ADAGIOS

Ago162024

ADAGIOS

ADAGIOS

Let us begin again, then, with some aphorisms from decades ago. See for yourself whether what was said then helps or not to understand what is happening now.

The goal of critical thinking is not to find the truth (and therefore build a new alibi for the arbitrariness of the moment), but to question “truths”, confront them, dismantle them and show them as what they are: the idiotic opinion of one or several idiots (men or women of course – do not forget gender parity -) and with many or few followers. Critical thinking is not just a theoretical position. It is, above all, an ethical position in relation to knowledge and reality.

What they call “History” (with a capital H) is only a corpse clumsily made up by politicians and their scribes. However, at the table of the politician in power, there is no skeleton. Just a mirror. You can embellish the frame, but the mirror will continue to reflect the same decomposition of reality. The difference between coffins does not change the similarity of their content. When governments accuse the mirror, because it is concave, of distorting reality, they pretend to hide that it is their gaze that excludes distortions. The same gaze in which He is the one who illuminates and colors everything.

Past history, with a lowercase h, is nothing more than the antecedent of the present nightmare. Today, the death and destruction of tomorrow are being wrought.

III

The idea does not precede matter. But the other way around. It is not a social or philosophical theory that gives rise to capitalism as a dominant system. Nor to its different stages. Social theory is a gigantic shelf of ideas to which different political proposals turn in search of reasons that give meaning to the unreason. Dominant systems are nothing but the same body with different clothes in their presentation, but equal in their hypocrisy.

The fashionable social theory is only a momentary bestseller, which coexists with self-help theories, of how to win friends (“followers” is what they call them now), and of foundations alleging that the end justifies the means depending on whether it is conservatism or progressivism (which is nothing more than a soft conservatism).

What gives rise to capitalism is a crime. And each stage of its development resembles that of a serial killer: it gains more and more experience. The job of official theorists is to embellish this crime with a bit of romanticism, adventure and, of course, frivolity.

In social theory, most of the time, one does not seek to understand in order to revolutionize, that is, to change the material bases of a system. What the “theorists,” who yesterday were in opposition and today in government, seek is a replacement in the brotherhood. That is why yesterday’s “aNexos”[1] are today’s caricaturists. The names and jobs change, but the apology is the same. And, of course, the pay. The reaction of the enlightened right is that of a scorned ex, indignant because others were chosen. And those others, what they aspired to was to occupy the place of yesterday’s pampered ones. They share the same intellectual anemia, so there is no problem.

Today’s historian accommodates historiography to the taste of the Boss. He goes to the shelf of ideas looking for characters, either to build villains or to build heroes. The inclusion of women villains and heroines is a benevolent concession to a feminism that is satisfied with little or nothing. The greatest fear of a historian today is to find groups, collectives or entire peoples responsible for a period. Who can sell a book with the biography of a non-individual? Because that is what a community is.

Today’s historian sells alibis and is the advertising support for the cardboard story of Power. For him, history is only the background scenery that adorns his luminous present. The literary equivalent of the lavish scenery about indigenous peoples are the biographies and research cultivated in the circles of Power. Thus, calendars are adjusted to suit the, and the defeats of one empire over another are turned into victories.

The confusion is such that there are those who think, maintain and argue that the Aztec Empire was the panacea of the native peoples before the Spanish conquest, that Russia is the USSR and that China is a geography with communism as the dominant system; that the people are wise if they vote for Lula, Kirchner, PSOE, Macron, and Harris; and ignorant if they vote for Bolsonaro, Le Pen, Milei, Trump. Few things are as prostituted as “democracy”, but none is more expensive.

In the unknown history of capitulations, those who remain silent and mature (as is taught in the school of cadres of The Party), go to the shelf of ideas to buy something that is useful to them. It is useless: the betrayal of principles and convictions is a capitulation, even if it is dressed as Poulantzas. The label “left wing” does not change the essence of a fact: it is complicity with a crime, the worst of all: that of a system against humanity.

In politics there are no dead people, only repeated corpses.

Just as people said about Pedro Infante: the PRI has not died, it lives in the heart of all political parties. That is why professional politicians change their acronyms like underwear without any problem. Although underwear is washed… or maybe not.

There is no difference between progressive and right-wing politicians, just as there are no fundamental differences between good and bad bosses. Both manage a dispossession.

Political options do not change in their objectives (having the government), nor in their work (serving the economic Power). They only change their alibis.

At its current stage, the system is waging a new war of conquest, and its goal is to destroy/rebuild, depopulate/repopulate. Destruction/depopulation and reconstruction/reordering of an area is the fate of that war.

The Israeli government is not avenging the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, it is destroying and depopulating a territory. The business is not only in destruction and mass murder, it will be in reconstruction and reordering. That is why there is an obvious complicity among the nation states of the world. When “nations” send military supplies to Israel, they are not only supporting the genocide against the Palestinian people. They are investing in that crime. The dividends from that business will come later.

There are no “good” or “bad” destructions. The excuses and colors change, but the result is the same. There are no substantial differences between the Porfirian Isthmus Train, the Foxist Plan Puebla-Panama, and the Morena Trans-Isthmus Corridor. One failed and the other will too. Its objective is not well-being (except for that of big capital), nor the Porfirian modernization of plunder: it is simply and plainly one more border of those that already exist. And, like its peers, it will also be breached. And not by the thousands of migrants, but by the corruption and cynicism that, centuries later, the neo-slavers of today discover: human trafficking is a business with an immense source of raw material (obtained from wars and the policies of the different governments). And capital investment is minimal: you only need bureaucracy, cruelty and cynicism. And there is plenty of that in Capital and in the State.

The so-called megaprojects do not lead to development. They are only commercial corridors opened so that organized crime has new markets. The dispute between rival cartels is not only about human and drug trafficking, it is above all the dispute over the monopoly of the floor fee in what is wrongly called the “Maya Train” and the “Trans-Isthmus Corridor.” Trees and animals cannot be charged fees, but communities and companies that settle on that other useless border in the southeast of Mexico can.

This ensures the growth of wars for territorial control, in which the hologram of the Nation State will be absent.

Starting from the criterion that the violence of what they call “Organized Crime” is an anomaly of the system is not only false, it also prevents us from understanding what is happening (and acting accordingly). It is not an irregularity, but a consequence.

The objective is consensual: the State wants an open market (“free” of intruders – that is, of indigenous peoples), and the others want control of a territory.

In the image and likeness of what was called State Monopoly Capitalism, in which Capital expected the State to create the conditions for its implementation and development, now it is about what the military calls a “pincer maneuver”: both – State and Organized Crime – seize a territory, destroy and depopulate it, and then big Capital comes in to rebuild and reorganize.

Those who say that there is an alliance between governments and organized crime are lying. Just as there is no alliance between a company and its clients. What there is, is a simple -albeit costly- commercial operation: the State offers an absence and the cartel in question “buys” that absence and replaces the presence of the State in a town, region, zone, country. The gain is mutual between seller and buyer, the loss is for those who survive in those places. “Whoever pays or lends, commands” is the old aphorism that analysts and “social scientists” “forget”.

As for what is called “Organized Crime”, the State and Capital make a wrong calculation (as usual): they assume that the employee will adhere to what was agreed upon. And not that he will operate on his own.

As happened with the encouragement and creation of paramilitary groups, which, as they were formed by indigenous people, it was thought that they could be controlled. After all, they were ignorant and manipulable people. And then Acteal. The Abejas are right, the Acteal massacre in 1997, with its cruelty and the resulting impunity, was only the prelude to the current nightmare. The State thinks that those of the so-called Organized Crime are its servants and come and go as they are told or forced to. It is because of this belief that they get the surprises they suffer.

Now, try to answer this question: Why do cartels and their confrontations flourish in a federative state that has been militarized for 30 years, with the governmental approval of those who invaded the southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas, claiming that they were thus avoiding the “balkanization” of the republic? Yes, it seems that the Mexican territory is more fragmented than ever.

(To be continued)

From the mountains of the Mexican Southeast.