By this, I mean gathering all the vile crap and bigotry these people say, whether a tweet or a politician quoted by a media outlet. If we admit these fascists may commit massacres on a mass scale, including within the West, I think it would be wise to gather and archive all the evidence for a future Nuremberg trial? I know many of us want them to get the death penalty without a trial, but I was thinking social-democrats/liberals should be in this database too because they should be held accountable for their bigotry. Or am I thinking too much and this is stupid?

I remember caitlin johnstone, a writer of a blog, saying this as well.

On January 14 in a CBC interview, Goldy Hyder, president and chief executive officer of the Business Council of Canada, attempted to shine a positive light on the Prime Minister’s recent economic deals with China. Hyder warned that global politics and economies were rapidly changing and that Canada needed to solidify relationships with other strategic partners, specifically with China. The CBC interviewer only had one concern: “NATO also calls China a strategic risk.” Later in the segment, a human rights advocate, Cheuk Kwan, talked about the imprisonment of Jimmy Lai. Kwan was brought in for a reason—that is, to discredit China with its alleged human rights violations. He is the co-chairman of the Toronto Association for Democracy in China. According to their website, it was founded in May 1989 to support the student protest in Tiananmen Square in Beijing and the movement for democratic reform in China.^1

But who is Jimmy Lai?

The BBC claims he is “one of the fiercest critics of the Chinese state and a leading figure advocating democracy in the former British territory.”^2 However, Lai is much more than that. "I'm a born rebel," he told the BBC in an interview in 2020, hours before he was charged. "I have a very rebellious character." Lai doesn’t only claim he is a born rebel, the billionaire firmly believes he was chosen and destined for greatness. In Lai’s biography, The Troublemaker, is a detailed account of the life of Jimmy Lai from his childhood up until his recent arrest. The author is Mark L. Clifford, president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong, which is a US-based NGO, and he has a PhD in history from the University of Hong Kong. “Lai defies easy characterization,” Clifford writes, “His success as a pragmatic businessman meant that he approached human rights activism in a results-oriented way. He’s interested in freedom, but you won’t hear him talk much about social justice. His philosophy verges on libertarian, contending that government should play a limited role beyond providing order and a strong rule of law. A Catholic, he is a militant anticommunist in the mold of John Paul II, the Polish pope who encouraged the democratic uprisings in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the 1980s and 1990s.” It is quite accurate to define him as a libertarian because multiple times in the book Jimmy Lai speaks about weed in the dorkiest attempt to look cool and edgy. Lai was the founder of Apple Daily, where the “only forbidden area was commentary that smacked of socialist economics.” All mythological heroes need an origin story and Clifford tells us that when Jimmy’s father left for Hong Kong, “Lai’s mother, Liang Shaoxia, chose to stay. His crying father picked the young boy up as he was leaving and said, “You are going to do great things.” The scene would haunt Lai for decades, fueling his belief that he was somehow a chosen person even as he hunted for the father who had abandoned him.” The media tycoon would himself become a father later and it wasn’t without its difficulties. Indeed, in the book we learn that “as soon as they were married, Lai wanted children. After three months with no result, he worried about fertility problems. ‘He complained I had something wrong with me because I didn’t immediately get pregnant,’ Judy says.” Of course, a man chosen for greatness could never have fertility problems himself and it had to be his wife’s fault. Nevertheless, he was quickly proven wrong, since their oldest child, Tim, was born about a year later in October 1977. This kind of attitude was pathological: “He and Judy ate out often. He didn’t want her to cook. He said, ‘No you don’t cook,’  she [Judy] remembers. ‘He didn’t want to make me unhappy if he didn’t like my food.’”

The aforementioned BBC article notes that “In 2021, he urged Donald Trump to help the [Hong Kong] territory, saying he was ‘the only one who can save us’ from China. His newspaper, Apple Daily, published a front-page letter that finished: Mr President, please help us.” On January 6, 2021, the Capitol in Washington, D.C was attacked by reactionaries. Jimmy Lai’s Apple Daily had help to foment the rage that led to the riot by fabricating a story against Joe Biden that was used to spread accusations about the presidential candidate’s son and his business dealings in China. Lai denies his responsibility, but admits his associate Mark Simon was involved.^3 Simon, defined as “Lai’s longtime aide” in the book The TroubleMaker, served in the U.S. Navy, and his father was a career bureaucrat at the CIA. Clifford recounts that Lai “talks less about universal human rights than about values, especially what he calls Western values, by which he means freedom and tolerance and the use of law to give people a sense of security.”

What are these so-called Western values?

"We've seen a backsliding of democracies and democratic values everywhere around the world, including in some of the world's historically strongest democracies," former Prime Minister Trudeau said at the World Economic Forum. "The 80 years of stability and prosperity that the world has seen since the end of the horrors of World War Two is over. That era is done. We are now in a transition period where we are creating the new world we live in," he added. Justin Trudeau doesn’t agree that “hard power” is the manner in which countries should deal among themselves. Instead, he prefers “soft power,” relating a story about small businesses boycotting American products as an example of Canadians standing up for each other.^4

As for Prime Minister Mark Carney, the CBC writes, “[he] delivered a frank assessment of how he views the world in a provocative speech in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday, where he said the longstanding U.S.-led, rules-based international order is over and middle powers like Canada must pivot to avoid falling prey to further "coercion" from powerful actors.” The speech is surprisingly lucid: "This is not naive multilateralism. Nor is it relying on diminished institutions. It is building the coalitions that work, issue by issue, with partners who share enough common ground to act together. Middle powers must act together because if you are not at the table, you are on the menu," Carney said. "We are engaging broadly, strategically, with open eyes. We actively take on the world as it is, not wait for the world as we wish it to be. The old order is not coming back. We should not mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy. But from the fracture, we can build something better, stronger and more just. […] Great powers can afford to go it alone. They have the market size, the military capacity, the leverage to dictate terms. Middle powers do not. But when we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what is offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating. This is not sovereignty. It is the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination. In a world of great power rivalry, the countries in between have a choice: to compete with each other for favour, or to combine to create a third path with impact. […] Canada has what the world wants. We are an energy superpower. We have the most educated population in the world. We have capital, talent and a government with the immense fiscal capacity to act decisively. And we have the values to which many others aspire.”^5

The leaders of Europe are attempting a to form a bloc, a new order to correspond to the world’s rapidly changing conditions. Von der Leyen in her speech said that Europe must increase its independence in the face of what she described as seismic change in international relations, including improving security ties with partners she named as including Canada, Iceland, Norway and the United Kingdom.^6 Mark Carney agrees: “Our commitment to Article 5 is unwavering. We are working with our NATO allies to further secure the alliance’s northern and western flanks." Greenland is even more irrelevant than Ukraine for them. Here, the goal is a new economic power attuned to the corresponding changes in international relations. The contradiction of the Western world against the Global South/China continues, but under a new European-led Western alliance. The Western supremacist ideal and their values can be summarized in one single word: anticommunism. Yet socialism is the future and the future is trying to come into being. This is why Carney has to make trade deals with China. But the old world is stubborn and these countries will violently resist turning into socialist states. Fascism is the result of an exhausted middle class without a way out yet still ideologically aligned to capitalism. The third path that Carney spoke of is the same phenomenon. They are aware that Trump will be gone after the next election and that the democratic party has a high chance of winning again. The liberals in the USA will consolidate this "new" world order. Remember what Kamala Harris said in 2024: “As Commander in Chief I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”^7 But NATO is the world’s police and America will formally rejoin again the next election. Beware of buzzwords such as democratic socialism because any movement not explicitly socialist are fascistic in content. The portrayal of Jimmy Lai as a defender of democracy is frightening because he is an anticommunist. The media is praising a fascist and liberals are falling for it.

Let’s concede a fact: nothing is eternal, and the only constant is change. Now, what do we mean by that, and what is our purpose? Both physical things and things of the mind, such as concepts or even one’s personality, are always subject to change; therefore, when we say that nothing is eternal, we mean that nothing is eternal. It is commonly understood that revolutionaries summon the heroes of their past to represent the cause of liberation. Yet we barely have such heroes in the West. Heroic figures are important for nation-building enterprises, and whether they are mythical or historical characters matters only insofar as they are practical for the purpose of nation-building. And so, in Germany, the Roman figure of Spartacus was conjured up to accomplish this historical task. The French revolutionaries of 1789 likewise excavated Roman history for the same purpose. Simón Bolívar, too, invoked figures of the past like Bartolomé de las Casas.

The German left was highly influenced by the French Revolution. However, the Napoleonic wars against Germany fostered a strong nationalist sentiment among the Germanic peoples. A revolutionary influence—external and French—was imposed from above, yet simultaneously caused nationalist sentiments to grow from below. These revolutionary ideas were foreign and often treated as such. This schism shaped Germany's search for its own raison d'être. It remained suspicious of anything foreign, especially the revolutionary ideas of 1789. During the Napoleonic repressions, Paris was seen as a rich, elitist metropolis, and Germany as its poor, uncultured countryside. Given France’s Roman past and Catholic allegiance, Spartacus as a Germanic hero must have seemed a foreign concept to most. Yet, during the consolidation of the Second Reich, French influence permeated German society via acculturation. The German ruling class, having bested France through brute force, then welcomed its cultural influence with open arms. Just as the mind controls the body, the ideas of les philosophes and of 1789 exerted a powerful force upon Germany. Unfortunately, by 1914, German soldiers didn’t carry any work of Rousseau but specifically Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, seeking a uniquely Germanic, anti-Enlightenment ideology.

In this context, we can understand how Bismarck granted concessions to German workers, creating what we now call the “welfare state.” The influences of 1789 first arrived externally and from above. As from above, so below. The struggle for better living conditions was twofold: the masses fought their own ruling class—which was itself deeply influenced by France—while the intellectual movements forming in their interests were also absorbing the ideas of the French Revolution. All current leftist movements have their roots in the French Revolution. The so-called “Red Terror” attributed to the society that emerged from 1917 is not too dissimilar from the accusations leveled at the Jacobins—namely, of committing mindless violence. Yet the dialectic of Saturn, the phenomenon where the revolution “eats its own children,” is a real one. Just as the mind can lag behind the material world, so too in theory we find an over-theorization, a framework that cannot properly grasp current conditions and must then rely on excessive force to impose itself. It was Losurdo who noted that “the Terror contained a surplus of violence vis-à-vis the objective situation.” It is in this context that we can understand Trotsky and his ilk, and their terrorist attacks on the newly founded worker-state. An organism, whether biological or social, is only as healthy as the effectiveness of its purges. Any immune system that has been compromised must be protected from toxic interference—a protection that must come externally or from above. The ideology of Trotsky could not impose itself from above nor from below. Consequently, the worker-state, as a body, rejected such poisonous ideas, which could only infect the mind of the organism destructively.

During the Second Reich in Germany, concessions were given to workers in response to the numerous agitations around Europe in 1848, but primarily by the fear brought about by the Paris Commune. Here, we have the origins of the Western labor aristocracy. In the US, too, the civil rights movement was able to gain some concessions when the post World War II government feared communist influence among the black population. Indeed, there is a link between the social reforms in a capitalist society and the fear that communism will influence and agitate the masses. The Western colonization of the mind is now in a stage of having a more or less passive influence, and its opposite, therefore, must feel as if a foreign influence is attempting to impose its control. And for those who oppose the ideological ideas of the West, we are then accused of being “authoritarians.” The capitalist system is a dying system. Its ideological apparatus and economic structure are in an existential crisis.

We proletarians must supplant the current superstructure with our own. We are changing the figure of the saint for that of the revolutionary. The saints, having convinced so many of us of a hereditary guilt we all share, that of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, continue to exploit that motif to render us useless. Suffering is seen as a virtue; thus, poverty is a blessing in disguise, since we are told it builds one’s “character.” Suffering, according to them—brings us closer to God—to Christ bleeding upon the cross. But must we live according to them? The character of a human being is certainly not found within the suffering they experience. And if instead we search for the source which apparently gives strength to our character in the struggle against adversity and its suffering, then the logical conclusion is to eliminate poverty, not to seek solace within it. Poverty of mind is as dangerous as material poverty, and the principle is the same: ignorance cannot be a blessing. Though we may begin our intellectual journey in rags and reeking of shit, we celebrate the result, not the path. Everyone is a sucker for a rags-to-riches story, yet only by living according to them can we worship this absurdity. Who is idiotic enough to let their adversaries dictate their future?

When Saint Augustine claimed that our will is only as powerful as God bestows his upon us, he concludes that “the destiny of the weak is the will of the stronger.” We know that the highest stage of matter is consciousness, imbuing organic matter with motion. Arthur O. Lovejoy, in his book The Great Chain of Being and speaking about Plato’s deification of the idea of good tell us that for the Greek philosopher, “The fullness of good is attained once for all in God; and ‘the creatures’ add nothing to it. They have from the divine point of view no value; if they were not, the universe would be none the worse.” And yet consciousness itself, going through a process of what we sense as “fullness,” seems to attain this absolute. Progressing toward perfection, we may feel closer to God, but there is no perfection and there is no God! This is exactly what Xenophon’s Socrates meant when he said, “the divine is the ultimate ideal, and closest to the divine is closest to the ideal.”

Liberals are self-appointed gods, objects of worship we are told to respect through rituals such as voting and nonviolent protests. The mythological rules-based-order is good only for the vulture capitalists preying on the workers. Always perched up on high cliffs while those below suffer the consequence of their successes. For far too long the vultures have found safety in the structure of oppression, but these architects of our misery will suffer the rising tide of equality soon enough. In New York, two great human beings have been captured in the name of democracy, liberty, and values. Yet the liberals are only concerned about their rituals not being properly practiced. What is democracy for a liberal? It is the ability to vote for fascism. What is liberty for liberals? It is the freedom to be poor. And their values? Well, truth be told, the morality of the Great Satan doesn’t concern me one bit anymore. Liberals are the amalgamation of everything we despise. We communists are forging the path towards the unity of humankind. Abandon all your gods, you who enter here, and in the name of socialist democracy, liberty, and values, we must break the chains that bind us to this hopeless capitalist system.

First, you must know that the misanthropy of the liberals showed some of its ugliness in 2017 through a CNN host. When discussing the significance of the Trump administration’s airstrikes on Syria, Fareed Zakaria declared, “I think Donald Trump became president of the United States” last night. For them, to be presidential one must be cold-blooded and inhumane. In the “real world” they will tell us politicians have to be relentless in protecting democracy against an omnipresent danger. But such is not the world inasmuch as it is the real misanthropy of the liberal worldview. We are facing a violent reaction against progress. The US-led hegemony has turned inward against itself, that is to say, it is a repression now affecting white people with a harshness and cruelty similar to what has been historically reserved for peoples of color and of colonial origins. Since freedom as theorized and practiced by Western liberals always comes with an exclusionary clause, the oppression without will shape the repression within. Atrocities will be committed, and those who are above the law shall do so with complete impunity as countless tragedies from below are bound to be left untold and unheard. May the rising tide of equality and justice drown the vulture capitalists sooner rather than later. The victims of capitalism’s abuses cannot achieve liberation by themselves. Whoever gives the most lucid expression to the social content of this revolutionary tide and organizes these forces into a concrete programme will succeed. We are at the eleventh hour. It is as true as it is scary. But let’s not fall into despair, for even the harshest winters on earth cannot stop life from growing and blooming again the following spring. Political power must be built and turned into a battering ram. The social content of this political form is not the only thing that needs clarification, but the vehicle which is then called upon to bring about a new society also necessitates further theorization. An anarchistic expectation of “transforming power into love” is nonsensical. The opposite is much more accurate. Therefore, our aim should be to transform a mutual love which presently lies dormant within the proletariat into a political power.

Now, we can focus on the consciousness of Western man. Before the rise of Western civilization, the domestication of animals led to a concentration of wealth within the growing patriarchal families. The main feature of “barbarism” was the domestication of animals; thus, Engels writes: “the domestication of animals and the breeding of herds had developed a hitherto unsuspected source of wealth and created entirely new social relations. […] Food had to be won afresh day by day. Now, with their herds of horses, camels, asses, cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs, the advancing pastoral peoples […] had acquired property which only needed supervision and the rudest care to reproduce itself in steadily increasing quantities and to supply the most abundant food in the form of milk and meat. All former means of procuring food now receded into the background; hunting, formerly a necessity, now became a luxury.” And by now slaves were in demand: “The family did not multiply so rapidly as the cattle. More people were needed to look after them; for this purpose use could be made of the enemies captured in war, who could also be bred just as easily as the cattle themselves.” In regards to consciousness, can we claim a continuous line of ideological oppression between the ownership of cattle and human slavery? Aristotle in his Politics may shed some light on this: “Out of these two relationships between man and woman, master and slave, the first thing to arise is the family, and Hesiod is right when he says, 'first house and wife and an ox for the plough,' for the ox is the poor man’s slave.” It is quite revealing that the ox is considered a ‘poor man’s slave’.

In ancient times the dominant classes considered humans beings, animals, and tools to be instruments—Instrumentum vocale, instrumentum semi-vocale, and instrumentum mutum respectively. Today, we continue to face a similar struggle for recognition. Domenico Losurdo discusses this issue in his book Liberalism, a counter history: “[…] denial of political rights to those with no title to be recognized as members of the community of the free seemed self-evidently proper. How could the ‘horse’ or ‘beast of burden’ to which Locke and Mandeville compared the wage-labourer, or the ‘speaking instrument’, ‘bipedal instrument’ or ‘work machine’ that Burke and Sieyès referred to, claim to form part of it? In other words, those who continued to be defined via the categories used by Aristotle to conceptualize the figure of the slave could not enjoy political citizenship. If they were men, they were members of a different, inferior people; they were barbarians.” According to Michael Parenti, slaves were barely considered humans in ancient Rome: “The slave as a low-grade being or subhuman is a theme found in the writings of Plato and Aristotle. In the minds of Roman slaveholders, the servi—including the foreigners who composed the larger portion of the slave population—were substandard in moral and mental capacity, a notch or two above animals. Cicero assures us that Jews, Syrians, and all other Asian barbarians are ‘born to slavery’.”

Regarding the ideological line of continuity between animal and human slavery, we know the wealth of men at the time of animal domestication was tied to the products of husbandry. It’s no mystery that the word husbandry is similar to another one: it was labor done by the husband. Engels writes: “With the herds and the other new riches, a revolution came over the family. To procure the necessities of life had always been the business of the man; he produced and owned the means of doing so. The herds were the new means of producing these necessities; the taming of the animals in the first instance and their later tending were the man’s work. To him, therefore, belonged the cattle and to him the commodities and the slaves received in exchange for cattle.” The slave and the cattle had exchange value, with the former gradually replacing the latter as the primitive money form. Therein lies a crucial part of the ideological line of continuity between animal and human slavery. In the book Political Economy, we see that cattle were not only the main product of exchange, but also the first private property: "The separation of the pastoral tribes was the first great social division of labour. […] Among the pastoral tribes there appeared a certain surplus of cattle, milk products, meat, hides and wool. […] At first the chief item of exchange was cattle. Pastoral communities had large flocks of sheep and goats and herds of cattle. The elders and patriarchs […] became accustomed to dispose of these herds as their own property. […] Thus first of all cattle, and then gradually all the implements of production, became private property.” Those were the conditions wherein slavery arose. Slaves were captured by the wealthier families, which quickly grew richer and more decadent: “[…] the rich began to convert into slaves not only prisoners but also their own impoverished and indebted fellow-tribesmen.” The further growth of the productive forces alongside the social division of labor and a more elaborate exchange was the basis of the transition toward a slave economy.

At the dawn of slavocracy slaves were not considered foreign, but rather a part of the family. Only later, in a more developed slave economy, were they not regarded as human beings—then, they were bought and sold like cattle. According to Parenti, “All slavocracies develop a racist ideology to justify their dehumanized social relationships.” Even today this dehumanization seems to be in force, as Losurdo writes: “Precisely on account of its novelty, the category of citizen did not impose itself at a stroke on Sieyès, who compared non-property-owners to ‘foreigners’ and ‘children’: the slave too was a foreigner—in fact, the foreigner par excellence, the barbarian. Or he was a child, and as such formed part of the master’s extended family.” The slaves of the earliest patriarchal families were too close to be considered foreign or barbarians, since they were virtually taken from neighboring places. For slave relations to take over, there was a need for a dehumanizing process. The dialectic between the growing cities and their surrounding countryside played that role.

In Sparta, young children were brought to an assembly place where a session of the elders of their tribe was convened. If the baby was deformed or flawed it was to be sent to the place called Apothetai, the “place of exposure.” That is to say, it was thrown off a cliff. Spartan society had no mercy toward helots, i.e., peasants of the surrounding area, primarily from the neighboring territory of Messenia. Subjugated and humiliated, they formed a particular caste of people and were slaves to the military society of Sparta. The Krypteia, referred to as a “secret service” in Plutarch’s Lives, had carte blanche authority over the fate of the peasants. This humiliation included whims of the most sadistic kind, such as sending young Spartiates (Spartan civilians) into helot territory for night raids in which they would stab and murder the peasants without any warning, almost randomly. Also included in this dehumanization was forcing helots to get drunk. They made them dance and sing songs “not proper to free men” and paraded them around in a community center to show the youth that getting drunk should be avoided—all the while laughing at the terrible spectacle they created. Sieyès, a main protagonist of revolutionary France, made a relevant proclamation: "It is an absolute fact that the privileged class look upon themselves as another species of beings." In the case of the Spartiates and helots, that’s absolutely true.

The domestication of dogs by our ancestors played a significant role in the Neolithic Revolution. The Zhorkhov dog, which was bred for sled pulling, existed on a Siberian island at least 9,500 years ago. Meanwhile, the Yakutian Laika can be traced back to at least 12,500 years ago in the region of Yakutia. In Siberia, remnants of dog sleds and harnesses have been dated to 7800–8000 years ago. From a study, Vladimir V. Pitulko and Aleksey K. Kasparov concluded that sled dogs could have even been used in Siberia around 15,000 years ago. They also suggest that hunting dog and sled dog standards existed and were bred selectively. During the times of the patriarchal family, dogs were already an integral part of family life, including in the Near East, Europe, and many other places; moreover, animal domestication was developed side by side with methods of selective breeding. The training and authority that we impose on animals are not dissimilar to our treatment of children—thus, the line separating the domestication of animals and the disciplining of children is thin. In the book Political Economy, we find a relevant passage: “(Plutarch) tells of the “model" slave-owner Cato and how he bought slaves young “that is at the age when, like puppies and foals, they can be readily subjected to education and training." Here, we have a striking comparison of slaves as if they were young animals. And even more recently, Georges Vacher de Lapouge, a French anthropologist (1854-1936), declared that slavery ‘is no more abnormal than the domestication of the horse or the ox.’

The art of managing slaves meant educating them only as much as it was necessary for efficient productivity. What the husbandmen learned in cattle breeding and domestication of animals in general, they later applied to their slaves. As the distance between a master and his slaves’ origin of birth increased, the abyss between them grew, eventually creating a gap reinforced by theorists of slavery such as Aristotle. A master viewed himself as the limit of his slave’s reasoning capability, and consequently, the slave as an extension of his physical self. It was to this dialectic that Aristotle was referring when he wrote in his Politics, “that which can foresee by the exercise of mind is by nature intended to be lord and master, and that which can with its body give effect to such foresight is a subject, and by nature a slave; hence master and slave have the same interest.” We must not err anachronistically and deny their perception of slaves as animals, since it was the prevalent idea during those times even among the most educated. Today, admitting that we are all categorized under the same species is something we take for granted. However, it was the soul rather than the body which characterized the inferior nature of the slave.

Since time immemorial the city and its countryside were antagonistic towards each other. In the city, where the inhabitants are more educated, it is common to find negative views of the countryside among the population. For example, Sparta and its occupation of the helots or the Romans with their latifundia plantations. But even today we can see this in the Ukraine conflict. Andrew Wilson, a historian and a senior fellow of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a lavishly funded think tank, had disgusting views regarding the people of southeastern Ukraine participating in counter-Euromaidan protests: “For Wilson, the answer is simple: they should simply have stayed at home and not protested at all. He effectively reduces the whole ‘Eastern Imbroglio’ […] to Russian military intervention and oligarchic manipulation, presenting the Donbass region as a ‘criminal Mordor’ that has now spawned a revolt of ‘lumpens against Ukraine’.” (From the book Towards the Abyss by Ishchenko). This comparison of Russians to orcs, or in this case “Mordor” is familiar to us. The idea that liberals are more intelligent, which is said to be a result of a higher education and thus less likely to be racist, is false and ahistorical. Throughout its various developments, liberalism and its adherents, in part because of their higher education, was not only vilely racist but the racists par excellence.

During the privatization of the means of production came a division of our species into numerous categories. For nature to become aware of itself, the development of the individual was needed to realize this process. Materially speaking, we are nature, not as individuals but as an unbreakable whole, since there is no such thing as a void and everything is linked. In recent history, all individuals have been leveled to the category of “human”—an absolute and undeniable truth insofar as biology is concerned. But humans are nature. In that sense, humanization is not an absolute. It is a process, an event in the grand design of life, with a turning point during the age of enlightenment. We are nature’s self-awareness. Isn't that sublime? However, nature first had to conceptualize the category of “I” before “we,” as it is easier to acknowledge one’s own existence before that of others; yet, our ancestors didn’t understand the latter, but rather the former, that is, perceiving themselves as one. They labored as one, lived as one, and consumed as one. They evolved together as producer and product. The conception of “we” as a contrast to the others was shaped alongside the privatization of the means of production in fewer and fewer hands, consequently developing warlike clans, tribes, families, and the individual. Therein grew our sense of self. The history of individual consciousness is therefore the history of property, with the former continually following behind the latter like a shadow.

In sleep and dreams we go through the lessons of earlier humanity once again, just as Nietzsche writes in his book Human, All Too Human. In primitive times, as human beings were developing consciousness, they had to be in a state similar to our dreaming state today, confused and dazed, unsure of what was real or not. They didn’t engage in primitive warfare until at least the Neolithic Revolution, when sedentism became the norm about 10,000 years ago. Except for hunting accidents, such as shooting an arrow at an unfortunate comrade, violence towards each other was rare. During those times, they labored as one, lived as one, and consumed as one. Their worldview, what we now call animism, was the belief that everything is alive in a similar way. Animals, rocks, plants, water, the sky, and themselves had no specific distinction. This animism dissolved into many religions. The ancient Greeks, for instance, gave personhood to everything.

The concept of “I” (or mine) was not yet born. When matriarchy gave way to patriarchy, kinship began to be reckoned in the paternal line. It was then, concurrently with the development of husbandry and its products, that the concept of “I” first took form. Born out of the uniform group, the idea of the self had to be contrasted with the others as well, those living near but far enough for a peaceful coexistence. The other groups gradually became problematic since territory was now a cause for dispute. For example, herds had to continually feed on new pasture. But first, they had to learn the concept of “mine” (or I) from their relationship to the domesticated beasts since it was the first private property. As they tamed the beasts, so they tamed themselves, beginning a revolution over nature. The ownership over beast came before the consciousness that a father has toward his own son; for that relationship to take shape the ownership of property was needed, hence customs and laws for the inheritance of private property solidified his fatherly role in relation to his children. The dehumanizing treatment of women and the control of their sexuality by men can likewise be understood in this context—the control of her sexuality was necessary to protect and bequeath private property to blood-related posterity.

Nature, determined toward self-awareness, had no other way than to quantify this development. Only as one could nature realize itself—therefore, it needed individuals. At the end of this development, nature is conscious of itself as human beings. The individual, who demands rights, has no other option than to promote its rights in relation to others, that is, as a group. A modern concept is thus born: the concept of human rights. I believe that during the development of the relationship between tamer and beast, the tamer, such as cattle breeders, experienced a process of speciesism, which brought about the germs of dehumanization. This first occurred during the separation of handicraft from husbandry, the former imprinting its stamp of slavery on the latter alongside contempt for its labor, forming itself all throughout the stages of the class struggle and now within our global consciousness. The slaves, those considered within the extended family of the master, became the first exploited peasants, and, since they knew the art of husbandry, they inherited the farming profession if they were freed. Yet it follows that our concept of a human being formed alongside a dehumanization requiring, at the very least, one lower rank below it. By moving up the rungs of society, the well-off defined themselves in contrast to the lower ranks—an echo from our treatment of animals resonated back in all other human relationships; for example, master and slave, men and women, capitalists and workers. In those social relations, the former actively defines itself in contrast to the latter, reflecting in return only a passive influence. The oppressor has to rationalize its oppressive relationship. A process thus arises wherein oppressors dehumanize themselves by legitimizing an unequal social bond with other human beings, and, in a semi-conscious rationalization, taint their concept of human nature with their own cruelty. Aimé Césaire in his Discourse on Colonialism explains it well: “They prove that colonization, I repeat, dehumanizes even the most civilized man; that colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest — which is based on contempt for the native and justified by that contempt — inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; that the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal. It is this result, this boomerang effect of colonization that I wanted to point out.”

An economy of souls—Nietzsche’s philosophy can be comprehended as such. Marx’s work serves as a counterpose to the aristocratic philosopher—in this respect, I agree with Roderic Day and Domenico Losurdo. For Nietzsche, the lower classes of society must be reduced to raw materials for the “production of geniuses” and have no other purpose. Therefore, “our body is after all only society constructed of many souls.” As for Marx: “Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour.” We are confronted with a dialectic whereby, through a sacrifice, living beings become instruments for the creation of “geniuses,” per Nietzsche, or “capital,” per Marx. Both perspectives are materialist. According to Nietzsche: “[Philosophy] always creates the world in its own image, it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the most spiritual will to power, to ‘world creation,’ to the causa prima.” He puts culture as the primary cause of change in the world, but we should not accuse him of idealism since for him “cause and effect should only be use as pure concepts” and “should not be erroneously reified.” Here, we should note that Nietzsche considered artists to be geniuses.

In The Communist Manifesto, Marx writes: “The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. […] It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.” On the one hand, instruments are used for the purpose of the “production of geniuses,” whose individual body is “constructed of many souls,” and on the other, for the production of capital. If we put the aristocratic philosopher—who never grew tired of pushing his readers to rebel against “modern society”—upside down to make him stand on his feet, we are left with a figure similar to that of Marx. The old complaints of “cultural Marxism,” now called “woke,” can be understood as a critique of culture from the viewpoint of Nietzsche. There could only be “geniuses” if others did the harsh, simpler labor necessary for them to live, which is usually quite physical and doesn’t require any special education. These are the people whom Nietzsche’s philosophy requires for his sacrificial hecatomb, but in the name of genius instead of gods.

What is anti-humanism? It is not just hatred of man as such, but the repudiation of the very concept of human beings. In their struggle for emancipation the bourgeoisie of 1789 held the banner of Liberté, égalité, et fraternité. Yet it would be a dangerous mistake to reduce humanism to a bourgeois movement. The Jacobins are evidence of a kind of humanism which sets itself apart from the bourgeoisie. Losurdo shows us a striking difference between the two: “However, Jacobinism was not implicated in the history of colonialism. At key points it challenged it, just as, sanctioning the abolition of slavery in the colonies, it proved capable of undermining naturalistic and racial de-specification. It is illuminating to compare two declarations: ‘No man, whether born red, black or white, can be the property of his fellow’, proclaimed Toussaint L’Ouverture, the black Jacobin who, taking the Declaration of the Rights of Man at its word, led the slave revolution in San Domingo. ‘I am for the whites because I am white; not for any other reason – but that is a good one’, replied Napoleon Bonaparte, engaged in restoring the slavery in the colonies abolished by the Jacobin Convention.”

At the heart of proletarian philosophy, we find the struggles of the colonized peoples and those of colonial origins. Many Western Marxists, with their superficial materialism, reject the various struggles for recognition which, alongside the class struggle, must emancipate the proletariat. Speaking about a Marxist philosopher who despises the concept of humanism and condemns it as bourgeois, we find that a rather long passage from Losurdo confirms my thesis:

“[…] Althusser acknowledges that there can also be a “revolutionary humanism” inspired by the October Revolution but on this point he is very hesitant, blocking out the awareness of the gigantic struggles that the “slaves in the colonies” (to speak with Lenin) waged for their recognition. This is all the more true since Althusser’s theory of Marx represents only one chapter of the history of scientific thought: “before Marx, two continents only had been opened up to scientific knowledge by sustained epistemological breaks: the continent of Mathematics with the Greeks … and the continent of Physics (by Galileo and his successors).” This approach of necessity has two significant consequences: 1) Marx insisted many times that his theory was the theoretical expression of a real movement; now, however, the real movement is to be regarded as the product, to speak in Althusser’s terms, of an “epistemological rupture,” or, to speak in Della Volpe’s terms, of a scientific method that heeds the teaching of Galileo and, before that, of Aristotle as a critic of Plato. We are thus witnessing an idealist distortion of historical materialism, which is now understood as the result of the genius of a single individual [my emphasis] who set out to discover a new continent! After repeatedly accusing humanism of disguising class struggle, it is precisely Althusser who makes class struggle disappear behind the theoretical elaboration of historical materialism. 2) The idealist reversal of Marxism is, at the same time, a reinterpretation under the banner of Eurocentrism. With Engels, Lenin, and Gramsci, the French Revolution was understood to stand behind Marxism, and this ultimately—or at least potentially—referred to the gigantic struggles triggered in Santo Domingo (Haiti), culminating in the abolition of slavery in the colonies. With Althusser, however, the elaboration of historical materialism becomes a chapter of a history that takes place exclusively in the West.”

Misanthropy, this hatred of “human nature,” has no place in socialist thought. We believe human nature to be conditional and historical. By conditional, we mean conditions based on the material development of society; by historical we mean ideology forged by those same material conditions. The aristocratic materialists, by expunging all traces of humanist philosophy from Marx, are leaving us with a Frankenstein-like socialism, drained of its lifeblood and vigor. This amalgamation of various anti-humanist ideas now seeks to liberate humankind with its hatred of human nature disguised as a materialist philosophy. They declare that human beings are innately selfish, but will also assure us that socialism serves human selfishness better than capitalism. These people, unaware that labor is not entitled to all that it creates, are likewise not socialists. It is a messianic belief that socialism comes readymade out of the sky to give workers the full worth of their labor—as if liquidating society could liberate the individual. Arguing against Althusser and the relegation of Marx’s humanism to a simple mistake of his younger years, Domenico Losurdo writes, “The denunciation of the misanthropy of the capitalist system has by no means disappeared [in his mature years], and it cannot disappear because it stands at the center of Marx’s thought.” Going even further, Losurdo boldly claims that “scientific rigor and moral indignation are closely intertwined” and that “the description of existing society alone, however exact and merciless it may be, does not spur action for the overthrow if mediation through moral condemnation is lacking, and this moral condemnation arises in Marx from the representation of the dehumanizing processes inherent in the capitalist system.”

Moral condemnation of misanthropy is therefore central to socialism. We often are tempted to dehumanize those in power, who themselves harbor no qualms about doing so, yet we shouldn’t forget that by admitting we are all of the same species any dehumanization can only be reflected against us, a reciprocal dehumanization about which Aimé Césaire wrote with such eloquence in his Discourse on colonialism. But how are we supposed to morally condemn those in power without resorting to dehumanization? Our aristocratic materialists, without a doubt with some elements of anarchism, are developing a theory of materialism, which includes parts of Marx and of Nietzsche, creating a Frankenstein-socialism by using the body of the former and the head of the latter. And now that their materialism is imbued with a will to power of its own, any desire of a person becomes legitimate and thus given a natural right to achieve its fulfillment. The rural property owner who joins the army is forgiven since he is just following his immediate desires. The desires that were instilled into him by a sophisticated ideological apparatus becomes the sole object of focus and this reactionary gets covered by an hermeneutics of innocence. Any reactionary desire can find its justification within aristocratic materialism by separating the desirous person from his environment; people, after all, only care about their own material conditions. But on closer investigation we soon see this separation for what it really is: a reduction to crude determinism. The material conditions of a person and their wishes are merged and covered by an hermeneutics of innocence which severed said person from the outside world, and who now apparently has a natural right to exist at the expense of other people. (An individualized socialism devoid of social content!) Instead of promoting violence against the capitalist system and its protectors, they prefer to focus on criticism of the system and its ideological structure in hopes that some soldiers and police officers might join the revolution. The very same soldiers and officers who are anticommunist and have strong inclinations to crush it. To humanize fascists by focusing on their material needs is to halt the struggle for recognition of those they are victimizing—for example, Hamas and the Palestinian struggle.

In the next decades, even as the age defined by a multipolar world emerges, these aristocratic materialists remain stubbornly attached to the idea of the West as the sole inventor and builder of civilization, and, as a consequence, the heir of an immutable system created by Marx which must then be protected from undesired “Asiatic” elements at all costs. Regardless of how much they love professing a strong adherence to Marx, their socialism is anything but scientific. They are assured that the cumulative thoughts which form scientific socialism find its ultimate fullness with Marx. For them, human philosophy is confined to Western philosophy, dismissing the achievements made anywhere else around the globe in the improvement of human thought. Aristocratic materialism thus appears as a sort of Western determinism, the heir to an absolute system destined to liberate humankind and deified in the manner of Plato. Yes, it is nature’s will to be recognized as one and the human race struggles for its recognition as a species. But the socialism of certain labor aristocrats cannot grasp the idea of building a socialist society based on the current conditions. Yet it was in the Global South that socialism was first fought for victoriously. And by using Marx’s theories nonetheless! The successes and failures of these worker-states cannot be ignored; their achievements, above all, should be studied and emulated. To deny the intellectual achievements of the Global South is to reject the very real improvements in material conditions brought about by these states. This is not a new phenomenon: scientific achievements in ancient Babylon, for instance, have long been ignored by historians and still await their proper place in history.