Fernando Mires
The New Ideological Swindle: The GLOBAL SOUTH
on August 12, 2023
Translated by Oded Balaban balaban@research.haifa.ac.il
Every meaning has an original signifier (carrier of meaning, O.B.), which, when written or spoken, nominates and gives meaning to that same meaning. But sometimes, as it happens with birds in spring, the signifiers fly from the original nest to other objects, which they re-signify. This is what happens in poetry. A poem written with original signifiers ceases to be a poem and becomes prose. That —the dislocation of signifiers concerning their original meanings— is undoubtedly a feature shared by poetry and madness. In both cases, that of the poet and that of the madman, the untamed forces of the unconscious, whether individual or collective, are at work.
But we will refer not to this unconscious separation (metonymic or metaphoric) between signified and signifier in this text but to another. We will refer to the conscious de-signification, that is, to the one that operates intentionally or ideologically premeditatedly. Or, to put it in everyday language: to that treacherous purpose of those who try to trick you, to those who say they sell sheep meat and sell it to you as horse meat, to those who want to present a genocidal invasion as an act of pacification. This transmutation of the signifier is what, in common parlance, we call a scam.
The autocratic offensive
Concepts are products, and when exchanged, they are not exempt from the possibility of becoming a fraud. That is why we assume that great frauds are committed in commerce, in all its forms, local or global. However, they can be extended to all areas where exchange relations occur, and one of them, not only because they become part of commercial practices, are those of political exchange.
How many dictatorships have been established in the name of offering democracy and freedom? If not all of them, most of them. Even those who raised a theoretical slogan, “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” when the time came to postulate themselves, hid such anti-political expression, replacing it with the less aggressive one of “popular democracy.” Indeed, no dictatorship does not think of itself as a democracy of a “new type.” Worse still, as the dictators of China or Russia have dared to say, the one they represent is a “superior democracy”.
Looking at international political reality this way, we could affirm that every dictatorship swindles its citizens as swindles are the promises they raise on a global scale. One of these frauds —and it is the one we refer to in this article— is the one proposed today by the two maximum anti-democratic powers on earth, China and Russia: that of a multipolar order framed in the broader concept of the Global South, antagonistic to the supposed unipolar order, represented by the economic, political, cultural and military supremacy of the United States and Europe, that is, by what both mega-dictators call the West. In the words of Kawita Krischman:
… multipolarity has become the keystone of the shared language of global fascisms and authoritarianisms. It is a rallying cry for despots, that serves to dress up their war on democracy as a war on imperialism.
The Global South would be, according to its propagandists, a new international force erected, according to the south-globalist discourse, against the libertine, hypersexualized, immoral, colonialist, capitalist, exploitative West. Such an offer dazzles not a few members of the extreme right and the extreme left simultaneously. For the former, the Global South is a rebellion against a West that sweeps away the customs and traditions of nations, subordinating them to a culture that is —to use Putin's terms— “degenerate.” For the latter, the Global South is a historical force arising from anti-colonialist, anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and, above all, anti-American countries. Because of this duality shared by left and right, we defined Putin in another work as “a beast with two snouts,” with one snout directed to the right and the other to the left. Few dictators have managed to reconcile both extremes of the universal political spectrum in such an astute way.
From the Third World to the Global South
From a geographical point of view, the Global South starts from a radical incongruity. According to the most elementary logic, the South should be an antinomy of the North. But according to its spokespeople, the Global South has been erected as an antinomy of the West. We will let this pass, for we have already hinted that those who seek a strict correspondence between meanings and signifiers are destined to fail. The Global South wants to “en-globe” a set of nations that are supposed to be developing against a “capitalist” West that inhibits such development. That is the ideological intention.
Seen in this light, we find that the Global South would be nothing more than another concept to designate what, in the recent past, “anti-imperialist social scientists” called the Third World. Why this change of name? The explanation may be obvious: after the collapse of the communist World, there were only two worlds left: the democratic one and the rest. After 1990, no socialist society survived unless we call as such those autocratic shits that exist in countries such as Syria, North Korea, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Venezuela. According to all definitions, China is today the World's most capitalist country. In Russia, even a large part of the army invading Ukraine is a private company led by a war financial magnate. As is known, the social support base of Putin's dictatorship is a consumer mass subordinated to a savage capitalist oligarchy of which Prigozhin is only one of its members.
Now, according to the anti-capitalist discourse of the recent past, the Third World consisted of poor countries from which a revolution against the rich and capitalist countries should come. However, not all those who referred to the Third World agreed. For the pro-USSR communists, the Third World was a potentially revolutionary space against the First (capitalist) World, but only in the framework of bourgeois democratic revolutions led by the USSR and its communist parties. For the pro-China communists, the Maoists, the Third World was formed, according to Mao Tse Dong's image, by “the villages that would advance towards the cities” of the First World, which was included, according to Mao's manuals, the USSR itself.
Inspired by Mao's doctrine, let us recall the so-called “dependency theory”, whose leading exponents were the North Americans André Gunder Frank, Paul Sweezy, and Paul Baran, and the Brazilian Ruy Mauro Marini, who had outstanding academic and political success in Latin America. According to Maoist inspiration —which they did not recognize but was more than evident— the World was divided for these ideologues into metropolises and peripheries (Mao's villages) and, naturally, from the peripheries, Third World revolutions against the imperialist countries would emerge. Those revolutions made not in the name of freedoms but of needs, should be —given the extreme polarization between poor and rich countries— products of revolutionary violence. The sixties and seventies saw the rise of hippie and beatnik-type pacifism and the feast of the theoreticians of armed struggle—especially those who wrote from the so-called Third World.
The post-Hegelian theories of the Martiniquez psychiatrist Frantz Fanon caused a furor among the intellectuals of the “first world”. Even Jean-Paul Sartre —abandoning for a time Husserl's phenomenology, the basis of philosophical existentialism— decided to prologue from the café Les Deux Magots, the mythical book The Damned of the Earth, where Fanon inverted the Hegelian dialectic of the servant and the master, not to explain submission, but to propose the dialectical negation of the master through his physical death.
Less subtly, Regis Debray developed in his essay Revolution in Revolution? The theory of the guerrilla focus, whose function would be to catalyze the revolutionary potential nestled in Latin American countries. This theory sought, above all, to give ideological format to the ideology of the world revolution proclaimed by Che Guevara in his mythical Algiers speech (1965), one of the most disordered and hallucinated visions ever heard of, but which, perhaps for that reason, enamored generations of “Western” students, “revolutionaries” and potheads at the same time.
Let us remember Guevara when he wrote:
There are no frontiers in this struggle to the death. We cannot remain indifferent in the face of what occurs in any part of the World. A victory for any country against imperialism is our victory, just as any country's defeat is a defeat for all.
That would be the ideological premise of his famous slogan launched from the Bolivian highlands: “Create two, three Vietnams” (as if one had not been sufficiently atrocious). In other words, the Third World revolution —today called by the followers of Xi and Putin, Global South— was, for Che Guevara —let's put it in today's words— a global revolution against global imperialism.
Xi, whose Maoist scars are evident, does not use the word revolution when he speaks of the new multipolar order coming from the mythical Global South. But Putin uses a worse one: war: a war against the West, a war of which the invasion of Ukraine —a country on the road to democracy— has been seen by the Russian tyrant as an opening chapter. However, although without using the word war, Xi's speech is also meant to be anti-Western. The previous statement of both leaders during the Olympics in China testified to that commonality.
The West of rogue governments
What do the two mega-dictators of our time understand by the concept of the West against which the Global South would emerge, dragging a supposedly multipolar order of international character with it? One culture, against which the other cultures of the earth are united. But that is only an appearance.
The thesis I suggest here is not that the West is neither for Xi, nor for Putin, nor for the members of the imaginary Global South, a culture to which they try to oppose a multiculturality, but something more precise: a political order. A political order called democracy. A political order opposed to the one that both dictators defend in the world arena. So, to advance in the substantiation of the thesis, it seems appropriate to try to answer the question: What is the West? Or better formulated: What is the West for the dictatorships of the earth?
The difference between what the West is and what it has become for its enemies is relevant. The West, in the first place, was not an invention of Westerners but a term first coined in the 15th century, when rulers of non-Christianized countries in Asia referred to the Christian nations of western Eurasia. The primary definition was, as we see, religious-cultural and made when there was no separation between religion, culture, and state. To a certain extent, the West was the space of ideological jurisdiction of the Catholic Church, so Christianization was understood in the medieval past —especially from the Muslim World— as a synonym for Westernization.
Today, on the other hand, the West can be defined neither by a culture nor by a religion, still, as the result of the growing adoption of a democratic form of government that makes possible the coexistence of different ideologies, parties, and cultures under the hegemony of a constitutional state that guarantees the separation of the three public powers, that is, of everything that the so-called “anti-Western cultures” cannot claim for themselves.
When authors such as Spengler, Toynbee, and, more recently, Huntington told us about “the decline of the West,” they pointed to Western nations' cultural substratum. Well, they were not deluded. Western countries experienced a long period of cultural decline. But —and this was what the three great thinkers failed to understand— the cultural decadence of the West did not lead to the end of the West but quite the opposite. The cultural decadence of the West was the historical condition for the birth of another West: the West of our times, the modern West that emerged from the American Constitution, from the French Constituent Assembly, and, more recently, from the democratic and anti-communist revolution in Eastern Europe, from the fall of the dictatorships in Southern Europe and, not least, from the decline of the dictatorships in the Southern Cone of Latin America. In short, it is a political West, or more clearly, the democratic and political West of our time. A West is no longer governed by tradition, religion, or culture but by politics as a form of government and life. Naturally, the anti-democratic imperial powers and semi-powers, unable to define the West in political terms —if they had been able to do so, they would have had to accept its democratic nature— tried to describe it in economic terms.
During the Cold War, the West was, for the USSR and China, the space of world capitalism to be occupied by an anti-capitalist and socialist revolution. But today, when Russia and China have also become capitalist powers, they cannot define the West in economic terms either. In the end, the dictators of both countries seem to have chosen to describe the West as the space where the United States dominates, i.e., not in political terms but in geopolitical terms. Thus, Westerners would be all the countries allied with the United States, independent of their geographical coordinates, such as Israel, Japan, Thailand, South Korea, New Zealand, Australia, and others, plus an essential part of the South American continent. In short, all countries that oppose the advance of the Chinese and Russian empires or their allied autocratic semi-powers, such as North Korea, Iran, India, and South Africa, would be called Western countries. According to the Xi doctrine, thanks to these “emerging powers” (yesterday's so-called “developing nations”) plus some client countries, such as Lula's Brazil, a new multipolar world order would begin to take shape. This new world order, led by the Chinese state, would advance from the Global South towards the northern hemisphere, stripping the U.S. of its economic hegemony and political and military hegemony with it.
Interestingly, the term Global South only began to take ideological forms in the framework determined by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. That war has become a demarcation line: on one side, the nations that support the invasion; on the other, those that reject it. Now, let's take into account that, except for Lula's Brazil, there is no democratic country that has supported Russia's invasion of Ukraine. From a political point of view, the Global South can be considered an international association of dictatorships and autocracies. From an economic point of view, it is also the place from where China intends to achieve its world hegemony. From the military point of view, Putin's Russia, as yesterday in Syria, then in Mali, in Ukraine, and more recently in Niger, operates as a hired thug in the service of the Chinese empire.
The great ideological swindle
Like the concepts of the Third World, “non-aligned countries”, “developing countries,” “pluripolar world,” and many others, the concept of the Global South was also forged in the academies of studies and research of the so-called Western countries. Initially, it was used to designate technical, economic, environmental, and energy cooperation between countries in the southern hemisphere. At no time did its creators intend to configure it as an anti-North bloc, much less an anti-Western one. But it usually happens that international autocratic powers, just as they seek to take over raw materials, technological innovations, and cultural productions originating in democratic countries, also try to do so with political concepts.
The Global South, let us say it with all its letters, is no longer a theoretical concept. It is only the imaginary space from where the geostrategic expansion of the autocratic powers towards the rest of the World begins.
Like any bloc of nations, the so-called Global South is not a homogeneous association. The hegemony of this bloc inevitably resides in the countries with the most remarkable economic capacity, in this case, China, and in those that can best impose military conditions on the political West, i.e., those that possess the means of nuclear extermination, such as North Korea, Iran, India, Pakistan and, above all, Russia.
If we are to take sides in international politics, we must not do so for the West, the East, the North, or the South. Nor for a uni-polar, bi-polar, or multipolar order. It is enough that you decide on a democratic or autocratic world. And both are present, beyond geostrategic fiction and ideological scams such as the so-called Global South, in all latitudes of the planet.
Or, to put it in Twitter style:
The definition is not to take sides with China-Russia or the West. The definition is to take sides for or against an order based on freedom of opinion, with parliamentary political parties, in a freely elected government. Democracy or dictatorship, that is the definition.