Voluntary slavery

Forty-nine years ago, I started my adult life as a wage slave, working for about a third of the total time in manual jobs, another third as a part-time teacher and a final third as a full-time teacher. For about half of that period, I was simultaneously involved in left-wing politics and read several thousand pages of text about the history of the labor movement since the nineteenth century. I even managed to contribute a few dozen more pages myself of published articles on the same subject. Nowadays, in preparation for retirement, I often reflect on the recent evolution of the class-based societies in which all human beings are obliged to live.

When I first started out back in 1965, most people in North America, Western Europe and Japan were industrial workers, slaving away five or six days a week to make their employers a lot richer than they would ever become themselves. A half century later, the bosses have transferred most of those factory jobs to newly industrialized parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America, where billions of low-cost laborers are doing their best to keep nineteenth century British economist David Ricardo’s “iron law of wages” fully operational. Which means that most of them are still being paid only a few dollars per year more than what is biologically necessary to keep them alive and reproducing.

In those same countries, hundreds of millions of other people are still poor peasants, most of them lacking any title to the land. About a billion of them earn as little as one or two dollars per day, making them even poorer than the cheap labor contingents in the factories. Many commentators in the world media often make a big deal about how still other millions of people in those same regions have recently left behind abject poverty to join a huge new “middle class”. But those observers seem to forget that the Third World definition of the middle class refers to people earning a few thousand dollars a year, less than a tenth of what is required to get into the lower ranks of the middle class in the world’s richer countries.

Meanwhile, back in those somewhat richer countries, tens of millions of people are still working in factories, but the majority of the population now toil instead in the service sector. Professional optimists also classify many of them as middle class, ignoring the fact that most of them earn only slightly more than the minimum wage. In any case, even though the total wealth generated in such countries has increased hundreds of times since the 1960s for rich people, it has not increased at all for the middle class. In the USA, the American dream has been dead in the water since 1972, overall upward mobility in all the rich countries having become a thing of the past.

At the same time, a very small number of people spread out all over the world are making twenty or thirty million dollars per day, while hundreds of millions of much less fortunate people are barely avoiding starvation. Since the urban revolution in the Middle East 6000 years ago, at no time in history has the income gap between the social classes ever been higher. In Marxist lingo, this means that the objective conditions for world social revolution have never been better.

Unfortunately, however, the subjective conditions have never been worse, since no organized, world-wide, genuinely labor or socialist movements currently exist. The abject failure of state capitalism, back in the twentieth century, to provide a credible alternative to private capitalism, has completely eliminated whatever hope for the future that people may have had in the past. The only international organizations for progressive social change that exist right now are intellectual chimeras, comprising only a few thousand members each. Most working-class people nowadays are either not involved in politics at all or support neofascist parties instead.

In most countries, people are so desperate for jobs that they will do anything to get work. At the bottom of the heap, hundreds of millions of people have been tricked by fraudsters into becoming real slaves with no income at all, even though slavery as an institution became illegal in the last remaining slave state (Mauritania) back in 1980. Millions of young people, including many of those in the so-called rich countries, have also signed on for voluntary slavery by accepting unpaid internships in order to get the work experience necessary for (maybe) acquiring a real job later on. Employers have no compunctions whatever to support slavery nowadays as long as no one uses that term in public, since it was supposed to have died out as an institution back in the nineteenth century.

On a world scale, the industrial working class has never been bigger. The total working class, including agricultural, industrial, transport, service workers and illegal-service workers (prostitutes, criminals, etc.) make up the vast majority of the world’s population. Landed peasants, genuine middle-class people (making between 20 and 100 thousand dollars per year) and homeless beggars make up most of the rest. One percent of the world earn over 100 000 dollars per year, but only one percent of one percent (one person in every ten thousand) belong to the ruling class, defined as all those people (major investors and leading politicians) making decisions every day that are worth at least one hundred million dollars.

Once upon a time, more specifically between 1945 and 1975 (the thirty glorious years), most of the people in the world’s richest countries could feel relatively good about themselves, because in those days most of the world’s large investors were involved in productive investment and only a minority were hooked on speculation (negative investment). This meant that most people’s incomes were rising significantly during those halcyon decades, not only for a privileged few. But since 1979, with the election of politicians like Margaret Thatcher and the simultaneous onslaught of monetarism and neoliberalism, most of the world’s largest investors have moved instead into useless forms of speculative investment. They still claim to be the only ones creating wealth, but in reality they are only robbing the rest of the world economy to create wealth for themselves and no one else.

In other words, nowadays only about 70 million people, out of about seven billion, really have the freedom to do whatever they want. They are the only ones who see life as an amusing comedy, in which they have the power to enjoy themselves to their heart’s content by deliberately ruining the lives of millions of dirty, inferior peons. Most of the rest of the world’s people are forced to see life as a disgusting tragedy instead.

Reverse racism rides again

A number of well-known intellectuals have recently been denouncing the Quebec government’s proposed “charter of values”, mostly because it would prohibit provincial civil servants from wearing ostentatious religious garments and symbols while on duty. Left-liberal philosophers like Michel Seymour and Georges Leroux have been particularly active in their criticisms of this project because they believe that the current Parti Québécois government is using ethnic nationalism to get re-elected, deliberately appealing to the prejudices of the French-Canadian majority against recent immigrants.

They feel that it is especially conservative Muslim women in Quebec who are being singled out for exclusion because an increasingly large number of them have begun wearing cover-up garments like the hijab, the niqab, the chador and the burqa. The afore-mentioned intellectuals think that those Muslim immigrants are covering up like that for reasons of cultural identification, and not necessarily because they support the ultra-chauvinist oppression of women that has become a world-wide trademark of Islamic fascism. No one, however, least of all the Muslim fundamentalists, wants to recognize that the culture that those women are identifying with is more tribal than Muslim, since it appears that the Koran has nothing to say about those particular female garments and merely admonishes women to be modest in their appearance.

But a more important point in this context is how odd it is that left-wing intellectuals feel called upon so often to support such ultra-right wing religious movements against “dictatorial” Western secularism. In this particular case, the PQ’s proposed legislation is decidedly hypocritical since they have decided not to include in their ban such rather obvious public symbols as the cross behind the speaker’s chair in the National Assembly and the opening of many municipal council meetings with a Christian prayer. But it is not the rather obvious contradictions in the PQ plan that has the philosophers upset.

These critics are angry at the provincial government because they belong to a rather different, world-wide ideological association known as the politically correct, who are deathly afraid that anyone might accuse them of supporting Western imperialism. Their way of avoiding the charge of racism is to join forces with whatever opposing government, political tendency or group that seems to be most against the prevailing policies of the world’s richest countries. Adhering totally to the Maoist slogan, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, they support any set of ideas that seems opposed to whatever the leaders of North America, Western Europe and Japan seem to be supporting. They are still stuck in the old Third World versus capitalist imperialism paradigm that dominated world politics during the second half of the twentieth century.

Their cultural relativist attitude was attacked as far back as 1983 by Pascal Bruckner, a French author who wrote a book about how many liberal-minded people in the West have abandoned Rudyard Kipling’s racist “white man’s burden” to adopt instead a reverse-racist “white man’s shame”. Bruckner focused on the many different ways in which those Western liberals always blamed their own culture whenever some Third World dictator horribly mistreated his (or her) own people. For them, every Asian, African or Latin American famine, civil war, genocide or manifestation of feudal or totalitarian oppression had to be exclusively blamed on the deleterious effects of Western colonialism and neocolonialism. Bruckner demonstrated instead that Third World leaders and their political movements were quite capable of mistreating their own populations for their own particular reasons, and did not always have to be acting entirely on behalf of Western puppet-masters.

Unfortunately, Bruckner considerably overstated his case and was not prepared to admit that most of those dictators and corrupt politicians were also operating as compradors, helping foreign investors extract as much wealth from their own countries as possible in exchange for a share in the profits. Even though a small minority of those Third World economies have since become much richer and more industrialized than they used to be, the overall situation has not changed all that much since the publication of Bruckner’s book. The ordinary people in those countries are still being exploited as much as they were before, albeit in slightly different ways, but nowadays some of the local political leaders and big-time investors are getting a significantly larger share of the pie than they did in days gone by.

The real world has therefore changed a little bit since the 1980s, but the emotional reactions of the would-be anti-racists have not changed at all. In the case of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, cultural relativists nowadays are still writing books twenty years after the event about how the poor innocent Tutsis and Hutus really got along quite well for eons, until racist theories imported from German and Belgian colonizers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries turned them all into bloodthirsty zealots. Romantic Western observers seem thoroughly incapable of realizing that mass killings of ethnic enemies have been going on all over the world ever since human beings became numerous enough to separate into warring tribes, and did not have to wait several millennia so that they could all be “caused by” Western imperialist social-Darwinism.

The reverse racism being practiced by the politically correct assumes in a very paternalistic way that people from non-Western origins are incapable of acting on their own and matching the ferocious intensity of planning and execution typical of European cultures. In Rwanda as in Cambodia, in the Congo as in Syria, in Guatemala as in Myanmar, the people doing most of the killing all had their own local reasons for committing mass murder. This does not mean, however, that the world’s largest political and economic empires, based in Europe, the USA, Japan and, more recently, China, were not also involved in every one of those horrific events. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, every single region in the world has been brought kicking and screaming into the global economy and geopolitics, and every local event has also become an international event.

But the same kind of analysis that applies to international relations and the growth of the world economy also applies to ethnic and cultural relations within those countries that have become more culturally diverse than they were before. The most obvious examples are places like Canada, the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina and Uruguay, where the expansion of European empires during the colonial period resulted in populations of mostly European origin becoming the majority. By hook or by crook, indigenous populations (as well as former slaves of African origin) were forced into a minority situation, largely dominated and mistreated by a “Creole” majority.

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the cultural relativists from the politically correct crowd also glorify native peoples nowadays. Whenever some type of conflict occurs between European majorities and First-Nation minorities in any of those countries, such as the Oka crisis of 1990 in Quebec and the more recent Caledonian crisis in Ontario, the same kind of romantic fantasizing breaks out once again. Analyses of such events by the would-be anti-racists always assume that everything that the “Europeans” do in such situations is necessarily evil and that everything that native people do (except for a few traitors to the cause) is necessarily wonderful. Once again, cultural relativists seem unable to attribute any blame whatsoever to anyone on “their” side of the equation.

Needless to say, the same kind of misinterpretation also takes place whenever the same crowd has to deal with conflicts between European-origin majorities and more recent immigrants from the Third World, particularly those who are not Christian. Ever since many Western countries started admitting larger numbers than before of Asian, African and Latin American immigrants, during the 1960s, a new situation has sprung up to allow today’s cultural relativists another field in which to exercise their romantic delusions.

In the charter debate in Quebec, Left-liberals like Michel Seymour and Georges Leroux are once again using so-called reverse racism, paternalistically defending religious minorities, particularly conservative Muslim women, from their Christian-European tormentors. They assume that most of those women are naive victims of cultural identification with their communities of origin, unable to realize the implications in today’s world of showing off their vehement rejection of women’s liberation and their obvious promotion of Islamic extremism. According to the politically correct, the Quebec government should leave those unfortunate women alone, not because a ban on people’s clothing is difficult to enforce, nor because the PQ is practicing a throughly hypocritical kind of secularism. The cultural relativists feel instead that the only way to fight such unacceptable “racism” is to allow all minorities, even ultra-conservative religious minorities, to do whatever they want. For them, anything less would be unconscionable.

In point of fact, however, reverse racism is just a paternalist form of ordinary racism. The cultural relativists in the charter debate act as if well-educated immigrants from the Third World had never heard of secularism or anticlericalism before they arrived in the West. They conveniently forget that even countries as presumably backward as Afghanistan were already governed by home-grown modernizers like Amanullah Khan during the 1920s and the communist government of the 1980s.

Politically correct proselytism also seems to have affected the judges in several recent Canadian cases who decided to give much lighter sentences to rapists of Haitian origins, or wife beaters of native origin, ostensibly because those perpetrators grew up in horrible conditions. According to this theory, it was the living conditions during these people’s formative years that “caused” their attitudes towards women and not their individual decisions to solve their personal problems through sexist violence.

However, belonging to an oppressed group of people does not give someone the right to oppress others around him, any more than belonging to an oppressor group gives someone the right to oppress socially “inferior” people. British judges should not be punishing workers of Irish origin more because some of them hate the Irish individually, nor less because the British have been collectively oppressing the Irish for several centuries. Judges in the USA should not be giving heavier sentences to Black murderers than to White murderers because they hate Black people, nor lighter sentences to compensate for four centuries of White oppression of Afro-Americans.

Similarly, pro-socialist workers should not be allowed to get away with mistreating their women any more than anti-socialist workers should. Victims of wife-beating do not have the right to beat up their children in protest against their husbands violence against them. ANC leaders in South Africa do not have the right to mistreat their own people, like their Boer predecessors did, just because those leaders fought against apartheid thirty years ago. Communist totalitarianism is not better than fascist totalitarianism just because the proclaimed goals of the communist movement were superior to the proclaimed goals of the fascist movement. People have to be judged by what they do, not by what they say that they are doing. Oppression is oppression, bad behavior is bad behavior, racism is racism, no matter what the source.

None of this means that people should therefore ignore important differences in the severity of the crimes being committed. The bankers and the traders who stole trillions of dollars from the world economy during the 2008 crisis should not be treated in the same way as are treated ordinary con artists who defraud their own victims of mere thousands of dollars. Fraud is the name of the crime is both those cases, but a trillion dollars is still millions of times greater than a thousand dollars. Those who commit the greatest crimes are much more reprehensible than those who commit lesser crimes. But when the crimes have exactly the same effect on the intended victims, the punishment should be equal, regardless of the social or cultural origins of the perpetrator.

Those who wish to denounce the PQ’s charter of values in Quebec, therefore, should be denouncing it for several appropriate reasons, but those do not include supporting Islamic extremism. The Left-liberal cultural relativists in Quebec are a lot like the equally naive Left-liberal elements in the Arab spring movement, who fought hard against political and military dictatorships in alliance with Muslim extremists, only to see the Muslim extremists set up new dictatorships as bad as the old ones.

Unfortunately for the politically correct, Islamic fascism has become an enormous problem in many different parts of the world, including the Western countries, and is not just confined to countries possessing a Muslim majority. It is true that several Western intelligence agencies spent hundreds of millions of dollars decades ago promoting Islamic fundamentalism, to help them fight against communist and nationalist movements threatening Western political and economic domination. That is one of the reasons why that ideology has become so dangerous nowadays, but it is not the only reason. Intelligence personnel cannot create such a movement out of nothing, and such movements only become dangerous when they are well anchored within the victims own culture.

After neoliberalism, religious fundamentalism as a whole is probably the most dangerous ideology in today’s world. Not just Islamic extremism, but also the even more  dangerous Christian varieties, not to mention the Hindu, Buddhist, Confucianist and Shintoist versions. Tribal animism of antediluvian origins is also still damaging millions of other people’s lives, often in combination with many of the afore-mentioned kinds of extremism. Progressive intellectuals all over the world should avoid naively helping any ultra-conservative ideology, thereby bringing world domination by the extreme right-wing closer to victory. If they do, they may soon find out that the individual rights for everyone that they so eagerly want to protect may soon be abolished for everyone, everywhere, by some of the very people that they tried so hard to save from their would-be oppressors.