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Alain de Benoist

@Daily_Benoist

12 Jun

1/ Capitalism is not primarily an economic system, but a “total social fact” (Marcel Mauss), from which flows the fetishised form that social relations take in liberal societies. It is therefore futile to seek to assess its value with regard to its real or supposed effectiveness.

2/ The capitalist system is undoubtedly highly efficient at producing commodities, but efficiency is not an end in itself. It never qualifies that the means implemented to achieve an end, without telling us anything of the value of this end. Goods bring in money,

3/ which allows us to produce more goods, which in turn create more money. The surplus value thus released allows the transformation of money into capital, and the over-accumulation of capital allows money to perpetually increase itself.

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Alain de Benoist

@Daily_Benoist

23 Apr

1/ Being disconnected from gold, the dollar could be multiplied without an immediate automatic effect on its value or on inflation, which would permit Americans to have their growing commercial deficits financed indefinitely by the rest of the world,

2/ especially thanks to the issue of Treasury Bonds. In fact, the massive demand for dollars has permitted Americans to accumulate extravagant commercial and budget deficits without suffering any negative economic effects from the debts for a long time,

3/ which such imbalances should normally have provoked. The result is that the United States can live beyond its means thanks to foreign capital, and, for at least the last thirty years, the American economy has lived off the rest of the world. .

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Alain de Benoist

@Daily_Benoist

21 Apr

1/ On the psychological level, individuals now feel dispossessed by overwhelming mechanisms, an increasingly fast pace and even heavier constraints—variables so numerous that they are no longer able to grasp where they stand.

2/ That this happens at a time when individuals are lonelier than ever, abandoned to themselves, when all great world-views have caved in, only intensifies this feeling of a nothingness. “Globalization,” says Laïdi, “strangely reproduces the Freudian mechanism of the crowd

3/ in the grips of infection and panic: infection, to the extent that globalization engenders conformity and uniformity; panic because everyone feels alone, faced with mechanisms beyond their understanding.” Accordingly, globalization resembles a puzzle of splintered images.

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Alain de Benoist

@Daily_Benoist

28 Feb

1/ Stripped of its traditional mediation, society is becoming more fluid and more fragmented, which only makes it easier to objectify it. You live in it suddenly and quickly. With the real disappearance of the main collective ideas that were once carriers of various worldviews,

2/ the religion of the Ego—based on unrestrained freedom and narcissistic desires, created out of nothing—has caused a deterritorialization that goes hand in hand today with the decomposition of all boundaries and all references, making the individual more and more vulnerable,

3/ more and more defenseless and more and more nomadic. Under the guise of emancipatory "modernization", for more than half a century there was an ideological osmosis between the financial right and the multicultural left, meshing economic liberalism with social liberalism, the

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Alain de Benoist

@Daily_Benoist

18 Feb

1/ Decadence in modern mass multicultural societies begins at a moment when there is not longer any discernible meaning within society. Meaning is destroyed by raising individualism above all other values because rampant individualism encourages the anarchical proliferation

2/ of egotism at the expense of the values that were once part of the national heritage, values that give form to the concept of nationhood and the nation state, to a state which is more than just a political entity, and which corresponds to a particular people who are conscious

3/ of sharing a common heritage for the survival of which they are prepared to make personal sacrifices. Man evolved in cooperating groups united by common cultural and genetic ties, and it is only in such a setting that the individual can feel truly free, and truly protected.

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Alain de Benoist

@Daily_Benoist

15 Jan

1/ As opposed to the centralising tradition, which confiscates all powers to establish a single level of control, as opposed to a bureaucratic and technocratic Europe, which relinquishes sovereignty without transferring it to a higher level;

2/ as opposed to a Eur. which will only be a big market unified by free trade; as opposed to a ‘Eur. of Nations’, a mere assemblage of national egos which can't prevent future wars; as opposed to a ‘European Nation’ which's nothing more than a larger version of the Jacobin state;

3/ as opposed to all of the above, Europe (Western, Central, and Eastern) must reorganise itself from the bottom up, in close continental association with Russia. The existing states must federalise themselves from within, in order to better federalise with each other.

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