CSS Participates at New Resistance Brazil First Congress

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printable-letter-englishtowne-new Resistance Brazil, or locally known as Nova Resistência (NR), held their first historic congress over the Easter weekend, April 19-21. The monumental event was hosted in Latin America’s largest city of São Paulo and saw NR members from all across this giant country arrive to participate.

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The Center for Syncretic Studies Research Fellow Paul Antonopoulos made the 950 kilometer (600 mile) journey from Espirito Santo to São Paulo to participate and contribute.

The Congress was opened with a 20 minute video message and support of solidarity from Alexander Dugin, the Russian Philosopher and Political Scientist who explicated that a Fourth Political Theory is emerging.  The Center for Syncretic Studies own Joaquin Flores, some four years ago, explicated for the public some of what the Fourth Political Theory may look like, and how it may take hold, in the United States. For further reading, see: The Disintegration of the United States and the Fourth Political Theory: A Brief Overview

Antonopoulos himself transcribed the text into English so it could be orally translated by an NR member into Portuguese. Dugin encouraged NR members to not give up their battle against liberalism and to create a model of the Fourth Political Theory that is suited to Latin America and to find their own philosophers to follow and expand their theories. Of course, when we think of Brazilian philosophers and political inspiration, the immediate names that come to mind are Leonel Brizola and Enéas Carneiro – to be discussed in a future article.

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The Fourth Position – Series Part II

sealBy Tim Kirby – Ideological Director, Eurasia Research Fellow, & Multimedia Project Director

The Fourth Position – The Victims of New Ideas (The Anti-Subject)

 

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Part II, Episode II

The 4th Position” is an ongoing series of essays regarding the past, present and future of ideology and how we can move forward to an Illiberal age written by award-winning political analyst and radio talk show host Tim Kirby.

 

In the previous article we discussed the need for a 21st century political theory that takes into account both the individual and collective identities as its subject, which the other theories of the previous century(ies) did not.

Before we begin to fathom what a new subject could be it would valuable to take a look at the “anti-subject” of each of the big 3 political theories of the 20th century (Liberalism, Communism, and Fascism). There is no idea which could suit everyone, nor could there be any position which lacks a counter position. The second we create a new subject for a new political theory, we shall also have an anti-subject appear right in front of us.

Fascism’s enemy is the easiest to understand. Its anti-subject is any other race/ethnicity that it views as a threat or oppressive force, or for the most extreme basically all other ethnicities. For the Nazi’s in Germany this was the Jews (considered secret repressors keeping Germany from glory) and Slavs (considered subhumans wasting valuable territory that could be used for the “glorious” Aryans). There were of course other enemies as well but in general we can see that clearly who is the anti-subject of German Fascism and the Misery (the negative effects of political action/direction as felt by the masses) and violence they received for it. They are in the way of a Utopia for some sort of “master race”. If we look at any Nationalist of Fascist movements today, they always have some ethnic group they hate and blame for the poor state of their nation.

The anti-subject of Communism’s working class was of course the bourgeoisie and the capitalists. Marxism tends to divide the world into the “haves and have-nots” in a material sense. It is true that under Capitalism “it takes money to make money” but is that a justification to murder those with money? For Communists the answer would be “yes”. For the “haves” are a barrier against the victory of the working class, keeping everyone down in perpetual serfdom and therefore must be crushed or subjugated for the betterment of all mankind. They are in the way of a Marxist Utopia. If we look at today’s Marxists, we see that nothing has changed, they see a certain power class that must be destroyed in order to liberate the “oppressed”.

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The Crisis in Brazil’s Left: Future Radicalism to be Syncretic in Scope

sealBy Paul Antonopoulos – CSS Project Director;  MENA and Latin America Research Fellow.

 

The End of the Brazilian Left? Analysis and Criticisms

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OE Former leftist Brazilian President Luís Inácio Lula da Silva left the headquarters of the ABC Metalworkers’ Union and turned himself in to the Federal Police at 6:42pm on April 7, 2018, becoming the first ex-president arrested in the history of the country. A year later, experts have assessed the impact of Lula’s imprisonment and the future of the left while right-wing Zionist-loving Jair Messias Bolsonaro is the current president.

For Ricardo Ismael, political scientist and professor at Pontifícia Universidade Católica-Rio, the problem is from the culmination of weariness accumulated after the arrest of the supposedly most successful leftist leader in Brazil which was triggered by the sequence of denunciations about Lula’s relations with companies linked to Petrobras (Brazil´s state-owned oil company). A year later, Ismael evaluates that the former president is still an important figure in Brazil, but questioning his legitimacy tends to undermine the authority and respect the people have towards the Worker Party (PT) leader.

“There is a lot of wear and tear from Operation Car Wash*, especially in the South, Southeast and Midwest of the country, and although the Northeast still preserves a bit of political capital, mainly due to social programs made during the [Lula] government [to this poor region of Brazil] – today there is a much greater questioning of Lula’s political leadership, even in leftist circles,” said the professor.

The opinion is shared by Fundação Getulio Vargas São Paulo professor, Claudio Couto. For him, Lula remains present in the national imagination and is still stamped in the Brazilian news – helping to catapult Haddad [Lula´s successor] to the second round of the 2018 elections, even with a strong rejection of the PT – Lula is gradually beginning to be seen as a barrier to the renewal of leftist ideology by party leaders adjacent to the metallurgical legend.

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Perspectives on Modernity in Crisis

Small Logo By: Ronald Thomas West

The Decline of the West & its Shaping by Long-Standing European Misconceptions on the Essence of Society and Being

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502377t should be said first that the following observations offer a view that does not originate with Western thought, and therefore in the Western academic sense may be deemed insufficient.

This is for two reasons, primarily; 1) the thought that all analysis must be subject to exam for the fact of necessary cultural bias, when bias must be synonymous to belief, and; 2) this essay does not delve deeply into the subject academically but necessarily notes certain phenomena in a context of inter-cultural observation, exogenous to what is known as the ‘Institution’. This is necessitated by the observation that Western academia can be (more often than not often is as a matter of rule) a feedback loop where mistaken ideas are perpetrated by a process of ‘peer review’, or subjected to strict framing by ‘empiricism’ (3rd party interpretation) with a vested interest in protecting a status quo.

The method used here is not Western but derives from an oral history form exogenous to European culture. This method proposes a story constructed from metadata and is a hybrid in that philosophical elements of non-Western oral history and related to underlying principles of thought and a format is applied to (or superimposed upon) Western metadata.

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The Multipolar Revolution: Syncretic Perspectives – Part III

Small Logo By: Jafe Arnold

Marx and the Indo-European Mode of Production

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Of the three main socio-political ideologies of modernity – Liberalism, Marxism, and Fascism (and their offshoots) – Marxism is arguably the most complex, scientific, and paradoxical. On the one hand, the theories of Karl Marx are no less contextually rooted in their 19th century Western European environment than other thinkers and currents that contributed to the first and third political ideologies. On the other hand, Marxism proved to be something more historically commanding and globally relevant than the myriad of other 19th century frameworks and theories which proposed a socio-political trajectory of modernity based on one or another meta-historical philosophical narrative. Societies claiming to be consciously guided by Marxist ideology and realizing its political pivot – the “dictatorship of the proletariat” – once covered nearly half of the globe for half of the most turbulent 20th century, thereby shaping a unique experience of modernity for more than a billion people and rather convincingly insisting that communism would be “the end of history.”

In this installment, we will address the dilemma of Marxism from two standpoints: (1) weighing the benefits, downsides, and paradoxes of Marx’s framework, and (2) demonstrating the relevance of Marxism’s identification of the relations of production and class to understanding the mythological, sociological, and political-economic developmental trends that uniquely affected primordial Indo-European society. With these analyses integrated into our arsenal, we can move ever closer to understanding the modernity that we are leaving, how it came about, and the multipolar world into which we are moving.  In order to broach such, we must first establish why it is worth picking Marx up again at all. Continue reading