It is at their dusk that empires demonstrate their most ruthless brutality. This historical law finds the most evident confirmation in today's crisis of imperialism, which increasingly defends its hegemony to the detriment of the popular classes. The origin of these changes and the conflicts that derive from them lies in the economic structures that regulate human activity and in the consequent division of the world into social classes that are fighting one another. With the vain myths of invisible hands in the best of all possible worlds gone, the intrinsic and terminal contradictions of capitalism seek to slow their inevitable collapse by resorting to expansion through brute force. With ever-increasing war fronts stretching from Ukraine to Gaza, the US-led Western bloc seeks to defend and expand its financial space.

In the context of a general crisis of capitalism afflicted by overproduction, the Western ruling classes see their aims threatened by people fighting for self-determination and by the interest of the new emerging powers of the Multipolar World.

From this it is clear that the clash between the old unipolar world and the new Multipolar World constitutes the main dialectical contradiction, or threat - for the less Marxian - of the current system.

The epochal nature of this contradiction lies in the fact that the West, armed by its own dogmas deriving from the ideological superstructure of liberalism, is by definition the fullest expression of neoliberal tyranny. Acting to all intents and purposes as an aid to capital, liberalism is distinguished from other superstructures by the cult it dedicates to the individual, elevated to the subject of History. According to the principles of this philosophy, the individual must be "freed" from any collective and super-individual identity, such as ethnicity, value system, and family unit, seen as barriers to the expression of one's will. In its post-ideological evolution today, modern liberalism comes to conceive the liberation of the subject from his own nature, or in other words from himself, giving birth - for example - to the idea that biological sex is a factor relating to individual subjectivity. The consequence of all this is the proliferation of what Nietzsche called The Last Man, a society of consumers left atomized and uprooted to the graces of the anonymous excessive power of capitalist globalism.

If it is true that capitalism today has no flags, it is equally true that only in the West has it achieved, through the help of the liberal superstructure, its most monstrous metamorphosis.

This interpretation allows us to see the emergence of the multipolar dawn as a process intrinsically opposed to the interests of imperialist capitalism. The rebellion of the new emerging powers is a direct reaction to the project of total victory of Western liberal-totalitarianism, which, as described in the famous book by Francis Fukuyama, aspires to its own Washington-centric "End of History".

And it is here, in the interests of the full implementation of the ideal of multipolarity itself, that we must subject these profound changes to meticulous analysis. Although it represents an improvement, it is undeniable that in the current phase the push for a Multipolar World derives mainly from the interest of the national bourgeoisies of the states in question. In them, we can observe, without almost any exception, a clash in the ranks of their financial elites, between those who propose a rapprochement with the Western sphere and those who instead support greater autonomy from unipolar control.

It is no coincidence that this split is most evident in the state that has most radically decided to break relations with Washington: Putin's Russia.

The beginning of the Special Operation marked a definitive break between the Russian state and the pro-Western wing of the ruling class. Among the many cases, the example of the oligarch Oleg Tinkov, founder of the Tinkoff Bank with assets of over 4 billion, stands out. Tinkov, convicted in the United States for having evaded over 200 million dollars, rediscovers himself as a champion of democracy by siding against "Putin's fascist regime" and renouncing his citizenship. Another gem comes from Mikhail Fridman, a billionaire banker who financed the Yeltsin government and the collapse of the Soviet Union, as well as an opponent of Putin, who at the beginning of the conflict fled, coincidentally, to Israel.

The British state, in fact, thanked him for having changed his coat without hesitation, removing sanctions from both oligarchs.

Putin's actions represent a change of direction compared to twenty years of Westernisation imposed by the Russian oligarchy itself. The Kremlin's bold political choices have certainly irritated more than a few oligarchs, but despite the rifts, they find tacit consensus, if not support, even amongst the ruling class. This shows that Russian capitalists, like those of all the BRICS states, see in the new order a prospect of pacification between their respective employers and therefore a reorganization, not an overcoming, of the status quo.

Multipolarity represents a fundamental stage in the fight for a more just world, but it cannot be the final one. If the material conditions that underlie the inhumane modern world remained unchanged, the current problems would manifest themselves in another form.

Capitalism is the enemy of every people; its reorganization will not be enough to free humanity from its yoke.

The idealism of those who, in the area of political antagonism, speak of an imminent multipolar utopia - a few years from now - is to be considered a counter-revolutionary chimera.

The pure self-determination of peoples, free to develop and cooperate in peace and prosperity, is not in the plans of international finance, regardless of the poles in which it is distributed.

Properly understood, multipolarity is not the hope of a new order, but rather that dynamic chaos that crumbles the old. A chaos that conceals within it an irrepressible creative force that allows people to dream of an alternative to the value, social, and economic models imposed by imperialism.

Fidelity to this vision inevitably implies that we hope history reserves the same fate for every oligarch, whether unipolar or multipolar.

Adam Bark is a political activist fighting for the Free Territory of Trieste. He has participated in several government political forums in Russia and has reported to the UN in Geneva for the Minority Forum 2023, carrying out his struggle both locally and institutionally.

Republished from ComeDonChisciotte.org with thanks

Translated from Italian by Nora Hoppe