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I The “Liberal” Vision of Society

THE GENERAL IDEAS which govern the dominant liberal vision of the world are simple and may be summarized in the following terms:

Social effectiveness is equated by liberals with economic efficiency which, in turn, is confounded with the financial profitability of capital. These reductions express the dominance of the economic, a dominance characteristic of capitalism. The atrophied social thought derived from this dominance is “economistic” in the extreme. Curiously, this reproach, wrongly directed at Marxism, in fact characterizes capitalist liberalism.

The development of the generalized market (the least regulated possible) and of democracy are decreed to be complementary to one another. The question of conflict between social interests which are expressed through their interventions in the market and social interests which give meaning and import to political democracy is not even posed. Economics and politics do not form two dimensions of social reality, each having their own autonomy, operating in a dialectical relationship; capitalist economics in fact governs the political, whose creative potential it eliminates.

Apparently, the most “developed” country, the one in which the political is actually conceived and practiced entirely in the exclusive service of the economy (of capital, in fact)—obviously the United States—is held to be the best model for “all.” Its institutions and practices should be imitated by all those who hope to be contemporary with the world scene.

There is no alternative to the proposed model, which is founded on economistic postulates, the identity of the market and democracy, and the subsumption of the political by the economic. The socialist option attempted in the Soviet Union and China demonstrated that it was both inefficient in economic terms and antidemocratic in the political sphere.

In other words, the propositions formulated above have the virtue of being “eternal truths” (the truths of “Reason”) revealed by the unfolding of contemporary history. Their triumph is assured, particularly since the disappearance of the alternative “socialist” experiments. We will all truly arrive, as has been said, at the end of history. Historical Reason has triumphed. This triumph means then that we live in the best of all possible worlds, at least potentially, in the sense that it will be so when its founding ideas are accepted by everyone and put into practice everywhere. All the defects of today’s reality are due only to the fact that these eternal principles of Reason are not yet put into practice in the societies that suffer from these deficiencies, particularly those in the global South.

The hegemonism of the United States, a normal expression of its avant-garde position in using Reason (inevitably liberal), is thus both unavoidable and favorable to the progress of the whole of humanity. There is no “American imperialism,” only a noble leadership (“benign” or painless, as liberal American intellectuals qualify it).

These “ideas” are central to the liberal vision. In fact, as we will see in what follows, these ideas are nothing but nonsense, founded on a para-science—so-called pure economics—and an accompanying ideology—postmodernism.

“Pure” economics is not a theory of the real world, of really-existing capitalism, but of an imaginary capitalism. It is not even a rigorous theory of the latter. The bases and development of the arguments do not deserve to be qualified as coherent. It is only a para-science, closer in fact to sorcery than to the natural sciences which it pretends to imitate. As for postmodernism, it only forms an accompanying discourse, calling upon us to act only within the limits of the liberal system, to “adjust” to it.

The reconstruction of a citizen politics demands that movements of resistance, protest and struggle against the real effects of the implementation of this system be freed from the liberal virus.