The Gender Crisis in the Era of the Phrygian Mother

Posted on February 26, 2022 by Joaquin Flores

by Alessandro Napoli

**Zeus and Hera, Pallas Athena Fountain, Vienna.**

Fluidity

Since the dawn of the last century, the society has been hit by a deep and gradual crisis of values that has touched multiple aspects of life, from the world of work to family stability, from community relations to the same individual who has been disintegrating into multiple “Egos” conflicting between them. The leitmotif of this era, in which the world around us is shredded into fragments poorly coordinated, while our individual lives are fragmented into a succession of episodes badly connected to each other, was presented to us as an added value, something to enjoy and passed off as a false myth of progress: the fluidity of both work and human relationships.

On the one hand, as Z. Bauman points out, the Welfare State, which is the extreme and modern embodiment of the idea of community, which promotes the principle of a collective insurance underwritten by the whole society against individual misfortunes and their consequences, is deliberately dismantled because the sources of profit of capitalism have shifted from the exploitation of the labor force to the exploitation of consumers, since they – the consumers and therefore the poor – deprived of the resources necessary to respond to the seductions of consumer markets, have need for money – not the kind of services offered by the «Welfare State» – to be useful according to the capitalist conception of «utility». On the ethical and moral side, consequently and hand in hand, instances have been pushed that have distorted civilization by making human nature itself «liquid», changing in its most intimate cultural, spiritual, even biological profile.

The idyllic society envisaged by T. Negri and M. Hardt turned out to be nothing more than the projection of a metaphysics of chaos on the same social fabric, primarily the Western one but not only. Macabre and nefarious metaphysics at the basis of the machinations of an organized elite which, through the reaffirmation of the domination of the market in a totalizing sense, broke the bonds that held society together, from the end of political parties to the religious disintegration of communities, to family and social bonds today extremely unstable and no longer bound by those values of loyalty, according to which ancient wisdom, human relationships served to enrich living time and not egoic emptiness.

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Magna Graecia: The Ultimate Resistance to Post-Modernity

Posted on April 24, 2020 by Joaquin Flores

photo_2020-04-06_05-06-04

The Coronavirus has proven the essentiality of the traditional mode of community and being, which can survive manufactured crises and transcend the entire capitalist paradigm

By Alessandro Napoli

We are in a moment of epoch-making transition in which concepts such as development, progress and the “normality” of modern life are proving inconsistent in the face of a threat of a virus, one probably produced by the same as those who brought hybrid wars and a race to global domination by a super-bourgeoisie.

This is a virus which in fact among the fundamental and dominant characteristics does not have the lethality of diseases of the past or still existing today in remote places on the planet, but that of mainly destabilizing the administrative, economic, social system due to its high level of virulence and its effects on those affected who need invasive interventions to survive. These are those which are not available to everyone when they are too many – there is an atavistic fear of the instability that this condition could generate, as well as the the same fear of imminent death that re-emerges from the deepest depths of history, re-evoking medieval scenarios, fears to which individuals and peoples react differently depending on the impact they suffer with it.

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Counter-Hegemonic Visions of Neo-Eurasianism

Posted on January 15, 2020 by Joaquin Flores

Ivliane Dzneladze

Introduction

Intellectuals and writers of modern Russia with great enthusiasm take care of the search for adequate socio-political explanations of the former gigantic empire, which after the collapse of the Soviet Union was lost and disoriented. At the same time, the universal vacuum was affecting Russia’s integral environment due to the fall of the Marxist-Leninist development project. After all this, philosophers and social activist tried to make a foundation to the actual ideological goals of Russian society. However, so far, many of ideological aspirations to create new national policy was unsuccessful.

Since the mid-1990s, theoretical debates about Russia’s role in post-soviet space began with the key concepts of “Eurasia” and “Eurasianism”. The concept of Eurasia has become an integral part of the political discourse in Russia. As a matter of this discourse, the value of this concept appeared numerous presentations and analytical works of publicists, intellectuals, and politicians who are tried to use it to describe the present and future role of Russia in world politics. Today, Eurasianism advocates general turns and ideas of geo- political and geo-strategic processes which should give an idea about the Russian position in the post-communist world order. In this sense, the concept of Eurasia represents mainly normative category, which is used in the work within the framework of political and ideologically debate about the self-understanding of Russia.

It is obvious that an increasing spread of the hypothesis of Eurasia is not only about a geographical value, but it also refers to specific socio-cultural issues that can serve as the point of crossing of very different research strategies. Despite the apparent popularity of the concept, yet there are no criteria that should justify the scheme of the concept of Eurasia’s geographical space that covers the Russia and the countries of Central Asia, as well as some adjacent areas of Western and Eastern Europe. In this paper, I would like to relate the points of view on contemporary Eurasianism – what impact it has on modern political processes. First, we consider the post-Soviet debate over Eurasians and Eurasianism in Russia. At the same time, we will focus on the concept of Eurasianism how it perceives the modern globalization.

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How are Progressives Being Used for Imperialism? Front & Center – ep 4

Posted on September 13, 2019 by Joaquin Flores

Tim Kirby, ideological director at the Center, and Joaquin Flores, director at the Center, debate what the ins and outs of ‘Progressive Imperialism’. Kirby poses the question to Flores “How are progressives being used for imperialism?”

Flores tries to deconstruct the phenomenon, beginning by talking about how the Atlantic Council has ‘deployed’ a series of progressive journalists recently to write hit pieces on the Center. Flores and Kirby move towards deconstruction the psychological, sociological, and geopolitical factors behind this phenomenon. What emerges is quite interesting: Progressive institutions which have arisen in more recent decades, have re-written history.

While ‘progressive’ reforms in the US were sometimes supported by progressives, in reality they were fought for by much more militant and grass-roots people and movements, who had broader visions and who were hardly in-league with US imperialism. Far from it, they were its most ardent opponents.

The US has successfully transformed its narrative into one which co-opts the struggle against the US ruling class itself, and weaponized into a tool – a legitimating ideology – which lures in and convinces progressives from other countries, primarily peripheral to Europe and in the post-communist world.

This is where Human Rights Imperialism recruits its most ardent foot soldiers from – those who do not really understand the America story from a really American working-class or grass-roots perspective, and are only really exposed to the narrative of its progressive institutions.

Heidegger & Marx: Marcuse’s Dialectic

Posted on September 10, 2019 by Joaquin Flores

In this piece republished by CSS, Feenberg develops concepts of liberation within the Heideggerian and Marxian framework as developed by Marcuse. While the Center has found much of Marcuse’s theses to be either unfinished or flawed, it is in the process of understanding the questions posed that the contribution to the literature and the corpus, on the whole, can be found.

Feenberg approaches Marcuse as a ‘Left-Heideggerian’, a category which Abromeit disputes, and instead places Marcuse within the Marxian tradition. The relevance or utility of the need to categorize Marcuse as one or the other is, at first passing, irrelevant. But it is through an understanding of the deep problems within Western academia, censorship, its funding sources, and ‘personality contests’ between the men that academia attracts, that we find the real reasons.

It echoes the treatment and categorization of Nietzsche by Walter Kaufman – the well-known scholar who translated and annotated critical English language versions of works like ‘On the Genealogy of Morals’ and ‘Ecce Homo’. His aim is to sanitize Nietzsche, to misrepresent Nietzsche’s views on Rome and Judea, to present Nietzsche as either anti-science or anti-nature, and the core purpose of his ostensible philosemitism. Yet his introduction of Nietzsche to the Anglophone world defined its interpretation for several generations. But Kaufman’s revisioning of Nietzsche was justified within its paradigm.

How so? If Nietzsche and Heidegger are going to be categorized as worthy subjects of study for their insights and revealed truths, and not as examples of mistakes, Western academia finds itself in the position of also having to categorize them as something other than how they were understood by political actors in the last century.

In the case of Nietzsche, it is increasingly impermissible in Western academia to embrace his call for a transvaluation of values without first changing the real content of his other, though related, ideas. Rather than an apologia, we find a rewriting of the real meaning and historical record.

In the case of Marcuse, Abromeit’s ideological and career commitments in light of the above described conditions prevailing in academia, force a position in which he concludes the best contributions of Marcuse have a lineage traced through the acceptable Marxian tradition and not from its Heideggerian foundation. It is, as we can see not surprising, that Marcuse’s work – the nature of its flawed or incomplete conclusions despite the posing of valid and new questions – also a reflection of the purpose of the Columbia University Institute for Social Research (known also as the Frankfurt School), which may have influenced or predetermined these errors.

The Center reproduces these for the public without alteration, towards a broader and more meaningful public discourse in this exciting and revolutionary post-academy age.

[Originally titled ‘Marcuse’s Dialectic’ – Forthcoming in Transvaluation of Values & Radical Change: Five Lectures]

by Andrew Feenberg

his is how Marcuse began his lecture at the famous “Dialectics of Liberation” conference in London in July, 1967:

I believe that all dialectic is liberation…and not only liberation in an intellectual sense, but liberation involving the mind and the body, liberation involving entire human existence…. Now in what sense is all dialectic liberation? It is liberation from the repressive, from a bad, a false system — be it an organic system, be it a social system, be it a mental or intellectual system: liberation by forces developing within such a system. That is a decisive point. And liberation by virtue of the contradiction generated by the system, precisely because it is a bad, a false system. I am intentionally using here moral, philosophical terms, values: “bad,” “false.” For without an objectively justifiable goal of a better, a free human existence, all liberation must remain meaningless — at best, progress in servitude. I believe that in Marx too socialism ought to be. This “ought” belongs to the very essence of scientific socialism. It ought to be; it is, we may almost say, a biological, sociological and political necessity. It is a biological necessity in as much as a socialist society, according to Marx, would conform with the very logos of life, with the essential possibilities of a human existence, not only mentally, not only intellectually, but also organically. (Marcuse 1968, 175-76)

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