A-Infos (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #16-26 - But what if Giordano Bruno had survived? Opposing the traditionalist restoration. Liberating critical thinking (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

The historical significance of Giordano Bruno's story can only be 
understood within the context of the historical and social events of 
Europe between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. ---- This was a 
period in which tendencies toward social transformation were far from 
dormant, even in Italy. It was a situation in which the material 
conditions for social transformation had developed, exacerbating the 
conflict between oppressor and oppressed. At the end of the sixteenth 
century, in most of Europe, the struggle involving bourgeoisie, 
peasants, nobles, clergy, and absolute monarchs did not end with the 
victory of the revolutionary forces, but with the shared ruin of the 
contending classes.

The revolution's failure to assert itself led to a state of social 
decay. The counterrevolution, which took the form of the 
Counter-Reformation, succeeded, and the social devastation was enormous. 
At the end of the sixteenth century, Italy was still a leading European 
country, both economically and culturally, even though it was now on the 
margins of the great trade flows that were taking the oceans and 
abandoning the Mediterranean. Precisely during that period, despite 
attempts to maintain the industries and trade that had made Italy 
prosperous, a period of decline began, which would accelerate under 
Spanish rule.

Spain itself saw its countryside and cities depopulated, following the 
militaristic and imperialist policies of successive prime ministers in 
those years. We were witnessing a neo-feudal restoration that reinstated 
the dominance of the nobility, the aristocracy of the sword, and 
transformed the peasants once again into serfs. This was happening in 
both East and West: it was happening in Spain, but it was also happening 
in Poland, Germany, and so on. It was a massive counterrevolutionary 
phenomenon that destroyed the material foundations of the revolutionary 
classes.

At the end of the 16th century, the great European monarchies-Habsburg 
Spain, Henry VI's France, and Elizabeth I's England, succeeded in 1601 
by James I-achieved a peace that would last until the start of the 
Thirty Years' War and beyond. The monarchies shared the belief that 
there existed a "bien commun des couronnes," a common good of the 
crowns, as a minister of the king of France wrote to the ambassador in 
London. And what could this common good be, if not the fear of new 
revolutionary crises?

Spain was a protagonist in counterrevolutionary politics, which would 
continue even after losing its status as a great power, but France had 
also suffered a bitter experience from the Wars of Religion, while the 
king of England now had to contend with the Puritans, and even the 
wealthy Dutch bourgeoisie had to guard against the popular radicalism of 
the most intransigent Calvinists.

One of the most obvious signs of the counterrevolutionary nature of this 
"pacifism" of absolute monarchs is the rapprochement between crowns and 
aristocracies. National states had been formed through the struggle 
against the feudal nobility; in this struggle, absolute monarchs had 
relied on the artisan and financial classes of the cities and the 
peasants of the countryside. At the end of the sixteenth century, by 
contrast, the political scene was dominated by the rapprochement between 
crowns and aristocracies, which sometimes led to the absolute state's 
actual capitulation to the noble caste. This anachronistic neo-feudal 
restoration was accompanied on the international level by courtly 
pacifism, and on the religious level by the anti-Calvinist reaction, 
which converged both the forces aroused by the Catholic 
Counter-Reformation and the conservative, Anglican and Lutheran wings of 
the Protestant Reformation. It must be kept in mind that class 
conflicts, in the cultural climate of the time, took the form of 
religious conflicts.

The neo-feudal wave was strongest in areas where the Counter-Reformation 
was taking hold, such as Italy, Spain, Poland, and southern Flanders; it 
was visible, though its effects were attenuated, in countries with 
regalist Catholicism or conservative Protestantism, such as France, 
Germany, and Scandinavia; it diminished in England, where this tendency 
encountered energetic resistance from the Puritans, and it diminished 
further, almost to the point of disappearing, in Calvinist countries, 
such as northern Flanders: the United Provinces.

Restoration reigned supreme in the countryside, where the landed 
nobility benefited from the rising value of land caused by inflation and 
imposed, with the support of state authority, the reinstatement of royal 
servitudes, which at the end of the Middle Ages free cities or absolute 
monarchies had abolished or transformed into cash income. Land 
ownership, in the neo-feudal imagination, symbolized the dominance of 
the aristocracy's caste: thus, lands were covered with entails and 
trusts, designed to prevent inheritance divisions, so that they could be 
passed intact to the firstborn.

This nobility treated work as degrading, viewing thrift and the 
meticulous care of one's affairs as a sign of avarice and 
narrow-mindedness, while considering military prowess the most admirable 
of virtues and lavish idleness the ideal of a gentleman's life. This is 
why the ostentatious and irresponsible aristocracy of the seventeenth 
century found itself short of money, despite all its grain and lands, 
and had to scramble to obtain it. The nobility then sought other 
people's money, that is, the money of all those who worked and paid 
taxes. The attack on the public treasury was the core of the neo-feudal 
restoration: the mutual pacification between absolute monarchies and 
aristocracies was nothing more than a gigantic compromise to devour, by 
mutual love and agreement, the sweat of the common people, especially 
the peasants.

All this has only one brutal conclusion: death. The European population, 
which had grown rapidly until the end of the sixteenth century, would 
halt its growth in the early seventeenth century and then begin to 
plummet. And when one reads that so many Italian, Spanish, or German 
cities lost up to half or three-quarters of their population, one can 
only think of a long line of corpses: corpses of people starving to 
death in famines, corpses of plague victims, corpses of those stabbed 
and executed, corpses of soldiers left to rot on battlefields, corpses 
of sons of the people, dying like locusts at the foot of magnificent 
palaces or gleaming cathedrals.

Italy, in the late sixteenth century, was engaged in an interminable 
rearguard battle. It was the effort of a country unwilling to die, 
against a complex of factors dragging it toward decadence. Genoese or 
Medici finance, the grain trade, Venetian industry, or Lombard silk 
marked the peninsula's enduring economic vitality. But this vitality was 
closely tied to the production of luxury goods for the courts and 
aristocrats, or to financing Spain's military adventures. With the 
decline of the aristocracy and the repeated bankruptcies of the Spanish 
state, this vitality would fade, unable to find other outlets, because 
Italy was cut off from the major ocean routes, Asian markets, and access 
to Baltic raw materials. The regional states-the Duchy of Savoy, the 
republics of Genoa, Venice, and Lucca, the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, and 
the Papal States, which had grown stronger in the shadow of Spanish 
rule-had no future.

Even on the intellectual level, late sixteenth-century Italy continued 
to fuel European culture: great pontiffs holding up the symbols of 
Catholic universalism to the masses, Jesuit missionaries swarming from 
France to Japan and from Sweden to China, tormented followers of 
Socini's radicalism, naturalist philosophers, precursors of the founders 
of modern science, such as Bernardo Telesio, Tommaso Campanella, and 
Giordano Bruno.

Intrepid thinkers who courageously faced prison or, like Giordano Bruno, 
the stake at the hands of the Inquisition.

Recline in slothful conformism is the fate of Italian culture, a 
faithful mirror of the submission of capitalist economic activity itself 
to neo-feudal restoration and the submission of the Italian states to 
Habsburg supremacy. The burning of Giordano Bruno illuminates Italy's 
decadence.

It is the common ruin of the warring classes, mentioned above.

Fear of peasant revolution and the urban plebs inspired the neo-feudal 
reaction of the seventeenth century.

Even today, the fear of proletarian revolution is the unspoken 
protagonist of the political scene of every country. The exhaustion of 
capitalism's animal instincts pushes the ruling classes into an 
increasingly shameless policy of plundering natural resources and labor 
capacity, disguised as artificial emergencies or, at any rate, 
resolvable with a radical shift in the economic paradigm and the 
elimination of increasingly bloated and useless state apparatuses. 
Financial and real estate restoration is the lifeline of a system 
suffocated by its contradictions; but this restoration has its 
consequences in the form of increased poverty, hunger, and unemployment, 
and economic poverty is accompanied by intellectual poverty, which 
excludes ever-larger masses from culture and knowledge, which are 
transformed into barren sources of income.

Even today, the ban on critical thinking is accompanied by the 
persecution of those who champion it. Just as the economic stagnation 
looming for capitalist society reproduces the stagnation of the 
seventeenth century, so the current repression of dissent, which 
sometimes takes violent forms, recalls the burning of Giordano Bruno and 
many other lesser-known figures.

The Judeo-Christian restoration of the West is currently accompanied by 
the Confucian restoration in China and the rise to power of 
fundamentalist Muslim or Hindu political forces in other Asian states.

The restoration will collapse, sooner or later, under its own weight; 
but how many deaths, how many sacrifices to people and the environment 
will depend on the time we allow before ending its rule. In the 
meantime, our task is to connect critical thinking and alternative 
social models, to create, strengthen, and broaden the elements of the 
new society.

The sacrifice of Giordano Bruno teaches us that religious critique 
cannot be left to the spontaneous evolution of social consciousness, but 
must become a weapon of attack against the main ideological underpinning 
of the restoration.

Titian Antonelli

https://umanitanova.org/ma-se-giordano-bruno-fosse-campato-opporsi-alla-restaurazione-tradizionalista-liberare-il-pensiero-critico/
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