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Alain de Benoist

@Daily_Benoist

Dec 17, 2022

1/ Modernity, born out of industrial capitalism, established itself as a movement that overturned the society of orders, rent, and status. Today we are watching an overturning of this overturning.

2/ The tertiarization of societies and the financialization of capital (and private estates [patrimoines]) mean that wealth no longer comes fundamentally from materially productive work: The economy has become “immaterial” and wealth is henceforward obtained by stock purchases,

3/ dividends, and monetary changes (in the United States, Bill Gates and Walmart have replaced Ford and General Motors). At the same time, larger States redistribute 15-20% of their budget in the form of financial income. Under such conditions,

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Alain de Benoist

@Daily_Benoist

Jul 15, 2022

1/ The principal criticism communitarians address to liberal individualism is precisely that it makes communities disappear, communities which are a fundamental and irreplaceable element of human existence. Liberalism devalues political life by considering political association

2/ as a mere instrumental good, without seeing that the participation of citizens in the political community is an intrinsic good constitutive of the good life. Because of this it is unable to give a satisfactory account of a certain number of obligations and commitments, viz.,

3/those that don't result from a voluntary choice or contractual obligation, such as family obligations, the necessity of serving one’s country, or of giving the common interest priority over personal interest. It propagates an erroneous conception of the ego by refusing to admit

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Alain de Benoist

@Daily_Benoist

Aug 19, 2021

The international law issued by the Peace of Westphalia 1648 is today equally turned upside down by the ideology of human rights, which justifies the right (or the duty) of ‘humanitarian interference’, i.e. preventive war, formerly seen as nearly identical to a war of aggression.

2/ This right of humanitarian interference, which patently violates the Charter of the United Nations, has no precedent in international law. It suggests that every state, whatever it be, can intervene at will in the internal affairs of another state, whatever it be,

3/ under the pretext of preventing ‘attacks on human rights’. Justifying politico-military intervention, which decolonisation had theoretically put to an end, it permits a group of countries or authorities professing to act in the name of a nebulous ‘international community’

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Alain de Benoist

@Daily_Benoist

Jun 12, 2021

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

Apr 23, 2021

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

Apr 21, 2021

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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