The impact is a kill to save mentality in the name of

The impact is a kill to save mentality in the name of market efficiency
Boaventura de Souza
Santos
, Professor of Sociology at the University of Coimbra
,
Collective Suicide?,
2003
According to Franz Hinkelammert, the West has repeatedly been under the illusion that it should try to
save humanity by destroying part of it . This is a salvific and sacrificial destruction, committed in the
name of the need to radically materialize all the possibilities opened up by a given social and political
reality over which it is supposed to have total power. This is how it was in colonialism , with the genocide
of indigenous peoples , and the African slaves . This is how it was in the period of imperialist struggles,
which caused millions of deaths in two world wars and many other colonial wars. This is how it was in
Stalinism , with the Gulag and in Nazism , with the holocaust . And now today, this is how it is in
neoliberalism , with the collective sacrifice of the periphery and even the semiperiphery of the world
system . With the war against Iraq, it is fitting to ask whether what is in progress is a new genocidal and
sacrificial illusion, and what its scope might be. It is above all appropriate to ask if the new illusion will
not herald the radicalization and the ultimate perversion of the western illusion: destroying all of
humanity in the illusion of saving it. Sacrificial genocide arises from a totalitarian illusion that is
manifested in the belief that there are no alternatives to the present-day reality and that the problems
and difficulties confronting it arise from failing to take its logic of development to its ultimate
consequences. If there is unemployment, hunger and death in the Third World, this is not the result of
market failures; instead, it is the outcome of the market laws not having been fully applied.
If there is
terrorism, this is not due to the violence of the conditions that generate it; it is due, rather, to the fact that total violence has not been employed
to physically eradicate all terrorists and potential terrorists.
This political logic is based on the supposition of total power
and knowledge, and on the radical rejection of alternatives; it is ultra-conservative in that it aims to

infinitely reproduce the status quo. Inherent to it is the notion of the end of history .
During the last hundred
years, the West has experienced three versions of this logic, and, therefore, seen three versions of the end of history: Stalinism, with its logic of
insuperable efficiency of the plan; Nazism, with its logic of racial superiority; and
neoliberalism, with its logic of insuperable
efficiency of the market . The first two periods involved the destruction of democracy. The last one
trivializes democracy, disarming it in the face of social actors sufficiently powerful to be able to privatize
the State and international institutions in their favour. I have described this situation as a combination of
political democracy and social fascism .