finance Capital. See Rudolf
Hilferding, Finance Capital (London: Routledge, 1981), 325–30, 342.
7. ↩ Meusel, “Der Neu-Liberalismus,” 372–73, Mises, Socialism, 413, 422. I would
like to thank Joseph Fracchia for translations from the German.
8. ↩ Mises, Liberalism, 9.
9. ↩ Mises, Socialism, 400–401.
10. ↩ Mises, Liberalism, 30; Herbert Marcuse, Negations (Boston: Beacon, 1968), 10.
11. ↩ Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (Boston: Beacon, 1944), 57. Polanyi’s
analysis of embeddedness, which is at the center of his critique of neoliberalism, was
originally based on Marx’s discussion of Aristotle’s inability to fully explore the
distinction that he had made between use value and exchange value, given that the
separation of economy from its embeddedness in the polis had not yet taken place.
Polanyi’s treatment is thus most fully developed in “Aristotle Discovers the Economy,”
in Trade and Market in the Early Empires, Karl Polanyi, Conrad M. Arensberg, and
Harry W. Pearson (Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press, 1957), 64–94.
12. ↩ Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste (London: Verso, 2013),
24, 37–50.
13. ↩ Eamonn Butler, “A Short History of the Mont Pèlerin Society,” The Great
Offshore, “Mont Pelerin Society” (encyclopedia entry) [Link]
14. ↩ For an important work that described this transition as it was occurring,
concentrating on the role of international economic elites, see Joyce
Kolko, Restructuring the World Economy (New York: Pantheon, 1988).
15. ↩ Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2008).
16. ↩ Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 116–17.
17. ↩ Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 131, 145.
18. ↩ Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 145.
19. ↩ Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 133–38, 176–78; Joseph
Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1942),
81–86; Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 64; Mises, Socialism, 344–51;
George Stigler, Memoirs of an Unregulated Economist (New York: Basic, 1988), 92,
162–63.
20. ↩ Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 118. Foucault’s remarks are related to the
comments of Baran and Sweezy on how capitalism with growing monopoly has
abandoned its classical principle of quid pro quo. Paul A. Baran and Paul M.
Sweezy, Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966), 336–41.
21. ↩ Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 145. The square brackets in the quotation were
inserted by the editor of Foucault’s lectures.
22. ↩ Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 145, 165.
23. ↩ Craig Allan Medlen, Free Cash, Capital Accumulation and Inequality (London:
Routledge, 2019), 149–69; Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital, 142–77.
24. ↩ Samir Amin, The Liberal Virus (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004).
25. ↩ See Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy, Stagnation and the Financial
Explosion (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987); John Bellamy Foster and Fred
Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009); John
Bellamy Foster and Robert W. McChesney, The Endless Crisis (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 2012); Costas Lapavitsas, Profiting Without Producing (London: Verso,
2014); and Medlen, Fresh Cash, Capital Accumulation and Inequality.
26. ↩ Federal Reserve Board of Saint Louis Economic Research, FRED, “Capacity
Utilization: Manufacturing,” February 2019 (updated March 27, 2019),
[Link]
27. ↩ Foster and Magdoff, The Great Financial Crisis, 63–76.
28. ↩ On the imperialist aspects of this, see John Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-
First Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016); Intan Suwandi, R. Jamil Jonna,
and John Bellamy Foster, “Global Commodity Chains and the New
Imperialism,” Monthly Review 70, no. 10 (March 2019): 1–24. On the connection
between financialization and expropriation, see Lapavitsas, Profiting Without Producing,
141–47, 166–68.
29. ↩ On the deepening global inequality, see Jason Hickel, The Divide (New York: W.
W. Norton, 2017).
30. ↩ David Harvey, “The Neoliberal Project Is Alive but Has Lost Its
Legitimacy,” Wire, February 9, 2019. See also John Bellamy Foster, Trump in the White
House (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2017).
31. ↩ F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1960), 221.
32. ↩ Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, 232–33.
33. ↩ Michael Tigar, Mythologies of State and Monopoly Power (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 2018).
34. ↩ Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 171–73; Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty,
220–33.
35. ↩ Michael Polanyi, The Logic of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1951), 185; Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 174; Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty,
220–33. See also Tigar, Mythologies of State and Monopoly Power.
36. ↩ “Why Leviathan?… The answer is both very simple and painfully difficult. Very
simple in the sense that the state—despite the great variety of its forms, as constituted in
history, from the time of the so-called oriental despotism and the early empires to the
Modern Liberal State—cannot be other than Leviathan in imposing its structurally
entrenched power on overall societal decision-making” (István Mészáros, “Preface
to  Beyond Leviathan,” Monthly Review 69, no. 9 [February 2018]: 47). While this
remains true, in neoliberalism the state is selectively withered away in its relation to
capital, confined by its own self-imposed rational-legal character that must conform to
the formal economic laws of the capitalist system, of which it is, paradoxically, the main
legitimating force and official guarantor. The extent of these limitations is apparent
whenever a social democratic government is brought to power, thinking it can institute
reforms, only to discover that it is compelled to enforce neoliberal policies.
37. ↩ Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 105, 172.
38. ↩ “Leviathan Frontispiece,” [Link].
39. ↩ See Samir Amin, Modern Imperialism, Monopoly Finance Capital, and Marx’s
Law of Value (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018). On the role of neoliberalism to
finance, see also Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, Capital Resurgent (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2004), 110–18; David Harvey, The Enigma of
Capital (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 11.
40. ↩ The extreme monetization of information in our era induced by the Internet has
led to an era of surveillance capitalism. See John Bellamy Foster and Robert W.
McChesney, “Surveillance Capitalism,” Monthly Review 66, no. 3 (July–August 2014);
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (New York: Public Affairs, 2019).
41. ↩ John Bellamy Foster and Michael D. Yates, “Piketty and the Crisis of
Neoclassical Economics,” Monthly Review 66, no. 6 (November 2014): 1–24.
42. ↩ Suwandi, Jonna, and Foster, “Global Commodity Chains and the New
Imperialism”: 15.
43. ↩ On the class analysis provided here and its relation to neoliberalism and
neofascism, see Foster, Trump in the White House.
44. ↩ C. Wright Mills, White Collar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1951), 353–54.
45. ↩ R. Jamil Jonna and John Bellamy Foster, “Beyond the Degradation of
Labor,” Monthly Review 66, no. 5 (October 2014): 7. For a rough demarcation of the
major class divisions in the United States, see Dennis Gilbert, The American Class
Structure in an Age of Growing Inequality (Los Angeles: Sage, 2011), 14, 243–47. The
divisions between the working class and the lower-middle class obviously cannot be
determined with precision. As Karl Marx wrote, “Middle and transitional levels always
conceal the boundaries.” Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 3 (London: Penguin, 1981), 1025.
46. ↩ See Henry A. Giroux, “The Nightmare of Neoliberal Fascism,” Truthout, June
10, 2018.
47. ↩ Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works, vol. 4 (New York:
International, 1975), 330.
48. ↩ There has recently been a convergence of Marxian analyses of ecological crisis,
social reproduction, and racial capitalism, all of which increasingly emphasize the
dialectic of exploitation and expropriation. See Nancy Fraser, “Behind the Hidden
Abode,” New Left Review 86 (2014): 60–61; Michael D. Yates, Can the Working Class
Change the World? (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2018), 52–56; Michael C.
Dawson, “Hidden in Plain Sight,” Critical Historical Studies 3, no. 1 (2016): 143–61;
John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, “The Expropriation of Nature,” Monthly
Review 69, no. 10 (March 2018): 1–27.
49. ↩ George Monbiot, “The Earth Is in a Death Spiral. It Will Take Radical Action to
Save Us,” Guardian, November 14, 2018.
50. ↩ Mises, Socialism, 413–14, 452.
51. ↩ The brief comments on Marx and Engels’s Irish writings here are inspired by
research I have carried out with Brett Clark to be included in our forthcoming book, The
Robbery of Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020).
52. ↩ Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question (Moscow:
Progress, 1971), 90, 124; Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 860.
53. ↩ Marx and Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question, 210.
54. ↩ “Extermination,” The Compact Edition of the Oxford English
Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 938.
55. ↩ Eamonn Slater, “Marx on the Colonization of Irish Soil” (Maynooth University
Social Science Institute Working Paper Series no. 3, January 2018), 40.
56. ↩ Marx and Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question, 142.
57. ↩ E. P. Thompson, Beyond the Cold War (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 41–79.
Thompson made it clear at times that he thought of exterminism as generally applicable
to the environment. Others were to develop this notion explicitly in terms of ecological
crisis. See especially Rudolf Bahro, Avoiding Social and Ecological Disaster (Bath:
Gateway, 1994), 19–25; John Bellamy Foster, The Ecological Revolution (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2009), 22–28; and Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 2016), 179–80.
58. ↩ David Roberts, “The Brutal Logic of Climate Change,” Grist, December 6, 2011;
World Bank, Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4°C Warmer World Must Be
Avoided (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 2012), [Link]

A barbárie começa em casa

É bem esclarecedor examinar de que forma a pretensão civilizacional

vem se desenrolando no Sudoeste Asiático - aquilo que a perspectiva
orientalista define como o Oriente Médio
2 de julho de 2020, 15:34 h Atualizado em 2 de julho de 2020, 16:29
 4

Protesto de sírios em defesa de Bashar Al

Assad (Foto: Reuters)
 
Por Pepe Escobar, para o Asia Times

Tradução de Patricia Zimbres, para o 247

A Grécia inventou o conceito de barbaros. A Roma Imperial o herdou

na forma de barbarus.  
O significado de barbaros tem sua origem na linguagem: é uma
onomatopeia para "fala ininteligível", como a de gente cuja fala soa
como "bar bar bar".

Homero não se refere a barbaros, mas sim a barbarophonos ("de fala

ininteligível"), como aqueles que não falam grego, ou falam muito
mal. O poeta cômico Aristófanes sugeriu que Górgias seria um
bárbaro, porque falava um forte dialeto siciliano.

Barbaru significava "estrangeiro" em babilônio-sumério. Os que

estudaram latim na escola lembrarão de balbutio ("gaguejar",
"balbuciar", "falar bobagens"). 

Portanto, era a língua que definia o bárbaro em relação ao grego.

Tucídides era de opinião que Homero não teria usado a palavra
"bárbaros" porque, em seu tempo, os gregos não haviam ainda se
distinguido dos demais povos, de modo a ter um único nome comum
para expressar esse contraste. Mas o cerne da questão é evidente: o
bárbaro era definido em oposição ao grego. 

Os gregos inventaram o conceito de bárbaro após as invasões persas

de Dario I e Xerxes I, em 490 e 480-79 A.C. Afinal, eles tinham que
se distinguir  claramente dos não-gregos. Ésquilo levou ao palco sua
peça Os Persas em 472 A.C. Esse foi o ponto de virada: depois de
então, bárbaros eram todos que não fossem gregos - persas, fenícios,
frígios, trácios.

Agravando ainda mais esse cisma, todos esses bárbaros eram

monarquistas. Atenas, uma democracia jovem, via isso como
equivalente à escravidão. Atenas exaltava a "liberdade" - que,
idealmente, desenvolvia a razão, o autocontrole, a coragem, a
generosidade. Ao contrário dos bárbaros - e dos escravos - que eram
infantis, efeminados, irracionais, indisciplinados, cruéis, covardes,
egoístas, gananciosos, lascivos e pusilânimes. 

De tudo o que foi dito acima, duas conclusões são inevitáveis. 

1. Barbárie e escravidão eram um par natural. 

2. Os gregos viam como moralmente elevado ajudar amigos e repelir

inimigos e, neste último caso, escravizá-los. Os gregos então, por
definição, deveriam dominar os bárbaros. 

A história mostrou que essa visão de mundo não apenas migrou para
Roma mas, posteriormente, passando pela Cristandade pós-
Constantino, chegou ao Ocidente "superior" e, por fim, ao suposto
"fim da história ocidental": a América imperial. 
Roma, como de costume, foi pragmática: o termo "bárbaro" foi
adaptado para qualificar qualquer coisa ou qualquer pessoa que não
fosse romana. Como não nos deliciarmos com essa ironia histórica:
para os gregos, os romanos, tecnicamente, também eram bárbaros. 

Roma se centrou mais no comportamento que na raça. Se você fosse

verdadeiramente civilizado, não se deixaria atolar na  "selvageria" da
Natureza, nem habitaria a periferia do mundo (como os vândalos, os
visigodos etc.). Você moraria no exato centro da matriz.  

Todos os que viviam fora do domínio romano e, principalmente, os

que resistiam ao poderio de Roma, eram bárbaros. Um conjunto de
traços estabelecia a diferença: raça, tribo, língua, cultura, religião, leis,
psicologia, valores morais, vestimentas, cor da pele, padrões de
comportamento.

Gente que habitava a Barbária jamais poderia se tornar civilizada.  

A partir do século XVI, essa foi a lógica que sustentou a expansão

europeia e/ou o estupro das Américas, da África e da Ásia, o cerne
da mission civilisatrice portada como uma carga pelo homem branco.

Com tudo isso em mente, uma série de perguntas permanece sem

resposta. Todos os bárbaros seriam irremediavelmente bárbaros -
selvagens, incivilizados, violentos? O "civilizado", em muitos casos,
poderia também ser considerado bárbaro? Seria possível configurar
uma identidade pan-bárbara? E onde fica a Barbária de hoje? 

O fim da religião secularizada 

A barbárie começa em casa. Alastair Crooke mostrou que, nos Estados

Unidos extremamente polarizados dos dias de hoje, "ambos os
partidos",  essencialmente,  acusam-se mutuamente de bárbaros: "essa
gente mente e se rebaixaria a usar quaisquer meios ilegítimos,
sediciosos (ou seja, inconstitucionais)  para atingir  seus fins ilícitos".

Tornando as coisas ainda mais complexas: esse entrechoque de

barbáries opõe uma velha guarda conservadora a uma Woke
Generation (a geração conscientizada sobre as injustiças sociais), que
de várias maneiras macaqueia a mentalidade da Revolução Cultural de
Mao.  Esse "woke" poderia facilmente ser interpretado como oposto ao
Iluminismo. Trata-se de um termo anglo-americano - visível entre as
vítimas desorientadas, socialmente desiludidas, em grande medida
desempregadas, com ou sem máscaras e não-distanciadas da Nova
Grande Depressão que se avoluma a cada dia. Não há "woke" na
China, na Rússia, no Irã ou na Turquia.   

No entanto, a questão central da Barbária vai muito além dos protestos

de rua. A "nação indispensável" pode ter perdido irrecuperavelmente o
equivalente ocidental do "mandato celeste" chinês, que ditava, livre de
qualquer oposição, os parâmetros de seu próprio construto: a
"civilização universal". 

Os fundamentos do que chega a ser uma religião secularizada estão

em frangalhos. Os "pilares estreitos e sectários" dos "princípios
liberais básicos de autonomia, liberdade, industriosidade e livre-
comércio individuais" só poderiam ser incorporados a um projeto
universal - enquanto fossem sustentados pelo poder". 

Nos últimos dois séculos, mais ou menos, essa pretensão

civilizacional serviu de base à colonização do Sul Global e da
dominação incontestada de todo o Resto pelo Ocidente. Não é mais
assim. Sinais vêm se insinuando por toda a parte. O mais gritante
deles é a parceria estratégica Rússia-China atualmente em construção.

A "nação indispensável" perdeu para a Rússia sua vantagem em

tecnologia militar e está perdendo sua preeminência econômico-
comercial para a China. O Presidente Putin viu-se obrigado a escrever
um ensaio retificando o relato histórico  quanto a um dos pilares do
Século Americano: a vitória na Segunda Guerra Mundial que, em
grande medida, só aconteceu graças aos sacrifícios feitos pela URSS.

É bem esclarecedor examinar de que forma a pretensão civilizacional

vem se desenrolando no Sudoeste Asiático - aquilo que a perspectiva
orientalista define como o Oriente Médio. 

Em um paroxismo de zelo missionário, o autodesignado herdeiro do

Império Romano - podem chamá-lo de Roma sobre o Potomac -
pretende agora, por intermédio do Deep State, destruir, usando de
todos os meios que forem necessários, o supostamente "bárbaro" Eixo
da Resistência: Teerã, Bagdá, Damasco e o Hezbollah. Não por meios
militares, mas com o apocalipse econômico.  

Este testemunho, apresentado por um religioso europeu que trabalha

com os sírios, mostra de forma concisa que as sanções da Lei de César
- perversamente  definidas como a "Lei de Proteção de Civis",  e
promulgadas no governo Obama, em 2016 - têm a intenção de
prejudicar e até mesmo matar de fome as populações locais,
conduzindo-as deliberadamente a revoltas civis.
James Jeffrey, o enviado dos Estados Unidos à Síria, chegou
a festejar, em um pronunciamento público, que as sanções contra "o
regime" tivessem  "contribuído para o colapso" do que,
essencialmente, são as fontes de sustento do povo sírio.  

A Roma sobre o Potomac vê o Eixo de Resistência como a Barbária.

Para uma das facções hegemônicas dos Estados Unidos, essas nações
são bárbaras porque ousam rejeitar a pretensão norte-americana de
superioridade "moral". Para a outra facção não menos hegemônica,
elas são tão bárbaras que apenas uma mudança de regime as redimiria.
Boa parte da Europa "iluminista" também apóia essa interpretação,
ligeiramente adoçada por laivos de imperialismo humanitário. 

O Muro de Alexandre 

É o Iraque, tudo de novo. Em 2003, o farol da civilização lançou a

operação Choque e Terror contra o "bárbaro"  Iraque, uma ação
criminosa inteiramente baseada em inteligência falsificada - de forma
muito semelhante ao capítulo mais recente da infindável Russiagate,
onde vemos russos malignos no papel de financiadores do Talibã com
a intenção de matar soldados (invasores) dos Estados Unidos. 

Essa "inteligência" - sem nenhuma prova que a corroborasse e

papagueada de forma totalmente acrítica pela mídia empresarial - veio
do mesmo sistema que torturou prisioneiros inocentes em
Guantánamo até que eles confessassem seja lá o que fosse; que mentiu
sobre as tais armas de destruição em massa no Iraque; e que financiou
e instrumentalizou os salafi-jihadis – apresentados como "rebeldes
moderados" - para matar sírios, iraquianos e russos.    

Não é de admirar que, em 2003, eu ouvisse incessantemente por todo

o Iraque, tanto de sunitas quanto de xiitas, que os invasores
americanos eram mais bárbaros que os mongóis do século XIII.
Um dos principais alvos da Lei de César é fechar definitivamente a
fronteira sírio-libanesa. Uma consequência que não foi levada em
conta é que isso fará com que o Líbano se aproxime da Rússia e da
China. O secretário-geral do Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, já deixou
isso bem claro.

Nasrallah acrescentou um sutil insight histórico - ressaltando que o Irã

sempre foi o intermediário cultural e estratégico entre a China e o
Ocidente: afinal, durante séculos, a língua preferida ao longo das
Antigas Rotas da Seda era o persa. Quem é o bárbaro, agora? 

O Eixo da Resistência, assim como a China, sabem que será

necessário lidar com uma ferida infeccionada: os milhares de  uigurs
salafi-jihadi  espalhados por toda a fronteira sírio-turca, que poderiam
se converter em um grave problema, obstruindo a rota terrestre do
Norte do Levante das Novas Rotas da Seda.

Na Líbia, parte do Grande Oriente Médio, absolutamente destruída

pela OTAN e transformada em uma terra arrasada de milícias em
guerra,  a tática de "liderar a partir da retaguarda" na luta contra a
Barbária tomará a forma de uma perpetuação da guerra - as
populações locais que se danem. O enredo é uma reencenação fiel da
guerra Irã-Iraque de 1980-1988. 

Em poucas palavras, o projeto de "civilização universal" vem

conseguindo destruir por completo as estruturas estatais "bárbaras" do
Afeganistão, do Iraque, da Líbia e do Iêmen. Mas, agora, chega. 

O Irã traçou a nova linha na areia. Beneficiando-se da dura

experiência de viver há quatro décadas sob as sanções dos Estados
Unidos, Teerã enviou a Damasco uma grande delegação de
empresários  para programar o fornecimento de bens de primeira
necessidade, e está agora "quebrando o cerco dos combustíveis na
Síria, enviando diversos navios-tanque" - de forma muito semelhante à
quebra do bloqueio americano da Venezuela. O petróleo será pago em
liras sírias. 

A Lei de César, portanto, está levando a Rússia, a China e o Irã, os

três principais nós das inúmeras estratégias da integração eurasiana - a
se aproximarem cada vez mais do Eixo da Resistência "bárbara". Uma
característica especial são os complexos vínculos diplomático-
energéticos entre o Irã e a China - também parte de uma parceria
estratégica de longo prazo, que inclui até mesmo uma nova estrada de
ferro ligando Teerã a Damasco e, futuramente, a Beirute (parte da
Iniciativa Cinturão e Rota no Sudoeste Asiático) - que também será
usada como um corredor de energia.

No surá 18 do Corão Sagrado, encontramos a história de como

Alexandre o Grande, a caminho do Indo, deparou-se com um povo
longínquo que "mal conseguia entender algum tipo de fala". Quer
dizer - os bárbaros. 

Esses bárbaros disseram a Alexandre que eles vinham sendo

ameaçados por gente que eles chamavam - em árabe - de Gog e
Magog, e pediram seu auxílio. O macedônio sugeriu que eles
juntassem uma grande quantidade de ferro, que o fundissem e
construíssem um gigantesco muro - projetado por ele. Segundo o
Corão, enquanto Gog e Magog permanecessem do outro lado do
muro, o mundo estaria seguro. 
Mas então, no Dia do Juízo, o muro cairia por terra. E hordas de
monstros beberiam todas as águas do Tigre e do Eufrates. 

Enterrado sob morros ao norte do Irã, o lendário Sadd-i-Iskandar

("Muro de Alexandre") ainda existe. Sim, jamais saberemos que
espécie de monstros engendrados pelo sono da razão espreitam por
toda a Barbária.  

Pepe Escobar: como Lula e Dilma não perceberam o

ataque do império contra o Brasil?

Diante das revelações da Vaza Jato de que o FBI interferiu no

processo de perseguição do ex-presidente Lula, o jornalista Pepe
Escobar alertou que não se pode subestimar o poder norte-americano e
baixar a guarda. Assista na TV 247
3 de julho de 2020, 16:05 h Atualizado em 3 de julho de 2020, 16:10
1.7K

 12

Pepe Escobar, Lula e Dilma Rousseff (Foto:

Brasil247 | Stuckert | Reuters)
 
247 - No contexto das novas revelações da Vaza Jato, de que o FBI
interagiu e interferiu na Lava Jato e no processo de perseguição do ex-
presidente Lula, o jornalista Pepe Escobar, em conversa com a TV
247, analisou a ofensiva do império estadunidense contra o Brasil e
questionou: como os ex-presidentes Lula e Dilma não perceberam o
ataque e não providenciaram o aumento de suas defesas?

Analista dedicado das guerras híbridas, Pepe Escobar alertou que não
se pode brincar diante da capacidade de influência e poder dos
Estados Unidos. “É a pergunta que eu faria pessoalmente em uma
próxima conversa com o presidente Lula e com a presidente Dilma.
Eu perguntaria diretamente a eles dois: como é que vocês não viam
que o império ia cair matando como caiu? Eu quero muito ter essa
resposta deles dois porque eu quero exportar essa resposta para os
russos, para os chineses, para os iranianos, para os turcos, os
paquistaneses. Eu já ouvi isso de vários analistas: ‘como é que eles
não perceberam?’, ‘eles estão no mesmo continente’. Você não pode
brincar com a maquinaria do império. Se eles são capazes de fazer isso
com a Rússia e China, que são os dois mais potentes, eles fazem com
todo mundo. No Brasil deu certo [a guerra híbrida], foi fácil, eles
conseguiram destruir [as empresas] campeãs nacionais”.