Domination is permanently transformed

Domination and submission have existed since ancient times with phases of impious savagery and others more moderate. Domination is transformed with time and change of circumstances, but a few times it has been fully eliminated. Is this unavoidable? Is there a way to break that terrible historical trajectory, especially during this phase of the so-called “capitalist realism” that, as always, presents itself as eternal and unmovable? There are those who believe that what is presented as impossible can become possible.

The secular tendency has been that one type of domination has given way to other types of successive or simultaneous domination. During phases of strong systemic shakings, dominant groups were replaced by other new dominators, while during weak transitions the same dominant groups or their descendents remained as dominators. In every case, as an inexorable common denominator, domination is exercised by powerful minorities.

Frequently, those powerful minorities directly impose themselves through the repressive forces they control, but other times they do so by proclaiming themselves defenders of tricked majorities. Forms of domination are multiple and diverse; generally they overlap within a set territory.

Hegemonic forces (today powerful financial groups) exercise their domination over global or national groups with local complicities that consolidate such domination. They are local actors that come be accomplices who, either conscious or unconsciously, voluntarily or forcibly, help materialize hegemonic domination.

Generally, domination subdues large majorities by colonizing their minds. That is, minorities take advantage of ingenuity, ignorance, or misinformation of certain majorities subduing them in the most despicable way that exists: molding the subjectivity of individuals and social groups so that they do not recognize their own interests and values of solidarity and adopt as their own the interests and values of those who submit them. For that, those who dominate must appropriate the means and mechanisms by which it is possible to mold subjectivities, among others: mass media, social media, educational system, think tanks, good part of political parties, judiciary, and “civil society” organizations. Using their economic power and the derived influences they achieve their objective.

Resist and defeat domination

Domination is neither eternal nor unmovable as dominators try to make others believe to dissuade their resistance and prevent them from defeating domination. They present as impossible what can become possible. In more than one sense, history of humanity is just the history of the disappearance of empires and systems that thought of them as eternal.

There is a diversity of actions and strategies to resist and defeat domination, among which it is worth to highlight the strategic action of clarifying and social organization. A hard work to clarify us and help clarify other majoritarian segments of society and, in this process, strengthen and articulate main social movements to mobilize majoritarian wills oppose to domination.

It would be an unequal fight if it were addressed in terms and circumstances imposed by dominators but it is possible to level it using alternative acting formulas. Those alternative modalities of action are not gathered in any recipe book, despite the frequent dream of oppressed majorities that long for finding magic recipes to come out of the confinement they were sentenced. What is distressing is that mounted on those deep longings the usual tricksters appear proposing simplistic views with apparent cogency; they are just mermaid chants to disguise tricks and betrayals.

Successful transforming strategies have always been singular and materialized by taking advantage at the same time of latent strengths in majoritarian segments (different according to countries, phases, and societies) and tensions, greediness, and contradictions produced within hegemonic power, many of which derive from the own concentrating tendencies that generate turbulences, instability, and eventual crises, that used to be sectorial or regional crises, and now are more and more globalized. Some of these strategies have been published as articles in Opinion Sur and others as books.

Cultural struggle

Social culture is not plain, homogeneous, or immune to absorbing novel modalities for altering the prevailing correlation of forces. That is the point, forming a counter-power able to neutralize the actions of hegemonic power by creating social and political conditions to enable other course and way of functioning for countries and localities.

As domination has acquired a definite systemic character and is lead by global financial groups, coordination and cooperation relations with other national and local movements that also search for breaking off the yoke that is widespread in the entire world is very much needed, always open to embrace the diversity of modalities that each situation requires.

For centuries, different types of domination were slaver, extractive of resources of the submitted, using commercial, transportation, technological, information advantages as well as military power. With time, an institutional architecture was shaping up, one of international organisms devoted to preserving the order established by central countries. From those layers of domination and submission, a globalized financial class emerged, which, mounted on impressive communicational innovations and scientific and weapons development, erected itself as steering wheel of the course of humanity. It is well-known the unbridle process of concentration of wealth and the consequent decisional power that prevails in the world.

The interests of the dominant financial class have had deadly influences over geopolitics and friendship among nations, social fragmentation and arms race. They subordinate scientific knowledge to the objective of maximizing profit in health (medicines and forefront equipment crushing humanistic/non client-base medicine), use and abuse of destructive productive modalities (with agro-toxics that contaminate populations, soils, and waters), an accelerated  robotization to appropriate of even larger rates of return, and many other dimensions of contemporary life. Preeminence of financial world over real economy, selfish profit over general wellbeing, has been imposed on us.

This tiny minority of powerful economic groups keeps appropriating large part of the world’s wealth as well as the mechanisms that preserve domination, the engines that today generate and reproduce concentration.

It is an almost suicidal course of social domination and environmental destruction, very hard to sustain without changes as it includes enormous destabilizing forces in the economy and politics. Communicational revolution used for submission by molding subjectivities, sterilizing freewill, manipulating public opinion with tricks, lies, imposition of beliefs, inoculation of values, leaves more permeable gaps than those of brick prisons and terror imposed by oppression.

There is no lack of hopes and liberating paths ; however, be aware that dominators never give away the power they have and know how to adjust to new reforming and even revolutionary circumstances. They will keep on using deceit and lies, spreading disbelief, hopelessness, and cruel cynicism that replace involvement and commitment, as Nietzsche rightly pointed out.

 

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