A god in search of blood: living labor snd the dialectic of the sacred

Abstract

The following work analyzes the rise of neofascist governments and new right-wing movements (Trump, Milei, Vox) from Mariátegui’s (2010) perspective, which argues that bourgeois society, by prioritizing reason, has created a mythological void, eliminating faith, myth, and hope. Science fails to satisfy the need for the infinite, whereas myth, according to Eliade (1999), fills the “deep self” with absolute truths. The death of liberal values, described as the “bourgeois drama” by Fernandes (2019), leads to a search for past myths, evoking an idealized history that reinforces neofascism without subverting the status quo. In capitalism, the sacred is perverted into idolatry and fetishism, where capital, as Moloch, demands sacrifices of living labor (Dussel, 1993). This vampiric logic, rooted in violence and concealment, transforms commodities into fetishes, perpetuating a system that demands workers’ blood to sustain itself.