The world-system of predatory capitalism
Immanuel Wallerstein’s concept of the modern world-system applies quite well to everything that is going on in the human part of the universe these days. It only requires a little up-dating to become an accurate description of our collective condition in 2024. Predatory capitalism has been holding sway for a very long time, all over the world. It had been originally put into place during the industrial revolution, that began in Great Britain during the late eighteenth century. Then it gradually spread to countries like the USA, Germany, France and Belgium, arriving in Russia and Japan during the late nineteenth century.
In the Western world, the almost universal domination of private capitalist investors over society was originally supposed to free the economy, and society in general, from the stultifying, bureaucratic control of the absolute monarchy, typified by French kings like Louis XIV (1643-1715) and Louis XV (1715-1774). According to the prevailing theory, much more rapid economic development would then ensue, free the peasants and the artisans from feudalism, and provide the newly-created working class with what would eventually become good jobs and decent incomes. Unfortunately, however, things did not work out that way for the vast majority of the ordinary people involved. A small number of capitalist investors became immensely rich, profiting not only from growth in the industrialized countries, but also from the ongoing expansion of European empires all over the world.
Centuries of warfare between those competing empires, as well as ongoing warfare between the social classes, culminated in the First World War and the Great Depression. But the “transition” from absolute monarchy to “free enterprise” sounded less like progress, and more like a liberal version of fake news. In some parts of the world, however, this was followed by the “Keynesian compromise” that took place between 1939 and 1979. During that brief period, the stringent hegemony of classical liberalism was partly replaced by government “intervention” into areas of policy that had previously been handed over en masse to private control. Unfortunately, the triumph of neoliberalism in 1979 brought about “statu quo ante bellum”, that is to say a return to the total domination of classical liberalism.
That Keynesian “compromise”, however, did not go nearly far enough toward changing the fundamental nature of predatory capitalism, which continued to dominate the world-system even during the temporary dilution of direct capitalist dictatorship. More recently, in a dismal attempt to keep everyone from rebelling against the return of the old order, the expert sycophants divided the world’s countries into deliberately misleading categories of analysis, such as “democratic”, “communist”, “authoritarian” and “totalitarian”.
In the real world, however, countries electing theoretically anti-capitalist regimes from time to time, such as Lula da Silva’s Workers Party in Brazil, never succeed in escaping the world-system. Social-democracy does not triumph over capitalism any more than fake communism does. The fundamental truth that everyone has to realize is that none of the numerous attempts at finding a genuine alternative to predatory capitalism ever succeeded. This includes the most pretentious failure in recent history, the Soviet conceit of “socialism in a single country”, that as recently as the 1980s falsely claimed to have achieved “advanced socialism” in its thoroughly unconvincing propaganda.
The whole idea according to which the world was divided almost in half, between the 1920s and the 1980s, between capitalist and socialist regimes, is a colossal fabrication. None of the political parties and organizations that claimed to be “building socialism”, whether from a “revolutionary socialist” or a “democratic socialist” perspective, ever got anywhere near to achieving their goals. In reality, predatory capitalism has been dominating the world ever since it took over from medieval feudalism. Failed attempts at creating some kind of socialism, or of diluting capitalist appetites through government regulation, should never be confounded with successful attempts. The only real exception to capitalist domination has been the ongoing existence of several ancient feudal systems, located in hyper-colonized parts of the world. Those systems do not pose any kind of existential threat to capitalist domination.
At the same time, none of the equally dismal attempts at creating “democratic capitalism” out of thin air ever came any closer to succeeding. Predatory capitalism has always thumbed its collective nose at pretentious attempts to impose “the rule of law” on the tiny coteries of ultra-rich and ultra-powerful individuals who run everything that moves. Instead, the real rulers of every country, and of every political, economic, social and cultural system, have always succeeded in imposing their own dishonest pretensions on everyone else. They talk a great deal about legal conventions, but only because they know that those conventions are as much under their control as everything else. They rely on what Noam Chomsky has so aptly called “manufactured consent”, to assert their collective right to do whatever they want to do with their money and their power. In the overall scheme of things, society belongs to them, they do not belong to society.
The essence of private ownership of capital has always been predation, the words “predatory” and “capitalism” meaning exactly the same thing. Nowadays, the only possible justification for using such a repetitive term is to underline just how false by comparison “democratic capitalism” really is. The expression itself seems to have been invented during the Cold War (1947-1989), when many countries in the world were divided into two opposing sections. For example, in the case of Germany, the larger, Western part belonged to the so-called “free world”, in fact controlled by the American empire, while the smaller, Eastern part belonged to the Soviet empire.
Both of those empires were in fact capitalist, the Soviet one having merely pretended to be socialist for awhile. Even within that historical context, however, “democratic capitalism” only pretended to be democratic, in the same way that the USSR was pretending to be socialist. Nowadays, any reference to “democratic capitalism” has become an even more obvious fib than it was before. It has now become the most important kind of misinformation, or fake news, currently being practised.
Neither of the opposing Cold War regimes ever represented the common people in the real sense, by refusing to let the interests of foreign or domestic investors control their actions. Nor did the 1990 reunification of Germany, for example, mean that the enlarged republic became any more democratic than it was before. It turns out that none of the world’s countries, divided or not, ever achieved any genuine version of either democracy or communism.
In previous blogposts, I presented hundreds of recent examples demonstrating just how bogus the concept of “democratic capitalism” has always been. An every more recent example was provided by constitutional lawyer Alain-Robert Nadeau, in an article, “Citoyenneté et identitité numérique”, published on April 4, 2024, in the Montréal daily, “Le Devoir”. Nadeau analyzed the impact of several new laws, adopted recently in Canada and Québec, that nullify most of the fundamental rights theoretically granted in the past to every citizen. As he pointed out, none of the lawmakers in the Canadian Parliament, or in Québec’s National Assembly, seem to realize that their new laws effectively eliminate fundamental rights that their predecessors had supposedly guaranteed to all their citizens decades ago.
Every time that such governments, all over the world, rush this kind of legislation into existence, without bothering to reflect on the impact of such laws on rights theoretically acquired in the past, it demonstrates that those rights never really existed in the first place. In The same kind of debilitating charade has also led to the adoption of hundreds of other laws, all over the world, that are never accompanied by any enforcement mechanisms. Whenever the people in power want some particular law to function for real, they always make sure to add such mechanisms. This means that the very large number of laws being passed anyway, deliberately lacking such mechanisms, constitute a form of window dressing. Those laws were only put into place to impress the public; they were never intended to have any real effect.
Analyses published recently in “The Guardian Weekly” came to similar conclusions. In the February 9, 2024 issue, columnist George Monbiot (“It’s a plutocrat’s world—and all dissenters are swiftly crushed”) provided several examples, especially from the UK, of peaceful protesters being treated like terrorists while real terrorists, especially on the far right, “remain unmolested by the law”. In his view, those abominations took place “because the UK, the US and many other nations have become closed shops run by the plutocrats’ trade union.”
In the February 16, 2024 issue, there was a similar commentary by columnist Nesrine Malik (“Fragile front: Israel’s assault is rocking the foundations of liberal politics”), in which he demonstrated just how bankrupt the ideology of political liberalism has become. “If liberalism shows no ability or desire to protect civilian life, regional security and its own electoral prospects, then its mission-defining claims of principle and competence collapse.” All three articles bring to mind similar claims made during the Cold War, when the Western side claimed to be treating their own people much better than the Soviet side did. But that Western propaganda favouring “democracy” was fake, just as fake as Soviet propaganda favouring “socialism”. “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
Ideological pretension should not be confounded with reality. No one is justified in describing any country, at any point in history, as being genuinely democratic. In a similar way, at no time in its history was the “People’s” Republic of China ever a communist country in the true sense of that word. Any more than were any of the other fake-communist regimes, all of them constructed on the Soviet model. No regime past or present has ever attained either of those goals. In fact, if we look at the real meaning of what those words were initially intended to convey, democracy and communism are synonyms, not antonyms. Both of them are really supposed to mean rule by, of and for the common people, not something else altogether.
Unfortunately, elitist rule has prevailed throughout history, regardless of the constitutional form that was officially adopted during any given period. This observation applies to feudal domain, absolute monarchy, formal empire, informal empire, military dictatorship, fascist totalitarianism, communist totalitarianism, democratic regime and authoritarian regime. The sad fact is that since urban civilization began four millennia ago, no group of human beings has ever succeeded in establishing anything like real democracy or real communism.
Everything that happens ends up influencing everything else, not only when it is divided into political, economic, social or cultural categories, but also when it is divided into local, provincial, national or international categories. One of the negative consequences of having people fall under the influence of such artificial categories is that millions of them, all over the world, end up forgetting what reality looks like. For example, our world has been going through successive waves of galloping globalization for several centuries now. It all started with the expansion of the modern European empires, and their Euro-American clones. Together, those countries conquered the entire world, bit by bit, between the beginning of the fifteenth century and the end of the twentieth century.
That period of time is officially known as the “colonial period”, which is an obvious misnomer. Imperialism and colonialism most definitely did not begin with modern European expansion. Thousands of empires and their colonies were set up all over the world long before the modern period began. According to the current state of our knowledge, it seems that the first empire to be founded was the Akkadian empire, that conquered the first urban civilization, the Sumerian city-states, around 2350 BC. That particular empire, located in Western Asia (also known as the Middle East), only lasted for a couple of centuries before being replaced by several more recent ones.
Dominant empires and subordinated colonies were also founded in every other part of Asia, as well as in every part of Europe, Africa, North America, South America, Australia and Oceania, from 2150 BC up to the beginning of modern European expansion. Those European and Euro-American empires then took several more centuries before they were able to take over the entire world, succeeding only towards the end of the so-called “colonial period”.
This means that the real imperial/colonial period of history started out 35 centuries before modern European expansion began, and has continued to evolve right up to our own time. The modern imperialism of the Western world was only a small part of the overall process, eventually succeeding in globalizing imperialist control for the first time. As for the subsequent “decolonization” of the numerous countries and territories that had been seized by those same “Western” empires during their expansion, often at the expense of previously existing, non-Western empires, not one of them has ever been fully decolonized since that time.
To be sure, some kinds of direct colonization by the empires of European origin were partly replaced by some less direct forms of colonization in more recent times. By behaving in this manner, however, the modern empires were only imitating similar kinds of differentiated territorial domination that had already been put into place way back when, long before modern European expansion began. Once again, the only thing genuinely new under the sun has been the worldwide nature of modern imperialism. It is therefore completely ridiculous for anyone nowadays to treat either direct or indirect imperialism as being of modern origin.
At the same time, glorifying European, or Euro-American expansion, like millions of people do, is just as ridiculous as blaming that same expansion for causing everything that is horrible in today’s world, as millions more people also do. By the same token, glorifying non-Western forms of imperialism, or blaming non-Western empires for everything going wrong in the world, is equally ridiculous. All forms of territorial domination, in every period of history, are part of the problem, none of them have ever been part of the solution.
Naive people of every variety, in every part of the world and in every period of history, gobble up any kind of disgusting pablum that is fed to them, without ever trying to analyze what is, or was, really going on. Once again, millions of people living right now have become gullible victims of official propaganda, just like millions of people were in the past. Misinformation is currently being spewed out even more than it already was before, emanating from rival empires, giant corporations and ultra-rich investors, all those messages currently being reinforced by artificial intelligence.
Another misnomer that keeps getting repeated these days is the existence of any form of real independence. The list of the world’s countries that are officially considered to be independent from each other has now risen to 193 constitutional entities. Other pretenders would also like to be officially recognized, such as Québec, Scotland, and Catalonia. The list also includes the Sami region in northern Europe, many other territories situated north of the Arctic Circle, parts of the Baltic states, parts of Ukraine, of Kazakhstan, of Kashmir, of Tibet, of the Uyghur region, of the Sahel, of the Kalahari, of the Caribbean, of Amazonia, of Patagonia, of Southeast Asia and of Oceania. Ultimately, no part of the world can claim to occupy its territory, in whole or in part, without its claim being contested by at least part of its own population. No worldwide consensus about the territory of any of the world’s countries has ever been attained. The “international community” does not exist in the real world, except as a propaganda device of the USA and its closest allies.
Joining the list of the 193 officially recognized states, while a positive achievement in itself, is not as edifying as many people tend to believe. One reason is that the official list contains several micro-states such as Monaco, San Marino, Singapore and the Vatican, the legitimacy of which are often questioned. More importantly, becoming independent is not such a big deal as people often assume. For example, while it is thoroughly legitimate to support the Québec independence movement, Québécois like myself still have to recognize that even should our part of the world become as independent from Canada as Canada is now considered to be independent from the USA, that would not be as Earth-shaking as some of us may imagine.
The USA, after all, has always had a huge influence on Canada, even after Canada (almost) succeeded in breaking away from the British Empire in 1931, quite a long time after the Thirteen Colonies did in 1783. In spite of the obvious linguistic and cultural differences between mostly-English-speaking Canada and mostly-French-speaking Québec, it is not at all certain that an independent Québec would succeed in becoming more independent from the USA than Canada is now independent from the world’s most powerful empire. Everything depends on the approach that an independent Québec would decide to adopt. It would, however, not be very difficult to become a lot more independent from Canada than is the current, supine, neoliberal, provincial government.
What everyone should also realize is that not even the USA is now, or ever has been, itself independent from the rest of the world. In the first place, the USA, as well as its current, number-one rival, China, both depend to a great extent on each other. In spite of that, both of those powerful empires compete furiously between themselves to control as many other countries as they can. The USA is still far more powerful than China, succeeding more than any other country in the world in extracting wealth from dozens of other nations, without offering much of anything in return. Most of the countries that the USA and the PRC exploit together are located in Asia, Africa and Latin America, that often rely on the exportation of vital natural resources, shipped out of each nation with the help of its very own “compradore bourgeoisie”.
Britain, France, Germany and several other European countries, as well as Japan and South Korea, also extract raw materials from dozens of “under-developed” countries. In addition, countries like Canada and Australia, in spite of being more industrially developed than most of the “third world”, also depend quite a bit on their own exportation of natural resources. They nevertheless also participate in worldwide neocolonialism at the same time, centred mainly on the mining industry. To sum up, the “independent” nations of the world are not nearly as independent of each other as is commonly believed.
Another fascinating situation has to do with the current politics of the Russian Federation, that in 1991 replaced the previously number-two most powerful country in the world, the USSR. The much less powerful Russian Federation has been at war with Ukraine since 2014, whose partial independence from Russia is currently being upheld by the Ukrainian military, which would have collapsed long ago if not for aid provided by the USA, as well as by the rest of the NATO alliance, founded in 1949.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine, however, has not prevented Russian goods and services from being traded with the USA and its allies, in spite of all the official embargoes. This is because the USA also trades with many other countries that do not share in “the American way” of doing things. Since every country belongs to the same global system, the USA is also trading indirectly with Russia. Go-between countries like China, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, India, Brazil, South Africa and so on, make sure that every part of the world trades with every other part, regardless of pretensions to the contrary.
In spite of the hundreds of wars and embargoes going on all over the world, every country still belongs to the same system. The dominant people everywhere can wish all they want that they could control everything going on in every other country, to the same extent that they succeed in manipulating their own citizens with false information. Government and corporate big-wigs are supposed to know their own limitations quite well, but they often choose to deny everything that they feel like denying, even to themselves. Their real victims, however, are ordinary citizens who believe in any of the official propaganda. Social media also make the situation much worse than it was in days gone by, greatly intensifying the spread of fake news, with the result that the entire world is even less well-informed than it was in the past.
To make the situation still worse, every state and every corporation, no matter how rich and powerful, can never escape the vice-like grip of the very numerous syndicates of organized crime, that control huge parts of today’s world. The dominant people in every country never seriously try to eliminate such corruption anyway, every government and every corporation getting even more corrupt than each one already was when it was initially founded. New financial instruments like bit-coins are also making the concealment of such corruption even easier than it was in the past. Finally, it is true that some ordinary people know that a few ultra-rich and ultra-powerful individuals, such as Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un, are exceptionally corrupt. This does not mean, however, that the same degree of corruption does not also exist for thousands of other big-shots as well, those who have so far succeeded in remaining relatively invisible.
In the real world, extraction, exploitation and oppression are present all the time, operating in every country, within every political, economic, social or cultural category of analysis that exists. Millions of people now realize that extraction from nature, such as in the fossil-fuel industry, or in beef farming, or in such false solutions as the electrification of everything not previously electrified (without controlling overall production or overall pollution), cannot possibly succeed. All those negative trends are not only very real, but also extremely dangerous.
But what millions of people do not realize is that extraction from people occurs just as often as does extraction from nature. When applied to people, the word “extraction” is usually replaced with words like “exploitation” and “oppression”, then divided into intersecting categories of domination versus deprival, such as social class, sex, “race” and so on. In the end, extraction from nature is similar to extraction from the world’s dominated people, that is to say anyone not sufficiently rich and powerful to be considered part of the ruling elite.
Some folks still do not seem to realize that people belonging to dominated social classes, like the working class or the peasantry, are not simply going to rise up and throw off their oppressors one of these days, all by themselves. In reality, the world’s dominated people have always been divided into opposing sections all the time. Working-class people, for example, are divided by geography, those living for a long time in richer countries usually having greater access to unionization or social-democratic legislation, than those living in poorer countries. As a result, some workers are a lot better off than others, a fact that does not, however, turn any of them into capitalist investors. Owning a few thousand paltry dollars of investment never translates into having any influence on multi-billionaires “earning” millions of times more money. Anyone pretending otherwise is making a fool of himself, or herself.
The same kind of reasoning also applies to the vast majority of the world’s women, who make up half of the human race. In addition to also quite often suffering from class exploitation, women are exploited and oppressed most of the time by men, not only by ultra-rich ones, but also by poor ones as well, often by their own partners. This takes place all over the world, including among the world’s indigenous peoples, as was demonstrated once again in a recent film produced by two indigenous women, about the Inuit people in northern Québec. Sexual domination functions across the board, just like class domination. It has also been around since the human race began, long before the advent of urban civilization.
This, however, has not prevented a minority of privileged women from becoming every bit as odious as any of the world’s male deviants and assorted wife-beaters. Over the centuries, hundreds of thousands of upper-crust women, such as Cixi, the empress dowager of China (1861-1908) and Margaret Thatcher, the prime minister of Great Britain (1979-1990), succeeded in outdoing their male contemporaries, ruining the countries that they were supposed to be serving. Many other women, who have never gotten anywhere near political power, also try to behave as odiously as they possibly can, in imitation of dominant men.
The same kind of reasoning also applies to hundreds of millions of other people, all over the world, who, in addition to often belonging to a dominated social class, or to the female half of the population, also fall under yet another form of domination. This one is based on perceived “race”, a category that does not have any biological justification. That fact, however, has not prevented millions of people, even those belonging to “races” perceived as “inferior”, to also mistreat other people hailing from the same “race”. For example, millions of people with dark skin colour are often perceived as “inferior” by millions of light-skinned people. That, however, has not prevented many dark-skinned people from selling other dark-skinned people into slavery, not only in the distant past but also much more recently.
In every instance, be it class, sex or “race”, exploitation and oppression continue to exist, the dominant people in every category most often coming from the usual gang of perpetrators. Others nevertheless hail from theoretically dominated groups of people, who sometimes betray their own kind. In the case of racial prejudice, some light-skinned people are categorized as “inferior” as well, such as Slavic peoples living in eastern Europe. The very word “slave” itself originally came from the word “Slavic”. Unfortunately for true believers, accurate social analysis is full of such unpleasant surprises.
The analysis of capitalism, as a dominant system of social control, ought to be conducted with a great deal more insight than is usually the case. What does the word “capitalism” really mean? It is not just an economic and social system that started to exist towards the end of the European “Middle Ages”, and has continued to expand since that time. It is also not just the common denominator underlying the more or less dominant status of every country in the world today.
Particularly in its intensified, classical-liberal or neoliberal configuration, it means the total domination of the entire human race by a very small number of ultra-rich rulers and investors, concentrating on short-term goals. Those people use their enormous sums of money and the political, economic, social and cultural clout that goes with those sums, to control everything that moves. The movers and shakers in today’s world are completely devoted to upholding that system everywhere, all the time, even when they fail to realize, or pretend not to realize, that they are in fact doing a great deal of harm to the entire human race. They continue to act in this way because they thoroughly enjoy dominating everyone else, exhibiting a form of egotistical mania by ignoring everything that they feel like ignoring. Belonging to a real conspiracy is what differentiates dominant people from those unfortunate souls who invent fake conspiracies because they would rather believe in something they made up themselves, than in something that really keeps them in their place.
No matter what the world’s dominant people may be saying about such things, they do not really care all that much about nuclear war, or about global warming, or about accelerating inequality, or about organized crime, or about drug addiction, or about misinformation, or whatever other huge problem is currently afflicting our world. They do care very much, however, about the bottom line, the accumulation of capital, and elbowing each other at a corporate level and an imperial level, constantly trying to increase quarterly earnings and market share at everyone else’s expense. The almighty dollar bill, or any other currency or non-fungible token that comes along, that they convinced everyone under them to adore more than faith itself, is what predatory capitalism is all about. They are especially excited whenever they realize that a large part of their capital investment has nothing whatever to do with the old-fashioned needs of ordinary people, such as food, clothing and shelter.
Those devoted to the capitalist religion nowadays often claim that they support the non-existent “carbon capture” of fossil-fuel emissions, or a “peaceful transition” to the circular economy, or curtailing the production of plastics, or controlling nuclear proliferation, or avoiding “excessive” climate change, or stopping any other life-threatening practises. However, they are not being the least bit sincere when they make such outrageous claims.
They have decided instead to ignore all the world’s “lesser problems”, in the much more gratifying belief that they will succeed in becoming, or in remaining, number one in the business world, or in the imperialist world, regardless of what happens to the rest of humanity. They simply do not accept that any of those “secondary objectives” really apply to them at all. Their advanced fetichism has taken over their minds completely, in a way quite similar to that of the world’s most devoted drug addicts, who continue to shoot their fix even as parts of their bodies succumb to flesh-eating diseases caused by “recreational” drugs like xylazine. The world’s dominant, short-term investors and politicians feel that they must succeed at what they set out to do, at whatever cost. They will not let such an insignificant obstacle as reality get in their way. Instead, they have decided to themselves become a new kind of flesh-eating disease, for their billions of ordinary human victims.
Cultural differences participate fully in the capitalist scheme of things. Highly intelligent individuals advising world leaders, particularly in the most powerful countries, have always known that the best way to control different groups of victims all over the world is to deliberately exaggerate their obvious differences, setting one culture off against another. “Divide and conquer” has always been the favourite method used by every empire, corporation and dominant ideology, to achieve its nefarious goals. All the world’s peoples and cultures have always been divided up into opposing factions.
A good example of the divisions that existed all over the world, throughout the extremely long history of imperialism and colonialism, was the one provided in another article (“The Empty Plinth”) published in “The Guardian Weekly”, by author Vincent Brown, on April 5, 2024. As part of his analysis of the history of British Jamaica, Brown referred quite convincingly to divisions that arose between recently arrived slaves and those who had been enslaved for a much longer time. None of the world’s empires, over the past four millennia, would ever have survived without one version or another of that same strategy.
Starting back in the 1940s and the 1950s, the founders of neoliberalism, such as Walter Lippmann, Ludwig von Mises and Frederik von Hayek, knew quite well that in order to bring about the major change in the world that they were seeking back then, replacing the Keynesian system of socio-economic exchange with a return to more intense corporate dominion, they had to do more than to just agitate in its favour. The truly brilliant strategy that they came up with was to co-opt dozens of reactionary tendencies, developed centuries earlier within every population in the world that they were targeting.
They were assisted by highly influential geopolitical thinkers like George F. Kennan, who founded the USA’s containment strategy toward the Soviet Union, and by leading minds advising newly-arrived geopolitical entities like the Central Intelligence Agency. With their help, the ultra-elitist, neoliberal intellectuals worked feverishly to make sure that vulnerable populations, especially in the “third world”, could be manipulated into reacting against Western imperialist rule by reinforcing antediluvian mindsets left over from the past. They therefore set out to wean as many different peoples as possible from the Soviet conceit, as well as from the influence of nationalists like Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, who were “self-centredly” opposed to Western interests.
They also knew that in centuries past, missionaries sent out by Western churches and religious movements had already succeeded in converting a large portion of the non-Western world to their brands of Christianity. People recently converted by those colonial missionaries shared a well-known tendency to support the same government and corporate policies that the leaders of the Western world were then supporting. But conversion had its limits, since converts to Christianity were often seen (with reason) by locally-based, anti-Western movements, as traitors to their own peoples.
Which is why the leading intellectuals supporting Western domination in the Euro-American empires decided to adopt a much more diabolical strategy. They set out to encourage the revival of atavistic religious belief in particular, thoroughly opposed to any form of Western Christianity. In Palestine, for example, that meant weaning the Palestinians away from any pro-communist movements, or even ferociously anti-communist nationalists like Nasser, replacing them instead with ultra-Islamic movements. Several decades later, this same strategy is still being pursued by today’s Israeli government, particularly since the 1987 formation of the Hamas movement in Gaza. It turned out to be easier to justify using extremely harsh military repression on a thoroughly reactionary organization like Hamas, rather than trying to crush more popular, left-wing opponents like Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization. Especially after the extremely naive PLO leaders decided to make a deal with their Israeli oppressors, that succeeding Israeli governments abruptly overturned.
The most extreme religious fanatics in the current Israeli government take a particular delight in helping the USA wipe out ultra-right-wing-populist movements like Hamas and the Islamic State. At the same time, some Israeli leaders accept as historical fact that today’s Palestinians, most of whom descended from the original Jewish population of ancient Israel, abandoned Judaism centuries ago, most of them converting first to Christianity, then to Islam. The opposite side of the coin being that a large percentage of today’s ultra-religious Israeli Jews descend instead from religious conversions going in the opposite direction, such as in parts of China and Ethiopia. One of the most important of those mass conversions was the ninth-century conversion to Judaism of the nomadic Khazar people, then living on the southern plains of today’s Russia.
This sort of thing makes me think that much of recent human history is still behaving according to the concept that two British anthropologists, David Graeber and David Wengrow, referred to as schismogenesis in their 2021 book “The Dawn of Everything”, that dealt especially with the “Iron Age” of human history. Although I don’t necessarily agree with every comment that he made about Graeber and Wengrow’s ideas, I nevertheless recommend the reading of Victor Piché’s fascinating article, “Le dialogue au temps de la ‘schismogenèse’, ou l’art de radicaliser la pensée de l’autre”, published in “Le Devoir” on September 20, 2023.
The basic idea promoted by Graeber and Wengrow has to do with what happens when two or more peoples living right next to each other discover rival new technologies tending to improve their lot in a given ecosystem. Even in cases when it became obvious that each group’s discovery could be just as beneficial to everyone living in that same region, each cultural group tended to defend its own discovery, just to be different, refusing to also adopt discoveries made by the neighbouring cultural group.
One example they gave was the discovery of the igloo by the Inuit in northern Canada and the almost simultaneous discovery of the snowshoe by one of the near-by Algonquian peoples. Radicalizing what were initially relatively minor differences of opinion between rival groups of people became a way of discrediting the other group, and increasing cohesion among one’s own people. It seems that this sort of thing has been going on for a very long time, way beyond the artificial division of human history that used to prevail, between the “pre-history” of palaeolithic, mesolithic and neolithic cultures, and the “real history” of “civilized” peoples.
In line with this universal interpretation of world history, the Palestine/Israel example could be seen as similar to the current revival of antediluvian forms of Hinduism in India, promoted by the Modi government. Hindu fanatics in India, as well as in the diaspora, argue that they are merely reacting to other forms of religious fanaticism, among the Muslim, Sikh, Buddhist and Christian sects also living in that same country. They feel that shoring up Hindu nationalism means “saving” their nation from “foreign” elements imbedded within India, that they believe ought to belong exclusively to the Hindus. Traditional Hinduism arrived in India around 1500 BC (before the Christian era), invading the northern part of that sub-continent and pushing the indigenous, Dravidian population to the southern part. Those Hindu invaders originally came from ancient Persia, the country now known as Iran, reflecting India’s own Aryan, or Indo-European origins.
Hinduism carried Arianism into India 3400 years before the same concept also inspired the Nazi movement in Germany. Traditional Hinduism brought with it the caste system, an attempt to preserve forever the social classes that had existed way back then into permanent divisions set up within Hindu society, the Brahmans on top, the untouchable “Dalit” on the bottom, and all the other castes lined up in-between. Caste has become a major source of division in modern Indian society, in spite of having been denounced since independence by the Congress Party of Jawaharlal Nehru, a political formation that has unfortunately lost a great deal of its former importance.
What is objectionable about this kind of historical revival nowadays is not the fact that those religious movements existed in ancient history, or even in relatively recent history, but the fact that many people nowadays are trying so eagerly to impose their own throughly reactionary interpretations of that history onto everyone around them. For example, the first empire in “civilized” history, the Akkadian one that I mentioned earlier, was of Semitic origin. However, there is no particular reason for fevered imaginations nowadays to believe that there is something necessarily evil about Semitic origins as such. A large proportion of the Arab peoples also descended from Semitic origins, as did many other peoples living in the same region a long time ago. People living nowadays do not have to react in such atavistic ways by pretending that everything Semitic has to be wrong by definition. This is just the worst kind of racist and fascist nonsense.
In a similar fashion, it is just as idiotic for Israeli extremists nowadays to proclaim that anti-Semitism and opposition to Israeli imperialism have become synonyms, as many of those fanatics currently proclaim. Some of today’s Jews can still trace their cultural and biological origins back to one or another of the Semitic peoples living in the ancient world, a fact that does not at all nullify the massive Palestinian conversion to rival religions, that I outlined earlier.
The same kind of reasoning also applies to the current revival of Hindu nationalism by the Modi government in India, for its own nefarious purposes. But this is also not taking place because there is something inherently evil about Arian origins way back when, any more than it is for Semitic origins. True, the founders of traditional Hinduism pushed their Dravidian predecessors out of northern India, thousands of years ago. But that does not mean that there is something necessarily evil in the fact that various peoples happen to be of Indo-European origin.
Once again, whatever their religion, or lack of it, people living nowadays are not automatically required to go on reacting in the same ways that their ancestors may have been reacting a long time ago. Any more than people nowadays descending from the founders of Western imperialism are required to forever consider “Western values” to be superior to any other kind of cultural values, or, alternatively, to decide that they are inferior instead. They may just be different.
We ought also to reject the equally unacceptable attempt of the Erdogan government in Turkey to construct a new version of the Ottoman Empire, that existed from the 14th century to the early part of the 20th century, for the same kind of reasons. Those who support Erdogan and his ideology seem to be reacting against the imposition of a modern Turkish republic under the dictatorship of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1921-1938). After the Second World War, however, Turkey fell under the influence of the USA, forming part of the anti-Soviet NATO alliance. More recently, after a meteoric rise to power, Erdogan (who was born in 1954) became the first elected president of Turkey in 2014, furiously promoting the revival of Ottoman rule.
Kemal’s old party, the CHP, has recently adopted a liberal-democratic stance, as well as a social-democratic program, and has become the main opposition party in today’s Turkey. Erdogan is very much into the same kind of pro-imperialist, “elected dictatorship” that dominates so many other countries these days, in his case he is riding on a wave of ultra-right-wing populism that sometimes pretends to be pro-Western, as well as a form of “democratic capitalism”. In reality, however, Erdogan’s regime, like the Modi regime in India, adheres to both neoliberalism and neofascism, a condominium that seems to have taken over practically every country in the world today.
A similar analysis also applies quite well to Russian president Vladimir Putin’s claim that he invaded Ukraine in 2014, and again in 2022, because the first specifically “Russian” cultural entity to appear in history was Kievan Rus, an empire that lasted from the ninth century to the thirteenth century. It was one of the numerous consequences of the Viking invasions, the Vikings having set up colonies for a time not only in North America, but also in Sicily and in northeastern Europe. “Rus” was the word then being used by some of the Slavic peoples to refer to the Vikings, which by a curious linguistic transfer ended up being applied to some of their own people, notably in what we now call Ukraine. This may seem to some people to bestow a kind of historical “legitimacy” on Putin’s current invasion. In reality, however, it does no such thing, for the same reasons that Semitic origins, Arian (Indo-European) origins and Ottoman origins do not quality as justification for new imperialist adventures undertaken nowadays.
We have to free ourselves from all of these reactionary tendencies if we intend to survive, as a species, for more than a few decades into the future. Given the proliferation of nuclear weapons, we ought to be avoiding war like the plague, rather than starting new wars all the time, all over the place. Any one of those regional wars could easily become a Third World War in today’s hugely over-heated political atmosphere. The most important such war currently going on is centred in the “Democratic” Republic of the Congo, where more than six million people have bee killed off since the 1990s.
Political and tribal divisions that have long existed in that country were recently intensified after the collapse of the Hutu regime that carried out the 1994 genocide against the Tutsis in neighbouring Rwanda, killing almost a million people. The return to power of the Tutsis, under Rwanda’s current leader Paul Kagame (a US ally), was accompanied by a Rwandan pursuit of Hutu perpetrators of the 1994 genocide into the DRC. Existing divisions in the DRC have combined with that Rwandan assault to greatly increase the number of people constantly being killed off in that part of the world. Not to forget that the Hutu genocide of 1994 against the Tutsis was supported by the Mitterrand regime in France, a sometime rival of the USA, in Africa as well as in some other parts of the world.
Global warming and climate change could quite easily touch off large new famines in many different regions, also helping to ignite nuclear confrontations. New plagues, like the COVID-19 pandemic, could easily break out in the near future as well. Nor has it been definitively established that the Chinese laboratory in Wuhan did not set off the COVID epidemic in the first place. The trial of the invited Chinese scientists that were alleged to have illegally exported a large number of dangerous pathogens, from the Winnipeg stockpile in Canada to Wuhan, does not yet seem to have come to any definitive conclusions on that score.
As if those existential threats were not sufficiently terrifying, international rivalry and mutual distrust are also constantly exacerbated by enormous increases in the worldwide gap between the rich and the poor, that has never been so extreme before. We are also suffering a great deal from the intensely polarizing effects of social media on all the world’s very numerous culture wars, of which some of the most dramatic examples were mentioned above.
It was recently reported that 45% of all Internet messages currently being produced are based on false information. However, it seems to me that more than 90% of all those extremely numerous messages are false. After all, trillions of commercial messages are based on “creative lying”, messages that vastly outnumber all the other kinds of messaging put together. The vast majority of all religious messages also promote invented tales about supernatural entities that do not exist except in the minds of true-believers.
Most of the world’s political messages are also based on invented slogans, not only ones like “Mother Russia”, the “Chinese path to socialism”, or “saving India from foreign religions”, but also including the British “tradition of freedom”, “the American dream” of social climbing, the French Republic’s “liberty, equality, fraternity”, and the all-inclusive “national liberation” promoted by the ANC government in South Africa. Thousands of such falsehoods are constantly being propagated by dozens of other political movements, in every part of the world, claiming to represent majority or minority populations, currently in power or seeking it.
It would be much better for our future if we could all focus instead on the kinds of genuine empathy, détente and international cooperation that could prevent any, or all, of those intersecting prejudices and assorted tragedies from wiping us all off the face of the earth. At the very least, we should avoid fusing all the most reactionary tendencies into one gigantic, converging catastrophe.
Worldwide, the ideological effects of the simultaneous revival of classical liberalism, along with the return of pro-fascist religious movements, has also further radicalized the Christian world, not only in less influential countries like Uganda, but also in extremely powerful countries like the USA. Millions of Trump supporters in the USA, and those supporting similar movements in Europe, have joined the antediluvian chorus, feeding into the overall convergence of ultra-right-wing populism.
As a result, millions more Christians are again singing along to the tune of ultra-reactionary ditties like, “Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus going on before,..’Til every foe is vanquished and Christ is Lord indeed.” To be sure, some of the support for such movements can also be traced back to the transfer of millions of industrial jobs to non-Western countries and regions. However, this is not the first time in human history that religious revival has been successfully fused together with violent social upheaval, each element of the equation reinforcing the other one.
The founders of neoliberalism were not the least bit ashamed at contributing to the revival of such ultra-reactionary religious movements, all over the world. They were also pursuing their own fundamentalist goals as “true-believers” (Eric Hoffer), that they felt automatically authorized everything that they set out to do, as with religious fanaticism. Their success in imposing neoliberalism all over the planet took place only about forty years after they began propagating their theories. Now, however, another four decades further on, we are still having to deal with the nefarious consequences of the overwhelming success of their strategy. Neoliberalism is still very much the dominant stance today, having become a distinctly totalitarian form of capitalism, dominating not only North America and Europe, but every other continent as well.
Some journalists have argued that politicians like Joe Biden recently abandoned neoliberalism altogether. They cite Biden’s intended expenditure of billions of US dollars on infrastructure development as proof of their claim. But the founders of neoliberalism were not at all opposed to massive government expenditure as such. What they wanted was not just a massive return to the privatization of everything. They also called for massive government expenditure, provided that it be exclusively focused on helping private enterprise intensify its stranglehold on every sector. It turns out that at least 90% of Biden’s investment program is not at all aimed at returning to any form of state “intervention”, theoretically designed to do away with private enterprise. It is instead aimed at strengthening private control, in the USA and everywhere else as well.
The most important multi-sectorial and multinational corporations based in the USA, including the all-important military-industrial complex, will benefit greatly from Biden’s legislation, if implemented as he intended. Even neofascist politicians as falsely “anti-system” as Donald Trump will find a way to get around the fact that it was Biden who initially proposed that package, should Trump succeed in returning to power in 2025. Neoliberalism will survive political polarization at the national level, just like it survived polarization at the international level, creating the “uneasy partnership” between the US empire and the Chinese one.
Not to forget that neoliberalism arrived in China in the same year that it arrived in the UK, two years before it took over the USA. This is one of the interesting observations duly noted in a book by Amin Maalouf, of the French Academy, “Le labyrinthe des égarés: L’Occident et ses adversaires”, published in 2023. In that book, he focused on the role played by turncoat Deng Xiao-ping in bringing about China’s abandonment of Maoism, and of the USSR, in favour of unabashed support for capitalism. Maalouf presented this truly spectacular ideological and geopolitical realignment as the result of Deng’s pragmatism, summing up Deng’s philosophy (page 303) by citing his favourite phrase: “It does not matter if the cat is black or white, as long as it catches the mouse.”
In other words, “stop fooling around with all this socialist nonsense and do what we should have been doing all along to solve our problems.” Or, in another way of putting it, “we should follow Margaret Thatcher’s lead instead, because she really does know how to catch mice.” Adopting neoliberal capitalism was also designed to make everyone in China a lot richer than during the extreme poverty that they had been foolishly producing over the previous decades. Unfortunately, the riches that Deng and Thatcher were talking about in 1979 were never shared with more than a small minority of each nation’s total population. China did become a great deal richer than it was before, but nowhere near as rich as the USA, and with a distribution of wealth every bit as unequal as the USA’s.
Most of the chapters in Maalouf’s book were about the main enemies of the Western world over the past two hundred years: imperial Japan, the USSR, and the People’s Republic of China before Deng took over. Maalouf’s chapter about the West itself was insightful in many respects, particularly about the erratic geopolitical leadership role played by the USA after 1945. Maalouf, however, had nothing much to say about the rise of neoliberalism in the post-was era, nor about its connivance with atavistic forms of religious fascism all over the world. He ignored the negative effects that such economic and social regression might have had on purely geopolitical considerations.
Nevertheless, his book provided me with abundant confirmation of the very numerous shortcomings of the most important enemies of the Western world. Between 1905 and 1945, the Japanese empire, following its military victories against czarist Russia, went from inspiring other victims of Western imperialism, into repeating all the same kinds of imperialist domination that the European empires had carried out in the past. After its 1945 defeat by the USA and its Chinese allies, culminating in the nuclear annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, today’s Japan is still very much under the American thumb, and no longer inspires the way that it used to do.
Maalouf also did a good job demonstrating that the second major enemy of the West, the post-czarist USSR under Stalin, never really tried to bring about any form of real communism. Instead, Stalin spent a great deal of effort thwarting every attempt made by dozens of other Soviet commissars to genuinely advance the cause of “socialism in a single country”. His murderous hatred was not just directed against Leon Trotsky, but also against every one of his potential rivals, especially those who shared Trotsky’s Jewish origins.
The USSR’s thoroughly unexpected victory against Hitler’s invading forces, between 1941 and 1945, convinced many people in the “third world” that the USSR could become a useful ally against Western imperialism during the Cold War. According to Maalouf, however, none of their hopes ever came to fruition. The post-Stalinist Soviet leaders never genuinely supported communism any more than Stalin did. So far as I can tell, the anti-Western alliance also did not succeed because most of the national liberation movements allied with the USSR never came any closer to genuinely achieving their own lofty goals.
Maalouf also dealt with the history of Chinese communism, during the years leading up to the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, as well as during Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” and “Cultural Revolution” experiments in socialized thought control. He showed how Mao, like Stalin before him, tried to collectivize agriculture and impose industrial development in one fell swoop, resulting in the particularly devastating death by starvation of millions of ordinary peasants, in both countries. Maalouf also showed how incredibly self-centred both of those “communist” leaders really were, behaving in some of the most egotistical-maniac ways humanly possible.
However, the main shortcoming of Maalouf’s book was his final chapter on the Western world itself. Although Maalouf mentioned quite a few current problems currently “disturbing the peace” in the richest parts of the world, he refused to get truly upset at the world’s dominant ideology, neoliberalism. The explanation for that highly interesting oversight seems to come from the fact that Maalouf very much supports the European Union’s devotion to post-national integration of the European economy as a joint neoliberal enterprise. He also refused to denounce neoliberalism as such because he really seems to believe, like Deng Xiao-Ping before him, that capitalism catches mice, whereas socialism does not. He did not seem to realize that since all the regimes of the past century have never really been anything else but capitalist, his conclusion makes no ultimate sense.
