Denes Martos

The First Decade

The first decade of the 21st century is over. Did it bring something really new? Not much, actually. As I see it, this first decade accumulated quite a lot of trash inherited from the previous century and has still not found a way to get rid of it. We still handle the same arguments and, above all, the same criteria that in the twentieth century led to senseless wars, bloody massacres, to unbearable oppression, to untenable arrogance and to utopias that were as whimsical as they were unworkable. The world is still ruled by people who spent most of their life in that bloody 20th century, and in these first 10 years of the new century, one is left with the feeling that these rulers have learned nothing at all.

All right. Granted, it remains being an open question if Man is capable – or not – to learn from history. Even if for some people the concepts of "Memory" and "Never Again" have become fashionable, it is quite clear that their "memory" is highly selective and that what they "never again" would like to see are the mistakes of their opponents. Simultaneously, however, they are quite willing to repeat their own mistakes. Or at least, to find an excuse for them – which is only a subtle way of admitting the possibility of making them again.

But even disregarding this distorting bias of the immediate past, from all those who directly or indirectly lived the events of the last century one would expect an analysis of our recent history, at least to learn something from it. Because, theoretically, history is one of the best teachers holding the chair of experience and we could learn a lot by studying it. Theoretically, we could. . . But unfortunately, objective practical reality is another teacher and in its classroom we learn almost exactly the opposite. That is: that human beings usually do not learn much from history. What's more: instead of trying to correct their mistakes according to the lessons taught by history, generally what they try to do is to correct history in order to harmonize it with a story concocted to justify their previous mistakes.

The vast majority of today’s intellectuals proceeds with historical experience and the recommendations that emerge from this experience in the same way teenagers behave when confronted with the experience and the recommendations of an adult: history may prove ad nauseam many things, but they – the intellectuals of postmodernism – always know everything better. This may be a clear sign of the immaturity of our pubescent intelliguentsia, but it brings us not an inch closer to solve the real problem.

And it would be high time – whether by the way of historical experience or by any other means, such as simple common sense for example – to find some way of avoiding this constantly tripping on the same stones because, despite a huge progress in technology and in some other areas, it is quite obvious that we are trapped in the vicious circle of the same eternal issues.

Perhaps the past twentieth century did not give us many examples of what is worth achieving. We could name some accomplishments of course, even important ones, but let us agree upon that they were not so many and even a good number of them passed by, almost unknown outside of certain highly specialized professional circles. However, even if not too many and not too enlightening things happened, it is still undeniable that the 20th century offers a wide sample of paths that are not worth taking and medicines we should not take because they end up making us feel worse than the disease they are supposed to cure.

Examples? It would be really as long to list them, as it would be boring. Just think about two world wars and dozens of local wars, the collapse of Soviet communism, the cyclical economic crisis and their resulting social setbacks, famine and unemployment in several countries, environmental depredation and endemic poverty. I could go on but honestly, it would be just a waste of time. The historical data of the 20th century draw a quite explicit picture. It is only not seen by those who do not want to see.

But of course, to see – or refusing to see – the objective data is only one side of the story. The other side has to do with extracting the right conclusions from that data. Because, even seeing the data you can always choose to "interpret" the information at hand and then build upon these "interpretations" a narrative, or a discourse, that accommodates history to certain intellectual preferences. With this procedure what ends up prevailing is not the real historical experience but the narrative or the discourse that some people build on, above, and in some cases even in opposition to historical facts. The risk created by this way of manipulating history resides in the generation of constructs, proposals, projects or "models" that are nothing else but copies of those same twentieth century trends that led to a dead end and a trail of disasters and massacres. They are just more or less revamped, more or less disguised, more or less corrected and expanded versions of the same old thing.

What the first decade of the 21st century has shown us has been just that: the continuing quarrel between the trends that failed in the previous century but which desperately try to achieve a revival through new "interpretations" and fanciful "narratives" built upon a biased exegesis of historical data.

The fall of the Berlin Wall made liberal capitalism feel triumphant and the neo-liberals not only refuse to take responsibility for the social and economic disasters of the past but they have engaged triumphantly in the conquest of the whole planet with a worldview that sees the globe only as a big market and considers money, finance and economic potential as suitable tools to impose the political will of a plutocratic elite upon all countries and peoples. By the force of arms if necessary or by economic extortion and commercial blockades, if need be. Whereupon the epicenter of the 21st century neo-liberalism – which is now in the United States – behaves essentially in the same way as the epicenter of the former liberal capitalism behaved when its operational base was in England in the early 20th century.

We are still holding up the idea of one, and only one, political system, suitable for all people on the planet. The international plutocracy is still trying to impose its version of democracy on every country in the world. Officially, plutocracy promises freedom, equality, progress, better life standards and many other goodies for those involved. In reality, this plutocracy continues imposing a single political system on everybody because its leaders believe that this is the best and more suitable way to promote business, be it with oil, weapons, medicines, drugs, and usually not quite immaculate but always preferably usurious financial operations.

In some places this democracy is drowning in corruption, degradation, futility and senselessness. An enormous amount of its citizens flee from it into the unreality of a personal illusion based on narcotics. Elsewhere this democracy slides from one financial crisis into another. In other places, it has failed to be enforced even at gunpoint, as in Iraq, Afghanistan or Palestine. In other countries it simply navigates on a sea of mediocrity and demagoguery with a barely acceptable economic performance.

However, sometimes the project fails and in those cases where the plutocrats fail to enforce or to run their democracy, they simply destroy and devastate entire regions. They have managed to displace millions of people locking them up in refugee camps, which only by using semantic euphemisms we do not call concentration camps. They have succeeded in establishing an endemic poverty in places where poverty already prevailed. They achieved millions of unemployed and millions of semi-robotic droopy sheep-like humans who cannot see beyond their noses glued to their eternally turned-on TV sets. They succeeded in turning those human sheep into compulsive consumers who frenziedly buy products with a built-in obsolescence that causes the purchased artifacts to be periodically thrown away and replaced by new purchases. They got a herd of ignoramuses to believe that the license to utter any stupidity is the democratic exercise of their freedom of expression. Or that dropping a piece of paper in a box every couple of years, or to push a little button in a pulse counting machine, is an effective exercise of sovereignty and that the mercenaries whose faces appear on TV are really representatives of a free and sovereign nation.

The tragicomedy in all this is that people who actually see and are aware of this disaster are also prisoners of the prejudices we inherited from the previous century. They too remain attached to the dogmas and strategies that emerged during the mid and late 19th and the first half of the 20th century refusing to admit that the alternatives attempted by dialectical materialism collapsed boisterously during its second half. And not just in Russia. In retrospect, the French May of 1968 has proved to be a failure at least as complete as the 1989 Soviet collapse and now the Cuban Revolution of 1958 has run into the same dead end as the Cambodian Khmer Rouge in 1975, or the Russian perestroika in 1991. Raul Castro has just discovered that the “model” of his brother’s socialism needs an "update". Perhaps – and only perhaps – he is even beginning to understand the genuine functions of the state. Daniel Cohn Bendit is now devoted to ecology and Mikhail Gorbachev delivers speeches and gives lectures around the world. Both try to explain why something that theoretically should have worked did not work at all. Both try to sell the notion that the theory was good; it only happened that the darned reality ruined everything. And both try to ignore the fact that, if reality makes it impossible to apply a theory, there is something wrong with the theory and not with reality. You may hit your head against a wall. But consistently throwing the blame on the wall is – to put it bluntly – simply stupid.

The only people who really seem to have done their homework properly are the Chinese. Without making too much noise after the death of Mao in 1976, one might almost say quietly, the Chinese rearranged their country and reorganized their society to move forward. They are far from having completed the process – and even farther away from presenting a valid alternative to the West – but it worked for them and the results are quite obvious. The path taken by the Chinese has very little to do with class struggles, or with an international solidarity of the proletariat, or with intensifying the internal contradictions of capitalism; it has even very little contact with Hegelian or Marxist dialectics. It is simply based on a state that performs and a society that works. Despite unavoidable human imperfections, despite corruption that is not less significant in China than anywhere else, in spite of the burdens China also carries not only from the 20th century but also from its ancient past. And if we are not entirely happy with their methods of operating their state, their answer is just a more or less diplomatic shrug. To be more precise: they give a damn about our political opinions. They care even less about the fact that we, in the West, would not accept the way in which they have organized their work. The only thing that seems to matter for them is that they have found a workaround to break out of a system that not only failed to function in all countries where it came to power but was not even designed taking into account the special characteristics of the ancient Celestial Empire. With these ingredients, China is not an emerging great power. It already is a great power. And it is doing it in its own way. Which is surely the only way to go.

Be as it may, the big question after these first ten years of the 21st century is: where is this world going? And in this context, where is Western civilization and Western culture – or whatever remains of it – headed? What driving forces will determine its direction in the coming decades? When will the time come when the current political, social and economic worldview, based on hypocrisy, false promises and unrealistic fantasies, collapses completely?

Obviously, this is something hard to predict. If one follows the path of the countries after the Soviet collapse, the almost forced conclusion is that the world – at least in an ethnocultural sense – is headed towards a greater diversity and a substantially weaker applicability of dogmatic political universalisms. Constantly it takes more effort, more money and more troops to maintain the course towards a “one-world" order, be it bourgeois or proletarian. The dream about a world ruled by only one political worldview, with only one ideological philosophy, with an identical social architecture for all countries, with the same production system, with a single financial structure and a single universal culture; that dream is over. Those who have dreamed it had to wake up and those who wish to go on dreaming only manage to turn that dream into a nightmare. In spite of the drumming speeches and unrealistic promises.

Anyway, one thing should be clear: it is highly unlikely that a new global political architecture will be determined by any of the powers or nations that traditionally have defined it during the last centuries. Because the other rather obvious thing is that all these nations have lost their true imperial calling. Britain and France missed the train of history after the Second World War. Germany, a country that never really was a great imperial power, has reemerged as a power on the European continent and in terms of economics but, after its defeat in 1945, its hands are politically tied. Spain buried most of its imperial calling on the battlefields of the 1936/39 Spanish Civil War and the remainder disappeared when its leadership of the Hispanic area declined. Russia is a factor to be considered, but presently it is busy trying to avoid an even greater territorial disintegration and in the immediate future Russia may be happy if it recovers at least something of what it lost after the dissolution of the USSR. Contrary to an almost mechanically repeated mantra, America is not an empire. If there is something that always characterized true empires it has been their ability to dominate and organize diversity. American politicians, all they manage to do about diversity with their foreign policy is to destroy it and domestically the only thing they have achieved through diversity is to degrade their own society. Lately they are not even able to keep their e-mails under control.

Another thing to keep in mind is that in the world to come, although ethnoculturally the trend seems to be towards dispersion, geopolitically the trend moves exactly in the opposite direction suggesting the integration of progressively autonomous regional blocs. While this may seem contradictory at first glance, it's not so paradoxical if you think it in terms of states recovering their capacity to exert the three key functions inherent to a true state: synthesis, planning and leadership. The potentially successful states of the future will be those with a political architecture capable of synthesizing differences, designing and executing long-term plans and leading effectively the societies they govern. Given the proven inability of democratic states to perform these functions, the political architecture of the future will hardly be even similar to today’s democracy. Demo-liberalism is stalled and in retreat. It is bound to follow the same course as its Marxist counterpart. In the same way that dogmatic socialism did not survive the 20th century, liberal capitalism and its democracy will hardly survive beyond the 21st.

So, despite the above caveats made regarding Russia, the BRIC acronym may suggest – to some extent at least and just perhaps – the future trend. Brazil, Russia, India and China, if they strengthen their geopolitical influence, may very well become in some way the new "barbarians" who will inherit a decaying West. From this perspective it would be highly enlightening to review the history of the Roman Empire between II and VI AD. In that history there is much to learn. When Rome slid into decay, power gradually shifted to the "barbarian" invaders that besieged it. One of the big questions for the 21st Century is: Who will the new "barbarians" be?

In this sense, the quest of Vandals, Huns, Goths, Visigoths, Franks, Angles, Saxons, Burgundians, Lombards and all the rest is highly instructive for those who do not pretend to "interpret" history but wish to learn from it. Of course, the process will evolve otherwise, in another environment, with other means and under different conditions. But essentially, it would be worthwhile to learn from history that every political organism in decay generates a power vacuum.

And power vacuums are always – and pretty soon – occupied by the most daring.

Especially when the most daring are also the most able.

December 2010