Atlantis Rising A Blueprint for a Better World

The current dynamics of the global political economy are depressing: A multidimensional climate crisis is taking on speed; new pandemic waves with unknown lethal consequences are building up; National capitalism – bent to become a new form of fascism – raises its head and the return to military conflict solution makes a 3rd World War possible. But despite these gloomy perspectives it remains true that mankind so far has mastered all difficulties as soon as it became aware of them. Our species in principle has all means – physically and intellectually – to let a new Atlantis rise. And the guidelines how to overcome the above mentioned three crises, are delivering the blueprint of the organizational design of such a new Atlantis. This paper explores this exciting hypothesis. The first goal to reach clearly is to avoid a 3rd World War, which means to defeat the fascist movements in the world. As the 20th century showed, fascism developed out of nationalism, which in turn was nourished by a nationwide controlled class rule, a form of military (and police) governed capitalist exploitation. This currently so successful form of capitalism (China, Russia, USA) is defined as ‘National Capitalism’. It corresponds to what I called disintegrating capitalism in (Hanappi, 2019a). Being victorious, to have overcome national capitalism, means to have been able to establish a global democratic government. To get there the progressive opposition to National Capitalism has to develop theory, strategy and practice. As described in (Hanappi, 2020) a certain degree of division of progressive labor activities – the emergence of a global class of organic intellectuals (1) – will be needed. Only with global governance the other two crises, the climate crisis and the future global health crises, can be overcome. Since they are already here and help to make the impasse of capitalism, of national capitalism, become very visible to every human individual, we already can find ways of global coordination to prevent them. In doing so, success is possible and can yield into the necessary optimism, an attitude which is necessary for the emotional basis of any progressive, humanistic movement. A man-made Atlantis can rise - not beyond an ocean but here on earth. We just have to unite our intellectual forces and to continue the century-old struggle for emancipatory social evolution (2). (1) In explaining Gramsci’s concept of the organic intellectual Perry Anderson writes: ‘Gramsci argued that intellectuals are absolutely necessary for the proletariat, both in historical periods when it is a class in-itself and in those when it is a class for-itself. Without intellectuals the proletariat could neither come to power, nor consolidate or develop its power after winning it.’ (Anderson, 2016, Kindle-Positions 1971-1982). (2) Thomas Morus wrote his ‘Utopia’ in 1516.