"The great question of our time is: from where will the next successful challenge to authority arise?"
The answer is quite clear: Confucianism. This is because Confucianism pursues a different view of humanity, one based on inner virtue, morality, and respect for the community and its values. Respect for the community, in particular, is the key to a different organization of society, one that no longer adheres to the pleonexia of the financialism of Western societies. China is known as a pioneer in placing the common good above individual interests, which is evident in the arrests and harsh sentences even of members of the upper nomenklatura.
The Chinese are not afraid to bring people like Jack Ma, whose wealth has gone to their heads, back down to earth. The motto is that as long as there is poverty in their own country, everyone must contribute to changing this situation. And since there is unlikely to be a color revolution in China, these principles will shape the future.
In Russia, similar approaches are also being explored by Alexander Dugin. In his Fourth Political Theory, which is essentially inspired by Heidegger's concept of Dasein (human being as a social being), it aims to establish Russia as the "heartland" of a new political culture. While this is obscured by the current war, it can also serve as a guide for solidarity.
David Graeber "Debt: The First 5000 Years", 2011, Page 356:
We are used to thinking of such bureaucratic interventions—particularly the monopolies and regulations—as state restriction on “the market”—owing to the prevailing prejudice that sees markets as quasi-natural phenomena that emerge by themselves, and governments as having no role other than to squelch or siphon from them. I have repeatedly pointed out how mistaken this is, but China provides a particularly striking example. The Confucian state may have been the world’s greatest and most enduring bureaucracy, but it actively promoted markets, and as a result, commercial life in China soon became far more sophisticated, and markets more developed, than anywhere else in the world.
This despite the fact that Confucian orthodoxy was overtly hostile to merchants and even the profit motive itself. Commercial profit was seen as legitimate only as compensation for the labor that merchants expended in transporting goods from one place to another, but never as fruits of speculation. What this meant in practice was that they were pro-market but anti-capitalist.
Again, this seems bizarre, since we’re used to assuming that capitalism and markets are the same thing, but, as the great French historian Fernand Braudel pointed out, in many ways they could equally well be conceived as opposites. While markets are ways of exchanging goods through the medium of money—historically, ways for those with a surplus of grain to acquire candles and vice versa (in economic shorthand, C-M-C, for commodity-money-other commodity)—capitalism for Braudel is first and foremost the art of using money to get more money (M-C-M). Normally, the easiest way to do this is by establishing some kind of formal or de facto monopoly. For this reason, capitalists, whether merchant princes, financiers, or industrialists, invariably try to ally themselves with political authorities to limit the freedom of the market, so as to make it easier for them to do so. From this perspective, China was for most of its history the ultimate anti-capitalist market state. Unlike later European princes, Chinese rulers systematically refused to team up with would-be Chinese capitalists (who always existed). Instead, like their officials, they saw them as destructive parasites—though, unlike the usurers, ones whose fundamentally selfish and antisocial motivations could still be put to use in certain ways. In Confucian terms, merchants were like soldiers. Those drawn to a career in the military were assumed to be driven largely by a love of violence. As individuals, they were not good people, but they were also necessary to defend the frontiers. Similarly, merchants were driven by greed and basically immoral; yet if kept under careful administrative supervision, they could be made to serve the public good. Whatever one might think of the principles, the results are hard to deny. For most of its history, China maintained the highest standard of living in the world—even England only really overtook it in perhaps the 1820s, well past the time of the Industrial Revolution.
"The great question of our time is: from where will the next successful challenge to authority arise?"
The answer is quite clear: Confucianism. This is because Confucianism pursues a different view of humanity, one based on inner virtue, morality, and respect for the community and its values. Respect for the community, in particular, is the key to a different organization of society, one that no longer adheres to the pleonexia of the financialism of Western societies. China is known as a pioneer in placing the common good above individual interests, which is evident in the arrests and harsh sentences even of members of the upper nomenklatura.
The Chinese are not afraid to bring people like Jack Ma, whose wealth has gone to their heads, back down to earth. The motto is that as long as there is poverty in their own country, everyone must contribute to changing this situation. And since there is unlikely to be a color revolution in China, these principles will shape the future.
In Russia, similar approaches are also being explored by Alexander Dugin. In his Fourth Political Theory, which is essentially inspired by Heidegger's concept of Dasein (human being as a social being), it aims to establish Russia as the "heartland" of a new political culture. While this is obscured by the current war, it can also serve as a guide for solidarity.
The outlook isn't so bad.
David Graeber "Debt: The First 5000 Years", 2011, Page 356:
We are used to thinking of such bureaucratic interventions—particularly the monopolies and regulations—as state restriction on “the market”—owing to the prevailing prejudice that sees markets as quasi-natural phenomena that emerge by themselves, and governments as having no role other than to squelch or siphon from them. I have repeatedly pointed out how mistaken this is, but China provides a particularly striking example. The Confucian state may have been the world’s greatest and most enduring bureaucracy, but it actively promoted markets, and as a result, commercial life in China soon became far more sophisticated, and markets more developed, than anywhere else in the world.
This despite the fact that Confucian orthodoxy was overtly hostile to merchants and even the profit motive itself. Commercial profit was seen as legitimate only as compensation for the labor that merchants expended in transporting goods from one place to another, but never as fruits of speculation. What this meant in practice was that they were pro-market but anti-capitalist.
Again, this seems bizarre, since we’re used to assuming that capitalism and markets are the same thing, but, as the great French historian Fernand Braudel pointed out, in many ways they could equally well be conceived as opposites. While markets are ways of exchanging goods through the medium of money—historically, ways for those with a surplus of grain to acquire candles and vice versa (in economic shorthand, C-M-C, for commodity-money-other commodity)—capitalism for Braudel is first and foremost the art of using money to get more money (M-C-M). Normally, the easiest way to do this is by establishing some kind of formal or de facto monopoly. For this reason, capitalists, whether merchant princes, financiers, or industrialists, invariably try to ally themselves with political authorities to limit the freedom of the market, so as to make it easier for them to do so. From this perspective, China was for most of its history the ultimate anti-capitalist market state. Unlike later European princes, Chinese rulers systematically refused to team up with would-be Chinese capitalists (who always existed). Instead, like their officials, they saw them as destructive parasites—though, unlike the usurers, ones whose fundamentally selfish and antisocial motivations could still be put to use in certain ways. In Confucian terms, merchants were like soldiers. Those drawn to a career in the military were assumed to be driven largely by a love of violence. As individuals, they were not good people, but they were also necessary to defend the frontiers. Similarly, merchants were driven by greed and basically immoral; yet if kept under careful administrative supervision, they could be made to serve the public good. Whatever one might think of the principles, the results are hard to deny. For most of its history, China maintained the highest standard of living in the world—even England only really overtook it in perhaps the 1820s, well past the time of the Industrial Revolution.