Translation made to facilitate communication among the global working class, by Veredas Criticas in 04/07/2023. The original text can be found here: Notas: A Nova direita, o Identitarismo, a Esquerda não-marxista e a necessidade de um Novo Comunismo
By Diogo Fagundes
In my view, belief systems based on cultural relativism and the celebration of diversity and human alterity, however progressive and well-intentioned they may be, are insufficient to combat modern fascism.
For a simple reason: their leading intellectuals propagate these things!
Let's look at the main figure of the Nouvelle Droite, one of the great influences on Alexandr Dugin, the Frenchman Alain de Benoist. A former militant of the OAS against Algerian independence, an apologist for South African apartheid and former Rhodesia.
About five decades ago, he took a relativistic turn, apparently abandoning his belief in racial superiority. He started to defend certain struggles for Third World Independence!
He formulated something called "ethnopluralism," recognizing the right of every people to live with their own belief systems and social models. He acknowledges, just like Dugin, the rights of indigenous peoples and their own worldviews, as well as an environmentalism highly critical of Western urban consumerism and waste.
It is no wonder that both Benoist and Dugin have a significant debt to modern anthropology, from Mauss and Lévi-Strauss to Gilbert Durand. It doesn't seem to me that the proponents of the "ontological turn" in the discipline, such as Descola or the perspectivism of Viveiros de Castro, advocate such incompatible ideas.
Due to the influence of Guénon's perennialist school and its fascination with ancient peoples and "traditional" wisdom, they propagate a relativizing (or even negationist) esotericism of modern science. Aren't there many points of contact with the "mystical" and skeptical left regarding scientific universalism?
All of this is encompassed in a political perspective strongly linked to non-Marxist variations of socialism, starting with Proudhon. Federalism, decentralization, and local self-management are, therefore, significant values. Once again, does this not resemble the movement-oriented left, like the World Social Forum, of our contemporary times?
But what's the catch then? Why is there something problematic about all of this? Well, the focus on Difference and Alterity eludes the Same: despite our differences, we are part of the same species, sharing a common destiny.
Fascist identitarianism (yes, they declare themselves as identitarians, and there is a European political movement influenced by these authors) envisions a world divided into self-sufficient islands, each preserving its own regional identity. Each in its own square. Again, echoes of the epistemological pluralism typical of a certain left.
What generates the possibility of coexistence among these regional cultures? An Empire. They take up not the traditional bourgeois nationalism of the 19th century but a pan-European conception encompassing its multiple identities. And non-European peoples? Let them create their own civilizations! It's every man for himself.
The fetish for closed and exclusive identities makes these authors appear as an inverted version of certain theories present in minority oppression movements.
That is why I am convinced that firm opposition to this kind of thing requires something beyond the theoretical orientations that dominate our humanities departments. A new universalism focused on equality and the Same, not on infinite differences, without denying them, but encompassing them in a rational and comprehensive common project. In politics, this can only mean one thing: a new communism.
Comments