How can one be a capitalist ?

How can one be a capitalist?



Right-wing pseudo-philosophers have built their certainties around a few points to which they cling to tenaciously. In all their articles, we easily find the same nonsense. One of the latest examples is the magnificent ‘interrogation’ conducted by our former education minister, Luc Ferry, in Le Figaro (March 10), who wonders ‘how can one be a Maoist?’ today, denouncing it as a ‘holy alliance between the old senile and the futile youth.’

Central to Ferrys’ argument, as is always the case with reactionaries, is the concept of shame: ‘Shame on you, people of communism, who support an ideology that cost one hundred and twenty million dead.’ Oh how weary we have become of your mantra, gentlemen, and how we have come to endure your repetitive & macabre call to accountability, as you hold the moral high-ground, your black book of communism, serving you as an ideal and convenient tool to conceal the two questions which need to be asked: that of the absence of justice, and that of the eternal value of the hypothesis of the community, namely the Idea of communism.

So are we to accept at face-value your ideology of half-conscious vultures and your capitalism, portrayed as fragrant as menthol breath and as innocent as childhood? How is your call for accountability applicable to the three million Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange and napalm? And since you insist on the teaching of expeditious history, what do you say to the origins of the slave trade, the extermination of Native Americans, the colonization, and the eminently capitalist causes of the First World War (and consequently, those of the Second World War)? Who are you kidding with your little game of slaughter, if not those with a memory as nuanced as yours? It’s not difficult for you capitalists to recognize yourselves as world champions of mass destruction throughout history. Isn’t Nazism, ultimately, on your side, a Fool’s mate on your chessboard of legal fairies, which you conveniently manipulate for your continuous and fascists ends? Isn’t your Marianne, in these Sarkozist times, in reality, Marine? As you hypocritically denounce the self-avowed radicalism of the ‘Beast’ Le Pen’ – when this Beast is but the Beauty which suits your ends?


My dear Luc Ferry, I know only too well that you would like the 'hirondelles de la mort’ (1) to be on a single side: ours. This would be much easier for you and for the squadrons of silent, systematic barbarity by indifference towards the nine million dead from hunger and disease worldwide each year. A symbolic death that the system operates daily in the rich countries on its subjects - which is actually called a ‘subject’, not subjects, in the philosophical sense of the term- a subject, we say, and not a spectator, not a producer, not a consumer… But do you know what it is, this one thing in us that makes life meaningful, and not reduced to the flavour of a can of Coca-Cola and the brainless desire to consume? This is called - this sense- a Subject: a truly collective subject.

Your short insight functions well as long as we avoid thinking. Only as it happens, we, the communists, actually think! And we happen to think that any man/woman can think for him/herself.





Always the same terror in velvet gloves: "Do not move, besides, you're dead, you're finished. Stalin killed you, yourselves ... "And you dare speak of a trend of communism among young intellectuals! So we just happen to wake up in the morning thinking: "Oh, what if I were to put on a nice Marxist suit today, just to make myself look like a trendy punk?” Do you really believe that we have embraced the commercial superficiality and consumerism which leads nowhere but to an aimless end that you basically support? The fact that you’re talking of a communist ‘fashion’ among young intellectuals is enough proof that you only think in these categories. You accept a pure materialism of wandering and appropriation, without a real human purpose, nor ending. But who do you take us for? We endure the contempt from your generation of intellectuals inflicted on our new generation, as yours believes - a little too prematurely- to have liquidated the ‘68 ideals which witnessed our birth; Your contempt, particularly of the political situation and of the current challenges it represents, shuts out the healthy revolt of the people -the community- sprouting everywhere, this revolt you want to remain deaf to.

Pity the right-wing philosophers for they have forgotten the true meaning of philosophy, only responding to the journalistic knee-jerk reaction. We can do the same, you see? The process is so easy! And of course we would! We, the fools, the suggestible, and the victims of opium Marxism but only if that makes you– which is more likely- the institutionalized-empowered philosophers-clowns, the zeros points as far as philosophy is concerned and of fake, non-authentic politics.

Fabien Tarby
Translation : Nada Cabani

Footnotes:
(1) this is the name given to an enemy regiment by the German army