We know revisionism as the critical study of historical facts for their subsequent reinterpretation. The concept has had at least two approaches. One, arising from within Marxist ideas that is handled with a disdainful and pejorative accent, which alludes to the revisions of the doctrine as abandonment of the canon, even as treason. Another, as a post-Marxist set of expressions, which is adapted from political theory to the current characteristics of a country and its socioeconomic evolution.
One of its pioneers, Edward Bernstein (1850-1932)a German politician of Jewish origin, challenged the unilateral vision of the world and of society typical of radical socialists, recognized the struggle between classes but also the intra-class frictions, affirmed that the predictions of Marxism were not fulfilled to the letter, social laws had begun to take shape and, therefore, the changes were leading to a revision of the classical doctrine and his proclamation on the self-destructive condition of the development of capital. In that phase of history the Bolsheviks imposed their vision and the reformists were defeated.
From 1903, when these heated debates arose, until well into the 20th century, social democracy on a global scale and orthodox communist parties argued intensely on the international scene. Each tendency argued showing the failures of the one-party system on the one hand, but also the setbacks of the transitional approach. Every time the reformist tendencies were defeated by the dictatorships, the radicals found ways to validate their proclamations; Whenever the verticality of orthodoxy wreaked havoc, as in the forced collectivization in Ukraine that precipitated the tragedy known as Holodomor (famine), reformists insisted on the feasibility of nonviolent transitions.
It was in 1974 when the SPD (the German social democracy led by Willy Brandt) abandoned Marxism seeking to stop the rise of the social market economy designed by Ludwig Erhard and Konrad Adenauer. The new social democracy became more important by promoting a mutual solidarity not incompatible with the market economy and private property, a system even more compensated than that of its opponents of the social doctrine of the church, solidarity and subsidiarity.
Although garments of victory and defeat abounded for the orthodox and revisionist schools, the second half of the 20th century showed that the two visions were losing correlation with the meaning of history. The vertigo of science and technology and its influence on social life began to mark gaps with respect to the elaborations of political science in the duo between industrial capitalism and real socialism.
The second half of the 20th century was as feverish as the first: we witnessed the American defeat in Vietnam, the cultural revolution in China, the assassinations in India, the German and Japanese reconstructions, the consolidation of the European Union, the rise and decline of the socialist bloc, the modernization of China and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the fall of the wall and the crisis of real socialism. We had to go pari passu with the successive technological transformations strongly incident in the forms of life and learning a second language. Our way of existing has been redesigned over and over again, and birth control has altered concepts of family and marital relationships. The economy was transformed in response to the development of energies and we had to assimilate the changes in transport, electronics, communications, urbanization, the bioeconomy and the globalization of social life.
Along with the advances, we witnessed cyclopean disasters for the species and the planet. The environmental crisis, climate change, compulsory migrations, wars, concentration, inequality, cultural depredation and consumerism, pollution and psychic fatigue. Our utopias were razed to the ground or stolen and deformed to the point of precipitating us into the degradation of politics, weariness and idiocratic prostration. Our life has improved thanks to the achievements of human development and the sociological advancement of women. However, the problems of racism, machismo, human trafficking, child labor, drug trafficking, nuclear expansion, forced displacement and wars do not give way. And now we confront the dilution of our own individuality in the complex digital society.
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Both old-fashioned industrial capitalism and real socialism passed into the cellar of history. Despite this, the new global order remained anchored in retrotopia, that almost elementary longing that consists of searching in the past of politics and in its first phase revisionism, the answers to build a doctrinal set that tries to support the recent and prospective evolution in the expanded and complex sphere of the global. It is no longer a question of explaining the imperialist social deformation that the Soviet Union experienced as a revisionist form of real socialism until its own collapse.
Neo-revisionist narrative
Putin’s neo-revisionist acts consist of fabricating a justification for his alleged regrouping of what was the USSR under a model of political control that ensures its global influence and consolidates the Eurasian axis of power using a revisionist narrative supported by the energetic-military tense. To do this, the justifying discourse springs from the pen of Alexandr Dugin with its formulations supported by historical and cultural aspects that would shape the hypothesis of an imperial Russia. On February 5, hours after the end of the meeting between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, Dugin, the Russian nationalist philosopher, announced the collapse of “global liberalism and Western hegemony.”which would be being defeated by the alliance of the “great Chinese space and the Eurasian project” within what some call the “war of civilizations”.
In China, this trend is driven by Xi and his “unappealable thought”. The heavy hand applied in Hong Kong, the repopulation of Tibet, the concentration of Uyghurs in “re-education camps” in the Sinkiang region, the impact on the conflict in Myanmar and the delineation of The strip and the road based on expansive interests, indebtedness induced under leonine conditions in adhering countries, and many internal manifestations of restriction to the minimum freedoms are sustained with a neo-revisionist narrative that no longer has reference to the communist dogma or the synthesis between systems proposed by Deng Xiao, but to a plot mix that starts from supportive and compassionate approaches of Confucian philosophy, passing through episodes of the Chinese classical literary anthology, until reaching books I and II of the History of the Peloponnesian War of Thucydides, to end up justifying the commercial war and the political emulation of version 2.0 of the cold war, as well as all the maneuvers of the fierce competition between the giants of the information industries.
Ever since the 2008 crisis, China thought its waiting time was over, filled its toolbox with clubs and loaded up on some carrots. It had results, but the imprecise explanation for the origin and spread of covid linked to the claim of manufacturing hegemony led the world to distrust and consider how to reduce dependence on China.
Old format industrial capitalism
and real socialism passed into the cellar of history. The new global order was anchored in retrotropy
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The Trump thing (america first) is a crude attempt by paleorevisionism that has not achieved anything other than the generalization of distrust towards the United States. That nation also needs a justification for the political incompetence of its leaders.
The North American nation, with the most consolidated academy in the world, lives its empty democracy, its own idiocracy, its shell system and ethical rootlessness. The predominance of ‘technofideism’ (technology solves everything) and ‘cornucopeism’ (capital achieves everything), variants of a neo-revisionist narrative, do not provide the props that political philosophy demands to recover lost ground.
The geopolitics of the present still shows vectors in multiple directions. Although we live in a climate of cold war 2.0, such a reality does not clearly characterize a bipolar world, nor a multipolar one. Perhaps a muddy trough of perplexity and uncertainty. While Russia applies the scorched earth policy in Ukraine, for which it will pay a high strategic cost, the powerful countries would prefer to pull the chestnut out of the fire by someone else’s hand. But in that context, When the world needs them most, multilateral institutions don’t seem to work.
While it is true that the center of gravity of geopolitics leans towards Asia, the disproportion of the Russian aggression has broken the system of equations. The west, with Turkey in the lead, looks puzzled by applying a wait to see which does not have an indefinite term, among other reasons, due to the bullish run in fundamental prices. India, presiding over the Security Council, resorts to prudence and observes that it can gain ground in the recomposition of global chains. However, he hesitates before the options of retreading the non-alignment, the outlining of a diagonal from Australia to Europe and its approach to the United States. However, he has learned the sentence of the Gita: “Even the wise are confused about what is action and what is inaction.” India does not intend to impose, but any model fails in its territory with 1,400 million beings that explore every route to defeat suffering all the time.
The consolidation of the global geopolitical scenario is going through a phase of disorder. The theatrical piece assigns important roles to the neo-revisionist powers and to the traditional nuclei of power that have greater long-suffering. As never before, although with profiles sadly recognized by history, the powerful practice approximations for convenience. As the Indian ambassador and internationalist says PS Raghavan“we are moving towards a bipolarity with multipolar characteristics, with a different template”.
I have read over the past 30 years various epitaphs written many times for tombstones to be placed on the coffin of American capitalism, or on the catafalque of the Chinese political system; also to carve them on the tomb of European civilization, or on the tombs of major religions. Over the years, even in these times, when infomania threatens to liquidate individual freedom, It is worth asking ourselves if the variants of state capitalism or market socialism will not end up giving way to forms of power that are less one-person in their exercise and less unilateral in their mandatoryin which a citizenry resistant to the brutality of manipulation, no matter how sophisticated, builds on its designs an ethical, social and sustainable capital in accordance with moderation and digital humanism.
JOHN ALFREDO PINTO
Former ambassador and writer
Special for WEATHER
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