A superpower not like the others...

Sometimes one has the impression that globalization is nothing more than globalized nationalisms. Among them stands China’s nationalism. What China did was nothing else than make an exact copy of the Western obsession with boundless, endless increase in production and consumption of commodities and sell it to the West at a lower price. Joe Bennett documents the gigantic development of China with his unique narrative talent, in a book in which he seeks the source of his… underpants. His original query: how is it possible to buy so many cheap ‘made in China’ products and be in almost complete ignorance about China and the modus operandi of its economy? Joe travelled to this huge mother of world trade to discover how, where and by whom his underpants are manufactured. What were his impressions? They were mixed. On the one hand, happy (too happy perhaps for Westerners), smiling people. But, on the other, a huge scale in almost everything, a shocking exploitation and mechanization of workers, a dirty and uncontrolled ‘develpoment’. Such a large scale, that human beings get lost on the way, become dots on monitors, like in the port of Shanghai:

excerpt in English (the control tower in the port of Shanghai) not available

China learned to play the insane game of global capitalism, of production of mass commodities out of every proportion, of total control of human beings, better than Westerners. And without biting its own bait, without becoming a consumer itself. But, one may wonder, does not China import anything? Of course it does:

excerpt in English (China's imports and exports) not available

Reading Bennett’s book one realizes that, in the dusk of the hubristic Western consumerist civilization, we see the dawn of its nemesis: its exact copy, selling to it its own products cheaper, faster, and easier. Today’s globalized capitalism could not find itself in a worse adventure than that of depending, for its own survival, on a far more cynical, inhumane, mechanical version of it, tirelessly set to prove that all these cheap copies it massively produces may, eventually, embody globalized capitalism's more authentic spirit.

Elective sympathies

I see, on the occasion of the occupation of the Athens Law School by illegal immigrants, a flood of sympathy flowing their way, in and through references to the sanctity of asylum in its ancient Greek meaning and the sanctity of the immigrants themselves, who, in the cradle of civilization and hospitality that Greece historically is, should have been treated better by authorities. All the ‘leftist’ humanists who argue so refuse to see the reality around them. They take the decadence that has stamped Greece in the last thirty years as granted. These humanists take it for granted that Greeks should feel like immigrants in their own country, against the bizarre background of the absurd institution of the university asylum, spineless politicians unabe to deal with it, religious leaders acting like opinion leaders and, most of all, endless symbolisms. Our humanists look above and beyond what ordinary Greeks live through in a free falling country, turning their eyes away: turning their eyes to the immigrants. There is no humanism more inhumane than the ‘humanism’ of shutting your eyes in front of a decadence that you have so much embraced, letting it become part of you, that you take it for granted: so much for granted, that you immediately and unhesitatingly label as ‘Right Wing’ or ‘racist’ anyone who might dare argue against you. Anyone, that is, who might argue that despite everything things may still take a positive turn, that not everything is lost, that Greece does not exist symbolically, despite the fact that it has been plagued for decades by all sorts of outdated symbolisms: the symbolism of the university asylum, the symbolic occupations of universities, schools, roads, public buildings, symbolic strikes by civil servants, the symbolic marginalization of anyone not wishing to take part in this feast of symbolisms. If we truly wish to leave symbolisms behind and return to reality, looking it straight in the eye, we have to see, before turning our attention to the immigrants, what we have to do, what is really happening in this bankrupt country – bankrupt not financially but, most of all, culturally.