1. The concept of nature and the concept of domination
The concept of nature and the concept of domination are concepts known by man
since the oldest prehistory. Domination of nature and the domestication of animals and
plants introduced social relationships of production that transformed primitive societies,
changes which, in their time marked man’s own evolutionary destiny.
Today, we can feel the influence that human society has provoked in nature in all
aspects of daily life.
Capitalism, as the prevailing productive system, diversifies the economic risk
weighing the natural risks to guarantee the optimum level of production that satisfies the
needs of the system. Therefore, one can set forth objectives like stopping world hunger,
an end that gains the social and political support of everyone. On the other hand, it is an
objective that appears to need science. That is, the necessity of social approval,
political and financial support, to present the world with the results of the discoveries
as real benefits for the benefit of all. Nevertheless, technological products and scientific
projects that are developed under the economic support and patronage of the richest
nations of the world, end up being included in the capitalistic production system
resulting finally in the betterment of the existing social positions and the polarization of
world wealth. There is, therefore, an incompatibility between the initial goal, support
for the fight against world hunger, and the final beneficiaries of scientific discoveries.
Biogenetic knowledge has transformed agricultural techniques and, therefore, has
introduced new changes in social relationships of production at a planetary level. The
present phase of the domination of nature, at a speed unknown until now, alters the
genetic flux of same artificializing it’s behaviour. For example, the genetic
manipulation of the soya bean, one of the most consumed products in Asia with a very
high number of potential consumers, has already created, by the hand of genetic
manipulation, introducing genetic mechanisms that provoke infertility in a year, beans
that cannot be reused. These beans cannot leave of the supply chain of the biogenetic
companies’ brand. The modification permits the creation of a more resistant bean but
the dependence on technology is greater thereby generating a specific, highly
concentrated market.
The thesis of over-industrialization, based in the undefined augmentation of
technological solutions at the cost of over-exploitation of nature, has converted political
ecologism into it’s principle opponent Political ecologism considers the industrial
solution of capitalism or socialism equally pernicious. Political ecologism explains the
domination of nature by way of the economic relationships that it promotes. Those
relationships, equally with social domination, are exercised by means of organized
action, by the institutions, by the known procedures in our culture and the collective or
individual participation of the citizens, that is, by means of the systems of political
action. (Horkheimer, Max: History, metaphysics y scepticism, 1998. Madrid, p. 20). “In
the strict sense, society doesn’t only support the domination of nature. Society bases all
that, as much as the domination of men by other men, on the combination of methods
that drive that domination and the measures that serve to maintain so called politics”.
Once we pay attention to the field where the dissolution of the exploitation of
nature comes from, the power relationships as much as the economic relationships, and,

2. as a consequence, that, by political means, we can modify said relationships, we
confront the problem of the need to make the responsibility to guarantee the survival of
huge masses of humans compatible with the need to assume that the only instrument
available is the capitalist, industrial system. So we are not only dealing with utilizing
the argument that industrialism is the instrument that demolishes natural space, which is
the principle criticism of the system, we are dealing with the principle argument of
legitimization of the same industrialism which comes from the demand for economic
and industrial growth and that, the poorest nations have confidence in grasping this
same industrial system that generates inequalities and dependencies and puts the
survival of a large number of people in crisis. Therefore, a phase of development of the
system where the wealth has it’s principle argument in the justification of an abundance
of misery, and in order to solve this, there only exists the capitalist system of production
itself as an alternative.
Disidealization and the loss of cultural and individual identity are the
characteristics of the present phase of the domination of nature. The formation of wealth
and the necessary domination of human nature transcends physical, political and
cultural borders (limits). The capitalist system demands a tribute, imposing a fetishistic
adoration of money and submitting the value of everything to the value of change. It
demands an unquestionable recognition of the status quo of economic power and in a
survey of scientific rationality, demands acceptance of the instrumental rationality, and
in a survey of thought an aseptic positivism, and in an ideological survey a defence of
all irrational ties of collective identity (religious, ethnic, cultural and linguistic) that
alienate individual identity. Irresponsible postures that end up delegating to faith what
reason can’t justify. Finally, since a more efficient system for the production of wealth
doesn’t exist, capitalism should assume ethically, the responsibility of the consequences
of misery, ignorance and unsustainable development of its own acts, so that, the system
encounters it’s legitimization in it’s diametric opposite. The inability to reconcile acts
with responsibility, in an irresponsible society, in a society without identity, causes a
permanent crisis of legitimization and coherence to be maintained at the same time.
The crisis of natural resources is the alarm signal of the limits of capitalist growth; the
systematic domination over nature of which wild, domestic and human nature form a
part. The uni-dimensional nature of the capitalist system looks, in a capitalism, reborn
and fortified, to reinvent all the ideological processes that can contribute to the
integration within the equilibrium of the system this new characteristic of the system of
domination. Capitalism, which is presented as the champion of all the solutions, only
looks for the success of it’s own reproduction.

3. The concept of nature for the criticism of logical positivism. The concept. The
choice of the concept of nature in critical theory, can denote an idealistic vision of
critical theory, because “concept”, for positivism, is an empty category that hopes that
the experiment will crystallize it’s significance, and, a function “Y”, dependent on the
variability of “X”. On the contrary, critical theory, has significance as a logical
abstraction, a reflection of material reality, two existing faces separable only by means
of intellectual abstraction but inseparable in material reality. Positivism, however,
sustains the objectivity of the idea and, therefore, reifies said category. Horkheimer
says, in Critique of Instrumental Reason, (Ibid., 1969. p. 57) “Pragmatism, pluralist as
it may appear, converts everything into a mere object and so in the final instance, one
and the same thing, an element in the chain of cause and effect.” The nature itself of the
concept indicates to us the methodological orientation, that is, the methods by which
one must subject the object to analysis. That brings us to set forth the following
questions: Positivist science reifies thought, in the same manner as that conceded by
objective reality. For that, the alienation of man with respect to nature is a necessary
condition and concedes to human nature an existence objectively distinct from the rest
of living things that is only sustained thanks to the concession that positivism makes to
the objectivity of the methodological procedures of science and, on the other hand, a
concession to theologization, divination and the extra-material superiority of scientific
explanation if we treat it as a mere substitute for myth and not an explication of veracity
and a reflection of realist thought. This conflict between man and nature is crucial for
logical positivism, since it illustrates the historical separation that this philosophical
position concedes to the domination of man as a sensitive and distant phenomena and at
the same time distinct from the domination of nature. That is, that the exploitation of
nature has nothing to do with the exploitation of man. Positivism, the same as pre-
animist culture, grants to nature an identity distinct from material reality. By means of
categorization, classification and scientific nomenclature, the positive scientist
reproduces what the savages made of the natural world, that is, to make it an objective,
real existence in his own perception of reality. In the same way that animist cultures
believe in objectivity of the spirits, science believes in the objectivity of it’s
codification. (Horkheimer, Max: The Dialectic of Enlightenment, 1969, p. 70) ”It’s not
that the soul was interjected into nature as psychology would have us believe; manna,
the moving spirit, are not projections but rather echoes of the real superiority of nature
in the fragile souls of the savages. The separation between animate and inanimate, the
occupation of determined locations by demons and divinities already stems from this
pre-animism; in which the separation of subject and object is already given. If a tree
is not considered only as a tree but rather testimony to some other thing, as was manna,
the language expresses the contradiction that a thing could be itself and at the same
time something distinct which is, identical and not identical. By means of divinity,
language is converted to tautology in language.” The domination of nature arises in the
same instant in which we recognize the identity of objects by means of the assignation
of values that permit that knowledge of that reality has significance for man. Therefore,
the concept supposes to provide the identity of the infinite realities possible that share
something in common, a common sense. The concept dissolves contact with reality, it’s
existence is ephemeral and negative. (Horkheimer, ibid.) “The concept, which is
customarily defined as a constituent of that which has come down understood, was,
however, from the beginning the product of dialectic thought, in which each thing is
only the measure in which it is converted into that which is isn’t. This was the origin of
the form of objective determination in which the concept and the thing separate
reciprocally; the same determination that we encounter very widespread in Homeric

4. epic poetry and which we invert in positive modern science.” With the reification of the
concept we end up with it’s negative power, it’s instrumental explanation turns into an
instrument of explanation; that is, the identity of the object by means of assigning a
location, significant for the subject, substituting the subjective value of the object for an
endowed intrinsic value. The dialectic relationship between reality and valuation of the
same reality, implies a reflexive knowledge about the reality, and, therefore, a
permanent rectification, a perfection of the thought that thinks this reality. In logical
positivism this relationship is inverted since the values arising from this thought acquire
the category of objects as if those objects couldn’t be another thing nor complete
another function that wasn’t what the original thought was. So nature, in logical
positivism, is a slave to those procedures with which it is analyzed, since those
procedures grant a scientific value, by tautological method, of the universal law. Or, by
the same token, nature is converted into classified objects whose natural order is
substituted for an order determined by the grid that the investigator uses to classify it.
The illumination of reason, the light that disperses the shadows of ignorance,
doesn’t allow the resolution of the panic of man confronted with the power of the forces
to which he is subjected. The learned, the scientists, have not been able to calm the
forces of nature and only continue in artificial light, the light of scientific knowledge,
which is manifested as another form of power and, therefore, another form of terror.
“But this dialectic continues being impotent in the measure in which it develops from a
cry of terror, which is the duplication, the tautology of the same terror. The gods
couldn’t rid man of the terror of which their names are a petrified echo. Man believes
in order to be free of terror when there no longer exists anything unknown. Which
determines the course of demythologization, of erudition, which identifies the living
with the non-living, the same way that myth identifies the non-living with the living.”
(Horkheimer, ibid.). The placement of a scientific solution as an instrument, the
substitution of the labour force by machines, the reduction of intellectual work from the
numerous data gathered, the disappreciation of philosophy and social thought, are forms
that manifest the fear of the dark, the blind search for the circuit breaker in a dark room,
the displacement of our fears to the exterior. “Erudition is the mythic fear made
radical. The pure immanency of positivism, it’s latest product, is no more than a taboo
in a certain universal sense. Absolutely nothing should exist outside since just the idea
of the exterior is the genuine font of fear.” (Horkheimer, ibid.)

5. The Conflict between Man and Nature.
The crisis of nature is, therefore, also a crisis of human nature. The concept of
conflict, that only has sense for man, in which moral nature self projects guidelines of
behaviour, values and reason, constitutes the principle criteria from which to initiate a
reflection about the behaviour of nature.
Seen as two objects of interaction, man and nature bring to the table the question of
the significance of human rationality, since that existing in man is blind to other forms
of nature at least that we can attribute. What sense does reason have? Are we
determined by our nature, in all senses? What does reason look for that nature doesn’t
provide?
We can intuit the sense of reason from the moment that the fight for survival is
associated with an exercise of instrumental rationality. From this point reason self-
justifies the practical results, but when the practical results threaten survival, then we
face a strategic failure, an inadequate choice of procedure, and, therefore, from this
other point reason disqualifies itself. So therefore, we could think that, given that this
process of validity and fiability of reason has accompanied man since time immemorial,
we should know not only the social construction of our nature but the myths that we
have constructed, the taboos, the moral decisions and ethics applied to external and
internal nature. Horkheimer sets out for us key questions in "Critique of Instrumental
Reason". (Horkheimer, Max: 1973, ibid., p. 119) "How does nature react, in all it’s
phases of repression, inside of man and outside of him, in the face of this antagonism?"
Referring to the antagonism between man and the total exploitation of nature, "Of what
do the psychological, political and philosophical manifestations of it’s rebellion
consist? (Horkheimer, ibid.)
What we are looking for in this investigation, which can’t stop at mere
approximation, is if in those myths, those moral guidelines really, if at some point along
the path we can find the point of inflection from which those deviations that we have
elevated to enemies of ourselves and the rest of nature are corrected. “Is it possible to
solve the conflict by means of a “return to nature”, by means of a reanimation of old
doctrines or the creation of new myths?" (Horkheimer, ibid.) Horkheimer understands
the conflict between man and nature as a prolongation of human conflicts, that is, the
relationship that we begin with nature projects the relationship that we establish with
society.
The term projection is used here from the explanation of social psychology. In the
most genuine use of Freudian Projection, derived flow included, that is, as much as it
permits an explanation of the projection of internal conflict made external, we realize
that when we don’t want to confront our defects or our destructive impulses we attribute
those vices and defects to an external being; it explains the displacement of energy from
an intense relationship to a discharge of violence in other relationships, such that our
desires or will are repressed to unsustainable limits and the power of our superego
becomes repressed and the violent reaction that said situations provoke spills over
friends, our social conduct, traffic, football, this quantum violence that didn’t flow in
the original situation.

6. As well as projecting internal conflicts of individuality on society, so we also
project our social conflicts on nature and that is so because social links are established
on the basis of a relationship of physical survival. The “to be or not to be” of man is the
“to be or not to be material” of man. Any other form of being responds to a
metaphysical or religious explanation of human nature itself, that doesn’t allow us to
confront the internal conflicts of man in a fearful manner. That same projection that we
can exemplify in the energy that impels nations to usurp the territory of other nations or
ways of life, of conquest, deviating thereby their internal tensions and channelling the
violence of those conflicts, conquering and creating new spaces in which to construct
their utopias, the dreams of their unresolved internal repressions. A “pioneering”
solution for the destiny of man. Until now, the relationship of man with nature was a
relationship measured by alienation, in the measure that nature constitutes the other
nature, that is, wild nature; the other forms of nature. Our technological relationship
with nature which was via those instrumental processes which permit, more easily, our
digestion and our metabolism. But, we have modified that relationship. In the
economic plan we have reached the point where nature isn’t the free contribution of
“Mr.” natural, it isn’t the manna that God sent us. Today nature, equally with our whole
civilization, travels the path of our whole civilization, travels the path of technology and
has been converted into a purely human creation. But we can’t reduce this to a mere
technological relationship. We are also confronting a modification of the dominant
values such that they could rebalance the part of the conscience of reality. That is, we
can’t deal only with what the capitalist system provides as the undefined progress of
humanity, but rather to convince ourselves of the one dimensional nature of the system
in order to survive confronting the shortage of resources. Preparing ourselves in order
to organize society while confronting the imminent fount of conflicts that the
monopolization of resources represents supposes the first ideological work of the
system. In this sense and by these measures, to which the trends point unanimously, our
relationship with nature is, in reality, a relationship amongst ourselves and therefore, it
is converted into a philosophical problem, before the banishment of the subject and it’s
consciousness. Scientific ethics constitute another element in the actual process of
awareness and therefore in the formation of the social conscience. Also, the social
division of labour, the hedonistic cultural values, have brought a major banishment of
the individual respecting any type of conception of the world. Also, a political problem
of the first order, in which the hierarchy of power over nature and behind all that the
debate about state ownership versus privatization, the legitimacy of institutions, the
virtualization of the concept of sovereignty and their effects on human nature. That is,
the relationship of man continues the same and therefore the equilibrium of his cultural
behaviour.
Cultural Behaviour.
Significance and significant inter-relationships of our cultural behaviour..
When a temporary rupture in the inter-relationships of the significant concepts is
manifested, that is, of those concepts employed in expression, and equally, the rupture
of sense and direction of linguistic expression, we are confronted with a linguistic
dysfunction, the expression loses sense. What occurs with language can also be
extended to other languages and expressions of consciousness, such as art or human
creativity in general. Really, man’s own social behaviour. Cultural behaviour is affected
by that loss of temporary continuity that represents the relationship of cause and effect,

7. in terms of Hume and Aristotle, a “before” as cause and an “after” as effect which is
similar to the process of schizophrenic dysfunction in the mind of man. Incapable of
piecing together the temporary logic of his reality, he lives the past and the future like
an eternal present. In this manner, we can say that the identity is a temporary
construction, a synthesis of reference between the past and the future. But the processes
of reification of the conscience, according to logical positivism, that practices the
temporary isolation of the phenomena that it studies and reduces them to a purely
present experience, corroborates this tendency of cultural schizophrenia. Presented as
cultural productivity, the significant concepts vary in multiple directions, lack of self
reflection converts to authentic the compulsion that resorts to instinct and abandons the
search for sense. As Frederic Jameson describes to us: (Jameson, Frederic:
Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Contradictions of Late Capitalism-, 1996,)
“significant. What we are in the habit of calling “the meaning” - the meaning or
conceptual content of enunciation - should consider itself more an effect of meaning,
this objective mirage of the significance of the inter-relationships that the significants
generate and protect. When the relationship cracks, when the links in the significant
chain break, we find ourselves with schizophrenia, a jumble of different significants
without relationship. The connection between this type of linguistic dysfunction and the
psyche of the schizophrenic can be understood then in a double thesis: first, that the
personal identity is an effect of a certain temporary unification of the past and future
with our present; and, secondly, that our own actual temporary unification is a function
of language - or, better still, of oration (speech) - in it’s temporary journey via it’s
hermeneutic circle. We are so incapable of uniting the past, the present and the future
of oration as the past, the present and the future of our biographic experience or
psychic life. Therefore, with the rupture of the significant chain, schizophrenia leaves
us reduced to an experience of pure significant materials, or, in other words, to a series
of pure presents and without connection in time.”
The process of civilization itself distinguishes between culture as an efficient
response of said process and the impulses channelled into occurrences of violence or
neurotic manifestations. In which manifestations of social conscience, the cultural
behaviour of man reflects the social conditions which pressure individuals and the
degree of expressions that the individual has in his own nature. By this means, when
the networks of relationships between those that produce the process of socialization
contain repression, by means of fear, of desire and affect, then we only encounter a way
out by means of compulsive actions or some other nervous pathology. (Norbert, Elias.
The Process of Civilization, 1989) “But depending on the internal pressure and the
situation of society and the individual in it, tensions and determined disturbances in the
behaviour and in the instinctive life of the individual are also produced. In certain
conditions they can drive a continual restlessness and dissatisfaction of the individual
precisely because a part of his inclinations and impulses only find satisfaction in an
unusual form, for example, in fantasy, in contemplation or hearing, in somnolence or in
daydreams. Sometimes, the custom of containing the emotions goes so far - the
permanent sentiments of boredom and loneliness are good examples of this, - that the
individual no longer has the possibility to manifest his repressed affects without fear, to
satisfy directly his suffocated instincts. In those cases, real impulses are anesthetized by
means of a specific structure in the network of relationships that an individual
developments from childhood, under the pressure of the dangers of manifesting the
result in the sphere of the infant, those real impulses are armoured in such a way with
fears of an automatic character that, in certain conditions, entire lives are passed deaf
and dumb. In other cases, the coarse, emotional and passionate character of those real

8. impulses cause inevitable conflicts in those children in the course of their development
of conversion into “civilized” beings, in such a manner that their energy only
encounters an exit laterally via compulsive actions and other neurotic manifestations.”
Socialization Phase. It is in the socialization phase, from infancy to youth, that the
experience of cultural awareness is shared with the experience of growth. A process
where to awaken the consciousness of “I” and of the formation of personality, where the
construction of subjective identity forms or conforms with objective identity, that we
confront the conflict between what nature demonstrates and what society says. A
contradiction that internalizes the social rules and conduct, the established social order.
The peculiar stability of the apparatus of psychic self compulsion that appears as a
decisive feature in the habits of every “civilized” individual, we encounter in an
intimate relationship with the formation of institutions monopolized by physical
violence and with the growing stability of central social organs. The family itself
constitutes the introduction to the world of hierarchies, privileges and social conflicts.
This contradiction provokes violence, the violence that adds to our struggle for social
position, the violence that we load on the strange, on the different, on those that protest
and on those obstruct us. Just as fear of the dark is not a product of the dark - the
darkness doesn’t bring it, it brings no fear - so our internal mental processes construct
phobias, a reaction hidden, perhaps, in the “genetic conduct”, that recalls the fear of the
dark that a primitive simian - that knew he was vulnerable in the absence of light and
the dangers of nature - associated with it. This atavistic fear that we try to resolve;
extending it to our environment, searching for the key to the light, an unresolved fear,
postponed, an anesthetized anguish while the light shines. This cultural sham
(mockery), this light whose filmography is constructed with appearances of reality, is
the cultural answer of our time. Each product, created to satisfy real needs, loses all
significance when converted to the reification of desire, a desire that, aligned with one’s
relationship with reality, responds to a world in unconscious key, to atavistic, primitive
resorts, stimulating compulsive behaviour and conditioning our conduct by way of our
habit of consumption. (Jameson, Frederic, Ibid., p. 39), tells us that: “The culture of
mockery was born in a society where the value of change has been generalized to the
point that the memory of the value of use has disappeared, a society where, as Guy
Debord has observed in an extraordinary phrase, “the image has been converted into
the final form of the reification of merchandise” (the society of spectacle).” We cannot
forget, therefore, the internal principles of human conduct, where irrationality
completes its role in the systemic equilibrium of conduct. Paraphrasing the Freudian
schema, the “I” takes the beginning of reality and synthesizes it, its impulses, desires
and basic necessities, at the same time that it designs a plan to prove it can bring it into
practice in a context structured by coexistence with others.
In the same manner that we talk about personal identity of the individual in his
social interrelationships, can we talk about national identity? To what extent and in
what way? Which are the admissible parallels?
We can establish the parallelism between the behaviour of individuals and the
behaviour of nations, following the path set by two classics of socio-political
philosophy, Hobbes and Montesquieu.
Hobbes, in his “Leviathan”, shows us the foundation of the state has the same
origin as human nature. Man that is like a wolf for man, justifies cessation of authority

9. of a force, superior to all and capable of re-establishing the peace amongst the egoistic
interests of man. The law of the state is the monopoly of violence. Nevertheless, when
Montesquieu, in his “Civil Government”, proposes to us an equilibrium of powers based
in executive power, legislative power and the power of foreign affairs, he is telling us
about the self-regulation of power. This exercise of self control comes from existing
suspicion about the ethics of the State, which, extends to development of autonomous
behaviours respecting the people that it sustains. Self regulation corrects or should
demarcate and limit each one of those powers by means of mutual supervision. The
difference between one vision of power of the state and the other, stems from what
Montesquieu notes as a democratic power, and Hobbes, as an absolutist power which
the Hobbesian line already considers the realization of the State as a consequence of the
end of sovereign will, while the Montesquien is based in the self reflecting necessity of
power as a condition of a rational power.
Kant already introduced us to a universal moral, valid for individuals and nations.
We are accustomed to hearing the principle actor speak in international relations,
referring us to the state. We attribute to the state the supreme personality and sustain
the tension between the legal code and the exercise of power in order to equalize the
State’s own identity, which is shared among the role of individuals, as well as collective
desires (the social unconscious), legal normativity (the social superego) and the
beginnings of reality that exercise power in its many forms and regimes.
In this sense we can say, of all young nations, that they suffer the same processes
of development as man in his individuality, a development ontogenetic y philogenetic.
And so, today we speak of the state as protagonist, exercising its international relations
on the primitive basis of those qualities of isolated individuals, of survival and security.
Justice, the law, the character of it’s institutions and finally, the rationality of it’s system
is a product of it’s own experience and of the existing social order. Therefore, the
social contradictions are internalized locating in a separate penal system those
individuals whose behaviour has not respected said order. The penalization of anti-
social conduct is in the custody of professional bodies of police, as are the streets,
airports and private housing developments. Perhaps because our anti-civilized conduct
should be repressed generating “keys”, “interruptors” for those that regulate fears and so
place in future moments social peace and the harmony of man, branding them with
ingenuousness. Horkheimer tells us (Horkheimer, Max: Ibid., 1973, p. 124) - "Cultural
progress in it’s totality, as well as individual education- it deserves saying, the
philogenetic and ontogenetic progresses of civilization-, consist, in grand measure, of
the work of transforming mimetic behaviour into rational behaviour-.” Those
behaviours are integrated including those far removed from the existing initial
conditions of their existence, incorporating them in the cultural inheritance. "Adaptation
signifies the arrival of identification - for the sake of self-preservation - with the world
of objects." (...) "...constitutes a universal principle of civilization". And so, the internal
stability of the system in the adaptive process, it’s self-preservation, is realized by
means of internalization, that is to say, by means of the rationalization of it’s conduct,
behaviours that the mimesis expands in social relations, it’s cultural production and it’s
ideological production, all the processes of the manipulation of consciousness, have, as
an end, to reduce the effects of the social contradictions, to soften, normalize, regularize
the responses of, in order to deal with conflicts in the same manner as incurable
illnesses, reducing their effects at the price of renouncing the illness and liquidating it,
at the cost of creating chronic conflicts. Instrumental reason permits us to project
internal conflicts, those conflicts of inequality and the differences of society postponing

10. their solution in a “key” that, outside of society, clouds and confuses consciousness
itself postponing real knowledge, substituting this last for knowledge and manipulation
of environment. So a hedonistic society attempts to give the appearance of happiness
and social equilibrium. Those phantoms, hidden in social conflicts, don’t resolve future
wars, revolutions or violence for the sake of God, the nation or race, given the unknown
historical entity. Horkheimer says: (Horkheimer, Max,1973, ibid. p. 121) "What
tortures a young man above all is his turbulent conscience and he confuses the narrow
link, almost the identity, between reasons, “I”, domination and nature. He senses the
abyss between ideals that have been inculcated in him together with the hopes that they
awaken in him and the origin of reality to which he is obligated to submit himself.."
This process which projects internal conflicts to the exterior, occurs in logical
positivism as a work of nature, that is to say, as an objective fact, and not as a conflict
linked to the process of internal development of contradiction, (from Hegel, Everything
Happens in Existence,).
Institutional Behaviour. Institutional Complicity.
A decisive part in the development and dissemination of the ideology of reification
is represented by an enormous institutional machine. It has been reducing the political
space on par with the emptiness of ideological-political discourse. Today, in Europe an
extensive debate has been raised surrounding the representativity of it’s institutions and
the necessity, clearer every day, to provide those institutions with a power based on the
vote of the citizens of the European Union. Farther still from a conscience of a nation
of all nations, the European Union must confront, in a particular manner, the general
representative crisis in the predominant democratic model. The depoliticization of
institutions, in the sense that Hanna Arendt recalls for us, by means of the displacement
of political questions so that they are called domestic questions, has been displacing the
importance of said institutional forums and favouring others far from political
responsibility and public judgment. There are always more technicians, meetings of
social agents, designing social policy of the governments that always end up short of a
final agreement. In Spain, where the Senate is considered the best territorial chamber,
they maintain sine die, the discussion about how to confront the vertebración of regions
and nationalities within the constitutional and institutional brand, in a context where the
nationalist parties, who have majorities in two of the most important autonomous
communities of the country, do not renunciate their own powers of negotiation or deal
with other autonomous communities with the equivalent respect, thereby stripping the
Senate of it’s institutional role. As some authors have come to indicate (Held, David,
1996, Alianza, Models of Democracy, p. 261) “the traditional representative political
institutions have been progressively displaced by the process of third parties taking
decisions. The parliamentary position as supreme centre of the articulation of politics
and agreement has eroded; the approval by parliament of projected law is now, more
than ever, a mere procedure”. “(...), territorial or parliamentary representation is no
longer the principle manner of expressing and protecting interests. (...), the most
important work of political and economic direction derives from functional agents, to
know, corporate delegates, the unions and the branches of the state. The extra-
parliamentary political processes have been converted, little by little, into the central
organs of decision making. (...) In short, parliamentary sovereignty and the power of
the citizens is being sapped by economic changes, political pressures and organized

11. development.” Neo-corporatism places in danger, room for political decisions, the rights
and duties of the citizens to establish the socio-economic conditions in which they can
exercise those rights and elaborate those negotiations, at the margin of the institutions of
direct representation of the citizens.
Also, a good example of the space where the ideology of the reification of power is
made, are the public health systems. Enormously dependent on the public budget, in
some cases (in the Europe of Keynesian societal well being, and the remains of state
protectorate, as is the case in Spain) the market for health, insurance entities and
institutional hospitals and, in others, private clinics. The certainty is that the decision to
guarantee minimum standards of public health is in the hands of those professional
groups who have their own interests in play. By means of the concentration of the
resources of investigation, that demand enormous capital flow, the plan is relegated to
the clinic and by means of the dosage of medicines that reduce the effects of illnesses,
cause a chronic situation of medical demand, far from that which supposes the use of
resources for the elimination of illness. Criteria like, the number of people affected in
relation to the total population and percentages that aren’t representative of certain
ailments, evidences the language of reification such that it reduces the subjective role
of the citizens themselves, a decisive factor in the formation of the ideology of power.
As well, in the education system: organic principles in the academic structure are
imposed from the top by means of the application of rules, of which there are always
more, that try to apply a criteria of quality extracted from the experiences of productive
processes. The offer of education is continually more dependent on the production
system and offers of employment and we are presented with the language of
institutional positivism; the same reification logic, the same instrumental rationality that
has been described above.
The International Relationship.
According to Hoffmann (Stanley H. Hoffmann, 1979, Tecnos, Contemporary
Theories About International Relations, p. 314) theories about international ethics tend
to be grouped in two categories. The realists maintain that relations between states are
ruled only by power and ethics doesn’t play any part in them.
The contrary theory, maintains the existence of an international community, and
that the same moral code can be applied to individuals and states.
For political realism, the only law that exists between states is that same law that
governs the relations between men, before the existence of Leviathan and, therefore, the
necessity of same becomes implicit in the initiative to order international relations from
a power far removed from the desires of it’s contestants. A stronger State and with the
capacity to monopolize the exercise of force over the other States. The self-regulation of
Montesquieu supposes that the natural impulses of man aspire to monopolize all the
power. Democratic power, in contrast to absolute power, consists precisely of the
application of self-repressive criteria; in the change of conduct to conform to the self-
imposed rules. The division of powers has, as a result of self-regulation, a mutual
vigilance. In this sense, the attention paid to foreign affairs has a special importance
that also acts as a self-regulator of unilateral decisions in a manner such that the
relationship with others constitutes an essential part in the identity of the State.

12. The goal of political realism is to grant the most security via the availability of
the most eloquent dissuasive armaments. (Waltz, Kenneth N.: Theory of International.
Grupo editor latinoamericano. Buenos Aires. 1988). The most effective play of alliances
and the knowledge of the motivations of other states; the most clarity in the scheme of
subordination and predominance, the major capacity for intervention in the
configuration (regulated or non-regulated) of international order.
The strategic fragility of political realism. Political realism, in which the
dominant political thought in international relations grants to the State a major part that
is not foreign to it’s own process of loss of political representativity of the democratic
models. Principally exercised in the institutional area of executive power, the process of
taking decisions, as well as the responsibility of national security located in said
political thought in the purest requirements of pragmatism, that is, before the fiability of
information as a font of valid, worthwhile judgment. But, not only the information
systems, but rather the institutional whole that surrounds exterior politics, in some cases
the army, in others the huge international corporations, in others the desire for technical
influence, for ideological influence, share with the strategies of positive thought, their
confidence in the technicians, in the aseptic criteria of social sciences. That puts those
states before a rational election system. Following the events of September 11, what
was in some cases a hypothesis, that is, that nuclear armament or massive destruction
could be manipulated by terrorists, brought to the table in a clear direction the process
of the restructurization of the international military model. Those models that were in
play, that were smashed, such that the possibility of a military collaboration in order to
combat the most obvious proof of the appearance of the enemy clashed with the
fundamental basics of the proposed new model of collaboration. That is, if the enemy is
terrorism, are we confronted with a tactical enemy or a strategic enemy? Are we facing
a new modalidad of war or war without definition? The principle tactical objective of
terrorism is to immediately have a division amongst the old block of alliances. The
uneven response of the western nations shows that terrorism, in it’s political arm, has a
certain degree of efficacy. But, is terrorism a form of fighting or is it an ideology in
itself? From this dilemma the reification concept of realist political thought flows. The
faceless enemy is the enemy thing. The best enemy is a dead enemy. This is the
discussion that flows from a positive conception instrumental to reality politics. Where
is the scientificity, the rational security of said strategic criteria? For realist political
thought, the available technology is the purveyor of all the rationality it needs. In the
analysis that the Bush administration has realized about “the enemy”, as well as the
group of alliances that were formed in order to justify the attack on Iraq, that “the
enemy” doesn’t need an infrastructure at a state level in order to develop itself or
accomplish it’s objectives is demonstrated, and rather, it is enough to attack the most
sensitive side of the most powerful military in the world in order to be considered the
most important “enemy” of that powerful order. In a world determined by globalization
of the only capitalist economic system, no opportunity is provided for any other
reading; one more ideologized or sustainable in order to explain the latest basis of
international relations, because, the most important characteristic of this new escalation
of international tension is the role in play by the politics of development in the strategic
resources of petroleum and it’s derivatives. The theoretic support that this reading of
“enemy” has received by international commentators proves the absence of an
ideological intention, that is to say, the fight against Islam or any of it’s variant forms,
for the moment is not necessary. But what we should learn from those events is the
existing relationship between the control of strategic natural resources and the capacity
to influence political conflicts. All of us should reflect on the necessity of a new model

13. of international relations. In the actual scheme of things the geo-strategic area of
conflict appears very well defined, but, can we say the same if conflicts expanded to
other forecast shortages of natural resources? For examples, drinkable water.
This predatory relationship with nature which contains all the justifiable
instrumental rationality of the most sophisticated armament, is also the basis of the error
of valuation about the conflict and has consequences not only in order to identify the
State that more or less collaborates in order to combat terrorist organizations, but also is
calculated in terms of intelligence and in terms of time. The superiority and the
preparation of the American techno-scientific system of defense does not permit us to
tally the errors of the system itself. The percentages of frequency of the aggressive
(warlike) balances, do not permit us to see the qualitative efficiency of the individual
strategy of their enemies. The role of the State, in this forecast panorama of
relationships and conflicts is similar to a bull in a china shop. And this is a feasible
impression shared by a great number of people.
International Conflicts:
International conflicts, when submitted to new schemas and readings, have
become, in the defence of the west the axis of evil. The fight against communism to the
punishment of Islam. And all in the application of a neo realist scheme of international
politics. The international political system has changed the rules. The methods of war
have shown the strategic debility of a scheme based in equilibrium. That is to say, the
international system has been submitted to a restructuring of the role of NATO, the lines
of attack of missiles and even the value of the military bases. The geo-strategic scheme
changed in only a few years. As a result of those changes, the most modern army in the
world, incorporates schemes of flexibility, applies procedures of industrial reconversion
and happens to invest in research and development, in the style of the biggest strategic
technology companies. But, the availability of armaments, depending on these new
conditions of combat, have established new industrial alliances which are now more
important. Research in the field of telecommunications and research in new and more
efficient fuels, capitalizes on space exploration. Chemical and biotechnology industries
are the sisters of pharmaceuticals, specializing in the bacteriological modification of
viral agents and others, or the monopolization of antidotes in a foreseeable microbial
war. “Micro” not only because the size of the biological agents but rather for the combat
strategies that can unleash them. We can’t discount the part that will be played in the
technological treatment of water. Urban concentration, that is growing at a rapid pace,
has augmented exponentially the demand for infrastructures for the treatment and
provisioning of drinkable water. This role, in the manner of a “syringe” will serve as an
instrument of control of illnesses and as a means of the transmission of same and
therefore, as a decisive factor in the productivity of the labour force.
In short, the strategic dependence of contemporary man with respect to the powers
that control strategic technology, that is, the technology of life, place before the human
being the questioning of the strategic success with respect to said technological
procedures. The advances, the scientific achievements reached, have been seen and
presented to humanity as definitive in the protection and extension of life, but have
caused the withdrawal of the relationship of man with nature, about himself, have
converted man into the being responsible for his destiny and he still doesn’t have, still
can’t use the alibi of alienation as a syndrome of the system whose benefits are greater
than it’s costs. Now we attempt to define the scope of responsibility that we are

14. disposed to assume. The greater automatism in the behaviour of States, demands greater
reflection and criticism. The traditional political position, based on the intent to
prophesy and foresee in advance those critical events, the development of enemies or
the reform of alliances, obliges us to incorporate new focus on the theories of
international relationships. Until now, political realism has been the predominant
language in international relations. As much in it’s classic versions (Machiavelli,
Spinoza, Hobbes, Hegel), as in it’s “neo” version (Morgenthau, Kehoane, Walt, Walz),
where attention is called to the intentional and attitudinal factors that have been
determinant in the process of making decisions. The equilibrium, formally based in the
threat of mutually equivalent forces has given way in an international political context
based principally in the ideological importance of religious faith. The United States, as
principle military power in the world, sees it’s hegemonic role growing when
confronted with the equally growing Islamic ideology. Also the fragile nature of those
moments of hegemony are being threatened by instability but what perhaps has to be
rescued from realist logic is the effect of the small for it can acquire enormous
dimensions impeding the hegemony in the system. (Walt, Stephen M. Walt: The
Origins of Alliances.Cornell University Press. Ithaca and London. 1994) “If equilibrium
is the norm (rule), if ideology creates the possibility that the small effect will be
decisively insignificant, and if foreign assistance and penetration are causes sufficiently
weak, then hegemony over the international system would be extremely difficult. The
majority of States have abundant security. But if the hypothesis of “bandwagoning” is
more exact, if the ideology is a powerful force for alignment, the hegemony would be
much easier (although it would also be extremely fragile). Including the great powers
would see their security as precarious.”
The Alternative.
The critique of Habermas to Marcuse with respect to the posed Marcusian vicious
circle, is critical of the capitalist system: (Habermas, Science and Technology as
“Ideology”, 1986, p. 62) “If you have, therefore, presented that technical evolution
obeys a logic that responds to the structure of rational action with respect to controlled
ends for the success that you want to describe; that responds to the work structure, then
I don’t know how we can renounce technology, that is, our technology, substituting it
for a qualitative distinction, which the organization of human nature doesn’t change
and while we have to maintain our life by means of social work and valuing ourselves
by means that substitute work. What Marcuse is thinking is an actual alternative for
confronting nature but from there he doesn’t finally deduce the idea of a new
technology. In place of dealing with nature as an object of a possible arrangement, he
should consider it the interlocutor in a possible interaction. Instead of exploited nature
he should search instead for fraternal nature. At the level of still imperfect
intersubjectivity we can suppose the subjectivity of animals, plants and including rocks
and communicate with nature instead of limiting ourselves to working it cutting
communication. Particularly attractive, in order to say the least we can say, is the
conservative idea that the subjectivity of nature, still shackled, cannot be liberated until
the communication between men and nature itself cannot be seen free from
domination.” In this critique, Habermas insists that, while we depend on work in order
to relate ourselves between it and nature, the technical proposition of non-domination
becomes contradictory and therefore falls into the vicious circle from which there is no
escape. That is, - if technology produces definite production in social relations, we can

15. only change the mentality that directs this technology, to change the destructive course
of man and nature imposes a new mentality-, to which Habermas answers: - A new
mentality doesn’t suppose a new technology that simply doesn’t exercise it’s dominion-.
Close the circle. What is surprising is where Habermas situates the point of inflection,
his alternative response. For Habermas, the interaction with nature is measured by
subjectivity that man believes particularly and is not extendible to nature. Therefore,
this relationship should have the power to correct itself by means of subjugation to
nature. Said concession, that separates man from nature, has some practical examples in
the ecological argument from the pro rights movements with respect to animals, trees
and plants. We are, therefore, confronting an overvaluation of language as
communication, that is, as communicative action in the axis of social and natural
interaction.
In order to explain Habermas’ position , we call attention to a brief paragraph in
Science and Technology as Ideology (Habermas, ibid., 1986, p., 92) “The advanced
industrial societies appear to approximate a type of control of behaviour better directed
by external stimulus than by rules. The indirect action of conditioned stimuli have been
augmented above all in the fields of apparent subjective liberty (electoral behaviour,
consumption and free time). The psycho-social signature of the age is characterized
less by the authoritarian personality than by the destructurization of the superego. But
this increment of adaptive behaviour is only the reverse of the continual erosion in the
sphere of linguistically mediated interaction, under the pressure of the structure of
rational action with respect to the ends to which it responds, subjectively, such that the
difference between rational action with respect to ends and interaction not only
disappear from the conscience of the sciences of man, but rather from the conscience of
man himself. The ideological force of the technocratic conscience is demonstrated
precisely in the concealment that this difference produces.” With this quote, we can
emphasize two aspects to which we called attention above.
Linguistic interaction. The role that Habermas grants to linguistic interaction and
the axis of contradiction that stands out in actual industrialized societies, that is, the
control of behaviour directed more by external stimuli that by rules. We should observe
that it also produces a negative circularity (in systemic terminology) in that which
constitutes an argument based on the replication of the article against Marcuse. The
rules, are linguistic prescriptions, verbal or written and interiorized by reflexive or
adaptive action of man, however, the action respects the ends bridges said reflection
appealing directly to the control of the conscience, by means of a non-normative
language, that is, by means of manipulation of emotions, the indirect action of
conditioned stimuli. In this sense it becomes contradictory to defend the formulation of
rules and, at the same time, deny the from the exercise the historical domination that
man has realized over nature at the same time that he elaborates said normative
prescriptions. The proof that the rule completes it’s mission is not when it is formulated,
nor when it is exercised and the rule is internalized, nor when it is understood but rather
when it is obeyed often enough in order to permit that the action of said rule is in a
regular manner and by the majority. There are no rules foreign to a determined
combination of power and the critique of Habermas to Marcuse tries to dismantle the
rationality of a technique of non-domination, more perhaps, because he falls in his own
errors, than because he supposes a fruitless frontal counterposition. The criticism of
Habermas to Marcuse puts in the fabric of judgment the practical consequences of

16. negative dialectic. The opposition doesn’t build an ideology of change simply to take
that posture. It is a posture of resistance, a posture of nuisance, but it is not an
alternative posture. The Habermasian alternative cannot end up changing the rules as
the Marcusian cannot change attitudes. Both lose the historical perspective and
substitute intuition of occurrence for philosophical reflection.
Philosophical Negativism. Contrary to Adorno, who maintains together with
Horkheimer a philosophical pessimism, Marcuses’ militantism gets to the crux of the
problem, that is, in the “HOW”. To this point, we have noted the loss of individual
identity as a manifestation of the contradictions of late capitalism, and we have
observed that in the internal debate in the ecological movement some practical problems
derived from the absence of this social identity are reflected, tacked, the individual as
much as the social, in the speech made by Bauman by means of the processes of
globalization. It stands out to us that the ideological processes that are disputed in social
practice, are those that, on the one hand, recreate the current situation of capitalism as
the basis of opportunities, from which we can observe new social behaviour, and on the
other hand, the ideological processes point out the isolation of the subject and it’s lack
of a protagonist for social change. On both sides, there are detractors and defenders of
capitalism, nevertheless, they have in common the construction of an argument of major
force to analyze the ideology of the system. Ideology as an eternal flow that an
anonymous creator oversees from on high all of social experience. We are missing,
therefore, and here we follow the anxiety of Foucault, a concrete rationality. A force to
explain what concrete experience of the dominant ideology means to concrete
individuals.
Among the possible escapes from the cultural contradictions of capitalism are, the
solution of D. Bell, indicating religion as the restorer of vital sense, enjoyment and
enjoyment of values, an answer not foreign to the discursive processes of radical Islam,
the politicized religiosity of the Jews or Neo-protestant “axis of evil” of North
Americans.
Negative Dialectic. The other is that which derives from the process of a Negative
Dialectic, that is, that which constructs the heat of -NO-, that expresses what we don’t
want, but agitates consciences and therefore stimulates the search for solutions. In the
words of Marcuse: (Marcuse, Herbert: The End of Utopia, 1968, pág. 142) “The
concrete alternative is, for the moment, negation, but in negation itself we already
encounter the positive. If you will, permit me to offer an example as proof. If we had to
give a response in America to the question, “what do you really want to put in place in
actual society?”, I would answer: we want a society in which there are no colonial
wars, in which it would not be necessary that colonial wars recur, in which it would not
be necessary to raise and maintain fascist dictatorships, in which there would not be
any second or third class citizens. All these formulations are negative. But one has to be
completely stupid not to see that in this negative formulation you also encounter the
positive”. But, negativity doesn’t stop with awareness, it doesn’t construct change
hoping for what will occur. (Adorno, Theodor, Consignas, Buenos Aires, 1969) There
are no guarantees of the goodness of progress. Decadence is a concept opposed to
progress, that is, the dialectic concept necessary to give meaning to the concept of
progress; Adorno compares this with sexual taboo. Sex, as a free expression of nature, is

17. held back by taboo which represents the domination of nature. Decadence is also the
negation of progress and therefore the action of criticism of progress. The dialectic of
progress is the dialectic that surpasses it’s historical limits, it’s the ascendent direction
of the dialectic movement. Decadence is the descendant of the same dialectic
movement. Therefore, progress requires faith, fideism in only one sense. Dialectic
warns that the logical consequences of progress, cuyo interior, contain an
undifferentiated and irreflexive progress.
In Conclusion.
The schizophrenia of multiple social personalities that we observe in the historic
events that we are living, confronts us with the coexistence with the neurotic experience
of accepting or rejecting the perversion of human nature as a means of self-preservation.
Therefore, injustice should not be the acceptance of the instinctive compulsions of
human nature, but rather it’s rational achievements. The procedure has to be the
identification of the ideology of opportunism, the only sceptic. Scepticism is a an
unhealthy modality of intellectual independence; it’s immune to truth and falsehood.
That we can construct a society without domination if like saying we can construct
a rational society but for that we have to integrate rational values as part of their utility
not their utility as part of the rationality of those values. Therefore we should
deconstruct the dominant ideology for a philosophy of autonomy. To share this
stimulus for the use of reason. Reason is an excellent dialectic organ; only reason can
combat domination and the virtue that lies within it in which it can confront itself
without changing it’s nature. The criticism of same has to mature in place of
debilitating itself.

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