Violence, normality, and social order

The word “violent” has a Latin etymological root (violentus) which the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy, in its tricentennial edition (2020 update), defines as that “which implies extraordinary force and intensity.”

Was there violence in the demonstrations held around the world on International Women’s Day? Of course there was! Is that violence justifiable? To answer this question—which is precisely what this exposition seeks to do, and not merely in the case of feminist struggle—we must begin by saying that machismo is a phenomenon (described in broad terms very well by Friedrich Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State) inherent in systems of political economy, that is, in economic systems in which differences in resources are sufficiently significant to give rise to irreconcilably contradictory social interests (antagonistic interests, whose conflict can only be resolved through the annihilation of one class by another—as the bourgeoisie physically annihilated the feudal class during and after the French Revolution, and as the feudal class annihilated the slaveholding class when Flavius Odoacer dragged Romulus Augustulus from power, deposed him, proclaimed himself King of Italy, and thereby put an end to the Western Roman Empire and to ancient Rome with it, the greatest empire any human eye has yet seen). This will be developed further below.

As already stated, machismo forms part of the natural state of class societies (i.e., systems of political economy), just as racism, poverty, marginalization, exclusion, and so many other social facts do (to use Émile Durkheim’s terminology in The Rules of Sociological Method, where he argues that social phenomena must be treated as things—and calls such phenomena social facts). They are omnipresent not merely in capitalism but in every class society, so omnipresent that they form part of people’s everyday normality, and precisely because they are so deeply normalized they generally encounter little resistance… Thinking again about antiquity, Rome was not Rome because of the spears carried by its legions; it was Rome because of the ideas those legions imposed with those spears (financed through resources of various kinds, fundamentally economic ones) upon the minds of peoples, ideas that sedimented with the unstoppable passage of time. Of course, the key word in the preceding reflection is “normality.”

Dynamical systems, ergodicity, and crisis

In dynamical systems (a system should be understood as a kind of musical orchestra that not only possesses instruments and musicians, but also a concrete dynamics through which what occurs at one moment conditions what may occur later—any phenomenon with a sufficient degree of complexity can be studied in this way in Physics and in other sciences—) there are several notions that will shed light on this analysis. One of them is an invariant measure, which mathematically is a way of measuring the distribution of the possible states of a system that remains preserved under the system’s own dynamics. Put in a less formal way, although without losing the conceptual essence, if the system evolves according to a given rule, the invariant measure makes it possible to describe a statistical structure that does not change merely because the system advances through time.

Connected with the preceding notion is ergodicity. Under the corresponding mathematical conditions, an ergodic system is not divided into dynamically independent regions of positive measure between which its trajectory cannot move; therefore, its temporal evolution may come to adequately represent the system’s global statistical properties. In colloquial terms (and only in colloquial terms), ergodicity expresses a particularly strong form of statistical unity in the dynamics: the system does not possess several dynamically relevant “worlds” that are completely separated from one another within the same description.

Different from this, although later related to the study of critical phenomena and renormalization, is the notion of a characteristic length or scale. A characteristic scale is a magnitude that serves as a relevant reference for describing the structure of a system; for example, the characteristic length of a circle may be taken to be its radius, since once the radius is known its geometric scale can be completely reconstructed. In more complex physical systems there may appear, for example, a correlation length, expressing approximately the distance over which two regions of the system continue to display statistically related behavior. Near certain critical points this correlation length may grow enormously and, in the corresponding ideal limit, there may cease to be any privileged finite scale; it is precisely there that scale invariance and forms of self-similarity may appear, that is, situations in which certain relevant structural relations are approximately preserved when the system is observed at different scales.

The importance of distinguishing these concepts is not merely terminological. Ergodicity concerns the dynamical and statistical structure of the system under an invariant measure; characteristic scale and correlation length belong to another conceptual family; and renormalization studies how the effective description of a system changes when the scale from which it is observed changes. The three notions may be related in the study of complex systems and critical phenomena, but they do not mean the same thing, nor can one simply be defined in terms of another.

An ergodicity breaking, more precisely stated, does not consist in the disappearance of a characteristic length, but in the dynamics ceasing to behave as one single ergodic regime and in the appearance of dynamically separated regions, states, or sectors that can no longer be traversed in equivalent fashion by one and the same trajectory of the system. Put less formally, the system ceases to behave as if all its relevant dynamics belonged to one statistical “world” and begins to become trapped, divided, or differentiated among configurations with different dynamical histories. In this sense, and only at the level of qualitative structural correspondence that concerns us here, crises of capitalism may be conceived as breaks in the ergodicity of the preceding social regime: the ordinary reproduction of the system ceases by itself to guarantee the continuation of the same economic, political, and ideological regularities, and trajectories begin to open that had previously remained contained within the normality of the order.

The contradictions of capitalism are multidimensional because capitalism is a complex system with multidimensional characteristics; nevertheless, its fundamental contradiction is the dissociation between production and consumption (which is the economic phenomenon that appears in the sphere of circulation as a dissociation between investment and saving, although the sphere of circulation is ultimately subordinated to the sphere of production; the essential dissociation is therefore between production and consumption—and this dissociation obeys institutional relations of distribution, i.e., distributive relations fixed prior to the production process and determined not by technical criteria but by purely political ones; here I am speaking of the distributive relation itself, not of distribution as such). The determination of society’s institutional relations of distribution prior to the production process is a brilliant discovery made by William Hickling Prescott, the father of History (history from its scientific perspective) in the United States (since he is generally regarded as that country’s first scientific historian) in his History of the Conquest of Peru, a matter subsequently developed by Marx in his celebrated research known as the Grundrisse (which should not be confused with Capital, since the former constitute the foundation of the latter and of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy).

In the context of this article, the contradiction of interest is the one expressed in the fact that the capitalist system of political economy increasingly diffuses technology (which it in turn develops incessantly) and in the impact generated by this dizzying technological change that is increasingly homogeneously present in Western society (to generalize the preceding statement would not only be a gross error but also a profound lack of respect, since Africa and the Arab world suffer and the decent world suffers with them), together with other factors (fundamentally the intensification of exploitation—regardless of the form that exploitation assumes, what happened to George Floyd is one of the forms taken by exploitation, specifically its racial form—), producing ruptures in the dominant ideology, something poetically expressed as an awakening in the consciousness of peoples. In dynamical systems and Physics as well (both theoretical and applied), critical phenomena may appear associated with a slowing of the system’s dynamics; in Political Economy the two matters are intimately related, that is, the slowing of the system of political economy (expressed through economic crises) and the ideological rupture occur within the same interval of time (first the economic slowing occurs, then the break in ideological ergodicity or ideological uniformity in capitalist society or the capitalist social system).

Thus stated, it becomes evident that economic crises (which form the core of capitalism’s systemic crises, although by no means their only relevant factor—the anatomy of civil society must be sought in its Political Economy—) may be understood, at the level of qualitative structural correspondence employed here, as breaks in the ergodicity of the preceding social regime, while the rearrangement of the shaken economic structure after the crisis (this rearrangement involves the centralization of capital—the large firms devouring the smaller ones after crises—the disappearance or absorption of productive units, modifications in relations between branches and productive scales, and other matters associated with them) presents a structure qualitatively corresponding to the logic studied in Physics through renormalization.

Renormalization does not mean “returning the system to normality,” nor merely recovering a characteristic length that had been lost, but studying how the effective description of a system changes when the scale from which it is observed changes, and which relations continue to be relevant after that change of scale. In certain critical phenomena it is precisely the case that microscopic details cease independently to determine macroscopic behavior, while certain collective properties come to dominate the description of the system, allowing materially different systems to share the same effective large-scale structure.

It should be remembered that self-similarity may appear in this context as the approximate preservation of certain structural relations under changes of scale. In colloquial terms (without thereby losing the conceptual essence), the image of Russian Matryoshka dolls remains useful provided that one small but important qualification is introduced: the point is not to claim that each doll is literally the same physical object as the preceding one, nor that every system is identical to itself at every scale, but rather that certain structural relations may reappear when the scale of observation changes. That is precisely the characteristic that matters here: the whole and its parts do not need to be formally identical for certain structural patterns to be preserved, transformed, or to reappear at different scales.

Isomorphism, dialectics, and transformation

It is worth saying here that, as the Soviet philosophers point out in the 1965 philosophical dictionary (which, incidentally, marked the systematic banishment of Stalinism from the academy—in particular from philosophical academia—even if not necessarily from everyday life in general), reality itself presents relations of isomorphism, with the word being used here in its philosophical-structural sense: materially different phenomena may reproduce internally organized relations that are qualitatively equivalent without thereby being formally identical objects. What matters philosophically in isomorphism, then, is the preservation of a particular structure of relations.

In Mathematics the word “isomorphism” has a more restricted meaning: in general terms it designates a bijective correspondence that preserves the relevant structure of the type of objects being studied. When speaking specifically of Topology, the corresponding isomorphism between two topological spaces is called a homeomorphism, which is a continuous bijection whose inverse is also continuous; intuitively, two homeomorphic spaces possess the same topological structure even though they may differ completely in size, distances, angles, or other metric properties. A homotopy, for its part, is not simply another name for the preceding concept nor an immediate generalization of homeomorphism, but a continuous deformation between maps; and homotopy equivalence does constitute a weaker notion of equivalence between spaces, because it preserves more general topological properties without requiring the stronger structural identity imposed by a homeomorphism.

This mathematical distinction does not contradict the Soviet philosophical use of isomorphism; rather, it helps clarify the different levels of the exposition. I am not claiming here that two phenomena belonging to different domains of reality are necessarily homeomorphic under some concrete mathematical map that has not been defined, but rather that qualitative structural correspondences may exist between them. Something similar may be observed even in the natural sciences when modifications in connectivity, configuration, or other relevant structural properties of a molecule alter the properties or functions available to it; structure is not an external ornament placed upon matter, but one of the concrete determinations of the form in which that matter exists and acts.

This is equivalent to the way in which, in the Hegelian system (which should be remembered as seeking to synthesize the ancient Greeks’ studies of Nature with the studies of Thought undertaken by the classical German idealism that preceded him), Being-in-Itself (which expresses “that which is there,” Nature) is reflected and dialectically synthesized with Being-for-Itself. A dialectical synthesis (which in its most general form is expressed by the German word Aufheben, simultaneously meaning to abolish and to supersede—strictly speaking, the difference is that Aufheben occurs at the level of the homogeneous, whereas synthesis properly speaking occurs at the level of the heterogeneous; but because reality in general is a whole reflected with relative and varying precision in its parts, Aufheben is more general than synthesis) is the resolution of contradictions among the component parts of a whole (indissolubly linked by the very nature of reality) after a quantitative accumulation of contradictions inherent in the nature of the parts that make up that whole, permitting a qualitative leap of the whole that in turn entails a change in essence (what Hegel describes as the passage from the Abstract Universal to the Concrete Universal—Hegel is, incidentally, the only philosopher to date who includes the Concrete Universal within his system).

In his Science of Logic, Hegel draws an analogy between Aufheben and Classical Mechanics (the Physics of his day), specifically with the torque of a lever. What the German philosopher’s example makes clear is that what matters to him is that, at the level of physical systems, the moments of force of a lever represent how the application of an action to a system alters its state or dynamics and generates a response conditioned by the system’s own structure; philosophically, what matters in this example is the relation among action, resistance, and transformation, not the claim that every social contradiction can formally be reduced to the mechanical equation of a lever.

The preceding notion also manifests itself, under scientifically different determinations but with a qualitatively related structure, at very small physical scales. In Quantum Mechanics and, more generally, in Quantum Field Theory, particles are classified according to their spin and the statistics they obey into two broad families: bosons and fermions. Bosons have integer spin and obey Bose-Einstein statistics; fermions have half-integer spin and obey Fermi-Dirac statistics. Photons and the celebrated Higgs boson, for example, are bosons, while electrons and quarks are fermions (protons and neutrons are also fermions, although unlike electrons and quarks they are not elementary particles but composite structures).

One of the most powerful ways of representing many-particle quantum systems is known as second quantization, in which states are described through occupation numbers and operators are introduced that are capable of increasing or decreasing the occupation corresponding to a given state. These operations are represented through the so-called creation and annihilation operators: a creation operator increases the occupation of the corresponding state and an annihilation operator decreases it. These operators do not belong only to the case of bosons; they appear for both bosons and fermions, although their algebraic structure differs: bosonic operators satisfy commutation relations, whereas fermionic operators satisfy anticommutation relations, a difference that mathematically expresses the different quantum statistics of the two families.

What is philosophically relevant in the preceding process does not consist in converting second quantization into a demonstration of a social thesis, nor in claiming that a revolution is an interaction among quantum fields (which would obviously be absurd), but in observing that even at one of the most fundamental levels of the contemporary description of matter, processes of transformation are represented through relations between creation and annihilation, appearance and disappearance, occupation and vacancy of states. The particular scientific form belongs to Quantum Mechanics; the qualitative structural correspondence of interest to philosophy consists in the fact that transformation, negation, and the production of new determinations do not necessarily appear as external and mutually uncommunicating processes, but as related moments within one and the same material dynamics. Everything described above concerning creation and annihilation operators can be found developed, among other sources, in Richard Feynman’s Statistical Mechanics, published by Avalon Publishing in 1998, specifically on pages 167 and 174–175.

What has been stated above concerning isomorphisms in the philosophical sense already defined—that is, the preservation of certain structural relations across different manifestations—is captured in two sayings of popular wisdom, specifically “You can dress a monkey in silk, but it remains a monkey” and “He who walks among honey gets some of it on him” (which is isomorphic to “He who runs with wolves learns to howl”). Yet it is captured with unequivocal precision in a popular expression belonging to a type of popular wisdom (surely even more popular) that is less elaborate, cruder (but often analytically more powerful): it is the same “thing” with a different smell. That is precisely what all economic restructurings following capitalist crises are, as are all promises of reformism coming from the governing class (the political-bureaucratic class) and from the ruling class (the owners of the great means of production, which is the type of private property Marx criticizes—never personal property, and distinguishing between the two should offer no difficulty to an intellect of middling stature or above), because crises are the only possible result (every result is a result insofar as it is the product of a process; that process is precisely the industrial cycle of the economy) of capitalism’s natural or normal behavior. This is what can occur when dizzying technological change is introduced into a society in which social classes exist and in which one of those classes produces in order to make a profit, but in order to realize that profit requires the final consumption of another social class with which it enters into contradiction (because wages and business profits have an inverse relation). Capitalist reality as a whole, like reality as a whole in general, reproduces in its parts certain structural relations that may be isomorphic in the philosophical sense defined above; what is required is to describe adequately which qualitative structure is preserved between the whole and its parts and, whenever one wishes to speak of isomorphism in the strict mathematical sense, to define explicitly the objects, relations, and transformations that preserve that structure.

Technology, welfare, and political power

The magnitude and direction of the social disruption produced by dizzying technological change within capitalism are due to the fact that it multiplies human productive forces in a nonlinear fashion (understanding this as a mathematical function, not merely as a scatter plot), and with them it also multiplies itself nonlinearly—in the sense previously defined—hence capital is accumulated labor, past labor, as can be seen in the following scatter plots (and in many others that can be found on the web without the slightest difficulty).

In light of the preceding graphs, it becomes indispensable to pause here to discuss the widely known ethical-moral justification of capitalism according to which it is an ideal system in ethical and moral terms because it provides greater welfare than its predecessors (primitive community, slavery, and feudalism). Such logic omits nontrivial matters. For example, the justice of a social order cannot simply be measured by the relative welfare (measured only in material terms) that it provides its citizens, because by that logic Hitler would unquestionably have been more just than some chief of a gens (from the period of primitive community when matrilineal succession prevailed—through the mother, before gender discrimination existed), even though such chiefs were not genocidal, did not discriminate (social classes did not even exist), and such reasoning would also omit the fact that technological progress is a social achievement (collective, fundamentally the achievement of the working class, which includes scientists and technicians) and cumulative (technological change may be greater under capitalism, but the capitalist class did not therefore invent it—and in general it is not even the class that conceives it intellectually). Surely not only Jews and Poles but also many Germans would disagree with such reasoning.

The technological level available to a social system must be considered jointly with the material welfare it provides to its citizens (and this is still without complicating the issue by adding psychological welfare), because only in that way can a system be analyzed in terms of the welfare that the system itself is capable of providing, thereby avoiding vulgar reductionisms when comparing social systems whose progress is cumulative and which are separated by thousands of years. In other words, the relative technological level available to a system (relative to its contemporaries) must constitute the standardization factor that makes comparison among the different systems of social production that have existed throughout history logically optimal. In this respect it is evident that capitalism can only properly be compared with slavery, although it is obviously superior in terms of human dignity, which is simultaneously a cause for joy (we have evolved a little) and sadness (we have most definitely not evolved nearly enough).

Political power, sociologically understood, as defined by the Salvadoran political scientist Dagoberto Gutiérrez, is a social relation based on differences in resources that serves either to transform reality or to prevent it from changing. This definition is important because it refers to the existence of a particular order.

It was stated earlier that the moments of force of the lever crystallized the idea of the action of a force external to a reference system altering that system (not necessarily changing its state, since not every contradiction is antagonistic), and it was also said that “violence” implied extraordinary force and intensity, sufficiently extraordinary to produce the effect of taking something—whatever it may be—outside its natural state. What the preceding paragraphs expressed through the formal sciences and the so-called “hard sciences” is the natural state or natural order of the capitalist system of political economy, and the role of violence in history is, as Engels already said in a work of his own bearing the same name, to be the “midwife” of history. This is connected with the celebrated reflection of the Italian political thinker Antonio Gramsci that the old always gives way to the new, but never without first resisting it; or, what amounts to the same thing, that in the context of class societies, in the process of creating a new world, a new society, processes of annihilation simultaneously occur among the component parts of present society (the social classes of that society). This will be addressed again at the end of the exposition, since it is indissolubly connected with the answer to the question initially posed here.

Of course, for one mode of production to be replaced by another there must also exist a certain technological level that allows one set of social relations of production to be replaced by another that is technically superior (as slave relations were technically superior to those of primitive community, feudal relations to slave relations, and capitalist relations to feudal ones). In Physics, a qualitatively similar structure of change appears in phase transitions, in which the quantitative modification of certain variables or parameters changes the conditions of stability of a previous state and, after a certain critical regime is crossed, a new qualitative organization of the system emerges. This does not mean, obviously, that a change in the mode of production is formally a physical phase transition, but rather that both processes may share the same general dialectical structure of quantitative accumulation, loss of stability, and qualitative leap (the classical example in the foundational history of Marxism is embodied in the changes of state of water under sufficient variation in physical conditions; here I have tried to present more heterodox examples).

The preceding analogy is possible because both Nature and Society are governed by objective universal laws^[1], the dialectical-materialist laws, and this is consistent with the fact that Nature is structurally reflected in its constituent parts, among which conscious organic life is found (of course, only when one speaks of formally defined mathematical isomorphisms does it make sense to require perfect mathematical equivalence). The celebrated Marxist evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, and Richard Levins discuss this fact in various works, including The Structure of Evolutionary Theory (Gould), The Mismeasure of Man (Gould), The Dialectical Biologist (Lewontin and Levins), Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on Ecology, Agriculture, and Health (Lewontin and Levins), and “A Reply to Orzack and Sober: Formal Analysis and the Fluidity of Science” (Levins, where he also points to foundations of complexity based on the number of topological dimensions of the structure analyzed), among others.

It is necessary, however, to make a clarification here in order to avoid a confusion that is by no means trivial: that Nature and Society form part of one and the same material reality and that certain general dialectical laws may manifest themselves in both does not mean that a society is formally a molecule, a quantum field, a thermodynamic system, or any other particular physical object; nor does it mean that a political conclusion can be directly deduced from a physical equation. What is being maintained is something different: qualitatively different material processes may reproduce the same general logical structure of transformation. The relation invoked here is therefore a qualitative structural correspondence of one and the same underlying dialectical logic, not a formal identity among the particular sciences that study each domain.

Put differently, the fact that water changes state, that a molecule qualitatively modifies its properties or function when a relevant structural relation changes, and that a society undergoes revolutionary transformation does not mean that all three phenomena obey the same particular equations (it would be ridiculous to ask a Schrödinger equation to explain the French Revolution or an equation of class struggle to determine the energy spectrum of an atom); it means that in different domains of matter general forms of change may reappear in which a quantitative accumulation alters the conditions of stability of a previous state and makes possible the emergence of a new quality. The particular laws belong to each science; determining the most general form of change belongs to the philosophical plane.

What has been stated above concerning the qualitative structural correspondence between phase transitions and revolutionary changes in society (which entail the passage from one mode of production or social order to another) seeks to lay the logical groundwork so that it should not be surprising to say that the technological level necessary to replace capitalist social relations of production with others does not appear to exist (and, furthermore, no others are known; more will be said about this later), while it appears more than sufficient to reduce considerably the degree of incivility prevailing in class societies (specifically, in this case, contemporary capitalism), although this would inexorably entail a reduction in the rates of profit of the capitalist class, from which this uncivilized and uncivilizing order emanates, but which curiously does not itself suffer its “benefits.”

Capitalism, socialism, and the State

Why is it said that the technological level for such a matter does not appear to exist (at least not in a generalized form in every society—and that is a detail of vital importance both analytically and practically)? The answer is related to the refutation of another idea widely disseminated throughout the last century and regarded by many unwary people as the irrefutable scientific-technical proof of the impossibility of Communism: namely, that socialist and even communist social relations of production existed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (depending on which “enlightened” person one happens to be speaking with). When capitalist social relations of production are discussed, it is possible to define them well (to situate them within a general and relatively precise theoretical framework—the precision will vary according to the aspect of reality analyzed and/or the theoretical framework employed by the researcher, which is the meaning of “well-defined” in Pure Mathematics). Does the same occur with “socialist” and/or “communist” social relations of production? Let us briefly review the theoretical-historical and empirical-historical evidence.

The work of Marx and Engels centers on a systematic critique (a systematic analysis oriented toward transforming reality) of the capitalist system of political economy, and there are only a very few and very brief passages in which Marx and Engels discuss some future non-capitalist mode of production (considering their mature works, beginning in the temporal neighborhood centered around the publication of The Poverty of Philosophy—the immediately preceding and following publications). In particular, in Volume II of Capital, Marx lays out rudimentary guidelines for an economic policy concerning surpluses and deficits of fixed assets in a society without private ownership of the means of production and without paper money (let no one imagine Tinbergen’s On the Theory of Economic Policy or anything of the sort; it is a paragraph of a few lines). Engels, in Anti-Dühring (a book positively cited in Lewontin and Levins’s The Dialectical Biologist—which contains in its opening pages a dedication to Friedrich Engels that reads, “To Friedrich Engels, who got a lot of things wrong but got what mattered right”—as well as in other works), argues that the law of value initially ceases to govern only labor power (under socialism) and subsequently the other commodities as well (under communism), being replaced in both cases by a new law according to which the value of commodities is determined by the social needs they satisfy; Engels also develops arguments clearly reinforcing this direction concerning the validity of the law of value in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.

One cannot deny the furious anti-Marxists and anti-communists roaming about (and they are so dangerous because if they do not understand what Marxism is, still less do they understand what Socialism and Communism are) that the central cell—the progressive extinction of the law of value—exists and is defined. Yet surely even they cannot deny not only that it is minimally defined, but also that there is an enormous difference between a minimal cell and an organism functioning as a self-organized system (a phenomenon appearing in complex systems studied in the mathematical theory of complexity and consisting in the configuration of an order resulting from the interaction among the elements of an initially disordered system—the social state resulting from the resolution of crisis and the transition from one mode of production to another). As an example, the amount of time that elapsed before the first cell initiating life on Earth (since statistical simulations probabilistically indicate that this is how it happened) became a biological system as such was certainly not short.

Moreover, what social relations of production were implemented in the Soviet Union? Was labor power remunerated according to the social needs that it satisfied? What scientific-statistical methodology (and here the role of technological level begins to become visible) did they use to quantify those needs—which are not merely material but also spiritual^[3], as Marx makes clear in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844? There was no private ownership of the means of production by persons considered as members of civil society, but there was paper money (where instead there should have existed some well-defined system of equivalence among commodities not subject to artificial fluctuations—not subject to price variation, since paper money and speculation do not exist—that faithfully reflected in exchange relations the technical conditions of production of the commodities being exchanged) and there was state private property (because it is a fact that members of the Communist Party did not live in the same way as the people—even so, the people had greater material dignity than under Western capitalism then and now, although the spiritual dimension remained unresolved; and greater material dignity was hardly detrimental to the people). Thus classes existed insofar as the enjoyment of the social product did not belong to those who produced it—this is the fundamental characteristic—but to the Soviet political class, which underwent bourgeoisification and transformed the Soviet State (beginning with Stalin) into what Marx described as political power, namely, “the organized power of one class for oppressing another” (in classless societies the State is merely an administrator; organs of war directed toward political—class—repression such as police and army do not even exist, because without class antagonisms political power also ceases to exist). This was so even though oppression in the material plane was far less forceful and intense than in the West, while ideologically it was less subtle—the West is more elegant in its methods; one need only ask Merkel about the microphones installed in her office by the Government of the United States that produced a diplomatic incident some years ago—and even foreign actors appeared near the collapse of the Soviet Union, for example the bank David Rockefeller opened in Moscow’s Red Square (which does not belong to the set of “conspiracy theories”; it is a well-documented fact that an elementary web search can verify).

Evidently, what existed in the Soviet Union was State Capitalism, a variant of the capitalist mode of production in which, as Borísov et al.’s dictionary of Political Economy states, it “constitutes a means of struggle against foreign capital, uproots the economic roots of its domination, helps strengthen and develop the national economy. The state sector increasingly stimulates the rapid rise of the productive forces and creates the economic premises for those countries to embark upon a non-capitalist path of development. In the period of transition from capitalism to socialism, state capitalism represents a special form of subordinating capitalist enterprises to the dictatorship of the proletariat, established in order to prepare the conditions for the socialist socialization of all production.” It may also be mixed in the sense that foreign private enterprises coexist with it (while their power over national society is limited) and/or in the sense that private ownership of the means of production is shared by the capitalist State together with domestic or foreign private enterprises (the latter is the case of Cuba, for example), while a case combining the types of state capitalism just mentioned is what occurs in Venezuela.

All this without yet mentioning that capitalism underwent an extremely extended process of birth, since its economic development preceded by centuries its political consolidation as the dominant mode of production. Medieval boroughs, commercial expansion, mercantile accumulation, and later manufacture prepared the material conditions of the new society over several centuries (a process traceable from the High Middle Ages and which long before 1789 had reached a degree of development sufficient to distinguish the bourgeoisie clearly as a historically ascending class). Nevertheless, it is reasonable to locate its decisive political crystallization in the French bourgeois revolution of 1789 and, as the emblematic milestone of that process, in the storming of the Bastille on July 14. What occurred there was not capitalism appearing out of nowhere—it had existed for a long time and was already developed and diffused to varying degrees throughout the known world of the time—but rather the great bourgeoisie decisively conquering political power and beginning consciously to transform institutions in accordance with the needs of the new social relations of production, a process subsequently expanded across much of Europe, including through the Napoleonic Wars. The date 1789 therefore expresses the political crystallization of a much longer material transformation, not the instantaneous birth of capitalist relations.

Of course, the advance of the new mode of social production was not linear. It is well known that France subsequently returned for a considerable period to constitutional monarchy because the feudal class temporarily regained power. Nor has it yet been mentioned that the Soviet Union found itself threatened by the West (not merely militarily—the fundamental factor driving it into the arms race—but ideologically as well—one of the factors determining the need to enter the space race), so the planning of its entire economic and social development had to be oriented under these two major constraints. It is no secret among those who knew the Soviet Union that calculations were still being made with abacuses in supermarkets while the country competed on equal footing with the United States in the space and nuclear races (even surpassing it in many respects, obviously at a high cost). In this sense, neither has it been mentioned that there are indications of substantial Soviet financial indebtedness to Western capital during at least the final period of its existence, precisely in order to finance the arms and space races.

International trade, imperialism, and development

Finally, a question of fundamental importance arises: why is the situation different in industrialized countries from countries in regions such as Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East? The answer has multiple faces, which will be presented synthetically by moving from the simplest to the most complex and, therefore, from short-run historical aspects (the more recent ones) to long-run historical aspects (those more distant in time). First, one must ask: do relations of distribution in those countries possess the same specific characteristics? Do they have the same tax structure, the same degree of government participation in the economy, the same alignment between fiscal-policy and monetary-policy objectives, the same labor regulations, the same degree of wage indexation to inflation and productivity, etc.?

If the answer is negative, someone might even consider capitalism functional and believe that all it requires is a sufficiently high level of technological development, which could also seem intuitive to someone, although it remains false nonetheless. To verify its falsity, however, a less superficial analysis is necessary; therefore, it is useful to introduce here the role of international trade, both in its legal and illegal dimensions.

Beginning in the 1990s, free-trade agreements were signed between industrialized countries (fundamentally the United States) and the countries of Latin America. Some thirty years have now passed since those agreements were signed in most of those countries, and the promised results in economic growth, employment, social development, and related matters never arrived. Instead, inequality increased in those countries (sometimes alongside significant economic growth, but always with rising inequality) and produced a wave of governments throughout the region that broke with Washington’s policies after reaching power through elections, something unthinkable at the end of the previous century, particularly during the Cold War. These free-trade agreements have one fundamental characteristic: they do not take technological asymmetries into account (which become asymmetries in competitiveness) between firms in industrialized and non-industrialized countries. The result of trade is therefore a situation in which, as the celebrated Uruguayan poet Eduardo Galeano put it, rich countries specialize in winning and poor countries specialize in losing (which is merely the generalization to the international plane of the class struggle occurring nationally), because firms from industrialized countries can produce at lower cost and higher quality, against which there is little or nothing that can be done. The same industrialized countries then “generously” offer loans to cover deficits that they themselves, together with the ruling class of the non-industrialized countries, have helped create, at usurious rates (as has been the tradition of international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, etc.), while conditioning the destination of those funds (formally known as “loan conditionality clauses”), which is not only a clear violation of a country’s sovereignty but also a systematic large-scale fraud.

Why is it said that this pairing of ruling classes produces such deficits in a country’s national accounts? First, because a deficit is generated and/or intensified by trade imbalances (the result of putting “David” without his sling and without divine backing into a fight with “Goliath,” that is, competition between industrialized and non-industrialized countries); second, because they are the only social class that generally and systematically evades and avoids taxes (even though these countries’ tax structures are deeply regressive, which should not be surprising, since the reason they founded these countries was precisely to avoid paying the corresponding tribute to the Spanish viceroyalty—the equivalent of what we now call taxes); third, because public officials whose electoral campaigns are financed by them are commonly not only those who servilely legislate in their favor (the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz describes this even for American politics in his book Globalization and Its Discontents—specifically, how those financing Bush’s political campaigns accompanied him everywhere in order to ensure that the commitments he made during the electoral campaign aligned with their interests, and conditioned the financing of the candidate accordingly^[2]) but also because one attraction of such servility (in addition to direct payments) for corrupt public officials (who are usually precisely the ones who reach the most important offices, because this forms part of the design of the political system) is the plundering of public institutions. At the political-bureaucratic level, corruption is an inevitable consequence of the exercise of power in class societies (which is why the people must always remain vigilant and organized against it, since corruption never occurs in favor of the majority but only in favor of a minority—whatever minority that may be, but ultimately always of the ruling class, which opens channels favorable to capital accumulation that are legally and formally closed and can therefore only be opened through corruption), while from the political-ideological point of view it results from declassing, that is, from the lack of class consciousness among members of the working class who become corrupted.

Fourth, we must examine transnational corporations (belonging to the industrialized countries) and the commercial behavior of industrialized countries in relation to the trade policies that they “suggest” (with a financial club in one hand and a military club in the other) that poor countries adopt. It is no secret that the policies of the Washington “Consensus” (curiously, they use such a word when none of the countries to which those policies were “suggested” participated in reaching it; empires must have a peculiar way of understanding dialogue with other nations) are not followed by Germany (which to date has not allowed Walmart to enter, something that produces no newspaper headlines about “communist enemies of the free market,” and whose state participation in the economy over the last half century—and even further back—has never fallen below 50% as a proportion of gross domestic product), still less by the United States [where the FED lends to private banks at a zero rate (and is, in fact, an institution under the power of private actors, specifically American private bankers, obtaining its operating funds from federal revenue, which in a country where the rich pay no taxes—and hence the American Occupy Wall Street protest movement around 2011—is collected fundamentally from the people—a people who paid for the 2008 financial crisis generated precisely by American private bankers, something Joseph Stiglitz describes masterfully in his article “Stupid Capitalists,” easily available on the web); where the agricultural sector contains extremely strong tariff barriers that satisfy no free-market criterion; and many other related features sharing the characteristic of being precisely the opposite of what the country prescribes in economic policy, both fiscal and monetary], Canada, Sweden, or any industrialized country (at least not until the beginning of this century, a matter to be addressed later).

Moreover, it is no secret that these great transnational corporations, which absorb the domestic firms of non-industrialized countries through legal and less-than-legal means, do not pay taxes in the poor countries they enter. Evidence includes the military coup generated from the United States embassy against Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala after he demanded that the United Fruit Company pay the taxes established by the Guatemalan tax regulations then in force (which predated his presidency), the military coup orchestrated by the Chilean bourgeoisie and the United States embassy in Chile against Salvador Allende during the last century (which, let us remember, was not long ago), and in general all the bloody right-wing military dictatorships installed throughout Latin America during the last century bearing the bloody seal of Uncle Sam’s democracy, with the “solidary” purpose of exploiting and plundering our peoples.

The saying “a lamp for the street, darkness at home” may be reversed to produce “a lamp at home, darkness in the street,” which precisely describes the morally hypocritical and economically efficient behavior of the governments of industrialized countries (which express the political interests of the ruling class), whose societies are model societies fundamentally because they succeed in transferring all the social contradictions associated with the bourgeoisie’s processes of capital accumulation into underdeveloped societies, thereby intensifying their underdevelopment. In the United States, considering the same historical moment in comparison, have the same wages ever been paid, the same labor benefits provided, the same number of hours worked, the same number of vacation days granted, labor rights violated with the same intensity (except in the case of undocumented workers, which is why immigration never ends and why the great capitals of industrialized countries are precisely those least interested in seeing it end), natural resources optimized to the same extent (the United States wants to obtain the oil of the Middle East and Venezuela but curiously avoids touching its own reserves), the same quantity of taxes evaded and avoided, etc.? Evidently not.

Observe that the American and German maquilas that enslave boys and girls in China and Vietnam (to mention only some), and the maquilas that pitilessly exploit women and men for starvation wages in countries such as Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala (again, only to mention some) “curiously” are not located in their countries of origin or in any industrialized country [except China; after industrialization it is well known that around 2008 China decided to move toward an “inward-growth” model (because the world economy entered recession, global demand contracted, and although China had been a country whose growth in recent decades was based fundamentally on demand for goods and services from the rest of the world—which is why its GDP grew so strongly despite very low wages and labor vulnerability, the very features of the Chinese working environment that attracted Western firms—it was not significantly affected by contractions in world demand beginning with the 2008 financial crisis because—as Marcelo Justo reports in his BBC Mundo article “The countries where the minimum wage rose the most,” published March 5, 2015—the Chinese authorities had already planned and publicly announced before the crisis that the Chinese economy would migrate toward a growth model based on domestic demand, so income redistribution had already begun within China before the crisis in order for the final consumption demand of so many millions of Chinese people to stimulate the Chinese economy instead of demand from the rest of the world—thus between 2005 and 2015 the minimum wage rose by between 8% and 13%, while Expansión/Datosmacro.com reports that China’s interprofessional minimum wage rose from 170.3 euros in 2013 to 271.6 euros in 2018—and this is how China was able, despite the contraction in global demand, to continue growing and consolidate itself as a hegemonic empire, something that occurred in the context of the COVID-19 health crisis), so Western maquilas have begun progressively moving to countries such as Vietnam, because a model based on domestic demand—which is the model found in industrialized countries—is incompatible with starvation wages and related labor conditions that those same industrialized-country maquilas seek elsewhere]. They are located precisely in underdeveloped countries, in poor countries. What interest, then, could they possibly have in the development of poor countries? The slightest common sense suggests none. Additionally, it should be said that they are equally uninterested in caring for the environment when it is not their own environment, as shown by the well-known practice of open-pit mining by Canadian corporations in Latin American countries.

Of course, nothing has yet been said about the plunder carried out by industrialized European countries against non-industrialized European countries such as Greece, Portugal, and even Spain (which is a strange economic creature because it is relatively industrialized—not to the level of Germany, but industrialized—while being plundered without restraint by its domestic bourgeoisie and by foreign bourgeoisies, fundamentally by the bourgeoisie owning the German empire—obviously it is an empire; the fact that it does not display the caveman manners of the United States is another matter—which is the bourgeoisie fundamentally engaged in plundering all of underdeveloped Europe; Germany does not lend to Greece, Spain, or Portugal in order to lift them out of underdevelopment either—that would amount to “shooting itself in the foot,” since in imperial republics the republic depends on what the empire plunders). But this is discussed not only by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz in his article “The Capture of the ECB” (referring to the control of the European Central Bank by European financial capital), but also in the famous case of the president of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who wanted to forgive Greek debt (because, as Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman—also a Nobel laureate—as well as Yanis Varoufakis—the Greek Finance Minister in charge when debt renegotiations with the Troika took place—have argued, Varoufakis recounts in various interviews available on YouTube, some together with Joseph Stiglitz, others with Slavoj Žižek, and others with Noam Chomsky, that during the negotiations he received telephone threats concerning his son’s safety if he did not abandon his negotiating line—opposed to that of German capitalists, but he continued, as he should have; when someone confronts capitalism he is seeking to guarantee the survival of the species and any collateral damage that is not the species in general, the people, is acceptable—as well as evidence in both action and words from German negotiators that German financial capitalists did not actually want the debt to be paid, because the debt was not only about the profitability of capital but also possessed a political component: they wanted to politically subjugate Greece—a left-wing party, Syriza, had come to power—in order to keep it economically subjugated. Thus, for negotiations to continue, following the cowardice of the democratically elected president—who had submitted to the Greek people in a referendum whether they were willing to face the consequences of deciding not to pay the debt to the German bankers, and the people magnificently voted YES!—Yanis Varoufakis had to resign so that negotiations could continue, now in a docile tone toward international financial capital, which constituted a flagrant betrayal of the people by the Greek “left.”

Thus another myth is dismantled, and all of this without mentioning the role played by vulture funds in the economic policy of underdeveloped countries or the plunder of the African continent and the resources of the Middle East. It would be interesting to compare the income that great international capitals obtain from the sum of the entire underdeveloped economy (both legal income and illegal income from the illicit traffic of weapons and drugs—which politicians in poor countries permit more readily—the slave labor exploited by American diamond companies in Africa, and the value of natural resources appropriated without payment) with the income they obtain within the United States alone, in order to gain an approximate idea of the magnitude of the plunder carried out in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. Marx expresses this in arguing that the world market merely transfers capitalism’s internal contradictions to a broader sphere of action or, in the words of the political scientist Dagoberto Gutiérrez, every imperial republic (a republic that has developed sufficiently within the international context of social classes to become an empire as well) consists precisely of the republic as such and the empire as such, and in this sense the flourishing of the republic depends upon what the empire plunders from the colonies it subjugates. Of course, although this occurs with the United States (precisely as it has been displaced by China and Russia in the world market as hegemonic powers, the flourishing of its republic has become progressively conditioned until reaching the lamentable condition in which it now finds itself—the reason is that the world surplus or surplus value is redistributed differently when hegemony changes, in a fashion that has progressively become less advantageous for the American empire), this is not the first time it has occurred, and it is a characteristic of every imperial republic, a planetary-scale social phenomenon in which class struggle reaches its most general expression; such was the case with the Romans and their plunder of barbarian peoples during the era of the slave mode of production.

Primitive accumulation and the colonial legacy

Now it is time to address the widely disseminated idea (and surely one shared by most people—alienation is powerful) that colonial plunder has no influence on the present socioeconomic conditions of the peoples of Latin America and Africa or, more generally, that the past has no influence on the present (which is merely the essence of the first idea). In the great Marxist economist Ernest Mandel’s Late Capitalism, it is stated that the value of the gold plundered from the Americas was equivalent to ten times the entirety of European railway capital of the period. Let us bring that fact into the present (afterward it will be time to examine whether the stated multiple is correct or incorrect).

It is evident that during the implementation and diffusion of the Industrial Revolution the firms moving the greatest amounts of capital were precisely those belonging to the railway sector, since that sector or productive branch (to use Marxist terminology) moved not merely the steam engines as such (as an innovation in themselves), but also the steel from which those machines were constructed and the steel used to construct the tracks upon which those machines moved. In the midst of a process of generalized industrial expansion across an entire continent (the Industrial Revolution first manifested itself phenomenally in 1760 in Manchester—surely on a rainy day, or perhaps it did not rain that day?—and its generalized implementation in Western Europe, the United States, and Canada was consolidated by 1840), this would hardly seem a trivial matter, especially considering that, as Marx reports in Volume I of Capital, drawing in turn on well-referenced official public reports of the period, royal decrees were approved allowing the nascent bourgeoisie to plunder churches and the tombs of saints through violent means (and others not quite so violent), extracting any gold possessions (including gold teeth) for minting currency. Common sense would appear to indicate that, relative to the circulation requirements of European capital at the time, there was not enough gold; on the contrary, it became extremely scarce relative to those requirements. Merely as additional information of interest, it should be mentioned that violent means were also used to expropriate direct producers from their lands (surely more violent means, since the Church was not entirely devoid of power), and this, together with actions of the same ethical-moral stature (judge that ethics and morality however one wishes), constitutes the “secret” of primitive accumulation.

Not only does the impact of European gold plunder appear far from negligible in terms of the initial resources available when the republics of the Americas (fundamentally Latin America) were constituted following the independence processes occurring across the continent, but it also appears to have been fundamental to the functioning of European capitalism. One should not forget that the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in Europe were far from decorous, and grotesque facts are perfectly documented: 18-hour working days for men, 16 for women, and 14 for boys and girls, overcrowding in factories, the hiring of paid killers (the famous “strikebreakers”) in case workers organized to demand a little dignity and, for brevity, “et cetera.” European capitalism was built upon the sweat, blood, and tears of America, fundamentally Latin America.

Now it is time to address the scale factor, that is, the claim that the plundered gold bore a ratio of 10 to 1 to railway capital. Assume that Mandel maliciously exaggerates the figure by a factor of two (to choose a relatively arbitrary number), producing a ratio of 5 to 1; then assume that Mandel takes the number from a source measuring it with a 50% error, leaving a ratio of 2.5 to 1; finally, assume that macroeconomic accounting at the time had profound deficiencies and recorded the data with another 50% error, producing a ratio of 1.25 to 1, that is, 125%.

Evidently, the joint requirements of capital and circulation at the time of the first great Industrial Revolution in history appear to have been harsher (even socially) than those observed in 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic; nevertheless, using this pandemic as a reference will suffice to finish making the point, which is nothing more than a simple question: what impact would it have on a businessman today, in terms of the consolidation of his firm and its future rate of capital accumulation (the rate at which surplus value—capital—reproduces itself or, in other words, at which the capitalist’s investment returns and expands the volume of functioning capital), if in the context of the health crisis and economic crisis someone for some reason simply gave him capital worth 125% of the capital he already had in operation (without interest, tricks, legal implications of fraud, or anything of that sort)? Once again, it is evident that European capitalism was built upon the blood, bones, and tears of America, fundamentally Latin America, in addition to the obvious impact that such plunder had upon America itself (everything that might have been done with those resources). And this is without yet mentioning the impact on primitive capital accumulation and on the capital accumulation that made consolidation of the Industrial Revolution possible through the slave labor power obtained by military means throughout the Americas (and that is no trivial detail, because the Roman Empire, the greatest empire in history, was built upon slaves and plunder—and the feudal class did likewise—so in the best possible case its contribution was “merely” significant).

In a world in which things operated with absolute justice, they ought to return everything stolen with the same usurious interest rates at which their financial institutions lend to Latin American countries or pay the debt of their ancestors with their own blood, but evidently we do not live in the world of the just but in the world of the strong; it is a malicious jungle, because not everyone arrives in the jungle with the same resources (and therefore the jungle is not equally savage for everyone). Evidence of this is that the Industrial Revolution did not arrive in Latin America, and while it unfolded in Europe people here were struggling to free themselves from the colonial yoke of murderous invaders who mixed indigenous peoples with rapists, murderers, kidnappers, and other forms of lumpenproletariat; that is, Latin America was not forced to mix with Europe’s best men (and here it really is appropriate to say only men, because those who directly committed these atrocities were men, even though society in general was complicit), but rather with the decomposition of its society. In the United States they simply exterminated indigenous people without mixing with them and left a few as a kind of “exhibit” in certain enormous forest cages called “Indian reservations,” as though they were elk or deer—the ways of Yankee democracy (which is why what they did and continue to do in Washington with undocumented boys and girls should not seem surprising, not only under Trump but under Biden as well; they have done it since the country’s foundation). Finally, it should be remembered that plunder continues not only financially (through the intensification of deficits and loans at usurious rates to “correct” those deficits—to date no country has managed to correct them using those prescriptions), but also through the asymmetric free-trade agreements mentioned above, which not only dismantle the national productive fabric but legally permit aberrations such as allowing only American companies to possess a monopoly (this is the case for El Salvador under CAFTA-DR, which stands in flagrant conflict with the country’s Constitution, since the latter establishes that only the State may do so—and here the philosophy of free-market fundamentalism is clearly revealed: the market above the State or, in other words, capital above human beings).

The foregoing does not include the fact that these trade agreements allow, explicitly or implicitly (the Salvadoran economist Raúl Moreno has written abundant and precise research on the matter), industrialized countries to patent biodiversity existing in poor countries without compensating in any way the country possessing that natural wealth, and then use that biodiversity to create medicines that are sold back in poor countries (from which the active ingredients were extracted) at exorbitant prices (far above the technical conditions of production of those medicines and, above all, far above the real costs of the inputs, since the biodiversity was obtained for free—like gold exchanged for mirrors—and at most one can count the cost of transporting it, which is trivial in comparison with the cost that might have been involved in purchasing the biodiversity and patenting it—how much would they charge if the situation were reversed?). Among many other matters that need not be mentioned because the point has been conclusively demonstrated, there is also the fact that in many instances such medicines served to cure diseases that they themselves had produced through experiments carried out behind people’s backs, using them as guinea pigs, something perfectly documented in Guatemala and Puerto Rico, although surely those were not the only countries to experience the “sweetness” of international Yankee democracy (all the foregoing concerning present plunder, merely to mention a couple of examples for the sake of brevity). Thus plunder did not merely occur in the past: it continues, and present generations of the “old” continent are therefore as guilty as their ancestors insofar as European capitalism continues to be built and to function.

Violence, women’s struggle, and social transformation

And now the time has come to close this exposition by examining more deeply why violence is the midwife of history and under what conditions violence in social struggle is justified as a historical necessity of peoples. When one analyzes the evolution of capitalism, it becomes evident that every social right obtained by the working class has been wrested by force from the capitalist class (from the eight-hour working day to the minimum wage, the year-end bonus, women’s right to vote, among others), except for the right of women to work (speaking here of the period in which the Industrial Revolution was becoming established), because this suited the capitalist class insofar as it caused wages to fall (through the simple law of supply and demand), increased the number of unemployed workers (the industrial reserve army or relative surplus population, with all the psychological importance this has in causing workers to self-exploit for fear of losing their jobs), and, holding output at a given level, even though individual wages declined, the total wage mass increased, which will always unfailingly benefit the capitalist class in its accumulation of capital, but not necessarily the working class (that depends on concrete circumstances, since one would have to examine the specific values assumed by changes in real wages—other things being equal, such as the statistical measurement of the basic consumption basket, for example—but if such changes are negative, they are not favorable, unless they are positive).

Women are demanding a change in the culture of those men who are significant accomplices of machismo (and of those women who are significant accomplices of machismo as well); however, it is evident that these changes can only arrive through public policies that strengthen women’s security (which should not be confused with militarizing society—something much favored by Latin American oligarchies and bourgeoisies) and through ferocious public campaigns against the machismo from which society suffers as a structural disease.

The matter becomes more complicated when one considers that implementing the two public policies just mentioned (necessary to satisfy the just demands of feminists) requires resources (which must be obtained from public coffers plundered by the domestic ruling class, the foreign ruling class, and the domestic governing class); that the ruling class is and always has been patriarchal (the “breeding ground” of oppression among human beings is the oppression of women by men, as Engels masterfully explains in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State—and in this sense the bourgeois class is no exception); and that this would hardly seem a trivial matter. Moreover, those two public policies require a whole set of complementary public policies given how deeply rooted machismo is in the social psyche (which implies monitoring those policies through time with a view to periodically maximizing their effectiveness—optimizing them) throughout the world, regardless of the fact that it assumes cruder and more visible forms in Latin America (at least generally, since exceptions clearly may exist), because it is associated with class struggle, the distribution of income, and another series of fundamental variables of the capitalist system of political economy in general (here I am not referring merely to the capitalist system of political economy as a productive system in particular, but to it as society or social system). The resources necessary for such public policy, at least in Latin America and especially in Latin America during the health and economic crisis, do not appear capable of coming from anywhere other than collecting more taxes from the working class (which does not appear easy, since raising wages could damage profits, public coffers are empty—they and their henchmen have plundered them—and collecting more taxes on consumption—regressive taxes paid by the people—would not only aggravate the economic crisis with near certainty but could also harm profits if final consumption demand falls sufficiently—which is the only thing they care about) or finally “daring” themselves to pay taxes (which seems like an extraordinarily abstract utopia, given that they founded these countries precisely in order not to pay taxes).

Before continuing it is useful to distinguish several senses of the word “violence” that belong to the same genus but are not therefore identical in each of their concrete determinations. In the most general sense used in this exposition, violence is an extraordinary force or intensity capable of removing a system from the ordinary reproduction of its state; in the social realm such a rupture may take the form of strikes, blockades, occupations, disobedience, destruction of objects or symbols, intrusion into institutional spaces and, under certain historical circumstances, physical confrontation between persons or groups. All these forms share the fact that they overcome or attempt to overcome resistance from the existing order, but they are not therefore tactically identical nor do they necessarily produce the same effects.

The general legitimacy of violence exercised by those systematically subjected to an oppressive order against the structures reproducing that order does not mean that every individual act, merely because it is violent, is automatically intelligent, necessary, effective, or ethically and politically indistinguishable from every other act. It means something prior and more fundamental: one cannot condemn the violent rupture of an order in the abstract while accepting as invisible, normal, or “civilized” the structural violence through which that same order reproduces itself every day. The concrete form that such violence should assume is a historical, tactical, and political problem and, like every concrete problem, can only be resolved through the concrete analysis of the concrete situation.

How could a state of affairs such as the one described above (founded upon violently spilled blood, hunger, deceit, ideological manipulation, false hopes, and in which those who benefit from such a state of affairs have no interest in seeing it change) be altered even minimally without violence? To demand “civilized” behavior from the women who took to the streets is not only to demand something whose meaning is hardly free of ambiguity; it is to demand that they not seek to alter the existing state of affairs, because those who criticize that use of violence are those who (through convenience or ideological alienation) conceive the present state of affairs as civilization itself. The same applies to racism and the demonstrations unleashed in the United States following the case of police violence that ended in the tragic death of George Floyd.

The response “Those are not the right ways” does not appear valid, because the opposite ways have produced no result over several decades (at least since the final decade of the last century people have been talking about eradicating machismo, and in Latin America it becomes more acute by the day—and Europe in general does not seem very different), and it is they who live, breathe, walk, dream, think, love, and miss others while anguished and afraid, burdened with complexes and trauma. “Those are not the right ways”? Recall the definition of the quality of being violent: “that which implies extraordinary force and intensity,” that is, outside what is ordinary. And what is “ordinary” related to? The word “ordinal,” according to the same RAE dictionary already cited, means “belonging or relating to order”; and in this sense, understanding order as the natural order of a system of political economy in general and considering that the same dictionary defines “to violate” as “to apply violent means to things or persons in order to overcome their resistance,” it is evident that the demonstrations had to exercise some form of violence upon the present state of affairs in the general sense defined above: to interrupt, block, disobey, intrude, or in some way prevent the order from continuing to reproduce itself as if nothing were occurring. This does not determine in advance which concrete form of violence is tactically appropriate in every circumstance, but it does determine something prior and more general: an order that actively resists its own transformation does not change simply because it is asked voluntarily to cease being what it is (which is why humanity has used and will continue to use different forms of violence for as long as societies exist in which individuals cannot peacefully resolve contradictions that, by virtue of their social structure, are irreconcilable—class interests).

Indeed, an alternative definition of “to violate” is “to enter a house or another place against the will of its owner.” If republics are the estates of the “Latin” bourgeoisie and oligarchs (who generally tend to have more European ancestry than otherwise), then the young women of a few days ago decided to enter the house to negotiate against the will of its owner because the owner refused to come out and engage in dialogue. In reality, the owners of these countries have never liked dialogue, because a ruling class must possess considerable intelligence to favor dialogue and it does not appear realistic to expect this from non-industrialized ruling classes. After all, in class societies the psyche of the ruling class is reflected (although in distorted form) in the psyche of the dominated class (this is what alienation consists in), and everyone understands perfectly well that underdevelopment is not merely material but also possesses subjective, psychological elements. If the rights of a massive sector of society (women) are being systematically violated through policies dictated by the owners of the house to its administrators (the governing class, professional politicians), if dialogue is sought with them and they refuse to engage with the affected social sector, I believe my grandmother would agree that the proverb “A word to the wise, a stick to the fool” is appropriate. She surely had not read Gramsci, but she had read life itself.

Let this era, then, be the era of revolutions at every scale or, at the very least, let it be the era in which humanity begins to move irreversibly toward its extinction because we are incapable of understanding one another, as we did manage to do so many thousands of years ago when we left Africa in search of new horizons and, as Homo sapiens, prevailed over the Neanderthals in the unbridled race for survival while confronting, as a common enemy, a nature that was merciless relative to the technological precariousness of the period. It must never be forgotten that Neanderthals were not intellectually rudimentary creatures in comparison with Homo sapiens: they possessed brains of similar and often larger absolute size, developed relatively sophisticated technologies, and there is convergent evidence of symbolic behavior and at least certain linguistic capacities^[4]. In what, then, might a decisive advantage of Homo sapiens have consisted? Not necessarily in some simple intellectual superiority, but, among other factors still under debate, in demographic differences and in the capacity to construct broader social and cooperative networks; put simply, in the scale at which we managed to understand one another. It is time to begin a reverse exodus toward our roots (which will surely take several centuries) or to disappear irretrievably because of our stupidity, which curiously is a characteristic belonging only to rational animals.