Gaza and the spirit of capitalism

Abstract

Text inspired by Walter Benjamin. It is not only the State of Israel that perpetrates the genocide in Gaza. It is the system. The genocide in Gaza is the clearest expression of its spirit, of its deepest ethos, which cynically and in an ethically untenable way disguises itself in the garb of liberal democracy, exposed today in all its falsehood as a manifestation of what it seeks to conceal, namely, its being the ideology of a violent universal. We cannot understand Gaza unless we relate the particularity of the genocide perpetrated against the population of those lands to the reproduction of the system as a process of totalization that entails violence as a form of existence, with the bare life inherent in capital. The truth of genocide in particular, and of modern violence in general, is that they lie at the very heart of the system; they constitute the true “spirit” of capitalism.