Against modern thought

The idea that modern capitalism arises from English industrialism, eludes its origin and support by the culture; which had been expanding since the discovery of the so-called New World, flooding the market with sumptuary objects. This expansion, prior to the technological revolution, would determine the consumption habits, stimulating industrialization[1]; as a culture that is not only consumerist, but also dependent on that consumerism, in the artificiality of its economic organization.

As a culture, with its own political expression, this would be what distorts the modern understanding of culture; already in crisis due to its own hermeneutical contradiction, with the political specialization of its middle class, as an intellectual. Neither capitalism nor the bourgeoisie would be then a modern phenomenon, defining the West culture since ancient times; when the expansion of Phoenician trade —outside its own regulatory framework— reshaped the Greek political stratification.

It will be the intellectual specialization of this middle class, with modern commercialism, what will provoke the crisis; and this comes from the political —not economic— conflicts of the transition to the late Middle Ages, with the Carolingian Renaissance. That Carolingian renaissance would in fact be an extension of the Merovingian, but lacking a middle class to become a cultural expression; that only appears with Louis VI in the twelfth century, in his strategy against the expansion of the Angevin empire; and that is why it takes its reference from that Carolingian period, as the closest instance of its political legitimacy[2].

Then, Modernity, with the fall of Granada and the discovery of the New World, would not be an original renaissance; but a reordering of the old one, explaining the postmodern persistence of the feudal political structure; including the tying to the gleba (land), by which citizens cannot move freely between countries. All this implies that modern thought —from Descartes to Kant, Hegel and Marx— develops as a political fiction; hermeneutically conditioned by its economic dependence, on both the aristocracy and the crown that funds it; explaining the period as a progressive disorder, rather than as a cultural order properly speaking.

Hence, the crisis in which Modernity culminates in the nineteenth century is not exactly political but anthropological; surpassing in this that of the Roman Empire —which survived in the Byzantine— and that of archaic Greece; to resolve itself in a postmodernity, which only marks the establishment of a new order, like that of the Germans in Rome. To understand this phenomenon, it is then necessary to overcome its determination, which is hermeneutical; not economic, because the economy only makes possible its historical realization as a political expression, but does not determine it.

Hence, any renewal of the structure will come always from its popular base, ethnically defined in an identity; because this identity is what provides them with the referents of their needs, as existential instead of political. This will reshape that hermeneutic, in its political framework as an order in disintegration, due to its dysfunctionality; but without its determination, given that marginality for which it had resorted to his identity, rather than to political convention.

None of this can be understood by modern thought, as dialectic and not trialectic, creating an epistemological loop; for which it can understand history, but not its determination, which is transhistorical, as a condition of reality. Hence this insufficiency, from which all its projections are contradictory but in dichotomies, not trichotomies; because of its incomprehension of the transhistorical nature of the real, structured in its immanence, not in its transcendence.

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[1] . It refers not only to gold and silver, which facilitated mercantilism by flooding the markets, but also to consumer goods, such as tobacco, alcohol and sugar, which are not as important to existence as English wool, which they displace.

[2] . It refers to the formation of cities under royal protection—with a bureaucratic structure—within fiefs under Angevin jurisdiction; referring to the entity formed by the County of Anjou and the Duchies of Aquitaine and Normandy, owned by the English crown. It’s from this function that is understood the pseudo-aristocratic character of the middle class; because its functional displacement of that aristocracy, providing the State with the new capital of ideology, with its of its intellectual specialization.