Franz J.T. Lee, November, 2008
Chavez ... as 'New Men' we have to bury world capitalism!
In Venezuela very often we are talking about the creation of a "hombre nuevo," about the 'New Man' as portrayed and described by the glorious revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara. In his latest speeches, President Hugo Chavez Frias always refers to the creation of a new man, of a novel humanity within the context of the Bolivarian Revolution. He underlined that capitalism as a world order has failed and demanded that we as 'New Men' should "enterrar" (bury) its corpse.
However, as Bolivarian revolutionaries, firstly, what/who is Man? Secondly, what is New? Consequently, in the current darkness of this awful, fleeting, historic moment, what is humanly still new, still unworn, still authentic; what is a New Man? Why is s/he today more necessary than ever before?
Ever since the dawn of conscious , thinking (wo)mankind on this azure planet, at least once in a life time some person was forced to ponder about such quintessential questions of cosmic existence. In Venezuela, in 2002, in very critical and dangerous moments, how often we have asked ourselves the following fundamental questions? Who am I? Do I know myself? Why do we become? Quo vadis?
Today, as the result of a dangerous tumbling capitalism we have to reflect them again, to think seriously about the continuation of human life on this planet, about revolution and socialism.
Worldwide across the last millennia, based on the actual level of endless ruling class religious and ideological mind and thought control, based on the fatal degree of manipulation of the poor autochthonous peoples, and based on the reckless indoctrination of the slaves, serfs, peasants and wage workers ... original, authentic, natural and social thinking and thought progressively were and still are fading away. True, popular, revolutionary acts and theories which in self-defense were launched against the oppressive system, against the dying bourgeois culture, the decrepit world order, were simply misrepresented and distorted.
Nowadays, in a global terrorist campaign to save itself, at the eve of massive belligerent capitalist crusades against any new, emancipatory, creative or creating endeavor, the very rebelling human spirit itself is in danger. By means of patriot and anti-terrorist laws any anti-capitalist critique is being demonized, is being asphyxiated; the USA and Europe are competing in the fabrication of inhuman projects and electro-magnetic weapons to quench all future threatening, revolutionary, juvenile flames, to obliterate working class dissension forever. In the metropolitan countries, the political lulling, the nefarious results of this intellectual Moloch can now be witnessed everywhere.
Across
the globe more than ever billions are becoming innocent victims of
the transhistoric accumulative capitalist mental holocaust. During
the previous decades a million Arab lives were sacrificed in Iraq and
Afghanistan in an effort to halt the coming energetic disaster. In
the name of 'progress', 'democracy' and 'world peace', against modern
'terrorism' and obsolete 'communism', in schools and universities,
millions of promising, youthful student minds are being neutralized,
are being mesmerized, are being taught what is 'new', en vogue, the
latest in fashion, what is 'in' and 'cool'. With the aid of all kinds
of drugs, many of them are being sacrificed and devoured on the
insatiable altar of Moloch, of the imperialist Leviathan
monster.
This is the current global corporate crusade
against the youth, the future, the new, the new emancipated man.
The
New implies the temporal death of the Old, Eros signifies the burial
of Thanatos, of the Obsolete, which by hook and by crook the rotting
status quo, the Establishment, armed to the teeth is defending.
All
workers' daydreams about a better world, about constructing a new
world, all proletarian emancipatory anticipation, nearly all popular
revolutions were brutally drowned in blood, were shattered on the
capitalist and imperialist boulders of "discovering new worlds"
(Star Trek), of permanently producing an "Oceania" at war
with "Eurasia" (Orwell) and of violently "discovering"
and establishing "Brave New Worlds" (Columbus and
Huxley).
Let us take a quick glance at some serious but
also stereotypical, euphemistic answers to the above key questions.
Once more, what is a Man? Who is Man? Leaving aside
the excellent exceptions which prove the golden rule, what did the
Great Men, ... especially those who confirm European and North
American capitalism, colonialism and imperialism ... officially
and without scruples taught and still teach us about global
humanity?
* Surely, till today for millions in Latin
America and elsewhere, for Christians and theologians of liberation,
basically any man, any human being, any Christian, embedded in
hundreds of absurd dogmas, dating back to the Dark Ages, is a "Child
of God" (Holy Bible).
* Our religious studies and
catechisms have taught us that man is the "Crown of Creation"
(Genesis: 1-3). Yes, it is an irrefutable fact that genetically,
according to his divine genesis, man really is a royal class
contradiction; biologically he is 96% a pig and 98% a chimpanzee.
Scientifically, long ago in his "Ascent of Man" (1871), the
atheist materialist Charles Robert Darwin already knew all this.
*
In fact, bourgeois man needed this scientific knowledge and class
consciousness to topple all feudal things constructed "by the
grace of God" and to launch the new homo faber (man the
terrestrial producer, the planetary maker).
*
Furthermore, is Man a "homo mensura" (Protagoras' Man the
Measure of All Things)? Can his possibilities surpass all capitalist
or divine measures? Is capitalist man, Big Brother, the measure of
our happiness? Has the European, Christian God been created according
to a northern Teutonic or Anglo-Saxon image,that is, white, blond and
blue-eyed?
* As ruling class man can the 'Old Man'
still transcend the current global crisis?
* At this
eleventh hour, still burning the midnight oil, is the creation of the
new, of a new man still possible?
So many essential
questions, so few transcendental answers!
Let us,
from the South, ask some pertinent questions!
* Is the
African Man a "paragon of animals" (Shakespeare)?
*
Is the Asian Man a "homo faber" (Max Frisch's Man the
Smith, the Maker)?
* Comrade Engels (and also Comrade
Marx), we living in the South, in the "barbarian and
semi-barbarian countries"(Manifesto of the Communist Party), do
we also belong to the 'Highest Blossom of Nature' (Friedrich Engels,
Dialectics of Nature)?
*Are the inhabitants of the
Congo and Amazon Basins also "noble savages" (Rousseau)?
*
Are only Men like Bush or Pinochet devils, that is, members of the
species "homo homini lupus"?
* What about
the rest, the hundred thousands of global statesmen, republicans,
democrats, aristocrats, kleptocrats, bureaucrats and technocrats, who
are celebrating every hour their pecuniary spoils of war with
imported whiskey and caviar on the sinking, capitalist, Platonic ship
of state?
* Is the "white" man a homo sapiens
sapiens (Man the Wisest)?
* Are all "blacks"
(including Malcolm X, Miriam Makeba, Nelson Mandela, Walter Rodney,
Patrice Lumumba or Barack Obama) not humans; do they have "impure
hearts"; are they "soulless" (Montesquieu), not fit
"for the use and abuse of philosophy" (Voltaire); do they
simply form part of a divine curse; are they black descendants of Ham
and therefore form the transhistoric "white man's
burden"(Rudyard Kipling); are they condemned to become eternal
"hewers of wood and drawers of water" for their arrogant
parasitic white masters?
Are they "Men" at
all? Old Men or New Men? In Apartheid South Africa they were simply
considered to have been truculent "Kaffirs", black monkeys
and baboons. That one of them is becoming the president of a great
metropolitan super power indicates the apocalyptic state of global
affairs.
Now we know what and who is a Man. Now we also
know why in Venezuela and in the rest of the world, the praxical
identification, the theoretical existence and the philosophic
transcendence of an emancipatory New Man is highly necessary.
In
reality, with reference to our humanness, as real revolutionary
socialist vanguard, as true emancipators, there is no big secret
about us, there is nothing corrupt, childish, divine, royal or
paradigmatic about us, we have no wolfish nature or savage traits,
our authenticity and originality daily we nurture untiringly within
the real struggle for life; for human beauty, truth and love;
qualitatively, we have no price, no prize, no measurement.
What
is New? A New Man? Humanly New?
There are many
connotations of the new, of that which is fresh, unworn and novel.
However to grasp the praxico-theoretical, the scientific-philosophic
meaning of the New, of the emancipatory, creative, creating New Man
we need to activate all our neurons to cruising speed, especially to
awake those dormant and till now unused intellectual faculties and
their corresponding acts and deeds.
This we cannot
present in a simple electronic analysis, this would surpass the
limits of a general commentary. However, let us just highlight a few
aspects of a possible New Man.
In capitalism not all
that glitters is gold, that which is being imported from the north is
not necessarily new, especially when it concerns material and
spiritual wares, exchange values. Daily hundreds of human beings are
being dehumanized, alienated, ossified, and are being converted into
bull-dozers, cannon fodder or human bombs. The mental holocaust
mentioned before has this objective: to destroy the thinking mind,
the generator of the new, of something totally different, even
"trifferent".
Thus, like with the terms
"ideology and practice", we have to be extremely cautious
in the usage of the concept "the new", lo nuevo. The
dialectical logical difference between a "man", the "new",
a "new man" and the "humanly new" is obvious,
these concepts are intimately related but they are not identical.
Two years ago, in my graduate class at the University
of The Andes ... while discussing political psychology and global
fascism, ... in Spanish I wrote on the blackboard: "little boy"
and "fat man" and asked my brilliant students ad hoc what
they associate with these words.
They mentioned all
kinds of things. They explained that all boys are not grown ups,
hence the term "little" is redundant, is tautology. I
agreed. I asked whether "new" is redundant for man, or if
"man" needs the addendum "the new", because per
se he could be the real, authentic new. However, they could not tell.
At least some stated that not all men and women are fat, and that
pigs and chimpanzees can also be fattened. With that, fatness and
leanness were eliminated in the quintessential traits of man and the
new.
I began to tell my students that a Great Man
Winston Churchill was relatively fat and round, and that the atomic
bomb that was thrown on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945, had the codename
"Fat Man". "Little Boy" was dropped on Hiroshima
three days later. With that the terrorist wolfish nature of ruling
class man was imprinted in the very Japanese genes.
I
explained further that like today, then in the 1940s humanity was
experiencing a severe imperialist crisis and that within the global
system, within fascism everything authentically new was attacked and
destroyed. There is nothing that world fascism fears more, it has an
infinite fear of the truth, of the authentic new.
A few
days ago, while studying Lenin's State and Revolution, in a speech to
the nation and to the world, President Hugo Chavez Frias of Venezuela
came to the conclusion that capitalism as a whole has no future. It
has nothing novel anymore, hence, he appealed to all of us to
"enterrar", to bury this corpse, to get rid of world
capitalism, and to create the New Man, something truly New.
This
is much easier said than done, but this is no stumble block for true
praxical, theoretical emancipation. If man is really all that what we
mentioned before, then we really find ourselves on the Rubicon, on
the same radical transcendental transvolution, which transformed
hominids, ape-men and men-apes into the human species. The really and
truly novum, the authentic metamorphosis of the hominid was the New,
was something that never existed before, and which will not repeat
itself again, was the galactic possibility of the creation of the New
Man on Planet Earth.
Just as capitalism never allowed
its real negation, socialism, to flourish, to create the conditions
for the birth of New Man, in the same manner, it never allowed
billions of human beings freely to create the objective, subjective
and "transjective" conditions, to surpass internal
revolution and to venture beyond, towards the outskirts of the starry
horizons, to extra-systemic emancipation.
In the
current dark fleeting moments of gigantic changes on our small
planet, the philosopher of hope, Ernst Bloch warned that we are
sitting at the foot of the watch-tower; this is why we cannot see the
light, we are sitting on the tumbling rocks of world capitalism and
imperialism. At the end of his three volumes, which comprise "Das
Prinzip Hoffnung" (The Principle of Hope), he describes the New
as "the place in which nobody ever has been, at Home."