Negative Dialectics & The Sao Paulo Forum

What has caused the crisis we live in today? A lecture on the roots of the revolutionary mind, communism, fascism, and The Frankfurt School. —The Interamerican Institute for Democracy, Miami, FL.

What is the origin of fascism? Fascism begins around 1910 with an internal discussion in the Italian socialist movement and a split in the movement based on the theory enunciated by two great theorists: Enrico Corradini and Alfredo Rocco; the latter became Minister of the Mussolini government¹. Corradini and Rocco had a theory that the active subject—the main force of the world revolution—could not be the proletarian class. In fact, it could not be any social class because the social classes were conditioned and circumscribed to their countries of origin.

There was, therefore, no international proletarian. International proletarian was just a way of saying that if the Italian proletarian left his country and went, for example, to Germany, he would not be a proletarian in Germany; he would be a beggar. Thus, the condition of a proletarian is a national condition. Philosophers then thought: if we want a world revolution, and the active subject of that revolution cannot be the proletarian class, nor can it be any class, only the nation can be the agent of the world revolution. The idea is, therefore, that nations will be revolutionary, that proletarian nations will be against bourgeois nations, or that exploited nations will be against exploiting nations². That was the origin of fascism.

Looking carefully, we will notice that after the Second World War, this strategy was adopted by the entire communist movement. The third world movement³ , created by Stalin, has exactly this idea. When we look at the history of the Brazilian Communist Party, for example, we will see that from the Second World War, at the time of the government of Getúlio Vargas, the strategy was the coalition, the alliance between the proletariat and the national bourgeoisie against imperialism. This is an expression of the proposal for a proletarian nation against the capitalist and imperialist nations, and it has been adopted worldwide. It is a logical conclusion, therefore, that the international communist movement, after World War II, became an international fascist movement.

Since the beginning of the communist movement with Karl Marx, we will see that all the evil, violence, and criminality that were intrinsically associated with this movement were justified in terms of the ends that this evil and this violence should serve, so that the evil would serve the good, as the end justifies the means. For example, the proletarian revolution, with all the blood it has shed, would be justified in terms of a future of freedom and prosperity for the proletariat, which evidently never happened. Since this never happened, it was necessary to change the discourse: to move from the proletarian revolution to the revolution of the exploited nations against the exploiting nations; however, this was also not achieved.

The so-called exploited nations that revolted against imperialism had, under the socialist regime and under the revolutionary regime, much more miserable luck than they had before. Cuba, for example, was the fourth economy in Latin America and is now the ninth⁴ . Cuba has disgraced itself under the pretext of freeing itself from imperialism; it has worsened its own situation immensely. The curious thing is that many blame the Cuban misery on the blockade carried out by the United States because the Americans did not trade with Cuba. But, before the Revolution, wasn't the disgrace precisely the fact that the Americans traded with Cuba? So, I don't know if imperialism hindered it more because of its presence or its absence. Before, they complained about the presence; now they complain about the absence. Of course, this is all a pointless pretext.

However, between the 1950s and 1960s, the smartest people in the communist movement, a group of German philosophers affiliated with the Institute for Social Research—also called the Frankfurt School—began to realize that the great contradictions and conflicts of capitalism were dissolving. Thus, the proletariat, for example, could no longer be the great revolutionary force, because it had been absorbed by capitalism, it was serving capitalism. The living conditions of the proletariat had improved considerably, and this group was prospering in all areas, feeling very well under capitalism, so that there was no more desire to carry out the revolution. The so-called “exploited” nations also practically lived off the help of their “exploiters.” Cuba, for example, lived on American money—before they complained that the money was there and now they complain that it is no longer there.

So the Frankfurt School philosophers thought: the contradictions have run out, how are we going to destroy capitalism if there are no more internal contradictions in it that we can exploit? Thus, Adorno, Horkheimer, Lukács, and others formulated the problem as follows: since in capitalism there are no more economic contradictions that we can exploit, and between rich and poor nations there are no longer the same contradictions, what can we explore as a destructive mechanism of capitalism? What internal contradictions can we find within capitalist countries that we can exploit to destroy them? Thus, what was called negative dialectics was born⁵.

Negative dialectics consists of facing everything that exists in a negative light and looking at the evil side, of exploitation, of cruelty that exists in everything, in all possible human relationships—relationships that can encompass the whole society as well as personal relationships, such as the relationship between husband and wife, father and son, teacher and student, and so on. These philosophers began to see evil in everything, and they believed, with good reason, that by doing this they carried out a program that Marx had enunciated but never carried out and which he defined as the “radical criticism of everything that exists⁶.” Attention: It is not about criticizing the capitalist economy or the imperialist countries, but everything that exists. Thus, they criticized marriage, education, friendship, economics, work, law, and morals. Everything is bad, everything is demonic. They dedicated themselves to this work for 40 or 50 years.

Many of these philosophers were Jews who fled Germany with just reason, as they would be killed. They arrived in the United States and received the best jobs and prizes, were pampered and applauded from all sides, and wrote books where they said that American society was exactly the same as the German one. Were they crazy? No. They were simply the authors of the negative dialectic. They saw everything on the bad side, including the best things that exist.

When someone becomes a radical critic of everything that exists, that person has placed himself above the existing reality. The whole reality is bad, and the person has placed himself as the critic who examines, analyzes, and condemns it. Automatically, he will be placed above reality, above the universe, not just above this society where he lives, but above the universe as a whole. What did he become? Did he become God? No. Because God is indeed above, but God did not create the world to criticize the world, but to save it. That is, when you become the radical critic of everything that exists, you become the devil, and the devil is evidently free from all human obligations. The devil has only rights, and his right is to do evil against that which is evil. Since everything is bad, he can do evil against everything, and he will never be condemned or accused.

This means that today's leftist politics has, on its audience, especially the young audience, a type of attraction that is completely different from what it was before. Before, it was about doing evil in the name of good. Today, good is no longer necessary. Evil is in itself a superiority. As soon as you adhere to that policy, you are above humanity. You are never subjected to examination, you are the examiner, you are the judge, you are the executioner who will destroy everything, and you will never be examined.

After having played millions of young people against their teachers, against the laws, against morals, against everything, one day Professor Theodor Adorno was dissatisfied to see college students invade his classroom and start breaking everything. Then he thought, "Wait a minute, this is too much negative dialectic, that can’t be done." Then, the negative dialectician, the universal accuser, is above all accusations and cannot be accused or even analyzed. He's the invisible guy who sees everything. It is the eye that sees everything and is never seen.

How many right-wing books have you read destroying, for example, Theodor Adorno's philosophy? None. How many right-wing books are destroying György Lukács's philosophy? None. All the right-wing bibliography that exists criticizes socialism, Marxism, criticizes various political programs, but never goes to the depths of the philosophy of negative dialectics. And, therefore, this negative dialectic always survives and manages to restore and rebuild itself even after its worst defeats. This means that as long as the Frankfurt School philosophy is not completely destroyed, it will renew itself and rebuild the communist movement millions of times. It never ends. See, destruction is not destructible. Destruction lives only to destroy. In other words, we can say that the Frankfurt School staff discovered the secret of eternal life: they can live forever, just live on destruction, and never propose anything positive.

And when they propose something, they propose something negative under the name of something positive. For example, operating a five-year-old child, a boy who says he is a girl: cut off his sexual organ, and that's it, he becomes a girl. Can there be any good in that? Of course, this is just destruction. No one knows what will become of this boy later. Nobody knows if he will want his sex organ back, but they don't need to know. As it is destruction, and destruction is always positive, let's move on. And so on.

Another example is the universal legalization of abortion. Can anyone prove that the fetus is a human being or just a thing? This discussion can go on forever, and no one comes to a conclusion. One side does not convince the other. This means that none of us knows the answer to that question. If we don't know, there is a 50% chance for one side and 50% for the other. Therefore, the choice is not rational. This means that the one who is in favor of abortion is not for rational reasons. He is because he wants to. He wants universal abortion. And he wants it because universal abortion is negative and, therefore, from his point of view, it will always be positive. Everything people consider bad, becomes considered good. Good exists only in the form of evil. This is the essence and the secret of the Frankfurt School.

This has an infinitely greater attraction than the old proletarian revolution or the old fascist revolution, since both the proletarian revolution and the fascist revolution claimed a future good that was the justification of the evil that was done in the present. It was the good purpose that justified the wrong path. Therefore, these revolutions could be criticized in the name of the end to which they themselves proposed. In the socialist regime, for example, the proletarians were experiencing more hunger than in the capitalist regime, and this proved that the revolution had failed to achieve its intended end. So it could be criticized in the name of its end.

Likewise, the fascist revolution promised that the nations that were exploited and robbed would be the dominators. Hitler wanted the Reich to last a thousand years, but it lasted twelve and ended very badly. Mussolini was murdered and hung by the legs, and Italy lost everything. Thus, these revolutions could be criticized in the name of the positive ends for which they were intended. But the new revolution, the negative dialectic revolution, cannot be criticized for anything because it has a monopoly on criticism. It has a monopoly on destructive speech, which transforms its bearer into a superhuman type—it can never be condemned in the name of anything, not even in the name of the revolution itself. The former communists still had the possibility to make a self-criticism; now there is no more mistake. The attractive power of the philosophy of negative dialectics is limitless.

For the same reason, it is not appropriate to argue against this revolution with the arguments and weapons that were used against the proletarian revolution and the fascist revolution. You must keep in mind that people are no longer accessible to this type of argument because they are superhuman. For example, a man who is born a man and wants to change sex, becoming a woman, rarely ends up looking like a woman. Most still look like men. So you look and see a man, but he says, "I feel like a woman, and you have no right to look at me as your eyes see me, you have to look at me as I want to be seen." After all, as Groucho Marx said, will you trust me or your own eyes? It became a reality. You no longer have the right to see things as you actually see them. You have to see how your interlocutor wants to be seen. So he has put himself in a superhuman position. He is not in a position to be judged by common criteria. That is, he can forbid us to speak without ever being accused of being oppressive or of committing censorship. If he prevents us from speaking, it could be considered freedom of the press.

In Cuba, there is freedom of the press, so much so that all journalists are in jail—putting them in jail is freedom of the press—because Cuba cannot be judged by human criteria, after all, in Cuba there is no positive purpose to be achieved to justify your revolution. Their failure became their success because they are the ones who determine what failure is and what success is. Fidel Castro, for example, when asked why people were starving in Cuba, said that it was because in Cuba there was not the obscene consumerism that exists in the USA and that only what is needed is eaten.

Failure becomes success because evil has become good. Is there any human good that is absolute? No. We are only humans, we are not God. An absolute good only God is able to accomplish. In everything we do, goodness predominates, but that does not mean that it is 100%. It is 80%, 90%, and we are satisfied with that. But for them, where there is 10% evil, they will say that it is all evil. And that little evil is present in everything. It is the kind of philosophical fallacy that is announced in the following way: everything is such a thing. If you say, for example, everything is energy. Is there any phenomenon where energy is absent? No, it is present in everything. Everything is the law of gravity. The law of gravity will never be absent. Well, any factor that is present in all phenomena cannot be the cause of any of them, but the technique today is to capture the factor that is present in everything, to say that it is the cause, and to use its omnipresence as an argument. Of course, it is a ridiculous, grotesque philosophical fallacy, but it convinces people.

In both the United States and Latin America, especially in Brazil, this philosophy has taken over the entire media and all universities. In Brazil, from the 1960s onwards, shortly after the military dictatorship regime, the communists, seeing that they had been defeated and expelled from the electoral and political field, decided to use Antonio Gramsci's strategy—that of the cultural revolution. Do the cultural revolution first, and then the political revolution. Taking the media, the publishers, and the universities, slowly and slowly, without saying that it is socialist propaganda, because Gramsci's goal was to make everyone socialist without knowing it. That is why I went against the campaign that liberals and conservatives waged against communist indoctrination. There is no indoctrination at all. They are inducing people to be socialists without ever indoctrinating them.

Behavioral changes that did not pass through the sphere of opinion and ideas were generally used. For example, a teacher from Sweden did an experiment in Brazil that was highly praised by a theater director. He picked up his students and said that during the weekend they should have an oral sex experience with their colleague next door, and on Monday they should bring a scientific report of what happened. Almost everyone said it was good. Why? There is research in psychology that shows that whenever you make people act against their principles, 80 to 82% change their principles not to say that they made a mistake. So, that is to say, until that day nobody had thought about having oral sex with the neighbor, and from Monday everyone started thinking about it. Is that indoctrination? No. The teacher didn't convince them of anything, he just suggested that they do an experiment innocently, and that's how it is done.

In the book by Pascal Bernardin, Machiavel Pédagogue: Ou Le Ministère De La Réforme Psychologique, the French author shows the behavioral manipulation techniques used today. None of them look like propaganda. There are several tricks, one example is the so-called “foot in the door.” In this case, the researcher knocks on the front door, says he is from the city hall, and would like to stick a traffic sign on the resident's wall. The person does not accept, claiming that this would cover the door and make it look ugly. The researcher then offers a smaller one, measuring 30cm [11.8 inches]. In 90% of cases, people accept. You ask for something more difficult, and nobody will give it, then you ask for something easier, and people end up giving it immediately. This is used a lot in schools. You suggest something, the students don't accept it, and you accept their opinion. Then you make a suggestion that is a little less shocking, and they accept it. These techniques are used all the time. The guy who calls this indoctrination is not understanding anything, he is thinking that they are doing communist propaganda. There is no communist propaganda. There is only intense use for this type of trick.

In indoctrination, which is something that is made via your mind, opinions, and ideas, you are practically asking for a debate, asking for a discussion. If there is any suggestion of experiments, this does not fall within the sphere of opinions. The conduct is changed directly without going through the opinion machine that is in each person's head. This means total control of the student's mind. However, very well-intentioned people launched the “School Without Doctrine” campaign and spoke out against indoctrination. And what did the left do? They went on to say that the campaign was an attempt to censor the left. The faction that dominated everything and that completely banned the opposing opinion of the dominated space started to pretend that it was being censored and that it was being persecuted and oppressed. The conservative and liberal right-wing people did not understand what was going on. There was something happening, and they were fighting another thing that did not exist. And that happens practically all over the world.

Walter Williams, an African-American economist, said the anti-smoking movement was the first test at the level of universal breadth to assess the possibility of manipulating the mass and dominating it. What did they do? They launched some scientific research stating that smoking causes a series of problems. What is the number-one principle of therapy? It is the principle that, once the cause is removed, the effect ceases. Today, the number of smokers in the United States has dropped to 1/3, but lung and heart disease have not decreased by a single case. Now, anti-smoking has already won. Everywhere you go, there is a smoke-free poster. When the governing authority is allowed to police personal habits, we have already lost everything. Then do we want to preserve some political freedoms? If you do not have personal freedom or concrete freedom to do what you like, you have already given everything in; you are already defeated. Curiously, the only social analyst who noticed this was Walter Williams.

What does smoking have to do with politics? Apparently, nothing. A large part of the conservative public, especially the Catholic and Protestant religions, applauded without realizing the damage they did to public freedom. They imposed their opinion, making it legally mandatory for everyone. Democracy does not do that. This is not democracy at all. But, like smoking, there were also many other things. Today, it is forbidden for a man to be masculine. Being masculine is obscene. We all have to be effeminate so as not to offend the people next door. Nowadays, you can see a man dressed as a woman, half naked, but if a woman breastfeeds, she can be arrested, because being a mother is obscene. Did you realize it started with a ban on something small? If you allow the government to ban these things, it will never stop. And none of this was done through political discussions. There was no indoctrination at all.

This mentality of negative dialectics conquers souls not for the promise of a future good but for the promise of an immediate superhuman condition, free from all obligations. You cannot be examined, you cannot be charged and analyzed, it is the all-seeing eye that is never seen. The whole youth is stuck in this mentality. The discussion is no longer political, it has moved to another level. That is why we see phenomena like this in Argentina: a totally failed government returns to power. Now the government is going to release people from all human obligations and give them an instrument of action with which they can oppress, scare, mistreat, and kill whoever they want. This is much more seductive than the old socialist utopia. The socialist utopia was for the future. The present generation will sacrifice itself, but one day there would be a socialist paradise.

The promotion of the superhuman scale, however, is immediate, it is not a utopia. You start to experience it at the first moment. A man who dresses as a woman says that you are obliged to see him as a woman. You say you can't do it, that you can still see a man, and you are branded a criminal. They are doing this and we are accepting this joke, because we do not realize the depth of the diabolical impulse of these men from the Frankfurt School. Someone who leaves Nazi Germany, where they would kill him, and goes to a country where he has freedom and a good job, everyone treats him well, and he says it's the same thing. It is demonic ingratitude. Don't you see the difference between Nazi Germany and American democracy? This is what I called cognitive parallax⁷. It is the total displacement between the axis of the philosopher's theoretical construction and the axis of his real experience. In other words, what he describes blatantly refutes his real experience, and this has been a permanent evil in Western thought for the past four or five centuries.

Karl Marx himself is an example of cognitive parallax. He says that all social classes have a distorted view of history because they have interests at stake and their view of things is distorted by their hidden interests, except the proletariat, which has no special interests. The interests of the proletarian class coincide with those of the whole of humanity. Then, the proletariat is the only class that can have an objective view of historical reality. Soon after, Karl Marx, who was not a proletarian nor had he even seen a proletarian, wrote the objective view of things according to the proletarian view. Thus, his existence belies his theory. If the proletarian view is the truth and reality, its existence demonstrates that a bourgeois can see reality as well as the proletarian. This is not hypocrisy, it is another phenomenon, the cognitive parallax. If it were hypocrisy, he would be aware of what he is doing, but he writes it with total naivety. He does not realize that his life is a denial of his work, and his real experience says the opposite of what he says in words.

It is clear that the Frankfurt School philosophers suffer from cognitive parallax, because the number one premise of negative dialectic is that its author will never be subjected to it. The author of the pejorative analysis will never be the object of the pejorative analysis because, if he is, he is finished at the same time. Max Horkheimer, for example, was the president of the Frankfurt School for a long time, and he was a millionaire man, but he paid the school staff a starvation wage. In other words, he is a more exploitative capitalist than any capitalist, and he saw no problem with that. He did not do this out of malice or hypocrisy, but because it was normal and natural for him to do so. It was natural that he would never be the object of negative dialectics.

The influence that this school had in Western countries, especially in America, especially in Brazil, is immeasurable. Because it has a much greater hypnotic appeal than capitalism or fascism. Karl Marx, Lenin, Mussolini, and Hitler have never managed to attract so many followers so easily. Max Horkheimer’s and Theodor Adorno's books are very difficult to read. And how does it attract so many supporters? Because there is no need to read. Just accept a proposal from them, and you are already transfigured into the analyst and condemner of humanity, free from all demands, and no one will be able to charge you anything. So you have millions of idiots who have become judges of humanity, and no one remembers to do the same to them. Why? Because the tradition of analysis of liberals and conservatives comes from the Anglo-Saxon world—that is, they understand everything as if it were a dispute between the conservative party and the British labor party.

Now, the policy of the Frankfurt School is not just the destruction of capitalism, it is the destruction of everything except them. It is the most cruel and sadistic proposal anyone has ever made—and to this day, no one has realized this, because the men at the Frankfurt School never belonged to the Soviet Communist Party. So people think they are communists, but they are more moderate than Stalin. However, Stalin, compared to them, was an angel. He never said it was to destroy everything that is good.

The Frankfurt School said that behind all good is evil. To give an example of a bad thing they want to destroy, Michel Foucault, who was a disciple of the Frankfurtians and even radicalized their proposal, was against people having fathers. He thought the worst thing in the world was the existence of fathers. Why does a person need a father to be born? When he says that, is Foucault against capitalism? No. He is against capitalism, against socialism, against nature, against history, against everything. He just wasn't against himself. Pierre Magnard, who was his colleague, said he was crazy. Of course, Michel Foucault is no fool; at times, he had some brilliant ideas. The fundamental difference between ancient philosophy and modern philosophy is that, in general, ancient philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, are right on the whole and err only on details. Today, it is the opposite. They miss the big picture but get it right in many details. Karl Marx makes brilliant analyses about certain things, but when you examine the whole, it makes no sense at all. Michel Foucault does the same thing. The whole of his philosophy makes no sense, and it is based on evil.

We cannot accept these people as genuine interlocutors, claiming to accept their ideas but preserving their person. What sucks is precisely the person. Their cruelty expresses their fear of existing and of taking responsibility for adult existence. They don't want that. They never reach maturity. They want to continue pretending that they are the judges of humanity. The entire São Paulo Forum is based on this and that is why it is successful: regardless of how many defeats it suffers politically, it will recover. We cannot be the antagonists of the São Paulo Forum; we have to destroy it. Destroy it so that it never rises again. Isn’t Nazism prohibited nowadays? Communism also has to be. The São Paulo Forum also has to be. This is not politics, this is a crime. The guy saying that all the Jews must be killed is a crime, and not politics. We can no longer accept the existence of these things. We cannot accept a criminal ideology as if it were a political proposal. This is not a political proposal, this is psychopathy, this is a crime.

1. From 1925 to 1932, Rocco held the position of Minister of Justice and Religious Affairs, promoted the Italian criminal codification, signed in 1930 the Criminal Code and the Criminal Procedure Code (with the help of Vincenzo Manzini), and reconciled the classical and positivist schools.

2. Corradini describes the concept called “proletarian nationalism” in 1919 as follows: “We must begin by recognizing the fact that there are proletarian nations and proletarian classes, that is, there are nations whose conditions of life are subject to [...] the way of life of other nations, as well as the classes. Once realized, nationalism must firmly insist on this truth: Italy is materially and morally a proletarian nation. ” (Report to the First Nationalist Congress, Florence, December 3, 1919)

3. Third-worldism is a faction in left-wing political thought that considers to be central the division between developed nations, classically liberal, and developing nations, or third-world ones. This ideology promotes support for movements against Western nations or their representatives, opposing capitalism and its values.

4. Data on Cuba's economy, as well as data on quality of life, are contested by several dissidents. Considering, however, that the country only began to popularize internet access in 2019 and that it is in a recession, Cuba's position as the ninth largest economy in Latin America is questionable.

5. Negative Dialektik is a book by the German philosopher, musicologist, and sociologist Theodor W. Adorno. Released in 1966, it describes the theory described here.

6. Idea published by Marx in articles in the magazine "The Franco-German Annals" in 1843.

7. The concept of cognitive parallax, according to Professor Olavo de Carvalho: “I call cognitive parallax the displacement, sometimes radical, between the axis of a thinker's theoretical construction and the axis of his real human experience, just as he himself reports it or as we know it from other reliable sources.” Source: http://www.olavodecarvalho.org/textos/0801entrevista.html

Translated by Daniel Bertorelli for The Olavo de Carvalho Academy.