The prevailing discursive order in the West imposes an image of Washington constantly exporting democracy and rights, while on the other hand, portraying Putin’s Russia or Xi Jinping’s China as dictatorships and realms of evil. This is a mad or comic book-like vision, which, among other things, insults and desecrates two thousand years of Western philosophical thought, says one of the most influential contemporary philosophers in an interview with our portal. He is a professor at the Institute for Advanced Strategic Studies and Policy in Milan (IASSP – Istituto Alti Studi Strategici e Politici), an authentic thinker, and the author of several notable works in the field of philosophy and social theory.
Respected Professor Fusaro, while thinking about this interview, I reviewed Italian media. There were the inevitable sports news, reports from the battlefields in the Holy Land and Ukraine. Besides crime stories and spectacle, I came across an article about the Mattei plan (the government’s strategy for repositioning in Africa). Do you believe that the Mattei plan truly, as Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni stated, serves the national interest?
We can certainly invoke the Mattei plan as much as we want, given the greatness of Mattei himself (Enrico Mattei, +1962, one of the most famous post-war Italian politicians and businessmen, ed.), and his projects, for which he ultimately lost his life, since he was killed in a staged plane crash. However, the real issue lies elsewhere. Italy will never be able to propose any Mattei Plan as long as it remains in its current position—a colony on Washington’s leash, subject to its imperialism, which treats Europe as just another province of the United States. In my view, Europe should detach itself from Washington and open up to the multipolar world, especially toward the Euro-Asian perspective closely aligned with Russia and China.
When the concept of national interest is introduced, it refers to both the nation and the state. Ninety-nine years ago, Edith Stein, in her “Investigation of the State,” wrote that communities largely create the state, whose key feature is sovereignty. Furthermore, according to her, Aristotle’s autarchy largely corresponds to what we today call sovereignty. Stein also claimed that if one state (or any other actor, I would add) imposes laws on another, the latter essentially ceases to be a state. Do you agree with this statement, and if so, how does this affect the ability to conduct politics in line with national interest?
I fully agree with the proposed framework. The modern state, much like the Greek polis, is the fundamental form of politics and communal living. Additionally, it is essential to understand what form of governance is best within a state. In this regard, I follow a line that ideally connects Spinoza, Rousseau, and Marx, which, despite all differences, sees radical democracy as the ideal paradigm for governing a state. What we are witnessing in the context of turbo-capitalist globalization is seemingly paradoxical and can only be understood through a deep grasp of Hegel’s dialectic: modern capitalism sees the state as its midwife, but with its gradual development, it tends to clash with it. This conflict arises as capitalism, by its very nature, strives to be cosmopolitan, imposing the global dominance of the economy, transcending the borders of nation-states, and seeking to neutralize the hegemony of politics. This is what we are experiencing today, often referred to as the crisis of the state. In reality, it is not so much a crisis as it is a radical hostility between absolute capitalism and the form of the state we have come to know and that has been tested in the modern era.
Therefore, today the nation-state can establish itself as the primary bulwark against capitalist globalization, placing at its center the sovereignty of the people, grounded in the state, in antithesis to the sovereignty of the cosmopolitan market—a variation of Lenin’s famous work State and Revolution. The tragedy of much of the cosmopolitan New Left, which fights against the nation-state, labeling it as fascist, is that it fails to understand that by doing so, it supports the arguments of capitalist globalization and neutralizes the foundation of revolutionary opposition to capitalism in the contemporary age.
Is there currently any political organization in Italy gathered around national interests, on sovereignist positions, considering the well-being of the people?
No, unfortunately, today there is no group in Italy that is gathered around national interests and against the process of uprooting capitalist globalization. This was partially achieved in 2018 with the formation of the so-called yellow-green government (Lega and the Five Star Movement, ed.). It transcended the division between right and left and brought the state back to the center, directed against globalization. Unfortunately, this was a fleeting episode, lasting only a year. However, I am closely following what is happening in Germany, where the results of recent elections were favorable for forces, though different, from AfD to Sahra Wagenknecht, who have returned the state and national sovereignty to the political center. This is a good sign, and I hope it points the way for others in old Europe.
As for Italy, it is currently paralyzed by the division between the right and the left, which I addressed in my study Demophobia. In that text, I determined that the right and left today are conceptual corpses, serving only as a guarantee of top-down domination, i.e., the transnational capitalist class over the subordinated popular masses.
One of the Italian intellectuals (actually Italo-American) Guido Giacomo Preparata, in an interview in 2023, claimed that nationalism and the Church (Roman Catholic) are outdated in the modern world and that the only preserved structure is the Anglo-American Empire, which has created a technostructure. What do you think about the role of the Church (Catholic) and the nation in this historical period?
The role of the nation and the state could be discussed at length. Essentially, I hold that the state today is the last bulwark of resistance against neoliberal globalism and that the nation, which should not be confused with nationalism and its associated pathologies, is itself a core form of resistance to the processes of nihilistic uprooting caused by capitalist globalization. I have explored this in two of my works, Glebalization (a play on words combining globalization and servo di glebba, which means serf in Italian) and Defending Who We Are: Arguments in Favor of Identity.
As for the Roman Church, it is at a crucial crossroads today. It can follow the path of Ratzinger by positioning itself at the forefront of the opposition to nihilism and capital, or it can commit suicide in capitalist nihilism, as Bergoglio is doing, who merely duplicates the unison of politically correct thinking, which then becomes theologically correct as well. I addressed this topic in my book The End of Christianity. The movement through which turbocapitalism seeks to destroy Christianity is analogous to the one through which it tries to destroy nation-states. After a period during which capitalism sought a balance with the Church and religion, it now no longer knows what to do with Christianity and must destroy it as a dangerous obstacle to its logic of turning everything into a commodity. To paraphrase and banalize the verses of the poet Ezra Pound, one might say:
If everything must already be for sale,
Then nothing is sacred anymore.
That is why I am convinced, following in Pasolini’s footsteps, that today the opposition to capitalist nihilism must be of a religious nature.
Today, there is a lot of talk about totalitarianism. One of the most renowned Serbian intellectuals, Slobodan Jovanović, wrote in the first half of the 20th century that totalitarian regimes, whether fascist, Nazi, or communist, with all their specificities regarding their preferred type of organization (state, people, or working class), are based on the party and the messianic leader as representatives of the group. What do parties in the West represent today, with their constant transformations and changes? There’s also the French case, where the president does not grant the mandate to form a government to the party that won the most seats in parliament.
Personally, I dislike the category of totalitarianism, which liberals often invoke to demonize any past or future political experience that doesn’t fit into the (concept of) liberal open society. However, if we were to use the category of totalitarianism, I don’t see a more totalitarian reality than today’s Western neoliberal imperialist plutocracy, which I’ve been calling for some time now uccidente (a play on the Italian words uccidere (to kill) and Occidente (the West), ed.). As I tried to demonstrate in my study Thinking Otherwise (Pensare altrimenti), this is the totalitarianism of the market’s glamor and propaganda, which doesn’t so much aim to persecute dissident thought but to destroy the very possibility of its emergence. In the political West, there is no democracy, but totalitarianism, or more precisely, rule by a plebiscitary financial oligarchy. The people can freely choose whether the government will be composed of left or right liberals, who cater to the wishes of the neoliberal transnational plutocracy. Thus, the sterile game of the right and left creates the illusion of democracy in a system that is fundamentally not democratic.
The phenomenon of the messianic leader seems to have disappeared in the West today, except in movements and political parties that appear to want to change the system, such as Donald Trump. How is it that the ruling system within the Atlanticist community lacks messianic leaders, while at the same time we see that social control is becoming more structured and comprehensive (for example, the detention for verbal offenses, starting with Julian Assange and continuing with ordinary citizens in the UK and elsewhere)?
I personally believe that Donald Trump does not aim to change the ruling order. He may be an anomaly in the neoliberal order, but he remains a part of it. Let’s not forget that in 2017, Trump deregulated (reduced oversight mechanisms for) finances, which gave the biggest gift to Wall Street, or War Street, as I call it. Those who truly want to change the system are Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. In conclusion, the glamorous totalitarianism of market civilization is not based on charismatic leaders but on a repressive technocracy, which appears moderate and without a pilot. It only serves the interests of the market and its ruling classes (the managerial structure, ed.). The lack of charismatic leaders does not change the fact that we live in a complete totalitarianism, where it is no longer easy to identify the responsible party, as it was during Nazism with Hitler, where the criminal could be easily recognized and blamed. Who, for example, should the Greek people blame for what they endured within the European Union?
For some time now, you have been arguing that in addition to the state, workers, or, if you will, the working class, and obviously the family, even the bourgeoisie is being targeted by international capital or, as I would call it, the oligarchic superclass. Luciano Canfora, in a dialogue with another Italian leftist intellectual, Gustavo Zagrebelsky (organized by Geminello Preterossi), stated that in modern democracies, which are in reality oligarchies, the field of the political is minimal. Oligarchies do not allow for substantial discussion but increasingly seek to consolidate power and control. In such an environment, what possibilities exist for an Italian government, and how can such a system be changed?
Exactly, in my book History and Conscience of the Precariat, I argued that class conflict today takes place vertically and in only one direction—top-down. The conflict is between a borderless neoliberal plutocracy and national, popular masses that include both the old proletariat and the former middle bourgeois class, now united into a single class I define as the precariat. I agree with Luciano Canfora that today politics is simply an extension of economics by other means. To paraphrase Marx’s Capital, the centrality of capital produces an accumulation of political power, the seat of which is now in large multinational corporations—the military industry, IT sector, pharmaceuticals… At the core is capital, which (referring to its owners, ed.) makes sovereign decisions, while the form is left to falsely democratic procedures in assemblies that have lost their meaning and operational capability.
In The Meaning of History, Berdyaev states that world civilization (as opposed to cultures) will be “barbarism with the stench of machines… In civilization, spiritual energy wanes… Then begins the rule… of the magical kingdom of machinism and mechanization, which replaces true being—a rule over human souls then begins.” (N. Berdyaev, The Meaning of History, Brimo 2002, 175). You generally explain political, social, and other processes and cultural changes of today through philosophy. What role does the philosopher have in the modern era, where fear and enthusiasm for so-called artificial intelligence are spreading?
A philosopher is called to always be the critical voice of his epoch. At the same time, he must strive for the harmony of two dimensions, which Hegel considered fundamental in philosophy: to comprehend his own historical time and deal with what is eternal. This means that the philosopher must identify what is enduring—that which is true, good, and just in today’s world—and distinguish it from falsehood, injustice, and evil. Today, more than ever, the key task of philosophy is to restore the possibility of choice in reality. This is achieved by teaching that what we have is not all there is: contrary to the liberal theorem of “there is no alternative.” Philosophy reminds us that reality is history, and choice exists, which means that change is possible. Fatum non datur (fate does not exist). This is what I try to do with my modest efforts—unifying the philosophy of Marx and German idealism with the concept of reality as a historical process mediated by the action of the subject.
With the end of bipolarity (if it ever truly existed), it began to be said that democracies do not go to war with each other and are less prone to warfare. The so-called only Middle Eastern democracy, Israel, still exists as a militarized society. How can Israel today be so ruthless towards the Arab civilian population, torturing prisoners, without Western democracies even discussing sanctions, except for a few individuals?
Reality is contrary to the image spread by American-centric spokespeople for globalization and neoliberalism. Never before have there been so many wars as since 1989, which were more limited and moderate during the time of bipolarism (Weltdualismus). My thesis is that the Fourth World War began in 1989, continuing the Third (Cold War). The Fourth World War is nothing other than the one that the civilization of hamburgers declared on all states that did not bow to Washington, from Iraq to Serbia, from Libya to Russia, and soon China. When it comes to Israel, we see that we are facing a state that is literally allowed to do anything, always in the name of its right to defend itself and fight against terrorism. Israel’s imperialism today is shameless, almost like America’s. It is obvious that the modern dominant order always equates criticism of Israeli imperialism with anti-Semitism, as if these concepts are identical. Such an approach seems to deny the possibility, which I wholeheartedly accept, that one can be against Israeli imperialism and also against anti-Semitism.
When Solzhenitsyn wrote about the cult of novelty, he criticized postmodernism for rejecting any value. The relativization of morals, traditions, customs, and behavior patterns marked a phase of Western civilization, similar to what happened in the communist camp during the 20th century. There is an obvious erasure and persecution of Christian values and symbols. What values do Western oligarchies promote, and why, compared to their rivals in China, Russia, and Brazil?
Capitalism is philosophically based on nihilism and relativism. Ratzinger rightly spoke of the dictatorship of relativism. That is, a form of thought centered on the commodity as form, knowing neither truth nor foundation, but only an unlimited will for power, which grows infinitely. This helps to clarify contemporary Western nihilism, exemplified by the culture of cancellation or the woke madness. Many criticize these outcomes without addressing their cause—capitalist nihilism—which they perhaps defend and find themselves in the paradox of attacking the consequences while supporting the causes. The fight against nihilistic relativism cannot be separated from the fight against capitalism, as the fanaticism of the free market. In this scenario, I gladly recognize the forces that resist and oppose unipolarism, like Russia and China, which are attempting, with difficulty, to create a multipolar world forming around the so-called BRICS.
Finally, what do you think about the contemporary apocalyptic spirit—do you see any light?
Today, we indeed live in a time with apocalyptic perspectives, which seem to deny dialectical reason. However, one could say that we are in a period of the destruction of reason, to return to Lukács’ statement. On the one hand, we have absolute scientism, which rises as the only source of rationality. On the other hand, as a consequence of this, with the lack of perspectives on reason based on philosophy, the masses flee into irrationalism. It is enough, regarding the eclipse of reason, to consider the fact that the prevailing discursive order in the West fails to historically ground relationships and events, imposing a banal theology of good versus evil, in which, of course, the good is equated with the West, and the evil is everything that lies outside its perimeter.
